That evening they went out for dinner and a movie with Lisa and her husband, Les, who worked in the garment business. Lisa was a regular, down to earth sort, but Les wore ill-fitting Cavaricci jeans, actually patronized a tanning parlor, and grossest of all, manicured his nails. Ethan cut his nails flat across the top. His hands were rough, workingman’s hands, even though the most physical work he did with them was punching numbers on a computer keyboard, or maybe swinging a tennis racket.
Lisa and Les insisted on eating at their favorite steakhouse—more blood. Erica ate only the stuffed potato and creamed spinach, layering her steak onto Ethan’s plate. The husbands chatted about golf and tennis, while Lisa yammered on and on about how she’d hired a girl from Housemates to work Monday through Friday. She felt kind of guilty because she didn’t work outside the home and her youngest was in fifth grade, but hey, there still weren’t enough hours in the day, and Les had just got a promotion. “It’s so great,” she enthused. “Dinner appears magically on the table, and then, after dinner, you go relax, and the dishes disappear. Like a hotel!”
“Everybody’s talking about Housemates,” Erica agreed. “My cousin Amelia’s been singing the praises of her housekeeper for months. My mother’s after me to call them.”
“You should,” Lisa said. “My God, you have four kids! What are you waiting for?” She leaned over the table, stroking Erica’s arm. “And to tell you the truth, hon, you’re looking awfully tired.”
The movie, a spy thriller, held everyone’s rapt attention except for Erica, who kept dozing off at critical moments and waking up with a start; she pretended to follow the discussion afterward over ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins. At home, in bed, she could not sleep. Ethan threw his arm around her, sticky and enclosing. She wriggled away so that only his fingertips touched her. The baby monitor predictably filled with the sounds of hungry crying.
She fed Sophia for longer than necessary, breathing in her sweet baby-lotion scent, and then went down to the basement and then pulled her plastic suitcase out from behind her underwear and smoked her dope. She was almost out. She’d told herself a couple of days before that she wasn’t going to buy any more from Jared—it didn’t seem right. But now, staring at the almost-empty baggie, she changed her mind. She cleaned the boys’ paint easel and stacked their wooden puzzles. As she shoved the last puzzle into place, it tipped over a box of Colorforms, scattering plastic shapes all over the floor. She should have realized: chaos always won. She left the mess and stumbled back to bed. This time when Ethan put his arms around her, she did not roll away.
: : :
In the morning she woke to Ethan’s limbs wrapped around her like a fuzzy towel and a small child tapping her on the back. She opened her eyes, and there stood all three of her boys, serious faced. A tear trickled down Jesse’s cheek. “Mommy,” he said, “something very sad has happened.”
“What is it?” she cried, her mind reeling through its usual litany of bloody and mangled bodies.
“The goldfish died. All three of them. They’re floating on top of the bowl.”
“We think we should bury them by the tulips,” Dylan said.
They lined a shoe box with tissue paper, placed the three bloated fish in it, and dug a hole by the tulips. Dylan read a Shel Silverstein poem about a fish, and the twins sang “Baby Beluga,” with appropriate hand motions, substituting the word “goldfish” for “whales.” Ethan said a prayer he remembered from Unitarian services as a child. Erica promised the boys new fish.
“Can we get an iguana instead of fish?” Dylan asked. “It would be more interesting.”
“If you want,” Erica said. Agreement seemed the simplest path. An iguana wouldn’t require walking or petting or obedience classes, or membership in a special society like Lisa’s beloved cocker spaniel.
She called the local pet store, up the street from her parents’, but it was closed on Sundays. After lunch, Ethan packed for another week in Florida, called the limo, and retreated to his Apple IIGS. The afternoon dribbled on disconcertingly slowly.
Erica poked her head into the computer room. “Um, that Stephan guy,” she said, hoping to casually get Ethan’s attention. Just saying Stephan’s name made her feel sticky and hot.
“Who?” said Ethan, barely looking up from the screen.
