by Tom Perrotta
“So does the cow,” drawled a fat girl.
“The cow’s two stomachs only serve the cow.”
“Serve the cow only,” corrected Adele.
“Whatever. The ant’s larger stomach, called the crop, is at the service of all. As an ant collects food and eats it, the nutrient is dissolved into a liquid and stored in the crop. When a fellow ant is hungry, its antennae stroke the food-storer’s head. Then the two ants put their mouths together, together, together”—she controlled her unseemly excitement with the aid of the soothing smile Mr. da Sola sent from the back of the room—“and the liquid food passes from one to the other. And in addition to the generous crop, each ant has another, smaller stomach, its ‘personal belly.’”
Alice, wearing a faded denim dress, said, “Then the larger stomach belongs to the community.”
“Yes!” said Emily. “And if philosophers had brains in their heads they would realize that the ant’s collective pouch is the most advanced device that evolution or God if you prefer has come up with.”
“A soup kitchen,” interrupted the fat girl.
“And the ant feeding her associates through her mouth out of her own belly is the fundamental act from which the social life, the virtues, the morality, and the politics of the formicary—that’s the word for the ant as a society—are derived.” Alice saw that Emily used no notes. “Compared to this true collective, Wolfie, Brook Farm is a sandbox.”
A few girls were gagging or at least making gagging sounds.
“The ant is being exploited by her pals,” said the irritating fattie. Her size-six jeans were big on her and she wore her little sister’s tee. A strip of pink flesh showed between the two, like a satin ribbon. “When does she eat?”
“She cannot be said to eat as we understand eating,” said Emily severely. “She collects and stores and regurgitates. She is the lifespring of her world.”
“So we evolved, and lost our second stomach,” said Wolfie. “We got ourselves brains instead. A good deal.”
“What’s good about the brain?” said Emily. “It evolved to make money and war.”
“Zeugma!” shouted Adele Alba.
Perhaps it was because of the only moderate success of her lecture, perhaps because of her binge at the banquet—at any rate, Emily turned up at the nutritionist that week at an unacceptable weight. She was hospitalized. She was not force-fed, but her room’s bathroom had no door, and while she consumed one pea at a time she was watched by a nurse’s aide with baroque curves.
“Sugar, eat,” coaxed the aide.
“Honey, do,” mocked Emily. But she acceded to the regimen; her work was calling her. Soon she’d gained enough to be discharged, though she’d have to see the nutritionist twice a week for a while. She was released a day earlier than planned. Her mother drove to the hospital in a downpour. She brought a present: a long, black vinyl raincoat with a hood.
“Thank you,” said Emily, unsurprised at the kindness of the gift. Her mother was everything a human was entitled to be: outspoken, attached to her particular children, unacquainted with tact. Ghiselle had no concern for the superorganism—but, after all, ever since the development of the spine, the individual had become paramount, the group disregarded. Ghiselle was only following the downhill path of her species.
“There’s a candy bar in the pocket of the raincoat,” said Ghiselle.
“Oh.”
“Wolfie and Adele can split it. Veux-tu rentrer?”
“Pas encore. Laisse moi à la bibliothèque, s’il te plaît.” Emily was the only member of the family, Richard included, who had mastered enough French to converse with her mother in her mother’s tongue.
Ghiselle parked and Emily got out of the car. The rain had stopped. The new coat concealed Emily’s emaciation, and she had raised her hood against the suspended mist that had followed the rain, so her patchy hair was concealed too. She looked, Ghiselle thought, like any serious modern girl—bound for medical school, maybe, or a career in science.
Emily crossed the modest campus and entered the library. Ghiselle blew her nose and drove away.
“Emily is the heroine of the moment,” Alice murmured into Richard’s shoulder.
“Is she? They all love insects now?”
“No, they envy her monomania—”
“Polymania is more like it. Subway systems, for instance—she can diagram the underground of every major city in the world.”
“And they associate it with her lack of appetite, and they associate that with free will. ‘You can get a lot done if you choose to skip dinner,’ Wolfie Featherstone told me. Richard, not eating will become a fad and then a craze and then a cult.”
