Some Possible Solutions

by Helen Phillips

  “Plant it somewhere else,” I correct her.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “You decide.” I pluck the seed off the ground and place it in her palm again.

  She walks around the concrete enclosure, cupping the seed, examining all the seams. It takes her about forty-five seconds. We’re talking six feet by ten feet, max. A siren wails by on the street and—absentmindedly, accurately, the way I used to hum along when a familiar song came on the radio—Lulu imitates its howl under her breath.

  Then she stops and plants the seed between two slabs. By “plants” I mean she shoves the pebble as far as it can be shoved into the crack.

  On the other side of the wall, the Stanhopes’ generator hums maddeningly. I wonder if we reap any benefit from living so near it.

  “Fun, huh?” I say as she stands up. I’m expecting her to be polite and accommodating when she glances at me, enthusiastic for my sake.

  But there’s an actual glow in her eyes, the delight moving slow and stately across her face.

  She says, “I should water it, right?”

  Bingo.

  * * *

  “No,” Sarah whispers. I’m holding her, spooning her from behind on the bed. Tomorrow will be Monday. “It’s not right. I just think—I just think kids now. I mean, our kids. The kids of people like us. They face—they face a lot of—they don’t have—the world—the schools—a lot of disappointment, you know? On a daily basis, right? Like, I heard of a boy who got a ticket for drawing a chalk dragon on the sidewalk. Her school doesn’t own a single microscope, okay? So I just don’t think—”

  “It’s too late,” I whisper back. “She planted the seed. She watered the seed.”

  “It’s not a seed,” Sarah hisses.

  “Be that as it may,” I say serenely.

  “‘Be that as it may’!” Sarah whisper-yells. “Are you stupid? Seriously, sometimes I seriously think you are stupid.”

  “She can hear us maybe, you know,” I say. Because if Lulu is awake, which hopefully she isn’t, but if she is, she can hear us even over WaveMaker. That’s how thin the walls are.

  * * *

  On Tuesday evening, the temperature is forty-five degrees higher when I leave my office building than when I entered it in the morning.

  “Feels like end times, huh?” a janitor says, laughing as I pass him on my way out to the street.

  “Sure thing,” I say to be nice, but then my words stick with me all the way down into the subway. Sure thing sure thing sure thing sure thing.

  “Where’s Lulu?” I ask Sarah the second I step through the door. It had been a long bad day. I’d spent nine hours feeling like my computer was an eye disapproving of my every action.

  “Out back,” Sarah replies, scrubbing rutabaga in the sink. I can feel her blaming me.

  I throw my bag down and run out the door.

  There she is, staring at the crack in the concrete. She looks up at me and the day falls away from my shoulders.

  “Hey kiddo,” I say.

  “It disappeared!” she announces like it’s good news.

  So the seed is gone. So a rabid squirrel squirreled it away, or the super finally got around to sweeping up.

  “I can’t see it anymore!” Lulu says. “It must’ve sunk down to put in its roots!”

  I’ve always thought Lulu is more like Sarah in temperament. Darker, tending toward pessimism. But now it occurs to me (with horror) that maybe Lulu is more like me. Relentlessly optimistic.

  “Well well well,” I say, far more accustomed to Lulu’s solemnity than to her glee. “How about that. Let’s go in and have some dinner, okay?”

  “Aren’t you glad, Daddy?” she says.

  “Oh,” I say, feeling sad. “I am so glad.”

  “Thank you for the seed.” Lulu gazes down at the crack in the concrete. “I gave it a few more drops of water. Is that okay?”

  She’s wearing her blue school uniform. The humidity frizzes her hair and shines her skin. Sometimes she looks so wonderful I have to shut my eyes.

  I say, “Let’s go see what Mom came up with for dinner.”

  Inside, Sarah has set the table with cloth napkins. She’s lit a candle. Sarah is the kind of person who can create something out of nothing, a skill that’s coming in more and more handy. Cleverly, she sautés rutabaga leaves with garlic. She roasts the flesh with oil and Italian seasoning and calls it rutabaga gnocchi, and sure, the chunks of it are not entirely unlike gnocchi.

  I have this trick where I flick my fingers against the side of my taut cheek to make a sound like a drop of water falling into a body of water. It’s a refreshing sound, and Lulu loves it. Given the hotness of the night, I make the drop-of-water sound a bunch of times as we sit down to dinner.

  Lulu claps. Sarah rolls her eyes.

  “Ugh, stop it,” she says. “That sound depresses me.”

  “Why?” Lulu demands.

  “Reminds me of the drought.”

  “Well it reminds me of the rain!” Lulu says.

  Parenthood is underrated, because there’s no way to talk about it. How can these chemicals and minerals, the chemicals and minerals of Lulu, add up to this?

