E
ven with the distraction of Lucas and Perry and teaching and meetings, Mira had been bereft without the twins. She found herself lingering in the doorway of their room, staring into it, feeling the kind of grief that would have been more suited, she thought, to their deaths than to their being gone for two days to visit their grandmother. When she found the UPS package with their Halloween costumes in it, she’d ripped it open, and her eyes had welled with tears.
She had ordered them off the Internet:
Little cow hoods with little cow horns, little hoofed hands, black and white spots.
The boys had been going through a cow phase for months. At the petting zoo they’d stood enraptured before one particular enormous bovine mass of weight and skepticism, humid nose pulsing, as if recognizing something from their previous lives.
The cow chewed her cud with such pensive blankness, looking from Matty to Andy, Andy to Matty (both were struck dumb in her presence), for so long that Mira finally felt the need to pull them back, fearing that this cow was either as in love with them as they were with her or was about to let loose her many years of petting zoo resentment and frustration on them.
But as Mira tried to take the twins’ arms and guide them over to the llama, they began to shriek with the kind of outrage she’d seen on documentaries about parents trying to kidnap their children from cults.
And, after that day, everything was
cows.
Cows in books. Cows in magazines. Cows in pastures glimpsed in passing from the freeway.
Mira had delighted the twins with two stuffed Beanie Baby cows one afternoon. She’d stopped and bought them at the bookstore on her way home from the office. Each of them had snatched one of the cows up and now guarded it jealously from the other. She had no idea how they could tell the cows apart, but they could. Once, she accidentally tried to tuck Matty’s cow into bed with Andy, and he’d sneered at it in disgust and tossed it over to his brother, exclaiming what sounded to Mira like, “Buckholtz!” or “Bullshit!” She was hoping it was
bullshit
, which would mean that the “imitative stage” of their language development, as the books she was reading called it, was getting on schedule. She had no doubt that they’d heard both her and Clark utter that word on numerous occasions.
They slept with the cows. They carried the cows with them everywhere. And, unlike every other toy they’d had so far in their short lives, they never lost the cows. The cows were never dropped and forgotten at the supermarket. They were never left behind in the backseat of the car overnight.
So, after that success, Mira had brought home a couple of plastic cows one night after teaching, and Matty and Andy had gone crazy with delight. A few days later, she bought a couple of cow-decorated cookies at a specialty bakery that she passed on her way to the parking ramp. They loved the cookies, licked the cookies, but they shrank from Mira when she pointed to her own teeth, her own open mouth, suggesting that they eat the cookies.
“You’re overcompensating,” Clark had said.
“What?”
“Overcompensating,” Clark said. “Trying to buy them off.”
“Buy them off?” Mira had tried to follow him down the hallway, to ask him what exactly she’d be overcompensating
for
, but he’d gone into the bathroom and shut the door and stayed in there until she had to leave for work.
In the nursery, Mira tacked up a poster of a cow grazing on a grassy hillside in Vermont, and every morning before they were taken out of their cribs the twins would stand and gaze at the poster, babble to each other in their language about the cow:
“Descher neigelein harva stora.”
“Gott swieten mant brounardfel.”
Mira imagined they were speculating. Was the cow happy? Did she have a family? Would her future be as peaceful as her present seemed to be? But when Mira herself pointed at the cow and said, “Cow!” and then waited for them to say the word, they looked at her blankly. “Haller,” one or the other would say. “Haller,” one or the other would reinforce. Then, they mirrored her own expectancy, waiting, it seemed, for her to say the word. To confirm it. To show that she understood what a
haller
was—that it was black and white and grazing on a grassy hillside in Vermont right in front of her face—and it was all Mira could do to keep from saying it (clearly they were talking about the same thing here, trying to give it a name), but she said, “Cow,” again, more desperately this time, and with less assurance, and they looked, she thought, disappointed in her.
W
hen Clark had finally walked in the door with the twins that afternoon, Mira got on her knees and embraced them so tightly for so long that Matty, who could never get enough, finally pulled away, looking alarmed.
