by Ali Benjamin
Alex gulps down a spoonful of cereal, then allows a series of tiny burps to escape her lips. “Well, that’s odd,” she says, as if pondering Aristotlean metaphysics. “I thought I was going to make a big burp, but it turned out to be just a bunch of little burps.”
A pause. Alex holds up an index finger, then releases a loud, juicy belch, so deep it sounds like it’s coming from her toes. “Ahhhh. There it is.” She pats her belly, satisfied, then jams her spoon back in the bowl and begins slurping.
Ethan smiles. Yes, it’s definitely one of the good days.
He pulls a prescription bottle from the cabinet, twists the cap off, shakes out a single tablet, red and oblong. Adderall: Alex’s daily dose of executive-functioning skills, prefrontal cortex in pill form. He sets down the medicine and a glass of water on the table. She groans. “Do I have to?”
“You do,” he insists. “And you’ll have a better day because of it.” The truth is, everyone’s day will be just easier because of this pill. Not just Alex’s, but also his own. Zo’s. The teachers. Her classmates.
Ethan peers into the prescription bottle: only one dose remains. He pulls out a piece of notebook paper, scribbles Get More Adderall, sets it on the counter as a reminder.
And because this is a good day, maybe Alex won’t resist a little academic help. “What do you say we practice some math?” The kid’s mastery of multiplication is horrid, just embarrassing. “Six times nine.” In response, Alex takes another spoonful of cereal, smacks her lips together loudly—possibly deliberately, to bother him, but it’s equally possible that her table manners are on par with her math skills and he’s simply failed to notice.
“Come on,” Ethan urges. “Six times nine.”
Alex grabs a number from thin air. “Twenty-one.”
He takes a slow breath. How can she still not have her multiplication tables down? What are he and Zo even paying for at the Rainbow Seed School? “You know this, Alex. Think. Six times nine.”
Alex furrows her brow, thinking hard. Then her face brightens. “Daddy, is it true that when you eat carrots, your skin turns orange?”
“I don’t know. What’s six times nine?”
Maddy strolls into the room, her blue hair pulled back into a loose bun. She’s wearing a threadbare camisole and what may or may not be Ethan’s basketball shorts. He does his best to stay focused, but when Maddy flashes a smile at him, the corners of his own mouth turn up involuntarily.
“Because I’m thinking…” Alex continues, oblivious to her dad’s idiot grin, “that if carrots turn your skin orange, then maybe if I eat a lot of spinach, my skin could turn green.”
Yes. Those are definitely his shorts. Ethan coughs, takes a sip of coffee from his travel mug, lets it linger on his tongue before swallowing. He has to fight to keep his attention on Alex, who’s sitting right there yammering away about…what, exactly? Spinach? Skin? Not math, that’s for sure.
“Six times nine, Alex. Show Maddy you know the answer.”
But apparently Maddy doesn’t care about the answer either. She turns to Alex. “Why do you want your skin to turn green?”
“Witch stuff,” Alex says. “I’m doing a science project on witches.”
“Cool.” Maddy picks up Ethan’s coffee from the counter, takes a swig.
“Six times nine,” Ethan repeats. And then: “Wait. You’re doing a science project on witches?”
Alex nods, slurps. The table is covered with oat milk.
“You mean you’re doing an English project on witches,” Ethan says. “A creative-writing assignment, maybe.”
Alex makes a face that—if he had to put it into words—could only be described as Dad the dumbfuck.
“Or maybe you’re doing a history project. Something about the old New England witch trials,” he suggests.
“No,” Alex says, like he’s the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “I’m doing a science project on witches. Duh.”
Ethan glances at Maddy, looking for backup. What the heck kind of science project could she be doing on witches? Maddy simply shrugs. “Sounds like she’s doing a science project on witches.”
“Alex. Honey.” Ethan tries to appeal to whatever common sense his kid might have. “You can’t do a science project on witches.”
“Mr. Boorstin says I can, and he’s the science teacher. So there.”
Ethan rubs his temples. Nearly thirty thousand dollars a year they’re paying for this education. “Alex, there’s nothing remotely scientific about witches. They’re fictional.”
