by Nell Zink
“It wears off fast,” Kenneth said to Joe. “It’s no biggie. You should try it.”
“It’ll spoil my appetite for pizza.”
“Please?” Gwen said. “I’ll be so sad and lonely if I have to do this by myself. We can reheat pizza for dinner.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “If it has to be, but only this one time.”
“Later on we’ll go downtown and help dig victims out of the rubble. Maybe somebody we know has one of those search and rescue dogs. Do you know anybody with a dog?” She sighed in a voluptuous manner. Kenneth grabbed her crotch and kissed her on the mouth. Joe was tolerant of that kind of thing, because they were life partners.
Kenneth gave him a shot with a brand-new, sterile hypodermic, fresh out of the shrink-wrap. He kind of eyeballed the dose, overestimating Joe’s body weight. He was used to hitting larger guys. Joe weighed maybe one-forty. He could have used Kenneth’s dose for girls just fine.
He said, “Oh, wow.”
He leaned back on the couch and smiled, closing his eyes. Kenneth and Gwen moved closer together while he relaxed. He stretched once and shivered, eyes and mouth wide, as if the shadow of a convulsion were passing over him. Kenneth turned to him and listened.
“Did he fart?” Gwen asked.
“You all right?” Kenneth asked.
Joe breathed in hard, wheezing. He was unconscious. His heart had stopped beating. He inhaled again without exhaling. Kenneth felt his neck for a pulse.
When he stopped breathing, Kenneth was truly, madly, deeply surprised. “Call 911 right now,” he said to Gwen as he gathered his equipment and fled, not latching the apartment door.
Being experienced, she wasn’t disabled by the drug. She could see that something was wrong with Joe. Anyone could have seen it. He was turning gray. She was frantic. There was no one around to teach her CPR. The cell phone network was not working, and she couldn’t get through to emergency services, not even from the landline. She screamed once, but when a neighbor knocked on the door, she froze. In her experience, her neighbors weren’t helpful doctors. They were nasty spies. She dumped cold water on Joe. She laid his leather jacket over his wet, scary face.
X.
Ginger told Pam that she and Daniel would be sleeping in her old room, with Flora in the guest room. That surprised her. The guest room was larger, with a bigger bed. She knew that because she had always resented having the small room. Nor did she appreciate being sent with her husband to the room of her childhood.
She opened the door, intending to dump their knapsacks on the floor and go back downstairs. She stood very still. She remembered for the first time in a long time that as a teenager she had covered the flowered wallpaper in her room with an Elmer’s-glue-based decoupage collage of found material on the topic of her favorite band.
At the time, quite a bit of diluted glue had landed in pools on the shag carpet, rendering the room, in Edgar’s words, “a disaster area.” When she left home, he had wanted to remodel it as a weight room and install a NordicTrack. Ginger refused. She let him replace the carpeting and the mattress, which had served Pam and her friends as a mosh pit and sagged like a hammock, but the collage was still there, along with her desk and her Tandy computer from RadioShack.
Her body and mind were already wobbly, and for an instant they became fifteen. She remembered what it had felt like to be herself. An amoeba of longing. An unformed thing that loved.
The fugue state receded. She returned to the present, whatever that was—the events of the day made it exceptionally hard to know—and observed with a philosophical eye that her recollections of having once greatly admired Ian MacKaye had been toned down somewhat in retrospect. The room in which she stood was a teen shrine to an all-consuming passion. It looked as though she had begged, bought, or stolen every magazine article and xeroxed broadsheet ever published about Minor Threat, liberated every flyer for every show from every bulletin board and phone pole in the capital, and devoted every waking hour to adorning his image with hearts and glitter. The ceiling had not been spared. The light switch plate by the door was decorated so that the toggle poked out of his crotch.
She stood still with her heart like a fist, aware in a way she’d never been before of the little girl she had once been. The haughty, insane child who ran away and broke her mother’s heart, not because her mother was possessive, but because she was loved.
Daniel came upstairs to see why she was taking so long. “Holy fuck,” he said. “I guess somebody liked Fugazi.” That was Ian’s best-known band.
