Our Little Racket

by Angelica Baker

  “Jesus, sorry. How long have you been standing there?”

  “Not long.” Isabel crossed to the sink, letting the door swing shut behind her. She stood beside Lily and stared down into the suds, as though she’d been called over for a consult.

  “Why are you scrubbing these by hand? I told you, just throw them in the dishwasher.”

  “You don’t want to risk the crusted bits making it through,” Lily said, her voice still wavering. Her whole body vibrated still from that moment, seeing Isabel standing just over her shoulder, staring.

  “My mother taught me to do this, and it’s a hard habit to break,” she continued. Isabel nodded.

  “Well, as is the case with all mother-enforced habits, I suppose.” She sighed and looked down once more at the sink. “But did your mother pay for an extravagant, inconceivably expensive dishwasher? Because we did, and we’ve still got you in here every night scrubbing your fingers red. Anyone looking in our window might think you have one of those thoughtless, oblivious housewives for a boss, Lily.”

  They both quivered at the image, at the idea of anyone peering into the house, then pretended that they hadn’t.

  “That’s something from my mother,” Isabel said. “To spend the money but then fret over it every time I look at the evidence. That’s her voice, lingering in the house.”

  Lily nodded and otherwise stayed very still. Isabel was existing in some unaltered space, and she did not want to remind her of reality, that they hadn’t spoken for more than a few seconds here and there since the initial news. She didn’t want Isabel to read on Lily’s face everything Jackson had said today, about the things that mattered to this woman.

  After lunch, after the ramen, she’d pushed aside her remaining, tugging annoyance with him and convinced him that they should go back to his apartment in Brooklyn before they went to meet his friends. She’d grabbed his keys from him as soon as they were inside the building and raced ahead of him on the stairs, removing items of clothing and letting them drop down behind her to hit him in the face as he scrabbled up behind her. She hadn’t showered when she got back to Greenwich; she’d cut it too close to dinner. So she had that thing, this evening, where if she turned her head suddenly to one side, or darted her tongue to a corner of her mouth to catch a rivulet of sweat, she’d get a dizzying whiff of the smell of Jackson’s skin. She had a soreness on her left breast that she knew was developing into small, purple bruises the sizes of fingerprints. She kept these sensations to herself, on nights like this, smiling at the zaps of pain whenever she made a sudden move to catch a tipped juice glass, or wipe a sauced chin.

  “Everyone’s eaten?”

  “Yes, absolutely. They’re in bed.”

  Isabel smiled, her face almost coy. She crossed to bring down a wineglass from an upper cabinet, then went into the pantry just off the kitchen where they kept the lesser bottles, the everyday overflow from the cellar. She returned with a bottle of red and opened it with two smooth tugs that drew the cork from its berth without resistance, as though it were being drawn up through water. These were the small things, Lily knew, the things you couldn’t learn, no matter who you worked for, no matter how much you watched them. The way Isabel could open a bottle of wine and not be aware of her own movements, the way she could be graceful without observing herself—Lily knew she wouldn’t have that, not ever. She’d made her peace with this. Cribbing from someone who did wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Isabel poured a glass of wine and then looked back over her shoulder, reaching up again to the cabinet. She raised her eyebrows.

  “Sure,” Lily said. “If it’s all right with you.”

  “Well, I’m inviting, so I guess there are new rules,” Isabel said, laughing softly. She reached up for a second glass. She was wearing tight black jeans and a black tank top that scooped low over her modest cleavage, the patterned scarf knotted at her neck the only bit of color on her body. She looked like a teenage cat burglar. The narrow hips, the muscles on each arm taut like stretched shoelaces. As Isabel aged it was all looking ever so slightly tenser, as though the muscles themselves were rising closer to the surface of the skin, but still this was a body any woman—a twenty-four-year-old, even—would want, would consider committing murder to have. Another reason, Lily knew, the other, older wives hated Isabel, even as they smiled and angled for invites to her fund-raisers. She was younger than they were and she exercised, sure, there was a full gym in the basement, Mina dragged her to a class every so often. But it wasn’t her life. She wore the taut thighs, the flat stomach, the tennis player’s angled hips, just as she wore everything else. As something she’d inherited, without giving it another thought. The only thing that kept Lily from wanting to pinch the whippet stem of her wineglass, pinch it until it shattered and cut her skin, was that there were so many other women in their town who wore their good fortune with no humility at all, and didn’t it make more sense to focus your resentments where they really belonged?