“Stephan Langston? Who we met at Josh’s party? The big-shot trader? The guy with the horn-rim glasses? Who was doing tai chi? Do you have his phone number?”
Ethan frowned. “Jeez, I don’t know his number. I don’t call him on the phone. Just let me finish this program, okay?”
“Well, do you think you could get me his number?” There was a high panicky undertone to Erica’s voice that she didn’t like.
Ethan punched a few more numbers and letters into the computer and then looked at her for the first time since she’d entered the room, scanning her face slowly and carefully. “What’s the big hurry?” he asked. “Do you need to continue your hour-long conversation about soft drinks and yoga? Do you like him or something? I wouldn’t think he was your type.”
“No, are you crazy?” Erica scrambled to compose herself, to come up with a credible answer. “Um, we were talking about Jamaica, like I told you, and I said I’d get him some information on that hotel we stayed in last year.”
“You mean Coconuts? I have the number on my Rolodex. I’ll give it to him at work.” Ethan picked at his ear.
“Well, you could do that,” Erica said, shifting Sophia to her other hip and making a show of unbuttoning her jacket. “But you know, he asked me, and you always get so busy at work and forget stuff like that. Plus, you’re flying to Florida in an hour.”
“Yeah, well, I suppose you have a valid point there.” Ethan pulled his earlobe and scratched his butt. He didn’t seem satisfied, but he did seem eager to return to his calculations. “Check my black leather phone book. In my jacket. Upstairs.”
That evening, before she could lose her nerve, she took the cordless phone into the powder room and called Stephan. His answering machine pronounced, “This is Stephan. Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but your call is very important to me.”
“This is. . .” she started and then stopped. Leaving a recorded message about illegal drugs seemed a really stupid idea.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She woke up, in the gray light of dawn, to the pulsing shriek of the burglar alarm. Her foot had fallen asleep. Numb and heavy, it slid heavily on the floor as she tried to stand up and shuffle to the closet control pad and turn off the alarm. The pulsing changed to a louder, faster, more urgent beep and then a shrieking wail. She made it to the closet just in time to avoid triggering a police visit.
Then the thought hit her like a sick punch: maybe she needed the police. She crept down the stairs. The front door was closed. The downstairs hallway, kitchen, and family room appeared tranquil and undisturbed. From the backyard came a faint rustle, a slap of something against the wood.
She spied a gray rounded shape on the damp redwood of her patio. Sticking out of the lump was a hand, pale and seemingly too small for the body attached, with two silver rings on the index finger. And rising from behind the lump, another, larger hand clutching a red rubber volleyball, followed by an arm and a spiky green head. Jared! The ball slipped from his hands and rolled toward the door, where it bounced off with a mild thump. Jared leaped for it, losing his balance and hitting his chin on the gas barbeque.
“What the hell?” Erica squeaked, shivering outside in her cotton leggings and a U2 concert shirt.
“Oh, Aunt Rikki, that’s not going to set the alarm off again, is it?’
“The alarm’s turned off,” said Erica. “You scared me half to death.” The pale ringed hand, now clearly attached to Ashley, rose, still clutching the gray woolen blanket that Erica last recalled seeing neatly folded at the base of Jared’s bed.
“I tossed the
ball at the door, and the alarm went off,” Jared said. “I’m so sorry.”
“We added extra wiring to the windows last winter,” Erica said. “It’s real sensitive. Come on in. It’s freezing out here.”
They straggled in, Jared wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a dirty pair of running shoes, Ashley still cocooned in the blanket.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Mrs. Richards,” Ashley said.
Jared launched into a soliloquy. “I get home at 2:00 a.m., and Dad’s waiting up, all red-faced like he gets, and he’s having a cow because my weekday curfew is 10:00 p.m. He’s ranting and raving, about how could I do this to Mom, how I’m making her sick. I didn’t even used to have a specific curfew, but that’s one of the stupid rules we worked out in family therapy. So Dad’s ranting on about how even when we negotiate rules, I break them, and why was my trashy girlfriend out at that time of night, didn’t her parents care, and if I didn’t like the rules of the house, why didn’t I leave. So I left.”
