“Is that so?” Emma replied calmly, nodding her head a little as she did. He could see that she was officially out of patience. “Would you care to tell me what I am known for?” she asked, throwing the gauntlet down.
Benjamin nearly jumped into the fray, interposing himself between the women warriors. “Why, you’re the queen of interior design,” he might have said. “That’s what you’re known for, Emma.”
But it was too late by then. He could see from the set of Cassy’s jaw that she was moving in for the kill.
Benjamin wrapped his arms loosely around himself, as if he were chilly in that temperate dining room. He felt like a passenger in a slow-moving vehicle, heading straight for a six-car pileup. He could see it all.
“‘Convicted felon’ would probably top the list,” Cassy said, as lightly as if she were telling the time.
“That’s enough of that,” Bobby barked at the girl.
Benjamin watched her shrug her father off, just like his sister always had.
He turned to Emma, who looked frozen in place. On closer inspection though, he could see that she was vibrating slightly—thrumming with rage like a red-tailed warbler, hovering in the air above its perch, wings aflutter.
Cassy had hit her mark.
Of course, it didn’t take very long for Emma to recover herself. She crouched forward in her seat like an angry predator, but he couldn’t help seeing that she looked a little shrunken too—a couple of inches smaller in every dimension.
Benjamin had forgotten all about Cassy’s cutting remark to him.
He only had eyes for Emma now, the gaping wound her daughter was so happy to inflict. He’d never seen his boss at human scale before—not even when she’d stood on those courthouse steps, announcing to the world, via fifty-seven camera crews, that she’d be going away for a little while.
It was a brand-new experience for him, seeing Emma cut down to size.
He wasn’t sure he liked it.
TINA COULDN’T BELIEVE HER EYES.
Something must have changed around here, she thought, standing inside the front door still, surveying the wide-open room before her, but she’d be damned if she could find the thing that had. Even the giant poster was there—straight ahead, on the tiled wall in front of her: a man with a prosthetic leg doing the long jump, or the broad jump, some kind of jump anyway, and landing roughly in a sandy pit, hardscrabble determination written all over his face.
“Yes, you can!” the caption blared.
Tina knew that poster as well as she knew her own name—and for almost as long, it seemed. The photograph made her just as squeamish as it always had. She felt a fluttering in her stomach and the jitters in her legs. She fixed on the spot where the man’s fake shin met up with his stump of leg, a spiderweb of shiny metal somehow holding the thing in place.
She looked away from his awful landing, just as she always had—that jarring mash of metal and plastic and skin—but not before she wondered at the perfect uselessness of the man’s left sneaker, its bright white laces done up tight, protecting a fake foot from whatever it needed protection from.
Gracie pulled her mother into the massive room.
And that smell, Tina marveled—like a roundhouse punch of chlorine bleach. She’d know it anywhere.
She showed her membership card to their local Y to the woman who sat at the entry desk. It was probably the same woman she’d spoken with earlier. Tina smiled at her when she asked Gracie her name. She’d called the branch closer to home, first, wanting to confirm the pool hours there, but found it closed for renovations. So she pulled out the phone book and located a replacement pool—the one near her parents’ house in Forest Hills.
“You said we were going swimming,” Gracie whined when they climbed up out of the subway, “not to Poppy’s house.” She must have recognized the landscape, Tina supposed—the Korean deli on the corner maybe, or the video store across the street.
“We are going swimming,” Tina replied, pulling her winter coat tight.
She felt a little whiny herself, not exactly thrilled at the prospect of a chilly swim on a winter’s evening, but she was the one who’d dreamed it up, after all—making amends to Gracie for a phony party at the Baptist church, a weight-loss meeting in drag.
“Good,” Gracie said, looking up at her a little bashfully. She rarely whined.
They walked hand in hand, just five or six blocks more, to the YMCA where Tina had gone as a child. It was her first visit back in what felt like ten thousand years.
On reflection, she supposed it was more like ten.
The woman at the front desk waved them past; they walked deeper into the building. Tina saw the skinny pools straight ahead: two of them, in fact, just ten feet wide and twenty-five yards long. They were laid out neatly, side by side, the indoor version beneath a cage of foggy glass, and the outdoor one right beside it, emptied out in the dead of winter, surrounded by patches of mangy snow.
“There are two pools here?” Gracie asked, barely containing herself.
She pulled her hand away from Tina’s and scampered down the hall to take a better look—her flame red coat, all puffy with down, bouncing up and down with every step. Tina had wanted to buy her a cloth coat—navy and fitted, she thought, as slimming as possible—but Gracie wouldn’t hear of it. The girls at school wore puffy coats.
Her daughter looked like a beefsteak tomato as she bobbed down the hall.
Tina tried to shake it off.
It wasn’t so hard really. She felt a little excited to be there herself. When she recognized the sunbathing area—that tiny patch of concrete just beyond the outdoor pool—she nearly laughed out loud.
Was it really that small? she wondered.
