Ann, the mother of Rainbow Clea, was different. She had a high blond ponytail and did yoga every day and kept a piece of paper taped to the refrigerator that said “Keep the channel open!—Martha Graham.” I wondered if she thought about Martha Graham every time she opened the freezer for a SoyPop. I wondered if it made her happy or sad. I wondered if, in her estimation, her own channel was open. Her daughter’s certainly was. Once when I stayed for dinner, Rainbow Clea said, “You know, Miss Heidi should really wax her armpits,” and Ann hooted with delight. (Miss Heidi, the Cleas’ teacher, was the kind of hairy, organic, unapologetic feminist who always made me feel vaguely threatened and inadequate, though in theory I supported her choices.)
Like Walter, Ann had one joke. Her joke was sticking her hand in a sock to create a puppet that spoke in an accent somewhere between Russian and French. It said, “I vill poot it in zee microwave!” or “No Popseecle vissout zee vegetables!”
Ann referred to female genitalia as “the peeps,” which Clea explained was short for “peepeemaker.” This euphemism bothered me—so incomplete!—but I chose not to interfere. She encouraged Clea to sleep without underwear; at night the puppet said, “Don’t forget to air out zee peeps!”
I was already three or four weeks into the job when I met Ann’s husband, David. Rainbow Clea and I came in from the playground one day and found him in the kitchen.
“Hi, Daddy!” yelled Clea.
“Hi, princess,” he said. But he was looking at me. He was absurdly handsome, like a cartoon superhero, with black hair and a cleft chin.
“So,” he said. “You’re the famous Tess. The Cleas’ new favorite person. Let me see. From Illinois or one of the other I states? Creative Movement at Bennington?”
“Iowa. And Body and Media Studies.”
“Ah, I see. What did that involve? A lot of interpretive dance to Jodorowsky films?” He smirked, in a way that was somehow both derisive and intimate, as if we were in on the same joke, the joke that was me.
I frowned. “Well,” I said, “it was mostly analysis of pop culture. My thesis—”
“Daddy!” yelled Clea. “Want to play Candyland?”
David glanced toward his daughter. “We’ll both play”—he opened the refrigerator, keeping his eyes on me—“if Tess will let me get her a glass of wine.” He pulled out a bottle of white. “Don’t worry. You’re officially off-duty.”
He didn’t give me a chance to say no—just expertly extracted the cork, pop, and poured a glass with a deft flick of the wrist. Then he handed it to me, again with that smirk. This time, I understood, the smirk referred to both of us, to the scene we were playing out: the sexy husband handing a glass of wine to the nubile messy-haired babysitter. Wasn’t it funny that we were enacting these tropes? Wasn’t it clever and postmodern of us to mock them through inhabiting them, to ironically reappropriate this clichéd moment? Wouldn’t I join him in the joke?
I shrugged and accepted the glass of wine, although I had already decided, officially, that I disapproved of David Wright. He was just an older version of the hipster boys I’d messed with in college, whose every action exuded a whiff of mockery—for whom even the human body was such a cliché that they could barely bring themselves to have sex unironically. They’d rub their bony hips against yours in a way that seemed more expressive of annoyance than desire; then they’d ejaculate perfunctorily and offer you a cigarette. You’d walk-of-shame home clutching your jacket around you, embarrassed by the obviousness of your breasts, the slime in your underpants.
So I was somewhat surprised to see David Wright, playing Candyland, become distinctly silly. He had a different voice for each of the characters, and unlike his wife, he displayed an effortless mastery of accent and dialect. The witch in the Peanut Brittle House sounded like a Yiddish washerwoman; the smiling lollipops were garrulous Venezuelans; the Gingerbread Man spoke in a nasal, hesitation-riddled voice that reminded me of Steve Buscemi. When Clea advanced up the Gumdrop Trail, skipping several spaces ahead of him, David let out a comic howl of consternation, provoking a cascade of giggles. When I then drew the Lollipop Card and left them both in the dust, he distracted her by making up a song that went “Revenge! Revenge! Revenge shall be mine!” and chanting it along with her until she’d overtaken me again. Clea spent the whole game either delirious with laughter or reverently looking up at her father, waiting for his next move, practically vibrating with adoration.
