PAULLINA SIMONS

A Song in theDaylight

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Timshel Books, Inc 2009

The Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of Virginia Woolf

Lyrics by John Lennon/Paul McCartney © Sony/ATV Tunes LLC/Northern Songs All Rights Reserved

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007241545

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007353156

Version: 2015-03-09

Dedication

To Sara Belk, a mother, a thespian, a theologian,

a friend, a woman extraordinaire

Epigraph

… Do not lose heart … Outward man is perishing, yet inward man is being renewed day by day … We do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:16–1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: Friday Night (Almost) Like Any Other

Part I. The Stonemason

Chapter One

1. Things Trains Bring

2. Che

3. Maggie and Ezra

4. Jared

5. Jared’s Wife

6. King’s, Ye Olde Market

7. Burial Grounds

8. 99 Red Balloons

Chapter Two

1. Things Which Are Seen

2. Othello

3. Aisle 12

4. “Moisten Your Head with Lubricant”

5. Between Childhood Friends

6. Loose Change

7. Ezra’s Boredom

8. A Birthday Gift

Chapter Three

1. 0–60 in 4.9 Seconds

2. Winter Gold

3. Perpetual Change

4. Waiting for Godot

5. The Navigation System

6. Much Ado About Nothing

7. Explanation of the Navigation

8. Auditing Safeguards

Chapter Four

1. Glad in the Guilt

2. A Dance to Lighten the Heart

3. All Else Shall Vanish

4. Jared and Larissa’s Dry Week

5. Kai’s Prayers

6. Surveillance, Electronic

7. Surveillance, Human

8. Much Ado on the Stage

Chapter Five

1. Split Rock

2. Spilled Milk

3. Simi and Eve

4. Family Fun in the Poconos

5. The Cagesweepers

6. Miami

7. Dracula

8. Love

Part II. Scylla and Charybdis

Chapter One

1. The Disappearance of Tenestra

2. Jonny and Stanley

3. Middle of the Night

4. Larissa the Epicurean

5. Doug’s Jaguar

Chapter Two

1. Paolo and Francesca

2. Stories on the Ceiling

3. Chris Chase

4. “Shall We Go?”

5. The Mungo Wilderness

Chapter Three

1. Heart Strings and Alice Springs

2. Mothers

3. Scylla and Charybdis

4. Fever Swamps

5. Before you Go

Part III. “Everything Must Go”

Chapter One

1. And Now for Something Completely Different

2. All Things Under Heaven

3. Lillypond

Chapter Two

1. Parenting Plus

2. Private Investigations

3. The Runaway Child

Part IV. Miss Silver City

Chapter One

1. The Walker

2. A Motherless Child

3. The Play

4. Happiness

5. Jared Stark

6. Land of the Dry Lakes

7. Pooncarie

8. Demon Ride

9. The Seven Ages of Larissa

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue
Friday Night (Almost) Like Any Other

“Yes, it’s mainly desert lands, nothing but dry creeks,” Doug was saying, relaying to Jared his torrid experience in the Australian bush, “but when it rains five hundred miles away, you get an astonishing twenty feet of water pouring through the arid lake beds and salty playas. Doesn’t happen very often, though, the deluge. And even when it does, it quickly evaporates. The stasis is earth, waterless and scorched.”

“Hmm,” Jared muttered, impatient fingers tapping on the desk. He wanted to get back to their conversation about the Yankees’ middle relief pitching. But Doug had recently come back from a trip to the Australian outback and for weeks straight had insisted on telling Jared all about it.

Jared had had a busy afternoon of capitalization meetings before the long Memorial Day weekend, and at 3:30, his assistant, Sheila, said that Emily had called and needed him to call back right away. He was going to do that but he got swamped with a Tokyo call, an emergency round-up about a possible bankruptcy filing for one of their affiliates, a Hong Kong call, and finally the usual Friday-night banter from Doug, when at 4:45 the phone rang again.

“Dad!”

“Oh, sorry, Em. I’m snowed under. What’s up?” He motioned Doug not to leave; he had one more thing to add to their revolving argument on the dire pitching prospects for the Yankees’ sinking (stinking) season.

“What’s up,” Emily said with all stridency, “is I have a volleyball game today at five and Mom is not home to drive me!”

“Volleyball game when?” Jared’s hand with the index finger out was still raised.

“In fifteen minutes,” said Emily, apparently through her teeth. “And did I mention Mom’s not home to drive me?”

“Where is she?” Jared was waving to Doug, to say, wait.

“Dad? Are you even listening? I don’t know where she is. I’ve been calling you since 3:30!”

“I’m sure Mommy will be right back, Em. Isn’t Michelangelo with her?”

“I thought he was, but Tara just brought him home.”

“Who’s Tara?”

Emily drew a long breath. “Our neighbor two doors down. Our neighbor for seven years.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Apparently he had a playdate with Jen and Jess. So here we all are, except for Mom—who’s not here. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I have a MEET in fifteen minutes!”

Jared’s finger was still up for Doug, just one minute. “Call her cell.”

“Dad, what do you think, I didn’t call her five thousand times before I called you? And then Asher helpfully found her cell phone ringing on her makeup table in the bedroom.”

“She didn’t take her cell phone?” Jared put his finger down, and stared at his desk, instead of at the casually sitting Doug Grant.

“Correct-o.”

“Well, how far could she have gone?” Jared said. “You know Mommy never carries any cash on her.”

“Dad!”

“All right.” He shook his head. “I’m leaving right now. I’ll be home in thirty minutes.”

“Dad! I’ve got to be at the game in fifteen!”

“Can’t you call a friend on the team? Have another mom drive you?”

“Another mom?”

“Or wait for me. I can’t blink myself home, Emily. Either you wait for me, or you call someone else.” Jared didn’t know any of his daughter’s friends by name. “I’m sure your mom will be right back.”

“Back from where? Both her cars are in the drive!” With a massive harrumph on the other end, Emily slammed down the TALK button on the cordless phone.

Jared got up. “Sorry, Douglas. We’ll finish this another time.”

“Everything okay?”

“Oh, it’s fine.” He sighed. “Melodrama. Teenagers. Everything has to be done on their time.” He was throwing his news papers away as he talked; he stuffed his laptop into his leather bag, plus three annual reports in case he had time to work over the three-day weekend. “Larissa’s not home to drive Emily to the game so, you know, major crisis.”

“Can’t wait for my lovely girls to become cranky teenagers,” said Doug. He had two toddlers.

“Listen, I don’t want you to have the last word. But I’m telling you, the Yankees are doomed without middle rotation pitching. When you’re over on Monday for the barbecue, I’ll explain it all more thoroughly. You can bring dessert.” Jared grinned. “And bathing suits for Kate and the girls. We’re firing up the pool.”

“I’d love to, mate,” said Doug with an Aussie flourish in his New Jersey twang. “You know I like nothing more than to hammer home why you’re deluded about the Yanks. They’re getting old! They have too many injuries! They can’t hit! But I can’t do it. The wife and I are going away for the weekend. Our fifth anniversary.” Doug raised his eyebrows. “Atlantic City.”

“Ah. Well.” Jared nodded. “Good for you. Stay away from the tables.”

“Don’t worry, Kate will keep me straight. She hates to gamble. I’ll be lucky if I get an hour for blackjack. By the way, I’ve noticed that Jan, our troubled little deputy secretary, is much better lately. What’d you say to her? She’s sober every day, seems like. Nice work.”

Jared shrugged. That last, successful chat with Jan had been months ago. But he couldn’t talk about it now; he had to run.

They shook hands, wished each other a fine weekend. Jared said he would see Doug bright and early on Tuesday morning.

Forty-five traffic-y and frustrating minutes later he walked into his house. Emily had missed her game and was sitting at the kitchen table crying. Asher was in the den watching TV and Michelangelo was coloring on the floor near the dog. As Jared looked closer, he saw his younger son wasn’t coloring near the dog, he was coloring the dog. Taking the markers (were these even washable?) away from the boy, he patted Emily’s back.

She bucked away from his hand like a wild horse. “Don’t touch me! Where’s Mom?”

“I don’t know,” said Jared. “I just got home. But don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry you missed your game.”

“You should’ve called me back, Dad. I called you so many times.”

“I was at work. I was busy.” Jared felt a stab of guilt. He was at work, and he was busy part of the time, but really, he could’ve called back an hour earlier, and didn’t. Larissa took care of home things; he never had to worry.

He called Maggie. “She’s not with me, Jared,” said Maggie. “I haven’t seen her since Tuesday. Maybe with Bo? Evelyn? Or call my husband. He’s working late tonight. Researching materialism or immortality or something. On a Friday night, too.” She scoffed mildly. “Maybe she’s at the theater. Saint Joan opens next week. They’re rehearsing every day.”

“Materialism and immortality, they’re not one and the same?” Jared said jokingly before hanging up.

“Nah, I haven’t seen your wife, man,” said Ezra when Jared reached him. “She didn’t come in today for rehearsals. Which is disturbing since not only do we open next Thursday but we finally did the run-through without the epilogue, as she expressly wanted, and she wasn’t even here for it. What be up?”

“Did she call?”

“Didn’t. Maybe she’s gone out?”

“Yeah, with someone who has a car.”

“Weird,” said Ezra. “But I did have lunch with her two days ago, and though she was pretty chill, have you noticed your wife’s lost a ton of weight?”

“You think?” Jared had lost interest in the conversation. “She keeps denying it.”

“Oh, yes. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes, she says.” Ezra grunted. “Hey, listen, Lar and Maggie are doing a beer run tomorrow to get ready for the party Monday, but are we still on for tomorrow night?”

“Yeah, sure, why not? Let me find her first, though, ’kay?”

“Like I said, she’s melted away.” Ezra chuckled. “She’s disappeared before our very eyes.”

“Till tomorrow, dude. She can’t have lost that much weight.”

Jared called Bo, who hadn’t spoken to Larissa since the week before.

Evelyn finally picked up. “I’m bathing all five kids at once, Jared,” she said. “I can’t leave them for long. What’s up?” She hadn’t heard from Larissa since her birthday dinner the month before. This surprised Jared. Larissa always made an effort to keep in touch with Evelyn, her college friend.

Six o’clock became seven.

The kids were hungry. Jared ordered pizza from Nina’s, then sat in the kitchen with them while they ate. For some reason he didn’t feel like eating. Finally he went upstairs to get changed, put on shorts, a T-shirt; he opened the bathroom, he opened her closet. Everything was neat, orderly, put away. On the bed were seven of his white shirts, still in sheaths of dry cleaner plastic; according to the ticket, picked up for him by her just this morning. The house was quiet. He looked inside Larissa’s closet again. Peculiarly, he looked inside her jewelry box. What was he looking for? She had many beautiful things. He ambled around the bedroom. Bed was made, patted down, hospital-cornered; clothes were in the closet; shoes in their boxes; books on the shelves. Diamond earrings he gave her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary, which she loved and never went anywhere special without. Everything was in its place.

Everything except Larissa.

PART I

THE STONEMASON

How small of all that human hearts endure,That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Samuel Johnson

Chapter One
1
Things Trains Bring

One sunny afternoon, on the dot of 12:45, from west to the east, after all the leaves had gone and the ground was frozen, into the concrete well of the Summit train station a shiny, stainless, steel-and-blue locomotive rolled in, the doors opened, and a smatter of people alighted.

Train tracks run through Summit, wind through it like the everflowing Passaic River. The station itself is brick and mortar, well kept, maintained by well-to-do people in a well-to-do town. You buy your ticket in a little office with white sash windows and red flowers on the sills, where a woman who wanted to retire ten years ago glares at you from behind the glass and her glasses as she sullenly sells you a one-way to Venice or a round trip to visit your lonely mother in Piermont.