  Sometimes she fought the suspicion that it was worse to act as if you didn’t notice all that you had, but that was only sometimes.

  “Thank you,” she said to Isabel.

  “Oh, we should’ve done this first,” Isabel said, clucking her tongue and gesturing at their wine. She tapped her glass against Lily’s, producing a noise like a bell. Lily double-checked that the glass hadn’t cracked.

  “If we’re cheers-ing to anything,” Isabel began, “it’s to you, Lily. I want you to know how much I appreciate your help these past few weeks. I haven’t been—feeling well. As I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  When will this woman learn, Lily thought, that I see her?

  “You know I’d do anything for those kids,” she said.

  “They’re barely kids anymore,” Isabel mused, and Lily wasn’t sure whether she was meant to reply. “The boys are already so big. And Madison, well. Madison’s practically her own sovereign nation at this point.”

  “You know that,” Lily began, fingering the stem of her wineglass. They both drifted over to the table, without agreeing, as if to acknowledge the fact that Madison as topic necessitated an actual conversation, not just hovering over the sink.

  “You know that I’m keeping an eye on her. I just wanted to say.”

  “I appreciate that,” Isabel said, gulping her wine.

  “I know how smart she is, but sometimes, at that age, you know, that isn’t necessarily a good thing.”

  “I’m wondering these days if it’s a good thing at any age,” Isabel said. She set down her glass and pressed the palms of her hands flat against the wood of the table, shifting her weight forward, then looked up at Lily.

  “So,” she said. “Look. I’m going into the city.”

  “Tonight? It’s Sunday.”

  Isabel frowned at her wine. Lily could see that her bottom lip was chapped raw, that she’d been chewing at herself. It was jarring to see such an unsightly flaw on Isabel’s face, to see that one part of her hadn’t been buffed and moisturized somewhere behind a closed door before she presented herself to even so inconsequential a part of the outside world as her children’s nanny. Lily bit her own lip, again tasting that flash of Jackson, the skin behind his ears, the soft skin just above his hip bones.

  “I’ll be here in the morning,” Isabel said.

  “I don’t understand. You’re going to drive in and drive back tonight?”

  “I’ve called for a car. I’m going to get Bob. I think . . . don’t you think? That it’s time for him to start sleeping here?”

  Lily kept silent. Isabel reached across the span of the table and put her fingers to the crook in Lily’s elbow.

  “Oh, Lily, come on. I know you feel you can’t speak your mind right now, with all that’s going on, but if I can’t talk to you, then I can’t talk to anyone.”

  This was frankly bullshit, Lily knew, but it didn’t matter. It hit her right where it was meant to.

  “Okay,” Lily said. “The kids will be happy to s
ee him. But I’m sure, if he’s stayed this long, there’s work—”

  “Well, there’s work here,” Isabel said, something animal coming into her voice. She tightened her grip on Lily’s arm. “There’s work to be done here. They deserve an answer.”

  Lily wanted to ask if Isabel had meant to say, or had wanted to say, “We deserve,” but she didn’t think they’d wandered far enough from their normal lives yet.

  “Why now?” she asked, and Isabel smiled. “I can imagine you must be concerned, but things are okay here. Won’t he come back in his, you know, on his own schedule?”

