Their son ran out to their lawn. There was a sweet green freshness in the morning air. It was a Tuesday; she believed she was six weeks along; there was a bad taste in her mouth, of ash. Behind them was their house, a flimsy tribute to the middle class, but one bad car crash, one growing lump, a few missed paychecks would send them packing. They could not afford to have a heart attack, to lose their minds. It was just spring; daffodils burst out of the cold earth. She and her husband stood, bewildered, watching the children in the golden Southern sunlight. She loved them so deeply her skin felt as if it were burning, and she also knew that her love, which she had thought contained boundless wealth, could be handed out to dozens, hundreds, had its finite limits as well.
She called the babysitter, kissed her children goodbye, and went to the clinic. She was afraid that he would have tried to convince her to have the third child. She wept on the way there, for her certainty that she could not have another, for her desire to be good enough for the boy and girl. When she arrived at the clinic, she had stopped weeping. She drove home, sore and cramping, three hours later, down the broad gray lanes bordered by fast-food emporiums, wanting to swerve in and run inside to the high school girls in bright hats behind the counters so that she could hear them say brightly, May I help you?
SOMETIMES DURING THE DAY THERE WOULD BE A KNOCK ON THE door, and it would be their eight-year-old neighbor Mary Grace. She was the only person who was ever at the door. She was beloved by their son, and for this reason, Jane let her wander into their house at all times. Mary Grace was fiercely competitive in all areas including height, hour of bedtime, and the quality of bribe her mother had given her in order for her to get a flu shot. She had thin brown hair, and her eyes were hooded with the suspicion that her parents would do anything possible to keep from listening to her.
Mary Grace’s parents were silent, mysterious types who were very involved in their Baptist church. Jane and her husband tried to guess why the parents never spoke to them and why they never invited the son to their house. Perhaps Mary Grace’s father was having an affair. Or the mother was having an affair. Perhaps they never had sex or had bad sex. Perhaps they did not make each other laugh. Perhaps the mother was sad because she wished she had become a ballet dancer, a doctor, a rock star. Perhaps one drank too much. Perhaps he wanted to live in Australia. Perhaps she hated his taste in clothes. Perhaps one of them had cancer. Perhaps they did not want their floors to get dirty. Would they break up or marinate in their sourness for years? Mary Grace’s parents did not set up any sort of social life for her. Jane noticed the wife spending most of her free time snipping their front hedges with gardening implements that were large and vicious. Jane saw the husband on his dutiful evening walks around the block, his eyes cast down, his feet lifting in a peculiar way so he seemed to be tiptoeing across ice. Mary Grace scuttled over to Jane’s at least once a day, neatly dressed and clean, but always with the demeanor of someone who was starving.
That day, she was grateful for the girl’s knock. Jane had returned from the clinic, opened the door to her home slowly, as though she were an intruder. The children noticed nothing; their absorption in their own crises was complete. They saw only that she was their mother and fell toward her. She was aching and exhausted, but the babysitter couldn’t stay. Jane needed a stranger in the kitchen, someone to speak because she could not.
“Let’s make a magic potion,” Mary Grace announced. She believed touchingly that she could realize her great dreams in their home. The girl rushed into the kitchen. Her hands rummaged through drawers, plucked juice boxes from cupboards. “We need to make a magic potion,” she said. “We need olive oil. Lemonade. Baking soda. Seltzer.”
“Yes,” her son said, gazing at Mary Grace.
Jane brought the items over, and Mary Grace poured them carefully into a glass. Her son was now whispering to her, his face intent, and the girl said, rolling her eyes, “No. It will not make you into a cheetah.” Jane looked at Mary Grace.
“He can become a cheetah if he wants,” Jane broke in.
“Then I want to become a princess,” said Mary Grace.
She brought them some vinegar and mayonnaise and seltzer and watched them stir their concoction. Mary Grace looked up and said, “My mother’s doing her fitness video. She wants to get to her high school weight.”
