The station was better, Lily decided. She’d meet Jackson directly at the station and put him on the first train back to the city, which meant she had only fifteen minutes to get back down there.
She left without taking the time to walk to the end of Bob’s hallway, without listening to see.
HER STOMACH BEGAN TO CHURN when he stepped off the train. She tried to hold tight to her annoyance, her determination to cut things off at the source. He had his hands on her immediately, when they were still standing on the platform, his fingertips at the buttons on her pea coat and immediately under her sweater and up against her skin.
“Surprise,” she said, wanting to shake her head at herself, her involuntary husky voice.
So now they were going for a walk, along Bruce Park Avenue of all places, because she worried that if they went anywhere secluded or warmer, she’d end up doing something like agreeing to give him a blow job on a park bench (this had been done before, though not in Greenwich) or, worse, agreeing to let him come back to the house with her, something she’d never done in the years they’d been together, never.
And then she saw the girls.
It was them, clear and obvious, no doubt in her mind. Zoë Barker was pulling into the station lot in an absurd convertible, and it was obviously Madison in the passenger seat. But the circumstances were so bizarre to Lily, in the context of the Madison she’d always known, that it was one of those times when you feel fate disintegrating your life into small pieces, sending the mundane routines of your days skittering away like marbles into hard-to-reach corners of a room. Because she, Lily, shouldn’t even have been down there, obviously, shouldn’t have been anywhere near Bruce Park Avenue except for the antics of her idiot boyfriend. Which could get her fired.
That thought, too, had crossed her mind. That Jackson was trying to make up her mind for her. If she was fired, he didn’t have to keep trying to goad her into quitting. She didn’t think he’d go that far—not he, who was so attentive to the right connections, to the casual meet and greet that could be nurtured into a future recommendation. She didn’t think he’d be so cavalier about muddying her future job prospects, but still.
The girls, surely, should have been more cautious. They might have considered driving to catch the train at Port Chester or even Rye. What would they have done if they’d run into a friend of someone’s mother, on the platform? The plan wasn’t so daring, perhaps, but it still must have taken a brassy confidence that was new for Madison.
Lily didn’t say anything. She never insulted Madison in front of Jackson. She didn’t like giving anyone even a narrow opening through which to ridicule the kids, or giving away any information that was rightfully theirs to release. So many parts of their lives only made sense if you saw the whole picture, if you were there every day. If you saw how much easier it was sometimes to spend a little money just to make life less stressful. That, up close, it was so silly—pretentious, even, the worst kind of snobbishness—to refuse to spend money for a good cause, whether that cause was helping those less fortunate or simply making life a bit easier for your own children.
But Jackson’s hand was in the back pocket of her jeans, and she’d made a soft sound of panic when she first saw Madison.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said. Even the way Madison carried her body was unfamiliar. Lily had never seen her move this way, as if she knew the world around her would take its step back to let her pass untouched. As if she knew that people would cede space to her, whether out of self-preservation or something deeper, some greater fear.
“Come on,” Jackson was saying, “I’ll leave tonight. I’ll leave before dinner. Just an hour or two.”
Lily watched the train pull into the station, watched them leave. She couldn’t see or hear them anymore, their glossy hair, their shrill calls back and forth to one another.
She thought again of something she’d been unable to erase from her mind for months now. If it were me. If the outside world had forced Lily to reckon with her own father, with the man in full, when she was fifteen years old. What would she consider possible, alone in the city, at a bar? Watching an adult man lick his bottom lip whenever she adjusted her bra strap or let her hair fall across her face?
She knew what she was meant to do, here. She knew, even now, what was important. Madison was a child, and her well-being was the job. Lily knew that she herself would, eventually, become unnecessary, this family’s phantom limb, causing them pain in her own desperation to make her presence more than a memory. But not yet.
When she took out her phone and dialed Isabel’s number, it rang sixteen times. There was no answer.
“Come on,” Jackson said. “Who are you calling? If we drive back now, we’ll have at least two whole hours. I took off work, Lil. I came here to see you.”
Maybe it doesn’t have to be mine to fix, Lily thought. What did they expect, ignoring her like this? And why shouldn’t she get to scare them, just for an afternoon? For all I know, they’ve got a security tail on her. She’ll be fine.
Jackson’s hand was under her shirt again.
TWENTY-FIVE
Madison was on the train with Zoë and Allie, thinking about Chip.
About the nights in his car, how once she was back inside her own house it seemed like they’d been spread across her very skin. His face above her, the cinnamon smell of the gum she never actually saw him pop into his mouth but that he was always chewing by the time it started. All of it brought with it an almost subterranean pressure, as if she fell deep down into some cavernous space when she was inside the car, so deep that the sounds and rhythms of the world receded entirely. Time could actually fly; people had not been making this up. When you had your tongue in someone’s mouth and wanted to touch every inch of his body, time could actually fly.
The first night, the movie after Thanksgiving, he hadn’t kissed her until the very last second. The second time, she’d been prepared. When he asked about her curfew, she told him they had time to kill. When he pulled into the bank parking lot off the Avenue, she had the good sense to sit still and wait for him to decide what to do.