“Want some coffee?” Erica asked.
“Yeah, sure, absolutely!” he said. “Mom never lets me have coffee. She claims it aggravates my DDD.”
Erica ground some glossy Costa Rican beans Ethan had special-ordered. This morning, Ashley was as quiet as Jared was voluble. She entwined her hand somewhere between Jared’s waistband and the small of his back. She looked congested and red-eyed. Erica fought back the urge to wipe her nose, to feel her forehead for fever.
She poured the strong coffee into three mugs. “Do your parents know where you are, Ashley?” she asked.
“My mother is in St. Thomas,” Ashley said. “Only the housekeeper is home, and she doesn’t care. Her name is Georgia. The last housekeeper we had was also named Georgia. Don’t you think that’s kinda weird? And she cooks jerk chicken every single night. It’s so fattening. She must dump a stick of butter on it.”
“You want to take a shower or something?” Erica gulped a long, satisfying draft of coffee. “You can borrow my clothes if you want, not that they’d fit.”
“No, thanks—we gotta get to school by 7:30,” Jared said. “I have to carry around a green attendance sheet that gets signed by all my teachers. It’s another negotiated psychologist rule.”
“I have to carry around one of those stupid sheets too,” Ashley said. “Not that anyone ever reads them.”
“We met in family therapy.” Jared stirred a heaping tablespoon of sugar into his coffee. “That’s the only good thing to come out of all this bizarreness.”
Erica popped a waffle in the toaster. “That sounds really dumb,” she agreed. “Green sheets.”
“I knew you’d understand,” said Jared.
“Do the sheets go on your permanent record?” Erica asked.
Ashley looked confused. “What’s a permanent record?”
“Maybe they don’t have them anymore,” Erica said. “When I was in school, teachers always used to threaten you about putting things in your permanent record. And you know what? When I was in high school, there was a court decision, and students got the right to examine their records. So I looked, and it was really boring. Just grades and test scores and a psychological evaluation from the school psychologist saying I was hyperactive and some other evaluation from a graduate student who observed my sixth-grade class and said I was a spirited child with advanced fine motor skills.”
“I got diagnosed as hyperactive too.” Ashley nodded sagely.
“Do you want to be my approved friend?” Jared asked. “We negotiated a list of approved friends in therapy. We could party.”
Were it not for her four children sleeping upstairs, soon to awaken, Erica thought they could have all been high school kids, chatting in the kitchen after a sleepover. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “But I think it would be best if I knew when you were coming over. Why don’t you tell your parents you’re lending me a CD? That can be our secret code.”
“Cool,” Jared said. “Thanks.”
From upstairs Erica heard coos from the crib and Dylan’s clock radio. She needed to try Stephan again but he would be on his way to work already. She could call him in the evening, but with Ethan gone, she probably couldn’t find any private phone time until all the kids were in bed, and suppose Stephan also went to bed early like Ethan, or went out to dinner, or movies, or late-night yoga? She still couldn’t see leaving messages on that phone machine.
When Ashley disappeared into the powder room to brush her hair, Erica asked Jared something she hadn’t planned on until it popped out of her mouth. “Jared, I do have a favor to ask you. Can you get me something?”
“You want more pot?”
“Well, yes, but also something else.”
“You want lots of CDs for real? My friend Rich works at Tower Records in Roosevelt Field, and he rips them off all the time.” Jared bounced a stray rubber ball against the refrigerator.
“Well, that would be nice too, but could you get me a gram of coke?” Erica said.
Jared dropped the rubber ball. “You do coke?” he asked. “This guy Colin in my therapy group went to rehab for that.”
“I thought I’d try it,” Erica said.
