Through all the years, the coupon cutting, working on the house every weekend until her knees ached and her hands were cracked and bleeding, rarely buying anything new for herself—or Walt—off in the distance her fortieth birthday glowed like a distant lighthouse, flashing its beam of rescue. She would turn forty and the money would drop into their account. Most of it would go toward college and some of it would pay down the house loan and all would be, if not completely right with the world, better than it ever had been. She didn’t like to think about the year the girls would go away to college, how she would feel without them, but she did allow herself to think about how things might get a little easier for all of them after The Nest. Finally, the girls could have something that wasn’t about price. They could line up the college acceptance letters and Melody could say, Whichever one you want. Choose. Finally, she could start to relax. Finally, she was going to get a goddamn break.
She turned up the volume on the classical radio station, which she only listened to when her mind was too occupied for lyrics or talk. Occupied was a polite term for the current state of her amped-up brain. If she hadn’t been parked in plain sight on the main commercial strip of their tiny gossipy town, she would have lain down on the front seat and gone to sleep. She was so tired lately. She couldn’t manage more than a few hours at night when she’d involuntarily shift into some kind of exalted state of anxiety. She would be awake for hours, telling herself to get out of bed and brew some tea or run a warm bath or read, but she couldn’t manage to do any of those things either; she would just lie next to Walt, listening to his gentle snore (even when sleeping, he was unfailingly polite), rigid and paralyzed with worry about Nora and Louisa and money and the mortgage and college tuition and global warming and pesticides in food and lack of privacy on the Internet and cancer—God, how often had she microwaved food in plastic containers when the girls were little?—and whether she’d permanently compromised their intelligence by not breast-feeding and what were the repercussions of that one month she’d let them joyfully tear around the living room in hand-me-down walkers from a kind older neighbor until an unkind younger neighbor told her that everyone knew walkers delayed motor and mental development. She’d fixate on what would happen to the girls when they left home and strayed from her watchful eye (What was the range of Stalkerville? How many miles? She’d have to check) and wonder who could ever love and care for them the way she and Walt did, except that lately she felt like a big fat failure in the love and care department. Oh! And she was fat! She’d gained at least ten pounds since the lunch with Leo, maybe more, she was afraid to weigh herself. Everything felt tight and uncomfortable. She’d taken to covering her unbuttoned jeans with long shirts borrowed from Walt; she could hardly afford to buy new clothes. Nora’s coat was looking particularly ratty, but if she bought Nora a new coat, she would have to buy Louisa one, too (it was her rule: parity in all things!), and she definitely couldn’t afford two.
Melody remembered a day long ago when both girls had raging ear infections. Two fevers, two toddlers crying all night who both hated medicine of any kind. As she watched the doctor writing prescriptions, she wondered how on earth she was going to manage to get eardrops and amoxicillin into two cranky, sick babies (four ears, two mouths) three to four times a day for ten days.
“It gets easier, right?” she’d asked her pediatrician then, holding one squirming, sweaty child in each arm, neither one would be put down, not even for a minute.
“That depends on what you mean by easier,” the doctor said, laughing sympathetically. “I have two teenagers and you know what they say.”
“No,” Melody said, dizzy from lack of sleep and too much coffee. “I don’t know what they say.”
“Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.”
Melody had wanted to slap the doctor. Having twins seemed so hard when they were little, especially when they were living in the city. Now she found herself wishing for the days when the hardest thing she had to do was dress and load two babies into the unwieldy double stroller and make her way to the playground where she’d sit with the other mothers. They’d all show up with steaming lattes in the winter, iced cappuccinos in the summer, and grease-stained paper bags with various pastries purchased to share. They’d talk and pass bits of lemon cake or blueberry muffins or some gooey cinnamon confection called monkey bread (Melody’s favorite), and the conversation would often turn to life before kids, what it had been like to sleep late, fit into skinnier jeans, finish reading a book before so much time passed between chapters that you had to start from the beginning again, go to an office every day and order out lunch. “Sure I had to kiss a few asses,” one of the women said, “but I didn’t have to wipe any.”
“I was an important person!” Melody remembered another mother saying. “I managed people and budgets and got paid. Now look at me.” She’d gestured to the baby fastened to her breast. “I’m sitting here in the park, half naked, and I don’t even care who sees. And what’s worse is that nobody is even trying to look.” The woman detached her sleeping baby from her nipple and ran a soft finger over his pudgy cheek. “These breasts used to make things happen, you know? These breasts didn’t put anybody to sleep.”
Melody couldn’t help but stare a little at the prominent veins running beneath the woman’s fair skin, the darkened, engorged nipple. She’d tried to breast-feed the twins, had wanted to so badly, but had given up after six weeks, unable to get them on any kind of schedule and nearly out of her mind with lack of sleep. She watched the other mom hook her nursing bra closed and hoist the infant up on her shoulder, rhythmically thumping his back to elicit a burp. “I used to read three newspapers every morning. Three.” Her voice was softer now so as not to disturb the baby. “You know where I get all my news now? Fucking Oprah.” Her expression was rueful, but also resigned, her fingers making small circles on the baby’s back. “What can you do? This is temporary, right?”
