She stood at the far end of the pool, took a deep breath to prepare for her dive, and stopped—something smelled odd. A skunk, she thought at first—the neighborhood had suffered a plague of skunks the previous summer—but the scent triggered something in her memory (the dark couch of a party in college, a joint dripping hot ash) and she realized: Someone was smoking pot.
The smell was coming from the dark recesses of the garden behind the pool shed. Lizzie was her first thought.
Lizzie’s in back smoking pot.
Janice tore back around the poolhouse, even as in her mind she registered the fact that not only was Lizzie far too young to be tempted by drugs yet (wasn’t she? God, she hoped so), but she was off at swim camp anyway.
She almost tripped over the pool boy, who was crouching by a pansy bed with a joint the size of his thumb stuck firmly in his mouth. James’s eyes were closed, and he sucked on the dark brown butt with the intensity of a newborn child at its mother’s nipple. After inhaling for a long, deep minute, he opened one eye, then both, and blinked twice, as if Janice might just be a hallucination.
When she cleared her throat, he jumped to his feet, tripping over his sneakers. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller,” he said and bent over, frantically stubbing out the joint in the dirt. And then, as if reading her mind—as she thought to herself,
Ash in my pansies!
—patted some dirt over the dirt that he had just soiled with his joint. And then, as she still watched in astonishment, dug that dirt up with his fingers and shoved it in his pocket, along with the crumpled joint stub.
Janice was stupefied into silence. “Are you going to fire me?” asked James, looking up at her.
She
should
fire him. That was the right thing to do. What kind of kid smokes pot on the job? How could she trust him with dangerous chemicals in her pool when his brain was addled with intoxicants? What if he tried to give some to Lizzie?
“I think that’s only appropriate, don’t you?”
“Look, I’m sorry, but it’s just pot,” he said. “It’s as benign as having a…glass of wine.”
“I’ve smoked pot,” she snapped at him. “I know what it is.”
And then James, oddly, winked at her. “Well, in that case…do you want some?” he asked. “It’s not a problem. I have plenty. What would you like? Thai stick? Humboldt green?”
Janice stared at him, stunned by his audacity. Her pool boy was offering her
drugs
? How bizarre, and how totally inappropriate. Should she call the police? She looked around, as if there might be an audience with whom she could share her bafflement at this scenario. James watched her struggle with the situation, a placid smile on his face. And then, as she considered and reconsidered his flabbergasting offer, the dots connected, from the dirt in his pocket straight up to her medicine cabinet on the second floor. Here it was, exactly what she needed. But—she couldn’t. The pool boy? No. How mortifying. She shouldn’t. Before she had time to think about it any more, she did.
“No. I don’t care for marijuana,” she said, her heart racing. “But maybe you could…help me with something else.”
“Help you?”
“Yes,” she said, not quite sure how to go about this. It had been hard to avoid pot altogether in the seventies, but even during her most suggestible moments at college she certainly had never bought it—or any illegal drug—herself. Not that Vicodin was a drug, though. It was a prescription medicine.
“Well,” she began. “What I’m trying to say is, maybe you know something about where to get…things.”
He looked at her, his face toasted brown from long days outdoors. And then he smiled, a delighted grin that revealed a wide winsome gap between his nicotine-stained teeth. “Things? Can you be more specific?”
“I need some Vicodin.” She paused, feeling James’s inscrutable smile in her gut. What must he think of her? “I hurt my elbow playing tennis, and my prescription ran out but my doctor is out of town. Do you know where to get that kind of thing?”
James squinted. “Not really. I don’t do prescription medicine. You could get that in Mexico, though, if you wanted.”
“Oh,” she said, and felt humiliated, half naked and lumpy in her bathing suit before this slight young man. “It’s the pain,” she said, by way of explanation. “It’s really unbearable. I can’t even put a foot on the court unless I have painkillers. But I really shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.” She took a step away, hoping to escape.
But James didn’t appear alarmed. “Don’t worry. I get it, Mrs. Miller,” he said, nodding seriously. “I think I can help you.”
“Any kind of painkiller would do, actually.”
“I’ve got something better than Vicodin—stronger, and it won’t make you drowsy.” He had a curious expression on his face, but he smiled at her beatifically.
“Not a prescription drug, though?”