An image of her eighteen-year-old self flashed before her eyes. And not like looking backward, not like turning around on a mountain path and gazing back down the hill you’d climbed to the pretty glade a mile or two back. No—for that moment, Tina was eighteen again, all oiled and shining at the water’s edge, lazing a summer afternoon away. She was sprawled out on the tanning deck, as pretty as a floral centerpiece—a spray of white roses maybe, in a long, slim vase—nothing but her two-piece and a thin beach towel between her own soft skin and the rough concrete floor, its texture as prickly as a bed of thorns.
Tina could feel the sun bearing down on her—its hot, rough fingers grabbing tight. She closed her eyes lightly and lifted her face to the searing heat. How she loved that burning stillness, the wavy sizzle on soft eyelids.
It never lasted long, of course.
There was always some commotion there, a rush of testosterone from the boys in the pool. Tommy, probably, she thought—shaking her head at the memory of him, her great love in those silly years—the hair on his arms and legs bleached to blond, his frayed cutoffs riding low.
Her great love, period, she supposed.
But it might have been any of them. All the boys preened for their bikinied attention—jumping wildly into the shallow end, the lifeguard’s whistle and the boys’ whoops their only warning of the dousing splash to come.
Gracie tugged on Tina’s sleeve.
“Mommy,” she said, interrupting the ancient afternoon, “I think the changing rooms are over here”—as if Tina hadn’t known for a thousand years already exactly where those changing rooms were.
“I think you’re right,” she replied, smiling down at Gracie, and letting her lead the way.
Tina felt the moment pass: the wavy heat and the golden light. It gave way, in a flash, to the solid little girl in her puffy red coat. Tina watched her waddling down the hall, over the creaky linoleum floor, and into the changing room at the very end.
Such a fool, she thought—her not-so-fond farewell to the beautiful girl on the prickly concrete.
But even as she turned away, Tina felt a whispering memory of her girlish optimism: so sure that she was only stopping at that Y for one last summer; that she’d be on her way again soon—to some place worth going. She�
�d been on her way to being someone.
Tina cringed at her youthful arrogance, nearly blushing for the girl in her pink two-piece—as if hope itself were some kind of vice. Not that it matters anymore, she thought, distancing herself from that hopeful girl, playing it all down. She was certain that she’d thrown all her chances away by then—just dumped, in big handfuls, like a bushel basket of dollar bills from a second-story window. She’d watched them flutter away already; she didn’t expect to see any more.
Tina didn’t blame anyone for the course her life had taken.
She’d made her peace with Tommy long before. She could no more blame him for her predicament than she could begrudge him his fine cheekbones, or the long white threads that ran down his strong thighs.
Tina reserved the blame for herself.
She felt overheated by the time she reached the locker room; the memory of her youthful missteps had her metabolism racing.
She pulled off her coat as fast as she could.
“There’s no one here!” Gracie cried, galloping all around the changing room. Tina shushed her in case she was wrong, but she didn’t seem to be. She hoped the girl wouldn’t be too disappointed. “I bet there’ll be plenty of kids in the pool,” she said, trying to reassure her.
“Maybe not,” the girl replied—as if to reassure herself.
Tina hung her coat in a rusty old locker at the edge of the room. “Do you want to take your coat off, sweetie?”
“Can I have my own?” Gracie asked, pointing to another locker, just two or three down.
“Sure,” Tina said. There were hundreds of empty lockers there.
The two of them sat down, side by side, on a long wooden bench.
“What’s that say?” Gracie asked, pointing to a rusty steel tag on the outside of the locker.
“It says, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Pitt,’” Tina told her. She knew the name itself wouldn’t answer her daughter’s question. “They helped to pay for the lockers,” she explained.
“Am I allowed to use it?” Gracie asked.
Tina nodded.
“But what if Mrs. Pitt comes in?” she wondered.
Tina decided not to tell her that Mrs. Pitt was probably long dead by then. She took off her sweater instead, and watched as the little girl did the same. “We’ll just ask her to use another one,” Tina said. “I’m sure she won’t mind.”
She untied her shoelaces and slipped off her pants, watching Gracie in close pursuit, never much more than a beat or two behind. They stood in unison finally—two girls in clean white underpants and warm wool socks, looking each other up and down.
“I’m so pale,” Tina muttered, raising her arm to inspect her skin.
“Me too,” Gracie said, lifting her arm the very same way.
Tina handed her a swimsuit. They both grew a little more furtive then. They finished undressing quickly—their eyes averted—and pulled on their swimsuits fast.
Tina had to admit that Blackman was right about the Diet Club.
Gracie barely fit into her swimsuit from the summer before. There were big handfuls of flesh, like yeasty dough, popping out from the edges of her Lycra suit—a fleshy jack-in-the-box all around.
“Almost time for a new bathing suit,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.
“Do I have to have blue again?” Gracie asked.
“Not if you don’t want,” Tina said. “What color would you like?”
“Guess!” the girl cried. She loved a guessing game.
Tina knew, of course; all roads led to pink, but she took the long way there. “Purple?” she asked. Gracie shook her head. “How about yellow?” She shook some more. “Green?” Tina asked. The girl began shaking her head vehemently; she didn’t stop either, not even between colors.
“Brown?” Tina asked.
“Eww,” Gracie cried, hopping from one foot to the other.
Tina heard a dull thud every time she landed.