To get to the train, you have to walk down forty concrete steps to the embankment where the train arrives and swishes open its doors for a few minutes. Neither the train nor the tracks can be seen from the road. Clearly this was the intent of the designers. Perhaps so that traffic wouldn’t crawl to a stop in a town of twenty thousand people every twenty minutes. But another reason could be that the train tracks, unlike a river, were not deemed by the architects and engineers to be aesthetically pleasing enough and were deliberately hidden below the cobblestoned street, remaining invisible to the town except for a small white-and-black RR sign on Maple Street, pointing that way. You could live your whole life in Summit, New Jersey, and not ever know your town had a train station that took people away—and brought people in.

And yet it did bring people in, every day, and this day also.

Today it discharged a friendly woman with a baby carriage, two bags and a small girl; an older woman with a wheeled suitcase whose gray unsmiling husband was tensely waiting for her on the platform, as if distressed by her arrival; a young man with a ratty duffel bag, a leather jacket, a baseball cap.

The young man strolled out clacking the pavement with the metal heels of his black riding boots, looked around, squinted, pulled down his sunglasses and whistled for the conductor to open the oversize hold compartment, from which he rolled out a motorcycle.

“Some bike you got there,” the conductor said, sliding closed the doors. “Like a stallion. But why’d you store it when you could’ve ridden it cross country?”

“Bike’d be stolen in five seconds.” The young man grinned. “And I’d be robbed and killed.” He had a crooked smile, frizzy hair, stubble.

“Robbed for what?” the conductor muttered. “After they took your bike, what would they want with you?”

“They’d have to kill me to separate me from the bike.”

“Ah.” The conductor shrugged. “But I thought you was headed to Maplewood?”

“I am. This isn’t it?”

“No. It’s Summit. D’you hear me calling it out?”

“Nah. I was sleeping. Damn.” He smiled unperturbed. “How far to Maplewood?”

“Six miles. You wanna get back on?”

The young man shook his head.

“Or two minutes on that thing if you’re going fast.” The conductor enviously tipped his cap. “All aboard!” The train slowly pulled away.

The biker was left standing on the platform, breathing in the freezing air, one hand steadying his bike, duffel between his legs. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He decided to drive around town for a few minutes, get a bite to eat, relax, and then head to Maplewood. It would’ve been better had he come in the spring, like he’d planned. Still. Fates, all kneel before ye.

He got his bike up to the street on an elevator. After driving around the sleepy subdued Summit and not finding any place he wanted to stop, he looked instead for a street where he could ride the bike a bit. It was real cold, too cold for him in the long term, but he was so happy to be out and about. He wanted a sandwich. On Route 124, he raced up to seventy for a few brief seconds before the light turned red, already out of Summit and in another bare-treed town. “WELCOME TO MADISON.” He saw a large supermarket, an empty parking lot. “Grand Opening,” the sign read, “Drive-through Pharmacy, Starbucks, Fresh Sushi Daily.” That’s the ticket, the young man thought. A box of raw tuna won’t be as good as Maui tuna, but still, a box, maybe two, five minutes in the saddle under the sun in the empty lot. He’d been on the trains too long. He needed air.

2
Che

We are never alone for a moment. We are deceived into loneliness, into solitude, by our pride, by our pretensions. And yet all Che wanted was a child of her own. To never be alone again. She wanted to be renewed by child-birth, and yet it looked like that was never going to happen. Forget the clock. The boyfriend was the problem.

On the outskirts of south Manila, through the wildly populated isthmus between two warm-water bays, on the edge of a rice field in Parañaque, near Moonwalk, in a thatched hut amid a thousand other thatched huts, at the end of a long afternoon when the palm trees were still dripping from the monsoon that had drenched the huts and the mud roads and made going out difficult, near a window and a mirror, a petite Filipino woman sat at a desk dressed in hiking boots, army fatigues, a pink scarf, red lips, tattoos, ebony hair spiked up and streaked white, cigarette dangling, ash falling, and scribbled a letter.

Larissa,

My one true friend, please come and visit your old best friend Che. I’ll teach you how to make rice pudding and patties. I’ll give you excellent cheap wine. I’ll introduce you to Father Emilio and to Lorenzo, if we’re still together, God help me. I can’t believe last time I saw you was before you were ever pregnant. I like the last picture you sent, though I don’t think you’re right, that your boy looks like an angel. His eyes are too mischievous. He looks like he rules your house. And angels don’t look like that, like kings. I should know. Lorenzo looks like that, and he’s definitely not an angel.

What Che didn’t write to Larissa, but which was the impetus for the letter and the slight anxiety underneath the placid epistolary demeanor, was that the night before, Che thrashed herself awake from a terrible black vision in which she saw Larissa in a yellow dress, walking away, while Che was running, calling, Larissa, Larissa … Finally out of breath she caught up with her fair friend and grabbed her by the arm. Larissa spun around. Her face was pallid and wizened, more like the face of a flightless bird long dead. Che cried out, and then Larissa spoke, not in her voice, but a dead stranger’s voice. She said, “Che, what if everything in your life had turned to ashes?”

Che could only shake her head.

“Everything,” Larissa repeated. “Every good thing, every terrible thing, just burned to the ground?”

No, Che mouthed.

“What if there was nothing left?”

That’s impossible, Che wanted to say. There is always something left. She reached out. Always.

But Larissa, like fine wet sand, shivered and dissolved to the earth, in a small damp heap of blackened shavings.

Che screamed—in the dream, in real life. For a long time she couldn’t get back to sleep and, because of that, today was exhausted. Nothing in Larissa’s previous letter gave Che any indication that everything was not, as always, joyous. The dream was incongruous. Che couldn’t put it out of her heart.

The door swung open, and a young swarthy Filipino man stood at the jamb, his hand on his impatient hip. He was attired like her, freaky clothes and rips and rags. He had a look on him of a thing untamed. “What are you doing?” he said. “We’re going to be late. We’re starting in a half-hour.”

“I’ll be right there,” said Che, turning her gaze away from his brooding face down to the white paper with roses on it. It was Epiphany today. So they were protesting. That’s what they were, Che and Lorenzo: professional protesters. For every major holiday and every major feast day, for every international visit and every small item of government policy, for every break in the political climate or even just the status quo, Che and Lorenzo protested. They worked for a company of subcontracted protesters. Whenever there was a demonstration that needed an increase in numbers, they were hired to paint the placards and then walk the streets and shout. “No More War! Separation of Church and State! No American bases! No Blood for Oil! Green Today and Every Day! Fur is Wrong! War is Wrong! Crossing Picket Lines is Wrong! No New Taxes!”

For this Che was paid, poorly. But then she didn’t need much. When she needed extra money, she worked for Father Emilio. The nuns grew the fruit, and she sold it at a morning street market in Parañaque, shouting. “Peaches! Ripe, Excellent! Pears! Fresh, Succulent! Tomatoes, from the Vine! Mangoes, in Season!” Che was an excellent shouter, ripe and fresh from the vine and always in season.

Amiga, thank you for the box of Nutella jars you sent me. It has nothing organic in it, right? So it’ll last me a good long time. Like Oreos. You and Nutella is what I miss the most. Can you send me a little of yourself too, in a box? Sorry this is so short. We have a “God is Dead!” demonstration in thirty minutes. Lorenzo is waiting.

When she wrote his name, Lorenzo, something hot ran through her insides, from the center of her brain through her lungs and heart, through her abdomen, down to where children might come from, in other people, though clearly, not in her.

“Che!”

How endearing he was when he shouted for her. Not her Christian name, Claire, that would be too conventional, but Che, a non-conformist shortening of her last name, Cherengue.

“I’m coming. Just …” She pondered. “One more word. One more sentence, Lorenzo. Wait.” After all, how long have I been waiting for you? A long time, right?

Maybe one day you can come. I know it’s hard to leave the kids. You can tell them it’s for a good cause. They know how much their mommy likes hopeless causes, the more hopeless the better.

Don’t worry about me. I know you think I’m doing crazy work, but these are just rumors of danger, of violence. Like you, I’m living exactly the life I chose. (Almost.) A little anti-God demonstration never hurt anyone. God will forgive me, right? He knows what’s in my heart. Last week I went to a pro-war demonstration. The anti-war people set us on fire. I mean, really on fire. Poured gasoline onto the street and lit a match. I’m fine, not a scratch on me. Dear Jesus. It’s not the work, it’s Lorenzo that’s giving me agita. You don’t know how lucky you are, not having to think about all this B#$%&!t. This is what we used to obsess about when we were in junior high. So how is it that you’ve got a hubby and three kids and I’m still obsessing about it? You’re living your happily ever after, but, Larissa, am I hopeless?

“Coming, Lorenzo!” Che hurried out of the bedroom. Hear those bells ringing? How could you not? They’re as loud as the bells of Notre Dame. The bells of impending non-motherhood.

3
Maggie and Ezra

“This longing for immortality, Maggie,” said Ezra, as the DeSwanns got ready in the morning, “don’t you think it’s a bit compulsive? Consuming? A little like mental illness? Do you think Larissa bothers with this?”

This was said in response to Maggie’s informing him that in addition to her other numberless interests, she was now enrolling in an art class.

“What are you talking about, Ezra? It’s not for immortality. It’s for fun.” She snorted. “So I can teach my kids to paint.” By kids Maggie didn’t mean her own son who was fifteen and way past painting, but the pre-schoolers she taught three mornings a week at the local church day school.

Ezra shook his head. “Thank goodness you’re just trying to ruin other people’s children. Larissa doesn’t bother yearning for the impossible.”

“How do you know? I thought you said we all yearn for the impossible? Make up your mind.” She scrunched up her wet, curly hair.

Ezra continued to struggle with his bow tie. “Do what I do to make life more fun,” he said. “Read. Try to understand the workings of the universe.” He had just last week become the head of the English Department at Pingry, the tony private prep school in Short Hills, after the previous department head had finally retired, at seventy-seven.

“You are the most miserable son of a bitch I know,” said Maggie. “Why in the world would I want to be like you?”

“I will become happy once I understand.”

“Tell me, Professor Smarty-pants—all that reading, doing you any good? Happy yet?”

“Who can tell?” said Ezra. “What is happiness anyway?”

Maggie laughed. “See, unlike you, I already believe in my own immortality. I just want to make the flesh have a little more fun. Would you prefer I paint or take a lover?”

With amusement, Ezra glanced at her. “I believe it’s a false choice, Mrs. DeSwann,” he said. “But enough. Do what you like, of course.”

He changed the subject. “Did you know,” he said, “that if there were one fewer electron in the hydrogen atom, one less negative charge, nothing we know would exist? Not us, not the universe, not the galaxies, nothing.”

“Huh,” said Maggie, straightening out the collar on his white shirt; 7:30 in the morning and he was already looking so disheveled. His brown shirts never matched his taupe jackets, and he frequently wore maroon or green pants that matched nothing. He was so eccentric, she couldn’t believe he was hers. Yet Larissa perversely adored him and thought Maggie married well, so he must be worth keeping. Or did Larissa think that Ezra had married well?

“By the way,” said Ezra, “I need to talk to Larissa about a very important matter.”

“Every quantum thing with you is an important matter.”

“Yes. But this …” He shrugged her off. “Denise’s leaving for maternity as soon as Othello opens. And we’ll have no one to direct our spring play. I’m hoping Larissa will be interested.”

“I dunno. Once, perhaps. I don’t know about now.”

He seemed surprised. “Well, I think she’ll be over the moon. I think this is what she’s been waiting for.”

“You think she’s been waiting?” Maggie chuckled.

“You’re wrong. Besides, I’ve already recommended her to the headmaster.”

“Without talking to her first?” She tapped her husband scoldingly on his head.

“Theater is her life.”

“Was.”

“You don’t know everything, Margaret. You’re totally off the mark.” But he became flummoxed, as if Larissa’s refusal was the last thing he had expected. “She’ll say yes. And she’ll be excellent.”

