by Monica Wood
She did not plan to feel overlooked and outclassed. But there it was. More than half the guests drifted out the door without so much as catching Cindy’s name.
Then: “I’ve got something fun,” Ann Pratt said, getting up and carrying her wine into the den. Her husband, following her, rolled his eyes and said, “She’s hooked on that infernal game,” and the remaining guests, following Don, said, “What game?” except for Cindy, who noticed, with the relief of a drowning victim, a flame-orange box floating on the glass top of Ann and Don Pratt’s coffee table. The box housed two stacks of four-inch-square cards containing riddles, conundrums, word puzzles, twisters of every stripe. “MindMelt,” Cindy said, pretending to read the box. “Huh.”
“Boys against girls,” Ann gushed, moving people into chairs.
“This is so Ann,” Bruce whispered into Cindy’s ear. “You want to go?”
“No,” Cindy said. “I want to stay.” Bruce looked nervous. She wondered whether he feared his own humiliation, or hers; either way it endeared him to her.
Parke-or-Barnes selected a card and read: “Question: If your house is freezing and you have a kerosene lamp, six candles, and a coal stove, what should you light first?”
Ann, Marina, and the Fellow conferred frantically.
“Time!” the men shouted.
Cindy said quietly, “A match.” Everyone looked at her. She shrugged prettily. “You light a match.”
There was a pause. Oh, for God’s sake, the women groaned, how could we have missed it, it was so obvious, so easy, hooray for Cindy!
Bruce looked at her. She snapped her eyes away, possessed of a secret.
The ladies kept their turn.
Don read this time: “Question: How did the hiker get killed by the pack on his back?”
Cindy sat by as the women mulled some ridiculous possibilities. “It’s a trick question,” Ann fretted.
The men were laughing. Bruce was laughing, too, and for a moment, as he leaned back in Don Pratt’s tapestried love seat, one leg crossing over the other, he looked exactly, exactly like Don Pratt, until he caught Cindy looking at him and shifted position, his elbows crashing down on his knees, wineglass gripped like a beer mug between his hands.
Don flipped the card over, snorted, and said, “They’ll never get it.”
But Cindy knew the answer. She knew all the answers, and felt a penetrating jolt of gratitude toward her ex-husband. As a couple they had suffered a string of disappointments both vague and obvious, odd eruptions of mutual blaming, and finally a long, difficult parting. She was glad for all of it now. Danny’s family—a chummy band of millworkers and their kids—had played endless rounds of MindMelt on Friday nights, teams arranged and rearranged, running tallies posted in all the kitchens. Once they’d exhausted all five hundred cards, they transformed it from a game of knowledge to a game of memory.
And thank God, Cindy thought. Thank God for those Friday nights.
“It’s not a backpack,” she said. “It’s a pack of wolves.”
“By gum, she’s right again,” Don said, just like a professor in a play. He grabbed another card: “How far can a dog run into the Lincoln Tunnel?”
Ann frowned. “What kind of question is that?”
“Halfway,” Cindy offered calmly. “After that, the dog would be running out of the Lincoln Tunnel.”
The women gaped at her. The men were beginning to sulk.
On the next few questions Cindy allowed her teammates a few foolish guesses, and then she didn’t, spitting out the right answers like that, like that, like that, until Bruce turned square around, bestowing upon her his full and frank attention.
Surprise, she said with her eyes. I’m good at games.
If all had gone well in the three years after the wedding, if she had set out on the stimulating trail she’d imagined on that first day, Cindy might have carved out a moment in which to confess the tiny fraud she’d perpetrated at the home of Don and Ann Pratt. But Bruce was not above a little fraud of his own, as it turned out. He had nothing saved. He had not sold a piece in five years. He had yet to get tenure. She found a note to a female student that could be taken more than one way. She saw another move in his future, another divorce in hers. This knowledge muted the days, but she had children to think of now: a girl named Francine who regarded her as if she’d floated in on Glinda the Good Witch’s bubble, and Francine’s older brother, Kenny, whom Cindy believed would just as soon have dropped a house on her.