Melody never knew how to join those conversations, so she didn’t. She’d sit and smile and try to nod knowingly, but what she would have said if she could have mustered the nerve was that before her daughters were born she was nothing. She was a secretary. A typist. Someone who blew off college because her father died the fall of her senior year of high school and her mother was checked out and Melody herself was paralyzed with confusion and grief. Not to mention her kind of shitty grades.
But then one day Walter sat next to her in their company cafeteria. He introduced himself and handed her a piece of chocolate cake, saying it was the last one and he’d grabbed it for her because he’d noticed she usually allowed herself a slice on Fridays. When Walt asked her out for pizza and a movie and only months later asked her to be his wife and only a year after that she became a mother to not one but two brilliantly beautiful baby girls? Well, that was something; then she became someone.
She leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe she could just doze for a minute or two. She thought about Nora’s coat and wondered if a new set of buttons would help. Something decorative—wooden or pewter or maybe a colorful glass button, emerald green maybe. She could do that, she could afford two sets of new buttons. Sometimes a small change could make all the difference.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After they saw Leo in the park, it took another three weeks for Nora to coerce Louisa out again and that was the day Simone spotted them leaving and asked if she could join. “I thought I saw you two skipping out of this particular ring of hell a few weeks ago,” she said, stopping on the front steps of the building to light a cigarette. “I live around here. Want to go to my apartment?”
In the weeks since then whenever they skipped class, Simone joined them and she’d completely taken over their weekly excursions. It was winter, and the only thing Louisa and Nora ever did now was go to the American Museum of Natural History because Simone had a family membership card and it was free or hang out at Simone’s apartment, which was always empty because both of her parents were attor
neys who almost always went into the office on Saturdays. Louisa was sick of it. She wasn’t only sick of the deceit—she was certain it was just a matter of time before they were caught and then what?—she was sick of Simone’s apartment and even sick of the museum, a place she used to love because it was one of their family’s special destinations, one of the few Melody-approved field trips into New York, and what had seemed gleaming and exotic all through their childhoods—rooms with sharks and dinosaurs and cases of gemstones; live butterflies!—had been dulled over the past few months, tainted with familiarity and guilt and boredom.
And then there was Simone—the beautiful African American girl who always sat in the front row and finished her work before everybody else and wandered the room offering help to those who wanted it. She was a junior in high school, too, and Louisa had overheard the instructor say that Simone could probably get a perfect SAT score without too much effort. “Probably,” Simone had said, shrugging. Something about her made Louisa nervous. She seemed so much older than they were. She supposed it was just that Simone had grown up in Manhattan and was braver, more sophisticated. And she was free with her opinions of Nora and Louisa in a way that was discomfiting.
Every Saturday, at the start of their outing, she’d appraise Nora and Louisa, looking them up and down and pronouncing judgment on each piece of clothing and accessory: no, yes, God no, no, no, that is actually nice, please don’t wear that again. When she laughed, she threw back her head and hooted a little and was so loud people turned to stare. She smoked. She applied bright orange lipstick without even looking in a mirror, flicking a pinkie into the cleft of her upper lip and the corners to be sure it was perfect.
“This is my signature color,” she’d told them, snapping the tube of lipstick shut and tucking it into her back pocket. “Black women can wear these shades. Don’t you two even think about it.” That day she’d had her long braids piled on top of her head in a coiled bun, adding inches to her already imposing height, elongating her face, which could be aloof or curious depending on her mood. She wore fitted tees made out of some kind of diaphanous cotton that left nothing above the waist to be curious about. Her bras, the kind with the molded cup designed to enhance cleavage, were brightly colored and lacy and clearly visible under everything she wore. Melody still shopped for most of Nora’s and Louisa’s clothing, buying them serviceable lingerie on sale that sometimes verged on cute—prints of puppies or handbags or seashells—but never veered toward sexy.
Occasionally Simone would point to something one of them was wearing and say, “That is adorable,” not meaning it as a compliment. As far as Louisa could decipher, adorable in Simone’s lexicon was a combination of stupid and tacky. Simone was also fiercely critical of everything that was—to use her favorite insult—popular, her bright orange mouth twisting the word into an insult. If Simone liked something, it was tight, which made no sense to Louisa. “Shouldn’t tight be negative?” she asked Nora. “As in uncomfortable, constrained, restricting. As in these old pants are tight?”
“Not everything’s an SAT word,” Nora said, in a drawl Louisa had never heard her employ before and which made her sound exactly like Simone. According to Simone, lots of the twins’ favorite songs or television shows or movies were popular. And just like that, things Nora and Louisa had enjoyed became tainted—at least for one of them.
