Fred strode from the bar, his anger a molten coil in his chest. The parking lot was quiet and dim. In this light, the building looked shoddy, unworthy of his business. He spat on the ground and vowed that he’d never come back. Fred reached the Buick and as he searched for his key in the dark, fighting through his inebriation and embarrassment, an arm looped around his neck; he dropped the key ring and his mind went blank. The arm flexed, and by the time Fred began to struggle, it had found a solid hold.
“You’re hurting me,” he gasped, surprised that it was true, but the grip continued to tighten across his windpipe until he felt his breath sucking distantly into his lungs like the pull of a stopped drain, slow and then slower. His vision grayed at the edges but sound sharpened—crickets whirring in the nearby grass, the highway’s white noise. The steady puff of the man’s breath. Fred grabbed at the arm, managing to turn his head and catch a glimpse of Tony’s face furrowed in grim concentration before it—and everything else—faded into black.
He woke on the asphalt alone, his body twisted halfway underneath someone else’s car. Where the Buick had been, there was only litter, an oil stain dark and spreading. His wallet lay splayed beside his cheek. Fred struggled up from the ground, his throat throbbing. He snatched up the wallet and searched through it, muttering, “No, no,” as if the incantation would make this act undone. His license was there, all his credit cards, but the cash in the main pocket was missing. Fred closed his eyes before opening the secret compartment. It’s still here, he hoped, but of course it wasn’t. The mad money, his wedding ring, the Buick, gone. Tony had left the watch, not fooled after all. Thick with shame, Fred hobbled back inside.
“Call the police!” he shouted, and the bar quieted, all eyes turned to him. “I’ve been robbed!” Then, commotion. Several men went out to the parking lot, as if Tony might still be there; another led Fred to a stool at the bar, and the patrons cleared the way for him. A woman with a beehive updo and rhinestones affixed to her long, painted nails offered him her glass of water. “Haven’t even sipped it,” she said. Hilda, who had been pulling a beer, slammed the tap closed and whirled out from behind the counter, disappearing into the kitchen.
Fred slumped onto the seat, wincing as he massaged his neck. In the mirror over the bar he saw the skin there already bruising, purple rising steadily under red. The other patrons issued automatic condolences and indignation on his behalf. “Damn shame,” the men mumbled, hands in their pockets, fingering their own wallets. Fred accepted their shallow comfort, feeling the slick bar top beneath his hand, and also Tony’s strong arm pressing hard into his Adam’s apple; the way Tony might have slid his ring from his finger, gentle as a lover. He wondered if the boy had let him down easy, or if he’d dropped him quick, all 210 pounds, like a worthless bag of potatoes.
The police showed up just after closing time, both of them white and jacked with blue eyes and short-cropped hair, walking in as if they owned all the hours in the world. Fred buried his resentment and explained what happened. Hilda wiped the same stretch of bar for five minutes, listening. The cops were writing it down and so was Hilda’s boss, trying to look official, his yellow legal pad headed: Incidents. Fred felt slighted, and tired, and important. He told them, “He could’ve killed me,” and paused to see what reaction this stirred in Hilda, but with her hair swung over her face like a partition, he couldn’t tell.
The officers spoke with a few of the other patrons who’d stayed behind. Asked if anyone had seen where the man went. “No,” one man said, pleased to be questioned, “but I saw him leave. The way they were talking, I figured they were friends.”
“Friends?” Fred croaked, his eyes bulging in disbelief. “It’s a crime to be nice?” Everyone started talking over one another, wanting their opinions heard, and the officers beckoned Fred away from the bar, into a more intimate corner, to ask their questions. He turned toward Hilda, opening his face to her, giving her an opportunity to return to him all that he’d paid for. “You’ll wait, won’t you?”
