Our Little Racket

by Angelica Baker

  Her mother leaned back into the water, closed her eyes again. “But I’ll tell you what really gets me. I’ll tell you what kills me. That we’re going to be the example. We’re going to be the cancer eating away at everyone else. It doesn’t matter that we’re far from the worst. It should, but it won’t.”

  The sentences came out slowly, as if her mother could see them behind her closed lids and was reading them to her daughter as they appeared, one by one.

  “You have no idea, how petty. Everything my mother hated about the world you’re in, once you’re somebody’s wife.”

  It wasn’t clear to Madison anymore if her mother cared what she thought. Whether she truly wanted her only daughter to stay in the room with her, or just didn’t feel a particularly strong aversion to having her there.

  “But you aren’t like that,” she said to her mother. “You aren’t someone’s wife.”

  Then, without warning, her mother was in motion. The bathwater sloshed in shark-fin waves as her mother drew her legs into her body.

  “Hand me a towel from the shelf, will you?”

  Madison reached for one and when she turned back, Isabel was standing, the bubbles and suds sliding down her body like a second, ill-fitting skin she’d decided finally to shed.

  Her mother’s breasts were perfectly even, something Madison had learned to recognize as unique as she got older, as she and Amanda had started to compare their own with incessant anxiety. Most people had one bigger than the other, but not her mother. They looked perfect on her chest, hanging below her sharp collarbone, sloping down from her shoulders. Like the most elegant that breasts could possibly look. This is what people meant when they called her mother an ice queen. They just meant they were jealous.

  Madison was embarrassed, to be looking at her mother’s breasts like this, and she realized that she was waiting for her mother to recall herself to her own physical body, remember she was naked. Her mother couldn’t possibly want her to see this. But then Isabel put out one hand and stared at Madison, fingers waving in the air, waiting for her towel.

  Two parallel cords of muscle led your eye down from her breasts to her hip bones, so angular, pointing you down toward the tiny, trim blond rectangle of pubic hair. There were soap suds wreathing her mother’s hips and thighs but her actual pelvis—Madison could not think the word vagina about her mother’s body, not even inside her own mind—was completely exposed, glistening with only droplets of water. When was the last time I even saw her naked? Madison thought, feeling herself grow more frantic. Did I even know to think about her pubic hair back then, to be jealous that hers is such a light color?

  There were these women in Greenwich, Lily called them the Biddies. They had grown up here, always stayed, but now they lived in the guard cottages on land that had once been tiny corners of their family estates. The town had changed, for them. They’d approach you, sometimes, in the grocery store, near the plumped and glossy cuts of organic chicken breast. They’d lurk there, in the anticipatory frost of that aisle, and at first you’d assume they were just charmed to see a cute little girl. But then something would be off, and you’d realize they didn’t know you, or where they were, had forgotten that they weren’t still little girls themselves. You’d have to look away, because there was no way to watch them, driven in circles by their own frailty, the abandonment of the lives they could remember. There was no way to look without stealing something from them that you didn’t even want.

  She handed her mother the towel, averting her eyes, and then Isabel reached for Madison. She put one hand to either side of her temples, and kissed the top of her head. Madison wreathed her arms in her mother’s and they stood there. Madison told herself not to cry, not to move, not to do anything that would make her mother notice the intimacy she’d given away for nothing at all.

  It might happen again, she thought. Even if she throws away the pills, she might still do this with me again.

  She understood, possibly for the first time, what it meant to be so comfortable with someone you could sit with them in silence. She had always felt this way with her father, but it had never seemed like silence with him. He was always in motion, always muttering to himself. Taking up space in the room. Now, with her mother, it felt like the room was expanding.

  ELEVEN

  Amanda didn’t know what she’d expected, really, but this wasn’t it. She sat on the steps of the Met, the last dregs of the city’s summer influx of tourists straggling up toward her, their cheeks and necks pebbled red in the oppressive Friday-afternoon heat. She herself had unwisely worn leggings beneath her sundress.

