“So. Alison and Charlie,” Claire said a few days later, squeezing Ben’s toe. It was late afternoon, and the three of them were in Claire and Ben’s living room, ostensibly studying. Charlie was taking notes at the too-small desk in the corner, and Ben and Claire were reading on the couch. “What do you think? She likes the country-bumpkin type.”
“That’s because she’s a country bumpkin,” Ben said, not looking up from his book.
“She is not!” Claire said, sitting up. “She’s not,” she assured Charlie.
“Oh, it’s fine to call me a bumpkin, but not her?” Charlie said.
“I’m not sure girls can be bumpkins,” she mused. “Is there a female ending?”
“Bumpkiss,” Ben said from behind his paperback. “Bumpkina.”
“Anyway, she isn’t one. She’s quite cosmopolitan and lovely. Don’t you think, Ben?”
“What?”
“That Alison is perfect for Charlie.”
Ben looked over at Charlie, as if to assess his qualities, and then began reading aloud. “ ‘The man who desires something desires what is not available to him, and what he doesn’t already have in his possession. And what he neither has nor himself is—that which he lacks—that is what he wants and desires.’”
“Oh, for God’s sake. What is that?” Claire asked.
“Socrates. You know, Charlie, this philosophy is good stuff. It applies to architecture in the most interesting ways. Just think about the kinds of structures people get jazzed about.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “But surely you read all those ancient Greeks at Harvard.”
“No, actually. I was pre-med for far too long. Chem labs and bio and physics—I never had time to study philosophy. Now I could read this stuff all day.”
Charlie envied Ben’s ability to immerse himself in a book as if it were as real as the world. Sometimes he’d find Ben studying in a library carrel deep in the stacks, his head over his book, his whole body hunched forward in concentration. Ben rarely noticed his approach, even when he came from the front; when Charlie touched his shoulder he’d flinch, as if awakened from a deep sleep. He was interested in what he was interested in, without any sense that he should be more or less interested in anything else. He didn’t seem to need to impress people with his knowledge, though he enjoyed sharing it. Charlie had the sense that Ben had been an unusual child, quiet and bookish and particular, and that someone—his mother, perhaps—had let him be that way without making him feel odd. He took himself seriously in ways that Charlie wasn’t confident enough to do, and for that reason he could laugh at himself in ways that Charlie never could. Charlie was insecure; his sense of himself in the world was too precarious to make light of.
Ben kept a violin in a black case propped in the front hall, and sometimes he’d take it out and disappear upstairs into a bedroom to practice—first scales, and then a haunting series of melodies. Charlie had never learned to play an instrument (unless you counted the tambourine he was assigned in middle-school band), and Ben’s obvious mastery was one more thing that impressed and intimidated him. Now and then, on a Friday night, Ben would take his violin to the White Horse Tavern, a pub on the edge of town, and play fiddle with a ragtag bunch of guys from Cambridge Tech. Charlie would tag along with Claire and a random collection of friends and strangers she’d pulled off the street. She’d sing along and drink Guinness and, after a while, get up and dance. Sometimes she’d be the only one up there, dancing in front of the band, her reddish brown hair backlit like a rock star’s, wearing a long flowing skirt and a black tank top, her skin pearly under the strobe.
Now, sitting on the couch, Claire was quiet for a moment, twisting a strand of hair across her mouth and sucking on the end, one of several odd habits of hers that Charlie had tucked away in his mind for future contemplation. “Maybe Socrates was right,” she said. “If Charlie is a hick and Alison is worldly, and the man who desires something desires that which he lacks—”
“She is rather pretty,” Ben said to Charlie, closing his book. “But let’s not oversell her, Claire. The girl has left North Carolina twice in her entire life; sharing an apartment in New York for six months hardly makes her worldly. And calling Charlie a hick is a bit low, isn’t it? Particularly to his face.”
“Oh, he doesn’t mind, do you, Charlie?”
“I’d hate to hear what you call me behind my back,” he said.
“Behind your back she raves about you,” Ben said. “That’s the funny thing about Claire—she’s meaner as a friend than as a gossip.”
“Stop,” she said, waving her fingers at him. “All I meant is that I thought they’d get along.”
“Anyone can get along with anyone, as long as they have decent manners,” Ben said.
Chapter Seven
“Tell me a story,” Noah said, settling deep into Alison’s lap. His hair was damp from the bath, his plump cheeks flushed and warm. He was wearing his favorite footy pajamas, navy blue with an airplane embroidered on one side of his chest like a badge. Clutching Bankie, a ratty scrap of baby blanket with satin trim, he stuck his thumb in his mouth.
