Very Nice

by Marcy Dermansky

  I showed Zahid how to flip over right before reaching the end of the pool. “And then you kick off the wall with your legs,” I said. “It’s easy.”

  Zahid flipped too soon, every time, too far away from the edge to push off. He had trouble with the flip turn, but he had a slow, lovely stroke. It was as if he were gliding through the water. There was no splash when his arms cut through the surface. The water remained still.

  I demonstrated for him, four flip turns at the edge of the pool, and he stood in the water, watching.

  “It’s genius,” he said. “What a body can do.”

  It was unnerving, having him watch me like that.

  It was funny to think of my daughter, off at work. She came home from camp and told me stories about her day, paint on her clothes, a girl in her group who attached herself to Rachel’s leg every day, pretending to be mud. I had heard that Theo Thornton’s younger sister, Amelia, was going to this day camp, a first grader, but I did not say anything to my daughter about it. I felt bad for the little girl, born into a family like that. I had seen her at school, she was a cutie, she wore her hair in braids, and I did not see why she should be treated different at day camp. I was glad my daughter would be kind to her.

  Rachel got up, got dressed and went to work, while Zahid and I spent all this time together. She didn’t ask what we did during the day, but she did not know what to make of us at dinner. She tried flirting with Zahid, but he was never anything but appropriate. She came to the table once wearing a tiny tank that exposed her belly button, red lipstick and dangling earrings, and we pretended not to notice. She had begun to leave the table before we were done.

  “You don’t have to help her with the dishes,” she had said to Zahid. “Let’s go for a walk. A swim. Do you want to?”

  Zahid did not want to. He stayed and he helped.

  Rachel became bratty before my eyes.

  It was painful.

  I also understood her heartbreak.

  She stopped watching TV in the living room. She watched shows on her laptop in her room instead, door closed, headphones on. Rachel didn’t like my friendship with her writing professor and she did not like how his dog was attached to me.

  I didn’t like it that Rachel was unhappy, of course. I wished that she were having a better summer, I wished her friends could have been home, I wished she had a boyfriend, a boy her age, young and uncomplicated, and yet, I was not unhappy. For her sake, I pretended to enjoy Zahid’s company less than I truly did. I even thought about telling him to sometimes have his dinners somewhere else, but then, I never did. I did not want to. I had gotten used to his gratitude, to his attention, to his company. One night, he cooked us dinner, the best lentils I had ever had, and a cucumber raita. I was impressed. For some reason, I was surprised to discover him competent at basic things: cooking a meal or balancing the pH of the swimming pool.

  I felt that if we tried, I could teach him the flip turn, but part of me was glad that his progress was slow.

  “Swim,” I told Zahid.

  I let myself touch his back when it was time for him to flip. That was all that it took. That touch. Something clicked. Zahid was positioned at the right place in the pool. His legs touched the back wall and he glided over. I was pleased. I was a teacher, a good teacher. I could have taught a wonderful yoga class. I knew that. He stopped swimming after the flip, turning to me for praise. We were inches away from each other.

  “That was easy,” he said, with a big happy smile. “All my life, I thought I wasn’t capable of a flip turn.”

  “And it’s easy.”

  We were both grinning.

  It was easy, in the pool, to put my hands on his waist. A Tuesday afternoon.

  “Try it again,” I said, turning him back to the edge of the pool.

  He tried it again. He did a perfect flip turn.

  I grinned at Zahid. He grinned back at me. Easy. We were in a beautiful swimming pool on a beautiful summer day. Not a cloud in the sky. We were wearing matching purple bathing suits; we were beautiful. I wiped a drop of water from his cheek. I pushed the wet hair off his eyes. He pushed his goggles up onto the top of his head. He had such beautiful brown eyes, such long lashes. His features were distinct, sculpted, as if he should have been a woman.

  “You did a beautiful flip turn, Zahid,” I said.

  I had noticed that my daughter was unable to say his name. My heart was beating fast. I was so incredibly happy that he had done a flip turn. My hand was still on his face, touching his hair, and so I kissed him. Easy. Zahid returned my kiss. A kiss. It had been so very easy.

  “Is this a good idea?” he asked.

  It was not the best question.

  What he was saying was: This is a bad idea. But it wasn’t. There were so many bad ideas: Rolling back government protection for the environment, deporting hardworking immigrants who had lived in this country for years and years. A boy bringing a gun into my classroom was a bad idea. Driving without insurance was a bad idea. Not turning in your short story for a writing class was a bad idea. Thinking about my daughter when kissing her handsome writing professor, that was a bad idea. Kissing Zahid, that was a good idea.

  “It is a very good idea,” I said.

  That was all that he needed. He needed permission. We kissed again. I pressed my body against his. Years of yoga, all in preparation for this moment. For the purple bathing suit that fit me so well. For the erection pressed against my leg.