  “At least take a sweater,” Lori had repeated as she drove Amanda to the train that morning. “You know how chilly they always keep those train cars. Always bring a cover-up.”

  Amanda knew her mother was really fretting over the fact that she had allowed her daughter to take the day off from school, to go into the city alone. All week, since the second column had been published on Monday, her mother had watched her like something that held the potential for sudden, shattering violence: a burnt package of instant popcorn, a champagne cork that had loosened in its berth and was just waiting to be liberated from its spindly metal cage.

  Her father, on the other hand, barely looked at her at all. Apparently he was afraid that any stray bit of eye contact might indicate an apology or even, God forbid, remorse. And Madison had been the same, ever since that first morning. It really felt, to Amanda, that of everyone in their little circle she’d had by far the least involvement in whatever chain of events led to Bob D’Amico possibly losing his job. She really did not think all that highly of her own influence in matters of global finance, possibly even less highly than she thought of her own clout in the Greenwich, Connecticut, ecosystem.

  And yet, apparently, she was the one everyone was desperate to avoid.

  She stood up and brushed the folds of her dress, admitting to herself that she didn’t have any interest in finishing the soft pretzel she’d bought on a whim from one of the carts at the entrance to the park. For a moment she’d convinced herself that it would be delicious, that it would be one of those many things native New Yorkers (she liked sometimes to lump herself in with this crowd) always treated with unfair disdain. What if all these touristy trimmings actually were the essence of the city, what if they were secretly wonderful and had been ignored for too long by those who thought they were in the know? What if this pretzel was delicious, and she missed it?

  Of course, it wasn’t. It was a throat-drying and yet also sodden lump of calories that couldn’t be saved even with liberal globs of yellow mustard, and she threw it in a trash can, then joined the dampened flow of human traffic making its way down Fifth Avenue.

  She cut east quickly, telling herself that it was time to catch a train home and call her mother for a ride, but when she came within sight of the subway station on Eighty-Sixth Street the thought of going down into the closeness and the heat was revolting, and she decided to walk to Grand Central.

  All around her the Upper East Side flowed at its usual lazy weekday rhythms. She felt silly for having expected anything otherwise, but she’d been thinking so much lately of that other September, when her parents brought her into the city every few days. Jake told her later that people said it bordered on child abuse, taking an eight-year-old with them to TriBeCa to serve hamburgers and pizza to the first responders. Most of what she remembered was sitting on top of stacks of cardboard boxes filled with paper napkins and utensils, the other women volunteers patting her head as they bustled by. Her mother appearing every so often, crouching beneath Amanda and taking her chin in the cup of her left hand to make sure she wasn’t afraid. It had smelled terrible, the smoke had clung to every tendril of her hair for days, but smells had never bothered Amanda and she’d liked being with so many adults, listening to them talk to one another when they forgot she was there. The way everyone liked one another for those few days. Susan Sarandon had been there, wearing an FDNY bas
eball cap and serving burgers, and that had been one of Amanda’s first brushes with celebrity, with the way a man might change the entire register of his voice just because he was talking to someone whose breasts he’d seen on a movie screen twenty years ago.

  After they volunteered, for those weeks—and her parents were often taking her out of school for this, spending days at a time in New York, camping out in the guest rooms of friends on the Upper West Side—they always took her to do something fun, a splurge. Tea at Alice’s Tea Cup or an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History or scrambling over the craggy boulders of Riverside Park, despite Jake’s known aversion to grass and sunshine and the ever-looming threat of Lyme.

  All that fall you had felt not only the open quality of the city but also the way everyone knew how unusual this was. The way people took one another’s hands to say hello when they passed in the doorway of Zabar’s or Barnes & Noble; the way strangers stopped to tell her parents what a precious child she was. Everyone was anxious for any excuse to linger and chat, trade stories and hearsay. The constant evasive, obsessive gestures at the treetops on the south edge of the park, toward downtown, “down there.”

