“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
J
ared 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
I
want 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 applique 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.