“Well, bulk the girls up ahead of time. Have the cook serve creamed casseroles instead of those stingy salads.”
Alice groaned. “You are undermining Caldicott’s famed nutrition.”
“Screw nutrition. The body tends to take care of itself unless it’s abused. All the girls except Emily are strong enough to beat carpets.”
“Beat carpets? The maids do that once a year.”
“Ghiselle does it more often.”
“Ghiselle? I don’t believe you. Ghiselle is a grand dame.”
“On the surface. She’s a peasant inside.” He withdrew his arm gently from beneath Alice’s shoulder, clasped his hands under his head. The watery light from the uncurtained window shone on him—on them both, Alice supposed, but she had lost all sense of herself except as a receptacle with grasping muscles and a hungry mouth. Only her lover was illuminated. His pewter hair swept his forehead, sprouted from his underarms, curled around his nipples, provided a restful nest for his penis, too restful maybe . . . she leaned over and blew on the nest and got things going again.
And afterward . . . well, this woman had come late to passion and had not yet learned restraint. “Do you love Ghiselle the grand dame or Ghiselle the peasant?”
“I love you, Alice.”
“You do?”
“I do.” He loved Ghiselle too, but he didn’t burden Alice with that information. He had come to believe that monogamy was unnatural. He would like to practice polygamy, bigamy at least, but Ghiselle would run off to Paris, taking the girls . . .
“Oh, Richard,” Alice was lovingly sighing. Then there was silence, and the room that had seemed so steamy grew cool like a forest brook, and she was as happy as she had ever been. They lay side by side in that silence.
“So you’ll leave her,” Alice ventured after a while.
“. . . No.”
“No!” She sat up. “You are going to stay with the bitch.”
“She is not a bitch. We’re a bit of a misalliance, that’s all, fire and steel you might say.”
“Misalliance? A disaster!”
He kissed her left nipple, and the right, and the navel; and if she’d had any sense she would have dropped the argument and lain down again. Instead, “You’re going to stay with her for the sake of the children instead of divorcing her for the sake of yourself. And for the sake of me,” she cried. “But Richard. Children survive this sort of thing. Sometimes I think they expect it. I’ve noticed at the bat mitzvahs I get invited to, and I get invited to them all, the girls with two sets of parents and a colony of half-sibs—they’re the snappiest. Richard, come live with me, come live with me and be my—” He covered her mouth with his. “We belong together,” she said when she got her breath, and he did it again. “You are practicing probity,” she said, and this time he didn’t interrupt her. “You are a prig!” She began to sob in earnest. He held her until the sobs grew less frequent, and they lay down again, and she fell asleep, and he held her for some time after that.
At five o’clock he woke her. Bleakly they dressed, back to back. Richard put on the clothes he’d folded earlier; Alice pulled on jeans and a wedgewood sweater. Then they turned. Her cheekbone touched his jaw. We’ll meet again. Richard left by the back door, walking carefully because the rain had made the earth slick. The air was cold now.
Alice, standing at the doorway, crossed her arms in front of her waist and cupped her elbows in her hands. Women have worried in that position for centuries. She watched her lover make his slippery way toward the bottom of the ravine. Maybe Paolo da Sola would marry her. She could raise his salary.
Emily was now standing on Alice’s side of the ravine not far from Alice’s house. She leaned against a birch. She had just left the library where she had been reading about ants’ circles of death. Sometimes ants, for no apparent reason, form a spiral and run in it continuously until they die of exhaustion. What kind of behavior was that from so evolved a creature? Oh, she had much to figure out. But at the moment all she wanted to do was watch her father behaving like a boy. If he sprained an ankle, it would put a crimp in his love life. Too bad he didn’t have six ankles. But with only two he did manage to leap over the little creek at the bottom of the ravine, land without incident, and start to climb the far side. He did not look up over his right shoulder or he would have seen Alice standing in her doorway, and he did not look up over his left shoulder or he would have seen Emily and her tree; he looked straight ahead through those binocular eyes embedded in his skull. Emily herself had compound eyes, at least some of the time—the images she saw were combined from numerous ommatidia, eye units, located on the surface of the orb. These eye units, when things were working right, all pointed in slightly different directions. In a mirror she saw multiple Emilys, all of them bulging, all of them gross.
