Fiction Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate? Like, tomorrow?
“Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says.
Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance. It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s name, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern—
“We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”
She can picture her clearly: a single woman who hovers in the school hallways wearing the look that Liz has come to associate with certain mothers—a mixture of doe-eyed expectancy and absolute terror, as if at any minute they might be asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or the current policy on plagiarism; the school being one of those places where mothers are kept on their toes and organized into various committees for advance and retreat, their children’s education understood as a mined battlefield that must be properly assaulted. Didn’t she just see her last week at the enlightenment session? A talk given by a Dr. Roberta Friedman, Professor of Something, entitled “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” But now, for the life of her, Liz can’t remember whether she and Matilda’s mother exchanged two words, just the way Matilda’s mother balanced on the edge of her folding chair taking notes, the intentional gray streak (intellectual?) of her cropped hair, the fury of her pen.
“Oh, God, that’s great,” Matilda’s mother is saying. “I just need to keep Matilda from losing her gourd.”
“I understand,” Liz says.
“Do you?” says Matilda’s mother. “You do?”
Her name is Fran, apparently. Fran Spalding. Liz has looked her up in the confidential, you-lose-it-you’re-screwed Parent & Faculty directory. She and Matilda live across the Park from the school, on West Eighty-sixth Street. Does anyone not live uptown? Liz wants to know, but she asks the question only of herself, so there’s no answer, just the relative quiet of her studio—a big loft in what was once considered Chinatown. Liz spends most mornings here spinning clay into pots and teacups and dessert plates. At this hour there’s little interruption, just the occasional rumble of a garbage truck and the low chatter of the radio and her own mind: Fran Spalding, daughter Matilda, West Eighty-sixth. They’ll go today after school. They’ll cross the Park in a taxi, mothers and daughters, and aim for the apartment building, three-forty-something, where Fran Spalding and Matilda live, and go up to the fifteenth floor, 15D, she knows—the address listed in the second section of the directory, the front pages clotted with emergency numbers and please-put-in-a-place-of-prominence evacuation routes.
It’s a playdate, a date for play; Caroline duly apprised of the plan this morning as she and Liz waited for the school bus on Lafayette. Around them, Cooper Union students bunched up like blackflies, bluebottles in window corners, at every “Don’t Walk.”
“Who?” Caroline says.
“Matilda. She’s in your class. You know. She wears striped shirts.”
“Does she have a cat?” Caroline asks.
“I have no idea.”
“Does she want to play My Little Ponies?”
Liz looks down at her daughter. “Who doesn’t?” she says.
Caroline shoves her hands in her pockets and swings one leg. She leans against a filthy meter tattooed with stickers advertising things: 800 numbers for important advice; someone staying positive with H.I.V.
“I’ll go,” Caroline says, as if going were a question.
“Great!” Liz says. “Here comes the bus!”
The school bus is the big yellow kind, exactly the same as the one Liz once rode to elementary school, in that faraway place, that faraway land known as rural Ohio. Here, in lower Manhattan, the bus seems too large, wrong, a dinosaur lurching through the veering bicyclists and throngs of pedestrians, the construction cones and smoking manholes; a relic of a thing, a dirtied yellow shell, an empty chrysalis whose butterfly has flown the coop. Inside, a handful of children are spread front to back, their expressionless faces gazing out the smeared windows, their ears plugged. Her own school bus, her Ohio school bus, had burst with noise and the boys who wouldn’t move over and then, later, would.
The bus stops; its doors open. Liz releases Caroline’s hand and waits as she ascends the high steps and disappears down the aisle. In an instant, she reappears in the window seat closest to Liz, her backpack beside her like a twin. Liz waves and smiles; that she has refused to buy headphones and the machines into which they fit remains a constant source of outrage to her daughter, though on this morning Caroline seems happy enough, smiling back, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue as the doors close and the school bus lurches on.
“First, the golden rule: Never compare your own childhood experiences with those of your children,” Dr. Friedman had said, her glasses pushed to the tip of her nose. “This is a fruitless exercise, unhealthy and counterproductive. Best to remain alert; to look on the bright side; to, whenever possible, accentuate joy.”