  Human relationships are complicated. Human relations are messy. I remembered, as long ago as it had been, that sex could be messy. Not just the act itself, but the emotions attached to it, the confusion, the obsession. I had had an affair, only once, five years into my marriage, with a married gym teacher, of all people. Jonathan never knew about it, but I was wrecked when it ended. The gym teacher had ended it. I had decided that adultery was not for me and that had been it. I had been careful with my emotions. I had given all my love to Rachel and my poodle. To my house. I did not want to be careful anymore.

  I was lucky. I did not have to go on the Internet, create a dating profile like friends had told me to. I did not need an app. I simply had to take what was given to me. Zahid Azzam.

  We kissed in the pool for what seemed like a very long time, too long, until my lips got tired, until I became almost bored. He was nervous, my daughter’s professor. He had his hands in my hair. My hands on his waist. I slipped a hand under his bathing suit, touched him. That worked. It didn’t have to be good, the sex, but we had to have it. I had started this and could not back out now. I knew that I didn’t want to do it in the swimming pool. I had never liked having sex standing up. Or in water. I took Zahid’s hand. I pointed to the deck. The pool chairs.

  We climbed the steps at the shallow end of the pool.

  Zahid looked afraid.

  “Are you afraid?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  He looked almost terrified.

  I touched him again. I wouldn’t let him bolt; it would be too hard to move on from there. Too awkward. It would ruin our turkey sandwiches. Our walks along the beach. I would not let everything be ruined. This was simple. It was good. I wanted him, more than anything else. I took off my bikini shorts.

  “Should we go inside?” he said.

  I shook my head. The pool was in the back of the house. It was private. This could not wait. Anything could go wrong.

  “Next time,” I said.

  Zahid nodded. He was following my lead. I had my hand back on his cock and he seemed powerless to think. I had forgotten about this, how easy it was, to be with a man, any man. They were almost incapable of saying no. I had been with so many in college. I wished I had been with older men, when I was young, when they might have had time to teach me something.

  I lay back on the lounge chair. I took
off my bikini top. It was the early afternoon, broad daylight. Years of yoga, I told myself.

  “Come here,” I said.

  Zahid took off his bathing suit and lay down on top of me. I guided him inside me. It was shocking, really. I felt his penis slide in, and there was a moment of resistance, like when I first put in an earring after months of not wearing earrings. I could feel him breaking through.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh,” Zahid repeated.

  I kept my hands on Zahid’s ass and he started to move inside me. I moved with him. In the house, I could hear Posey barking. I could hear the blip blip blip of the swimming pool. Zahid’s lips were on my breast. His hands were on my body. We were moving, together. His skin tasted like chlorine.

  Two

  Rachel

  One of my kids showed up at day camp half an hour late, in tears. She ran right into my arms. She was wearing mismatched shoes and her hair was loose instead of her trademark braids.

  “What’s wrong, little bean?” I asked her.

  Amelia told me that everyone was fighting at her house. Her mother, her father, her older brother, home for a visit. Screaming at each other in the morning. “My brother said fuck you to my parents,” she said. “And my dad said, Right back at you, fuckface.”

  “He said that?” I asked, surprised.

  Amelia nodded.

  “That’s a lot of cursing.”

  Amelia nodded. Amelia’s other older brother was at boarding school. He was the kid who brought a gun into my mother’s classroom, and in Connecticut, especially after Sandy Hook, this was not okay. The director of the camp had taken me aside before the kids arrived on the first day and talked to me about Amelia. She had asked me not to say anything to her about her brother.

  “Why would I do that?” I asked.

  It seemed like such an idiotic request. Like, duh. Did I not have any sensitivity to human feelings? Why would I go out of my way to upset a little girl. Anyway, I liked Amelia, even if she was a little bit clingy. Literally clinging to my leg, playing mud in between activities. It seemed nice that there was someone in the world entirely enamored with me. Unlike Zahid, who I caught looking at me, sometimes, but would never acknowledge it. We had never looked at each other, once, at the same time, simultaneously, this entire summer.

  Amelia had snot dripping down her face. I did not have a tissue. I used the bottom of her T-shirt. I wondered what my mother would say to this crying little girl. I wondered if my mother had been good at talking me down when I was a kid. She must have been, though I don’t ever remember having big emotions, until now, with Zahid in my house, so close and yet somehow, inscrutably, so far away. I could not understand it. Maybe it was because my mother never went out. Every night, she stayed home, cooking her perfect dinners. Did she not have friends to see, I asked her, a movie to go to? Did she not want to go out? My mother smiled at me stupidly, as if she did not understand the question. Go out? I had the urge to smack the strange smile off her face. What I was feeling, at home, was close to fury. It was uncomfortable.

  I gave Amelia a hug. I kissed her on top of the head. She was so much younger than her brothers. Probably she had been a surprise baby, a mistake.

  “I’m an only child,” I told her. “It’s quiet at my house in the morning. No one calls anyone fuckface.”

  This made Amelia laugh.

  I realized that I could get in trouble if I was overheard cursing, even if I was just repeating what she’d heard at home. Maybe I was not supposed to hug Amelia, either. Jesus. There were so many rules. I had spaced out during orientation, but I knew there were a lot of them. More than the years before. Probably it was only the male counselors who couldn’t hug the girls.