The third night, they’d pulled over on a residential street a few minutes away from her house—“not on my street,” she’d warned, and because he was perfect he hadn’t asked why—and that time the whole pageant of getting themselves to the actual moment had clearly weighed on them both. Because he hadn’t even really reclined his seat, hadn’t maneuvered the coffee cup in the console between them out of his way, before he had his hands in her hair. Before he was cradling her head at the nape of her neck, his tongue touching the roof of her mouth, once, twice, again.
Now, winter break was about to start. They’d been on four dates. Some dim, scrambled part of her brain knew that it must be a conscious decision on his part not to push for anything much beyond his tongue in her mouth and his hand up her shirt. But this felt charmed, she felt lucky. The sharp corners of any distressing thought felt muffled, unimportant.
Seeing him was the only thing she had any interest in doing for the next two weeks. Her mother did have a tree in the foyer, tall and fragrant, its spice filling every room on the ground floor and even the hallway at the top of the stairs. But Madison had known from the start that the tree wasn’t for her. It had been standing there, a complete, twinkling package, when she came home from school one day in early December.
Decorating the tree as a family had been Gran’s favorite Christmas tradition. She’d loved it more than her annual Christmas open house in Georgetown, more than she loved a solitary, quiet winter evening drinking mulled wine from a jelly glass out on Shelter.
And now it was apparently one more thing they were just going to discard in silence. It didn’t matter to Madison, she wasn’t upset over it herself. But it made her sad on behalf of the twins. They hadn’t even asked any questions about the tree. They’d just walked into the room, looked at it in doleful silence, and then walked quietly upstairs together.
She let her head loll back against the torn leather of her train seat.
“I’ve been to this place before,” Zoë said. They were headed to Grand Central, the first stage of a plan Zoë had dictated to them earlier this week.
“You have not!” Allie insisted. “You would have told me.” She linked her arm through Madison’s. Zoë still hadn’t looked up from her phone.
“Are we going there because Wyatt will be there?”
“I have no idea where he is,” Zoë said. “We’re going to meet new boys, not follow around the same ones we’ve known since we were eight.”
“Men,” Madison said. She looked out the window and for the first time she realized they were coming out of this endless autumn, that the gray-streaked houses and parked cars were decidedly the elements of a winter scene. The sidewalks and pavements everywhere had that ice-bitten look so that you knew they’d be cold to the touch. It was only three thirty, but it would be dark soon.
“Excuse me?” Zoë looked up from her phone.
“If we meet anyone at this bar, it’s going to be men. Not boys,” Madison said.
Zoë snorted. “That’s very optimistic.”
Madison put her forehead to the window, feeling her skin shrink back momentarily at the chill, keeping it there, closing her eyes. She spoke very little for the rest of the train ride, but this did not seem to bother Zoë, and Allie was too busy letting herself imagine, out loud, every single thing that could possibly go wrong with their plan. Someone at Greenwich Prep would notice their absences during eighth period. Her mother’s assistant would forget that Allie had called to say she’d be going home with Zoë. They’d run into a family friend at Grand Central who would realize it was far too early for them to have attended a full day of school. The fake IDs Zoë had gotten from her cousin’s girlfriend at Choate would so little resemble their actual faces that they’d be arrested on the spot. It didn’t seem to occur to Allie that cops in New York might have something better to do than come collect them from the street outside a bar that would surely rather just send them on their way.
Madison imagined a world in which she could turn to Allie and speak to her honestly. She had newfound access to things Allie couldn’t possibly know. That it was always the plans like this one that actually succeeded, the white-knuckle moments that implausibly came off. It’s the things you take for granted, she would have liked to tell Allie, the things you believe in without question or fear—the things you don’t even know enough about to view as dangerous—that are sure to leave you vulnerable, exposed.
She had all this new knowledge, she was realizing these past few weeks, and no one who cared to hear it.
COMING UP OUT OF THE TRAIN always felt like being launched from a sluggish cannon. Making your way through the clammy tunnel that smelled of newsprint and exhaust, the air uncomfortably close to your skin even in the dead of winter, the archway that spit you out onto the endless, swarming floor of Grand Central.
There was a fluid rhythm to everyone’s movement in that room. You felt like one small part of an enormous wave of humanity being swept up and out beneath the vast expanse of the restored ceiling, borne up to consider that span of burnished teal above you, its twinkling constellations. You fought the sensation that if you gazed up at it for a moment too long you’d be carried out into the city, not because you made the decision but simply because the anxieties and schedules of this many people propelled you forward with a strength greater than that of any engine.
Zoë moved with quick, decisive gestures toward the south exit. Out on the street they all stopped and looked at one another, as if the spirit of their caper had carried them as far as it could.
“Do you know how to get there?” Allie faltered. Zoë fixed her with a cool gaze.
“We’ll just get a cab to Stone Street,” she said. “I can look up the exact address on the way downtown. There’s going to be crazy traffic right now.”
They all continued staring at one another.