Liz pounds the clay on the wheel and straightens her miner’s cap, a figment of her imagination but one that works relatively well in focussing her thoughts away from the business of children and onto the clay. The twins are presumably in the park with Lorna, sleeping in their double stroller or being pushed, side by side, in the swings meant for babies. Lorna is a pro. She will have bundled them up and thought to bring nourishment—formula or the breast milk that Liz pumps every evening; her breasts have nearly expired, she thinks, they’ve hit their expiration date. And Caroline is safely in school, repeating the colors of vegetables in Spanish or sitting at a small round table having what’s known as Snack: individual packages of Cheez-Its (they’ve all complained!), or free-of-hydrogenated-oils-and-corn-syrup-though-possibly-manufactured-in-a-factory-traced-with-nuts animal crackers. The point is, Liz has five hours before she needs to take the subway uptown: five whole hours. It is nothing and everything. It could stretch out before her like an eternity if she has the will, or it could evaporate in a single moment.
Concentrate, she thinks.
In the bright light of the cap, Liz sees the spinning clay take form and her own hands, aged, fingernails bitten to the quick. She has written Fran Spalding’s cell-phone number across her knuckles, in case she forgets, or there’s a problem, or the world blows its cork: a possibility, a probability, apparently, but for now she’s going to concentrate. She’s not going to think about that.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an important message from the New York City Police Department,” says the subway voice over the loudspeaker five hours later. Liz stands half in, half out of the subway car, a new habit; she always waits until the last passengers have pushed past before she fully commits to sitting down.
“Keep your belongings in your sight at all times. Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious package or activity on the platform or train, do not keep it to yourself. Tell a police officer or an M.T.A. employee.
“Remain alert, and have a safe day,” the voice adds as the doors shut.
The taxi barrels across Central Park, through its odd scattering of tunnels; blocks of stone rise on either side of the road as if the taxi were plummetting through earth. Above loom the barren trees, leafless and gray, or the blotched white of sycamores; once, aeons ago it seems now, orange flags were unfurled along this same route. Then, thousands of people, all of them vaguely smiling, had wandered the paths like pilgrims in a dream. No one appears to be smiling now. They hurry along, wrapped in their coats, the day leaden, darkening; an Ethan Frome day, Liz used to say in college, to be clever, though she wasn’t particularly, unable to decipher the strange manners and customs of the East. She hasn’t thought of that in years.
Fran pays the driver, while Liz, in back, unbuckles Caroline and Matilda, leaning over them to push open the door. “On the curb,” she’s saying. “Watch your step,” she’s saying. “Grab your gloves.” Fran gestures for them to follow her into the building entrance, where two men in uniform hold open the large glass doors, bowing slightly as Fran passes.
“Partner!” one of them says, high-fiving Matilda. “Who’s your buddy?”
“Michael,” Fran says, arrested at the “WELCOME” threshold. “This is Matilda’s friend Carolyn.”
“Caroline,” Liz says; she can’t help it, raw nerve. Anything else she would let slide, she tells herself. Truly.
“Of course,” Fran is saying. “Caroline.”
“Buddy bear,” Michael says to Matilda. “Look at you.”
They look. How can they not? Everywhere there are mirrors, reflecting them, reflecting Michael and the other guy, reflecting the bounty and the grandeur of it all—potted green plants with white lights, garlands, a cone of poinsettia and even, on a pedestal between the elevator banks, an elaborately carved stone urn containing—what? Liz wonders. Dead tenants?
“This is lovely,” Liz says.
“It’s home,” Fran says. She rings for the elevator, the girls crowding next to her. In an instant there’s the ping, and then the doors slide open. Another man in uniform smiles as they all step in; there is a small chair in the corner for sitting, though he clearly prefers to stand.
“Hey, Matty,” he says. “How’s the Go-Go?”
Go-Go, Fran explains, is the cat, their cat, who recently contracted a hot spot. A hot spot, she tells Liz, is an itch that can’t be scratched.
“Wow,” Liz says.
They rise in mechanical wonder and then stop, abruptly, on eleven, where the elevator doors slide open to no one.
“False alarm,” the man in the uniform says, releasing the doors and driving them onward, upward. The girls stand stock still; they all stand stock still.
“Are you allergic?” Matilda says to Caroline.
“The cat,” Fran says to Caroline.
“Are you allergic to cats?” Matilda says. She wears pink plastic barrettes and a striped shirt underneath a pink jumper.
