“Actually,” Zoë said, “we’re moving out of the city.” As if in response, a car from ten flights below gave a loud honk of its horn.
“Westchester? I have a girlfriend who just moved to Pound Ridge.”
“A bit farther than that. My daughter’s just been accepted to a wonderful school in Dutchess County.”
“Ah.” Susan looked blank. “Where is that?”
“Two hours from the city.”
“What’s the name of the town?”
“Arcadia.”
“I’ve never heard of it. So, let me get this straight. You’re moving out of Manhattan just to send your daughter to school in a small town?”
Zoë sighed. Clearly the woman was concerned that there might be some new educational trend she should know about. “There’s one school in particular,” she said. “It’s one of the best places in the country for students with dyslexia. And since I didn’t realize that Maya required specialized teaching until the academic year had already started, it was the only place that had room for her right away.”
“Oh,” Susan said, visibly discomfited. “I see. Well, it sounds like you’re doing the right thing. Personally, I could never leave the city. I’d just go insane out in the boondocks.”
Zoë, who feared that very outcome, tried to look unfazed. “Well, in our case, it’s just for a year, so that Maya can get caught up.” The head of admissions had said a year at Mackinley would make a huge difference in Maya’s reading and writing, and had shown Zoë the marked improvements that other students had made in just a few months. Of course, there were no guarantees, but Zoë figured that Maya’s dyslexia was mild enough that all she needed was a little extra assistance to get her back on track.
Susan looked puzzled. “I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot here, but why are you selling your apartment if you’re only making a short-term move?”
Zoë felt herself flush. “Our co-op board is extremely strict about subletting.” She left out the fact that the current president of the board was a high-powered lawyer who was slowly replacing all the old, middle-income tenants with other rich lawyers and Wall Street types.
It didn’t matter, really. Some people said the real estate market was peaking, and that it was better to sell now and buy later.
“So, let me get this straight,” Susan began, when something seemed to catch her eye. “Hey, um, what’s all that smoke out there?”
Zoë looked out the window in the direction Susan was pointing. “Oh, that’s the chimney of the apartment building next to us.”
“Does it do that a lot?”
“Only when they’re running the incinerator. As long as the smoke’s white, it’s okay, but when it burns black we call the local fire station and they send someone over to yell at the other building’s super.”
Susan looked appalled. “How long has this been going on?”
Zoë shrugged. “As long as I’ve lived here.”
“It shouldn’t be. You should complain to the Environmental Protection Agency. I mean, that stuff probably contains all kinds of toxins.”
“That’s the downside to living in the city, I guess.”
“I’d just worry about an infant breathing that in all day. You know, at this stage, babies are very sensitive to chemicals.” At that moment, the baby began to fuss, kicking her soft legs and squirming against her restraints. “Hush, honey, we’re going to go right now.”
The baby’s face contorted, and she began to cry.
“Listen,” Zoë said, “if you have any more questions…”
“Oh, no, I’ve taken up enough of your time.” There was a definite chill in her voice.
Zoë followed them out of her bedroom. She felt like saying “That smoke was not the cause of my daughter’s dyslexia,” but she restrained herself. After all, she’d been in this woman’s shoes once. When you had an infant, the weight of all that new responsibility gave you the mistaken impression that every single choice you made had a profound impact. So you fretted over the mobile you hung over the crib, the television shows you did or didn’t turn on, the bedtime stories you read aloud each night, the organic foods you prepared. You deluded yourself that if you did everything correctly, made the best choices, timed it so you hit each developmental phase just right, then your baby would rise to her fullest potential.
At this stage of the game, nobody wanted to accept that so much of your child’s destiny remained beyond your control.
The other woman’s Maya was red-faced and screaming now, jerking her knees up to her belly. Zoë opened the front door for them. “You might just try taking her out of there,” she said.
“Thank you, I think I know how to handle my child.”
Just throw up your hands and back away, Zoë instructed herself as she went into the kitchen to help herself to some long overdue coffee. Claudius, her massive Maine coon cat, was curled up around the warm pot.
“Come on, fatso, move it over.” Claudius blinked his green eyes at her, his pupils narrowing to vertical slits in the sunlight. Zoë scratched him under his chin and then counted out scoops of ground roast, trying to ignore the baby’s hiccuping sobs. God, these walls were thin. Through the back door, Zoë could hear the woman yelling at someone, presumably on her cell phone. “No, absolutely not. I looked out the window and saw a chimney belching smoke.”
Zoë took the milk out of the refrigerator, wishing that both the elevator and the coffee machine would hurry up. Even though she already had a pretty good idea of what Susan thought of her apartment, she had no desire to hear it spelled out.
“Yes, there was good light and a lot of space, but the place is basically a wreck. It would need at least six months’ work to be even close to livable.”
Why was the woman speaking so loudly? Did she want Zoë to hear what she was saying? A sudden, unpleasant thought occurred: Was she as audible to people in the hall as they were to her?
In the back of her mind, she’d always been dimly aware of the acoustics of her place, but still, there were times she’d forgotten to be quiet. Like the other week, when she’d had a screaming match over the phone with her mother. And that weekend last spring, when she and Jeremy had found themselves alone in the house and had gone a little wild with the chocolate syrup. How was it that she’d never let herself realize how exposed she was?