“Our cat compared to Denise would be excellent. What a disaster that has been. She should direct The Poseidon Adventure.” Maggie shook her head, then remembered something. “Speaking of disasters, we’re having an ice cream party today. Except three of my kids are allergic to peanut butter, and I got notes yesterday asking if the vanilla ice cream was made with peanut oil. Turn to me.” She redid his fire-red bow tie to go with his wine-colored jacket and green slacks.

“The parents are asking the wrong question,” Ezra said sonorously.

“Of course they are!” Maggie laughed, kissing him on the cheek. “If the vanilla ice cream had one less electron in it, we wouldn’t be here at all, right? The question they should be asking is not about peanut oil. It’s about the existence of anything as delectable as vanilla ice cream.”

“Ah,” said Ezra, “you’re mocking me.” His eyes twinkled at her.

“Not mocking. Teasing.” Her eyes twinkled at him.

“Confound them completely by telling them vanilla ice cream is made not with peanut oil but peanut butter.” They both laughed. “Tell them also, Margaret, that if the gods are indifferent to us, then that leaves us also free to be indifferent to the gods. If there is no immortality, we have so much less to worry about. Paint, don’t paint. Read, don’t read. Direct spring plays. Vanilla ice cream, peanut butter. It’s all good, Curly. Do whatever you like without thought to consequence. Tell your worried mothers that. I’m going to tell Larissa that. That’s what I’m learning from Epicurus. Let’s go. We’re late.”

“As usual. You should be thanking God I’m taking up painting and not the piano,” said Maggie, grabbing her bag and heading downstairs. “Pam has suddenly and inexplicably started playing the piano at the age of forty-four. It cost her husband thirty thousand dollars—so far—for an upright that doesn’t offend her delicate hearing. But, Ezra, riddle me this, Batman …” Maggie got into their old Subaru and cranked the keys in the ignition, while her husband leaned into the window to peck her goodbye. “What if the gods aren’t indifferent to us?”

4
Jared

Jared walked in, as usual, to an internal crisis. Well, why not? It was Monday. Crisis was a reaction to Monday. There was no crisis on Wednesday, Thursday, even Tuesday. Only right before a weekend, to sour things a bit, and right after, to let you know no one wanted to be back at work. This particular Monday, Jan showed up to the morning meeting smelling distinctly not of a double latte.

It was one thing for Jan to be incapacitated at 9:30 on a Monday, but Jared had an analyst meeting to run, which involved not just Jan, but fifteen sober individuals. And there was Jan, belligerent, inappropriate and loud, interrupting measured voices.

After the hastily aborted meeting, Jared called Jan into his office. His space at the Newark headquarters had a great view of New York City from floor-to-ceiling windows. Unfortunately they were always behind him, and the only time he allowed himself a glance at the Big Apple skyline was when he called Larissa. He would whirl his chair around and chat to her, dreaming of Sunday brunches at the Plaza, the violinist and the pianist playing Chopin’s Nocturnes. Just thinking about the music trilling in his ears made him want oysters and waffles. He shook his head to rid himself of melodies and wives.

“Jan, it’s like this,” he said. “I’m not going to accuse you, and you will have nothing to deny. We’ve been through this before; the company has been more than lenient. It’s paid for your rehab—twice—and has given you three warnings instead of two, and put you on probation four times, not three. I don’t have to remind you that you’re still on probation. Which means, if you’re caught drinking on the job—again—you can and will be fired summarily, no more warnings, no more meetings, no more rehab.”

“But I’m not drinking on the job,” said Jan. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was thirtysomething, a single mother of two boys, almost well-dressed if you didn’t notice the fraying around the edges, the shirt not quite tucked in, the strap of one Mary Jane unbuckled, the hair not washed this morning. She was in a cavalcade of certain destruction and her breath was stinking up his paneled office, yet she sat saying she wasn’t drinking on the job.

“I didn’t accuse you of anything,” said Jared. “But if I can smell it, other people can smell it, including Larry Fredoso, the CEO. If I can tell you’re not acting normal on a Monday morning, other people can, too.”

They eyeballed each other, with hostility, with resignation.

Jared lowered his voice. “I can smell it.”

“I didn’t have any carbohydrates this morning,” Jan suddenly said. “That’s why my breath is bad.”

“Your breath isn’t bad! It smells like vodka.”

“Well, must be the Dayquil,” she mumbled. “I haven’t been feeling well. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Not feeling well. She’d been wired, jumpy, loud, straining to listen, to comprehend; she’d been leaving ostentatiously early with no explanation or defense. “The signs are everywhere,” Jared said. “There are no more chances.” He paused. “I want to help you save your job. For your kids. Who else do they have to depend on? You’re all they got.”

“That’s right,” she barked. “I’m all they got.”

“Right. So the responsibility is greater, not less, when it’s all on your shoulders.”

Jan muttered something he didn’t hear, that sounded like perhaps too much responsibility on her sagging shoulders, and then asked if she was being dismissed. He didn’t know what she meant. Dismissed permanently? Or just out of his office? Jared turned away to the window so he wouldn’t see her stumbling out. After sitting for a few minutes, he dialed home. He wanted to talk to the mother of his own kids.

The phone rang and rang.

5
Jared’s Wife

Iwant to be neither in pain nor terror, she thought, her palms out flat against the pane of wintry glass. That is the imperative of my existence: neither, nor.

The day Larissa’s life ended, she didn’t even know it. The day it ended she was wearing sweatpants. And not Juicy Couture sweatpants, snug and velour, with satin accents, maybe a little heart appliqué on the buttocks area, embroidered in gold silk with little sparkly crystals to make a married woman’s rear-end moonlight as a young filly’s: maidenly not matronly. No. She was wearing her should’ve-been-thrown-away-ten-years-ago faded gray sweats, frayed at the hem, baggy, worn paper thin, procured at college where you either wore sweatpants or were naked and having sex.

Two months ago in November, before Thanksgiving, it snowed. Ice cotton fell out of the sky, ruining all her plans for a bike ride, a walk, a stroll to the store. The winter coats were still deep in the attic, the gloves, the hats, the winter galoshes far away.

But the dog was happy. Galloping like an overjoyed beast, Riot held in her teeth one of Emily’s stuffed cats, muddied, blackened, thoroughly mangled.

Snow in November. Didn’t bode well for the winter ahead in land-locked Summit. That was the one bad thing about living here. Sometimes out of the sky came ice and didn’t stop till late March. New Yorkers were lucky: they were closer to the water. Water tempered everything.

Oh yes, and when they lived in a walk-up in Hoboken, with two babies, an old car with no muffler and one tiny paycheck, like it didn’t snow? It snowed like they were in the Ninth Circle of Hell. And they had no money. It doesn’t snow only on the well-to-do, Larissa, she muttered to herself, limping to the storage room to get some book boxes. And all things being equal, better to be on a golf course in swank Summit than in a tenement in Hoboken. She used Jared’s tape gun to fix a half-dozen book boxes and then hobbled over to the bookshelves in her master bedroom, her glance toward the windows.

Larissa pressed her face to the Arctic windowpane, her silent house behind her. Every day some form of freezing rain fell from the sky. Yesterday, warm weather came and turned all to slush, until today, when a freakish gale made it twenty below and a hockey rink. The coiffed blonde chick on the six o’clock news last night forecast that it would feel like forty below. Apparently not good for wet faces. And Larissa’s face every time she went outside was wet, because for some reason when the chill sun caught her eye, she would start to weep.

The kids had barely got off to school in the morning. That was true for most mornings. By 7:00, Jared was already up and shaved and showering, all hummy and spring-steppy. So cheery. Damn him. Larissa opened the doors to the children’s bedrooms, made some noise to get up, stumbled downstairs, put the cereal bowls out, let Riot out, the dog bounding outside into the cold, full of exuberance for the day ahead. Everyone should be a dog. But Larissa’s kids, usually spectacularly unobservant, grumbled about how glum it was outside, and freezing, and refused to leave their cozy beds. Larissa almost let them stay home. What’s one day? What are they going to miss? The atomic weight of magnesium? The three branches of government? They should be so lucky as to learn that. Asher spent the entire seventh grade social studies on American History and didn’t read a word of the Constitution. Not a word. He couldn’t tell her what Plymouth Rock was, or the Pilgrims. Or Mayflower.

Ah. Except Emily had a science quiz, and Asher a clay project on the Egyptians, and Michelangelo his beloved art class. So she cajoled them into rising, herself dreaming of falling back into the down quilts after they left for school.

Would it all be different had she let her children stay home for gray snow day? Even the inscrutable atoms moving doggedly on their inexorable path through the universe were occasionally given to unexplained and random swerves—jumps and diversions from the steady path, unpredictable yet permanent. Was letting her children stay home a break in the pattern of the atom? Or was sending them to school the break? There was no way to know.

They got ready for school.

The next forty minutes, a litany of supplication. “Asher, take your glasses from the bathroom.” “Em, remember your cello.” “Michelangelo, drink your milk.” “Asher, brush your hair.” “Em, I don’t know where your shoes are. Probably where you left them.” “Michelangelo, drink your milk, we have to go.” “Asher, take your Egyptian pyramid. Yes, the thing we were working on all weekend, that one.” They named him Asher because it meant happy. The placid boy looked like his mother, tall and lean with a steady gaze. “Asher, have a yogurt.”

“I hate yogurt, Mom. It’s disgusting.”

“Since when? You used to love yogurt.”

“Yeah, and I used to suck my thumb. Things change, Mom.”

“No, you can’t have a cookie. Have apple sauce. Emily, so put on a different pair of shoes. You must have another pair or two, don’t you?” Emily looked like her dad, but with a round face and pixie bangs. “Michelangelo! Finish your cereal.” They broke the mold to make their youngest son with his mystifying blond curly mop of hair and the most unaccommodating demeanor. “Riot! Stop jumping!”

Jared was long gone. Then the two older younglings were running through the wind, running up the long narrow street for the middle school bus at the corner of Bellevue and Summit. It was a three-minute Olympian sprint, for which they left precisely ninety seconds. Like Larissa said, getting to school, a (perhaps not such a minor) miracle. She herself limped down the driveway with Michelangelo in tow with his bookbag, though without a scarf or gloves (the absence of which would dub her a bad mother in the parents’ lounge, which she didn’t frequent). She drove him the mile and a half to Lincoln, parked and limped alongside him, holding his small cold hand.

The crossing guard asked her how her leg was. “Getting better finally?”

“Yes, thanks,” she said, though it wasn’t, not at all. That it was her left leg and not her right was the only good thing you could say about it. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to drive.

Michelangelo was only ten minutes late. “Oh, good morning, Michael. So nice of you to stop by,” said the passing principal, and he turned, smiled impishly at his wan, waving mother, and gunned it down the hall even though he wasn’t supposed to gun.

It was in the hours between the missed Pledge of Allegiance and the afternoon food foraging that Larissa stood with her freshly made cardboard boxes near the windows where she put on her makeup. The leg was still too sore to stand on for long even after four weeks. Her bedroom faced the front of the house, and past the tall bare oaks she could see the rolling sloping hills of the golf course, and beyond them the highway, and the mall. The view so convenient: beauty and utility, both natural and man-made. Larissa placed her palm on the cold window, to feel the life outside.

Stepping away, she glanced at her books. They’d been freshly dusted and stood spines out and shiny. Ernestina was so meticulous. In three hours she and her team of two licked the house clean. Muy limpio. The books were never dusty. There was never a speck on them.

Or, for that matter, a dog’s ear.