Alison knew she should try to break the thumb habit before he got much older. She also needed to curtail warm milk at bedtime, Noah’s tendency to creep into their bed in the middle of the night, his insistence on having his sandwiches cut into stars and hearts (something she’d done on a whim one day when he was cranky, and he now demanded every day), his refusal to sit in the front basket of the shopping cart at the grocery store, instead running up and down the aisles at full throttle—and many other newly acquired behaviors. Annie, too, had become, as Alison’s mother observed, “spoiled.” She wouldn’t go to bed at night when Alison told her to, instead sitting wrapped in her comforter on the middle landing of the stairs, reading a pile of books. She plotted and schemed to get whatever dolls and toys happened to be heavily advertised on TV at that moment, using a range of tactics to make her case, from comparison—“But Lauren has one!”—to false promises—“I’ll be really, really good and do everything you ever want for the rest of my life if you get me the Glitter Gloria doll, I mean it”—to threats—“I’ll hate you forever if you don’t let me!”—to outright lies—“Daddy said he’d get me one, but he’s never home.” (That last part wasn’t a lie.) This arsenal of strategies, typical of addicts and savvy children, ordinarily wouldn’t have held much sway; Alison was a seasoned pro at child wrangling. But since the accident she felt powerless to resist; she couldn’t bear the inevitable cries and complaints.
“It’s a short-term solution,” her mother said, sizing things up with her usual bluntness. “You can’t bring that little boy back, Alison. And letting your kids run roughshod over you isn’t going to help.”
Maybe it wouldn’t help, Alison thought, but what did it hurt? She wanted desperately to show her children how much she loved them; she brought them presents and treats like a lovesick suitor. She wanted—what? To be the best mother in the universe, the most adored, beyond reproach. The gratitude of her children would quiet the voices in her head that told her she was a bad person, a bad mother, accursed, unworthy. That having taken a life, she didn’t deserve to have children of her own; she didn’t deserve to be loved by them.
But her children didn’t seem particularly grateful for her generosity; they didn’t seem to care much at all. The more she gave, the more they took, with a growing sense of entitlement. If the slightest detail didn’t please them, their voices became smug and haughty; they erupted in tantrums. Annie would get a new doll, tear it out of its packaging, play with it for a few minutes, and toss it on the floor. At the Stop & Shop Noah lay on his back in the cereal aisle, his arms and legs pumping like an upended beetle, and bawled at the top of his lungs until Alison put Cap’n Crunch in the cart.
“They’re going to turn into monsters,” her mother said, and her father, who rarely had anything negative to say, added dryly, “They already are.”
Now, sitting with Noah on h
er lap in the old rocking chair in his room, Alison shut her eyes and breathed in his baby smells: aloe-scented baby wipes, antibacterial ointment and a Band-Aid she’d put on a paper cut on his index finger, Oreo cookie. He kicked his furry foot against her leg. “Story, Mommy,” he said impatiently.
It was their custom for her to tell him a story about himself: Noah the hero, conqueror of bad guys, who celebrated his birthday every week and for whom broccoli was a Super Food that gave him special powers.
Without opening her eyes Alison said, “Once upon a time there was a little boy who was three years old.”
That afternoon, while Alison’s parents were downstairs with Noah, and Annie was still at school, Alison had gone to her room to lie down. A headache had lingered for days. It seemed to be wrapped around her brain like a caul, tightening and loosening according to its own erratic whims. Since the accident she had taken Aleve every morning with her birth control pill, a tiny pink tablet and an oblong baby blue tablet in the same gulp of water, an eradicating broth—no baby, no pain.
In the bedroom she had lowered the shades, one by one, a ritual that felt almost religious, then pulled back the covers and slipped between the cool sheets, wearing her jeans and bra and socks. What kind of person goes to bed in the middle of the afternoon, in her clothes? She felt as if she were pretending to be sick, as if she were trying to fool someone. She fluffed and scrunched the pillows, lay on her stomach, curled on her side, but she couldn’t get comfortable. She shut her eyes and opened them again.
Her restless glance fell on her bedside table, where in a stack of unread books she spied a slim purple and white paperback: e. e. cummings, Poems. She reached over to pick it up. She’d ordered the volume from an online bookseller several weeks earlier; her book club was reading it for April. Judy Liefert, whose turn it was to choose, had explained that she’d read it in high school and it had changed her life, and she wanted to see how it held up.
Several dissenters, primarily Marly Peters and Jan O’Hara, had argued that poetry wasn’t appropriate for a book club. “It’s so … inscrutable,” Jan said, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Poets never say what they mean, they just expect you to figure it out. And there isn’t even a plot. Why don’t we do the latest Jodi Picoult?”
But the lit majors and the intellectually defensive in the group rose up to defeat them. We aren’t just a bunch of beach-reading housewives, damn it! We can analyze poetry!
Still, Alison thought, e. e. cummings. It wasn’t exactly Pound.
She leafed through the volume, drifting in and out of the poems, and alighted on one that immediately felt so close to her own experience it was almost painful to read. It was from a man to his lover; it had nothing to do with Alison’s life, and yet it stirred something in her.
Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
For Alison the boy who had died was present in these words, his innocence and potential, her connection to him. She read the poem aloud in a whisper. A chant, a eulogy.
Once upon a time there was a little boy who was three years old.
“Who was it?” Noah said.
“I don’t know his name.”
“Where did he live?”
“I don’t know.”
Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience…
“What happened to him?”
“He stayed three years old forever.”
“He never turned four?”
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near…
“No. He never turned four.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t want to. He liked being three, I guess.”