Hilda turned her back, organizing receipts at the register. “Uh, sure, Fred. I guess I could stick around for a little while,” she said, but a few minutes later, he saw her slip out from behind the bar, apron folded in a neat square hugged to her chest. The fry cook’s arm was draped around her waist, comfortable there, and she left without even once looking back. Fred couldn’t help it, a raw little sob bumped up his throat, and the officers shifted their eyes. He kept answering their questions—yes, no, yes, I don’t know—his tongue leaden in his mouth. The cops said they’d call as soon as they had something. “Oh, we’ll probably find the car soon enough, stripped and burned in some abandoned lot,” one of them said, a little too brightly, “but I wouldn’t count on the boy. Cases like these are usually open-shut.” They finished their report and offered Fred a ride home, and when they put him in the back and shut the door, he understood he looked like nothing more than a criminal.
Fred grabbed the spare key under the fake rock near the steps and let himself inside. A dense silence lay over the house, the click of the front door, his footfalls, all sound disappearing smoothly into it, as if there were nothing physical to his being. What he wouldn’t give to have the phone ring right now, shattering that awful, accusing quiet, so complete, implying to him something eternal and dreadful from which he could no longer hide. Would that the doctor might call with better news, or the officers, even Tony—who could have still been a good boy gone wayward, who might have looked up his name in the phone book and wanted to check that he’d left him alive. Fred wished so hard he thought he heard a ring, and he ran to the phone, jerking it from the cradle and slamming it to his ear. “Gloria!” he shouted, hurting his throat, but only the dial tone answered.
Fred felt all the tears he hadn’t cried with Gloria the day before rocket up inside of him like soda in a shaken bottle, and for a few merciful minutes, he let himself weep, needfully and gasping. When he was empty, this noise, too, vanished quickly. Fred wiped the snot from his nose with the tail of his shirt, then unpinned the gold spade from his lapel and held it in one hand as he stripped. The oil-stained jacket, his boots, his pants. He left his clothes in a pile in the front hall, and wandered into each dark room of the house, rolling the pin on his palm, the fact of his nakedness following along the corridor. In the bedroom, the closet gaped, absent of Gloria’s blouses, her favorite pair of shoes, a purer darkness leaching from within. Fred went to close it, and when he crossed the mirror, he would not look.
The Hearts of Our Enemies
It is the little piece of folded paper Frankie found in the back pocket of Margot’s favorite pair of jeans six weeks ago that calls for a cigarette and this extra pluck of courage. She lights up, willing the smoke to hotbox the car, to consume her. For this next act, she must feel hidden. The cedarlike smell seeps into the cloth seats and settles on her. Lingers. She doesn’t smoke the cigarette, just lets it burn, and it is a relief to be bathed in its secondhand qualities. Her husband—and he still is her husband—would be pissed to know she does this, and that knowledge is almost as good as any nicotine.
It feels so good that as soon as the first goes out, she lights another.
Frankie looks out onto the tidy, duplex-lined street named for a flower. Women push babies up the sidewalk, clothed in name-brand workout jackets and CrossFit trainers, dog leashes wrapped around their miniature wrists and the padded handles of strollers. They park in the driveways, bring in mail, brown paper bags of groceries, more children sticky with peacekeeping candy bars, their husbands’ dry cleaning. These women with their endless arms.
A small thrashing part of her congratulates them on keeping it all together when they could just as soon let those bags fall to the ground—purple cabbage bumping its way down the hill, the dozen eggs blinking open on the concrete—and walk away. They could let slip the leashes, watch the babies go the way of the cabbage.
Sitting there, Frankie tries to ho
ld on to a self that she still knows: mother, ex-smoker, lover of all shades of blue and the rare luxury of freshly churned butter, but there are newer, darker aspects she can’t yet identify, layered with grief, guilt, and rage. To sift them out and individualize them would unravel the known elements, so she lets the mess lie. And in the lying, a flicker. Her own bare flesh stippled in sunlight. Hands not her husband’s, the press of fingers against her mouth. Their ridges and salt.
She isn’t careful. Ash falls from the cigarette and lands on the seat. Frankie licks her thumb and wipes at it, smearing a gray streak across the tan fabric. The car is barely a year old, and she has so many payments left that she will now make alone. Her eyes flit back outside.