“Get a cab!” Zoë urged, and Allie tiptoed out into the street, her weight resting on the pads of her high-heeled feet, her knees buckling inelegantly. They’d all left their school shoes in Allie’s locker.
“You’ll love this place,” Zoë said, her eyes once again on her phone’s screen. “It’s wall-to-wall bankers. It’s all the way downtown, right near Wall Street, so they all go there for happy hours.”
Madison looked up at the slate sky. It wasn’t yet five o’clock and already the light was fading, leaving the windows of the tall buildings all around them burning in the gloom. It looked so beautiful, the city humming all around them, and all it was, really, was fluorescent office lighting viewed from a distance. Madison kept her neck back until she was absolutely certain her face wasn’t red, or that if it was, it would be indistinguishable from the redness of her wind-chapped cheeks. It had been a mistake, coming into the city. She knew that now, but it was too late. It was inevitable that when the cab pulled up, she would climb into the backseat.
Zoë tried to sit in the front seat, next to the cabbie, and when he rebuffed her with a guttural exclamation, she took her place next to Madison in the back as if that was where she’d intended to be all along. Without saying anything, she patted Madison’s knee twice.
The cab pulled into traffic and began its cruise down Park Avenue.
TWENTY-SIX
Jackson had never seen the house before, and from the moment they walked in, Lily remembered why that was. Why she’d structured her life this way, kept him always so far from this place.
“Jesus,” he said when they came into the kitchen. “You always say it’s tasteful. Are you kidding me?”
“Well, you should really see some of the other houses,” she said, but her voice sounded unconvincing even to her.
“Lil,” Jackson said, “I had no idea.” He continued to wander around the room, touching various surfaces. “I would not put this on the tasteful end of the spectrum. You’ve got D’Amico in your eyes, babe.”
What she actually had in her eyes were the beginnings of anxious tears, and her annoyance at their looming arrival was mounting. He hadn’t even bullied her; she’d brought him here on her own recognizance. Why?
“You act like you’ve never met a rich person before,” she said. “Half the guys in your year at J school were trust-fund babies. You had no problem holing up at their houses in the Berkshires all winter long. I don’t remember that bothering you at all.”
“Not like this,” he murmured, not even wary of her tone. “You could play football in this kitchen.”
He crossed the room and put his hands to her waist, lifting her up onto the butcher block island. He kissed her and let his mouth slide lazily down to her chin, her jawbone, and then the most vulnerable parts of her neck, her throat.
“We should fuck on this,” he said.
“No,” Lily said. “Come on. Get off me. I told you they’ve got those cars parked down there, I still think they might have seen you.”
He pulled back and stared at her in mock outrage.
“As I’m pretty sure you remember,” he said, “I hid. I buried my face in your lap, I believe it was.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Still worried.”
“Come on,” he said to her, notching his thumbs to her hip bones. “You’ve seen some crazy things in this football-field kitchen. What were the craziest ones? You never share the really good stories, I can tell.”
She became conscious of her own breathing, of the air as it moved into her, filled her lungs.
“Nobody’s going to give away anything juicy in the kitchen around the hired help.”
He kissed her.
“Bullshit, Lily.”
“This one couple came in once, having a hissing fight,” she began. His fingers were kneading the skin just below the waistband of her jeans. “The husband was complaining that this was the last party for him, he was done, and she shrieked, ‘You’re the one who wanted to live in the
People’s Republic of Connecticut!’”
“Mediocre,” Jackson said. “Not juicy, come on. I know worse stuff happens. The husbands come in and try to feel you up. People try to feel her up.”
“I don’t spy on them during their parties,” she said. “I’m not downstairs.”
He snorted into her hair.
“This one man came in here a few years ago, the summer,” she said. “I was down here making some food for Luke, he couldn’t sleep. This guy came in and sat down at the breakfast table before I could stop him, and started to cry.”
Jackson smiled. His hands flew up under her shirt.
“No,” she said, “he was kind of sad. He was. They were trying to build this new house and all the little old ladies of Greenwich were outraged and went to the planning and zoning commission.”
“Yes! The zoning commission of Greenwich. I love it.”
Her stomach was churning, no longer with simple desire, but she ignored it. It felt like her voice was keeping his hands in motion.
“They went to the Times and then he didn’t get to build his dream house anymore. He’d bought, like, eleven acres. And this was the following week, after the big article, and he was in here crying. He kept saying, ‘It was tasteful!’”
“And then he made a pass at you, I assume,” Jackson said.
The man had done no such thing. He’d had the look of a man who, on any other night, would have been a predator. But on that night he’d been battened down into submission by his own failures. He sat at the same table where the boys ate their morning cereal, his ruddy cheeks and veiny radish nose those of a man who’s well on his way to liver damage. And he’d looked so rumpled, so small. Lily knew it wasn’t that he’d been such a spectacular failure when he tried to take his rightful place alongside Bob and Isabel. It was just that being near them made it clear to him how far he would have remained, even in his monolithic eyesore, from someone they would ever respect, even take seriously. He had been promised, by some unuttered decree, that there was some final plateau he could reach, that he’d then be able to stand beside Bob D’Amico.
Our Little Racket Page 29