“Asshole,” I heard Allison mutter under her breath as they ran.
Rachel went after them. Maybe I should have gone and helped with the emergency, too, but I was very tired, suddenly, overwhelmed. I considered the situation. My father and Allison had been married now for ten years. Given the age of the girls, they would have to hang tough another twelve. Longer than my father and my mother had endured each other. And, when I was a child, my parents, preferring whispering and occasional violence, had traded overtly hostile words like this only on very special occasions: the shattering of Paquette china, the disparaging of my mother’s meditation teacher. The life that these girls had been drawn into, the air they would breathe in this largely wall-free apartment—there was no predicting anything.
Lucia marched in and interrupted my reflections. “You hiding?” she asked. “We going to do another show. Grown-ups have to watch.”
To express urgency, she tugged on my black Marc Jacobs cardigan, an old gift from Julie, streaking it with the white frozen yogurt that now covered her fingers and much of her person. The commotion, I suspected, must have started when she discovered my father’s used frozen yogurt bowl on the coffee table and dragged it to the floor by pulling on the tablecloth.
“Wait,” I told Lucia. “Hold still.” I squatted, as I’d seen harried parents do in the streets of Los Angeles, and extracted some folded paper napkins from my wallet: Tom, Myra, Julie 2. I soaked them in my glass of water and applied them to Lucia’s face and hands.
Acknowledgments
Thanks so much, Brant Rumble, Claudia Ballard, Kyle McCarthy, Linda Baker, Conn Nugent, Annie Baker, Curtis Sittenfeld, Michelle Huneven, Allan Gurganus, Peter Orner, Rachel Reilich, David Gorin, Leslie Jamison, Andy McNicol, Holly S., Elizabeth Cunningham, Lan Samantha Chang, Elizabeth McCracken, Uncle Rory and the rest of the Baker and Nugent clans, especially Jack, Danny, Molly, Isabelle, and Kati. I’m grateful to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yaddo, Southern New Hampshire University, Beth’s Cabin, and the people at Scribner and William Morris Endeavor I rarely or never see, such as Nan Graham, Susan Moldow, Ian Dalrymple, and my copy editor. And to those who offered affirmation when it was much needed: Rob Spillman, Aisha Muharrar, Amy Williams, Edward Carey, Connie Brothers, Melissa Flashman, Greg Walter, Blake Fronstin, Hanna Rose Shell, Amie Barrodale. And to Khadijah Britton for the use of her name and nothing else.
© ANNIE BAKER
BENJAMIN NUGENT’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Time, and n+1, and his fiction has appeared in Tin House. He was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Director of Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University, he teaches fiction and nonfiction in its MFA and undergraduate programs. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and lives in Boston.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012027692
ISBN 978-1-4391-3659-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-5433-5 (ebook)
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