“Sort of—it’s in a lot of other drugs,” he said. “Crystal. Heard of it?”
Janice racked her brain—hadn’t she seen a special on TV about this recently? Something about that conservative talk-show host who had been sent off to jail? “It’s not OxyContin, is it?”
“Nah,” said James. “Look, it’s not totally harmless, but it will definitely help you feel no pain, if that’s your problem. And it gives you lots of energy.”
Janice hesitated.
“And it helps you lose weight, too. If you’re interested in that kind of thing. I know personally that a bunch of other women in Santa Rita take it. It’s kind of like a diet pill, in a way. But better.”
This tipped the scales for Janice. “How much would it be?” she asked.
“You’d want…what, half a gram?” Janice nodded, having no idea what exactly a gram represented. “That’d be fifty bucks.”
“Fifty dollars? Vicodin costs a fraction of that at the pharmacy.”
James laughed. “Yeah, well, I don’t accept any insurance. Sorry.”
She paused. She knew better than this, and yet something in her felt reckless. She closed her eyes and had a sudden vision of herself at twenty in a patterned shift dress and long flaxen hair, gesturing widely with a Gauloise. When she opened her eyes, James was still there. “How soon could you get it?”
“Later today?” James said. “I’ll need to talk to—”
“Please,” she said quickly, sensing how fragile her grasp on this moment really was. “I don’t need the details.”
“Not a problem.” He hiked the pool net over his shoulder, as if he were a javelin thrower about to send the pole flying over the pool into the bougainvillea. “I assume this means I’m not fired after all?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Well, anything you need. I’m your man.”
“Thank you,” said Janice, who thought she felt better already. “Oh, and James?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t smoke pot in my garden. The neighbors might smell it. And it’s really not good for you, you know.”
“Sure,” he said. “I won’t do it again. Thanks again, Mrs. Miller.”
“Please,” she said. “Call me Janice.”
by the time janice reemerges from the bathroom, Margaret has vanished from the kitchen. Janice goes to work on the pie with renewed energy, quickly and efficiently sifting flour, squeezing lemons, measuring out sugar by the tablespoon (her hand still shakes slightly, she notices). The butter is too cold; she takes it out of the fridge and sets it on the counter to warm. She’ll have to wait to finish the pie. She glances at the clock: It is now three in the afternoon. Her fingernails rap agitatedly on the granite countertop. Her mind races from one thought to another, settling on each for precisely two seconds before it forgets and moves on to the next. She feels marvelously alive, marvelously
in the moment,
implacable and unperturbed.
She picks up the morning paper Margaret left on the table and turns to the business section to study the Nasdaq listings. APPI has gone up another one and a quarter points, making the shares worth $148.75, which, by Janice’s mental calculations, means that the 2.8 million shares they own are worth roughly $3.5 million more than yesterday. Funny money. She thinks of the FedEx in the hallway whose contents she suspects she knows already and reminds herself,
Half of that money is yours.
Over $200 million dollars—my God, she can do whatever she wants with it now, without even asking Paul. This thought thrills her for a minute and then nauseates her, as if she’d just eaten an entire bag of marshmallows in one sitting.
Janice folds the newspaper neatly closed, walks it over to the trash compactor (acutely aware of the racing pulse at the back of her neck), and throws it on top of a pile of eggshells and onion skins. She hits the “On” button and listens to the whole mess grind down into a muffin-sized cube. Then she goes to work chopping the butter into the flour, kneading it into dough, and noticing how sticky and wonderful it feels between her fingers. She should do this every day.
Margaret materializes through the kitchen door again, wearing the same shapeless sundress with the dangling hem she had on yesterday. Did she not bring any other clothes home with her? “I’m going out,” she announces.
“Oh, don’t do that,” Janice says. “I’m just about to make a pie. Lizzie will be home any second and I thought maybe we could play a game together. We have Pictionary? Or Monopoly. Hearts—do you remember how much you loved to play hearts when you were little? Lizzie should be here any second.”
And yes, just then Lizzie walks in the door from swim camp, carrying her wet swimsuit in a string bag over her shoulder and looking somewhat boiled from a day spent immersed in chlorine. “See!” crows Janice.
