by Tom Perrotta
“It’s so hard,” she said.
“He’s getting better,” he said sternly. He sat up, kicked his good leg. “He’ll be fine!”
His words sounded lame, but to his surprise her tears ceased. She put her arms around him. “Dylan,” she said, “do you know how amazing you are?”
Despite himself he grinned shyly. She could stop now.
But she didn’t stop. She held on to him tight. “You’re alive. Alive.”
Of course he was alive. She smelled of sweat and deodorant. He sat breathing her in, with a combination of joy and terror that overrode his medication. His heart thudded savagely. At her trust in him that he had to live up to—from now on, it seemed, and for the boundless rest of his life.
KATE WALBERT
M&M World
FROM The New Yorker
GINNY HAD PROMISED to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard and wave from the spire, its color dissolving yellow, then blue, then red, then yellow again. She had promised. “Promised,” Olivia said, her face twisted into the expression she reserved for moments of betrayal. “Please,” Olivia whined. “You said ‘spring.’”
She had said “spring.” This she remembered, and it was spring, or almost. Spring enough. Spring advancing, the trees newly budded, the air peppery. Regardless, it felt too early to go home when the light shone this strongly, slanting across Central Park in the way of late March, early April; plus, the city had already collectively sprung forward. Spring has sprung, the grass has ris’.
“All right,” she found herself saying. “Just once. Today. Just once. This is it.” Breaking her resolution to stop qualifying—five more minutes, this last page, one more bite—and wishing, midspeech, she would stop. She has tried. Just as she has tried to be more easygoing, but when push comes to shove, as it always will, she is not easygoing. And she qualifies. It’s a verbal tic: first this and then that. A constant negotiation—action then reward, or promise of reward. What is it that the books say? Screw the books.
She takes the girls’ hands and holds tight, changing course, crossing Central Park West to Central Park South. The girls suddenly delighted, and delightful, straining ahead, buoyant. They are gorgeous, bright-eyed, brilliant girls: one tall, one short, pant legs dragging, torn leggings, sneakers that glow in the dark or light up with each step, boom boom boom. They break free and race across, bounding onto the sidewalk, their hands rejoined like paper cutouts, zigzagging here, zigzagging there, Maggie clutching Zoom Zoom with her free hand, choking the thing, its dangly legs and arms, its floppy, flattened ears.
Ginny follows them quickly, remembering how her heart would literally stop as Olivia—then, what? four? five?—would run to this same corner, the light not yet changed. Her daughter had only to step into traffic, to veer off the curb. She never did. Olivia climbed the stone seals at seal park in Chelsea, the bronze bears on the playground outside the Metropolitan Museum; she teetered on their heads and could so easily have slipped—she did slip once, but it was nothing. Still, Ginny had to wake her every hour that night, shake her out of her sleepy fog. “Who am I?” Ginny had said, Olivia’s blue princess pajamas silky beneath her grip, Olivia’s shoulders so thin. “Mommy?” Olivia said, squinting, pupils the right size, shrinking: constricting or contracting, she never knew which, but, whatever, correctly—she was fine. And then, a bit older, those other sneakers—wheelies? heelies?—and Olivia careering along the sidewalk, wheels where the heels should be, the speed! And downhill too, with nothing to hold on to, no way to stop. The pediatrician had said the most dangerous thing was trampolines, even with nets. And then the rented house that summer had one, netless, in the back yard. She had watched as the girls bounced higher and higher. She couldn’t get them off, Olivia and now Maggie, just like her big sister. She had stood vigil at the window, or next to the rail in her hat and long sleeves buttoned at the wrist, the girls slathered with sunscreen. The point is, her heart stuck in her throat, always in her throat.
Ginny hurries to catch up. One has tripped the other accidentally on purpose and now the other howls as if singed with fire.
“Stop it,” Ginny hisses. “Right now. Period. Stop it or no M&M World.”
They stop, Olivia smiling to clear the air, though the air stinks: they’re near a line of carriages and their horses.