“Caroline,” Liz says. “Did you hear—”
“No,” Caroline says. She hunches beneath her huge backpack, carried solely for fashion, or just in case. In it now, Liz happens to know, is a palm-size notepad on which Caroline draws the details of her day and a purple-lipsticked Bratz doll that she treasures, received on her last birthday from Ted’s mother, who, Ted said, meant well.
“Lots of people are,” Matilda says.
The elevator stops.
“North Pole,” says the man in the uniform.
“Thank you,” says Fran.
“Thank you,” says Liz.
“Thank you,” says Matilda.
“Thank you,” says Caroline, walking behind Liz and tripping her, accidentally on purpose. “Caroline,” Fran’s voice soars in from ahead. “How do you feel about strudel?” But neither Caroline nor Matilda is listening, or hungry, for that matter; released from the grip of the elevator, the girls run down the poorly lit hallway playing some sort of imaginary game, knocking into doors and taking corners at high speed.
“Matilda Beth,” Fran yells after them. “That’s one.” She pauses. “Don’t let me get to two.”
Matilda stops and grabs Caroline’s hand, pulling her toward what must be D—an unassuming door with a child’s drawing taped over its peephole. It is always the same, Liz thinks, in these pictures: the mismatched ears, the round eyes, the name scrawled across one corner. The girls are six years old and braided, the days of the week stitched on their underpants. They wear seamless socks and rubber-soled shoes, and both are missing two teeth, though not the same ones; each has been read “Charlotte’s Web” and “The Boxcar Children,” the first a story of a pig on a farm and its friendship with a spider, the second a story of children, orphans, living happily alone in the woods, making do with rusted spoons pulled from the dump and the occasional cracked cup of milk.
“Caroline,” Liz says. “Is this a gold-star day?” She has spied Caroline twisting her finger up her nose and refers to a deal between the two that sometimes results in better behavior but more often does not.
Once in the apartment, Matilda leads Caroline to her room, where they settle beneath a green canopy of gauze to play My Little Ponies. Liz returns to the living room with Fran, whose gray streak, she learns, is natural and who works at home during school hours, copy editing and proofreading documents for a legal firm. From time to time, the girls interrupt them, flying into the living room in leotards and ballerina skirts and, once, in nothing at all, at which point Fran calls Matilda aside and speaks to her in a voice that Liz has heard only from single mothers or from mothers with numerous children—women who simply do not have the time or the patience for the monkey business that everyone else puts up with, they have told her; once, even, she heard the voice from a mother who said she just placed herself in the hands of Jesus. So maybe it’s the voice of Jesus, Liz thinks now, admiring it; her own, she knows, entirely lacks authority, as if she were questioning each verdict she pronounced.
“More tea?” Fran asks.
“Thank you,” Liz says, following her back into the kitchen, where they wait with great anticipation for the water to boil, watching the kettle’s curved spout, its shiny, smudged lid, as if they had never seen anything quite so fascinating in their lives.
“We are living in the Age of Anxiety,” Dr. Friedman said, “and here we sit at the epicenter, the Ground Zero, if you will.” She looked up and over those glasses at all of them, the throng of mothers, the few stay-at-home dads or those fathers whose schedules allowed them to be flexible—men in T-shirts, shorts, and sturdy boots, their hairy legs oddly comforting, as if, at a moment’s notice, they could sweep the whole group onto their shoulders and hoist them out the window. Many of the women in the circle appeared to Liz to be close to tears, though some were more difficult to read, writing with expensive pens, their briefcases balanced against their slim ankles, their hair blown smooth. Dr. Friedman surveyed the room, clearly attempting to make eye contact with the closest suspect, though unfortunately that suspect was Janey Filch, wall-eyed and so shy she looked ready to faint.
“Everywhere we go are reminders of where we are. I don’t think they need to be chronicled here. The school has briefed you on contingencies, and your emergency-contact cards have been filed in triplicate. Each child has an individual first-aid kit and a protective mask.
“Still and still, you might say, the question remains: What can you do right now, on this day, at this hour, in this moment?”
Here Dr. Friedman looked up again and smiled, the smile so studied as to be disarming, as if Liz weren’t really looking at a woman smiling but at a portrait of a woman smiling.
“Take a deep breath,” she said, exhaling loudly. “Smell the roses,” she said, inhaling loudly. “Relax.”