Alice wrenched her gaze from Richard’s climbing form and looked sideways and saw Emily, aslant against a white tree, spying on her father. She was covered in a black, helmeted carapace. She looked as if she had attached herself to the tree for nourishment. She was a mutant, she was a sport of nature, she should be sprayed, crushed underfoot, gathered up, and laid in a coffin . . . Then rage loosened and shriveled, and Alice, in a new, motherly way, began to move toward the half sister of her child-to-be. She couldn’t keep her footing in the mud, so she had to use her hands too. She would bring Emily to her house. She would offer her a weed. She would not mention food. She would whisper to the misguided girl that life could be moderately satisfying even if you were born into the wrong order.
Having safely ascended the opposite bank of the ravine, Richard turned and squinted at the artful bit of nature below: two banks of trees slanting inward as if trying to reach each other, some with pale yellow leaves, some brown, some leafless; more leaves thick at their roots; and mist everywhere. It was a view Ghiselle would appreciate, she loved pointillism, though she had decorated their house in bright abstractions for no apparent reason. For no apparent reason one of his two promising younger daughters spent her evenings in front of a television screen and the other seemed to have sewn her thumb to her BlackBerry. Perhaps it was in the nature of people to defy their own best interests. Why, look, as if to validate his insight, there was his beloved Emily, oh Lord let her live, make her live, there was Emily, plastered lengthwise to a tree like a colony of parasitic grubs; and there was his Alice, intruding like the headmistress she couldn’t help being, undertaking to crawl toward Emily not on hands and knees but on toes and fingertips, her limbs as long as those of a katydid nymph. And above her body, her busybody, you might say, swayed that magnificent blue rump.
Some of what Alice wished for came about. She and Emily developed a cautious alliance. Emily’s weight went up a bit, though her future remained worrisome. Paolo da Sola said “Sure!” to Alice’s proposal of marriage. “And I don’t want to know the circumstances. I’ve been mad about you since we met.”
Richard eventually replaced Alice with an undemanding pathologist who already had a husband and children. The baby born to Alice had Paolo’s dark brows and golden eyes—surprising, maybe, until you remember that all humans look pretty much alike. And when Caldicott’s old-fashioned housekeeper discovered Wolfie and Adele embracing naked in Emily’s little room, and failed to keep her ancient mouth shut, Alice summoned a meeting of the trustees and told them that this expression of devoted friendship was not in contravention of any rule she knew of. She adjusted her yawning infant on her pale blue shoulder. Anyway, she reminded them and herself, Caldicott’s most important rules, even if they weren’t written down, were tolerance and discretion. All the others were honeydew.
ANGELA PNEUMAN
Occupational Hazard
FROM Ploughshares
ON A FRIDAY, during his inspection of the sludge containment tank at the East Winder Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant, Calvin’s foot slipped off the catwalk—it was raining, the metal was wet—and his left work boot and left leg became submerged up to the knee in treated sewage.
“Whoops,” said the plant manager beside him. The plant had a history of noncompliance, and the inspection had been unscheduled, causing the manager’s big-cheeked Irish face to grow and stay red as Calvin lifted samples. Now the man visibly cheered up. “Occupational hazard,” he said merrily.
“Shit,” said Calvin. The sludge plastered his pants to his shin, oozed underneath the tongue of his boot. The manager showed him the hose, and he rinsed most of it off, but he knew the smell—sewage sweetened with chemicals—would inhabit the interior of his battered Taurus for days.
“Fragrant truffle,” said Dave Lott back at the office, sniffing thoughtfully as Calvin passed his cube. “Hints of coriander.”
“Right,” said Calvin.
“Eau de toilette,” Dave Lott said.
Calvin snorted.