“Please,” Maggie’s saying. “Please. Please.” And so they circle around, petting Blackie, petting Whitey, petting Gummie with the drippy nostrils, the one the driver says loves sugar—“Yes, yes, next time we’ll bring a sugar cube”—and Whinny and Happy and the other one, its long yellow teeth reminding her: she needs to bleach. Suddenly everyone’s teeth are whiter than her own; they wear them like necklaces. And their faces too seem suspiciously doctored, first one line then another magically evaporating, a whole generation of women paying for erasure.
“Ouch,” Maggie says. She holds one hand flat as instructed, the brown carrot there, a gift from the driver. The driver laughs. “No danger,” he says. The horse roots and chews. “You’re fine,” Ginny says. She strokes the soft hair of the horse’s muzzle, the horse nuzzling Maggie’s tiny palm; it wears a hat with a feathered plume, as if it had trotted here from the stables of a fallen tsar. Ginny leans into its solid skull, and the horse stares back at her with a huge watery eye. Where am I? it wonders, or something equivalent, and she thinks of the whale in Patagonia that asked the same thing. This was years ago, before the girls were born, when she and the girls’ father took a trip to Chile.
They were there for vacation; there to see animals. Animals had been promised, including whales. A center existed, manned by earnest students, young men and women from all over the world who spoke Spanish beautifully and wore thin silver bracelets with a symbol that meant something. They piloted the boats and explained to the tourists the seriousness of the venture, the need for extra donations. The tourists kept quiet, mostly, standing on the side of the boat where they’d been told to stand, given the radar and various other instruments that would determine the location of the whales—sometimes a female with a calf or two, or, rarer, a male on its own. The whales communicated over great distances, as everyone knew, but the students could intercept their communications, or decipher them: regardless, somehow the students knew what the whales were saying, or might be saying, and so could steer the boat in the right direction where, for a fee, the tourists could take pictures of the whale surfacing or of the plume of water from the blowhole, or sometimes even, if the tourists were very lucky, of a whale jumping gracefully as if showing off.
On this particular voyage, the one Ginny found herself on with the girls’ father, Ginny chose to stay on the side of the boat with more shade. She was hot, she told the girls’ father. He could call her if anything exciting happened. She had opened her book: War and Peace, a paperback edition she had picked up in the paperback exchange in Santiago, where they had stayed for a few days before heading south. She had been at a good part, a really good part, and so perhaps it took some time for the whale to get her attention. She had had, when she later thought about it, the feeling of being watched. And so she had looked up from her place in War and Peace and seen the whale, a female, she would learn, uncharacteristically alone, lolling before her on the surface of the water. She folded the corner of her page and stood, shading her eyes; then she walked to the boat rail to get a better look. She didn’t call the girls’ father; she didn’t call anyone. She looked down at the whale. It lay on its side, staring with one eye straight at Ginny, drifting alone in its disappearing sea, the sun burning both of them, beaming through the torn shreds of the shredded atmosphere. They stayed like that for a while, Ginny convinced that the whale had a message to deliver, something she might translate and convey to the world. But she never figured out what, since too soon someone from the other side sa
w it and the whale was gone.
“Mother!” Maggie’s saying.
Ginny pulls away from the solid skull of the horse and turns back to her youngest.
“You weren’t listening,” Maggie is saying.
“Was so,” Ginny says.
“Then can I?” Maggie says.
Ginny bends down to kiss Maggie’s head, the part between the plastic barrettes that Maggie repeatedly refastens each morning, wanting to look, she says, “right.” Maggie’s hair smells delicious.
“No,” she says.
Maggie stomps her foot; she’s pushed Zoom Zoom deep in her pocket, its strange face, not quite rabbit, not quite anything else—“it’s extinct,” Maggie once said—just above the fold.
“I love you,” Ginny says. “You’re beautiful.”
“What about me?” Olivia says. She has been standing next to Ginny, as quiet as a stone.
“You too, sweetheart,” she says, pulling her oldest in. “You too.”
