Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  There was a sound at the door. It set off a burst of happiness in me.

  I didn't realize how much I'd miss you, I formed my lips to say, thinking it was Marjorie, finally coming home, and how lucky that I happened to be here.

  It kept going, though, a persistent scratching, until I realized it wasn't a key trying to fit in the lock but something more high-pitched and desperate. I picked up Ann and, just as we walked into the hallway, heard this whumpfof something heavy landing awkwardly after a bad jump. We got there in time to catch a blur of gray-blue fur, its claws working frantically on the polished wood, trying to get traction before shooting off to the bedroom, to hide under the big queen-size mattress again. I knew the cat was around. I had been changing its litter, putting new food and water in the bowls. But I had never seen him until now.

  Not a person coming home, then, but the last shy creature trying to escape.

  Fauntleroy, I remembered.

  • • •

  “Filet mignon.” When it came my turn at the butcher's, I tried sounding confident. “One pound.”

  They were busy. People were jostling, ahead and behind, calling out orders. The weather had turned us all into cavemen needing to cook meat over fire. I didn't think the owner recognized me and was secretly disappointed we weren't going to have one of our joke flirtations, but then, just as he handed me the soft paper-wrapped package, he winked, in the midst of all the chaos, establishing a private line of communication. It was so old-fashioned. I tried remembering if anyone had ever winked at me before. I didn't think so. Or maybe I just never noticed. On the way home, clutching the bag as if he'd given me a dozen roses, I realized he probably winked like that at everyone he didn't have the time to talk to. Every woman. Still, I savored the way it had gone from his eye to mine, then traveled slowly down my spine.

  “Your mother's a whore,” I giggled, shielding Ann from the cold.

  There was a free coupon for soy-based formula in the mail, and since we'd been talking about weaning her but worried about milk allergies I was reading it with real interest, even the little section addressed to MERCHANT, while I balanced her on my suddenly secure shelf of hip and magically selected the right key to get us inside, bags bouncing, cheeks burning. I wasn't even aware of the difference in the apartment until I automatically kicked aside the favorite blanket that I had ripped from her frantically clutching hands and dropped on the floor an hour earlier, right before we left.

  It wasn't there.

  Or it was, rather, but not where it was supposed to be. It was folded once and then draped over the back of the futon like a decorative little ornament.

  The rest of the place looked different too. It was arranged. The sliding dump of stuffed animals was a nest now, lining the interior walls of the crib, while her rattles were attached to the higher bars. All the other objects were either picked up or straightened or oriented slightly differently. The floor was visible, for the first time in ages, its yellow pine and geometrical border of light birch and dark cherry. The reason we had taken the apartment in the first place, I remembered, was because of its beautiful floors.

  Then I noticed how, off to one side, was a pile of things that didn't fit. A small pillow whose velvet case was so threadbare you could see the dirty white batting pushing out, a broken candlestick, some books with no covers, and, straddling all of them, the biggest item, Ann's swing, with a dead plant I'd been meaning to throw out stuck in its seat.

  The Dirt Thief, I thought.

  I wrestled Ann out of her snowsuit and deliberately dropped it on the floor. I had to create some clutter. It was too creepy. Because … your mess is who you are, I reasoned.

  Mindy came out of the kitchen.

  “What's this?” she asked.

  “It's a cheese grater. Or was. I left it in the microwave by accident and it got kind of melted. But it still works, if you just use that one side.”

  She put it with the rest of the throw-out pile and went back.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Ann was squirming through my arms. I put her down and she immediately cried to be picked up.

  “Just tidying.”

  “Did Harvey tell you to—?”

  “Harvey doesn't know I'm here.”

  “Then how did you get in?”

  “The super let me in. I told him I was your sister.” She hauled out a huge black plastic garbage bag. “Come. See what I've done.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The rest of the apartment was still disgusting. Much more so now, by comparison. I couldn't believe how filthy I'd let it get. I closed the door, sat, and noticed mold growing on the shower curtain. Down the hall, I could hear Ann's low-level whine.

  “Your mother will be out in a second,” Mindy said, as if speaking to a fellow adult, as if I was the child.

  When I finished, she was in the living room, sitting in the armchair. I thought I saw her wince slightly at the way I let everything fall, this trail of junk marking my progress, undoing all her work, but she didn't say a word.

  “He just let you in?” I asked. “Every time I ask him to do something he acts like he doesn't understand English.”

  “He doesn't. I speak Spanish. I spent a year in Ecuador.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “I told him you were in trouble. That I had come to help you out.”

  We looked at each other. I was madder at her than I had ever been at anyone in my entire life. I couldn't believe she hadn't already shriveled up and died just from my killer glare.

  “You're dripping,” she said.

  “What?”

  She nodded to the package of meat.

  “Oh.”

  I went into the kitchen and almost fell down.

  It was … I didn't even realize the counters were white. I mean, I guess I assumed they had been once, a long time ago, but thought time, age, the tragedy of everyday life, had dulled them to the sooty gray speckle I called a pattern. Now I saw it was just filth, or had been. Instead, there was the powerful odor of cleaning fluid and all these dazzling planes of pure surface.