Nothing stays new, she wants to tell the women, though she’s sure they already know. Not their cars or clothes or bodies. Not their children, fat and smiling, still happy. Still in want of them.
Six weeks ago, she had crept into Margot’s room, pulling the door open with the knob twisted far to the right so that the catch wouldn’t click and alert her daughter or the friend who’d slept over. Every surface was covered with something—fashion scarves and mislaid jackets. Scattered textbooks. Lip stain in shades Frankie would not have been allowed to wear at her daughter’s age, one the gleaming crimson of newly plucked cranberry.
Margot slept beautifully, of course, flung wide over the small bed—covers tangled between legs and one brown arm trailing over the edge, the other resting across her friend’s stomach. Marissa was long and dark and beautiful too, wrapped in a yellow gossamer gown Frankie wasn’t aware girls still wore for sleep. Margot wore an oversized T-shirt and a pair of her father’s old briefs, ignoring years of camisoles and matching pajama sets crammed at the back of her nightstand, and she snored, her face half-buried in her pillow, mouth open in a ring of moisture. Her one visible eyelid fluttered, crusted with sleep that hinted of late-night talk. Frankie remembered what it was like: whispering about the pros and cons of false eyelashes and girls at school with false faces and how many sit-ups equaled one slice of cafeteria pizza and which teachers were fucking which other teachers and boys’ names they said before sleep and would they one day be fucked too and would they like it? She and her friends used to compare their bodies in the mirror, side by side, so they would know what normal was. Frankie wondered if girls still did this, still deadened their arms and touched themselves as if testing unfamiliar fruit.
To look on Margot in the filtered sun was like holding your breath underwater, she thought. A tightness in the chest, a small amount of panic, but bigger than that was the wonder at how light the body could be, held up by all that matter. The feel of it touching you everywhere at once—the soles of your feet, the inside of your nose. How you, suspended in the deep, could truly feel your heart working. That was how Frankie felt, watching her daughter sleep. A little afraid, a little hurt. Exhilarated. She wanted to kiss the sloped forehead under which all those attributes that made her daughter too bright and difficult convened and pulsed.
She didn’t.
Even in sleep, Margot projected warning: Do not touch me.
Frankie slipped from the room as quietly as she had entered it, went back to her chair in the kitchen. She wanted a cigarette, but instead had a third cup of coffee—dark Arabian roast flavored with honey and cinnamon. She thought of the crepes she would make for her daughter and the friend, a peace offering in the only language in which she was absolutely fluent. In the fridge were heavy cream and strawberries she’d gotten from the farmer’s market that morning, sweet-smelling and dense red. The counter was floured and the griddle set on the stove, all of it waiting only for the girls to awaken. She needed to be busy, to fill the space with hearthy smells. To set her hands to useful work.
They didn’t wake for nearly an hour. In that time, the cordless rang twice, summoning her to check the caller ID before answering the first call (her mother), and not answering the second (her husband). The message light blinked like an active tracking device.
At noon, she heard movement, the muted, musical signature of girls in the thrall of serious conversation. Frankie pressed herself to the wall to feel the hum of their words coming through, to know their vibrational setting, but she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t tuned in. She peeled herself away and waited by the stove, hands clasped above the warm bowl of her belly. The girls appeared some minutes later still in their sleeping things, Margot’s hair wrapped and Marissa’s combed down and gleaming, her daughter flicking those precious crusts from the corners of her eyes. Frankie found herself suddenly overwhelmed by the girl, a creature once of her own body and now nearly eighteen and too big to sit on her lap or let go of a grudge easily. What a gorgeous thing she’d made. She tried to remember what it was like before her daughter despised her, the small years when she was revered as a Mother-God, and said to the girls, “Good morning!” though it wasn’t anymore.
Margot’s face creased as she crossed to the kitchen counter to riffle through the bread box, presenting her back to her mother.
“I’m making crepes,” Frankie tried again, indicating the griddle. She felt like a game-show hostess, grandstanding to highlight all the prizes her daughter could win if only she could stomach one unbearable act of kindness. If she would just let Frankie feed her.