Larissa had forty shelves of books in her house, not including those of her children, not including those of her husband. One for every year of her life. Twenty-four shelves held books she’d already read. The other sixteen …

In her bedroom four shelves housed just the books she was meaning to read. They had to be cast into categories finally, into a hierarchy of value, like castes of Punjabis, so it would be easier to know in what order not to read them. There was the non-fiction subsection, itself separated into memoirs, general interest, religion and philosophy. There was a section of commercial fiction, enough for the next two years. There was serious hardcover fiction she was planning on not reading in the next three. It had been four, five years since she touched a book on these shelves. She bought the books and cataloged them like an efficient librarian, hoping that someday she would have the time, find the time. Her house was impeccable and the children were in school and the husband would have dinner tonight, and clean white ironed shirts, and every project would be on time, and each drawer organized. How was she ever going to find the time to open One Hundred Years of Solitude, the annotated Lolita, The Executioner’s Song?

But on the plus side, there were no miscellaneous drawers in Larissa’s house! The bed was made like the presidential four-poster at the Ritz-Carlton. All five beds in the house. Beautifully made.

The books had no hope of being read. Jared, because he thought he was so funny, called them her non-reading list. The only books she attempted to read were the ones that came fresh in a UPS box to the red front door. She thanked Dominick, the UPS man, glanced over his head to the golf course across the narrow street, past the oaks, the manicured lawns like a valley, and then slammed shut the door and opened the cardboard box, efficiently discarding it to stay neat and on top of things. First she placed the book on her side of the bed where it had a slim chance of being opened. If it fell off the bed onto the treadmill, its chances weakened considerably, because on the treadmill the newly arrived books became covered by gossip magazines, by People, by Entertainment Weekly (though EW had a lot of words in it, didn’t it?); they became covered by used eye-makeup remover pads and discarded bras, by shirts and socks, cardigans, often earrings, sometimes earphones, three pairs of them, and printed pages of nonsense off the Internet on the latest current event she pretended she might catch up on under her Ralph Lauren quilt. Her side of the bed was the only place in the house where chaos reigned.

So today, Larissa took firm charge of the last unruly vestige of her ordered life. Book by book, shelf by shelf, she worked her way from top to bottom, placing the books inside boxes that would be donated to St. Paul’s Thrift Shop in Summit.

Had she read Lord of the Flies by William Golding? Through books I can be someone else, she thought. She didn’t need to read books about it; it was Lord of the Flies every night in her house. When reading books, she wanted to be far removed from herself.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong? No; too much sex. It would just rile her up, inflame her unnecessarily.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks? Love! World War I! She knew nothing about the latter; it was perfect. It was also a little too removed. Reluctantly she dropped it in the box, recalling with a twinge of regret that that was why she had bought the book in the first place—so she could read about something she knew nothing about.

Lonesome Dove? Too Texan. Once she had wanted to read it. But once she had wanted to read everything.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf? Wait, she’d read that! How did that get up here? Yes, she was almost sure she’d read it. There was a line in it she kept coming back to. She devoted herself to that line until it was carved into her memory. But today, as she sat on the floor and leafed through the book in vain, Larissa couldn’t even remember what the line was about, much less the actual words. All she recalled was that it had meaning, and now she couldn’t recall a word of it, a whiff of it. Disgusted, she threw the book in the box, and then the thumb of her memory ran over I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Jared loved that book when he was young(er).

The phone rang; she didn’t answer. The doorbell rang. Two men were delivering a dishwasher. She had to leave her book project half completed and babysit Chris the installer and his non-speaking companion, who shook their heads at her dicey kitchen cabinets and said the new machine might not fit without tearing up the floor. “But we’re jacks of all trades,” hefty Chris said with a smile. “We know what we’re doing.”

She smiled wanly.

She didn’t want to go out today. Hobbling down to the basement, she opened the freezer to see if there was any dubious forgotten meat she could defrost. Maybe they could go vegetarian tonight, fettuccine Alfredo. With bacon bits. Almost vegetarian, that is, if you didn’t count the chunks of smoked pig. She could mask the lack of food with garlic bread, except she didn’t have any bread. Or garlic. Or bacon bits.

The stainless-steel, smart-wash, nine-cycle machine with sanitized rinse and heated dry hadn’t arrived until noon. By the time the crack installers left—without tearing up her floor—it was almost one. She had planned to take a shower before she went out, but now there was no time. She had to pick up Michelangelo from school at 2:40. Besides, to have a shower, she needed Jared to tape her casted leg inside a plastic bag. She didn’t think asking Chris and his buddy, the jacks of all trades, to help a naked woman with a broken leg get into the tub was such a swell idea or qualified under one of the trades they were jacks of.

Though truth be told, if she had a choice, she’d rather have two unshaved strangers help her naked into the shower than stagger to King’s unwashed and unpainted.

6
King’s, Ye Olde Market

But the children, the husband, they needed to eat. The children! What about the children? King’s was overrun. The entire population of Summit seemed to be clamoring for the tiny parking lot behind King’s, 20,000 cars trying to fit into 200 spaces. No one but she could do the math. She sat for exactly three seconds waiting to make the right into the concrete madness where every Escalade was honking at every Range Rover, every woman, her windows down, yelling at another, “Are you leaving?”

Larissa flipped her turn blinker, revving the engine to straight. She’d find another supermarket. She could just see herself getting knocked down by the crazy fur-clad lady in a green Hummer.

Trouble was, she didn’t know where else to go because she always went to King’s on Main. It was seven minutes from her house, two lights and a right, and had all the things she needed. The no hassle was important. Larissa worked very hard to make her life hassle-free, which is why the cast on the leg cast a pall on her otherwise sunny life. Was the broken leg the atom swerving its own way?

She decided to drive down Main Street to Madison, the next small town over, to find a supermarket there. It was only thirteen minutes away.

Over lunch last week at Neiman’s Café, Maggie had asked her, “If you could be any person in the world, who would you be?” and Larissa had answered one question with two: “Forever? Or just for a little while?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Yes,” Larissa said. “If it’s just for a little while, I’d like to be a hundred different people. If it’s forever, then no one. I don’t want anyone else’s life forever.”

They’d spent the rest of the blissful lunch thinking of who they’d like to be. Someone else other than us, Larissa concluded, because I want to know what it’s like to live a life as far away from my own as possible, and Maggie, all mischievous eyes, had said, “Larissa, you are living a life as far away from your own as possible.”

Maggie was right. Summit was already someone else’s life, thought Larissa as she drove slowly, gaping at the little shops along the hectic business district, looking for a supermarket. She could’ve easily become a professional protester with Che, maybe gone to the Philippines with her. Larissa was already far removed from her very self. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t reading.

Oh, excuses, excuses. As many as the day was long.

She had asked Jared if he would want to be someone else, and he said cheerfully without a moment’s thought: Robert Neville in I Am Legend. Larissa thought it was such an odd thing for her husband to wish for. “Completely alone in the world,” Jared explained, “trying to eke out a meager survival, hoping to stay alive till daylight because bad things that wanted to suck out your soul came for you in the night. I would want to be a vampire hunter. With silver in my pocket. Just for one day.” And then he mad-jigged in his underwear through the bedroom.

On her left Larissa spied a “Grand Opening” sign for a Super Stop&Shop. She smiled (because Asher called the chain Stupid Stop&Shop) and flicked on her turn signal, waiting patiently for the oncoming traffic to pass.

This lot was spacious and empty. She parked over by the griffin trees. Through the chain link fence in front of her lay a small local cemetery. Tall granite tombstones were haphazardly spaced out amid the slushy ground, black on white. As she took the keys from her ignition and grabbed her purse, climbing out of her shiny Escalade, she remembered! Not all of it, not even the gist of it, but the heart of it, the Dalloway quote. Something about Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then: “…that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

7
Burial Grounds

She needed to buy only a few things; why was she still stumbling around the store thirty-five minutes later? After school today, Asher had an orthodontist appointment and a guitar lesson. And Emily had cello and voice. How did Larissa manage to allow the last few minutes of her afternoon to be vacuumed into aisles of self-rising flours and Cajun spices and new milk bones for Riot, into mozzarella cheese and new yogurt with antibiotic properties, which apparently she couldn’t live without? There were only three cashiers working, and one of them was on break, just leaving, or just coming back, i.e., incredibly slow. Larissa’s ankle felt sore, swollen. She couldn’t even muster a tight smile for the chronologically impaired cashier who looked all of twelve and wasn’t smiling much herself.

“Cash back?”

“What?” Larissa’s teeth were jammed together.

“Would you like some cash back?”

“No. No, thank you.” I’d like thirty minutes of my life back, can you do that?

A full fifty minutes after she walked through Stop&Shop’s automatic doors, she slid out of the automatic doors, leaning on the grocery cart for support. It was cold, her coat was unbuttoned, her capri-style sweats fit over the boot-cast but also bared her good ankle. She had forgotten the scarf, the gloves. What might it be like to stick her wet tongue on the metal handles of the cart, she wondered, as she pushed it slowly across the parking lot. And what if her tongue got stuck? She and Che used to do that when they were kids. The image of herself—nearly forty, limping, freezing cold, coat opened, shirt too thin, six bags of food in front of her, on a sub-zero January weekday bent over with her wet tongue crazy-glued to the steel handlebars—made Larissa laugh.

Her face still bearing the lines of the smile, she inched past a young man sitting astride a shiny flash motorcycle, about to pull a helmet over his ears. He wore the motorcycle. Brown leather jacket, jeans, black boots. The helmet was metallic silver, to not match the burnt yellow and black of the bike. He smiled at her.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

Larissa looked for her car. Flustered by her idiotic thoughts and her vapid grin, she tried to cover it up with a shrug, and a “Oh, nothing,” grimace now frozen on her face, morphing into polite stranger nod. He spoke again. “You’re a trooper, walking around in a cast. Need help?”

“No, no. I’m fine.” She averted her eyes, not for any reason other than she tried not to make prolonged eye contact with male strangers, especially male strangers wearing bikes and jeans and boots and shiny helmets. “Thanks, anyway.”

He got off his bike and came toward her.

“How long in a cast?”

“Uh—about four weeks, I guess.”

“You broke it at Christmastime?” He whistled. “Bad luck. How’d you do it? Skiing?”

“Skiing? No. I don’t ski. I just—it’s silly.” She still wasn’t looking at him, but she did slow down. Not stopped—just slowed down. “It’s my ankle. I tripped coming out of the hair-dresser’s.”

Now he laughed. “You tripped coming out of the hairdresser’s? Oh, that’s rich.”

“Well, I didn’t think so at the time.”

“You’re right—that is worth laughing about.”

“Really?” she said noncommittally, wanting to breathe into her cold hands. “That’s not why—” the image inside her head still of her slithery tongue stuck on the metal bars. God! She stopped walking.

“I’ve noticed,” he said with a teasing air of forced formality, “one thing about women based upon years of careful observation …”

“Years?” Larissa muttered, drawing attention to his youth. “Really.”

His chuckle was easy. “Yes, really. I grew up with a mother, a grandmother, and two older sisters. So. As I was saying. After years of observation, I’ve concluded that women take great care with their hair.”

Larissa forgot for a moment how cold she was. “You don’t say.”

The boy refused to be baited. “Even in the neon supermarket on a shotgun Monday afternoon, women take more care with their hair than with any other part of their appearance.” He spoke of it like he was reading poetry, like it was his life’s philosophy, while Larissa wanted to button her coat so he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her frumpy sweats. He spoke of hair the way Ezra spoke about the metaphysical reality of the soul!

“It’s always clean,” he continued, “it’s styled, moussed, gelled. Women think about hair. No one just gets out of the shower in their empty house and towel dries.”

“What did you say?” She squinted. Empty house? “Not even you?” His hair was sticking out every which way till Sunday. He took off his helmet to show her his kinky helmet head, thin brown-blond hair frizzing in all directions.

“Except for me,” he replied cheerfully. “But women think more about their hair than about anything else, would you agree?”

“I don’t agree.”

“No? You don’t think about what to put in it, how to curl it, thin it, thicken it, style it, shape it? How to put it up, how to braid it?” He pointed to an older woman pushing her cart past them through the thick cold. “Take a look,” he said. “She’s wearing a sheepskin rug for a coat, and her husband’s loafers, but her hair is blown dry and immaculate and shining! No makeup, but the hair is perfect. Like the Werewolf, baby.”