  “You need an apron,” she called.

  “Why?”

  “So your clothes don't get full of grease.”

  “Aprons are for housewives.”

  “Isn't that what you are?”

  She was standing in the entrance, watching me. I was crouched, trying to make room in the refrigerator.

  “What are you doing here?” I insisted.

  “I wanted to talk to you. Privately. Without one of my bosses looking over my shoulder, making sure I see at least forty patients a day.”

  “You could have just called.”

  “It was more a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  I gave up and shoved the meat against all the jars, open cans, and containers. I could feel it squish. I should put it on a plate, I thought, if it was dripping, and then saw she was holding one out to me.

  “I can't just sit,” she explained. “I have to do.”

  “So while you were waiting for me …”

  “I started cleaning up. I hope you don't mind.”

  “This is too weird,” I said. “Where's Ann?”

  We found her playing in the trash pile, pawing at everything Mindy had designated for throwing out.

  She shook her head.

  “It's like they instinctively know where they're not supposed to go.”

  “No. That's just all that you've left for her on the floor,” I defended. “Remember, the floor to them is like our …” Our what?

  I was too dazed to complete my thoughts. “Why throw out the swing, though? It's not broken.”

  “It's not good for them at this age. Didn't you read the instructions when you first got it?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Let's sit.”

  She led me back to the chair. Despite what she'd said, it wasn't so different from being in her office. I felt just as uncomfortable.

&nb
sp; “Have you thought more about what we discussed last time?”

  “Me seeing a shrink, you mean?”

  “Or someone.”

  “No.”

  “If you don't take care of yourself, who's going to be around to take care of her?”

  “Listen, if you're afraid you're going to get sued for malpractice or something, you don't have to worry.”

  “This isn't a professional call, Eve. You're married to my friend. I thought—”

  “And you want me to believe Harvey didn't ask you to come here and get me to go see someone?”

  “I told you, Harvey doesn't even know I'm here. I'd prefer you didn't tell him about it, either.”

  “You told Mr. Delgado you were my sister?”

  She looked, for the first time, uncomfortable.

  “It's my day off.”

  “So this really isn't about Harvey?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Him complaining to you. Last time, you said he was—”

  “I said he was worried about you. I never said he was complaining.” She hesitated. “Have I ever told you the story about Harvey and the old lady?”

  “I don't know. I don't think so.”

  “Once, we were going somewhere in a taxi and, at a light, this elderly lady was crossing the street. She seemed disoriented. So Harvey got out of the car and decided she needed medical attention. He made the cabdriver take us all to the emergency room. We were still in school, then, just students, but we stayed with her for a couple of hours, until her family came.”

  “I don't get it. What's the point?”

  She was looking at Ann. “The point is: Harvey doesn't complain. If there's a problem, he tries to fix it. He's one of the most decent men I've ever met.”

  Ah-hah!

  “What were you doing in a taxi?”

  Because in my mind taxi was right up there with bordello in terms of wild promiscuous decadence.

  She sighed and got that look, humoring this idiot wife of her friend.

  So they just cabbed around the city, like a bunch of comicbook superheroes, looking for citizens in need, never giving a thought to their own raging desires? I felt my heart pounding with indignation. Don't blame me, I wanted to say. I'm sorry if I'm the opposite of everything you'd want for Harvey, if I'm this constant insult to your idea of who he is or what he should be, but if you're even thinking about fooling around with my husband, I'll—

  “You should talk to him,” she said.

  “We talk all the time.”

  “No. I mean really talk.”

  I stared. “About what?”

  “Just … talk to him.” With an obvious effort, she stared right at me. She looked surprisingly human and embarrassed. “You two should talk.”

  There it was. Nothing as sensational as, He's been crying on my shoulder, coming to me behind your back, or, He realizes, after less than a year of marriage, what a terrible mistake he's made. Just this admission, this awkwardness I had forced out of her without even intending to, a secret I could see she had been struggling to keep inside. The real reason she'd come.

  • • •

  “Wow!” Harvey said, when he got home.

  “I know.”

  “What got into you?”

  Your pushy friend. She wants me to change who I am. She wants me to become this second-rate imitation of her. That way she can sit back and watch our marriage with a combination of condescension and approval, instead of feeling that you've betrayed some ideal picture she has of you by …

  It was too complicated. Instead, I just gave a modest shrug.

  “It looks great.” He walked around. There was all this extra space to explore. “What's missing?”

  “The swing.”

  “I thought I saw that down by the curb.”

  “You're not mad, are you?”

  “Mad? Are you kidding? I think it's terrific.”

  “You do?”

  “It's like you finally took charge of your life.”

  Oh, yes, I thought. That's me. Eve in Charge.

  Later, he wondered why I wasn't coming to bed.

  “I will in a minute,” I called.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Writing in that journal.”

