Amanda Bright @ Home (2 page)

“Damn!”

“Uh-oh, Mommy use bad word.” Sophie wandered into the kitchen stark naked, trailing one of Amanda’s scarves.

“Sophie,”
Amanda said tensely, “why did you take off your clothes?”

“I’m playing Indians with Ben.” The little girl shook her long brown curls. “I’m an Indian princeth. Will you tie this on me, Mommy?” She held up the scarf.

“No, Mommy will not tie this on you. It is Mommy’s good scarf,” said Amanda, snatching the scarf away. “And you are
not
Indians,” she added irritably. “You are
Native Americans
.”

Sophie burst into tears. Amanda sighed and wrapped the child in her arms.

“B-b-but I want to be an Ind-d-d … a-a-a Natif Merkan
princeth
.”

Amanda dabbed at her daughter’s tears with her sleeve and draped the scarf around the thin, shivering body, arranging it, as artfully as she could, to resemble a three-year-old’s conception of what Natif Merkan princesses would wear if Natif Merkan princesses shopped at Nordstrom’s.

“Just this once, Sophie. Next time use a towel.”

“Natif Merkans don’t wear
towelth
.”

“Well they don’t wear Mommy’s good scarves either, sweetie. Off you go.”

“I’m hungry,” Sophie replied.

The telephone rang. Upstairs, Ben began shrieking for his lost princess. Sophie did not budge.

“Go!” Amanda pleaded.

“I’m hungry!”

Amanda answered the phone. It was Bob.

“Hi, hon. What’s going on there? It sounds like you’re surrounded by Apaches.”

“Actually, I am.” Amanda pushed Sophie out the kitchen door and closed it, keeping it firmly shut with her foot. A second set of shrieks joined the first.

“Can you talk for a minute?”

“Uh, yeah—sure.”

“Do you think we could go out for dinner tonight? Alone? I’ve got some great news.”

Amanda brightened. “I’ll have to find a sitter—”

“Maybe Hannah could come over from down the block. We won’t stay out late.”

“Okay, I’ll call you back. But what’s the news?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

Amanda hung up and fetched the vacuum cleaner from the hall cupboard. She stepped over Sophie, who lay theatrically on the floor weeping, and ignored Ben’s howls. The only upside of vacuuming, she realized, was that it drowned out the screams.

Chapter Two

THE SHEIK KABOB was the restaurant they went to on the rare occasions they could afford to go out to dinner. It was only a few blocks away from their house, in a grotty stretch of old storefronts that had been converted into a grotty stretch of eateries, each one offering a fast-food version of some foreign specialty. Depending on your mood, you could sear your tongue on oily lamb vindaloo or order soggy pad thai while staring into murky aquariums of condemned fish. When Bob and Amanda had first moved into the neighborhood, they’d sampled every restaurant before deciding that the Sheik Kabob was the place in which they were least likely to contract food poisoning. A proud array of yellowed reviews taped to the front window declared it one of Washington’s
top 100 cheap eats
of 1988.

On a warm spring evening like this one, tables were set outside under a torn awning festooned with Christmas lights. By the time Amanda arrived, those tables were all taken, and the restaurant’s tiny front entry was jammed with customers waiting to be seated. Amanda politely elbowed her way through and found Bob standing at the bar among a line of young men assessing their nightly vodkas.

“How long is the wait?” she called out, by way of greeting.

“Fifteen minutes,” he called back. “It may be longer,” he added, as she drew near. “I just got here.”

Amanda squeezed in beside him and felt, as always, the immediate relief of his presence. She loved meeting him this way, in a restaurant after work, as she had done when they were dating. Bob complained about having to wear a suit and tie to the office, but she liked seeing him in these clothes. He looked so grown-up, so civilized, and yet still youthful. His dark hair curled over the back of his collar. His face, open and gentle, rested upon enough muscle to save it from appearing soft. Good-natured, but no pushover—that was Bob. Amanda only half jokingly likened his arrival home in the evening to the landing of the marines. Almost instantly, order and discipline would be restored among the rebellious natives, and she would greet him like a besieged and grateful villager. As for Amanda, she felt it was an achievement simply to have changed into something clean. Tonight, between feeding and bathing the children, she had managed to pull on a pair of batik drawstring trousers, a black T-shirt, and sandals. She clipped up her unruly brown hair in a messy bun, and, just before running out the door, smeared her lips lightly with gloss. She had long since ceased trying to compete with the stockinged-and-moussed working women. Amanda possessed a whole closet full of business suits that grew more hopelessly outdated every year—padded shoulders, short skirts, zippered blazers, all very eighties. Every fall she vowed to give them away to charity, and every fall she changed her mind. One of these days she
would
return to work. These suits might come back into fashion. They could be altered. And so the suits remained, hanging in their plastic dry-cleaning bags like bodies in cryogenic suspension.