The women slouched a bit in their folding chairs, attempting to follow Dr. Friedman’s advice. Liz imagined that if Dr. Friedman were next to suggest that they all stand and do a few jumping jacks, most would leap to the job.
“Now,” Dr. Friedman said, wiggling her shoulders. “I’m going to give you all some homework. This is an exercise that I’ve found works very well with my patients. It’s simple, really. How many of you keep a journal?”
A few hands shot up, Marsha Neuberger waving as if desperate to be picked.
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Dr. Friedman said. “I only wanted to get an idea. Anyway, what I’m going to suggest is that you all try keeping what I call an anxiety journal; just like if any of you have ever tried to diet and kept a food journal—”
Anxiety journal like food journal, Liz would have written in her notes, if she had remembered paper and pen. Bemused laughter, she would have added.
“—where you wrote down your caloric intake. Your anxiety journal will be the place where you write down everything that makes you feel nervous, or anxious, throughout the day: it can be anything you like. Don’t worry about how it sounds. No one is going to read it but you.” This Dr. Friedman said emphatically, Liz would have noted, whipping off her glasses and looking up, avoiding Janey Filch but generally trying to reassure each and every one of them.
“Promise,” she added.
Liz looks from her steaming tea to Fran. Fran is describing her terrific luck in finding the apartment, falling into it, desperate, after fleeing San Francisco with Matilda and a few pieces of luggage. Now, as a single mother, she kept a tight rein on things, she said. “Have you noticed?”
Liz is unsure whether she should have noticed or not, so she blows on her tea and shakes her head.
“There was a burglary,” Fran says. “In San Francisco. After that we felt like we had to get out. I mean, I did. I left Matilda’s father. Richard. And moved back East.”
“Oh.”
“Strudel?” Fran says, sliding a plate across the counter.
“Oh, gosh, no thanks.”
“I’ve sliced some apples for the girls.”
“Great,” Liz says, knowing that Caroline won’t touch them—the edges, minutes after being sliced, too brown.
“And you?” Fran says.
“I’m sorry?”
“What about you?” Fran says.
“Oh,” Liz says. “We moved from Boston. We were in art school, Ted and I, and then we moved here—Ted works in television, children’s television—and then we had Caroline and now the twins, but I’m getting back to it. Art. I’m a potter, actually. I work with clay.”
“In vitro?” asks Fran.
“I’m sorry?”
“The twins,” Fran says. “In vitro?”
Liz nods.
“Your eggs?”
Liz blows on her tea. “Nope. We had to shell out twenty thousand dollars; we did it through the alumni association.”
“Smart eggs,” Fran says.
“I didn’t really care. Ted felt strongly about that, you know. He didn’t want to adopt.”
“Men rarely do.”
They sit in the living room, on opposite sides of the sectional.
“I think our girls really get along,” Fran says.
“Yes,” Liz says.
“After the burglary, you know, Matilda had trouble making friends. I mean, she played by herself most of the time. Made up stories. I’d take her to a birthday party or something, and there all the other children would be running around and screaming and playing tag or smacking the piñata, that kind of thing, and Matilda would be sitting by herself involved in some fairy-tale game. It was, well, embarrassing, frankly.”
Liz can’t help thinking that taupe is entirely the wrong color for this room, high as they are above the city. Excellent light, the listing would say. Light and air; airy light; sun-drenched, sun-gorged, sun-soaked, rush to your sun-kissed oasis! There are windows everywhere, and those radiators that line the walls. Fran should clear them off and paint the place—something dramatic, terra cotta, she’d suggest, or saffron yellow.
“This was in San Francisco, where everything is, well, healthy, do you know what I mean? There’s always someone talking about loving-kindness. I couldn’t stand it after a while. I just left. I mean, we did; after the burglary. We just got on a plane and flew away. Anyway, that’s it. I’m here for good. I mean, I grew up here, in the city, but it’s different now, of course. It’s a lot different.”
There is a bit of a pause; comfortable enough, Liz thinks. The truth is, she’s enjoying herself. It’s a playdate, she finds herself thinking; I’m on a date for play.
“Would you like a drink?” Fran says.
“A drink?”
“I’d have one if you would. Carpe diem, or whatever. Anyway, screw tea, we’re grownups, right?”
“O.K.,” Liz says. “Sure. Great. Yes.”
“Excellent!” Fran says.
From behind Matilda’s door comes a shriek of giggles.
