“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 Quest
ion?” 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 s
he 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.” Riskaverse 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.”