She spent her happiest hours at the shop with Francine, who joined her after school, stocking the cooler and recording invoices while Cindy manned the counter. Cindy was teaching Francine to arrange poinsettia baskets when the call came. It was Bruce, with an invitation from Ann and Don Pratt.
“Remember that stupid game?” he said. “Mindsweeper or something? The new version’s out and they’re looking for a rematch.” He laughed. “Couple against couple, Ann says. This is war, baby.”
Cindy smiled. These intermittent moments she called intimacy felt like a series of dots that might still connect into a picture that made sense. He took a noisy sip of something: she pictured him in his small office adjacent to the art studios, drinking coffee. Who else was there? Who else waiting? “Shouldn’t we let them win?” she asked hopefully.
Something in the air hovered disagreeably; Don Pratt was on Bruce’s tenure review committee. “Fuck, no,” Bruce said. “We bury the bastards.” She could hear an arty-sounding commotion in the background, easels being put up or taken down. “I need you, babe. I need my girl with the answers.”
But Cindy was out of answers. She hung up and glanced around the shop. “Francine,” she said, “do you think you could hold the fort? I have to run out for a minute.”
Francine—a myopic, unlovely eighth-grader—brightened, her hand on the phone. “If a really big order comes in, can I take it?”
Cindy shrugged on her parka and swung her purse from a hook. “You can sell the place if you get a good enough offer.”
“I’d never do that,” Francine said, shocked. Then: “Oh. A joke.”
Cindy sighed. Francine, who was whip-smart and better than any of the part-timers Cindy had hired and fired over the years, had been born with absolutely no sense of irony. Her adoration, guileless and unconditional, made Cindy feel too powerful most of the time, an irony she could barely stand to contemplate.
Two hours later, after panicking through Woolworth’s, Flint’s, Rite-Aid, and the strip mall on Libby Road, Cindy pulled back in front of her shop empty-handed. As she sat in the cold car considering her options—there had to be a MindMelt II somewhere in this town, there had to be—she spotted her ex-husband, Danny Little, coming down the sidewalk with a yellow dog.
She felt extravagantly glad to see him, someone who had known her before she’d been granted the wish of a different life. “You got a dog,” she said, getting out of the car.
“Your replacement,” he said, not bitterly. “How’s life on College Row?”
“We never moved.” She lifted her chin toward the shop. “You should stop in once in a while, you’d know these things.” Since the divorce, Danny and his entire family had managed to avoid her altogether.
“I’m not much in the market for flowers,” he said.
“Nobody is,” she admitted. The mill had been on strike for ten months now. She’d seen Danny on television the night before, caught on the slushy picket line with his face scrunched up like a tin can, wielding a crowbar and spitting onto the greasy window of a pickup during shift change.
“I saw the news,” she said softly. “Dan, I barely recognized you.”
His eyes flickered. “You’re not the only one.” Now he held her gaze. “Timmy crossed.”
Timmy was the youngest of all those brothers, his favorite. “Crossed?” Cindy said, half-comprehending. “You mean the picket line?”
Danny nodded, his face puffy with grief. She found that she could still read him like a wife: he had given his
brother up.
“Danny, I don’t believe you.” She was of the opinion that love made exceptions to life’s most exacting rules. He looked haggard and old, and perhaps she alone was able to understand how much this breach had cost him. Thick as thieves, she used to think of them, thick as thieves, the flypaper family.
Cindy scanned the weathering town, its snowy hills gone ash-colored in the overcast afternoon. “Maybe it will end soon.” She imagined herself as a striker’s wife, collecting cans for the food bank.
“Is that your stepdaughter?” Danny asked.
Cindy nodded. Francine was waving mightily from the display window, where she was lining up the flower baskets, placing them into military rows. Her big sweatshirt read SCABS OUT! UNION IN!