“Besides, they’re having fun!” Fran says.
“So are we!” Liz says.
Fran disappears to the kitchen and Liz stands to stretch a bit, to look out the windows. The apartment faces west, she believes, though she gets turned around at these heights. She still isn’t used to apartment views or high floors, and the ease with which you can see other lives: how even now, across from here, a boy sits reading at a dining-room table while an old woman—a nurse? a grandmother? a nanny?—moves around him, straightening up, stepping in and then out of Liz’s sight. A diorama, they are; what you might see at the American Museum of Natural History: early twenty-first century, N.Y.C., U.S.A. They’re dead, actually—stuffed mammals, the old woman on some sort of a moving track.
And what of Fran in the kitchen? Liz in the living room? Urban/suburban women circa 2007 participating in/on playdate, an urban/suburban ritual intended to alleviate boredom/loneliness among children/women while encouraging/controlling social engagement—
“What?” Liz yells.
“Chilled?” Fran yells.
“Wonderful,” Liz yells. She turns away from the windows; there are other things to do. She pokes around the taupe room. On a wide bookshelf are the usual histories and paperbacks and framed photographs: an infant Matilda; an earnest-looking boy in mortarboard and gown, Richard?; a teen-age Fran leaning against a giant redwood, her hair not yet streaked with gray but solely black, her posture sophisticated, worldly—she’s in college, possibly, or a Manhattan high school. I live on a narrow island, her posture says. I live at the center of the world.
On the secretary are bills and Post-it notepads and loose receipts and whatnot. Liz has a strong feeling, a hot spot, an itch to be scratched, and, sure enough, there it is among them: Fran’s anxiety journal. It’s as she expected, a steno notebook generally used for reportage. Liz resists for only a moment.
“Voilà!” Fran says. Liz turns to see her carrying a tray, the TV-dinner kind; it makes Liz anxious.
“What have you got?” Fran says. She’s pouring and doesn’t notice.
“Oh, nothing,” says Liz. “Your anxiety journal.”
Fran stops. “You were reading it?”
“Oh, God, no. Of course not. I just saw it here and picked it up. I mean, I was thinking, Good for you, and remembering that I’ve been meaning to buy one, or get one. I’d write, ‘TV-dinner tray.’ ”
“What?”
“ ‘TV-dinner tray.’ Like the one you’re holding. It makes me nervous and I can’t tell you why.”
Fran looks down. “It belonged to Richard. He liked to eat in front of the news.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe it’s the news you associate it with.”
“Maybe.”
“See? She had a point,” Fran says. “Cheers!” They toast and sip the wine, which is delicious chilled, Liz says—she never thinks to do that. “You should,” Fran says. She takes the anxiety journal and tucks it beneath one of the sectional cushions. “To playdates!” she says, toasting again.
It’s near the dinner hour and the girls are getting hungry; they haven’t heard a peep from their mothers. Pinkie Pie and Sun Sparkles have been to the castle about a zillion times; they’ve flown in the blue balloon, late for the costume ball, and then arrived, the “My Little Pony” theme song playing as Pinkie Pie and Sun Sparkles twirl on the special pink plastic revolving disk within the castle walls. Caroline lies on her back, pedalling her legs in the air, her finger working her nose. Matilda is reprimanding her imaginary sister, Beadie.
“Get down from there,” Matilda says. Beadie perches dangerously close to the window ledge, threatening to jump, and even though she has wings on her back and little ones at her ankles Matilda pleads with her to stop.
“Goodbye, my friend,” Beadie says. “Goodbye!”
Beadie takes a tremendous leap and falls, tumbling, toward the street. Matilda screams an imaginary scream, though Beadie, she knows, won’t splat; she’ll fly with her little wings right back to Matilda’s room. Still, Matilda feels scared.
“Help! Help!” Matilda yells. “Thief! Help! Thief!”
The door swings open.
“Do not even start with that,” Fran says. “It makes me insane.” Behind Fran, Liz looks in. “Caroline,” she says. “Gold-star day, remember?”
Caroline pulls her finger out of her nose.
“Are you girls happy?” Fran says.
“We’re hungry,” they say.
“We’re staying for dinner, how’s that!” Liz says.
The girls hop up and down holding hands; they wear only their underwear.
