Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Eve, right?”

  The woman from the Parallel Play Group, Alison, was standing in front of me. She had just come from outside. She wore one of those knit caps from Tibet that come down over both ears, with each flap ending in a little woolen ball.

  “Where's…?”

  I tried to remember her kid's name.

  “Dominic is with Frances. I needed some time. Looks like you've got a ton of crap here. Are you almost done? Want some help getting it home?”

  “That's OK, I—”

  But she had already stuffed the last few items in my big bag.

  “Come on.”

  … … …

  “So you found all this?”

  At first I thought by “all this” she meant Ann, Harvey, the apartment. I was tempted to answer, Yes, I found all this. It was just lying around, waiting to be discovered. Then I realized she meant the clothes I was putting away. Because she remembered me talking about dumpster diving from that disaster time at Os-bourne's.

  “Most of it.” I looked at the closet, which was jammed with items I'd never wear, that I'd never even worn once.

  “What about the stuff you sew?”

  I had taken out the tailor's dummy. I didn't know why. It was another pathetic gesture, waiting in the corner, accusingly bare, an idol with no offerings.

  “No. I never made outfits for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don't know. Because it was work, I guess. It would be like mixing business with pleasure.”

  Alison prowled. She had taken off her coat and hat but wouldn't sit. She had loosely permed hair and rings around her eyes. I couldn't tell if they were from makeup or lack of sleep. I didn't remember her being so intense, that time at the meeting.

  “You want coffee?”

  “Let's do something,” she said. “You want to go somewhere?”

  “But I have her.”

  Ann had passed out on the way home. She was in the crib, with her snowsuit half undone.

  “Let's go to Snoopy's.”

  “That bar, you mean?”

  “It's just around the corner.”

  And up one block, then two blocks over, I added silently.

  “I can't.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can't leave her alone.”

  We hadn't been back more than ten minutes. There were still clean clothes all over the bed. Harvey's underpants looked a lot more pink in the light. I sensed he wasn't going to appreciate them.

  “What could happen while you were away?”

  “Fire,” I recited. “Choking on a toy. Kidnapping. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”

  “You have a baby monitor?”

  “Yeah.”

  Harvey's mother had given it to us. At the time, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever seen. Our apartment only had three rooms.

  “Plug it in. We'll take it with us. Those things travel over amazing distances.”

  “No way.”

  “Come on. Just for fifteen minutes. We'll have a drink. Remember how you used to be able to just go places?”

  “What if—”

  “Nothing's going to happen. She'll never know you've been gone. And you'll feel so much better.”

  “Who says I'm feeling bad?”

  “I dare you,” she said.

  “You dare me to leave her and take the baby monitor to a bar?”

  “It's a real rush. You'll see.”

  “So you've done this with Dominic?”

  “Once or twice.” She came closer and touched my arm. “Come on. It'll be great. I promise.”

  “Just fifteen minutes?” I asked dubiously.

  She was already putting on her coat. Snake hips, I noticed, taking advantage of her eyes being elsewhere, seeing her in terms of a fitting. A body type that doesn't segment. Easy to belt. Because there's nothing really to accentuate or hide. So you can use it more as an ornament. A slash of color. Or a band of metal.

  “Wait.” I wanted to slow her down. I wasn't even thinking about making a decision. “Let me at least get her out of her snowsuit.”

  Alison stared out the window. She looked so hard I wondered what was out there that I had missed. Wasn't it just buildings and a tree? Sky above, yes, but not the kind of sky you could look up into. City sky. She bunched what hair she had and pulled it back.

  “It's only four,” I sighed.

  “I know. It gets dark so soon.”

  That's what she was looking at, her reflection, peering at some new self she imagined.

  Because Ann was asleep in the crib, I hadn't turned on any lights. The room kept its winter feel. Objects were providing their own stubborn illumination, not soaking up sun or sheltering in shade but asserting their existence from within. Everything looked solid and monumental, even my hand, as it drew her out of formlessness—her hot back, her diaper-padded butt, her limp legs—and settled her on top of the covers. I let an extra blanket waft gently down.

  “There,” I breathed, not quite knowing what I was agreeing to.

  “Good.”

  Alison didn't whisper. She spoke in a normal tone of voice. It was a test. I watched Ann's face, confirming how far away she was already, in her mind. She seemed to be concentrating. Her little brow was furrowed and her lips pursed. Are you troubled? I wanted to ask. So soon? It seemed unfair to already be worried.

  Behind me, I could hear Alison moving away from the window.

  “Is she down?”

  “I guess.”

  “For at least an hour, right? So let's go.”

  “I'm not sure I can—”

  “Let's go, Eve.”

  She was determined, like we were about to rob a bank.

  • • •

  “I had to burn incense.” She pulled at the front of her pants. “Here. Directly over my uterus. I had to burn these sticks, all the way down. See? There's still a mark.”

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “This Chinese herbalist doctor. Don't laugh. It worked.” It never occurred to me to laugh. I was squinting, though, because there wasn't any mark I could see. But then again, I hadn't examined too many women's groins before, certainly not while sitting at a bar.