Outside in the hall, Susan had not finished complaining. “And I’m also sure there was some kind of a leak in the—oh, crud. I forgot Maya’s diaper bag in there.”
Zoë went back to her bedroom, retrieved the bag, and handed it out the door just as Susan rang her bell.
“Oh! Aren’t you a mind reader,” Susan said, overdoing the charm a bit. “I was just going to ask you for that.”
Zoë smiled thinly as she shut the door. These were the mental accommodations you make in order to live in the city, she thought. A little selective deafness in the kitchen, a touch of polite amnesia in the elevator, the pretense that the people living next to you and above you and beneath you aren’t privy to your secrets. Without at least the illusion of privacy, how could hundreds of strangers coexist stacked one on top of the other?
That was one of the side effects of leaving a place: you got to see it from a different perspective.
Two
O kay,” said Mack, using his most reasonable, patient, first-responder voice. “Let’s slow down and figure this out.” He put his palms out, as if he were approaching a belligerent drunk at the scene of an accident. Jessica said, “Fuck you,” and threw another egg at his head. It cracked on his bare chest; Jess had always been a lousy pitcher, even in high school.
“Come on, Jess,” he said, looking at his girlfriend’s flushed, tear-streaked face. “What’s this all about?” He gestured at the mess of flour and egg on the kitchen counter. “You want to make me pancakes, go ahead. I’m not stopping you.”
She shook her head, looking exasperated. “Jesus, Mack, even you can’t be that stupid.”
“Are you
kidding? Of course I can.” And he must have been stupid, because he couldn’t get what had set Jess off. He’d let it slip that today was his thirty-first birthday, and she’d said she’d make him pancakes. He’d said he wasn’t really that hungry yet, and then she’d gone off on a tear about why hadn’t he said anything, she felt so bad she hadn’t bought him a gift like a sweater or a watch, and then she’d gotten upset because she had to work tonight. And he’d said that was okay with him, he didn’t need a sweater, his old watch worked fine, and he figured birthdays were for kids.
That was when Jess had thrown the egg at him.
“Jessica,” he said, grabbing a kitchen towel and wiping the egg off his chest, “just tell me what it is I’ve done wrong.”
She looked at him as if she’d just discovered he’d been hiding an extra head. “What the hell am I to you? A pal? Someone to hang out with? Someone to fuck?”
Going by the tone of her voice, the correct answer was no, but Mack couldn’t for the life of him understand why. What was better than an old pal to hang out with, unless it was a pal you wanted to fuck? “You’re more than that,” he offered.
“Am I? Do you love me? Can you honestly say that you love me?”
“Sure, I do,” said Mack, meaning it.
Jess ran her hands over her face. “Oh, please. Admit it. I’m just convenient.” She took a deep breath and lifted her head, and Mack was struck again by how pretty she was. Unlike him, she looked almost exactly the same as when they’d graduated Amimi High fourteen years earlier. It wasn’t just that she was still slender and blond, it was something in her face that was still girlish, something expectant and hungry. He was damn lucky to have caught her right after her divorce from Jed Miller, before someone else snatched her up.
“I do love you,” he said, stepping in closer, putting his hand on her shoulder.
She looked up at him, blue eyes brimming with more tears. “But you never say it.”
Mack shrugged. “I’m a guy.” He smiled, trying to make a joke of it.
“Okay, fine, but you don’t act like you love me. You don’t tell me it’s your birthday. You don’t want me to give you anything.”
“I don’t need anything.”
“What, are you joking? You don’t have anything in your closet except jeans and black T-shirts. You own exactly one pair of hiking boots that look like they belonged to your grandfather. And I know for a fact that the one sheet you own did belong to your grandmother, because it has these seventies-style pink flowers on it. Jesus Christ, Mack, you don’t even own a CD player.”
Mack shrugged, which made his jeans slip down past his hip bones: without the structure of army life, he’d been losing weight again. “I don’t care about any of that. I have all the really important stuff.” He had his own apartment over his sister’s horse barn. He had a secondhand ’95 black Ford pickup truck as reliable as a bloodhound. He had a job in town as a driving instructor, which didn’t pay much, but it also didn’t take up too much time. He had his part-time work as a volunteer firefighter and EMT, which made him feel like he wasn’t just taking up space. He had all his limbs. He had Jess.
Out loud, he said, “I have you.”
“You have me. That sounds good, but what does it really mean? We never make plans to go anywhere. You call me when I’m about to get off work, like it’s only just occurred to you that you might want to see me. You never ask me anything about anything that’s happened to me since I graduated high school, and you never want to know about what I want in the future.”
“Aw, Jess,” he said, and tried to put his arms around her. She batted his hands away.
“Oh, no, no, no. I am not going to fall for that. For three months I’ve taken whatever you’ve been willing to give, but that’s my limit. It can’t just be hanging out and sex.” Jess looked up at him, her eyes bright but clear, as if she’d cried herself out. “I want to know if you see a future for us.” Shit, thought Mack, how had they gotten into this?