Werewolf! Larissa stared at him, wondering at what point to take offense and at what point to laugh. His eyes were merry. He clearly thought he was being clever. “I don’t mean it as a criticism,” he assured her. “I mean it as a compliment. Hair rules the world.”

Okay, she’ll play on this cold Monday. Why not?

“Hair and shoes,” she said.

“Yes!” he heartily agreed. “Everything in the middle, you can pretty much not waste your time or money on.”

It was true. Did anyone care that she spent twenty-seven bucks on Chanel mascara instead of six bucks on Maybelline?

She didn’t say anything, just squinted in the sunlight. He put the helmet back on his head. In the few seconds of silence between them, Larissa’s mind traveled from hair to boots, from mascara to jeans and in between belts and necklaces saw the other thing that both men and women noticed. Probably third after hair and shoes.

The swell between the breasts. Cleavage.

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” he said. “Men never notice shoes.”

“Some men.”

“Not straight men.”

She laughed. “So not shoes but hair?”

“Yes,” he said. “Hair we notice.”

And breasts. She hoped the sunlight would keep him out of the expression in her eyes. But he said nothing—in that pointed way people say nothing when they’re thinking about things that can’t be said.

“Jewelry?” She was fishing for other things in the water.

“If it’s sparkly, come-hither jewelry, yes.”

Come-hither jewelry! Now she said nothing in that pointed way people say nothing when they’re thinking about things that can’t be said.

He inclined his head toward her; Larissa inclined her body away and pushed her cart forward. “Well, have a great day.”

“You sure you don’t need help?” Stepping away from his bike, he put his hand on her shopping cart. Was he allowed to do that? Wasn’t that like putting your hands on someone’s pregnant belly? Against some sort of Super Stupid food shopping etiquette? “I’ll help you put your 12-pack of Diet Coke into your car. You far?”

“No, no.” No, no was to the help, not the far. He wasn’t listening, already pushing, as she walked next to him, slow. Before she found the unlock button on her key ring, a thought flashed: is he safe? What if he’s one of those … I don’t know. Didn’t she hear about them? Men who abducted girls from parking lots?

And did what with them?

Plus he wasn’t a man.

Plus she wasn’t a girl.

He looked exotic, his brown eyes slanted, his cheekbones Oriental. He looked sweet and scruffy. Who would abduct her from a parking lot? And, more important, why?

And even more important, how did she feel about being abducted?

And was that a rhetorical question?

And furthermore, how come all these thoughts, impressions, fears, anxieties, reactions, flashed in her head before her next blink, like a dream that seems to take hours but is just a couple of seconds before the alarm goes off? Why so much thinking?

And was that a rhetorical question?

She lifted the back hatch and he said with a whistle, “Awesome Escalade. All spec’ed out.” Like he knew.

It took him all of twenty seconds to load her groceries into her luxury utility vehicle. Slamming the liftgate shut, he smiled. “You okay now?”

“Of course, yes.” She was okay before, but didn’t say that. It sounded rude.

He began to walk back to his bike. “Have a good one. And stay away from hairdressers,” he added advisedly. “It’s not like you need it.”

When Larissa got home, she left her bags in the car, left her purse in the car, crashed through the house from back door to the front, limped to the full-length mirror in the entry hall and stood square in front of it.

She wore a lichen parka, gray sweats from college, a taupe torn top. She had not a shred of makeup on her face, and her pale hair was unwashed a day and unbrushed since two hours ago. Her lips were chapped from the cold, her cheeks slightly flushed and splotchy.

Whatever could he possibly mean? She stood in front of the mirror for an eternal minute until she startled herself back into life, and rushed out, Quasimodo-style, to pick up her youngest child from school.

8
99 Red Balloons

While Michelangelo cut and pasted for school, and munched his cup of dry Cheerios, a string cheese, a cookie, a glass of milk, and a fruit cup, Larissa puttered around, looking inside her freezer, realizing belatedly that she hadn’t bought meat. Now she was searching for some ground beef she could hastily defrost for a casserole or a pie. Maybe she could leave Michelangelo with the two oldest; they should be home any minute—

And there they were. The back door slammed, the backpacks thumped to the floor, shoes flew off. They bounded into the kitchen, opened the fridge and … “There’s nothing to eat in this house,” said Emily, slamming the refrigerator door. “Mom, we gotta go. Last week we were almost late to my lesson and I don’t want to be almost late again.”

“Okay, honey,” said Larissa. “I’ll hurry with dinner, so you won’t be almost late again.”

First was cello. Then karate for Michelangelo and guitar for Asher. Mondays were busy.

“Track is starting next month,” said Asher from the back. “I’m joining.”

“Is that before or after karate? Is that before or after band?”

“It’s with, Mom.”

“Is that before or after the orthodontist at five tonight?”

“With, Mom. With.”

Ezra had called when she was out, saying he needed to talk to her, but when she called back he was out and Maggie was cryptic on the phone, saying only that he would talk to Larissa Saturday night at dinner.

When Jared got home, he took one look at her and said jokingly, “Oh, hon, don’t get all gussied up on my account.” Her plain face, her unsmiling mouth didn’t deter him from kissing her, tickling her, from heartily eating the hamburger pie she made, from taking the garbage out, and getting the poster board for Asher’s project on hooligans, from looking at the eight boxes taped and stacked against the bedroom wall and saying, “Whoa. Whoa right there. What in the world have you been doing? Is that why you didn’t answer the phone all day?”

And then it was night and everyone was asleep, everyone but Larissa, who sat in bed, with a People magazine in her lap, staring at her peacefully sleeping husband, the vampire hunter, and the carousel spinning round and round in her head was it will soon be gone and no one will ever know how much she had loved it all.

Chapter Two
1
Things Which Are Seen

The external life is all Larissa knows, most of the time. She married the man she fell in love with in college. She loved him because her friends were either hippie potheads like Che, or sesquipedalian book chewers like Ezra, but Jared had the unbeatable combination of being both, plus a baseball jock. There was something so adorably sporty and cerebral about him. He wore baseball caps and black-rimmed glasses and pitched until his arm gave out, but couldn’t live without baseball, so he got a job teaching English and coaching Little League, and then, according to Ezra, completely sold out and got an MBA, instead of the long-planned PhD in fin de siècle American Lit, but the difference between the two terminal degrees meant that Larissa and Jared weren’t broke anymore, and Ezra and Maggie were.

They bought a gray-colored sprawling colonial farmhouse on Bellevue Avenue on a raised corner lot overlooking the golf course, the kind of house that dreams are made on, the house of twelve gables and white-painted windows adorned with black shutters. Through the pathways and the nooks thirty clay pots sprouted red flowers summer and winter—pansies, impatiens, poinsettia.

Larissa and Jared owned sleek widescreen televisions and the latest stereo equipment. In the game room, they had a pool table, a ping-pong table, an ice hockey table; in the backyard, a heated pool and a Jacuzzi. Their closets were organized by two professional closet organizers (how was that for a job description), and three times a year a file organizer came over to assess their files. Jared paid the bills. He drove a Lexus SUV, she her Escalade. Their appliances were stainless steel and there was marble in their bathrooms. The floors were parquet, the countertops granite, the lights recessed and on dimmers. The sixty windows that needed to be professionally cleaned four times a year were trimmed in white wood to match the crown mouldings.

She lived a mile away from Summit’s Main Street, and five minutes drive from the upscale Mall at Short Hills, with Saks, Bloomies, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Macy’s. It had valet parking, sushi and cappuccino, a glass ceiling, and every store worth shopping in.

The children, who were once little and required all her time, were now older and required slightly more. Emily had been the perfect child at eleven, playing championship volleyball and all-state cello, but now at nearly fourteen was exhibiting three of the five signs of demonic possession. The flying off the handle at absolutely nothing. You couldn’t say anything to her without her interpreting it the wrong way and bursting into tears. The taking of great offense at everything. The disagreeing with everything. She had become so transparent that recently Larissa had started asking her the exact opposite of what she wanted. “Wear a jacket, it’s freezing out.” “No, I’m fine. It’s not that cold, Mom.” “Em, don’t wear a coat today, it’s supposed to be warm.” “Are you kidding me? You want me to freeze to death?”

Michelangelo had manifest gifts of artistic ability. A note from his first grade art teacher read: I think he is showing real promise. He drew a donkey in geometric shapes, even the tail. Kandinsky by a six-year-old. Or was it just his name that fooled his parents into delusions of gifts? Che was wrong about him. He might not have been an angel, with his obdurate nature and single-minded pursuit of his own interests, but he sure looked like an angel, with his cherubic halo of blond curly hair and sweetest face.

No one was particularly sure what Asher did. Today he played guitar, yesterday took karate, tomorrow would run track. Or maybe not. Asher spent every day just being in it, and when it came to New Year’s resolutions he was the one who could never think of anything to write because he would say, “I don’t want to change anything. I have a perfect life.” He was the one who a month ago, at almost thirteen, refused to make a Christmas list because, as he chipperly put it, “I really don’t want that much.” He wanted one thing: an electric miniscooter. If Larissa and Jared could have, they would’ve gotten him the scooter in every color available, black, lime, lilac and pink. Here, we couldn’t decide which color to get for you, have all four of them, Merry Christmas, darling. The blood of angels flowed through Asher’s veins. He should’ve been named Angel.

Jared maintained Asher resembled Larissa in temperament and looks. Larissa knew: only in looks. Emily, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with being in any way like her mother, perming her hair, coloring it blue. Larissa was usually impeccably put together; Emily made a point of looking like hardcore indie Seattle grunge. Larissa didn’t play any musical instruments, Emily did. Larissa loved theater, Emily hated it. Larissa frowned for Emily’s sake, but shrugged for everyone else’s. If that’s rebellion, I’ll take it, she said. I’d rather blue hair than grandchildren.

Larissa wished Che could know her children. She missed Che. They grew up together in Piermont, had known each other since they were three or four. Larissa loved Che’s mother, a funny little lady who smoked a ton and cooked great. They were always broke, but somehow Mrs. Cherengue found the money to ship Che’s dad’s body back to Manila. The mother and daughter flew to the Philippines for the funeral. That was fifteen years ago. Larissa was barely pregnant with Emily. She was devastated and sore for years. How could you leave me, Che? What about us living parallel lives? What about us seeing each other every day? What about our friendship?

But Che remained in Manila (“It feels a little bit like home, Lar, what can I say?”), and then her mother got sick and died. Larissa cried for months after she heard. Larissa’s own mother, Barbara Connelly, said, “I hope you’re going to cry like this when I kick the bucket.” That comment went pointedly unanswered.

Che had already met Lorenzo by the time her mother died. So now she lived in Parañaque, without her mother, hiring out her passionate protesting, waiting for Lorenzo to propose and give her a baby, not necessarily in that order.

Che came to her house one morning. I’m in trouble, Lar. I’m in deep deep trouble. Larissa was a senior, Che a junior. Seventeen, sixteen, going on too adult. I’m pregnant.

No. Are you sure?

I’m positive.

Oh, please no. Are you sure?

I’m completely positive. I’m two weeks late. I’m never late. What am I going to do?

Don’t worry. We’ll fix it. Whatever happens.

No, you don’t understand.

I do. It’s bad. But it’ll be okay.

Lar, it’s the single worst thing that can happen to me. Honestly. What am I going to tell my mother? She’ll kill me.

No. Your mother? Never. She’s a sweetheart. And why would you tell her?

Oh, Larissa. My family is not your family. I tell my mother things.

No, not this. Especially not this.

Well, what am I going to do? She’s going to have to know eventually.

Why? I’m serious. Why will she have to know? We’ll go to Planned Parenthood. They’ll help us. You’ll see. Your mom will never have to know.

Planned Parenthood costs money.

Don’t worry. I’ll … I’ll help you. But we have to go there quick. Get a test.