“Oh,” said Jane.
“She was going to become a fitness instructor, but then she was dating my dad and they knew each other three weeks, and then she dropped everything to have me.” She giggled frantically, as though she was not sure what sound to make. Then Mary Grace grasped Jane’s forearm. The girl’s nails were long and sharp. “Can we add perfume to make princesses?” she asked.
Jane allowed the girl to hold her arm for a moment. “No,” she said. She patted Mary Grace’s hand carefully. “I’m sure she’s very glad she has you,” she said, and she reached up to a cabinet for some baking soda. Mary Grace released her hand.
“Then she had my brother like that, boom, and then my sister, and she says if she gets back to her high school weight, she’ll look seventeen again.” Mary Grace took the baking soda, poured it in, and the mixture began to fizz and rise. The children shrieked at the possibilities implied in this, and when the potion puttered out they looked toward Jane. “More!” called her son.
“I want a snack now,” Mary Grace said.
Jane opened the refrigerator. She felt more blood slip out of her, sharply took a breath. “Do you want some carrots?” she asked.
“I want ice cream with hot fudge syrup,” said the girl. “Please.”
IN BOSTON, WHERE JANE USED TO LIVE, HER HUSBAND HAD A SUCCESSFUL business constructing corporate websites, but he most enjoyed helping people create elaborate personal shrines that floated in no place on earth. People wanted all sorts of things on them: personal philosophy, photos both personal and professional, diary fragments, links to other people whom they admired but to whom they had no other connection. Her husband understood their desire to communicate their best selves with an unknown, invisible public; a shy person, he had forced himself to become sociable and liked convincing people of all the intimate facts they needed to tell strangers about themselves. When they met, he was exuberant, and she was disdainful of websites; she was the only person he had ever met who did not want one for herself. “Don’t you want people to click and find out all about you?” he asked. “Your achievements and innermost thoughts?” He was leaning, one arm against a wall, clutching cheap wine in a plastic glass.
“No,” she said.
He sensed she was holding back, and that made her appear to conceal something deeply valuable. She admired his shamelessness, the way he could go up to people at a party and convince them to create monuments to themselves. They had both stumbled out from families in which they felt they did not belong: she, second of four, he, oldest of three. He had a beautiful, careless mother who had left the family for two years when he was seven; this created in him a sharp and fierce practicality, a need to ingratiate himself and to hoard money. She had been belittled by her father and for years had cultivated the aloofness of the shy.
The economy quickly broke apart their life. People and companies were running out of money to create themselves in an invisible space. She had been working as an editor for a small publisher, and that was the first job she lost simply because the company was folding. Their rent was shooting up, they were in their late thirties with a three-year-old, another on the way, and they had nothing saved for retirement. It was time to move on.
HER HUSBAND CAME HOME THAT EVENING IN A CHEERFUL, DETERMINED mood, armed with a new digital camera. He wanted to take pictures of them in the garden and arrange them on a website that would record the children’s growth as well as that of the various vegetables and flowers they had recently planted. The routine quality of his new job sometimes filled him with a manic, expansive energy. So many parts of him were unused. The camera had cost $345. “We can do this every few days,” he said. �
��We can tell people about it. They can click from everywhere and see our garden. We can start a trend!” He tried, with difficulty, to arrange the children beside the plot of dirt.
She did not want him to take a picture of her. She did not want to see a picture of her face on this day.
“We need more good pictures of you,” he said, irritation flickering across his face.
“I look tired,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You need a picture with pearls. Holding a rose. Jackie Kennedy. A socialite surrounded by her darling cherubs.” He laughed.
“Oh, right,” she said. It was a sweet but clichéd worldview that he reverted to when he felt uprooted, and it comforted him. He had nurtured it when he was alone and neglected as a child and had formed his ideas of happiness, what his family and love should be.