LOUISA HAD BEEN SITTING on the linoleum floor in the museum with her sketch pad for almost an hour, and the leg bent beneath her had started to go numb. She stood awkwardly and tried to stomp the feeling back into her thigh and butt, which were tingling uncomfortably. She limped back and forth under the sign for the entrance to the small corridor where she’d been drawing: The Leonard C. Sanford Hall of North American Birds. She liked that part of the museum for a bunch of reasons. First, it was named after a Leonard and so was she, after the grandfather she’d never met (Nora was named after their father’s father, Norman). She liked that the hall wasn’t nearly as crowded as the more popular exhibits, the dinosaurs or the blue whale—on a weekend those rooms were nearly impossible to navigate, never mind finding a spot to sit in peace with her sketch pad. North American Birds was a dated, musty exhibit of field specimens tacked onto walls behind glass. It was more a corridor to pass through than a destination.
And she loved the bird specimens, even if they were old-fashioned and a little creepy. Her favorite case was the one displaying “Swallows, Flycatchers, and Larks” because the birds were in flight and almost looked alive. Her least favorite: “Herons, Ibises, and Swans,” because the large birds looked awkward and uncomfortable. Purely for vernacular, she loved the case she was sitting in front of now: “Wrens, Nuthatches, Creepers, Titmice, Mimic Thrushes, Jays, and Crows.” She wished she knew what a mimic thrush mimicked and whether titmice ate mice. She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.
But even in the relatively sparsely populated corridor, she was rarely left alone. People still constantly looked over her shoulder and asked questions about what she was drawing or why or, even worse, just stood watching in awkward silence. And the kids! Pestering her nonstop and asking if they could draw, too. Their parents were just as bad.
“Maybe if you ask nicely,” one mother had said to her son while Louisa was trying to sketch the larks in flight, right before her leg went numb, “this nice lady will share her paper and show you how to draw.”
“These aren’t for kids,” Louisa said, sharply, picking up her charcoal pencils and pastels from the floor.
“How come she won’t share?” the little boy whined.
“I don’t know, honey,” his mother said. “Not everyone is a good sharer like you.”
“Jesus,” Louisa said, slamming her pad shut. The mother threw her a dirty look and walked away. Louisa started to gather the sheets of paper on the floor around her. One wasn’t terrible. It was of a little boy who’d thrown a tantrum after his father wouldn’t buy him a stuffed seal in the gift shop. He’d flung himself to the ground and buried his head in his arms, shoulders heaving. Louisa had sketched him quickly and she’d managed to capture the bereft set of his shoulders, his legs swinging in frustration, how one of his hands reached out, fingers splayed, toward the door of the toy shop where his object of desire was cruelly out of reach.
“Seal-y! Seal-y!” the boy had wailed, his father finally having to carry him kicking and screaming into a nearby restroom.
The other drawings of people, quickly sketched as she watched visitors moving through the long halls, weren’t exactly embarrassing, but they weren’t great. She never got the proportion of features-to-face exactly right. The reason the little boy came out better, she knew, was because his face was concealed. She didn’t want to think about what it meant that she couldn’t draw eyes, the windows to the soul, the most important thing an artist had to master. It was not lost on her that all the birds in the Leonard C. Sanford Hall were eyeless, tiny bits of cotton inserted in their eye sockets.
“So are you going to art school?” Simone had asked once after Louisa let her look at some of her sketches.
“No,” Louisa said. She’d mentioned art school once and her mother had blanched. Art school, to Melody, was not really school.
“Why not?” Simone said.
“Because I want to get a good general education,” Louisa said, mimicking Melody’s words. “Art school is more like trade school.”
“What’s wrong with trade school?”
Louisa laughed nervously. She wasn’t sure if Simone was being serious or sarcastic.
“I mean it,” Simone said, still paging through Louisa’s drawings. “Medical school is trade school, so is law school.”
“But that’s graduate school, it’s different,” Nora said. Sometimes she thought Simone picked on Louisa a little.
“True,” Simone said, agreeably. “But if you love art and you want to draw or paint, why wouldn’t you go to a place where you can get better doing the thing you love?”
�
��Some of the schools we’ve looked at have excellent art programs,” Louisa said.
“How many have you looked at?”
“Fourteen,” Nora said.
Simone burst out laughing. “You’ve looked at fourteen colleges already?”
“It’s fun. We like it,” Louisa said. She knew she sounded defensive, and in truth she’d be happy to never look at another college again. “It’s good to be able to compare, so we know which ones are the right fit.”
Simone shook her head and snorted a little. “Wow. You all are seriously drinking the admissions Kool-Aid.” She plucked one of the drawings from the pile and handed it to Louisa; it was one of her favorites, a soft pastel of the front of the museum at dusk. She’d done it quickly and kept the rendering loose; the museum looked more like a mountain than a building, and the street beneath with its streaming cars resembled a rushing river of movement and color. “This is really beautiful,” Simone said, sounding more sincere than Louisa had ever heard her. “I know exactly what it is, it’s realistic in that way, but it’s also kind of abstract.” She turned the page vertically. “Look, it even works from this angle—the perspective, I mean.” Louisa was surprised and pleased to see she was right. Simone handed the drawing back to Louisa. “This is tight. Frame it. You should do more like that one. And you should really look at Pratt and Parsons. RISD, too. I’ll think of some more places for your list.”
The Nest Page 12