Lar, a test? And then what? I can’t have … I can’t do it. Don’t you understand? I’m not like you. I’m Catholic. I can’t do it.

Well, what are you going to do? You gonna be Catholic, or you gonna be smart?

Why can’t I be both?

Choose, Che.

I can’t. All I know is I can’t have this baby. But also, I can’t not have this baby.

That’s what I’m saying. I’ll get the money together.

How much you think it’s going to be?

Over three hundred dollars.

Che cried. Where am I going to get that kind of money?

I’ll give it to you. I have it. I have it saved up.

How am I going to pay you back?

Don’t worry.

How did you save that much money?

Little by little. Dollar by dollar. Took me four years.

Oh, Larissa.

It’s okay. That’s what it’s for. I didn’t know what I was saving for. But I knew I would need it for something.

I can’t take your money.

To save yourself?

Save myself for the short term, burn in hell for eternity.

Che, you’re not going to burn in hell. Who told you this? Larissa appraised Che, contemplated her. I didn’t know you and Maury went that far, she finally said.

Che wouldn’t look at Larissa. We didn’t. With a fake-casual shrug at Larissa’s startled face. Oh, last month, during spring break, remember Nuño?

No, I don’t remember Nuño!

Yeah, me neither. It wasn’t meant to be. Just a fun few hours.

Maury was Che’s boyfriend, her high school sweetheart. They were going to the junior prom next month. Yet there it was.

Oh.

I know. I told you it’s no good.

You can’t tell this to your mother, Che. You can never tell her.

She’ll know.

She won’t.

God will know, said Che, bending over her hands, on the stoop of Larissa’s quiet Piermont house. They were going to be late for school half an hour ago. It was a sunny morning.

You’ll be fine, said Larissa. You’ll be okay. You’ll see. You can’t have a baby at sixteen. That’s all there is to it. There’ll be plenty of time to have a baby. But we’ve got big plans after high school, after college. We’re going to travel the world. We’re going to go live in Rome and teach English as a second language. Then Greece. We’re going to become tour guides in France, remember?

I remember. But Che was slumped into a fetal position, her backpack on the concrete steps next to her. She looked like a backpack herself, dark and small and curled up. Larissa sat down next to her, patting her back. How could Che have been so careless when she knew what it would mean? When the decision was utterly unbearable, how could she not have taken every precaution and then some? They went to school. And Larissa carried her books, and laughed in the hall, and pretended that everything was as it always was. Only Che’s pallid face by the lockers in between periods was Larissa’s ruthless reminder that nothing was the same.

Later they went to New York University together, where Larissa, a theater major, met Ezra and Evelyn and Jared, while Che, an undeclared major, got busy with her causes: saving the spotted owl, saving the whale—and then her dad had a heart attack and died, and she left the U.S. for good. The girls never did get to Rome or Greece or become tour guides in France.

Nowadays, without Che, Larissa had lunch with Maggie most Tuesdays, and twice a month with her friend Bo, who worked at the Met in the city, and once a month on Thursday she drove to Hoboken to see Evelyn, whom she loved and envied. Occasionally she took a walk with Tara down the street, who, though married with two kids, always seemed lonely. Larissa walked, while Tara talked, and it suited them both. On Fridays, after she had her nails done and her eyebrows waxed with her young nail friend Fran Finklestein, Larissa wrote Che a short note, like a diary entry, gingerly holding the pen with her painted nails. She told Che of Maggie and Ezra, of Evelyn and her five children, of Bo and her hypochondriac mother and her layabout boyfriend. Bo was the only one working in that household and lately it had been driving her crazy. Che was far away and liked to hear news from home.

When the mail came, Larissa would leaf through the catalogs and the magazines standing over the island in her kitchen. She didn’t read sitting down anymore. She didn’t have time. There was always the next thing, and the next. The phone was always ringing. Evelyn called to ask her what she thought of Marilynne Robinson’s new book (which Larissa hadn’t read, but pretended she was really into because Evelyn was so smart and intimidated Larissa).

Evelyn and Malcolm didn’t watch TV in Hoboken. They didn’t even have a TV! They had two couches, a chair, and a fireplace. And a low long table on which to place the tea cups and wine glasses and the books they were reading. Whenever she and Jared went over, all they did was sit and talk about books. Larissa often held Evelyn up to Jared, who said, “Do you think it’s because they live in Hoboken that they don’t have a television? We lived in Hoboken, we had a TV.” And, “What do you want to do, Lar, you want to get rid of the TV? Propose it, I’ll say yes.”

Evelyn homeschooled her kids. It was incongruous that she had the time, could find the time, could do it. “What do you want to do, Lar?” said Jared. “You want to homeschool our kids? Propose it, I’ll say yes.”

“You’re impossible when you get that self-righteous,” said Larissa.

She envied Evelyn the abilities that Larissa didn’t even know how to begin to begin to have. It was all Larissa could do to keep her house organized. Evelyn’s house was a lot less organized, but she homeschooled her kids! Evelyn also had twenty-four hours in her day, right? How come she had time to homeschool five children and read Marilynne Robinson?

“TV never goes on,” Evelyn explained with a smile.

“Well, I know. But you’ve got five kids.”

“They go to bed. Eventually.” When Evelyn smiled, Larissa always felt better about everything. Evelyn had a light-up smile.

In the summertime, most Jerseyites rented a house on the shore by the ocean. But Larissa and Jared didn’t want to be like everybody else. They bought a lake house in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, two and half hours from anywhere, on Lingertots Pond in the woods, and Larissa went there with the kids for the summer. First year Michelangelo was old enough to speak, he called the place Lillypond, and it stuck. Jared drove out on Thursday nights and stayed through Sunday. At the end of August they went on family vacations, last year to Mount Rushmore, the year before to California and Disneyland. They’d taken hiking vacations and camping vacations. They’d fished and rock climbed. They’d gone to the Maine Coast and to the Rockies, to the Grand Canyon and Key West. For their anniversary last June, Jared took Larissa to Las Vegas. This was all in the six years since Michelangelo was born. Until he came, they had no money and went nowhere. The boy said he brought his family good luck. Since they lived on a street that was shaped like a horseshoe, they believed it.

As for family before her own family, Larissa had three much older brothers who were sharply ambitious and successful, executive vice-presidents, sales directors and school chancellors. They fiercely competed with one another, but Larissa had no one to compete with. She had neither exceeded nor subverted anyone’s expectations. Nothing was expected of her. Her parents unconditionally supported her in every crazy endeavor of her heart. Violin playing? Sure. Punk rock phase with Sid Vicious posters and temporary tattoos that looked real? But of course! At twenty, when she met Jared, her hair was still laced with hot pink. During their more intimate moments Jared still called her his hot pink girl. Which was sexy when she recalled it through the pulsing place inside her that remembered things.

Theater was the thing Larissa thought about when there was nothing else to think about. If I could pray to move, prayers would move me; But I am constant as the Northern Star. She had Mark Antony’s agony over Caesar’s betrayal carved into her heart. “For Brutus is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.” She recited Desdemona’s death while she washed the dishes. “Kill me tomorrow, but let me live tonight but half an hour …” This was why she painted stage sets for the theater department at Pingry. So that a few times a week, she could still hear unbroken voices shout the bard. If love be rough with you, be rough with love!

She was thoughtful, non-aggressive, not much of a nag, liked jewelry and cooking utensils, therefore was easy to buy for, unlike her friend Maggie, who for all her many virtues was impossible to buy for.

That was Larissa Stark. Constant as the North Star.

2
Othello

On Saturday night Larissa made a pitcher of Margaritas with Triple Sec, Cointreau and Grand Marnier and thus liquefied the four of them played Scruples, the game that challenged everyone’s idea of what was right, a game of moral dilemmas, everyone’s hated favorite, all conundrummy ambiguity chased farther down the gullet by hard liquor.

“I don’t want to play,” declared Jared. “I want to have some superficial laughs. I don’t want to delve into the complexities of my psyche, or anyone else’s psyche for that matter. Why can’t we be like regular people, and just talk baseball free-agency trades?”

He was voted down. The children remained clean and well-behaved (aside from three whines and a stomp from Emily, and silence from the adolescent and sullen Dylan, Maggie and Ezra’s son), and nothing broke and nothing burned. Larissa, her cast still on, wore a green, form-fitting jersey sweater and tailored black slacks, her hair loosely piled, her makeup deceptively light. She served Brie in puff pastry, a chicken paprika with pappardelle, a bacon salad with her own dressing, and a rum baba for dessert, also homemade. They drank red wine, chasing it down with shots of Reposado, following it with Margaritas. On the stereo, Glenn Gould played Bach like only Gould could play him, exquisitely, his six Partitas (especially BWV 830) imprinted on Larissa’s soul so clearly she could almost play them herself, if only she had a piano, and could play. The fires were on in all the fireplaces, and when the kids ran to the playroom for ping-pong and G-rated board games, the adults were able to talk while the house sparkled, and outside a light dusting of snow fell quietly on the tall bare oaks and the frozen ground.

The question that seemed to come up in Scruples a lot came up. Larissa personally thought it was the only question a game of Scruples ever asked. It was the only question they got mired in, despite the Triple Sec. “You see your best friend’s wife making out with another man. Do you tell?” Last time they played it with Evelyn and Malcolm, and that question came up, Evelyn had told Larissa she and Malcolm didn’t talk for four days afterward.

Last time they played with Bo and Jonny, Jonny’s nonchalant response to this stupid question (“Of course you don’t tell. That’s the guy code.”) so infuriated Bo, they had to take a break from the relationship. Which was difficult considering they continued to live together in an apartment that belonged to Jonny.

When the card was flipped over and read this Saturday night, Ezra and Maggie laughed, Larissa groaned, and Jared said, “You know what I’m going to do from now on? Give a different answer each time it’s asked, to drive you all crazy and maybe next time we can just play Risk.”

“What do you mean from now on?” said Maggie. “That’s what you always do.”

“Jared,” Larissa said to her husband, “just answer the dumb question.”

“No,” said Jared. “The entreaty is clear. Do not end marriages, cause family rifts, or destroy friendships by revealing something totally inappropriate. And that’s by the guys who designed the game!”

Larissa sipped her drink, the salt on the rim deliciously swelling her lime mouth. “Jared’s right. We should heed their rules. Besides,” she added, “I think we’re overlooking the obvious here. How come the only one not in any trouble is the actual adulterer? It’s all about the friends, the secrets, the obligations to the friendship. What about the obligations to the marriage?”

“Yeah, but that’s too obvious,” replied Jared. “That’s why it’s not a Scruples question. It’s not even an ethical dilemma.”

“It is a question, however,” Ezra said. “A question, among many others,” he added pointedly, “that a certain Larissa is refusing to answer. She’s doing that a lot tonight. Not answering questions.”

“Oh, calm down, Ezra,” said Larissa. “Have another drink.”

“Are you a relativist or an absolutist, Larissa?” asked Maggie.

“Well, it depends,” Larissa replied to the raucous laughter of everyone, and she laughed herself, though she couldn’t quite tell what was so funny.

“All right, Miss I-absolutely-shouldn’t-have-made-my-’ritas-so-strong,” said Ezra, watching Larissa who was busy squeezing more lime into what was left of his drink. “Can we talk about business for a sec? Don’t avoid me.”

Larissa pulled out a card. “Let’s play Invent a Question of Scruples instead,” she said.

“Fine,” agreed Ezra. “But I ask first.”

Larissa had two Margaritas and six partitas in her. She smiled, unafraid, tipping her glass in a toast. “Yes, Ezra. What’s your question?”

“Denise goes on maternity leave after Othello. That’s next month.”

This was all he said, like a riddle.

“Is this part of Invent a Question?” Larissa wanted to know. “Denise goes on maternity leave. But she’s ambivalent about the baby, being forty-four and a first-time mom. I believe Denise’s feelings are justified. She doesn’t seem very maternal. You’re asking if should I try to dissuade her from having the child and stay on as director?”