“Fugazi was after I left D.C.,” she said. “I was an early adopter.”
“This light switch,” he said.
WHEN THEY FINALLY SETTLED IN DOWNSTAIRS WITH THE TV, THEY FOUND OUT WHY they’d been so lonely on the highway. The nation was standing with New York. While Mayor Giuliani was exhorting downtowners to “get out,” people from elsewhere were streaming into lower Manhattan to donate blood.
Pam went quietly into the kitchen to try Yuval again. He was not answering his cell phone. No one was at the RIACD office.
She tried Joe. He wasn’t home. It didn’t worry her. On his own, he might have rushed downtown with the rest of the volunteers. But his bitch? Not bloody likely. They were surely at her apartment, curled up on the sofa, eating pizza. Probably drinking or having sex—any old urge the carnival atmosphere of universal conflagration gave them license to indulge. She didn’t worry about him. She didn’t think of him much. Meanwhile, thoughts of Yuval followed her like an obsession. He was her stand-in for an entire city. She felt that everything would be all right as soon as she knew he was safe.
Possibly this was because he was the one person she had seen take a deliberate risk. If a victim, then not entirely blameless.
The events of the day had been surreal and dreamlike, a long string of clichés come true, except for those first few moments when it had been an incident, an accident, an incompetent or suicidal pilot. Accidents will happen; what doesn’t happen is that casualties of war rain from the sky downtown. It upended her sense of the world. It seemed so obvious in retrospect. Killing us with our symbols—our arrogant, hubristic, late-hyper-capitalist architecture. The name alone. “World Trade.” The neo-imperialist system of laissez-faire capital flow that had cracked South Asia and put its tentacles on China. In hindsight its advance was ineluctable, its fall inevitable, both to Daniel, who believed in Armageddon, and to Pam, who had parachuted into the North Tower once on a windy day in March. It was swaying so much that her desk chair never stopped rolling. The creaking in the walls keened long and high. On lower floors of older buildings she had heard similar sounds plenty of times. Waterfront buildings in the financial district whipped in a gale like pines. Old hands shared news of those days like fish stories. Gusts so stiff you couldn’t cross Broad Street standing, wrists and faces sandblasted by dust, lungs scoured clean, the Staten Island Ferry listing with the wind, desk chairs rolling three feet with every blast. In a culture given to self-mythologizing, that wind would have had a name, like the Mistral or the Santa Ana. In the financial district, it was weather. She had looked down on cloud shadows sailing the golden waters of the harbor and heard the disquieting snapping of the building’s nonredundant tendons, like the cables stabilizing a crow’s nest on the topmast of a clipper ship. So that when the towers responded to the violation of their tense skins by collapsing, she was sort of surprised and sort of not. Even the attack itself was sort of surprising and sort of not. Who knew they had the nerve, and why did it take them so long?
Yuval was another question mark. Did he pause to get shots of people jumping? Did one of them land on him? What floor did his cousin work on? Did he go upstairs, as he had planned? Was he alive?
Knowing him, there was one thing she felt sure of: he had not walked away with the camera in his hand. He would document everything he could. Maybe he was at home now, cropping images on Photoshop. Maybe he’d lost his cell phone in the bedlam. It would be easy to call his paren
ts—she knew their names; they had to be in the Israeli phone book—but it wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t making a cold call to a rich, happy, generous man’s parents to ask if he was alive. Better to wait a week and get the scuttlebutt at RIACD.
THE NEXT MORNING, THEY HAD TROUBLE GETTING FLORA ORGANIZED FOR THE ZOO. SHE was busy after breakfast in the backyard, trying to climb a tree. When the blue jays screamed at her, she screamed back. Ginger said, “Looks like she’s having fun with animals already,” and refused to call her in. Flora switched to inventing tricks on the rusty swing set, frequently falling to the grass. She stayed in the yard until lunch. The zoo was postponed to the thirteenth, and the four of them took a walk to the park to play badminton.