Was he a good dad, or an attention-loving narcissist? Was there a faint air of mockery, or self-mockery, to even his performance of fatherhood? Either way, I’d fallen a little bit in love with him, in spite of myself, by the time Ann walked in, clearly fresh from yoga: blond wisps escaping her loose ponytail, cheeks flushed, spandexed body high and firm. “Hello, my leetle petoonia!” she called to Clea. “Hi, Tess.”
She didn’t say hello to her husband. She didn’t need to. In the dark looks they shot each other, I perceived their whole relationship, which is to say I understood their sex: Ann’s cheesiness transmuted into kooky, panting energy, David’s coldness shaming her into even deeper excitement. I could see the venom with which they’d attack each other, as soon as their daughter was safely stowed away in her big-girl bed.
I politely excused myself. As soon as I was out of the building, I called Zander and told him to come over. Something restless had gotten into me, and my waiting felt lonely. I felt like my body was heating up, its molecules moving in greater and greater arcs; if I did not act soon, I might become a liquid or gas.
“I want you to lie on top of me,” I said. “I want you to be as heavy as possible.”
“I want to do more than lie on top of you,” he said, kissing my neck.
“Whatever,” I said. “Just stop wasting time.”
We collapsed onto the couch and for a brief and delicious period of time, he did exactly what I wanted, which was to cover my whole body with his mouth. But then he did what I’d feared: he murmured a quiet question, to which I nodded with resignation, and then he put on a condom and began to fuck me very gently.
“Harder,” I told him. “Harder.” He obeyed, but it didn’t help. He’d opened the wrong door, and I’d flown away, and I couldn’t get myself back.
In theory I do not approve of faking, but in practice it’s easier than explaining. I prefer to call it performing, and over time I’ve grown expert: the breathing that quickens to match my partner’s, the soft moans, the desperate yelps that signal the formal end of another person’s responsibility for my pleasure.
When I sensed that Zander was close, I panted, yelped, allowed my breaths to slow—all from a great distance, as if by remote control. When he slumped onto my chest, spent from the hot bright journey he’d made alone, I slid out from beneath him.
The countdown had begun. I could see how the rest of this would play out. We’d sleep together a few more times, he’d say some tender gooshy things, and then he’d brush up against this cold part of me that repels other people the way the wrong end of a magnet does, and he’d start to drift away from me, and I’d let him.
And where did this big cold magnet thing come from? When did I absorb this allergy to the gentle fuck, this contempt for tenderness? Anyhow, at least the flying-away feeling was gone.
The next day, when I went to pick the Cleas up from school, Miss Heidi of the second-wave armpits pulled me aside. The girls were playing one of those games that involves hand slapping and a singsongy chant with dark psychological undertones. Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim, she put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.
“Clea Stein”—that’s Grass Clea—“had a little, ah, incident today,” said Miss Heidi. “I’ve already called her mother. She”—Miss Heidi glanced over at the two girls—“well, she bit another student.”
“Don’t all kids go through a biting phase?”
“Not usually when they’re six. And when I asked her why she bit Evelyn, she said, because Evelyn was being a”—here Miss Heidi leaned i
n and whispered an unspeakable word—the unspeakable word—into my ear.
I pulled back. “She said that?”
Miss Heidi nodded. “Afraid so.”
I took the two Cleas’ hands as we left the school. “Am I going to get in trouble?” asked Grass Clea, hopefully. I frowned.
“Obviously,” said Rainbow Clea.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s up to your mommy.”
“My mommy won’t care.”
“I’m sure you had a good reason to be angry,” I said.