  I had walked by Snoopy's a hundred times, and I had to admit it intrigued me. I was too shy to ever think about going in alone, though. It had TV sets on high shelves over the bottles. Everything was black vinyl: the stools, the booths. It was a nighttime coffee shop, with alcohol taking over from caffeine. Like the butcher's and the Laundromat, it was from before, very old-style and casual. I didn't feel comfortable here. We were outsiders. I caught several people, men and women, looking at Alison.

  All right, I thought, stop flashing your gross fishnet panties at me.

  “That's not all I had to do. There was this whole feng shui thing. We had a guy come in. It's not just the position but what direction you're facing.”

  “The direction you're facing?”

  “When you do it. You have to be aligned.”

  “But …” I was having trouble following, even though I'd barely touched my drink. I'd asked for white wine and instantly knew it wasn't what I wanted, watching the bartender pour from a big sweaty bottle. “I don't get it. Were you having trouble conceiving?”

  “No. But I really got into how you can influence your child's development before it's even born. Did you know there's this theory that a genius is the product of great sex?”

  I tried to remember. But how would you even know which time was the one? Unless you were as into consciously arranging things as she was. And anyway, what was great sex? How could you regard it in isolation?

  “Does it work with other qualities?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, are brave people the result of withstanding painful sex? Are patient people made by sex that takes a long time? Are some people born sneaky because the mother or father was fooling around, cheating on their spouse?”

  “Wow
,” she said. “I forgot. You're really crazy, aren't you?”

  “Me?”

  The receiving end of the monitor came with a stiff loopy handle so you could hang it off the doorknob or maybe a bedpost. I'd been holding it like a little electronic disco bag. I set it on the bar now, and turned up the volume. A red dot flickered.

  “Sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I quit smoking. For Dominic. Sometimes it still gets to me.”

  “When did you quit?”

  “Ten and a half months ago.” She looked around. “It's like the way some people don't know what to do with their hands? I don't know what to do with my mouth. Especially at places like this.”

  I put my ear closer to the speaker, thinking, This isn't going to work. Ann is miles away. Farther than she's ever been. Maybe not geographically, but my being at this bar, with this woman; it was all so alien to my role as a mother. What was I doing here? All these terrible things could be happening. I've got to get home. My legs twitched in reaction to the thought. I could feel the connection stretching, fraying. That word I almost never used, daughter, came into my head. I had to go back to my daughter.

  “I liked you at that meeting. The way you talked about hating your kid and everything.”

  “I did not say I hated my kid.”

  “You were so tense, though. You seem better now. Are you taking something?” She changed the subject without pausing.

  “See, I just said I did it for Dominic, quit smoking, but in my own mind I'm not even sure which Dominic I meant. Dominic Senior or Dominic Junior, you know? Because they're both named after each other, kind of I mean which hatched first, the chicken or the egg?”

  “Well if it hatched, then—”

  “So sometimes I just say whatever's on my mind. I'm trying to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “Calling you crazy just now.”

  I nodded, still bent low, trying to line up my ear with the speaker. The TVs were both going and there was music too. I could hear squeaks and low drawn-out whistles, traces of all those invisible signals that are supposed to be passing through the air.

  “Anyway, I liked you,” she insisted. “But then you left, really suddenly. And you didn't come to the next meeting. I went, just in case. So when he was driving me absolutely berserk today, I left him with Frances and went for a walk, and then I saw you through the window of the Laundromat.”

  “Who's Frances?”

  “You don't know about Frances? She's this woman in the neighborhood who takes care of kids. You can dump them anytime. For only eight dollars an hour.”

  “You just leave him with a stranger?”

  “God, she's saved my life. Once—”

  She still had her hat on. I reached out, touched one of the little woolen balls, as if it was a volume control, and squeezed it. To shut her up.

  “Oh, Bunny,” a voice said.

  We both frowned. It was coming from the baby monitor.

  The same voice, a woman's, waited a minute, then sighed.

  “That's because you don't understand.”

  She listened, you could feel her, listening patiently, before she went on.

  “I know. I know.”

  “It's a phone call,” Alison mouthed, as if the woman could hear us. “You're on someone else's frequency.”

  “But when I said that, I didn't mean—”

  “Why is it only her end?”

  “She must be on a portable phone. Sometimes that happens. You hear a conversation, but only half.”

  “Ladies?” the bartender asked.

  We both shook our heads. We didn't want another drink. We were riveted by this overheard talk, waiting for her to answer the silent man on the other end of the line.

  “I don't think that,” she said, with false decisiveness. She really did think it. You could tell. “It's just that—”

  Then he was talking. And talking. And talking.

  “Shut up,” Alison muttered.

  “Bastard,” I added.

  “No,” the woman said.

  But he kept on going. Insisting.

  “No,” she interrupted. “It doesn't matter. None of it matters.”

  We looked at each other.

