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
B
ut 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 Cafe, 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
S
he 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 hairdresser’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.