There are other things to fix, not just her yellow teeth. She needs some spots removed from her skin; she needs to dye her gray roots, the stubborn tuft that refuses to blend. She could use something for her posture—Pilates—and she’s overdue for a mammogram, a bone scan, a colonoscopy. She needs a new coat, an elegant one like those she’s seen on other mothers, something stylish to go with the other stylish clothes she means to buy, and the boots, the right boots, not just the galoshes she’s slipped on every morning all winter; it’s spring now, isn’t it? She should pay to have her toes soaked, her feet scrubbed of dead skin. She could choose a bright color of nail polish, a hip color, a dark purple or maybe even that shade of brown. She should take a class—philosophy, religion, vegan cooking—and wear sandals there, the new kind, with the straps that wrap the ankle or twist all the way to midcalf, her brown toenails shiny smooth, as if dipped in oil. There are posters on the subway and numbers to call. She writes down the websites in the notebook she carries for such things: lists, reminders. But she is constantly out of time, losing track, forgetting. Sunday’s Monday evening, then Wednesday vanishes altogether.
M&M World looms in the distance, the electronic billboard—M&M’S WORLD—as bright as a beacon. They hurry down Broadway. At Fifty-first, Olivia claims she can see the waving M&M hanging from the spire of the Empire State Building. “It’s blue!” she says. “Where? Where?” Maggie says. “No, it’s green!” she says. “Where?” Maggie says, hopping. She’s suddenly furious. “I can’t see! Lift me!”
“Be patient,” Ginny says. She takes Maggie’s hand and pulls her along. Olivia is in front, swimming upstream, parting the crowds. Hallelujah to the end of the hideous winter: blackened snowdrifts and dog shit and lost gloves. The city erupts, oozes, overflows; everyone is outdoors, walking quickly or standing on the corner checking phones, dialing phones, speaking on phones. “Where?” someone is saying. “You’re breaking up.”
“Olivia?” she yells; she doesn’t see her.
Olivia has stopped in front of a store window: snow globes and hats and luggage on wheels, a rack of “I ♥ New York” T-shirts, electronic gadgets. She is suddenly taller when she turns back around, her face complicated. “I’m here, Mom,” she says.
“Don’t scare me.”
“It’s the new kind.”
“I can’t,” Ginny says. “We’ve got to—”
Maggie’s pulling her hand. “Mister Softee!” she’s saying.
Christ, already? The truck?
“Please?” Maggie says.
“Not today,” Ginny says.
“Did you see it?” Olivia’s saying.
“Just a minute,” she says to Maggie. “What?” she says to Olivia.
“Please? It’s a special day, isn’t it?” Maggie’s saying. “It’s spring. You said.” Ginny turns to Maggie. In Maggie’s smile are four missing teeth, each one saved and wrapped in tinfoil in her Tooth Fairy Box. She plans on blowing her wad all at once: fifteen teeth—or are there more?—beneath her pillow, precious little things although three have already been patched for cavities, the dentist wondering how vigilant Ginny has been about flossing, the amount of candy consumed. “Remarkably so and hardly any,” Ginny had said at the last appointment. “It’s a mystery.”
“Next time,” she says now to Maggie. “Enough’s enough.”
“It’s the new kind,” Olivia is saying.
Maggie looks up. “Please,” she says, her teeth tiny pearls.
“Mom!” Olivia says.
“Oh, all right,” Ginny says. “Just this once. Not again. Only because it’s spring. This is it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Maggie says, smiling.
“What?” Olivia says.
“Ice cream!” Maggie says. They high-five and dance around Ginny’s knees.
Ginny had kept a list of the animals of Patagonia. The ones that interested her. There were the penguins, of course, an entire colony that was completely tame. They had never been hunted and it was as simple as that, the guide had said, she and the girls’ father stooping, squatting to watch them furiously building their nests: the mating season had ended and now they were preparing for eggs. There were some too that were not well. Those stood outside the colonies, looking in; sometimes small crowds of other penguins gathered around them and nosed them toward the water, a not so subtle suggestion, the guide had said, that they might be better off drowned. Brutal nature, the girls’ father had said. There were the lizards and the guanacos and the numerous birds, the elephant seals they’d watched from a cliff top, the males fighting over a female that lay on its side, clueless or, rather, helpless. Brutal nature, she had said, and the girls’ father had laughed, and in that instant, and this is true, a rainbow had appeared—it was that kind of weather—the arc stretching from one end of the ocean to the other, and she had taken his hand and said, “Yes.” She thought she was ready. Children, she had said. Dozens of them.