  “Madison came up to find me on Monday,” Isabel said, pausing to let the image form in Lily’s head. The kids knew they weren’t allowed into the master bedroom uninvited. “As you can imagine, I was caught off guard. And she wouldn’t leave, she had all these questions for me. She wanted answers. And now I’ve gotten a few troubling reports from the security guys. I’m sure you’ve seen the cars. Some kid was driving her around Cos Cob two days ago. And my daughter is, as we both know—how to say this—self-directed.”

  “And you’re worried she’ll go in by herself,” Lily said. “To see him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you aren’t sure what she’ll find.”

  They both put down their wineglasses and Lily knew that if Isabel stared at her, if there was an unadorned silence left to absorb Lily’s rudeness, then this would be the turning point. That would mean things were moving slowly back into place, into the old rhythm.

  But Isabel just smiled again, and nodded.

  Lily’s stomach contracted. She had always assumed, about Bob, but she had never seen a single sign. She’d been watching, more carefully than they could ever know. But she’d never seen him check the wrong phone at a strange time, or stutter when he had to explain a mysterious, midday errand. He was never one of the ones leering at the rare unattended single woman at one of the parties. Never, ever.

  “I’ve called for a car. I won’t be driving. I just need you to stay in the house. You can sleep in Lena’s room downstairs, tonight. Just be somewhere you’ll hear them if they need you.”

  Lena’s room, a spare bedroom—not a guest bedroom but the spare, which was different—was wedged unceremoniously down a small corridor that led off from the den. It had never, to Lily’s knowledge, been used by Lena. She couldn’t think what sort of emergency would ever require that the head housekeeper, responsible only for the inanimate residents of the house, would have to spend the night.

  Isabel’s afraid, she thought. Not because Madison asked her some pushy questions the other night. She’s never been afraid of Bob before. So, then, what?

  “Of course,” she told Isabel. “Of course I will.”

  BUT THREE HOURS LATER, as midnight approached, Lily was sitting on the top step of the main staircase. If necessary, she could be holding the boys in her arms in a matter of moments, calling for Madison to come out to meet them. But this was ridiculous logic. This was a contingency plan appropriate for a home invasion, something she felt certain was virtually impossible to pull off for this particular home.

  Isabel had mentioned the black cars, she realized now. That had been a missed opportunity; her boss had been sitting across from her, fingering the stem of her wineglass, casually mentioning “security guys,” and Lily hadn’t asked the right questions. Hadn’t even gathered any information. Security guys—did that mean they were watching her?

  She felt her back stiffen, her chin punching the air in front of her face. Let them watch her. Let them see the millions of tiny things she did for these kids, every day, without thinking. Putting the fear of God into Mina and her crew the other day, that was the least of it.

  The other possibility was that no one cared just yet about Bob’s children, that they wanted a picture of the man himself brought low. Eyes bloodshot, cheeks carpeted with stubble, mouth slack with fear and exhaustion. Which meant that, starting tomorrow, her role as bodyguard might still come into effect.

  Even as she considered this, though, she knew that Isabel wouldn’t let this happen. They’d go hide out on Shelter Island, where the local law enforcement would act like Isabel’s own private National Guard if she so much as asked them to do it, before she’d let that happen.

  But at what point did hunkering down exclude anyone beyond the children and Isabel? Where was the line between, say, hiring security guards to protect your kids, and hiring a professional security firm to assess the work being done by your employees?

  She thought of Madison, that first morning, of how quick she’d been to trace the blade across Lily’s neck, remind her of her own impermanence.

  Lily sighed, stretching her body from her toes, then curled herself closer to the banister. She wrapped her fingers around the cool wood, its curves shapely, almost feminine. She knew, of course, the real reason Isabel was so upset by his absence. Bob D’Amico didn’t do any more to raise these children than the man who came to clean the pool filters, and Isabel didn’t need his help. It was the apartment in the city. It was his presence there on the nights he was expected home, in Connecticut, his presence there now. It was his refusal to draw himself over the lives of his family, his disinterest in crawling into bed with Isabel, resting his head on her chest, listening to the sound of her breathing. That he’d chosen to be alone. After all this, all this time they’d been married and she’d been working for them, and one thing Lily would not have guessed about Isabel was that this surely illusory part of marriage was what mattered to her in her own.