Chicken nuggets are served. Somewhere in Matilda’s room, Fran is saying as she prepares the tray, lives a round table and two chairs, Little Bear size, ordered from one of those catalogues which arrive daily in the mail; this one featured three child models, she’s saying, two girls and one boy, sipping tea at the table, sunlight streaming through windows that looked out on what appeared to be Russian countryside. The girls were dressed beautifully; the boy served in a monogrammed apron. Or maybe it came from the other one, Fran says, knocking on the door, the one where the child models introduced themselves and listed their goals. “I’m Zelda,” Fran says in a wavery falsetto. “I’m going to be a rock star.” Fran opens the door; inside, the girls huddle within the gauzy tent, apparently hiding.
“I can’t remember which,” Fran continues, “but the point is, it’s really cute, and it cost a fortune, and it must be here somewhere. I mean, you can’t just lose a table and chairs.”
Fran wades through stuffed animals and clothes and artwork and books, to a stack of pillows and blankets in the center of Matilda’s room, excavating until she finds the ensemble buried beneath. They were making a fort.
“Jesus,” she says, flushed. “Can you believe all this crap?”
“Yes,” Liz says.
Fran sets down the tray and calls the girls over. “O.K., ladies,” she says. “Which princess?”
“Jasmine,” Matilda says.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Fran says, rotating the plates.
“Ketchup?” Liz says; she holds the bottle at the ready. The girls nod, and she lurches toward them, ready to squirt.
“I can’t say that anything really happened with Richard,” Fran says. “It was just, you know, the feeling.” She lies on the floor in the now dim light of the apartment, balancing her wineglass on her chest, her feet propped on the sectional. “The elephant-in-the-room feeling.”
“The wha?” Liz says. She can’t remember the last time she drank so much wine in the afternoon; usually, she waits until Caroline’s asleep, the twins with Lorna in the nursery, Ted back at the office (the demanding life of a children’s television executive!) before pouring her first glass. Then she might have another, and another, enough to erase the day, or the parts of it she doesn’t want to remember: Caroline standing with her backpack on Lafayette, the neon-scrawled windows of the gay bar next to the bus stop, the public-service poster of an unattended bag, like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, shoved beneath some unsuspecting person’s seat.
“The elephant-in-the-room feeling,” Fran says. “You know, the thing that’s just, God, there. It’s big and heavy and real, somehow, though unnamed. It’s just there, is all, this blob of feeling; the feeling from the Black Lagoon.”
Fran rolls over on one elbow. “Did you ever ruin your life for a feeling?” she says.
“I don’t know,” Liz says. “I hope not.” She has closed her eyes to watch the tiny red pricks of light behind her eyelids. It’s a trick she likes to do, a habit; she likes to count them, pretend they’re sparks. She’s combustible, perhaps—she’s burning up.
“I miss Richard,” Fran is saying. “I miss him every day. There’s nobody to tell anything to anymore. Nobody.”
Liz opens her eyes and the sparks die out; she is back where she was, things reassembling around her—bookshelf, secretary, radiator, carpet, floor lamps.
“I mean, there never was anybody to talk to, really,” Fran is saying. “But there sort of was. I thought there was. For a while I used to. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Liz says, closing one eye and then the other; it changes her perspective. “I think so,” she says. She is a highly trained artist, she could tell you. She has training up the wazoo. She got a fellowship, even, and there were many, many applicants. She majored in art history, in case you’re interested.
“Do the others look like you?” Fran asks.
“What?” Liz says.
“The twins. Do they look like you? Or, you know, like the smarter, younger egg woman?”
Liz laughs. She doesn’t mean to, but she laughs and tips over the wineglass that she forgot she’d balanced beside her. There’s just a little left, just a drizzle to darken an already wet spot; she’s a well-trained klutz is what she is, a social miscreant fluent in art history, trained in art history. “Sorry, sorry,” she says. “I did it again.”
“Forget it,” Fran says.
Liz blots the wet spot with her shirtsleeve. “Not at all is the thing,” she says. “The twins don’t look like either of us. They’re blond and blue-eyed, for one. I mean, adorable. Absolutely adorably wonderful, but people think they’re adopted.”
“That’s so funny,” Fran says.
“I forgot to laugh,” Liz says.
“But you’re lucky,” Fran says.
“God, I know,” Liz says. “I am in the ninety-ninth percentile of luck.”
“You tested out,” Fran says.