  There was nothing like this now, no such feeling of matched experience, and it was only in confronting this that Amanda realized how much she had expected this once more, this sense that everyone had dug, together, into their communal trench.

  Near Sixty-Eighth Street a flush of older teenagers poured from the glass facade of one of the Hunter College buildings, their Converse sneakers dotted with marker drawings. The girls lifted their arms to expose wedges of soft skin between their tight tank tops and tight jeans. The boys clutched their headphones around their necks with casual pride, the way they’d carry sweaty gym towels after a rigorous workout.

  Amanda let herself fall in with them, losing them when they descended into the subway but still imagining herself in some world where Bob D’Amico was a distant symbol rather than the man living in Madison’s house. Where her own father had the good sense to criticize from afar rather than embed himself in the thick of it all like some clumsy, outspoken spy. Amanda wiped the sweat mustache from her lip and let herself think about these things, the things she wanted. Walking the streets in New York always did this, filled her with this unstemmed sense of all the things she wanted and might never have.

  She passed the pizza parlors and old lady clothing stores in the East Sixties and Fifties, heading down toward the skyscrapers, that sense of business being conducted high above her. Steel and glass everywhere, the part of East Midtown that she secretly loved. She was letting her eyes roam over it all, this stretch of Lex with everything only a few stories tall, a little village, the Eat Here Now diner and Le Pain Quotidien and the boutiques. She was moving so quickly and thoughtlessly when she saw him that she almost tripped over the ankle-height iron fence that enclosed a tree planted at the sidewalk’s edge.

  She knew it was him without seeing his face: the barrel-shaped body, the way he had his hands in his pockets but leaned forward with his chest, a business-suit stance even though he was wearing sweats and a baseball cap. She could see the close-cropped pepper hair just at the nape of his neck, beneath the cap. And then he turned his body sideways, facing half uptown, toward Amanda, and she could see Bob D’Amico’s face.

  She did the quick calculations in her head. Their apartment was on Park, but where? Close to Grand Central, maybe. East Fifties. She should have known this would happen, why was she even walking to Grand Central in the first place? You wanted this, she thought, you wanted this agony, you walked right down this street like a little kid pushing at a loose tooth with his tongue until he feels the pop, the salt bloom of blood.

  Mr. D’Amico hadn’t seen her yet, so she didn’t move. She stood still, and that’s when someone just beyond him moved into focus, and she realized that there was a woman standing with her back to him, that he was talking to this woman. She was wearing a baby pink exercise top and skin-snug yoga pants, a Greenwich uniform if ever there was one, but Amanda didn’t think she recognized the face. The outfit seemed so incongruous, every aspect of the woman’s body language made it seem so unlikely that she was on her way to a yoga class, that the whole scene took on the outlandish cast of fantasy, of performance. These were their assumed identities, donned in a hurry so they could speak to each other on Lexington Avenue without anyone noticing. No one had; people continued to flow around them like they were two ordinary city obstacles left on the sidewalk. He was standing with his back to the street now, and she was facing away from Amanda, toward downtown.

  And then he lifted his hand in the air and reached toward her right shoulder and let it hover there, not touching her, not wrapping his fingers around the bony curve of her shoulder, just letting his fingers hang in the air above her body. There was something protective and yet menacing to the gesture. Like he wanted to crush her with his fist but also wanted to keep her from harm, and so barely held himself at some equilibrium by refusing to spoil her, touch her at all.

  Amanda watched them begin to walk down the street together, watched him take the woman’s elbow and steer her onto the side street. She didn’t watch them because she wanted to but because she couldn’t move. She felt a tide of something undefined cramping her stomach, and she stood perfectly still for a moment more. As though her body were a water glass balanced on a delicate tray, and she did not want to splash its contents all over Lexington Avenue. Eventually, she kept walking and made it to Grand Central Station, to the scattered clamor of the main terminal.

  All around her people gawked, stood unselfconsciously with their necks craned to stare at the ceiling, embraced one another and shouted. There was endless enjoyment and yet no fondness, not one display of warmth for anyone else. None of them cared what the others were doing. No hamburgers served to strangers, no one holding an unfamiliar hand.

