Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  • • •

  Late Saturday morning, Ian drives her to the train station, the one a bit farther from the house, because it’s a better line to be on. The boys are headed to a movie at the library, out to lunch, the day packed with plans while she spends hers in Manhattan with a friend.

  “Stop!” Jonas says from the backseat. “Stop!”

  “Four! Fivesixseveneightniiiiiine!” shouts Wesley.

  “He’s counting!” Jonas whines.

  “So what?” says Ian. “Let a dude count.”

  Wesley rambles on, numbers falling from his mouth at random.

  “It’s annoying,” Jonas says, smacking his own thigh in frustration.

  “Flower sign!” Wesley shouts as they pass a highway memorial. She is glad he doesn’t ask what they are. Ian doesn’t like to lie to him, and his brothers know. When Matthew first heard about death, it was months of night wakings and tantrums, of impossible questions: Will you be with me when I die? Who is going to die first, me or Jonas or Daddy? Will the dirt get into my eyes?

  One of her friends who stayed in the city takes every opening to remind her of the danger of driving. Be careful, she says, as though Margaret is not.

  Margaret doesn’t say anything as the boys continue to argue. She should have gone to the other station, the transfers now seeming worth it. She waves good-bye to the boys in the backseat (“Where are you going?” Jonas, only now, asks), touches Ian’s knee as she gets out of the car. “Good luck,” she says in parting.

  • • •

  Lunch with her friend, Caroline, is gossip about their old neighborhood, where neither of them lives nor visits anymore, discussions about who has stuck around too long, who is doing better than expected, who is leaving for a job or school or the Midwestern city they grew up in. They write down the titles of books for one another, the names of doctors, brands of mascara. Caroline makes inappropriate jokes about the waiter working the other side of the restaurant, blond and chisel jawed. She asks after the boys. Margaret waves the talk of them away. The usual. They drink coffee and Bloody Marys.

  Caroline is considering, again, quitting her job, whether she can, what could be next.

  “You thinking of doing something from home?” Margaret asks.

  “I don’t know. That’s hard, still, right?”

  “Always,” Margaret says.

  It’s been so long since the neighborhood playgroup where they met, and they don’t lie to each other, not then, especially not now. On her last trip into the city Margaret ran into one of the other women from that group, Amy, who still lived in the neighborhood, but she confessed as they rode from Twenty-third Street downtown that she, too, was curious about New Jersey. She asked about the real estate and the schools, which Margaret described as honestly as she could: the work of a house, the unevenness of the classroom teachers, the evening traffic something she forgot existed. “But you’re happy,” Amy insisted as they were squeezed closer together by another pack of commuters. For Amy, who’d had so much trouble breastfeeding she’d endured bleeding nipples for the first two months of her baby’s life, Margaret answered yes that day on the train, because it was the answer she wanted, because Amy must be someone else beyond those first feral months they spent together in rooms full of toys and half-eaten bagels, someone else she doesn’t really know, and this is how you talk to strangers.

  Margaret relays the story about Amy, whom she and Caroline called Saint Amy, after Catherine or Agatha, whichever saint it was who bled in the same way, torture. Caroline rolls her eyes.

  “She’s sweet,” says Margaret.

  “She’s always heard just what she wants to.”

  Margaret’s phone, resting on the table, vibrates three times. “Go ahead,” her friend says. She still has a baby at home, and a husband who counts the hours she’s away, one of the ones who keep score.

  Boys want to put tent up again.

  Looked in basement/their room. Did I miss it?

  Arg.

  Margaret quickly taps out: Don’t know, sorry love, and puts her phone back into her coat pocket. “Ian, looking for something,” she says to her friend.

  “Dear God, every last one of them does that, don’t they?” Caroline says.

  Then, while her friend is in the bathroom, Margaret, a full Bloody Mary in her, types: Try the trunk, my car. Long story.

  She holds the phone in her hand, waiting. She licks the salt, pink and expensive and mineral, from the rim of the glass, rubs it into the pockets of her cheeks with her tongue.

  He sends back a face with its tongue out, its eyes closed. Weirdo, he says.

  The server takes her empty glass before she can take more salt. She orders two more for her and Caroline. “Catch up,” she says, when her friend returns from the bathroom.

  When are you back? he texts half an hour later. She pretends she doesn’t see it, not till she is already on her way home.

  • • •

  On Sunday, after the boys have been tucked in bed, Margaret does the dishes, the warm water an antidote to the drafty window over the sink, to the cold tile floors. Ian calls her name from the study. She keeps washing, waiting for him to come to her. She can hear the boys still settling into bed, the floor creaking as they turn off the lights, pull blankets up over their shoulders, down to cover their feet. The house already feels small; sound carries.

  Ian calls her name again, and she turns off the water at the sound of worry in his voice. In the study, he’s standing away from the computer, hands on his hips, like how he watches Matthew’s flag football games.

  “Did you read that e-mail,” he asks, pointing at the computer, “from the school?”

  “The one about the lockdown?”

  “You did.”