  “You should come to our house for dinner,” Amelia said.

  “Okay,” I told her.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. I had not actually meant it.

  “Tonight,” Amelia repeated.

  I hated having dinner at home. It had become a freak show. My mother was performing for Zahid, wearing her Eileen Fisher sundresses, her hair loose. I swear, one night, she was actually wearing perfume. My mother never wore perfume. My mother smiled too much and drank wine and cooked those ridiculous meals, salads with farro and pine nuts and grapefruit. I wanted to inform my mother that my writing professor was not interested in her. That she was old. Only for some reason, inexplicable to me, Zahid seemed to urge her on. It was painful to watch. He had been at our house for more than two weeks already.

  I did not understand why he was not interested in me.

  I was still waiting for him. I left the light on, music playing. I walked down the hall to the bathroom in my nightshirt. I left the door open, sometimes, in the afternoon, changing out of my camp clothes. I was leaving signals, but they were too subtle.

  Back at college, I had kissed him.

  I had undressed him.

  I did not know why I was so scared now. Make a move, I kept telling myself. Make a move. But something held me back. Zahid, probably. The way he did not look at me. Sometimes, I told myself, he acted as if he was not interested in me because he was interested me. And this somehow made sense. He was fighting his attraction to me, because it would make life uncomfortable for him. My mother wouldn’t let him stay in the house if we started up again, and I did not want Zahid to leave. I could wait. If he could wait. And this made me feel a little bit better.

  We were both uncomfortable.

  He was working on his book, my professor. Clearly, he was letting my mother feed him. He did not have a wife. She had bought him a bathing suit, for Christ’s sake. I would not get in the way of his new book. I was not that selfish.

  I was a good person. Caring. Amelia, for instance, stopped crying when I told her I would come over for dinner. I was curious anyway. The famous fucked-up family. I had heard that they were insanely wealthy, even by Connecticut standards. I had seen her father driving around town in a gold Lamborghini. My father loathed him.

  Just like that, Amelia flipped a switch. It was unnerving. It seemed unlikely that there could be two sociopaths in one family, but suddenly I was worried. Where had her brother gotten a gun? From the house where I would be going to dinner.

  “Do you like corn?” Amelia asked me. She latched on to my leg. This habit had begun to get annoying.

  “Sure,” I said. “Who doesn’t?”

  “And lobster?” she said. “Do you like lobster?”

  Sometimes, it felt ridiculous to me, how rich everyone was in our little town. Except for the people who weren’t. The Mexicans who worked at the deli and the supermarket, for instance. I wondered where they lived. There had to be a magic bus that came in the morning and brought them all in and took them home at night.

  “I love lobster,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she said. “It’s my favorite food.”

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  “It is. It’s my favorite food,” Amelia repeated. She was seven. It made sense, actually. I remembered eating artichokes when I was her age. My mother was so proud of me. She told people that I was precocious. We used to eat Brie and M&M’s on New Year’s Eve.

  Amelia was still holding on to my leg.

  “No, I mean, for dinner,” I said. “Are we having lobster tonight?”

  “Of course. Lobster Friday. All summer. My mother says lobsters bring people together. That it is impossible to be mad when you are eating a lobster. It’s too messy. She doesn’t trust people who don’t eat lobster.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, though it made no sense at all.

  “So you are coming? You said you can come. You are going to come, right? You promised. You can’t take it back.”

  Was I going to go to dinner at Amelia Thornton’s house? Home of the kid who’d waved a gun at the little
kids in my mother’s classroom. Later, he told the police that my mother was his favorite teacher. That was why he picked her classroom.

  “Another reason not to be popular,” my mother said.

  Probably no one would ever accept a dinner invitation to their house. The Thorntons were tainted. On top of everything else, they were Republicans. They gave money to the GOP. The father had had his picture taken with Trump at some event, standing next to the man, smiling.

  “What was everyone fighting about?” I asked Amelia.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, Theo can’t stay at his school for the last two weeks of summer, and my mother doesn’t want him to come home. And my brother Ian made her cry. He told her it was time for Botox.”

  “Ow,” I said.

  “What is Botox?” Amelia asked.

  I shrugged.

  “My mom called Ian fuckface, too. For talking that way to her.”

  “Well, fuck,” I said. “She might have a point.”

  I had told my mother Amelia was in my group this year and my mother had taken a moment.

  “Check her backpack for a gun,” she had said.

  She was kidding, but she also wasn’t.

  “Let’s text my mom right now. Tell her to get you a lobster,” Amelia said. I had cell phone numbers for all of the parents. “Tell her I invited you.”

  “It can wait,” I said.

  I had really said I was going there for dinner. Even my father would be distressed. He had argued with Richard Thornton about local development at a town hall meeting. Apparently, the meeting had erupted into a screaming match.

  “Text her,” Amelia said, pulling on my arm, while still attached to my leg.

  She would not let it alone.