“Wrong,” Alex answers. She says it like the president does sometimes, like it’s a cartoon sound effect. Boing. Splat. Pow. Wrong. “There are more than two hundred thousand registered witches in America. I read that on Wikipedia. And there are plenty more like Mommy, who are unregistered.”
“First of all, Mommy’s not an actual witch, that’s just the name of her group.” The name All Them Witches came from an article in the Bettsbridge Eagle. When the group was first forming, the women had chartered a bus and traveled together, still relative strangers, to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. The Eagle had done a story about the trip; the reporter interviewed not only the women who’d attended the march but also some of the men back in Starkfield, the ones who watched the scene on the overhead televisions at the Flats bar. The article quoted a retired dairy farmer named Harmon Gow, who had shaken his head, eyes on the screen, and muttered, “All them witches screeching like hoot owls for no goddamned good reason.” The women had howled with laughter when they read this line. The name stuck: All Them Witches: we screech like hoot owls.
“It’s a joke,” Ethan assures Alex now. “Mommy would tell you that if she were here. Also, there might be two hundred thousand people who have registered as witches, but that doesn’t mean they are witches.”
And that’s when Easy Alex gives way to Angry Alex. She shoves her cereal bowl away, glowers at him. Black eyes, hard jaw. Her nostrils flare.
“Sweetie, I’m just saying…” Ethan tries to make his voice sound friendly, show Alex he’s on her side. “Maybe we can come up with an idea for a story about witches. Like that musical you love. Or you can write your own musical! I’ll help!”
“Ugh, whatever,” Alex snaps, disgusted, apparently, with his dumbfuckery, except that he’s right and he knows it. Alex marches upstairs and slams her bedroom door so hard the house shakes. And now he’s alone in the kitchen with Maddy, who’s still holding his travel mug full of coffee. He turns to her. “I mean…am I wrong?”
Maddy leans against the counter. She clicks her tongue in a tsk-tsk-tsk. “Daddy, you are so mean.”
“Whoa. Nope. Please don’t call me that.”
“Call you what, Daddy?” Maddy’s teasing him, trying to make him uncomfortable, and boy is it working.
“Seriously, Mad.” He scratches his beard. There is literally no appropriate way for him to respond to a twenty-six-year-old who wears his shorts and calls him Daddy. “I just—yikes. Also, can you please give me back my coffee?”
Maddy holds out the mug for him. But when he takes it from her, she doesn’t let go. Ethan tugs at the cup, pulling it—and, by extension, Maddy—closer. They stand like this, both hands on the cup, her eyes squarely on his. One beat. Two.
She lets go only when he looks away.
“A science project on witches,” he says. “You think the kids are learning anything at that school?”
“They’re learning those peace songs, I guess.”
He laughs, because it’s true. Every Friday, the whole school gets together for a weekly assembly, to which families are invited. They invariably sing old peacenik songs while the music teacher strums a guitar: “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “If I Had a Hammer.” Last week, the teacher tried to mix it up with a homemade rap. Ethan h
ad stood in the back of the room, cringing as his sixth grader and sixty other kids beat-boxed and recited lines like “Kind is fun! Kind is cool! We all love to be kind at school!”
“Fifty-four,” Maddy says.
“Hmm?” He looks up, not sure what she means. She’s still so close to him he can feel her heat.
“The answer to your question, Ethan. Six times nine. It’s fifty-four, in case you still need an answer.”
“Well, I’m glad someone in this house knows her times table. Cheers to that.” He holds out his mug to her. Maddy brings the coffee to her lips. She takes a long slow sip, keeping her eyes on him the whole while.
This time, he doesn’t look away.
* * *
—
Ethan has always been faithful. He was faithful to every girlfriend he ever had, even the ones who weren’t faithful to him. And since he met Zo, he hasn’t had any moments of real temptation. Okay, maybe one. But it was a long time ago, and it was before they were married. And he didn’t act on it.