  In fact, I was using it as a sketchbook. I had made lines going down, perpendicular to the ones going across, so each page was a graph, and on that graph I tried plotting just the simplest shapes, painfully dredging up long-buried lessons. The Silhouette. The A-line. I was back to my old dream of designing clothes, clinging to it against this latest assault on my fragile security.

  “Really? So you're finding it useful?”

  “I guess.”

  “I thought it might help. Sometimes, when you put things on paper, they make more sense.”

  “They sure do.”

  Lying made everything easier, though after the initial falsehood I tried being honest in all the particulars. As long as there was some central act of concealment.

  “That was a great dinner.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I think you're right. We could start trying the formula. Maybe one bottle a day.”

  What was it about imagining outfits? I didn't really care about clothes themselves. What I liked was the idea of feeling intensely about something, and fashion, early on, had seemed the most acceptable area to become obsessed with. I liked the process, studying designs, taking them apart and putting them back together, seeing how they worked, how they purred and ticked like those windup watches, the kind with a million tiny gears and springs. But clothes, what they showed in shop windows, I couldn't have cared less about. They seemed symbols of … I didn't know what. Greed, maybe. Or stupidity. I hated how much they cost. In every sense of the word.

  “Well,” he yawned, “I guess I'll turn off the light.”

  “OK.”

  “Are you coming to bed?”

  “When I'm finished.”

  The problem was, I didn't have a creative bone in my body. Yes, I liked the idea of making something new, of me doing it, but it wasn't like my pencil now danced magically over the page. All I could do was copy, and—I looked around—there was definitely nothing to copy here in my present life.

  An hour later, I came into the bedroom. Harvey was on his belly, a snoring land mass. A continent. I pushed enough of him aside to crawl in.

  “You didn't get back here,” he murmured.

  “What? Oh, you mean cleaning up? No. Not yet.”

  I listened to his breaths, the even spaces between them.

  “I will,” I promised, curling up, not at all sure, lying again. “Soon.”

  • • •

  “My mother … your grandmother”—I forced the word—

  “would know how to do this. But she never showed me.”

  We were folding clothes. I had put Ann in one of those carts at the Laundromat. I didn't know what else to do with her. I couldn't use the stroller. I'd had to haul down a week's worth of dirty laundry. Once we got there, it was too cold to leave, so I stuck her in a cart and twirled her around, watching suds. It was another store from before, that's how I was beginning to see them, from when the neighborhood wasn't so trendy. The interior was dark but clean, with an Asian woman keeping her eye on the various machines. Tables were littered with magazines all about TV, what the “daytime stars” were doing.

  “You're supposed to button these shirts, I think. I don't know why, though. It's not like there's a person inside.”

  Harvey had tried getting me to drop them off at the dry cleaners. “They do laundry too,” he'd hinted hopefully, but I kept insisting I could take care of everything. It seemed an essential part of my wifely duties. The problem was, I didn't believe in ironing. Irons reminded me of anchors. Or, when you stood them up, tombstones. Besides, what was so bad about wrinkles? They gave clothes character.

  “Now ties,” I continued wisely, “I have no idea what to do with. So I just roll them up like this, see?”
>
  “You wash tie?” the lady frowned, walking by.

  She seemed surprised.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “Mommy lived in a place where she wore the same dress, day after day. Everyone did. We all wore the same things, did the same things, and thought the same things, to show that we Belonged.”

  I stopped. The words felt wrong in my mouth. Did I really want to tell her about trying to live your life as if you were an inhabitant of the Old Testament? Poison her pristine brain? Instead, I had a vision that wasn't a memory, at least none I could actually claim to have experienced before. I was a girl again, down by the lake, wading into the water, watching the sky, the way it floated on the surface. I saw clouds and, through them, the sun, which you weren't supposed to ever look at, which could blind you, but now I sensed wasn't as real, as dangerous, as seen when staring straight up. I reached out and touched its reflection, felt it drip through my fingers, not hot or painful but a twinkling essence, bright drops. I splashed them on my face.

  “This isn't ours, is it?”

  I wiped away tears and concentrated very hard on a piece of clothing left over from someone else's wash. No. It was ours. It was Harvey's underpants. They had turned pink, somehow. Not really pink, more a pink effect, I decided, holding them up, trying to appreciate it for what it was. Very subtle. He probably wouldn't even notice, and if he did, so what? It wasn't like anyone else ever saw them besides me.

  “You no separate,” the woman accused, coming up behind me.

  The panels above the dryers were propped open, to heat up the place. You could see into where you weren't supposed to. Blue gas jets licked rotating drums.

  “What?”

  “Color. Keep color from white. White from color. Don't you know?”

  “Of course I know about separating,” I said with great dignity. “I just choose not to, that's all.”

  She gave me a look and swept on by.

  “It's an artificial distinction,” I explained to Ann. “Mommy doesn't believe in those.”

  She just took it in. Did she ever blink?

  “Your father,” I began, but couldn't think of anything to add. Just saying that, “Your father,” seemed more of an ending than a beginning.

  A voice said, “I thought it was you.”