“We could go next door for Mexican,” Bob shouted through cupped hands, above the laughter of a boisterous party of six that had joined them at the bar.

Amanda recalled the sight of her stomach in a bathing suit. “No, let’s wait. I feel like having one of their salad platters.”

Bob nodded as if he had heard her. By the time they were finally led to a table, they had worked their way through two glasses each of the house’s sour Chianti. The buzz saws and hammers that had set to work on Amanda’s brain after leaving Christine’s returned to punch through her skull.

“You okay?” Bob asked as they sat down.

“Just tired.”

He grasped her hand across the table. “Well, this should cheer you up.”

Amanda was eager to hear his news, of course, but five years of constant interruption from small children had taught them both to wait for the right moment to talk. It was not exactly the right moment now. The back of the restaurant was not much quieter than the bar. The small tables were jammed up against each other like domino tiles and shook unnervingly whenever the Connecticut Avenue subway rumbled below. It had been a long time, Amanda realized, since they could afford to eat somewhere quiet.

“I just got word from Frank …” Bob began. He was cut off by the arrival of a waiter, who thrust between them two vinyl-bound menus the size of phone directories.

“Vould you like to ’ear our speshools thiz ev’ning?”

Bob glowered at the waiter, an affable if overworked-looking man wearing the red vest, black bow tie, and green trousers of a lawn jockey.

“I think we know what we’re going to have,” Bob said, taking both menus in hand. “My wife will have the large Mediterranean salad, and I’ll have the mixed shish kabob platter, thank you.”

Bob turned to Amanda. “Would you like anything more to drink?”

“No,
thank you
,” she said curtly. “Water is fine.”

“In that case I’ll have a beer.”

The waiter took back the menus and left. Bob shot Amanda a quizzical look. Her eyes, which had awaited his news with such interest, were averted and annoyed.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You seem—”

“I’m not.” Amanda rubbed her temples. “It’s just, well, you didn’t have to be so rude to him. He was only doing his job.” What she was really trying to suppress was her irritation with Bob for ordering for her.

“Rude? I wasn’t rude!
He
was rude, cutting me dead in the middle of a sentence and dropping a ten-pound menu in my face. Why don’t they ever teach these guys to wait for a break in the conversation? Why do they always have to barge in?”

“That’s really—
really
—oh.” Amanda stared at him, offended. “I can’t believe you’d criticize someone who obviously works hard for a living, for, like, sub-minimum wage. Maybe if the job paid better … maybe if he didn’t come from a different culture …”

“Amanda, please,” Bob said, taking her hand again. “Let’s not turn this into a lecture on the evils of Western privilege. You know me better than that, and I have very important news I want to tell you.
Please
?”

Amanda removed her hand from his grasp. “All right.”

Bob carried on, stammering a little before regaining his earlier enthusiasm. “It’s finally going to happen,” he said. “Frank”—Frank was Frank Sussman, Bob’s boss at the Justice department—“is ready to launch a serious investigation into Megabyte. Finally! It took some pressure from the Judiciary committee, but Frank now agrees that what Megabyte has been doing warrants DOJ action, maybe even an antitrust suit. But—wait for it—here’s the best part. Guess who’s going to be leading the investigation?”

“Who?”

“Me.”

“Are you
serious
?”

“Very serious.”

This time they barely noticed when the waiter arrived with Bob’s beer and their plates of food, which he dealt to them like playing cards. Bob looked as happy as Amanda had ever seen him. No, that wasn’t quite it: he looked as if he had just received a hundred volts of electricity to his entire being, and there was so much energy coursing through him that he had to struggle to restrain even his smallest physical gestures, like raising his glass to his lips, lest he inadvertently knock out his teeth.