A few years ago, he’d read an article—this was The New York Times, he thinks, or maybe it was Slate—about fidelity. The article claimed that every married person, faithful or otherwise, faced some occasional temptation. The difference between cheaters and non-cheaters was simply this: when temptation arose, the faithful removed themselves from the situation. They didn’t flirt. They avoided extraneous conversations. They stayed away from circumstances where love or lust might have the chance to flourish. It’s as if the non-cheaters closed a metaphorical window, just shut those possibilities right down. Ethan was about a decade into marriage when he read the article, and at the time, he was relieved: He was no Bill Clinton, no Eliot Spitzer, no Gary Hart, all those guys who blew up their lives by having affairs, pathetic, really.
He, Ethan, was a window-closer. One of the good guys. Such good fortune, that. A blessing, really.
These days, though, it feels as if he’s lingering, just a little, near a window that someone accidentally left open. Giving himself permission to sneak the occasional breath of fresh air. And he’s started to wonder: what if he’d confused lack of opportunity with some sort of innate tendency? After all, he’s spent most of his marriage here, in Starkfield, where even now, in middle age, he’s still younger than the median age by nearly two decades. He doesn’t work in an office, doesn’t go out to bars, rarely spends time with women when Zo’s not around.
What if he’s not a window-closer, after all? What then?
* * *
—
The rest of the morning goes badly. Alex dawdles while taking her shower. She has to be reminded (one time, two times, five times, more) to brush her teeth, comb her hair, find clean socks. When all that’s done, she dashes around the house, snatching up scattered pieces of her homework.
“Come on, Alex!” Every day—every damn day—Ethan swears he won’t raise his voice. Yet here he is again, just like all the other mornings: frustrated and screaming. Alex jams a worksheet into her backpack as he hollers, “I keep telling you that your homework isn’t done until it’s put back in your bag where it belongs!”
But Alex isn’t listening, because now she’s rummaging through a pile of shoes and boots. “Where’s my other sneaker?” She tosses a flip-flop in the air as Ethan grabs his keys, his wallet, his phone. Ethan searches in a mad rush for the errant sneaker, finds it in the back of Hypatia’s dog crate. It’s damp, with teeth marks on the sole, one lace frayed and noticeably shorter than the other. But the shoe’s still wearable, so he tosses it to Alex. “Put it on in the car. Come on, come on, come on, let’s go!”
And through all of this, Ethan can’t help but wonder, where is Zo? Absent. That’s where.
Zo’s absent, entirely, until after he and Alex are out the door. They’re rushing toward his old Subaru wagon when Zo’s car—newer than his, but otherwise identical—screeches to a halt in the driveway. She rolls down the window, cuts her eyes at Ethan. “What, were you planning to go to the conference without me?”
The conference, that’s right. With Shreya Greer-Williams. He’d forgotten.
“What conference?” Alex asks as she climbs into the backseat of Zo’s wagon.
“PTA thing,” Ethan answers, strapping himself in, just as Zo says, “playground fundraiser.”
Zo flies down Schoolhouse Hill Road, hits the Ledge way too fast (stomach drop, whoosh). At the bottom of the hill, where Ethan turned left this morning to go to the coffee shop, Zo flicks her right blinker, away from downtown. The Rainbow Seed School lies twenty-three minutes south of here, in what feels like a different world altogether.
Corbury’s posher than Starkfield—a whole lot more expensive too. It’s one of those iconic Berkshire towns beloved by weekend leaf-peepers and second homeowners; it’s also a refuge for independently wealthy New Yorkers who want to raise their kids “in the country,” even as they hold on to a two-bedroom pied-à-terre in Chelsea. When Ethan and Zo first moved to the area, they’d toured a few Corbury homes. But even then, Corbury struck them as unreasonably expensive—a bubble unto itself. Meanwhile, at every Corbury open house they met only other couples like themselves: New Yorkers hoping to escape the Big Apple. Finally, after making three offers and being outbid on all, Zo had put her foot down. “I don’t want to be the people who leave New York only to be surrounded by a bunch of people who also left New York,” she said.