“Larissa.”

“Yes, Ezra?”

“Stop being deliberately obtuse.”

“How am I obtuse?” She loved her Saturday nights with her friends. They were like family.

“Why do you make me tell it to you twice? You know I want you to become the new director for the Pingry Theater Department.”

Larissa swayed while sitting down. She and Jared exchanged a brief but conflicted look.

She painted background murals. She was the set decorator. Which described her life at home too. And every once in a while, when she was working, she’d hear in the nuance of the rehearsals of the sixteen-year-old’s interpretation of Othello something that would catch her ear, and she’d clear her throat and say quietly, but loud enough so that Moor of Venice could hear: “Try it again, Linus, but this time with the emphasis on must as in, ‘And yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.’”

The paint she used for the sets sometimes needed to be thinned with turps, which gave her a vicious, delicious headache, because secretly she loved the smell even as she suffered, and she listened more intently to the last act as she stirred the paint, the black and white to make a stormy gray, and waited for the thickened paint to thin so she could paint the walls behind Desdemona’s bed, on which lay the fifteen-year-old siren Tiffany from Chatham, still in braces but with a Coach purse, straight from the Swim Club, waiting for her lover in the form of Linus from Summit in Birkenstocks to persuade himself of her unthinkable, of his unthinkable.

“That death’s unnatural that kills for loving.

Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?

Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:

These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope,

They do not point on me.”

“Do you ever plan to answer me?” Ezra demanded.

“Yes.” Larissa picked up another Scruples card. “Ezra, would you be willing to eat a bowl of live crickets for $40,000?”

“Lar,” Jared said, “if you want it, you should take it.”

“Want what?” she said innocently. They were getting undressed in the bedroom.

“Come on. Seriously.”

But she had too much to drink for seriously. She fell on the bed in her black bra and underwear, her hair loose, her made-up eyes half closing. Pulling up her casted leg, she motioned for Jared with her index finger, and he fell on top of her, in his clothes, also having had a little too much to drink.

“We’ll work out the kids,” he muttered, kissing her. “Take the job. You know Ezra will be thrilled.”

“What, I’m now accepting work to make Ezra happy?” Her arms flung around him.

“No, to make you happy.” They nestled, rumbled to an inebriated rhythm of a married Saturday night with nowhere to go on Sunday morning.

“I’m happy,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I know how much you used to love it. Directing.”

“Yes.” Her eyes remained closed. The true unspoken inquiry hung in the air, the real issue, the only one worth having an answer to, the thirsty dilemma at the crux of each human heart: How it best for me to live?

Soon Larissa would be asleep. She felt herself drifting, even as excitement built up in her from the feel of his man’s body on top of her, from the smell of his liquored-up breath, from his lips on her lips, on her throat. “I’ll think about it,” she said. It was like a placeholder to end the conversation. I’ll think about it meant she would endeavor never to give it another thought. Theatrically she moaned. Jared forgot about theater, as she hoped he would.

3
Aisle 12

The cast came off a few days later and Larissa limped with a walking stick to her car, like Uriah Heep, like her grandmother who had died aged ninety-eight, and then drove to Pingry and finished painting black the backdrop for Desdemona’s death, went to the library, got some books for Asher’s school project on Abraham Lincoln, and then dropped by Nee Dells to see if there were any new boots (there weren’t), afterward driving to Panera Bakery in Madison to get a mozzarella and pepper baguette and chicken noodle soup. After finishing lunch, she still had an hour left before Michelangelo. This day and every day was punctuated by the regimen of her children. When she was a kid, all she and Che wanted was to be free of school; little did Larissa realize that she’d never be free of it, that morning, afternoon and night, the homework, the projects, the notes home, the agenda books, the signatures on tests, the packed lunches, the bought lunches, the chaperones and the school trips, the exams and the #2 pencils, the rulers and compasses and looseleaf paper, the parent-teacher conferences, all of it, wasn’t just twelve years of her life. No. It was the rest of her life, the better part of the better part of her life. Sure, eventually it stopped, but when it stopped, you stopped too. Larissa would be over fifty when the last child would graduate high school, and who said it would be over by then? Who said that her daughter wouldn’t be back home, living as a single mother in the room upstairs, and suddenly it was playgroup and kindergarten and first grade again, and Larissa would be sixty, picking up her grandkids from school, still looking at her watch, saying, two hours left, one hour left, thirty minutes left.

How could Ezra not see how impossible it was for her to take on theater, too? What did mothers who worked outside the home do? Did their bodies also shift slightly downward, as if some perverse internal clock was ringing its alarm at them—it’s 2:30. It’s 3:00, it’s school bus time. Every day. Every year. Whatever it was they were doing, did they also lift their heads from their desks and acknowledge that while they were in their cubicles, their children were getting off the bus to come home to a house where their mothers weren’t?

Larissa wouldn’t have her life any other way. She would not pay someone else to take care of her kids to rehearse plays with other people’s children whose mothers were working.

Today she had an hour. Not enough time to choose, edit, cast and direct a play for spring. It was bitterly cold. She drove to Stop&Shop instead. She went because she needed detergent. Jared needed tissues for his office and some chewy caramels for his candy jar. Asher needed posterboard and glue, and Michelangelo colored pencils (of course he did). Emily needed her own shampoo because the family’s Pantene Smooth and Sleek just wouldn’t do. Larissa parked by the cemetery again, hurrying in from the cold.

She was scheduled like a mother. Every minute of her life was accounted for.

Every minute, except for the tiny present one after Panera and before Michelangelo’s bus.

She was getting laundry detergent in aisle 12 when she heard his voice.

“Hey, what are you doing here,” he said, like a voiceover narrative track, “in the laundry aisle?”

He was pushing his own cart, in which he had nothing but three containers of sushi and some dried almonds. She switched her gaze from his cart to him.

“Um—getting laundry?” Why did he smile like that was amusing? “Family’s run out.” She got that in there. Family.

Larissa wasn’t trying to be coy. She wasn’t trying to be much of anything. She actually was shopping for her family. She had just finished lunch in Panera down the street. She liked Panera. Why did she have to explain herself?

“How’s your ankle?”

“Good,” she replied. “Cast came off.”

“I see that. Feeling better?”

“Meh.” She stood awkwardly next to the fabric softener. The aisle smelled faintly of fake lavender. Best to go get some food now.

Larissa got some softener just in case, since she was standing right next to it. Got big containers, two of them, so she wouldn’t have to come back to aisle 12 anytime soon, and also to show him that she had a family that needed giant amounts of fabric softener because she was a good mother and softened their laundered clothes. He rolled his cart down the aisle beside her. He was wearing his torn jeans, brown boots, brown leather. His hair didn’t look brushed. He looked underfed in that skinny young guy way when they can’t keep the weight on no matter what they do.

“You ride in this weather?” she asked him. “That’s crazy.”

“Yeah. It is pretty crazy. I’m not used to it.” He pointed to his splotched face. “I get windburn.”

Her mother taught her to be polite so Larissa said she couldn’t tell. But where was he from that he wasn’t used to it? One winter in Jersey and you pretty much knew what to expect. She didn’t ask.

When she turned to aisle 13, to the frozen section and the bread, he turned, too. She didn’t need any frozen food. She bought some anyway. Frozen hash browns, frozen broccoli, ice cream. And some frozen pizza since that’s what they were having for dinner tonight. They got in line, he right behind her. Outside in the stinging sunshine, he asked where she was parked and they both saw she was parked close to his bike.

“You’re like me,” he said. “You don’t want to forget where you left your transportation.” His fingerless gloves clutched the paper bag full of sushi.

“Can’t imagine you’d forget where you parked that,” Larissa said, pointing. “I don’t know much about motorcycles.” Risk-averse and proud of it. “But it looks nice.”

He looked amused. “Well, you’re right. It is a nice bike. It’s a Ducati Sportclassic.”

Her face didn’t change; she couldn’t even fake being impressed. “You bought it new?”

“Nah, it’s way expensive. It was my old man’s. I got it when he died.”

“Oh.” She studied him closer. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, but,” he said, “look at the bike.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled, slightly ironically, but maybe not. Slightly ruefully, but maybe not.

He helped her again, the heavy detergent, the fabric softeners, the 12-pack of Diet Coke. “Someone drinks a lot of soda in your house,” he remarked. “All that carbon dioxide is terrible for your metabolism, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah. It slows down your Krebs cycle to a crawl. It interferes with the enzyme that receives the oxygen molecule. Terrible if you’re trying to lose weight. What, you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know,” she said slowly, frowning at him. “How do you know?”

“Ninth grade bio.” Instead of frowning, he smiled. “Not that you should care about losing weight,” he said. “See ya. Keep warm.”

“Yeah, you too.” She wanted to ask him his name, but didn’t dare. Ninth grade bio!

Bo called as soon as Larissa got home. “My life is being slowly destroyed,” she said. “Today she told me she was going blind. Blind! I said, Mother, have you tried your glasses? They’re right on the nightstand. Oh God. I’m leaving work early today to take her to the eye doctor. Can I come over first?”

“How can you not?” said Larissa. She liked Bo, who was stately and attractive and deliberate in her movements, but what she liked best about Bo was that she could hide herself in the fray of Bo’s graceful self-absorption.

4
“Moisten Your Head with Lubricant”

“Do you refuse to give me an answer?” said Ezra incredulously, cornering her in the kitchen after another late January week passed. Her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies would burn if she didn’t take them out right now.

“Ezra, excuse me.” Oven mitts on, Larissa opened the oven door. Damn. Overdone by two minutes.

He sighed behind her. “I thought you were going to think about it.”

“I have thought about it.” She took out a clanging metal cookie rack.

“Well, think some more. Think until you give me the answer I want.”

Giggling, she started to scrape the cookies onto a cooling rack. “I can’t do it. I don’t have the time.”

“What the hell are you talking about? You have from eight till two each and every day to dedicate to the unfailing pursuit of theatrical excellence.”

“Only in your limited and one-dimensional world,” said Larissa, “do I have nothing to do from eight till two.”

“Lar,” said Jared, pouring drinks and always ready to instigate, “tell our friends how long it takes you to get out of the house.”

Larissa stayed quiet!

“How long?” said Ezra. “Thirty minutes?”

“Thirty?” said Jared, raising his eyebrows. “Tell him, Lar.”

After veal shank and rice with corn, and everyone full and relaxed at the table, Larissa told them.

Did this seem unreasonable?

Brushing teeth, etc. | 5 minutes
Shower | 15 minutes
Drying | 5 minutes
Drying smaller parts, like ears | 5 minutes
Lotioning | 10 minutes
Makeup | 20 minutes
Getting dressed | 10 minutes
Hair | 30 minutes
Jewelry | 5 minutes
Misc tasks, e.g. shoes, purse | 10 minutes
Total: | 1 hour, 55 minutes

“That’s without dawdling, making coffee, or doing a single thing for any of the kids,” Larissa finished.

“Is this a joke?”

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

Ezra stammered. “Jared, you allow this?”

“I don’t allow it, that’s just how long it takes.” Jared gazed at Larissa.

“But it takes me fifteen minutes!”

“Ezra,” Larissa said calmly, “I’ve seen you spend longer in the bathroom when you have company.”

Ezra whirled to Maggie. “How long does it take me?”

“Fifteen minutes,” replied Maggie.

“I shave, five minutes, shower, five minutes, I put on my clothes, five more minutes. Done.”

“Yeah. So? What does your business have to do with my business?”

“You weren’t always like this. You weren’t like this in college!”

“In college, Ezra? We walked around in the same pair of jeans for weeks! We were theater hippies. We prided ourselves on not washing. Things have changed.”

“Clearly.”

They all tried that Saturday night to make Larissa more efficient at getting beautiful so she could become a drama director for Pingry.