“I am among the gifted and talented.”
From Matilda’s room there’s the sound of a thud.
“You guys happy?” Fran yells.
“We’re O.K.!” Matilda yells back.
“Caroline?” Liz yells.
“Yes?”
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Caroline says.
“I thought she might have disappeared,” Liz says. “Sometimes I think she’ll just disappear.”
“They’re fine,” Fran says. “More?”
“Just a skosh,” Liz says.
“A skosh?” Fran says.
“Japanese for ‘a little,’ ” Liz says. “Sukoshi.”
“Oh,” Fran says. “Do you speak it?”
“My dad was in the service. Stationed there. I used to think it was Yiddish. He’d say ‘Just a skosh’ whenever you offered him wine. I miss him, too,” Liz says. “Like Richard.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes.”
“Here.” Fran pours; they’ve finished one bottle and opened another. What they are celebrating they have no idea.
“Lemme at it,” Liz says. She crawls along the sectional on all fours. She hasn’t been able to locate the floor-lamp switch, but it doesn’t matter; she’s a cat who can see in the dark. “It was here, I saw it. You took it away from me.”
“Oh, God!” Fran shrieks. “The whole thing is so stupid. Please.”
“Lemme, lemme, lemme,” Liz says.
“You’re going to hate me,” Fran says.
“Are you kidding?” Liz says. “You’re my new best friend.”
“You have to promise,” Fran says.
“I promise, I promise,” Liz says.
“Not to laugh. Really. No. I mean it. Don’t laugh. You’re going to laugh. I know it. I can just—”
“Bluebird’s honor,” Liz says. “Bluebird, Brownie, Girl Scout, Kappa Kappa Gamma. God, can you believe me?”
“Wow,” Fran says. “Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious,” Liz says. “I’m never not serious. I’m a never-not-serious Ohioan, Ohioette gal, aren’t I? I remain alert.”
“Do you think if we lived there or, like, Montana or something, things would be, I don’t know, different?” Fran says.
“Ta-da!” Liz says.
“Shit,” Fran says.
“I found it!” Liz says.
“Shit,” Fran says.
“You said I could.”
“Go ahead, just please. You promised.”
“I’ll be dead serious,” Liz says. She swings her bare feet around. “I am dead serious,” she says. “I am a deadly serious, dead-serious, never-not-serious person. I repeat, I remain alert.”
What is she saying? She has no idea, really, though it feels good to speak, the words tumbling out of her mouth and knocking around in the darkening room, high above the city where she has spent the afternoon with a new friend, a sophisticated friend, a woman who grew up here, a woman with a streak of natural gray, a divorced single mother with a legal, razor-sharp mind who can look down on the lights and know where she is, know all the cross streets and the avenues, know the best places to buy things, the best things to buy, a woman who used to bicycle to Greenwich Village, who met Bob Dylan, even, in one of those places where people met Bob Dylan, back when the Village was the Village, and Bob Dylan lived there, or, at least, sang there, but then that would have been Fran’s mother, maybe, or an older brother who didn’t mind Fran tagging along, who took her even, rode with her balanced on his handlebars. And now look! This! The promise of the journal in her hands! Fran made notes! She caught all the things that Liz missed—the meeting room overheated and crowded, the acoustics so bad it was impossible to concentrate. And afterward—this is now Liz talking, Liz continuing to talk, Liz babbling—Dr. Friedman had been so mobbed, so impossible to get to, that she had actually waited in the school lobby and followed her out, down Madison and then some, then over, to Lexington, the subway entrance there, Dr. Friedman walking with such robotic—
“What?” Fran says. “What?”
“Robotic,” Liz says.
“Oh,” Fran says. “Right, robotic. Go on.”
—purpose, that she quite literally couldn’t catch up. She just couldn’t catch up, she says again, before Dr. Friedman flew down the stairs to the subway.
“A flying robot,” Fran says.
Liz turns to the journal. “It must be done,” she says. “The consensus has been reached.”
“O.K.,” says Fran, who has moved to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her.
“It won’t hurt,” Liz says.
“Please.”
“Well, just a little.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll make it quick,” Liz says.
“All right,” Fran says.
“These are difficult times, terrible times. Someone’s got to police the world.”
