A WEEK INTO THE SCHOOL YEAR, Colin and the girls still asleep, Kate stripped off her nightshirt and stood before the full-length master bedroom mirror. A bruise flowered over her left knee. Another colored her thigh. Another darkened her hip where she’d collided with the marble-topped kitchen island. She rarely recalled specific accidents. The bruises seemed simply to appear, as if erupting from within.
She pulled on yoga pants and a T-shirt and woke the girls.
“Is it a weekend, Mommy?”
“No. We’re getting ready for school, remember?”
“Can we watch TV?”
“Did you brush your teeth?”
“We want Dragon Tales,” Lila said.
“After your teeth. A little.”
They followed her downstairs. She spread an old tablecloth on the floor in front of the television.
“Can I have tea, please,” Lila said.
“May I.”
“May I have tea.”
“May I have tea, please.”
So tedious it was!
“May I please have tea!”
“Don’t shout,” Kate said. “Yes. You may please have tea. I mean, you may have tea. I will make you tea.”
“Tea too!” Robin shouted. “Tea for me!”
“Robin, don’t shout. You may have tea too.”
“Hey, why didn’t she have to say ‘please’ and ‘may,’ ” Lila said.
Kate headed for the kitchen, pretending she hadn’t heard.
She prepared chamomile tea and tiny bagels. While the water boiled and the bagels toasted she stood at the pantry window and watched a confused raccoon crouch beneath the neighbor’s dormant lilac. She served the tea and bagels on a tray on the floor cloth. She gathered clean clothes. She hung the pajamas over the banister. She laid sneaker sandals before the back door. She climbed back upstairs to the bedroom and shook Colin by the shoulder. “You’re going to be late again.”
He sat up and reached for his water glass. “We’re in the window.”
“Lila’s supposed to be there at eight-fifteen. You leave the house at eight-fifteen.”
“We’re not late.”
“It is physically impossible for you to make it to Wintergreen in negative one minute.”
“We are In The Window.”
“There is no window. It’s an eight-fifteen drop-off. Why don’t I just take them today.”
“I like taking my daughters to school.”
“Well, get up then!”
“We are not the Last Ones There,” he said. “Those Swedes. The architect. With the chubby wife. They’re the Last Ones.”
“You mean the Later Than Us Ones.”
“Yeah. That.”
“Oh, well, that’s all fine then!”
Back downstairs, this time stomping. Something had happened in her absence to Dragon Tales and the girls were crying, the screen gone to static. “What, guys? What is it?” Had she paid the cable bill? She knelt to investigate.
“Robin did it. She turned it off. Bad baby!” Lila smacked her sister on the shoulder.
“Lila, no hitting, no hitting!”
As usual, the girls had refused to spend the entire night in their beds and had crawled into Colin and Kate’s around two a.m. and, after sharp words between the parents, been allowed to stay.
Rounding back into the kitchen she found Colin at the table, brandishing a spoon over his Wheaties.
“Why is it,” she said, “that we wait on them? It used to be children who were slaves. Now we’re the slaves.”
“Ha, ha. So true.”
“I’m just going to take them, okay? They’re ready.”
“But—”
“Guys! Let’s go!”
The girls ran in and swarmed over Colin—sampling his Wheaties, sipping his coffee. Somehow Lila had donned a pink tutu over her pants. Kate herded them down the back steps. She strapped them into their booster seats and started the car and took the highway to downtown Fairfield.
“Don’t you look pretty.” Maggie, Lila’s teacher and a retired ballerina, clasped her hands.
Didn’t Maggie know one wasn’t supposed to say that? Lila would hear it and learn to feel proud.
Lila twirled. “I want to be a ballerina when I grow up.”
“Wonderful!”
“I’m going to be world-famous.”
“Being famous is difficult,” Kate said. “Especially world-famous.”
Lila stared at her. Robin wandered away and wedged herself into a cubby.
“The important thing,” Kate said, “is not to be famous, but to do something you love to do.” She looked at Maggie—she couldn’t help feeling proud of such an appropriate response. It was her role, she understood, to gently temper such fantasies.
What would they lead to, ever?
But Maggie was frowning slightly and looking back and forth from Kate to Lila.
“Is that your dream?” Maggie asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s great to have dreams like that.”
Had that been Maggie’s dream, to be a famous ballerina? Did she consider herself a dancer still? Was she resigned to teaching kindergarten, or did she wish she’d been world-famous?
Lila ran off to the sand table. Kate pulled Robin from the cubby. She dropped Robin at preschool and, in the cheery low-ceilinged hallway, encountered Mave Silverman, the mother of Robin’s best classroom buddy, and Brooke Williams, who lived in a pink mansion down the road from Kate and Colin with her five strawberry-blond children and a blond, handsome husband who favored pink shirts and ties. Trey, the husband, suffered from an eye tic, the family’s one flaw. For years Kate had assumed he was winking at her, that the two of them shared a special camaraderie, and she’d consequently become fond of him. However, after she spotted him winking into his beer at the club, she registered his winking at everyone and everything—but the fondness stayed, not so easily displaced.
“It’s been way too long,” Brooke said, hugging Kate.
The truth was, they saw each other at drop-off and pickup often. But Kate said, “I know,” and hugged back.