“Mommy just really, really missed you,” she said, and Matty gave her a reassuring kiss on the crown of her head and patted her shoulder as if she were an old woman in a nursing home. She’d looked up then and caught Clark’s eye, and they’d both laughed. She stood and embraced him, and he seemed to take her in his arms with genuine warmth. “I missed you,” Mira said, and they kissed—not a lingering kiss, but she’d felt the goodwill in it. He must have missed her, too.
Now she was hoping they’d have a good, peaceful evening. She’d bought two tuna steaks from the expensive gourmet market near campus. The woman behind the fish counter had wrapped them in several layers of white paper, and Mira had carried them hopefully home. Clark used to like to cook tuna steaks in sesame oil—pink in the middle, seared white on the outside. It had been at least a year since he’d done that, but she recalled that they were always delicious, and Mira fantasized that he’d make the fish that night after the boys went to bed, while she tossed a salad and boiled rice.
Maybe, after dinner and a last glass of wine, they would make love.
Clark seemed refreshed, in a better mood than he’d been in for a while. The only jab he’d made when she mentioned his good mood was, “It was nice to have some help.”
Maybe, then, he’d seen the look on her face and was as eager as she was to avoid a fight, because he’d qualified it right away:
“My mother really takes over, you know. She’d have spoon-fed
me
for two days if I’d let her. She had the boys up and dressed and playing with an old set of my blocks before I woke up both mornings.”
Since then they’d had only one stiff exchange—he couldn’t find his running shoes, which he’d left under the bed, but which, before finding them, he accused Mira of having put “in the toybox or something” while he was gone—and one argument that had ensued when she found, after Clark had left to go running, a note in his handwriting on the kitchen counter:
2:20—Your boyfriend called again. I told him you were in your office, to try your number there.
Mira had held the torn piece of notebook paper in her hand for quite a while, staring at it, trying to discern its meaning. For a crazy second she imagined he was referring to Jeff Blackhawk, but never once had she spoken to Jeff Blackhawk on the phone. Still, Jeff was honestly the only man who’d even
looked
at her, as far as she could tell, since before the twins were born.
Surely, she thought, Clark couldn’t be referring to any of the boyfriends she’d had before they were married?
When he came back in the door, Mira held the piece of paper up, and said, “What is this?”
Panting, red-faced, sweat trickling in zigzagging rivulets down his cheeks, Clark didn’t meet her eyes. He brushed past her to the bedroom.
“Clark?” she asked, following him.
“You know perfectly well, Mira. Your Eagle Scout. Your ‘work-study’ student,” he said, making air quotation marks around the word, and sat on the edge of the bed and began unlacing his shoes.
“Perry Edwards? Perry’s my
boyfriend
now?” Mira laughed. “Perry’s
nineteen.
” Relieved, Mira thought, It’s a joke, that’s it, and reached out to ruffle Clark’s sweaty hair, but when he felt her hand on his head, he flinched away from her.
“Clark?” Mira said. “You’re joking, right?”
“Yeah,” Clark said. “That’s right. I’m a big joker. Or, I’m a big
joke
.”
He took his shirt off, soaked with sweat, tossed it on the bedroom floor, and walked past her. He was, Mira saw for the first time, losing a bit of weight. He didn’t have the chiseled look of a few years before, but he was getting there. The extra ten (fifteen?) pounds he’d put on was coming off.
“What’s this about?”
Mira whispered it, following Clark past the twins’ room. They were blessedly asleep an hour earlier than usual.
“Clark?”
He’d continued to the bathroom and gotten in the shower. She stood outside, staring at the bathroom door until, finally, she went into the living room and tried to read the newspaper. When he came back out, he seemed to have forgotten the argument.
“Glass of wine? A little QT?” he’d asked.
She told him about the fish, and that she’d ordered Halloween costumes for the boys that she wanted to show him. She put two glasses of wine on the coffee table, and when he came into the living room—face still flushed, hair damp—Mira held up the cow costumes, and said, “Can you even believe how cute these are?”
Clark looked at them as if he didn’t recognize them as children’s costumes at first, and then he blinked, and he said with so little emotion that he might as easily have been expressing hatred or contempt as complete apathy, “Are those for the boys?”
“Yeah,” Mira said, and couldn’t help adding, although as soon as she did she wished she hadn’t, “Who else?”