“I give up,” she said finally, having named every color she could think of, some of them several times. “What color would you like?” she asked.
“Pink, silly!”
“Good choice!” Tina said, smiling down at the girl. “I had a pink swimsuit once.”
“I know,” Gracie said. “I saw it.”
Tina couldn’t imagine that she had, but she let it pass.
She closed their lockers firmly and led them to a large communal shower. It was a huge white cube—fifteen feet in every dimension—with old porcelain tiles on all the walls, and slightly larger ones on the ceiling and floor. They were beautiful too, like glassy white eggshells, all sparkling clean, but if you looked close, you could see a million cracks. Every tile was a shadowy network of them—the most delicate road maps in history.
Tina turned on the tap, one of a handful of shiny silver handles protruding from the wall. She waited for the water to warm up.
“Why are we taking a shower now?” Gracie asked.
“So we’ll be clean when we get into the pool,” Tina said, looking straight into the tangle of confusion on her daughter’s face. “It’s a rule,” she said, trying again, “so that everybody’s clean when they get into the pool.”
“But we’ll be clean as soon as we jump in,” Gracie said. “Won’t we?”
Tina let the matter drop. Better that, she decided, than getting too specific about other people’s filth. “Let’s have a quick rinse anyway,” she said. She hopped under the warm spray—like a rain shower almost, that old showerhead so high above her head, three or four feet at least. The water gathered some heft on the way down, pinging hard against her pale skin.
She saw Gracie on the sidelines still, giving herself a big bear hug.
“Brrr,” she shivered.
Tina coaxed her under the showerhead.
Gracie looked up skeptically.
Tina thought of Tommy for the second time that afternoon. She watched the water rolling down her legs, trailing off to the silver drain. They used to do it right here, she remembered—she and Tommy, in this little place—sneaking off to make love on the shower-room floor. Late in the day, after the little girls had gone home, but before the women came in from their offices.
She marveled at their never getting caught. It seemed so risky to her now.
They were short on pleasure, those shower-room trysts—more about boredom than sexual heat. Gracie was conceived right here, she thought, staring down at the tiles in front of her toes, the very ones she’d pronounced sparkling clean a moment before.
Tina felt ashamed of herself.
She turned to the wall, so Gracie couldn’t see.
“Such a fool!” she hissed, growing angry at the memory of it—at turning up pregnant by the end of August, all hope of college dashed, and her parents so hurt and disappointed. Even junior college went by the boards, with a baby coming and all the extra expense.
She was no better than dirty water herself.
She watched it trailing down the silver drain.
They went as far as marrying—she and Tommy—in the autumn of that year. They found a small apartment in Wood-side, but no one was very optimistic. Tommy was just a kid, she thought, only too happy to let him off the hook. He was no more ready for marriage than the man in the moon.
Tina didn’t spare a kind thought for herself though. Somehow she couldn’t, not even all these years later.
The marriage only lasted a couple of years. Tina cut him loose as soon as she could support herself. Her parents had helped her—straight through her mother’s cancer and death—and Tina moved up quickly at the plant, rising from secretary to bookkeeper much faster than anyone would have thought.
She gave Tommy permission to leave as soon as she could afford the rent on her own. “Really,” she told him, “it’s all right.”
He took her up on it too, running off like a boy on the last day of school, hurtling toward the summer days to come.
“I’ll be back,” he’d told her. “Wait for me.”
But Tommy ran and ran and never looked back.
She’d heard he’d moved to California a couple of years before; they hadn’t heard from him in ages. It was hard for her to say, just then, whether she was waiting for him still, or merely stuck in a rut.
Tina didn’t blame him though.
I might have done the same thing myself, she thought—if she’d been in his place anyway, if she hadn’t fallen in love with Gracie already. But she had, of course, so she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Mommy,” Gracie said, touching her lightly on the wrist.
Tina looked down at the girl, bursting out of her navy swimsuit—her face as wide as a movie screen, a picture of confusion pushing through the flab.
“What is it, sweetie?” Tina said.
“Are we clean yet?”
Chapter 6
MONDAY MORNING:
Milky Cereal
and Cookie Crumbs
IT’S YOUR OWN DAMNED FAULT, EMMA THOUGHT, addressing herself like a critic that morning, a finger wagging in her voice. She wouldn’t be in this mess right now if she weren’t such an eagle eye.
It was a strange kind of criticism though—like a cube of sugar hiding in the salt cellar, just a compliment in disguise. Emma could be as backhanded with herself as everyone else in the world was with her. She was almost used to it by then. People always made their compliments sound suspiciously critical to her.
“Oh, Emma!” she’d heard, more swooning times than she could count. “I wish I could be half as cutthroat as you!”
She didn’t have time to dwell on hit-and-run drivers that morning though.
Emma had more pressing business.
“Don’t you ever miss a trick?” she mumbled, picking up the phone and dialing it briskly, striking the numbers as roughly as typewriter keys: 4-1-1.
“Hello, operator,” she said.
She’d waited until ten of nine to call—until Bobby had left for his office. She wanted the place to herself, and she had to wait for someone to be there, of course—for someone to pick up at the other end of the line.
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