Liz opens the journal to read, but the truth is, it’s difficult to see what’s written in the near-dark, and her eyes have started to go. She brings the page to her face, and squints:
(1) Thieves
(2) Crowds
(3) School
(4) Shadows
(5) Playdates
(6) Lunchrooms
(7) Helicopters
(8) Anniversaries
(9) Night
“What?” Fran’s saying. “What? Oh, God. What did I write?” She moves closer to Liz, scoots in, so that Liz imagines Fran might next crawl into her lap as Caroline does, settle there between her legs to practice reading in the way she’s been instructed at school: Read It Once to See; Read It Twice to Comprehend; Read It Again to Fully Absorb Its Meaning.
Go-Go appears from nowhere. He scratches and scratches, biting at the hot spot on his leg, gnawing. “Stop!” Fran says, clapping her hands. “Stop!”
Liz closes the journal and stands up a bit unsteadily. “Jesus, it’s dark,” she says. “I can’t believe it got so late.” She hands the journal to Fran. “I promised Lorna I’d be back earlier.”
“Right,” Fran says, taking the journal. “God, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no. This was fun. I mean, this was really fun, and the girls—”
“They seem to hit it off,” Fran says.
“Caroline!” Liz yells in the direction of Matilda’s room, the shut door. “Shit. We had piano, I totally forgot.”
“Oh, my God. I’m really sorry,” Fran says. “I started—”
“Don’t apologize. Caroline hates piano. Anyway, it wasn’t your—are these my shoes?”
“Here,” Fran says. “They’re here, with Caroline’s backpack.”
“Caroline!” Liz yells.
“It’s impossible to get them—”
“Caroline, now!”
The door opens slowly and the girls, or what looks like shadows of the girls, drift out, fall out, into the hallway.
“Are Thursdays better?” Fran is saying.
“I’m sorry?”
“Thursdays. We could do Thurs—”
Liz feels a kind of draining away, as if the ebb of the twilight has returned to the night all that is loose, unmoored. She has always fought the feeling of this time of day, when her father would remain in the garden and her mother did what mothers did then in the house. Liz would ride her bike up and down the driveway, waiting for her father to call her, to tell her to come quick, to come see the misshapen gourd, or the earthworm, or the potato bug before it got too dark, and she would, before it went black as pitch. She would hurry, she would pedal like the wind to get to what her father held: this thing unknown, random, discovered in the dirt and now there for her in her father’s hand. A miracle. It’s what placed her squarely in the world, what kept her from being sucked out.
“Yes,” Liz says. “Sure, whatever.” She ties up Caroline’s sneakers, yanks the laces tight. “I’m sorry about Richard,” she says, straightening.
“Oh, it’s fine,” says Fran. “Really. Matilda and I are a team, aren’t we, Matty?”
“Rah rah,” Liz says.
“Thursdays,” Fran says. She has found Caroline’s jacket beneath the coat rack and now holds it out for her. “We’re going to do Thursdays!” she says to Matilda.
“Let me check at home,” Liz says. “I never know which end is up.”
“Oh,” Fran says.
“Thank Matilda,” Liz says to Caroline.
“Thank you,” Caroline says.
“Thank Fran,” Liz says.
“Thank you,” Caroline says.
Liz clutches Caroline’s hand on the subway platform. There is work being done somewhere, and the trains are running intermittently, though a taxi or a bus is out of the question—the traffic insane. The twins have had their baths and are sleeping, Liz has heard from Lorna. Everything is fine, she has been told.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” booms the intercom. “This is an important message from the New York City Police Department. Keep your belongings in your sight at all times. Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious—”
“Did you have a good time?” Liz says, talking over the recorded voice, squatting so that she can be at eye level with the girl.
“Uh-huh,” Caroline says.
“Is Matilda nice?” Liz says.
“Uh-huh,” Caroline says.
“Does she like to play My Little Ponies?” Liz says.
Caroline pulls on the loose straps of her backpack, a filched Pinkie Pie, its tail braided, its eyes pocked by a pen point, now zipped into one of the many compartments.
“I don’t know,” Caroline says. She turns away from her mother and stares out over the empty tracks. “No,” she adds, quietly, though who could hear anything for the screech of the approaching train. In the rush Liz teeters, grabbing Caroline into a hug, her hands gripping Caroline’s thin shoulders for balance. “But it was a gold-star day, baby,” she says as the crowd swells over them. “Wasn’t it?” ♦
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