“I’m just asking,” Clark said, “because cows aren’t
boys
.”
It took Mira a few seconds to compose any kind of response at all, and then she said, “I’m aware of that, Clark,” and let the costumes drop to her lap.
“Well, the twins
are.
Boys, that is. Males.”
“Thanks for that penetrating insight,” Mira said, and began to put the costumes back in the box.
“Well, it seems to me like, I don’t know, Mira—
bulls
, Superman, something like that might be more appropriate for two little boys for Halloween? I mean, I’m sorry if this offends you, or it’s too burdensome to come up with something gender-appropriate. It’s not like I suggested that you sew a thousand sequins onto a handmade serpent costume or something.”
Oh, yes.
The handmade serpent costume with the thousand sequins was something Clark’s mother had made for him when he was a kid. It was something he’d told Mira about his mother when they’d first started dating, to give her a sense of the woman who’d raised him—her fanatical dedication to her son, how seriously she’d taken her role as Homemaker. (“I wore the thing once,” he’d said. “The woman would have been perfectly happy to go blind making my Halloween costume.”)
They’d been driving in the dark together, Clark at the wheel. Mira couldn’t see his face, but there was no mistaking the grief, maybe even the shame, in his voice. She’d reached across to him, taken his hand, and her own eyes had filled with tears. She’d wanted, then, completely, to love Clark with that kind of devotion herself. She wanted to be, someday, the kind of mother to his child who would sew a thousand green sequins to a felt suit simply because the child had a passing fancy for sea serpents. She
would
be that kind of mother, she vowed to herself then, even if, someday, it pained her children to consider those pointless sacrifices. She wanted those she loved to be that certain of her love.
Now, looking up at Clark, Mira said, “Well, I wish I had time to stay home and sew the boys’ costumes myself, but I have to pay the fucking rent.
Somebody
around here has to work to pay the fucking rent.”
Mira hadn’t even noticed that Clark had the newspaper in his hand until he’d thrown it at her, and it had fallen in a wrinkled rasping disorder around her, and she was grabbing it up by the fistfuls and ripping it to pieces, throwing it back at him as he headed for the door.
“H
ell Week? Is this, like, hazing? You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, why would you join a ‘club’ that tortured you for a week?”
“It helps you bond,” Nicole said, and Craig choked a little on his milkshake. The way she said it was so sweet, so utterly naïve. “It makes it so you’re really sisters,” she went on.
“Nicole, I thought you already did this during ‘Challenge’ Month. I mean, if having to wear the same pair of panties for four weeks didn’t cement your bond, what good will Hell Week do?”
“Come on, Craig. You promised not to joke about that.”
He nodded. He had. He’d promised up and down as a way of getting her to tell him what she was so self-conscious about in November. He’d assumed she was planning on dumping him, since every time he kissed her she found some reason to squirm away, and even in the cafeteria she sat as far from him as you could get and still be technically eating a meal with someone. He’d showed up outside the Omega Theta Tau house after one of her “secret meetings” on a Tuesday night, holding a bouquet of red roses, and she’d burst into tears and started to run away from him. By the time he finally caught up with her, half a block away, he was crying, too. He grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away and she started to beg, “Please,
please
, just stay away from me for a few more days.”
“Why? Nicole, I
love
you. What’s wrong?”
She ran a little farther, but weakly, seeming to be losing her will to run from him, until he managed to pull her into an alleyway between a liquor store and a sushi place. By this time, he’d already tossed the roses onto a park bench. He grabbed her arms in both of his and pulled her to him, and she sobbed, but she also went limp when he wouldn’t let go, and he muttered into her hair, “Please. Nicole. I’m dying here. I love you. Just tell me.”
“You’ll
hate
me,” she said. She sobbed. “You’ll think I’m so stupid. You’ll think I’m so, so—gross. You’ll laugh at me, or you’ll tell people. You’ll—”
“Don’t tell me what I’ll do, Nicole! There’s nothing that would make me hate you. And I’d never betray you. You’re the most precious, the most—”
“Okay! Okay! My underpants!” she shouted. Some guy walking by the alley did a double-take then, and Nicole cringed, buried her head in her hands, and said it again in a ragged whisper. “My
underpants
.” And again. “My
underpants
.”