They lost her again at the elementary school monkey bars. Daniel said, “Let her play,” but Ginger said the kids trapped indoors might be irritated to see one of their own playing during school hours. They could all get hauled in for truancy. They continued toward the park at an adult pace, while Flora skipped ahead with Pam’s old jump rope from her toy chest in the attic of the garage.
Pam said, “I can’t believe I hated this place so much. It’s beautiful.” The trees were huge, many of them native species like tulip, large enough to have been standing since Northwest D.C. was woods. The leaves were starting to turn. “Especially now that I live in a toxic waste dump that’s on fire.”
“Maybe Flora should stay here for a while,” Ginger suggested.
“What—and take time off?”
“No. And go to fourth grade.”
“And live with you?”
Ginger smiled, the passive-aggressive equivalent of an eye roll.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Pam said. “I’m just wondering what you had in mind. Honestly, do I look to you like I want to take her back to Chinatown right now? I’m listening.”
“You could all stay here for a while.”
“I can’t. I have a job.”
Daniel said, “Supposedly, my office is expecting me to be on call next week.”
“Well, you can’t go home while the air is full of asbestos!”
They watched Flora jump rope. Crossing her arms for a simple trick, she tangled the rope and fell. She caught herself on her hands and knees on the sidewalk. It was fresh and white, swept clean by rain. There was not a single disk of filthy gum, much less thousands of such disks per block. No leaping fish were stenciled in yellow spray paint to say NO DUMPING! DRAINS TO BAY! over gutters full of dog shit, rat pelts, turpentine, and the dust of human remains. She stood, brushed a stray grain of mulch off a pink kneecap, and recommenced leaping from square to square of the immaculate pavement. A solitary car approached the stop sign and executed a full stop. The driver waved hello.
“I enjoy her so much,” Ginger said. “It’s like all the upsides of parenting and none of the downsides. By the time you were her age, I’d spent nine years yelling at you to stop doing stuff that was going to hurt you or make you sick, and you didn’t take me seriously anymore. With Flora, it’s different. It’s like she’s seizing her opportunity to be calm and relaxed.”
“You have an ace in the hole,” Pam said, granting Ginger her rose-colored rewrite of family history. “You didn’t have to toilet train her.”
“Well, I know exactly what you mean,” Daniel said. “She’s frolicking like a puppy down here. It’s fun to watch.”
Flora ran back to them, dragging the jump rope. Her eyes were wild with expectation. She looked at each of them in turn and then all three, seeking collective affirmation of a notion that had come to her suddenly and that she found too beautiful to believe, if it were true. They stood watching until she settled down enough to ask, “If I’m here, can I try riding bikes?”
“Does she not—” Ginger truncated her question.
“Yes,” Pam said. “Tomorrow we’ll get you a bike, and we’ll show you how to ride. You can ride bikes any time when you’re here.”
“We always liked her too much to put her on a bike,” Daniel explained.
They found a nice level place in a grove of trees to play doubles badminton out of the breeze. Flora played well, for a child beginner. Ginger remarked that the placidity of her surroundings might be helping her concentrate.
“No chance, Mom,” Pam replied. “City life is what taught her that. Nothing makes you mindful and centered like nonstop chaos.”
THE TOPIC OF SCHOOL WAS DISCUSSED IN MORE DETAIL AFTER DINNER ON THURSDAY. CNN was mercifully turned off—the terror alerts were starting to snowball—and Edgar had settled into his recliner with a cognac. Flora was asleep, worn out by a total zoo bliss experience.
It wasn’t the discussion Pam expected, about how to enroll her in the nearest public elementary school. It revolved around the competing merits of Washington International School and the Episcopal girls’ day school attached to the National Cathedral.
“International has a more diverse student body,” Ginger said. “I think we should try there first, with Cathedral as a backup.”
“It’s more competitive,” Edgar agreed. “I’ll call Steve tomorrow. It might be open to a refugee. I know the headmaster.”
“I don’t get this,” Pam said. “I went to public school.”
Her parents looked at each other and then at Daniel. “You certainly did, sweetie,” Ginger said. “But your father makes more money now. We can afford something better for Flora.”