She had been the daughter of nervous parents who cut up apples in her lunch so she would not choke and drove only on the right side of the road, and she had been drawn to his point of view when they were dating. She remembered the first time she saw his childhood house, in a suburban tract in Los Angeles—it was a small house that attempted to resemble a Southern mansion, with columns on the porch and a trim rose-bed in the front. There was something in the stalwart embrace of other people’s tastes that made Jane envious—not of the house so much as the purity of longing.
She heard the children shriek, and there was no such simplicity. Your own family was the death of it.
“Come on,” he said. “Throw something on. Wash your face.”
She looked at him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She did not want to injure his perception of himself as a good person. But she knew that now, at night, he clutched his pillow as though he were drowning.
Her family stumbled around the barren garden, hair lit up by the late-afternoon sun. He was clutching his camera, eager to record the physical growth of his children. “Look,” she said to him, wanting him to see everything.
THE CHILDREN WERE IN BED, SLEEPING. SHE BROUGHT BLANKETS TO their chins, watched their breath move in and out. Their eyelids twitched with fervent dreams. The sight of her children sleeping always brought up in her a love that was vast and irreproachable. No one could question this love. She remembered the first time she and her husband hired a babysitter and went to dinner, two months after their boy was born. They had walked the streets, ten minutes from their home. They had hoped that when they sat down in a restaurant, they would enjoy the same easy joy of self-absorption. But they realized, slowly, that they would never in their lives forget about him. The rest of the date they spent in a stunned silence understanding, for the first time, how this love would both nourish and entrap them for the rest of their lives.
She sat beside her husband in bed. She was still cramping; she went to the bathroom to urinate, and there was still blood. She was relieved as she felt the blood leave her, pretending that it was just another period, but she did not want to look too closely at the material that came with it. The names they might have used came to her: Charles, Wendy, Diane. But they were names for nothing now, air. There was no kindness she could offer it now, and that made her feel dry, stunted. She went to the children’s rooms and kissed them again.
She could not sleep. She was sitting in the darkness when she noticed a light go on in her neighbors’ house. Their houses were side by side, about ten feet apart, and the neighbors’ blinds were usually closed. Tonight she saw that they were open as though they were trying to enjoy the new warmth. The mother had put up curtains, but they were sheer, and Jane could see right into their room.
She saw Mary Grace’s mother sitting on her bed. Their bedroom had been decorated with the lukewarm blandness of a hotel room and was so clean as to deny any human interaction inside it. The mother wore a frilly aqua nightie that made her resemble a large, clumsy girl. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and suddenly pulled the nightie over her head. She was watching the husband, who wore bright boxer shorts and no shirt. The curtain lifted in the warm wind. The husband walked over to the wife, and she lifted her face for a kiss; the husband pulled her breast as though he were milking a cow. The wife’s face was blank.
“I know what you forgot! The detergent!” she exclaimed, in a clear voice. The husband drew back. His shoulders slumped as though he were begging. There was quiet, and Jane waited for his answer.
“Sorry,” he said. There was a plaintive quality to this word, his inability to come up with any sort of excuse; it seemed to designate everything about their future. The lights went off.
Jane got out of bed and went downstairs. She told herself she needed to take out the garbage, but she just needed to get outside. Opening the door, the night was thick and black and the air was fresh. She threw the bag of trash into the can and stood in front of her house. The cicadas sounded like an enormous machine. The sky was a riot of stars. She glanced around the empty street and began to run.
The neighborhood was beautiful at this hour, flowers and bushes randomly lit by small spotlights, as though each family wanted to illuminate some glorious part of itself. It was ten thirty, and the only discernible human sound was the canned television laughter floating out of windows. The houses looked anchored to these neat green plots of land. How much longer would her neighbors wake up, shower, eat their cereal, argue, dress their children, weep, prepare dinner, sit by the television, make love, sleep? She ran quietly, the sidewalk damp under her naked feet; she smelled the flowers, the jasmine, honeysuckle, magnolia, sweet and ferocious and dark.