At the time, Ethan was relieved by the sentiment. It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford Corbury, he reassured himself. This was a choice. In a way, it was even a noble choice! All those other families would be playing at rural life. He and Zo, by contrast, would have the authentic country experience. They would live among locals, people who passed their winters hauling firewood, or keeping the cows warm, or whatever it was that rural New Englanders did. (Ethan would soon discover that people here do pretty much the same things as anyone else: consume too much sugar and booze while watching viral video clips on Facebook. In Starkfield, they just happen to do these things without seeing their property values rise.)
Point is, now Ethan and Zo live in Starkfield, but they make the twenty-three-minute-each-way, twice-daily drive to Corbury just so they can send their kid to school with other children of former New Yorkers.
It’s twenty-three minutes, that is, if everything goes smoothly. Which today it doesn’t. Just a hundred yards outside of town, a neon-vested police officer steps into the road and holds up one palm. Zo grimaces, presses the brake.
Corbury Road is under construction. Corbury Road has been under construction since they transferred Alex to the Rainbow Seed School three years ago. Corbury Road will never not be under construction, at least that’s how it seems. In the passenger seat, Ethan shifts impatiently, watches a yellow loader inch toward a pile of dirt.
He turns on the radio, begins flipping through stations. Everything is news or a commercial.
…Supreme Court testimony scheduled for tomorrow.
…can finally shed that weight that’s been holding you back…
…more Americans are opposed to the nominee than in favor…
…talk of a coming “sex war…”
…new Toyota with no money down…
On the other side of the windshield, the loader crawls toward the dirt at the wrong angle, backs up, tries again. Zo grips the steering wheel and takes a long, deliberate breath, like she’s willing herself calm.
…Common effects include headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, palpitations, seizures or even…
…ask your doctor about what Cialis can do for you….
…Fed announced it’s raising interest rates…
…this week a third accuser claimed…
…still denies all allegations…
Zo reaches down, snaps the radio off. By now, several construction-crew members are directing the loader, each worke
r waving his arms in a different direction.
Ethan sighs. “I shall grow old, I shall grow old.” A line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot’s ode to longing. Once, Zo wouldn’t have missed a beat in repeating the next line. I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled. For years, they’ve gone back and forth like that.
Today, though, only Alex responds. “Huh?”
“It’s a poem,” Ethan explains. “Your dad once built a whole marketing campaign around it, actually.”
Alex brightens. “I wrote a poem this week! Well, technically it’s a rap. It’s about Pompeii, listen: Vesuvius is smoking! And everyone is choking! On the py-ro-clastic FLOW! Pyroclastic flow is superheated ash and gas! With lava chunks that flow downstream and come at you real fast! Four hundred miles an hour, there’s no chance to get away…I guess that sucks, I thought I’d live, To see another DAY!”
“Hey, that’s actually pretty good,” Ethan says. He nudges Zo. “Isn’t that good, hon?” Zo keeps her eyes fixed on the loader, whose driver is apparently giving up; he hops out of the vehicle, allowing one of the hand-waving crew members to climb into the driver’s seat instead.
“I wrote the rap for Latin class,” Alex says.
Ethan considers this. “Did you translate it into Latin?”
“No. Why?”
A rap for Latin class that’s written in English. A science report on witches, with no discernible science in it. Maybe next, Alex will submit an interpretive dance as a math project. Yes, he definitely wants to talk to Mr. McCuttle, the head of school, about their curriculum. He can do it this morning, after the conference with Shreya.
But of course he’ll only get to do that—or anything else, for that matter—if his family can ever move beyond this particular construction zone. But they won’t, it seems, not ever, because even when the loader finally moves out of the way, a dump truck rolls forward to take its place. It begins unloading a second pile of dirt so slowly that Ethan wonders if they’re being punk’d. Swear to God, sometimes his life feels like slow death, like reading Proust, like a John Cage song, like the self-checkout machines at the grocery store, the ones where the scales are calibrated wrong so the machine keeps jamming, a friendly robot voice saying, Wait, help is on the way, except the lady with the key, the only one who can restart it all, never arrives. It’s like he’s trapped in some never-ending Beckett scene, tedious and nonsensical and freaking eternal.