“By ‘diverse’ I guess you mean diplomatic brats of many nations. It’s going to be a shock to her system, going back to P.S. Zero.”
“What makes you put it that way?” Ginger said. “Is her school that bad?”
“Oh, God, her school. It’s study hall and nothing else. But seriously, how is she going to feel? It’s like giving a cat chicken. You know how after that, some of them refuse to eat anything else and starve?”
“Is this a way to talk about your own child?” Ginger said. “You could let her do the entire year here at a real school.”
“And live with you?”
Daniel said, “Not happening. I couldn’t do without her for more than a week.”
“As if I could,” Pam said.
“Earth to Pam,” Edgar intervened. “Do you read?”
“Yes, Dad?”
“You live in lower Manhattan,” he said. “You are not taking our granddaughter back there this week, next week, or the week after, and she has to go to school. We were looking for a workable solution, and I think we have one. What matters more—your selfish feelings or the health of a child? And how is a little time at one of the best private schools in the country going to hurt her?”
“We could go to Long Island for a while, or the Catskills. Get out of the city and commute.”
“Or just move uptown,” Daniel said. “Rents are going to be depressed. If you’re in such a hurry to send her to private school, pay for Dalton or Trinity!”
“That’s not the deal I’m offering,” Edgar said. “You think because you had it rough, Flora should have it rougher. That’s not parenting. It’s hazing. Every generation should have it better than the one before. Resisting that principle of continuous improvement is wrong. It’s nihilistic.”
“Improvement of what?” Pam said. “Was I the beta version?”
SHE AND DANIEL RETIRED TO BED SOON AFTER, CLAIMING EXHAUSTION. THEY PAUSED on their way to stare long and hard at the sleeping Flora.
“Your dad makes me nervous,” Daniel whispered. “They’re both kind of domineering.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Pam said.
“We’re a family. We stay together.”
“But they’re family too. It’s not like we’d be putting her in an orphanage. You know how she gets along with them.”
“You’re just scared to go home, and you’re projecting your fear on Flora.”
“Is that so wrong?”
WHEN PAM WAS A CHILD, GINGER HAD VOLUNTEERED ON PROJECTS LIKE THE LIBRARY book fair and the garden club house tour. Currently she taught
English to undocumented immigrants and chaired a citizen’s initiative to preserve wild meadows. She was a perfectionist, too High Church in her hereditary Protestantism to believe in salvation by faith. Whatever she believed in, she had to walk the walk.
She believed in beauty. Accordingly, the Bailey home was spotless and uncluttered. Morning hot chocolate was not microwaved Nestlé Quik, but dark squares melted with peppermint oil in organic milk and decanted into a demitasse that looked like an adult coffee cup, only Flora-sized. Before lunch, instead of sending guests to the fridge—the only place in the Chrystie Street loft where food was safe from vermin—for bread and peanut butter, she would kindly ask Flora to remove cut glass dishes from the china cabinet and dispatch her outside with shears to cut blooms for a centerpiece. Sandwich fixings were shaved into slices fit for dolls, even the already tiny gherkins, and Flora was allowed to choose among an assortment of napkin rings. The dining room had four large, high, many-paned windows edged with canvas drapes bearing an oversized pattern of birds and magnolias. The napkins matched the drapes. Everything outside the windows was green or blue, except for the pink climbing roses and massed white hydrangeas.
In short, daily life in Cleveland Park was more festive than holidays at home, and the house was prettier than anything in Manhattan south of Henri Bendel.
Daniel began to develop secret thoughts he didn’t express directly to Pam, but he didn’t have to. Three mornings in a row, they woke up by themselves, without Flora in the bed, after eight o’clock, well rested and on fire to have sex. He said, “If we’re not careful, we’re going to have another kid,” and Pam didn’t even take it the wrong way. She knew what he meant. Flora existed, and the whole universe depended on her, but a couple also existed—the two of them—now cheerful, curious individuals who were getting enough sleep, because Flora went from bed straight to the kitchen. Ginger and Edgar were always up at six, watching ABC and reading the Washington Post.