  When Lily heard the noises from downstairs they were not what she’d been expecting. She’d been waiting either for Isabel to return alone—this, in truth, had seemed most likely—or for the stately rustlings that usually announced their arrival home together, the sounds of keys hitting porcelain trays and wooden hangers knocking together in the concealed closet in the foyer. The tiny noises that seemed so loud and obtrusive when you realized that they signified two bodies, the owners of which weren’t speaking to each other much.

  There had been one night when she’d asked for some time to go into the city to see a cousin’s graduation from Hunter, but had come back on the Metro-North and taken a cab to the house rather than stay over with her parents. She’d relieved the housekeeper, who had agreed to stay to put the children to bed, and had been reading in the kitchen when they came home. They must have assumed that Lena, an older Ukrainian woman who inhaled with guttural sounds and sighed in a falsetto whenever the twins did anything even a tiny bit rowdy, would be dozing already. Lily had heard the door slam harder than usual, heard a body thrown against it with unmistakable force. She was on her feet, moving toward the foyer, before she heard the rumblings of Bob’s voice, Isabel’s hissed replies, and realized that the words she was hearing were charged with erotic challenge and not malice or violence. She’d hovered there in the doorway for a second, more, longer than she would ever admit, before tiptoeing backward through the kitchen and sliding out through the mud room.

  That might, in the end, be an ideal marriage, she’d thought then. Leave each other in peace, except for the days when you can’t keep your hands off each other.

  “Bob, please,” she heard from downstairs. She crouched on the steps like a runner awaiting the starting pistol. There was a loud thud, some sizable mass hitting the floor, and she knew that whatever was happening would not be managed by Isabel alone.

  But Jackson was wrong, she did listen to him, and she knew what he would say. Don’t see anything. Wait until they’ve forgotten you’re there, then listen.

  The next sound, the clatter of something sliding from the table in the foyer, was loud enough that the boys might have heard it, and so Lily stood. She tried to jog down the stairs with brisk intent, the way she would on any other day, attending to any other task, and when she came into the foyer and saw them she kept her face neutral.

  Isabel stood helpless above him, the front door still open behind her. Bob was splayed across the fl
oor, twisted like he’d begun to flop himself over before thinking better of it. He had also knocked over the antique wooden table that stood beneath the mirror, its legs split like branches snapped for kindling. Lily had an absurd image, suddenly, of Bob D’Amico locking them in, barricading the house against outside intrusions. They could do this to all the furniture, tear it to pieces, feed the fireplace, wrap the children in blankets and teach them to survive without the world beyond their parents.

  “Lily,” Isabel was saying, “I need your help. Just help me get him standing. I can get him upstairs, just help me get him off the floor.”

  Isabel didn’t seem surprised to see Lily, didn’t seem caught off guard or overwhelmed with gratitude to see that her nanny had waited up. Lily swallowed the taste of something sour, but she didn’t move. She didn’t begin to help.

  Bob rolled over onto his back, his knees pointing at the ceiling, and tried to lift himself up off the floor. It was threatening, almost, to see so much energy left dormant, like an exquisite gourmet summer meal left out to spoil in the sun, the cheeses growing sweaty skins, the salad greens wilting. His meaty upper arms, straining at the white dress shirt, looked more frightening now than they ever had in action. She was used to them flexing at intervals during even the most casual conversation, his hands in his pockets. She couldn’t look at anything else, now; he was mewling there, on the ground, and all she could notice were his huge arms, the dark hairs on his knuckles. His thighs giant and tubular, clad uncomfortably in the silk legs of his trousers. The sickly, jaundiced-looking exposed strip of skin just above the top of his diamond-patterned socks. He’d always looked a bit off in the uniform, though, like he belonged in a wrestling singlet rather than formal attire. That wasn’t because of what was going on right now. He’d always looked that way.