  * * *

  We try to be good parents. We try to foster compassion, independence, thriftiness. We permit Lulu to go by herself down the street to the bodega. We give her an allowance if she makes her bed every day. We let her hang out with Mason Mitchell, the unpleasant boy on the third floor whose parents don’t care if he plays video games all day and whose home doesn’t contain a single print book. We try to not freak out when Mason’s mother gives them Mountain Dew for dinner. A kid needs friends, especially an only child.

  But sometimes I don’t think we’re doing it right. It feels, at times, impossible. I’ve come upon Lulu browsing the Internet, staring silently at pictures of starving children and people drowned in tsunamis. I’ve watched her watch a video billboard screening a liquor ad in which seven almost naked women dance around a man in a tuxedo.

  Sarah is strong but sometimes at night she’s been known to weep. We’re all she has, and we’re not enough.

  Yet on Thursday evening, when Lulu meets me at the front door of the apartment building, jumping up and down, grabbing my hand, yanking me along toward the back door, it feels like we are doing something right.

  Bless Steve Stanhope. Because there’s a half-centimeter chunk of glittery white matter emerging from the crack in the concrete. Before I can bend down to examine it more closely, Lulu flings herself into my arms as she hasn’t since she was a toddler. That’s the thing, you hold your kids less and less with each passing day until one day you hardly get to touch them at all.

  Sarah refuses to come outside and look at the growing thing. She barely glances at our glowing faces.

  “I’m sure it’s great,” she says.

  I head to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. I like to drink cold water when I’m annoyed. Put out the fire. My hand is on the tap when Sarah calls from the other room, “Contaminated!”

  “What?” I snap.

  “They put out the announcement an hour ago.”

  I grunt in her direction, as though it’s her fault.

  “Only for forty-eight hours. There’s a gallon of bottled in the fridge. We can boil more too.”

  “But it’s so hot in here already,” I say.

  Lulu and Sarah are silent in the other room.

  “Thank you,” I say, ashamed of myself, and open the fridge.

  * * *

  The night turns out just great, though. We have rutabaga with brown sugar and allspice for dessert. Lulu and I go out to check on the growing thing after dinner and it’s still there, a small sparkle in the dark. The Stanhopes’ generator purrs away on the other side of the wall. And though I can hear the twins splashing in the pool, the moist noise seeping through the peephole, Lulu doesn’t seem to notice—she’s never been in a pool, so maybe the sound doesn’t even register. We come back inside and boil a bunch of
water and hang out and read print books and Lulu falls asleep smiling.

  Then we turn on WaveMaker, and the apartment takes on that special hush, and Sarah pulls out the CockFrolick and steps out of her work dress and skin is still skin, you know?

  * * *

  “No respite,” Sarah says at two in the morning.

  What’s driving her crazy is the noise from the upstairs neighbors, who stream violent movies all night long.

  I get up and go into the bathroom and buy a campfire app. I return to bed, a fire flickering on the screen of my phone, the sound of crickets and crackling sap joining the WaveMaker in the battle against the sound effects. I place the phone beside her on the pillow and swipe the volume up to its maximum level. The audio is fantastic. I can practically smell the wood smoke.

  “Turn that off,” Sarah says.

  “It’s working!”

  “No,” she says.

  When I listen hard, I can still hear the movie raging upstairs, and maybe it’s almost worse, listening for that beneath the sound of the campfire. But I don’t pause the app.

  “Please,” she says. “Seriously, it sucks. Don’t you think it sucks?”

  “I think it’s good,” I say.

  “That’s depressing,” she says, rolling away from me.

  I pause the app. I consider and reject the possibility of proposing a nighttime stroll. We do that sometimes, when we both can’t sleep, use Google maps to take a walk on a Greek isle or through a Peruvian village. We hold hands while one of us scrolls.

  Sarah rolls back toward me, apologetic.

  “You know what I hate?” she says. “Those screen savers at work that show one gorgeous nature scene after another.”

  A siren down the block launches its long wail. We lie there listening.

  “Remember Lulu dancing naked in front of the mirror when she was two, wearing all your necklaces?” I say.

  Sarah stiffens, surprised out of her crankiness.

  “She’s experienced plenty of joy,” I say.

  Our heads are so close together that I can feel her nodding.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” Sarah says.

  I get nervous.

  “Sometimes when you take the recycling out and I hear you through the window clanging the metal bucket against the container,” she says, “it sounds like the opening drumbeat of this awesome and never-before-played rock song.”

  * * *

  By the time I get home from work on Friday, Lulu’s plant is a quarter of an inch tall, a glittering globular dime-sized cluster oozing out of the concrete. She crouches down to drip a few drops of pre-boiled water on it. The contamination warning has been extended through the weekend.

  “I’m sure contaminated water is just fine for it,” Sarah said, sweating in the kitchen, where now there’s always water boiling on the stove.

  But Lulu insisted.

  “Do you love my crystal plant?” Lulu asks, looking up at me.