Jared rubbed a strand of greenish hair. “I don’t know. Let me ask around.” He rubbed his hair some more, bit his lip. “Wait a minute—I do know someone, this guy Nick Stromboli. I know him from the family clinic. It might be kind of expensive, though.”
“That’s no problem,” Erica said. “Thank you.”
“Where’s the toothpaste, Mom?” Dylan called from upstairs.
“Try the second shelf of the vanity,” Erica called up.
Ashley emerged from the powder room hairsprayed and mascaraed, but still shivering in her T-shirt.
“Here, borrow this,” Erica said, offering her a sweater from the front closet.
“Thanks so much, Mrs. Richards,” said Ashley, pulling on Erica’s pink Liz Claiborne, which hung on her narrow chest like a tent.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Erica wore a sparkly lavender leotard with a matching thong to aerobics class. A friend of Lisa’s sold these at house parties, where Lisa had pressured her into buying several. She fought her inclination to remove the thong. Five months after Sophia’s birth, her stomach still felt round and soft, and when she slapped her inner thighs, a shaky arc of flab rippled all the way through to her ample butt. Perhaps her inner discomfort would increase her motivation to exercise.
In class, sexy Ari lingered extra long correcting her leg lifts. As she did jumping jacks and hamstring curls, she tried to blank out her mind like Ethan’s mother, Clara, claimed to do when she meditated. Despite her valiant efforts, clutter surfaced: Dylan’s camp labels for Whispering Wind; the suspicious way Ethan had looked at her Sunday; the Audi grille inches away from Sophia’s car seat; the way Ashley’s pale hand traced across Jared’s back; whether Jared thought less of her since she’d asked him for the coke; the way Debbie was sure to call her about Jared’s vanishing act; the blood—she could never blank out the blood. Her beating heart stuttered, light and slippery, like Sophia’s newborn breathing. When, at last, Ari told the class to sit down on their mats for abs and stretches, her heart rate took its time cooling down, and she lay against the foam rubber of the mat, light-headed and panting.
“Nice leotard,” said Justine, buckling her spiked heels.
Debbie called Erica the minute she walked into the kitchen and didn’t let her get a word in edgewise.
“I took the morning off from work, Rikki. I hardly slept a wink all night. Jared got into a fight with Ron and ran out the house! For the life of us, we didn’t know where he went. We called all his friends, and he wasn’t there. I suspect he was with that trashy Ashley, because they’re always together these days, but I don’t know for sure because her mother is in the Caribbean. Her parents are divorced. They left her with some housekeeper who didn’t have a cl
ue where she was and didn’t care—you can’t believe how some people raise their kids. Anyway, we were about to call the police when Ron says, ‘Why don’t we call the school first,’ and guess what. La-de-da, they showed up at school like nothing was wrong. We still don’t know where they spent the night. I never thought I’d say this, but I wish he was still dating Lyndsey Schrabner.”
“Well, at least they’re safe. Isn’t that the most important thing?” Erica took the cordless into the garage where Sophia was still sleeping in the car. Debbie evidently didn’t suspect her in the least. She leaned against the cold concrete.
“Yes, of course! And I’m trying to be understanding. I know Jared doesn’t have good impulse control because of his DDD. But Ron is furious.’’
“Can’t you tell him to chill out?” Erica bristled at the very thought of Ron’s bulging eyes, his quivering chin.
Debbie sighed. “You know how hard it is to tell Ron anything. And on top of everything, he’s under so much stress at work. They’re switching from easy listening to adult contemporary and he has to familiarize himself with performers he’s never even heard of. But, say, Rikki, on a cheerier note, did Mom tell you she’s hosting Passover this year?”
“You’re kidding! You usually do Passover.”
“Well, this year she got it into her head that she’s going to do it. She said she’s worried about me because of all the stress with Jared and, you know, my blood condition.”
“Yeah. I’m surprised she didn’t palm it off on me.” Erica sunk into an unstable sitting position on top of a net bag of soccer balls, attempting unsuccessfully to keep blood from cascading into her vision.
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