“I’ve seen her down at the union hall,” Danny said.
“She’s been volunteering,” Cindy told him. Francine was tapping on the glass now, gesturing toward a display that Cindy would have to do over. After Cindy gave the thumbs-up, Francine climbed out of the window, lowering one lumbery leg at a time. Embarrassed, Cindy glanced away. “She was four when their mother left,” Cindy sighed. “She follows me like a dog.”
“Seems like a nice kid.”
“She is,” Cindy said. “Smart, too. Scary-smart. She’s designing my Web site.”
“You mean on the Internet?”
Cindy smiled wearily. “She’s planning to make me rich.”
He was looking at her as if to say, You’re trusting a kid with your future? Which was a good point, an excellent point, but she’d hitched her wagon to dimmer stars than this.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about Tim.”
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s gone now, anyway. Off to parts unknown. I thought you’d want to know.” He bent to adjust something on the dog’s collar. It was a sweet dog, well-mannered. We should have had a dog, she thought.
“Anyway,” Danny said. “I’m glad you finally got the kids you wanted.”
“They’re not the kids I wanted,” Cindy said. In a rush of regret and nostalgia, she blundered toward her former husband and his arms came around her. They stood that way for a very long moment, long enough so that she began to remember what it was like to be held by him before they’d been worn apart by their respective sorrows.
Francine was watching, of course, but Cindy didn’t mind. Her stepdaughter had been observing this town like a historian for months now, and she seemed to understand better than Cindy that all the rules of protocol had changed. Francine had once witnessed two women—one a striker, one a strikebreaker’s wife—leap out of their cars to slap each other’s face, then reported it to Cindy with the composure of a war correspondent.
Danny’s dog began to tug on its leash. Cindy blurted, “Remember that game?” and before she knew what she was doing she had confessed her three-year-old con. Danny chuckled a little, shaking his head. His old face flashed out from the blotched, grieving one, and she was glad she had told him just for that, for a two-second glimpse of her old life.
“Oh, God, Danny,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.” Their breath mingled in tiny, cold clouds.
“Especially not your family, Danny. Really.” She stopped. “Listen, you don’t, you don’t happen to have a copy of the new MindMelt that I could borrow?”
He looked at her. “We don’t play anymore. Cindy, we don’t even talk.”
There had been a time when the Littles’ not talking would have been her dearest wish. But now she retreated into her shop, aware of Francine’s appraising eyes. Danny’s family, so fastened by blood and history, had been in love with themselves as a unit, a secret club, a gravitational force. If a family like that could collapse at this late stage, then what hope was there for hers?
That night’s supper was a typical one in the Love household: Kenny gulping his food, holding his plate away from the table as if the lot of them had rabies; Bruce making painful small talk with Francine about her day at school; Cindy turning out radish curls that nobody noticed except Francine, who noticed everything.
“Wasn’t that your ex-husband today?” Kenny asked.
Bruce looked up. Then Francine.
“I was coming out of the VideoMart,” Kenny explained, the soul of innocence. “Looked like a deep conversation.”
“He’s having a bad time,” Cindy said evenly. She nibbled at a glazed carrot, having learned early on to give Kenny’s assaults more room than they required. “I’ve actually thought about sending him flowers, but I wouldn’t want him to take it the wrong way.”
“What other way is there to take it?” Bruce said.
Francine stopped chewing. “I can think of at least twelve.”
But Bruce was getting up, acting the wounded husband, an act that Cindy recognized as the righteous indignation of a sinner. She caught a glimpse of his face as he turned from the table, his eyes fixed in the middle distance, where the student he was screwing floated hotly, half in and half out of her paint-smattered shirt, her pinkish breasts turned up and asking.
Kenny pushed his plate back. “You’re a sculptor, Dad,” he said, switching to his true target, his voice well aimed and soft with condescension. “Cindy dumped the guy for you. What’s to worry?”