“Oh.” Noah stretched out, wiggled his feet, turned over and buried his head in her armpit. “That’s not a very good story, Mommy,” he said, his voice muffled in her shirt.
“Why not?”
He looked up, his expression far away, as if he’d been thinking about something important and had come to a momentous conclusion. “Teletubbies are not people,” he said.
She nodded.
“Why aren’t they people?” he wondered.
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
“Because they don’t have hands,” she said. She gathered him up, lifting the bottom-heavy weight of him in her arms, and cradled him like a baby. “Did you ever notice that? Did you ever notice they don’t have hands?”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “They just don’t have fingers.”
“You’re right,” she said, laughing.
“Their hands are mittens.”
“Yes, they are.”
“Why? Why are their hands mittens?”
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing …
The words were magical in their strangeness, vibrating with loss and hope and wonder, a rubric for her own tangled emotion. She could not have expressed, out loud, to Charlie or her parents or anybody, what she was feeling, but these words gave her access to it.
“But why?” Noah persisted.
“That’s just how they’re made,” she said. “Why do you have brown eyes and brown hair?”
“Because I look like you.”
“Oh,” she said with surprise. It was true—he did look like her. “Well—right. And the mommy Teletubbie has mitten hands, too,” she said, pleased with herself for following his logic.
He nodded. “But where is the mommy Teletubbie?”
“She’s there,” Alison said. “We just don’t see her.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” she asked, resorting to a default tactic familiar to parents and schoolteachers.
“I think because … umm … because the mommy has a headache. The mommy is sleeping.”
nobody, not even the rain …
“Yes, she’s sleeping,” Alison said. She looked at the boy settled beanbaglike in her lap, staring up at her, and she thought about how dependent and trusting he was, how aware and yet blessedly ignorant. This boy, here, now, in her lap, breathing with his entire body, like a puppy, every fiber of him quivering with life—this child who needed her.
“Big hug,” she said in a Teletubbie voice. He reached up and sang, “B-i-i-ig hug,” holding her as tightly as a three-year-old could, his hot sweet breath on her neck, his fingers in her hair.
“SO HOW ARE things with Charlie?” her mother asked the next day. She and Alison were at a local park with Noah, sitting on a park bench watching him go down a tall slide, run around to the steps, scamper up the narrow staircase and go down again. Charlie had been up and out of the house before anyone else was awake that morning. By now he was probably on a plane to Atlanta; he’d taken a taxi to the airport from work.
“Oh, you know.” Alison shrugged. “Careful, Noah!” she called, half rising off the bench.
“I am,” Noah grunted as he slid to the bottom and trudged around the slide to the stairs.
Her mother, looking intently at Alison, didn’t even glance over at Noah. “Actually, I don’t.”
“Things are—fine. As well as can be … ” expected. Everything she could think of to say sounded trite. It’s a hard time for both of us, but we’ll get through it. “He’s been very supportive,” she said finally. And hadn’t he? He’d gone to the boy’s funeral, held her in his arms while she cried, let her crawl into bed as soon as he got home from work. Twice he’d brought her Sleepy Time tea in bed. He’d rubbed her shoulders. They’d only had sex once since the accident, but he seemed to be following her cues, and except for that one time she had been uninterested, unresponsive.
But last night, before he left, in a rare moment of clarity Alison had suddenly realized—wh
at?—that he wasn’t fully present. Over the course of the evening she had watched him, talking to her parents with the least amount of effort or interest possible not to seem rude, dealing with the kids on a superficial level. It seemed as if he was biding his time, waiting for something. For what?
So how were things with Charlie? Fine, good, okay. She really had no idea. How long had it been since they’d engaged in a real conversation? In the evenings, preparing food together in the kitchen or watching TV, they made small talk, or didn’t talk at all. Now that she focused on it, she remembered little things: Charlie’s quick impatience that rose seemingly out of nowhere and disappeared as suddenly, a Loch Ness monster of emotion, its appearance fleeting enough that Alison thought she might have imagined it. Alison had never been suspicious, but something about his behavior was off-kilter. Or was it? How would she know?
“Maybe it’s none of my business,” her mother said, “but he seems—I don’t know. Out of it.”
“The accident has been a lot to deal with,” Alison said.
“Yes it has,” her mother agreed. She was silent for a moment, as if considering how to proceed. “But it seems like there’s something more. I don’t really know Charlie that well, Alison, so this could just be—I don’t know—the way he is. But.” She took a deep breath.
“Mommy, look a’ me!” Noah yelled. He had hauled himself up on top of the molded plastic sunshade covering the slide and was balanced there on his stomach like a surfer.
“Ohmigod, Noah,” Alison said, jumping up. She ran over to the slide. Other mothers and grandmothers and babysitters looked over with concern. Bad mother. “Noah, stay right where you are. I’m coming up.” She sprinted up the steep steps to the slide, holding on to both metal railings, and grabbed his feet. “Okay, back up,” she said.
“No!” He tried to inch forward, and she grasped his legs harder. “Mommy, you’re bothering me. Leggo!”