She ran one block like this and stopped, breathing hard. Her forehead was sweating. She was a middle-aged woman in her pajamas, running from her house at ten thirty at night. Looking at her house, she saw the small night-light in her son’s room cast a lovely blue glow through the window. From here, the room looked enchanted, as if inhabited by fairies. Her breathing slowed, and the night air felt cool in her lungs. When she glanced up at the neighbors’ bedroom window, she noticed that their blinds were now shut.
MARY GRACE KNOCKED ON THE DOOR AT THREE THIRTY THE NEXT day. Jane thought she was dressed up early for Halloween, with a short blue accordion-skirt and a T-shirt decorated with a halo made of rhinestones, but it was actually a cheerleader outfit. She was going to a practice for Halo Hoops, the church basketball team. “I have to go to our basketball game at church,” she said. “I have ten minutes. That is all.” Jane held open the door, and Mary Grace jumped inside and did a twirl.
“Can I marry you, Mary Grace?” her son asked.
“No,” said Mary Grace. “I’m older than you.” She looked at Jane. “I’m going to be a superstar singer. I’m going to be in the top five. Wanna hear—” She belted out a few words of a pop song. She was stocky, tuneless, and loud. Jane’s son was enchanted and requested more. He grabbed Mary Grace’s hand, and Jane’s heart flinched.
“Can we make cookies?” Mary Grace asked. “Quick?”
They bustled into the kitchen and proceeded to bake. No one came to take the girl to Halo Hoops. The kitchen suddenly smelled like a bakery. Mary Grace stood too close to her. “Do you like my singing?” she pleaded.
“Sure,” said Jane.
“Me, too,” said the girl. Jane felt Mary Grace’s breath on her arm. The girl’s breath had the warmth of a dragon or another unnatural beast. The girl’s belief in Jane’s worth was awful. “You have pretty hair,” said Mary Grace, reaching up to Jane and touching a strand. The girl had a startlingly gentle touch. Her hand smelled of sweet dough and chocolate.
“Thanks,” said Jane. The boy and the baby stared at Mary Grace. The baby, hanging on Jane’s hip, reached out and swatted Mary Grace away. Mary Grace’s face tightened, aggrieved.
“Do I have pretty hair?” asked Mary Grace.
The baby yanked Jane’s hair. “Ow!” said Jane, grabbing the tiny hand.
“Do I?” asked Mary Grace; it was almost a shout.
Before Jane could answer, her son stepped
forward and grabbed Mary Grace’s arm. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” he asked.
Mary Grace recoiled from his touch. Jane saw all of the girl’s self-hatred light up her eyes: that she had no other friends besides this five-year-old, that her parents did not want her at their table. “No,” she snapped, “Ick. Why do you keep asking me!”
Her son dropped his head, wounded. Jane slapped her hand on the table. It made a clear, sharp sound. “Then just go home!” she yelled at Mary Grace.
The children were suddenly alert. Jane was frozen, ashamed. The girl slowly picked up her jacket and, shoulders slumped, eyes cast downward, trudged to the door, a position already so well-worn it had carved itself into her posture. Her son screamed, “Stay!” and skidded toward her, arms open, but Mary Grace moved to the door and was gone.
THAT NIGHT JANE SAT BESIDE HER HUSBAND AND REALIZED THAT they had known each other for fifteen years. She wanted to tell her husband something new about herself, something she had never told anyone before. She wanted to tell him a secret that would bring them to a new level of closeness. What else could she tell him? Would he be more grateful for a humiliating moment in her life or a transforming one? Did people love others based on the ways they had similarly debased themselves or the proud ways they had lifted themselves up?
“What?” he asked, sensing a disturbance.
“I yelled at the girl,” she said. “She was mean to our boy, and I couldn’t stand it. I shouldn’t have. She turned around and left.”
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