“You’ve got your facts out of order, Kenny,” Cindy said, mortified. Was this what everybody thought? Was this what Danny thought?
“Kenny always has his facts out of order,” Bruce said, turning around. “Which is just the damnedest thing for a kid who knows everything.”
Kenny scraped his chair back—a hard scrape that changed the tenor of the room. “Then let’s do it, Dad,” he said, staring his father down. “Let’s put the facts in order. What do you say, Dad? Want to put the facts in order?”
Cindy held her breath, sensing a plate-rattling showdown in the works, a bad one, a naming of names, a litany of things Kenny knew about his father that Cindy did not want Francine to hear. But Bruce apparently had other plans. Before Kenny could wind himself up another notch, Bruce had slammed out the door and his car was spitting up ice as he screeched into the street. Kenny slipped into his room, eerily wordless, leaving Francine and Cindy and a glory of leftovers.
Cindy remained where she was, Francine silent across from her, until the sound of Bruce’s car faded far around the corner. She waited for the air to settle, for the kitchen clock to take over the management of time. Then she took up her fork, and Francine did likewise. They finished eating.
“I like what you put on the carrots,” Francine said.
Cindy thanked her. Then: “I didn’t leave one man for another, Francine. I would never do that.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” Francine said solemnly. “Kenny’s a jerk.” She took up some plates and put them in the sink. “You want to see what I’m working on?”
Cindy followed Francine to her room. This is what her evenings came to. She sat patiently, the way she had so many times since she had become Francine’s default mother. Bruce’s first wife had moved to London and showed no signs of ever coming back. The photograph on Francine’s desk hadn’t been updated in years, so it was impossible to know what she looked like now, but Cindy felt a profound, unwanted kinship with this woman who knew what it was like to be Mrs. Bruce Love: that peculiar loneliness, the kind that intensified the nearer he got.
“Watch this,” Francine said, presenting a scanned image of Cindy on the computer screen. The image startled her. She looked like a movie star holding flowers so vivid you wanted to eat them. A little flutter happened inside her, a feeling like, God help her, a bud opening. She thought, I’d buy flowers from her. I’d buy anything from her.
“How’d you do that?” Cindy asked.
Francine grinned. “Magic.”
From downstairs came the sound of Kenny slamming out of the house, then the more distant rrr-rrr-rrr of Cindy’s car struggling to start in the cold.
“He didn’t even ask you,” Francine said. “I don’t like him anymore.
” Finally the engine turned over, and Cindy relaxed.
“When I was little he used to ride me around on his handlebars,” Francine said. “I was his favorite little kid of all time.”
Cindy did not know how to answer this.
Francine shook her head—gravely, as if presiding over a death. Cindy thought something might be wrong with the computer, until Francine blurted, “He’s leaving. I know it.”
Cindy touched Francine’s hair, which was coarse and old-feeling. “Well, he’ll graduate soon,” she said.
“No,” Francine muttered. “That’s not what I meant. He’s already gone, really.” She hunched over the keyboard, blinking hard, clicking here and there. “A lady came into the shop today while you were out,” she said. “She wanted two dozen roses with the buds cut off. Just the sticks, that’s all. She wanted to send her brother a big bunch of thorny dead sticks.” She stared at the screen. “They’re on opposite sides.”
“What did you say to her?” Cindy asked.
Francine looked up; Cindy received her face in all its homely beauty. “I told her we were in the joy business.”
She clicked the keyboard again and another image showed up: an order form accompanied by a different photograph, a long shot that Cindy couldn’t place. She’d been caught outside the shop in summer, her back to the camera, hanging a basket of fuchsia, midday sunshine showering over her glinting hair. The real surprise was the town, which looked green and prosperous: window boxes brimming, doors flung wide, OPEN flags rippling. You could tell everyone was working.
“Where’d you get this?” Cindy asked, squinting at the screen.