  The person Amanda wanted to call, really, was her father, but he was at Yale for office hours and besides, she couldn’t call him. She had a piece of information now that he’d want, she had an insider tip. But she couldn’t trust him, anymore, could she? She stood in Grand Central, listening to the ignorant buzz of the people all around her, and she did not want to board the train, did not want to go home.

  TWELVE

  Mina wasn’t even hungry, not really. It was Tom who insisted they stop for dinner on the way up to Andover.

  It was the first Friday in October, and he was furious that this was how they were spending the first night in weeks he could have spent at home. And then Mina hadn’t said a word in the car, had denied him even the tiniest opening through which to shove the blunt force of his anger.

  When she’d called that morning, to see what time she should arrange for a car, he barked at her. He was slammed. Jaime would understand, for God’s sake, if they skipped her recital. If they dropped in on her the next afternoon, instead, and took her off campus for a celebratory brunch.

  “I’ll buy her a Bloody Mary if she wants,” Tom said. “I’ll buy the kid off. I swear to God, Min, it’ll be worth it.”

  She tried not to dwell on the all-too-easily summoned picture of her daughter guzzling a thick, salty red drink, chomping the celery stalk between her front teeth, while the waiter looked on with distaste and Tom sat mute, his eyes tracking the parade of e-mails filling his BlackBerry screen.

  Instead, she asked her husband if she could bring anything—his antacids, the papers. One of the crime novels he consumed at top speed on their vacations, novels he handled so aggressively that by the time he cast them off they looked pummeled, as if they’d been thrown from the window of a car speeding down the Merritt.

  But then he’d surprised her, after his immediate and febrile initial protest, by insisting that they take the Jag out of the garage for the trip.

  “Sweetheart,” she began. “Tom. You must be exhausted. And we’ve got the room at the Andover Inn—you can go right to sleep. The recital isn’t until ten o’clock tomorrow. So you’ll
really get a full night’s rest. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take a car?”

  “We aren’t taking the fucking car service. I already called the garage, they’ll have the car ready for us by six.”

  Then and there, she swallowed what she knew would be four hours of Tom threading through Friday-afternoon traffic on I-95, tailgating any car that wasn’t as nimble as the Jag, cursing under his breath. She swallowed a vision she’d had of a drive spent in companionable silence, Tom perhaps dozing on her shoulder, Mina sliding the rocks glass from his slackening fingers just before he might have let it tumble to his lap.

  She swallowed all of it, her fragile hope for how this evening might unfold, and she swallowed it because she’d visited Jaime exactly twice last year. Once for the parents’ weekend in the fall and once to pack her up for the summer. Tom hadn’t come up with her for either visit. They were going to this recital, whatever abuses she might be forced to draw down on her own head.

  He was punishing her, of course. That was why he hadn’t been to Andover yet. When Jaime was first accepted, he’d insisted that they look at houses up there, in Massachusetts. So they wouldn’t have to stay at any of the local hotels. The drive will be bad enough, he’d said. Might as well have it be a pleasant experience once we’re up there.

  She hadn’t objected. It certainly didn’t seem necessary, and it had only been a few years since they’d bought the house in Southampton. But she hadn’t said a word. She’d even been, a little bit, excited. Decorating the beach place had been fun, if nerve-wracking—it had the potential to be their most public house, after all—but now she could do something cozy, a place where she’d always be alone with Tom. She hadn’t said anything to indicate to him that she thought there was anything wrong with his idea. But Tom was always sure she was policing him, always sure the girl from the other part of Long Island was going to peer out from behind his wife and suck her teeth at him, roll her eyes as he slid his credit card across the table. When he was upset, when he was on a bad run of weeks at work, it was always one of two things: either she was a killjoy who begrudged him any spending for himself, or else she’d married him for his money. That both probably couldn’t be true did not seem to concern him.