“I wasn’t angry,” said Grass. “It was part of the game.”
“What game?”
She shrugged. “The game.”
I paused. “Did Evelyn know that it was part of the game?”
She shrugged again. I let it go.
That night, when we got to Grass’s house, we found Nadine hovering in the kitchen, rather than sitting in her habitual staring-chair by the window. She exchanged a serious look with me, then crouched down so that her face was level with her daughter’s.
“You’re not to say that word ever again,” she said.
“What word?” said Clea.
“The word you said to Evelyn today. Do you even know what it means?”
“It means…like, stupid.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Nadine. She stood up and paced back and forth across the kitchen. “It doesn’t mean that.” She crouched down again. “Who did you hear it from?”
“I don’t know.”
“From kids in your class? Clea Wright?” She lowered her voice, confidentially. “Or her parents?”
Clea shrugged. Nadine was standing now, arms folded, looking down at her daughter with a weary expression, as if she’d known all along that this day might come.
The next day, Ann picked up Rainbow Clea from school herself, unconvincingly claiming a forgotten doctor’s visit. She greeted me, and Miss Heidi, as exuberantly as ever, but didn’t acknowledge Grass Clea’s presence; she seemed to carefully avoid even looking in the child’s direction. Did Rainbow’s sudden “appointment” have something to do with the other Clea’s utterance of the Unspeakable Word? Was it possible, for Ann, that one’s channel could become too open?
Grass Clea and I had never spent the afternoon without Rainbow. I’d always favored her in my heart, but being alone with her was surprisingly awkward. I hadn’t realized how much Rainbow Clea contributed to the dynamic, how much my relationship with Grass depended on triangulation.
On the way home, I tried initiating a heart-to-heart. “You know,” I said, “about your sweater? When I was younger I had a favorite outfit too. I had this Cinderella nightgown, which used to belong to my older sister Grace, who I thought was the coolest person ever. So I didn’t want to let go of it, even when my mom told me I’d gotten too big.”
Grass Clea looked thoughtful for a moment, like I’d really gotten through to her. “You know,” she said, “cockroaches are smaller than mice. But they run faster.”
I gave up. Who could tell the reason behind the sweater, behind anything?
“When you were a kid,” I asked Zander that night, “do you think you were, like, aware of your parents’ happiness or unhappiness?” We had just shared a pizza on my couch. We were leaning against each other, and his hand was on my thigh and starting to slowly crawl upward, but I wasn’t really in the mood yet.
“What do you mean?” He stilled his fingers for a moment.
“Like, do you think their mood affected yours.”
“Of course it did. How could it not?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, when my parents got divorced, my dad was like that character in Peanuts with the constant cloud of dirt around him. But with sadness. For years.”
I pictured Zander, for a moment, as a child; he must have been heartbreakingly adorable, with those long lashes and weird beautiful eyes. Surging with a sudden tenderness for him, for the boy inside the man, I leaned over and kissed him deeply, playing my fingers over the edges of his ears. He responded hungrily, pulling my hips onto his and running his fingers through my hair as we kissed. But after a minute or two, he pulled away.
“What about you?”
“What about me what?”
“Were your parents unhappy?”
That was the kind of guy he was: the kind who cared about conversational parity, who would even pause sex in order to ensure it.
Instead of answering, I leaned in and kissed him, harder than I had before. I ground my hips against his. He moaned and pulled me in closer and told me I was beautiful and I felt a little twinge of gratitude and tenderness and said “You too.”
But when he gently made his way inside of me it was David Wright’s face that abruptly appeared in my mind, smirking at me, as if he knew my secret: my disdain for the trap of this body; my yearning to explode it from the inside; my fear that, after such an explosion, there would be nothing of me left.