“What’s going on?” asks Lizzie. Lizzie is all round and soft and sun-kissed, tottering in her unwieldy shoes. Her baby girl, her miracle child. After all those years of miscarriages, after sex had come to feel like a game of roulette, after they’d taken her doctor’s advice and given up trying (so much so that they’d rarely had intercourse at all), she’d been so surprised by her pregnancy that she hadn’t actually believed it until she’d held the purple squalling infant in her arms. At the time, Janice had felt blessed—Lizzie had saved her marriage, she’d thought then, though now she wonders whether her second child was just a distraction from her crumbling relationship. It doesn’t matter: Lizzie will always be her baby.
“I’m baking a pie,” says Janice. “Apple. You like apple pie, right?”
Lizzie ogles the dough. “I thought I was supposed to be on a diet.”
“Well, I’m cheating on my diet, too,” says Janice. “Want to roll out the dough?”
Lizzie drops her swim bag on the floor, and chlorinated water begins to make a puddle by the back door. She happily grabs a rolling pin and thwacks it into the pile of dough on the counter. Flour goes flying in all directions, and Janice thinks of the mess this will make of the floor, but discovers that it doesn’t bother her a bit. The idea of mopping actually fills her with pleasure. She rapidly slices the apples into perfect, even wedges and squeezes lemon over them, to save their color, before starting on the lattice for the top of the crust. If she’s going for traditional American kitsch, she might as well go all the way. Serve it up on a checked tablecloth, wearing a frilly apron. The thought makes her hiccup a giggle.
Lizzie breaks a piece off the dough and eats it, watching Janice out of the corner of her eye. Janice says nothing.
“So, Lizzie, how was your day? How was camp? Getting faster?”
“Good,” says Lizzie. She breaks off another piece of dough and crams it into her mouth. “I shaved a half second off my time in the five-hundred meter.”
Margaret is still standing by the back door, waiting for Janice. “Mom, we need to finish our discussion about…you know,” she starts. “Maybe not now, but let’s pick a time. I might be able to help.”
“Discussion about what?” asks Lizzie.
“I don’t need help, Margaret,” Janice says, and turns to Lizzie to change the subject. “Do you have any social plans this week, Lizzie? Any parties you’re going to?” Lately, Janice has noticed, Lizzie has been staying at home on Saturday nights again, and this concerns her. For a while, during the spring, it seemed like Lizzie had started making some friends, and while perhaps it’s just that the summer is quiet because everyone is off on vacation, she worries that Lizzie is reverting to her old, antisocial ways. Lizzie spends far too much time by herself, her social life starting and ending with Becky. Friends are so important at that age. It pains Janice to think that her daughter might be lonely. Hasn’t she done everything she can to make sure that her daughters were shown the easy path through life, easier than her own? And yet no matter what she does, she can’t quite protect them from cruel schoolmates and shiftless boyfriends and the vicissitudes of youth.
“Maybe you want to join some kind of activity group, with all your spare time this summer,” she continues, feeling chatty. “I think there’s a tennis tournament for teens at the country club.”
Lizzie sighs. “I don’t like tennis. You know I don’t like tennis.”
“Well, maybe you could start a knitting club,” she says. “I hear knitting is very trendy these days. I could teach you how—I used to knit when I was in college. I made a sweater for your father once. They have kits, now, I think, for beginners. It’s actually a very social activity. You’d be surprised.” Lizzie doesn’t respond, having apparently given up on rolling out the crust in order to stuff her face with dough.
“Want to leave some for the pie, Lizzie?” says Janice, and Lizzie abruptly stops chewing, her mouth bulging with pie dough, her eyes frozen in fear. Janice gives up and takes the dough, pressing it quickly into the pan, arranging the apples in symmetrical circles, and sprinkling the top with cinnamon and sugar. She places the lattice over the top and has the pie in the oven within minutes. She looks around the room, jittery with energy. Now she can clean. Where is the mop? She turns to see Margaret still standing behind her, watching, and quickly averts her gaze, worried that, if given a direct glimpse into Janice’s eyes, Margaret might somehow see straight into her mind and know exactly what she has just done in the bathroom.
“Mom? Are you okay?” Margaret says, staring at Janice.
Before Janice has to answer, the doorbell rings. “That’s the door!” she chirps. “Is anyone expecting someone?”