“What?” A slideshow of brief, crazy images flashed through his mind. He saw a football team throwing Nicole’s panties around on a field, panties flown from a flagpole, panties for sale on eBay, photographs of panties tacked to bulletin boards, and then she said, “They’re
dirty
. You’ll just tell me how
stupid
I am.”
It took a long time in the alley, and a lot of tears soaked into his corduroy jacket, to get the story out. She had three more days to wear them. On Saturday she had to hand over the filthy things to the Omega Theta Tau president in some sort of ritual celebration of sisterhood. Then she could wear new ones.
Nicole sobbed, “I can
smell them
.”
It was hard not to laugh, but even harder not to lecture:
“This is absurd, Nicole. You’re not joining the armed forces here. You shouldn’t have to do this kind of shit just to live in a big house with a bunch of prom queens.”
“I knew you’d—!”
“Okay, okay,” Craig said, and closed his mouth by pressing his lips to her forehead.
That was back in November. Now, the first week of March, she was informing him that for Hell Week she wasn’t going to be able to leave the basement of the Omega Theta Tau house except to attend classes.
“What the hell—no pun intended—are you going to be doing down there?”
“They don’t tell you. But the girls from last year said it was mostly different projects. Stuff for events. And tests on Pan-Hellenic things, facts. The Founders.” She shrugged.
“That’s total, unadulterated bullshit,” Craig said. “Why would you need to be in the basement?”
“It’s a trial.” Nicole lifted her chin, and he could see that it was quivering. “It’s a tradition.” She lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “I actually think it sounds fun.”
“Fun?”
“You’re not in a fraternity, Craig. I don’t think you can relate to . . . to . . .”
“You got that right,” Craig said. The waitress came over to their table then and started to take Nicole’s plate away even though she’d never touched her grilled cheese. Craig put his hand out and waved the waitress away. “She’s still eating that,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” the waitress said without a shred of sarcasm, and held her hands up as if he’d tried to slap her. She was one of those infuriating middle-aged Midwestern women who used her friendliness like a weapon. Already she’d complimented everything about the two of them before she’d bothered to take their orders—I
love
your coat, I
love
your sweater, I
love
your hair thing, I
love
your ring, I
love
your boots. Craig had stared at the menu, imagining his mother shooing this woman away:
Thanks, we love you, too . . .
But Nicole engaged the waitress exuberantly, told her that the sweater was from the Gap, that Craig’s coat was from the Salvation Army (!), that the hair thing was just a scrunchie of her sister’s, that the boots were Uggs, and the ring—Craig had given her the ring.
Here, at least, Craig quit grimacing at his menu and looked up at the waitress looking at the ring on Nicole’s right hand. Nicole held it up to her like a queen waiting for it to be kissed.
“Wow,” the waitress said, taking Nicole’s little fingertips in her own, twisting her hand so she could see the ring in better light. “Wow. It’s
sap
, isn’t it? There’s . . . something in it.” She bent down to look at it closely.
“A little fruit fly,” Nicole said proudly. “It could be forty million years old.”
Craig had told her this.
His science teacher in sixth grade at Fredonia Middle had kept a little collection of things stuck in amber—a spider, a frog, some mosquitoes. He’d even had a piece of amber with what looked like a long black hair floating in it, and another with two sad little ants scrambling over each other to get out before they were trapped in the stuff forever. Craig had been horrified and thrilled by the idea that, as Mr. Barfield had explained it, they’d probably stumbled in there in the first place because they were attracted to the whole sticky mess. Imagine, he’d thought, having the evidence of your fuck-up preserved for millions of years in amber.
“It’s not sap,” Craig told the waitress. “It’s resin.”
The waitress nodded then as if that were the most interesting thing she’d ever heard in her life, left their table finally, tossed the piece of paper with their order at the cook, and then disappeared, later leaving their sandwiches under the red lamps on the counter between the kitchen and the restaurant for a good ten minutes. When she finally brought them over to the table, they were stone-cold.
“W
hy do you have to be so negative?” Nicole asked after the waitress was gone. “What difference does it make? If you were a Greek, you’d be doing something like this, and
I’d
understand.”