He and Jess had started seeing each other in May, after running into each other at the Stewart’s shop a few times. He’d noticed her right away, even standing behind the counter, wearing the convenience store uniform, a shapeless maroon polyester shirt and matching baseball cap. He read her name off her shirt, pretending he remembered it. She told him she’d moved back home recently, and that she’d gotten divorced. He started buying more milk and ice cream when he was gassing up the truck. Like him, Jess was having trouble figuring out what to do at night. Everyone in their old crowd was married and had kids and farms and struggling businesses to keep them busy. He hadn’t known Jess that well in high school—she’d been in the band, and he’d spent all his spare time working in Mickey’s auto repair shop—but it turned out she’d had a crush. On their first date, he got diarrhea of the mouth and started telling her all about the army, how he joined to get advanced mechanical training, but had somehow gotten placed in the infantry, which turned out all right, because he was good at being a soldier, not that it took a lot in those days to be considered good. God, he’d even boasted about qualifying for Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, liking how Jess’s eyes got wide when he told her about the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course.
And it had worked—she’d had sex with him that first night, in the back of the car, both of them knowing how silly it was to be acting like they were still in high school. At least Mack had known it was silly. On second thought, he wasn’t really sure what Jess had thought, since she’d looked surprised when he showed up at her folks’ house two days later. She didn’t talk much about her failed marriage, but Mack suspected that she had her own war to get over.
“Jessie, I don’t know what you want me to say.” She looked pale and strangely blank, and for one bad moment, Mack saw what she would look like dead. Medic vision, Adam had called it.
“Well, I guess that answers my question.” Shit, there had been a question? Mack tried to recall what it was as Jess sank down into a chair, her head in her hands. Her long, bare legs distracted him for a moment, but then he got his focus back. This was turning into a breakup argument, and he didn’t want to break up with Jess.
“I don’t want us to break up,” he said, in case it helped anything.
She frowned at him. “So what’s your plan? We just carry on like this forever?”
Mack rubbed his neck. “Jeez, I don’t know. I can barely figure out next week, and you’re asking me about forever.” He thought about his sister’s husband, Bill, who had first appeared to be a big, gruff, gentle man, but now radiated a constant, low-level hum of irritation. The way Mack saw it, he’d already signed away a good chunk of his life to the army, and it had taken him some places he hadn’t wanted to go. He wasn’t about to commit himself to anything else that had the potential to turn nasty.
Jess leaned forward, giving him her compassionate, concerned nursey look. “Is this because of the war?”
Now, that was a good out. Yes, he could say, looking all haunted. She’d buy that. He could probably even get away with acting like a total asshole from time to time. Except that in a way it was true, and if he used it like that, it would be like holding out a stump and saying, Look, look, I was wounded in the war, here’s my excuse for being a bum.
Mack looked out the window and saw that the old maple was already beginning to change color. He realized it was going to be deer season soon, and wondered if he’d go hunting this year. He tried to imagine carrying a gun again, wearing camouflage. It didn’t fill him with joy.
He heard Jess come up behind him. She put her arms around his waist and rested her head on his back. “I’d love to know what’s going through your mind right this minute.”
“Nothing.” She’d serve him his ass if he admitted that his mind had wandered to hunting.
“It can’t be nothing.”
Mack stepped out of Jess’s embrace, wondering if there was some way to get out of this whole conversation. He noticed that the coffeepot was full.
“Hey, is that fresh?”
Jess walked over to the counter, ignoring the congealing pancake batter, and poured him a cup of coffee. “I wish you’d take a chance on opening up to me.” She handed him the cup. “You know, it’s something I’m good at. Listening.”
Mack took the cup from her. “I guess I’m just not much of a talker.” Unlike Adam, who’d turned everything into a stand-up routine. He took a sip of coffee. It tasted burned and bitter.
“I’m not asking you to entertain me. I want to know what you went through.”
“I don’t know how to tell it, Jess. When I talk about it, it sounds fake.” Mack kept his voice neutral, but knew damn well what she really wanted. She wanted the story, something big and personal and awful and tragic. But Mack didn’t have a story, he had a bunch of fucked-up memories, and a few funny ones. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure which were which. And it wasn’t like talking about Iraq was going to make any kind of sense to Jess, anyway.
Mack walked over to the sink with his cup and poured the coffee down the drain, then stood for a moment looking out the window. A wasp buzzed, caught between two panes of glass. There was an old cobweb there, too, with a couple of ladybugs caught in it, but no sign of the spider.
“Jesus, Mack, what do you want me to do? Never ask you anything at all?”
Mack rubbed his head. His scalp felt tight, which meant he had a headache coming. What he wanted, really wanted, was to get back into bed with Jess, naked, and climb inside her body. Even if it made his head hurt worse. There was a bad kind of tension in him, and he couldn’t think of another way to get rid of it.
He looked out the window, imagining it. He imagined the pancakes, too. Suddenly he wanted them. He wanted that fake maple syrup, too, the kind he’d had as a kid, that tasted twice as sweet as the real stuff.
Flirting In Cars Page 2