It was past five-thirty, and the office—twelve beige cubicles at sea in the middle of a low-ceilinged room—was nearly empty. Calvin parked himself in his cube, which shared a wall with Dave Lott’s, and glumly logged on to his computer. His shin and his foot felt clammy, but he was determined to ignore it for the fifteen minutes he needed to write up his report. Sometimes discomfort sharpened his brain, he’d noticed. On Calvin’s other side, Robin, the sole female inspector, stood to put on her jacket, pulling an arm’s length of thin, flat red hair out from the collar and letting it slap flatly against her back. It was so long that she probably hadn’t cut it in twenty years, like the missionary women Calvin had known in church as a kid. But he always liked watching her bring it up out of her jacket. It was long enough for her to sit on.
“Nuances of anise,” Dave Lott said. “An-us. Get it?”
“Blow it up yours,” Calvin said.
“Ah, poopy jokes,” said Robin tiredly, on her way down the hall. “They never get old.”
When she was gone, Dave Lott stood and peered at Calvin over the divider. He was a stout bald man with a gray thicket of a beard. The beard was an upside-down triangle, shaped like pubic hair, Calvin had thought more than once. But you’d never say that kind of thing to Dave Lott’s face. Calvin liked the guy, but carefully. He reminded Calvin of a cop, the way he could joke around and then get serious, all of a sudden, pulling rank and leaving you feeling like a jerk. Dave Lott’s eyes were as gray as his beard, small and round, tiny gravel pits above gold-speckled half-glasses. The glasses were the magnifying kind you bought at the drugstore. The kind old ladies wore, which was another thing you’d never say to Dave Lott’s face.
“Grab a beer?” Dave Lott said.
“Sorry, man. Got to get home.”
Dave Lott nodded and pushed up the gold glasses, ambiguously, with his middle finger.
“Got to get out of these pants,” Calvin said.
It was Thursday, and Calvin’s wife, Jill, had her GRE class, and he had to watch the boys. Jill hated Dave Lott, though she wouldn’t use the word hate. Everything was dislike, and now even the boys only disliked okra and disliked string beans, which sounded creepy to Calvin, coming from them—too much calm specificity. Jill disliked Dave Lott. She was friends with the man’s first wife in the way he’d noticed women were friends, with the need to designate an opponent so they could know they were on the same side.
“Next time,” Calvin tacked on, but Dave Lott just grinned through his beard and was
gone. In a few days the man would be dead, picked off the periphery of Calvin’s life, and Calvin would find himself trying to remember some significant detail about this, their last exchange; but in the moment there was only the dull noise of Dave Lott’s work boots on the cloudy plastic hall runners tacked over the carpet, the suck of the steel door closing behind him, the trace smell of sewage coming from Calvin’s own cube.
At home, Calvin’s boys were in the basement watching their favorite video, a cartoon of The Ten Commandments. Jill stood in the bathroom before the mirror, gripping the cordless phone between her chin and shoulder while she did her eye makeup.
“I know it,” she said into the phone. Her blue eyes flicked over Calvin as he popped his head in, and then she leaned into the mirror and blinked at herself. “I know it. No kidding.” She was pretty, still—not like a movie star but like women on aspirin commercials, trim, sensibly brunette, smiling much of the time. She and Calvin were at war. Jill claimed to want another child, to want to try for a girl, and Calvin had found himself boycotting sex until they talked about it reasonably, which meant, he knew she knew, until he talked her out of it. He felt—unreasonably perhaps—that this desire of hers had nothing to do with him, though he couldn’t prove that, of course, and couldn’t imagine trying to explain why it mattered. Whenever he caught himself admiring her, it pissed him off. Now he wished he’d gone out for a drink with Dave Lott after all.
He headed to the kitchen, opened a bottle of beer, and stared out at the back yard. A domed jungle gym rose from the grass like half a skeleton planet. Last year, Calvin had looked away for a moment to tend the grill, and Trent, then five, had fallen the wrong way. When Calvin looked back, his son had crumpled quietly to the ground, staring at his broken wrist, more confused than in pain.