  “I just want you to come home.” She said it not in a weepy way, just a statement of fact. More like he had gone out for a carton of milk. Come home first, was the way I heard it. Come home before … I had no idea. I was losing any sense of what this was about. Just that he was drifting away from her.

  “All right.”

  You could feel the balance of their talk had tipped now, that it was wrapping up. It had that speed at the end, when everybody's already said goodbye in their mind. But what had been decided, or left deliberately unresolved, we couldn't tell. It was frustrating. Our faces almost touched, trying to collect the last few bits of sound that came out of the monitor, filtering them from the hundreds of unimportant noises around us.

  “I'll— Well, be careful. Well—” She waited. “Of course. You can always—”

  “Always what?” Alison snorted.

  “Shhh.”

  We were both holding our breath for her to say, I love you or, better yet, I love you too.

  But nothing followed. Just strange subspace sounds, electronic clicks and squiggles.

  “She moved,” Alison guessed, after another minute.

  We waited some more.

  “She must have been in this one little pocket of space where we could hear.”

  “She didn't even say goodbye,” I complained. “And neither did he.”

  “Whoever he is.”

  “Bunny,” I remembered.

  We laughed. I liked Alison at that moment. She was definitely a sideways girl, I decided. She could slip sideways through things, pass from one state to another without seeming to move at all. Sitting next to her, I felt clunky and fixed in place. Chained to my life. I liked her. Maybe because I sensed she liked me. Then, all at once, her face darkened.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I should go.”

  “Why? Can't we have another drink?”

  “It's almost five. I told Frances I was just going out to shop. That was three hours ago.”

  “So? Does she have to be someplace?”

  “Her? No, she's there forever. But Dominic will be home soon and—”

  She was discovering all these new thoughts. Not liking them.

  “And what?”

  “I really did have to go shopping. There's nothing in the refrigerator. But I don't have time now.”

  She was off her stool, leaving the bar. I grabbed the baby monitor and followed. By the time I caught up with Alison she was already out the door.

  “Slow down,” I called.

  She was stalking down the street. From behind, I could see her sashaying like a demented runway model. By the time I caught up, her hands were compulsively smoothing the front of her coat, as if it was covered with crumbs.

  “I got to get my story straight,” she muttered.

  “What story?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What I've been doing this whole time.”

  I was aware of Ann again, that I had left her. We were coming to a corner where I would have to turn to get back to our building and I was afraid Alison would walk straight. I couldn't leave her so freaked out. I put on a burst of speed, to get slightly ahead, and took her elbow.

  “Everything's fine.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  She looked down at my hand but didn't shake it off. I turned us both, so we were heading for home. I needed her company as much as she needed mine. Maybe more. I tried not to panic, sensing that the closer we got, the higher the likelihood something had gone horribly wrong. My mere absence, now that I had abandoned Ann for that first crucial time, no doubt triggered some disaster waiting all these months to happen.

  “It's just so screwed up,” she said. I could feel her bod
y go jaunty, the way it was before, slouching on her bar stool, her other mode, besides miserable and wired. “I feel like I'm Under Suspicion. You know what I mean? And when I do manage to get away, it's like I'm on some work-release program from the local jail.”

  “Can't you do takeout?”

  “Takeout.” She nodded. “Absolutely Great idea.”

  We had stopped. We were standing in front of the building. I didn't make a move for the door, though. I was terrified of what I'd find.

  Alison put up her collar, trying to stay warm.

  “Pretty weird,” I began.

  “She sounded like an idiot.”

  Our exchanges were tiny tropical islands, bits of palm tree and coral that made it above the waves, more important for the distance they embraced, the unspoken ocean.

  “No, she didn't,” I said. “I thought she sounded like …”

  “Me?”

  “Like me, actually.”

  She nodded. Yes. It could be both of us. One didn't exclude the other.

  “And we're not idiots,” I concluded. “Are we?”

  “I got to get my story straight,” she repeated, took my face between her hands and without any warning stuck her tongue— she'd had a beer—between my lips, this wet alien shove. We stayed that way for about ten seconds, then she sucked back, taking half of me with her, and was gone, hurrying down the street.

  Something was happening in the air all around me, but I couldn't figure out what.

  I got out my keys. Dropped them. Picked them up. I tried putting the mailbox key in the front door. Finally, I found one that fit and went inside.

  The laundry, I thought, as a way of covering my anxiety during what felt like the endless flights of stairs. I have to put away the laundry.

  Ann was exactly as I'd left her. I lingered, still with my coat on, listening to her breathe, taking in the contrast between her dainty sips of air and my frantic panting.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, and then thought, What are you apologizing for? She doesn't even know you left.

  I swallowed the taste in my mouth—no, not a taste, a feeling, the pressure, the surprise, the invasion—and resolutely returned to the business of sorting. The underwear was definitely going to be a problem. And there was one rogue sock. There always is. I held it up, trying to decide if it was mine and didn't match, if I had lost its mate, or if it was someone else's I had ended up with by mistake.