In order to avoid this image, and what it implied, I opted to exit my body. I hovered several inches above the couch. First I focused on Zander. I watched him having sex with me. I felt mildly envious; he seemed like he was having a really good time. Then I focused on myself. I thought about how my face and body must look, in ostensible erotic transport—the o of my mouth, the flush of my cheeks, the muss of my hair. The image pleased me. I exaggerated my facial expression, and a moan escaped my mouth. This was my most reliable route to sexual pleasure: it was like I was fucking myself, through Zander, and thus having sex while simultaneously avoiding it.
“I feel like you’re not really here,” he said, afterward. We’d just finished, and he was holding me, doing the blind-guy thing to my face. “Are you OK?”
Briefly, I considered trying to actually answer his question. Then Grass popped into my mind, big-eyed in her dirty brown sweater. And I thought: where would I start.
The obvious tension between the families continued for about a week; Rainbow Clea rejoined us, but I perceived a sudden distance between the two girls. I wondered how much longer our arrangement would last.
Then, one rainy Friday, I was given money to take the Cleas to a movie. Unfortunately for me, they decided on a B-grade Pixar rip-off with environmental themes: a buxom, green-skinned fairy named Chloroplastia battles with evil condo developers to save the organic bean farm on which she and her fairy rock band record hits like “My Seed Is Your Seed” and “Worms!”
The movie made me want to stick razors in my eyes, but it seemed to restore the Cleas’ relationship: they exited the theater holding hands, and on the crosstown bus home they made me Google the lyrics to “Worms!”
“Let me ask you a question,” I said, as we approached Columbus. “Why do you think Chloroplastia fell in love with Bio D-Grade the Composting Rapper?”
“Because there was a spell on her, obviously,” said Rainbow Clea.
“I think it’s because he sang good,” said Grass Clea.
“That’s incorrect,” I said. “It’s because the movies want to make you believe that you can’t do anything unless you’re somebody’s girlfriend. It’s not true.”
“Are you Zander’s girlfriend?” asked Grass Clea.
“That is personal information,” I said.
“My dad has a girlfriend,” said Rainbow.
“What?”
“He does,” she said. “I saw them once. In the park. I was on the bus. They were standing next to a bench and he was petting her butt.”
I was speechless. I couldn’t say David’s unfaithfulness came as a huge surprise, but this public display of butt-petting? Rainbow’s best quality was her oneness with her id, and yet this distorted primal scene seemed enough to permanently disfigure anyone.
“I didn’t see the lady,” said Rainbow. “Just her back. She was really small and she was wearing a hat.”
“How did you feel?”
Rainbow shrugged. “She wasn’t naked, so it’s OK.”
I couldn’t bring myself to explain the flaw in thi
s logic. “How about you guys sing ‘Worms!’ again?”
“Yeah!” they cried, and David’s girlfriend was forgotten, at least for the moment.
Worms! They are nature’s recyclers
Worms! They make our plants fertiliiiiized
Worms! They are vegetable-likers
Worms! What a slimy surprise!
I dropped Rainbow off first, leaving her with the housekeeper. When we arrived at Grass’s door, it swung open before I could knock, to reveal a haggard-looking Nadine.
“There you are!” she cried. She looked even paler than usual, her face tear-streaked and raw, dark hair matted strangely to one side of her head. “I left you like five messages. I just got a call from Connecticut. My mother’s in the hospital.”
“Oh my God. I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”
“They’re not sure. They think a stroke. She’s still unconscious.”
“Jesus. Sorry, the girls were playing with my phone. What can I do?”
“I know it’s extremely short notice,” she said, “but can you stay over tonight? Walter’s at that Kant conference in Seattle.” She hugged herself, like she was cold: a little girl without her mother. “I just need to get out there ASAP.”
“Of course.”
“Is Oma going to be OK?” asked Clea.
Nadine looked down at her in surprise, like she’d forgotten she was somebody’s mother as well as somebody’s daughter. “I don’t know,” she said. She reached down and mussed Clea’s hair, then wandered off to her bedroom to pack.
The Wrong Heaven Page 8