Margot selected an everything bagel from the box. “We don’t want crepes.” She still did not look at her mother. Her friend leaned against the doorframe, one arm wrapped around herself, looking steadfastly out the window like a politician, Nothing to see here, business as usual. What was a three-month-long cold war between a mother and daughter except standard operating procedure? Margot sliced through the bagel, bread catching on the knife like skin, and put half in the toaster. She started eating the other half, tearing off chunks and chewing sloppily. She didn’t bother to wipe the crumbs from her mouth.
“Can you drive us to the mall?” she asked. “We’ve got a project.” She kept her tone even, but Frankie saw the slight slitting of her eyes, heard the dare in her voice, and Margot’s whole face like the bread knife, full of serrated edges. Frankie would not have tolerated this behavior if not for her daughter’s blamelessness, if this was just another instance of teenage impudence and not a result of Frankie’s own mistake. Margot knew this, too. The temptation of No was sweet, was perhaps deserved, but Frankie resisted. She knew what was owed.
“Sure, no problem! Get dressed and I’ll drop you off. Need some cash?”
“No thanks. Dad gave me some last week.” Her father, the good guy—or poor Charles, as she’d heard whispered at the bakery and over rows of thyme-stuffed sausages at the butcher’s, once the story got out.
“Good! That’s great!” Frankie said, her voice so bright it was sickening.
The bagel popped from the toaster and Margot seized it, ignoring her singed fingertips, and thrust the half at her friend, who shuffled it from hand to hand until Margot gave her a paper towel to wrap it in. They left the kitchen as quickly as they’d entered, back to the place Frankie couldn’t go. She was struck dumb by the swiftness with which people could leave. How used to doors closing a person could get, to saying good-bye or not saying it at all and wishing later that you had.
After she returned to the house alone and put the griddle away and silence again settled itself on the tops of the fan blades, Frankie busied herself with Margot’s laundry. Margot liked coming home to the warm, folded stacks on her unmade bed, burying her face in the T-shirts to soak up the dryer sheet smell, a scent of manufactured lilac and of being small and wild and unresponsible. Frankie liked picturing her daughter this way, and so kept performing the chore.
She stuffed all the errant clothes into a basket, picked up the jeans that she hadn’t wanted to pay for because, brand-new, they were already ripped, faded, and snagged. She thrust her hands into the pockets automatically, searching for forgotten gum or pens or crinkled dollar bills. Up came the square of paper, to
rn at the creases from being folded and refolded too many times. Frankie let it lie on her palm, holding it out from her body as if offering it the chance to fly away. Then she opened it.
There were two sets of handwriting, her daughter’s flowery, the confused mix of print and cursive most people took up after the third grade; the second writer had pressed heavily on the page, the letters swaggering forward like bulls let free from their enclosures. There were three lines of text—of which only one, the question, was her daughter’s. The note was mostly in French, and seemed innocuous for the fact that Frankie couldn’t understand it. All the French she knew related to culinary school: roux, mise en place; to her brief dream that she would be one of the next great chefs, have her own restaurant, Michelin-graced. This fantasy before Margot, before her husband’s dream of a more available wife won out. Frankie squinted at the writing. Temple. Lights. Love? She could have almost let it go. Almost would have, except for those deliberate periods between the English words: Every. Single. Time.
She abandoned the laundry and took the note to her husband’s study, which he had made clear how inconvenient it was for him to have to leave. His work, very important. His productivity would suffer without reliable access to a computer and he was paying all the bills, was she satisfied with herself? If Frankie could have afforded to replace it, she would have taken a hammer to the thing. Instead, she booted it up, and through its ordered slowness, the warbling dial-up, she imagined a white-napkined table set with vases of pale peonies, creamy bowls of lobster bisque, seared lamb with mint jelly, caramelized pearl onions to pinch whole between her teeth. It took eight minutes to connect to Netscape, and another ten to approximate the words:
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