Likes

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  As if not to be stopped, I became pregnant again, sooner than expected, and the apartment soon revealed itself as too expensive and too small, making the once unimaginable choice appear to us natural, attractive, inescapable, imminent: we moved to a house in the country. Our town is less than two hours away from the city by train; the backyards peter out into forests or fields; the houses are for the most part run-down, but with a lot of original detail, as the agent liked to say. A specialty food shop has bravely opened up, and there is a drive-in movie theater that still operates in the summer. At dusk, we flick the insects from our eyes and turn blankly to the wide, transparent sky, something like calm sliding over us.

  But the days can be long, which I remember from my first stay in the country, and I often catch myself calculating the hours and little activities until dusk falls and the train comes in and the babies are put to sleep. The stretch between the morning nap and the afternoon nap always has a particular endlessness to it. My children are just different enough in age to be impossible to entertain simultaneously; what mesmerizes one infuriates the other; their developmental stages appear mortally opposed. I shuttle between the two of them to neither’s satisfaction. Like a bad employee I tend to hang back and dawdle, taking longer than necessary in the bathroom, surreptitiously checking my email, drawn helplessly to any window to watch the smooth, indifferent functioning of the seductive world outside. There’s usually not that much to see. A couple of guys from the power company checking the lines, or the older husband and wife from down the road, walking in single file and not talking, intent on their exercise. The mailman, of course; or in our case, the mailwoman. More rarely, the brown UPS truck. But every once in a while I’ll look out the window and see someone who doesn’t belong there, like an overweight girl wearing enormous headphones and jogging miserably, or a woman dressed in city clothes who tramps along the side of the road with a faint frown on her face. I have no way of knowing who she is and where she’s off to, but she looks so unlikely out there among the gravel and the weeds, and so impractically dressed, that I briefly wonder if her car has broken down. I think to open the door and call out to her, asking if she needs help, if everything’s all right, but to do so seems altogether impossible, as impossible as one of those huge prehistoric fish half hibernating at the bottom of the tank knocking on the glass and mouthing hello! to a bright, quickly moving visitor on the other side. To our mutual embarrassment, though, she sees me, our eyes meet, and after automatically glancing away she looks back at me again and lifts her hand in a tentative wave. I wave back at her, electrified and sad. And then my daughter, in the far distance somewhere, lets out a long howl of frustration, and by the time I’ve gotten down on my hands and knees, rescued the wooden mixing spoon from under the stove, rinsed it off in hot water, hurried back to the window—the woman walking down the highway has already moved on, innocent of what waits for her, and passed out of sight.

  MANY A LITTLE MAKES

  Mickle. I hope I’m texting you at the right number. I tried sending you a message on FB but it seems you don’t go on there anymore. Good for you! I keep meaning to close down my account but then I see a photo of someone’s kid at a march and I get sucked in again. Speaking of which LOVED the video of Rose’s cello recital. I know it was from last year but literal tears when I saw it bc of listening to Bach suites with you when we couldn’t fall asleep remember?

  Rose is such a beautiful poised creative young woman and I just wish the kids could meet her they would love each other. They are all so big I can’t believe it. Life out here agrees with them but the bus can feel very small at times and especially when they’re fighting hahahaha. Bark beetles continue to decimate in nightmarish fashion but silver lining my study has been extended six months. Big hole in the canopy now sadly and so much more light coming through so collecting new data on red squirrels and snowshoe hares. Kids complain my hands always smell like peanut butter!!! I tell them not bad as far as occupational hazards go.

  Jon busy doing online portion of reiki certification and fingers crossed will get license when we go home next year. Strange to write that bc here has started to feel like home and I am tbh kind of dreading going back. Quite amazing the resources out there for people in our boat (hahaha BUS). Homeschooling community … wow! Impassioned. Kids are learning Japanese! They wrote a tanks about blue spruce I want to show your mother. TANKA sorry clearly phone doesn’t speak Japanese

  The texts arrived from a number Mari didn’t recognize. Even the area code was unknown to her, and it didn’t help that she thumbed through the messages backward, in reverse order. But there were only two people in the world who called her by that name, and Imogen’s various phone numbers (N.Y. cell, D.C. cell, office, home) were already saved in her contacts. So it had to be Bree.

  * * *

  In the sixth grade, on the subject of Bree, Mari’s mother had this to say: Three can get complicated. She was talking about the dynamics of female friendship, a topic that Mari did not relish discussing. In general she found her mother’s warnings reliably wrong but also impossible to forget, like shampoo slogans or the songs sung at camp. When, one Friday afternoon in November, she discovered herself lodged between Imogen and Bree in the back seat of a car heading swiftly to the mall, this earworm wriggled up to the surface and she thought at her mother: HA.

  They were fine.