  “The boys told me, when I picked them up.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was already over.”

  The e-mail is three days old. One line about a false report of a perpetrator on campus, the rest an assurance of a plan. Margaret deleted it when it came through, seeing it was a slightly modified version of the one they received with the safety protocols—fire, weather, shooters—at the start of every year.

  “You’re on the list,” she says.

  “They’re never important.”

  He presses his fingers to his forehead, exhales loudly.

  She thinks of all the things he has not told her: the time Wes lost a sneaker to a muddy pond, and she’d looked for it at home for nearly an hour before calling him at work, thinking she was losing her mind; his uncle’s bone cancer; parties he promised them to and groceries they ran out of. But, really, had she wanted to know those things? Did they seem, once she did know, like secrets? She knows so well the burden of being told, of knowing, and how impossible it is to unknow, to forget. The tent and gym class and thieves.

  “It’s so fucked up,” he says.

  She could say, You didn’t think we’d be safe here, did you? but he’d think she was calling him a fool, which, really, she is. But she understands, too, that someone in the family has to be the one who forgets just enough every now and then, so they can keep moving forward.

  She pulls his hand from his forehead, closes it in both of hers. “I know.”

  They stand like this, in front of the old couch in the study, till his thumb starts to move against her palm, and she steps toward him, and takes his other hand, too.

  Red Light, Green Light

  “Do you trust me?” the boy asked.

  I said yes, though it meant the opposite. Yes meant no I do not. Yes meant this is why we are here, because you are in eighth grade and the schoolyard is no place for surrender.

  Arturo shook his head and licked his thumb, used it to wipe something from the point of my chin—“I don’t know what that is,” he said—and this act drew the teacher over to us, wher
e she saw his hand, returned, lower, to my knee, and he sold me out. “She asked me to,” he said.

  “What for?” my mother asked the next morning as she dialed the aunt who promised to watch me while she worked. “The attention?” This was my second suspension since I started sixth grade; this time, they gave me three days.

  I narrowed my eyes at her but only when her back was to me. Arturo had not been suspended, but for the next week he’d be kept inside at recess with an aide and a book. He liked to read; he was probably happy.

  The teacher who caught us said, “Boys will be boys.” When my mother recapped the story for my aunt later that evening on the phone, down to the nasal tittering of the teacher as she delivered that line, she added, “Because they don’t know my daughter.”

  The look she gave the teacher in the office that afternoon was harder than the one she gave me as she motioned for me to get my bag. Some days—nights, mostly—she could be tender with me, but that, too, was from a kind of exhaustion, the other side of another failed solution.

  On this morning in the kitchen, we all listen to the phone ringing and ringing at my aunt’s house. I braid my sister’s hair because my mother doesn’t have the patience or the fingers for it. I tie off the ends with purple rubber bands, tap the top of her head to let her know she is free to go, but she lingers for a moment between my knees before she snaps back to attention and walks to the sink with the glass of milk she’s been drinking.

  My mother puts the phone back on the receiver. She looks at me the same way she has been scowling at an empty patch of grass in the park down the block—she knows something is off, but not what, exactly. I know. They cut down a tree, a birch that had been there since I could remember. They even carted the stump away. I wouldn’t tell her. She’d have to figure it out herself.

  Second-Chance Family

  Twice a week I pick up my half sister’s kids from school while she goes to various appointments: therapy, a midwife, a waxing salon. The children aren’t mine so I feed them cookies. I wipe the crumbs from the cracks of their lips with my thumb, then let them drop onto the floor of the subway car. I find a crushed Hydrox in my bag when I’m out one night; I make the man I’m on a third date with lick the crumbs from my fingers, a test he fails. I do not wipe his lips. I do not see him again. Good riddance. Adieu. The man of my dreams can live with some cookie crumbs, especially if they are from someone else’s children.

  It’s Thursday, one of our regular days, and my mother, who comes into the city every six or so weeks, is annoyed that I still have to go help Jill. I am the daughter of my father’s second-chance family, the one he tried after he failed with his first. He named me Hope. I am, depending on who is asking, an only child, or the youngest of four, two half sisters and one half brother, all so grown now that they’re already at work on not replicating their parents’ mistakes. I am twenty-four.

  We’re in the elevator going down from my apartment, a studio my parents bought as an investment—not that I have asked for it, not that I feel like the space belongs to me any more than it would if I rented it. When my mother comes to see me, her bag always contains the same things: the same black cashmere cardigan and slim dark-wash jeans, the same travel-size shampoos and creams she lays out along the back of the sink, though she’s only here for forty-eight hours. We sleep on the queen bed that used to be in my teenage bedroom, both of us turned toward the respective walls that are less than a foot away. She doesn’t like museums or shopping, but ever since she stopped working downtown last year, she misses walking Manhattan, and so this is what she does while I am at work: puts on a good pair of sneakers and expensive sunscreen and covers a neighborhood. She asks me about whether this or that place is still there or there yet, but the way it is in New York, half the time she’s talking about what has disappeared: shops and restaurants and buildings I never knew existed to start with, the overlapping of all the versions of this island we once inhabited as a family. Just before I started sixth grade we moved to the suburbs, another way for them to try something new, something separate from what hadn’t worked for my father the first time around.