“Look, Nicole. Hell Week, whatever. Do what you have to do—but, like, don’t expect me not to be unhappy that I’m not going to see you for a week. I mean, if you were going to Spain or something, I’d get it, but sewing doilies in a basement?”
The tears that had been pricking at the inner corners of Nicole’s eyes ever since he’d waved the waitress away turned into the real thing. When they started to run pathetically down the side of her nose, one of them even spilling over her upper lip, Craig jumped up from his seat and came around to her side of the booth, and put his arms around her, and kissed it away.
“Never mind, never mind. I’m an asshole, I’m sorry,” he said, kissing and kissing. “Do your damn doilies. Just come back to me. I can’t survive without you.” He took her face in his hands and looked at it.
Nicole inhaled a wavering, aborted laugh before she put her head on his shoulder and started to cry even harder:
“But you’re never going to understand. It’ll always be this
thing
between us. You’ll always be laughing at me. I just—”
“Are you saying you want to break up?” Craig asked, stiffening, trying not to shout it. He was painfully aware of the waitress hovering around behind him now, and knew she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she’d caught enough of this conversation to figure out what the problem was. He lowered his voice, and said, “So, you want to dump me for some frat asshole? Is that what this is about?” He started to pull away, and then Nicole reached out and grabbed the lapel of his corduroy jacket, bunched it up in her fist, the way a baby would, and it made him want to start sobbing, too, looking at her small soft hand clutching at his Salvation Army jacket. (She’d bought it for him. She and her sorority sisters had gone to the thrift shop to buy costumes for some carnival they were planning, and she’d seen it there. “I knew you’d look so cute in it! And it was your size!”)
“No, Craig. No. I want
you
, but I just wish—”
“I told you, Nicole, I’ll think about it. I can’t join this year anyway. Next year, okay? I’ll think about next year, okay?” She didn’t nod or say anything, just continued to clutch the jacket with her face against his shoulder. “Okay?”
She whimpered a little, and then she said, “No. You won’t. You’d hate it.”
Craig was about to try to deny it, but then she looked up at him and she had a little smile on her face—a wistful, regretful little smile like nothing he’d ever seen on her face before, maybe never before seen on anyone’s face.
She said it again, “You’d hate it,” and started to laugh. “I can just see you.” She was laughing really hard now, and he started to laugh, too, looking at her, looking at him, regarding him, and he realized what it was, that expression—that she was recognizing him, that she knew him for exactly what he was, and it amused her:
Despite herself, she liked what she saw.
She maybe
loved
what she saw.
He could see it in her eyes.
Had anyone ever looked at him that way?
Craig felt as if he were made of glass, that a note played now on a violin or a flute could shatter him into a thousand pieces. He was trembling, he realized, and he had her hair in his hands, and he was trying to keep himself from sobbing out loud, and he vowed in that moment, not for the first time, that whatever she wanted, whatever it took to keep her, for the rest of his life, for the rest of her life, he would do it
.
A bitterly cold wind blew through their booth at that moment, and he instinctively turned to look at the door of the diner. Someone had come in—a silhouetted figure in the doorway, blurred in Craig’s teary eyes—and the figure stood in the threshold for a second or two before Craig, blinking, looking more closely, recognized him just as he turned quickly and walked back out the door.
Craig pulled away from Nicole, and nodded toward the door. “That was him,” he said.
“Who?”
“That guy. The EMT guy, Nicole. The fucking ambulance driver. He saw us, and he left.”
“What EMT guy?” Nicole asked, bringing her napkin to her eyes to wipe them. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen him, that guy, like five times at your sorority. I told you already. Remember? I told you that I keep seeing him around there. Who is he?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Craig. I don’t even know what EMT stands for.”
Craig didn’t bother to argue with her, or to tell her what EMT stood for. He watched the plate glass window to see if the guy would walk past it, but he must have gone the other way: To avoid the window? To avoid being seen by Craig?
Craig stood up, as if to follow, although he had no idea what he’d do if he caught up with the guy—and, anyway, Nicole took the sleeve of his jacket in her hand and tugged him back down to her, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him so sweetly, and for so long, that even the waitress, who’d been watching them, must have felt embarrassed, and went away.