  I steal another quick glance over her shoulder. The thing glints in the dusk. This is a good one, Steve Stanhope. Flowers for city kids. Magic for the contamination generation. Thank you, sir.

  I’ve never seen Lulu this happy. Being happy, that’s how you thank your parents. That’s all you have to do.

  All evening Lulu and I are like two mirrors, reflecting excitement back and forth at each other. She strokes my arm while I read Flora to her. Together we do an Internet search about cacti.

  “You two,” Sarah says.

  After Lulu goes to sleep, I head out back to examine the crystal plant in the orange moonlight. But en route I get waylaid by shouting coming from the Stanhopes’ lawn. I shouldn’t rush over to the peephole. I rush over to the peephole.

  It’s been covered over. Thank goodness. Who wants to see that damn lawn anyway.

  Well, me.

  I put my ear up to the place where the hole used to be. In the great distance, Steve Stanhope is yelling a one-sided fight, presumably into a cell phone. “Beta? Beta!”

  “What’s eating you?” Sarah says back inside.

  “You should go and check out that thing back there,” I say. “Pretty cool stuff.”

  * * *

  Early Saturday morning, before Sarah and Lulu are up, I’m taking out the recycling yet again (I don’t know how three people can create so much waste), and there, in the bald humid light of day, I see the crystal plant for what it is.

  I drop the recycling bucket and kneel down.

  Five or so pebbles, rolled in glue and then glitter, stacked messily atop each other, drizzled with more glue, more glitter. The same old school glue they sell at the bodega. The glitter from tubes.

  I am stupid.

  I go back inside, shutting the door against the grind of the Stanhopes’ generator.

  Sarah is sitting at the table with a cup of instant coffee. We switched to instant after they doubled the tax on imports. I’m touched by the sight of her.

  “Thanks for doing that,” I say, ashamed. “It’s not totally convincing, but thank you.”

  “Hm?” she says absently. She’s reading the news on her small screen. For her this is as good as it gets. Saturday morning, silence, coffee, screen.

  “The ‘plant.’ That you made. For Lulu.”

  “UN Considers Proposal to Construct International Landfills in North Pole,” she reads. “Is that good or bad?”

  * * *

  I open Lulu’s flimsy door and step into her room. I turn off the WaveMachine. She’s sleeping on her back, her arms flung above her head as they were whenever she slept as a baby. Her breathing sounds as good to me as water running in a creek.

  Before I slide open the drawer beneath her bed, I already know what I will find hidden in the back corner: the glue, the glitter.

  * * *

  When Lulu was newborn we called her Muskrat, though neither of us really knows what a muskrat is. It was just that she seemed like a small, mysterious mammal. I remember the way she would arch her tiny eyebrows when I picked her up after she’d finished drinking as much as she could get from Sarah’s nipple. I’d hold her under her arms, in constant fear of dislocating them from her little shoulder sockets, and she’d raise those eyebrows, halfway a queen disapproving of something, halfway an animal startled out of its nest in its moment of deepest respite. I have no photograph of this face Lulu used to make, it was far too fleeting to ever catch, but that face of hers, those eyebrows peaked, imperious, disoriented, that is the face of my life.

  How many times did I call Sarah from work to ask, “Is she still breathing?”

  * * *

  I don’t touch the glue or the glitter. Lulu is awake now. I can feel it, can feel her pretending she’s still asleep. I shut the drawer and leave the room and (what’s this giddiness I feel?) wait for Lulu to come out, whenever she’s ready. The thing is, the organism survives no matter what; the organism even thrives.

  ALSO BY HELEN PHILLIPS

  The Beautiful Bureaucrat

  And Yet They Were Happy

  Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green

  About the Author

  HELEN PHILLIPS is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (a New York Times Notable Book) and the collection And Yet They Were Happy (named a notable book by the Story Prize). Her work has appeared on Selected Shorts and in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  THE KNOWERS

  SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

  THE DOPPELGÄNGERS

  THE MESSY JOY OF THE FINAL THROES OF THE DINNER PARTY

  LIFE CARE CENTER

  THE JOINED

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  WHEN THE TSUNAMI CAME

  GAME

  ONE OF US WILL BE HAPPY; IT’S JUST A MATTER OF WHICH ONE

  THINGS WE DO

  R

  CHILDREN

  THE WORST

  HOW I BEGAN TO BLEED AGAIN AFTER SIX ALARMING MONTHS WITHOUT

  THE BEEKEEPER

  THE WEDDING STAIRS

  CONTAMINATION GENERATION

  Also by Helen Phillips

  About the Author

  Copyright

  SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS. Copyright © 2016 by Helen Phillips. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.henryholt.com

  Cover design by Lucy Kim

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Phillips, Helen, 1983– author.

  Title: Some possible solutions: stories / Helen Phillips.

  Description: New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015046062| ISBN 9781627793797 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781627793803 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.H45565 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046062

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums.

  For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  e-ISBN 9781627793803

  First Edition: May 2016

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.