There are even more people farther on, in Times Square, though the cars have been blocked and so there’s that, at least—one less thing. They’ll finish their ice creams here before turning back toward the store, Ginny says, maneuvering the girls around the tables and chairs, the feet, the flocks of pigeons, the remnants of lunches consumed. Men and women she may or may not recognize—movie stars, rappers, models—loom above them, magnified a thousand percent, their eyes the size of swimming pools, their teeth cliff walls she could hide behind or possibly dwell in, like the Anasazi, chiseling toeholds so she might scale down at night to forage. The movie stars, rappers, and models are invariably smiling, cheerful; some sing or dance, the women with suggestive postures, the men in dark glasses and fur coats. Everyone is moving, gyrating, blinking, flashing. Tourists sit on the new risers, watching nothing or everything, looking down, from time to time, to study their guidebooks. The breeze picks up, eddying ticket stubs and wrappers and waxed paper and brown bags and plastic straws and whatever else has been left behind. Shameless, this litter: if she ran the world. Recently, a flock of plastic bags has caught in the spindly sycamore in front of their apartment, empty bags that inflate and deflate with the wind like marooned sailing ships. They are what she sees when she looks out the living room window, which, truth be told, she does more often now than she should. It’s as if she was trying to remember something that she’d forgotten, as if there was someone she was supposed to call. She stands at the window and looks, the plastic bags inflating, deflating. Alive, somehow, mocking her or maybe just reminding her—a cosmological message. From whom? Of what?
“Mother!” Olivia yells. Maggie, halfway between Ginny and Olivia, is on the pavement, clutching her knee. “Mister Softee!” she’s saying. “My cone!” Ginny is next to her before she knows it, pushing up Maggie’s ragged leggings to expose the skin, stroking her hair. Strangers gather dumbly. “We’re fine,” Ginny says. “Thank you. She’s fine.” She blows on the scraped place, red and scratched raw but not bleeding—they were racing, they were almost tied, Olivia’s explaining. Maggie’s ice c
ream is upturned and melting in the street, a ruination. Maggie cannot speak for sobbing. “Sweetheart,” Ginny’s saying, stroking her hair. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We’ll find another truck. We’ll get a new one. We’ll get another.”
Olivia licks her cone, listening. “Then I want another one too,” she says.
The place is jammed and loud. There are vats of brightly colored M&M’s everywhere, M&M’s crammed in plastic tubes spiraling to the ceiling. There are M&M T-shirts and M&M mugs and M&M tote bags and stuffed M&M men, or whatever they’re called (M&M guys? M&M characters?), and M&M pillows and M&M beach towels and M&M statues and M&M key rings and M&M snow globes and M&M plates and M&M puzzles and M&M umbrellas. The employees, dressed in M&M colors, dance and sing along—for minimum wage?—to a song Ginny recognizes, a song she’s heard played continuously on the radio station that Olivia listens to in her room now, the door mostly closed. It’s the voice, Olivia pointed out, of one of the men on the billboards, one of the men swathed in fur—or maybe he was the guy in the suit. Ginny can’t remember, her head already clogged, her eyes watering. It is hot in here, the air conditioning not yet on, the heat remembering winter. The girls stand on either side of her, transfixed. Maggie’s tears have been wiped dry, a Band-Aid found in the deep recesses of Ginny’s purse, the wound, as Maggie called it, cleaned with a Fresh Wipe, then kissed for good luck. Only Big Sister could do that part—wiggling her fingers first to conjure the fairy dust that only Big Sister could conjure. A fairy dust invisible to mothers, its healing powers a mystery, like phoenix tears, Olivia said. Or Zoom Zoom, Maggie said.
“Can we, please?” Olivia asks now. She has seen the sign directing customers up, by way of the escalator, to the second floor, where a life-size M&M waits like Santa Claus, available for photographs.