  A thin stream of air flowed over them, and the radio played a song they knew most of the words to. Bree was saying that they should buy their tickets before they got food in case the movie sold out, and Imogen was saying that a dog waiting at the corner to cross looked a lot like a larger, fluffier version of her dog, Hamish. They all craned their heads to look at the dog. Mari could jump in at any moment with a funny or pointless comment if it occurred to her, but if it didn’t, she didn’t have to say anything at all.

  Imogen had befriended Mari at the beginning of second grade, back when Mari was the only new girl in the class. Years passed and then Bree arrived, along with an assortment of other sixth-grade girls. Out of all of them Imogen chose Bree, for reasons not obvious to Mari. Bree wore eyeglasses with tinted plastic arms that swooped downward in a secretarial way. She had short brown hair and the long, waistless torso of a dachshund. On the first day of school, she appeared in a teal sweatshirt violently spattered with paint, a top that Mrs. Schmidt said was jazzy. It looked store-bought, not homemade, like something she had saved up for.

  Bree took the trolley to school from a town called Revere with the help of a student transportation pass that hung from a lanyard around her neck, which she removed every morning and tucked carefully in her book bag as she was entering the building. In the locker room, Mari had overheard some girls pronouncing Revere as “Ruh-vee-ah” in order to amuse each other, and this was how she learned that Revere was an undesirable place, inhabited by locals who couldn’t tell how thick their accents were. But Bree didn’t say it that way; she spoke quickly and correctly and without any accent at all, participating in class with palpable happiness no matter what the subject was. She was “bright,” Mari saw early on, which was probably what made her interesting to Imogen. Any girl at their school was smart enough to be there, or at least well-organized, but not many of them, not even a few of them, had an air of intensity.

  To be clear, Bree wasn’t excessively studious or preoccupied with cerebral pursuits, and Imogen and Mari weren’t, either. They didn’t read Russian novels or follow current events or dismantle electronics to figure out how they worked. Together they circled the mall and talked about their teachers and occasionally stopped to go inside a store and touch things that they wanted to buy. They ate swirled frozen yogurt and then watched a blockbuster movie full of French kissing and shoot-outs. But if, for instance, the sight of a botanical rendering of lavender wrapped around a bar of soap should suddenly fill Mari with a rich, heady, Eleanor of Aquitaine feeling, and if later she went home and pulled off the cookbook shelf an illustrated guide to medieval herbs from
which she painstakingly copied out on little sheets of paper the properties and uses of yarrow, chamomile, mugwort, and horehound, and then dipped the sheets of paper in tea and dried them outside so as to make them look more like parchment, neither Imogen nor Bree would wonder at it. Not that they would ever do the same; they weren’t excited by herbs. It’s just that they would recognize, wordlessly, the impulse to do so.

  That’s what the three of them had in common. Otherwise, Mari and Bree were short while Imogen was tall. Imogen and Bree were white and Mari was Japanese. Bree lived in Revere and Imogen and Mari did not. Their differences were evenly distributed, yet when Mari glimpsed a reflection of them gliding past a department store’s plate-glass window, she saw with perfect clarity that Imogen belonged to another species altogether, like a wood elf among dwarves, or a human escorting hobbits. Her hair shone in the muted light pouring down through the atrium. Her shoulders were pulled back, and her neck was long. When she laughed, she opened her mouth wide and you could see practically every one of her straight, gleaming teeth. She didn’t have a single cavity. However sometimes her breath up close could smell a little bit sour, a detail you’d have to be her best friend to know, because to the rest of the world she was just a radiant creature passing by, laughing, her head floating well above the other two.

  * * *

  What did they talk about?

  “They’re making us do the mile-run next week.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Coach Bell.”

  “I love Coach Bell. I wish we had her more often.”

  “I can’t do it. I will die. I will collapse from exhaustion, and then they’ll try to revive me on the side of the field and realize I’m dead.”

  “What if we walk? Like speed walk? Or jog very slowly and then walk?”

  “Last year I tried that but Coach Boudreau threatened me and said she’d make me do the whole mile over again if I didn’t start moving.”

  “‘Moving with a greater sense of urgency.’”

  “That’s why you guys always say that?”

  “She got the second-fastest time in the grade. And she had a cold.”

  “Shannon was so much faster than me, it wasn’t even close.”

  “I don’t like being timed. It makes me feel like a racehorse.”

  “I’m more like a cow. Cows move at their own pace.”

  “We should tell them we’re cows and that running is not in our nature.”

  “Running for a mile. That’s dangerous for a cow.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re not cows. You’re more graceful than cows.”

  And so on.

  * * *

  Mari hadn’t had a new friend in so long that she had almost forgotten what it was like to go to someone’s house for the first time, the inevitable shock to the senses. The smell most of all, not unpleasant but unfamiliar. The school year was nearly finished before Bree invited them over, and it turned out that she lived on the right side of a graying clapboard house that had an identical left side where a different family lived. A flight of concrete stairs rose from the sidewalk, and at its top was a shallow concrete porch, and there on either side stood two front doors, exactly symmetrical even down to their storm-door handles, which meant that one door opened up to the left and the other one to the right. Squashed behind the storm door on the left was a scarecrow holding a sign that said WELCOME in autumn colors. “We don’t talk to them anymore,” Bree whispered as she extracted her lanyard, which in addition to her trolley pass held her house keys. “Long story.”