“When does it start?”

“Right away.”

“Well—cheers, hon. You certainly deserve it.” She held up her water.

“Cheers.”

Amanda pushed some hummus onto a triangle of pita and ate in thoughtful silence. She was happy for him, thrilled in fact, really, but she felt a tugging inside her chest that compromised her sense of joy.

She understood the magnitude of his triumph: Bob had spent the past two years tracking the unsavory business tactics of Megabyte, the largest computer software company on earth. His efforts had been received with almost total indifference by his superiors, many of them holdovers from the last Republican administration. Amanda herself had begun to doubt that Bob would ever turn up solid evidence. She certainly believed in the cause, at least, to the degree that she could comprehend it. Bob had once tried to explain the case to Amanda by sketching it on a paper napkin in this very restaurant. He used terms like
bundling browsers
and
licensing source codes
and
application programming interfaces
(“Those are called APIs,” Bob said helpfully), and drew ballpoint arrows shooting this way and that. None of it made much sense, except for Bob’s analogy that Megabyte was “the Standard Oil of our time,” with its owner, a former hippie named Mike Frith, standing in for the top-hat-and-striped-pants-wearing John D. Rockefeller.
That
Amanda got. What troubled her was that Bob’s sole witness and lone ally was an eccentric attorney from Silicon Valley named Sherwood J. Pressman.

Sherwood J. Pressman (and he insisted on using the whole ridiculous name, right down to the middle initial) was a five-foot-three package of paranoia who represented a group of small computer companies, all of which blamed their failures to expand on Megabyte’s chokehold on the market. Pressman had written up his clients’ complaints in a document that read more like a potboiler novel than a legal brief. Somehow a copy had found its way to Bob’s desk. Bob was intrigued, if skeptical (“I find it hard to believe that even a guy like Mike Frith would say something as hokey as, ‘If you don’t do what we say, we’ll cut off your air supply,’” Bob had remarked as he read through the manuscript one evening in bed). Still, Bob contacted the companies involved and gradually became convinced that they had a case, although he told Amanda he would have come to the conclusion more quickly if it hadn’t been for the annoying Pressman. Pressman was obsessed with Megabyte and frequently called Bob in the middle of the night to describe the company’s latest wrongdoing. Amanda had learned to hand over the phone when it flashed Pressman’s number, too tired to express her exasperation that he had woken the baby—and her—for the fourth time in a week. That all of this had at last come to something—well, that was a surprise.

Yet so was her reaction—here, now, watching him. Bob was waiting expectantly for her enthusiasm to catch up to his, but it couldn’t. She felt—what?
What?
She tried to fashion a smile.

“What turned them?” Amanda asked suddenly. “Why now?”

Bob finished chewing a mouthful of meat and took a sip of his beer. “A few things, I think,” he said, swallowing. “First, as you know, we’ve now got Frank. He’s a lot more interested in these issues than Chuck Mendelson ever was.” Chuck Mendelson was Bob’s last boss. “Second, Frank’s pissed that Megabyte just announced it’s going to launch its new software, MB-98, with all these bells and whistles that violate pretty much every promise the company has ever made to us. Third, we’ve got the attorney general from Texas on our side. There are a couple of big high-tech companies in his state, and they’re furious with Megabyte. They’re willing to go on the record, which has been a problem because everyone is so frightened of standing up to Mike Frith. And if the big guys go on the record, we can get the little guys to go along, too. They’re already organizing themselves.”

He shook his head at the wonder of it all. “Basically, we’ve got live bodies now instead of just weird Sherwood J. Pressman. And Frank’s really pumped. He’s going to hold a press conference tomorrow.”

“That is amazing.”

Amanda watched Bob spear his last bit of meat. He seemed so alive and crackling with purpose that she felt … envious. Yes. Envious. When was the last time she had felt so alive and crackling herself? Amanda tried to banish her envy—she thought it unworthy—but she could not banish the feeling that Bob’s advancement reflected some failure on her part to advance in equal measure. He was not just pulling ahead of his colleagues but soaring past her, and Amanda found herself unconsciously gripping the edge of the table, bracing herself against being buffeted by the force of his slipstream.