“Why do you have to put lotion on?”

“You want me to have scaly skin, Ezra? Like a snake?”

“I don’t care either way, but you won’t be scaly.”

“I will be. My husband likes touching soft skin.”

All inebriated eyes turned from wine to the husband.

“I do like the soft skin,” admitted the sheepish, grinning husband, his shaggy gray-brown hair falling over his forehead, his hand reaching out to scrub Larissa’s cheek.

“Why can’t you let your hair dry naturally?” suggested Ezra. “You’ll cut thirty minutes right there.”

“Because I will look a fright.” Larissa suddenly remembered the bike dude’s disquisition on women and hair, and became uncomfortable, in her own home, recalling laughing at a stranger in the parking lot.

“You can’t possibly,” said Maggie. “You would look beautiful no matter what. Your hair looks so pretty now.”

“Took me forty-five minutes. Thirty to blow dry and fifteen more to get it into a bun that looks casually messy.” Larissa gracefully moved on from the freeform poetry of hair. “Why do you want me to be dry, disheveled, down?”

“Because I want you to direct the spring play,” said Ezra. “Why do you spend five minutes on jewelry? You don’t need jewelry to go to the supermarket, do you?”

“More than anywhere else,” Larissa replied. “Obviously you’ve never been to the supermarket. Do you know how many times I hear, I like your necklace, your earrings, your bracelet?”

“No, how many?” asked Jared, poking her, his eyes glinting.

Pinching Jared’s arm, Larissa went on. “How many times I hear, where did you get that beautiful necklace and I say I got it from Jean. Is that what you want, Ezra? Frump me up and run Jean’s business out of Summit? Besides,” she continued, on a pleasant, non-defensive roll, “Jared buys me my jewelry. You want me not to wear his lovely gifts? Some wife I am.”

“You don’t wear everything I buy for you,” Jared said with a wink.

Stop it, she mouthed to him, winking back. It was Saturday night, after all and Larissa had a fair amount of liquid Eros in her.

They worked on her like this the rest of the evening. Here in her present external life, the minutia of hairspray was scrutinized: should she spritz once or twice, and why moisturizer and foundation, while in the other past life, one evening she and Maggie and Ezra, and Evelyn and Malcolm, and even her beloved Jared, had spent 1 hour, 55 minutes figuring out why Psalm 23 sounded so sublime in its King James rendition but less so in successive, though (possibly) more accurate versions.

One version read: You moisten my head with lubricant instead of, You anoint my head with oil.

“Moisten? Who says that? It sounds … I don’t know,” Larissa had said with distaste she was unable to hide. “Slightly sexual.”

Ezra had chuckled, adjusting his red plaid blazer. “Well, in the original Hebrew, the word had no sacramental connotations,” he said. “The words were lubricate with pleasure.”

“You lubricate my head with pleasure?” Larissa had said incredulously. “That’s better than anoint?”

“No, quite right,” agreed Ezra. “Which is why we use moisten.”

So Larissa could conclude now in the fullness of time that in the end all philosophical discussions, past and present, were about lotion.

“I anoint my body with oil,” Larissa said to Ezra and Maggie this evening.

“You what?”

It was pleasant to sit, to chat. There was no denying the delights of her subzero freezer and canyon-capacity washing machine and her funny loquacious friends. It was only when she stood at her books and touched the spines of the unread memoirs and comedies before she boxed them all to be donated, it was only when she was saying no to Ezra for something so outlandishly magical as to live on the stage, that Larissa fleetingly thought that though she looked so rad in her glad rags, perhaps the books weren’t getting read and Othello wasn’t getting directed by her because she was taking 1 hour, 55 minutes to moisten her head with lubricant.

5
Between Childhood Friends

Larissa, you look great, let’s go.

Just one more coat of mascara, Che.

No, seriously, let’s go. My mom won’t let me go out with you if she sees you with globs of makeup.

It’s your prom. She’ll let you.

Come on, enough. You’ve been at this for an hour.

No, I haven’t. And it’s the prom!

I know. But we’ll miss the whole thing if you don’t hurry up. Look, you’re not even dressed yet.

Che … why don’t you want to talk about the other thing?

Put on the corsage and let’s go.

I need the dress on first.

So put it on.

Che…

Larissa, I don’t want to talk about the other thing.

But we have to do something.

I’m hoping it will just go away.

By itself?

With God’s help.

Oh, Che.

Look, I know. But I can’t deal with it, okay.

But you’re not alone. I’ll help you. I’m here. I’ll go with you.

I’m not ready.

Why don’t you want to go to at least get the test?

Because then I’ll have to deal with it.

You don’t want to wait too long …

What does it matter?

Because up to thirteen weeks costs three hundred bucks, but after thirteen is six hundred.

How do you know this? Che squinted at her friend.

Casually Larissa shrugged, standing in front of the mirror in her black bra and high heels, her young legs looking like impossibly long marshland reeds. I looked into it.

Why does it cost more?

I don’t know.

Oh, didn’t look into that part? Che paused. Maybe because there’s more to scrape out?

Che … come on.

Okay. Like I said, let’s not talk about it. It’s prom night. Are you done yet?

Che … don’t be afraid. I’m here. I’m always here for you.

Larissa, you can’t help me with this.

I can. I will. I am.

No. Don’t you understand? I can’t do what I know I must do. I must do it, but I can’t do it. Quite a pickle, isn’t it? Enough lipstick. You look like a streetwalker in daylight. Wipe it off before my mother comes in. You want her to like you, don’t you? Get dressed.

Well, you can’t have a baby, Che.

Shh!

You can’t.

There’s a lot I can’t do.

You want my advice?

No. I know your advice. But you’re not me. You’re not my mother’s daughter. You’re your mother’s daughter.

We’re not telling your mother.

I’m still her daughter. I’m still Filipino. I’m still Catholic. I’m still what I am. Telling her, not telling her, won’t change any of those things. Won’t change the truth of things, Larissa, no matter if it’s three hundred dollars or six thousand.

Except I don’t have six hundred dollars. I have three-fifty.

Okay. I won’t need it.

Oh, Che.

And Che cried again, in her silk blue gown, her white orchid corsage, her waterproof mascara enduring, but streaks remaining in her foundation when the doorbell rang, and her mother yelled up that their young men were here.

All right, Ma. Stop shouting, I’m not deaf.

Please. Just take the test.

What good will it do?

Let’s go to Planned Parenthood like we planned.

What good will it do?

You’ll talk to someone.

What good will it do?

So what are you going to do? You gonna have that baby?

I can’t have it.

Exactly.

I can’t do the other thing either.

How are you going to explain it to Maury?

I can’t explain it.

Exactly.

Right. Are you going downstairs in your bra or are you finally going to put some clothes on? Che wiped her face, wiped the blush and foundation off her wet cheeks, straightened up, pretended to smile.

How many weeks are you late now?

Eight, mouthed Che, in terror, into Larissa’s sinking heart.

Dear Che,

Why did you return the money order I sent you? Come on, it’s like a birthday gift certificate. I’d send you stuff but besides Nutella I don’t know what else you need. And anyway, how much Nutella can a girl eat? Please. I’m resending the money order, happy birthday, merry Christmas. Accept. Please.

Why are you worried about me? I should be worried about you. Everything is good here. Same as always. Nothing to report. I’m not aggrieved. I’m whole, not wanting. My temperature is as always climate-controlled, why are you anxious about me?

Larissa stopped writing. She couldn’t put into words what she was feeling. Highway 24 ran between the golf course and the shopping mall. Golf course—beauty. Shopping mall—luxury. But between them one hundred and twenty feet of concrete, and cars whizzing by.

Where were they going? East, they were headed to New York. But the other way, west. Where were they headed? Pennsylvania? Ohio, to visit relatives? Or somewhere farther? Farther where? Kansas? Colorado? California? Where after that? She would listen to the cars, racing as if rushing, hurrying along, hastening away, faster, faster away, out of New Jersey, beyond, far, away, and gone.

It got to be so that every time Larissa opened her front door, every time she got into her ivory Escalade or walked down the driveway to get the mail, or opened the windows, or stood briefly to take in the view from the slope of her property, all she heard was the madlong rush of cars.

Che, I know you’ll think I’m crazy for wondering this, but though I think you’re nuts for having that awful protesting job, sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be you. To have your life. What is it like to worry about Lorenzo, to sleep late if you want to, or get up early, or have your own schedule? I read your letters with such fascination. Human beings are perverse, aren’t they?

I sometimes wonder how your day breaks down into its many hours.

You know I’d love to come. Michelangelo won’t spare me. But I think the rest of them can take me or leave me. Especially Emily. She’s becoming so snotty. The hormones are going straight to her mouth. She can’t say anything to me without her hand on her hip like a kettle. Remember when we were the same way with our mothers? I miss you so much. Whenever I think of you, I picture us only as kids. You’re the only one who knows me from back then.

Dear Larissa,

I’ve decided to keep your Christmas gift. Thank you. I want to get a manicure and buy new sneakers but I think I’ll just pay my three months’ back rent, if it’s all the same to you.

You want to know about my day? Okay, I’ll tell you about yesterday. What you do is, you take yesterday and multiply it by 365, and you’ll get the picture.

I woke up at seven, because the outdoor market was opening at eight, and I had to go get the fruit baskets from Father Emilio. I got to him by 7:30, but he made me go to Mass first, which is okay, but Lorenzo and I have been fighting so much I didn’t think I deserved communion for all the nasty things I kept yelling, but when I told Father Emilio this, he said that was my pride talking. He said to me, “You’re going to keep yourself away from God’s sacrament because you think you’re not perfect? When do you think you’ll ever be perfect enough, sinless enough, to receive the Eucharist?” So … I went to Mass, and felt a little better about things, and then carried thirteen bushels, one by one, of mangoes and tomatoes and pears and spent till noon selling them, and when I got back home, having made a thousand pesos, I found Lorenzo still sleeping! And you know, we’re so broke, and he needs to work, ride a rickshaw in Manila, which he hates to do, so instead he goes out drinking with his derelict radical buddies and then sleeps till noon, and, like I said, we haven’t paid the rent for three months, living hand to mouth (without the rent).

We had a fight that lasted till one, but then made up nicely, till two, and he got hungry, so we went to San Agustin and had lunch with Father Emilio and his orphans, for free, and then made copies of our leaflets at the mission because Father Emilio lets me use the copier, for free, and afterward went to Manila City Hall Square and distributed them at a joint rally with the Manila Police and the Philippines Motorcycle Association in support of our current president. Imagine us in a joint rally with the police. It ended peacefully at 6:30, and we met up with some friends and went out drinking but I left because I didn’t want to hang out with his loser friends, and besides, I was three days late and wanted to take a pregnancy test. The test cost me 750 pesos. It was negative. I took it at 9:00 p.m., and then cried until Lorenzo returned at eleven, too drunk to care that we weren’t having a baby, but he did get blazing mad that I spent 750 pesos on a stupid test. Oh, to think that once upon a time, I avoided the test like the Black Death, and now I spend money I don’t have to take it randomly throughout the month, just in case.

So … we had another fight, this time till well after midnight, when the neighbors finally called the police because it was getting ugly, and the cops we had rallied with wanted to arrest Lorenzo, but I said no. After they left, I left too, and went to sleep in one of the rooms at the orphanage. Father Emilio keeps telling me that I can come and live with him. He doesn’t have enough hands to take care of the kids. But I said being around so many unwanted children would make me feel even worse about my life, if that’s even possible, because there I am, wanting a baby, and unable to have one. Lorenzo came to get me at three, and we lay in the twin bed together, and had sex under God’s eyes at San Agustin. I wondered if Father would still think I was worthy of communion. To test him, I came to him this morning, and challenged him with the truth of last night. And you know what he said? God never turns away from you. He is longing for your heart, Che. Yours and Lorenzo’s.

I give up on that Father Emilio.

So that was my day.

What do you think?

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