  She opened the door and out leapt the smell of her house, indefinable but strong, a little reminiscent of chicken noodle soup in a can. Soon enough it went away. Bree had cable TV, tropical fish, and a toilet lid covered in burgundy carpet. The three of them bargained over which channel they would watch, and somehow it felt easier to be flexible and magnanimous when more than one other party was involved in the negotiations. As they were eating cereal and watching music videos, Bree’s mother appeared, holding her younger sister by the hand, and while Bree’s mother looked about the right age for Bevin, who was four, she didn’t look like she belonged to Bree, despite having a lot of the same soft, unformed features. With her ponytail and scuffed-up sneakers, she looked more like a big sister, like the eldest in a family of sisters fending for themselves after their parents had died in a tragic car accident. Or maybe Mari’s and Imogen’s parents were simply old. Mari couldn’t recall seeing any of them wearing tennis shoes while not playing tennis. “Make yourself at home, girls,” Bree’s mother said to them with strange formality, and ushered Bevin upstairs for a bath.

  Darkness fell, and Bree suggested baking a cake. She made it sound like the idea had only just occurred to her, but in the kitchen she pulled out the bowl and the hand mixer and the measuring cups and the cake mix from a single cabinet, all ready to go, and Mari filled suddenly with so much tenderness that her eyes watered. The mix was Duncan Hines and the flavor was, mysteriously, “yellow.” At Mari’s house, what passed for cake was a nearly flavorless sponge that her mother bought at the Japanese bakery and then urged guests to try, assuring them that it was “very light” and “not too sweet.” When Bree dumped the yellow mix into the bowl, it sent up a mushroom cloud of synthetic sugariness that caused Mari to choke. Imogen was perched on the counter and slicing a plastic spatula through the air, as if felling enemies. She didn’t try to contribute anything. She looked on good-naturedly as Mari and Bree followed the box’s directions, and once the cake pans, trembling with batter, were slid into the oven, she held out her arms to receive the empty mixing bowl.

  “Oh nice,” she said. “You left a lot on the sides.” Without hesitating she sank her spatula into the bowl, circled it around, lifted it back up, and inserted its entire drippy width into her mouth. It came out clean. “Share,” Bree said. Imogen scraped the bowl again and Mari watched the slathered spatula head disappear inside Bree’s open mouth.

  The third time Imogen dipped into the bowl, she presented the mouthful of batter to Mari.

  “No thanks,” Mari said lightly, and drew back from the spatula. She deliberately did not say what she wanted to say, what was foremost in her mind, what was exactly the thing her mother had spoken ominously of: salmonella. Because her mother was usually wrong. Her mother, for instance, had assumed that just because Bree was eight years older than her sister there had to be “different fathers,” as she put it. Something about the tactful tone she used made Mari want to strangle her. “It’s the same dad,” Mari had announced in a clipped voice, “and don’t worry, him and her mom are married. And yes, she will be at home the whole time we’re there.”

  “He and her mom,” her own mother had answered, at which point Mari had covered her ears and let out a moan.

  Yet three large eggs had plopped glisteningly into that batter, three large raw eggs probably teeming with bacteria, and just the sight of its yellowness slicking the spatula was making Mari feel queasy. That, and the sickly sweet smell. And the buzzy fluorescent lights in Bree’s kitchen. And all the saliva being passed around freely.

  By now her friends were looking at each other and smiling. They’d seen right through her airy demurral. Panther-like, Imogen hopped down from the counter while Bree closed in on Mari from the other side.

  “Just try some,” Imogen murmured. “You’ll like it.”

  She handed the spatula off to Bree but held on to the bowl, dragging the length of her finger along its interior and then extracting it, coated. She slid the finger into her mouth.

  “It’s the best part.” Bree swam the spatula closer to Mari’s face. “Trust us. It’s delicious.”

  “I don’t want to,” Mari said from under the collar of her T-shirt, which she’d pulled up over her nose.

  “Just a little,” Imogen said. “Just a little tiny taste.” Bree stuck out her tongue and delicately pressed the spatula to its tip. “See?” Imogen continued. “It’ll be that tiny. You’ll barely taste it.�
��

  Mouth ajar, Bree darted her tongue in and out, in and out, in and out, very fast. Where did she learn to do that? It looked disturbing, like in a Prince kind of way. The yellow droplet sat at the end of her flickering tongue. Mari twisted her head aside.

  “You’re pressuring me.” Her voice was muffled beneath the T-shirt. “I don’t like eating batter or being pressured or throwing up all night and getting hospitalized.”