  Before the elevator doors open, my mother hands me my tea, which she’s been holding for me as I put my keys back into my bag, and exhales loudly. “I made a commitment,” I remind her, but she was never the one who was particular about sticking by her word; that is my father, who has always admired follow-through.

  I don’t tell her today is for Jill’s prenatal yoga; no one knows about the pregnancy yet, not my father or Jill’s mother or Caitlin or Jack. Jill is almost in the clear, she says, a few more weeks, though her belly has popped; last week she lifted her shirt to show me her unbuttoned pants, held together by a grocery-store rubber band. This, she said, will happen to you, and drew a circle around her belly with a flourish. I didn’t even look down, so accustomed to Jill’s undressing in front of me, to the nakedness that seems to always happen at that house between the children and Jill’s constant motion from one part of her life to another, which always requires something else to wear. Aunting, best birth control ever, right? Use a condom tonight! she shouted after me as I left that evening. I had a date with the crumb hater.

  As we step out of the lobby, my mother puts on her sunglasses. “It’s beautiful out, isn’t it?” she says, not wanting an answer. “I’ll find us a place for dinner. Six?”

  “Six is good,” I say, and we both walk off into our days.

  • • •

  The kids know about the baby. Anjali figured it out, Jill says, just by looking at her face. “She said it looked different, and then asked me if I was pregnant,” Jill told me, shaking her head, widening her eyes. “That little freak.” Anjali is nine. She is currently fascinated by how everything eats: fetuses and the tiny crabs they found on the beach last summer and the snake in the classroom down the hall.

  That afternoon on the train platform, Anjali tells me about the placenta; I grit my teeth, try not to make faces. I have never been good with blood. As she talks, her hands grip an imaginary pulsating cord. Sacha, her brother, leans into my legs, presses his fingertips into the holes of my belt. He has a cold; his breathing is heavy. His small shoulders aren’t wide enough to hold his backpack; it slides off.

  “Enough, okay?” I say to Anjali.

  “Does it make you sick?” she asks.

  “A little.”

  “It’s just science.”

  “Well, sometimes science is gross.”

  I reach for her hand when the train pulls in, Sacha still clinging to my lower half, and we squeeze our way into a car; I find seats for them. Though they are dark haired like me, like their father, no one mistakes them for mine.

  “Don’t lean on strangers,” I say to Sacha, and he sits upright, blinking at the woman next to him, whom he’s been using as a wall, who gives me a smile to say it’s okay. It’s amazing to me how kind people are to children, the grace they’re offered, even at their most feral. But both of these children are beautiful, with icy blue eyes rimmed in impossibly dark lashes. People, women especially, stop us on the street to say as much, waiting for a gratitude that the kids don’t understand and that I, having nothing to do with it, cannot offer. Anjali complains about this attention. When she was younger, she used to shut her eyes, but the laughter of the admirers would just make her more upset.

  I have to keep righting Sacha the whole way.

  I will stay with the kids when the baby comes. It’s not that I live the closest, but that they like me the best, Jill says. “Caitie’s, well, you know,” she says, using a nickname for our sister that I’ve never felt close enough to her to use myself, even though we lived together for a few years, when I was younger and she was in high school. I don’t know; I don’t want to know. I’ve learned that my best position in these conversations, when I’m in them, is a simple “mmmm,” which can later be construed as neither agreement nor defense. My family, in an
y of its incarnations, doesn’t have enough neutrality.

  Once inside the house, Sacha transfers from my leg to his mother’s. I hand her his backpack, which I’ve been carrying for him.

  “He can carry it home,” she says, not unkindly. “He should.”

  “I think he’s sick,” I say to her.

  “Yeah, a little,” she says, cupping the side of his face. “A month into the school year and already, colds.”

  Anjali has abandoned her backpack in the doorway from the foyer to the family room; she’s taken her shoes off but left them a distance apart from one another across the threshold, socks balled up shortly afterward. “Can I have a snack?” she calls from the kitchen.

  “One minute,” Jill calls back. She traces the trail of dropped objects with her finger and rolls her eyes at me. “I have clothes for you,” she says, waving me inside. “A big bag.”

  There are always bags of clothes ready for me to look through in a corner of her closet, though we’re not built the same. I go home and try on the clothes, the dresses and tops (we both know the pants will be too short on me), imagining myself into some other life; not hers—mother, museum administrator, woman who knows actual artists—but not mine, which is empty of possibility in both the work and love departments. The clothes don’t look like castoffs—Jill has always taken care of her things—but they feel that way against my body, even when they fit. They feel impossible, full of something I haven’t yet earned. I pass most of them on to a friend, a writer, who doesn’t look like Jill at all either, but whom the clothes suit so well that when I see them on her, it’s as though Jill has entirely disappeared from them.