Years ago she’d participated in a book club with both Brooke and Mave. But the club had broken up after Brooke, the informal director, delivered her third child.
“Do you want to come over for coffee?” Brooke asked. “Mave’s coming over for coffee.”
“And then I’m going to use her Pilates machine,” Mave said.
“And then she’s going to use my Pilates machine,” Brooke said.
“Oh, jeez,” Kate said. “I probably shouldn’t.”
She didn’t want to.
“Oh, come on, it’s right on your way.”
“Hmmm … I have to go to the store.…” She didn’t want to stop at Brooke’s for coffee and Pilates, but if she didn’t spend some time with Brooke and Mave now they would insist on it later. “Okay. Yeah, I can swing it.”
They got into their respective cars and got onto I-95 and pulled up in the driveway of the pink house. They entered through the ubiquitous mudroom: a row of hooks for coats, some sort of dull tile, and a colorful framed Toulouse-Lautrec print, artfully incongruous. They sat in Brooke’s stylishly outfitted kitchen, around the stainless-steel (to match the appliances) table from Pottery Barn. Children’s art, housed in chunky black frames, hung about the purple-painted walls. Five green ceramic plates, bearing handprints of ascending sizes, climbed a defunct but ornamental brick chimney. A carved walking stick beautified the western wainscoting.
“How’s the crew?” Kate asked.
Brooke rolled her eyes as if five children were a condition that had been thrust upon her instead of something she’d actively sought. Surely they allowed themselves birth control, if desired? How else had they conveniently avoided children before marriage?
“All those kids you have. I can barely get through the day with one. Weekends kill me—snow days, holidays.” Mave shook her head. “Awful. I’m an awful mother.”
“O
h, stop with that awful-mother business.” Brooke took plates and cups down from the sleek white cupboard. “I think a whole bunch of kids is easier than two. There’s sort of this group mentality. They all just fall in line. They play with each other. They entertain each other. They do.” She started coffee and sliced up some sort of tea cake and put the slices on a plate. “So when are you going to have another baby, Mave?”
“I’m practically forty,” Mave said. “Besides, I have no desire to go around smelling like Preparation H for a month. And I just lost my baby weight, four years later. Kind of absurd that something, I mean parenting, that makes you so physically exhausted doesn’t just burn the pounds right off. Sometimes it takes me over an hour just to get Hannah out the door in the morning.”
“I struggle with that too,” Brooke said. “You have to tell them ten times. Shoes on. Et cetera, et cetera.”
“Do your kids fight?” Kate asked. “What do you do about it?”
“A little. I ignore it; it works itself out.”
“You’re smart.” Mave reached for a piece of cake.
“I can’t do that,” Kate said. “I can’t stand it—the whining, the biting, the hitting. I panic. I feel like they’ll kill each other if I don’t intervene.”
“They won’t. They just want attention. If they know you’re going to work it out for them they won’t do it themselves.”
“But what if one of them bullies the other one? What if they feel abandoned?”
Brooke shrugged. How Kate envied her. How she wanted and didn’t want.
“Oh, look,” said Mave, suddenly distracted. “European animal crackers! So cute!”
Brooke got up and poured the coffee and took the animal crackers down from the shelf.
“How do they compare to Nabisco?” Mave asked.
“Try one.” Brooke pushed the bag in her direction. “These are more vanilla-y, I think. And with Nabisco you get wild animals; I mean exotic animals, what you’d see in a zoo. These are domestic animals, farm animals. Cows, dogs, cats. Sheep. Horses.”
“You did a great job with the framing in here,” Mave said.
Mave had an MFA in studio art. She taught part-time at the University of Bridgeport.
“Pottery Barn,” Brooke said.
“I went down to the basement for a bottle of wine the other day,” Mave said. “And I saw all this work I did maybe ten years ago, when I was in grad school and right after, this whole gouache series. God. And not like they were so great or anything, but I thought, Shouldn’t I still be doing this?” She stirred sugar into her coffee. “I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Of course you should be,” Brooke said encouragingly.
“Just seems like, with the kid, there’s always something else, something more pressing.”
“You should do it on the weekends,” Brooke said. “Get Dan to babysit and get back into it.”
“Babysit?” Kate reached for another animal cracker. “She’s his kid too, right?”
Mave laughed. “Allegedly.”
Something moved suddenly in the corner of the room. Kate jumped. Mave shrieked.
“Sorry,” Brooke said. She got up again. “That’s just Artoo.”
A foot-high replica of the robot sidekick from Star Wars ground its mechanical limbs by the mudroom door.
“He responds to voices. Watch this.” She stood in front of the toy with her hands on her hips. “Artoo! Walk, Artoo!”
“I think he’s stuck,” Kate said.
With her foot, Brooke nudged him over a divergence in the floorboards. “Artoo! Walk! Artoo!”
The robot marched forward.
“No wonder your kids fall in line,” Mave said.
“Stop, Artoo!” He stopped. Brooke leaped toward him and switched something in his back. “They always leave him on,” she said. “Then this happens. They left him on and they left him in our bedroom once. He started up in the middle of the night while we were having sex.”
“Wow,” Mave said, “sex.”
“You don’t have sex?”
“I do, we do, but not middle-of-the-night sex. Just regular scheduled sex.”
“What a shame.” Brooke looked at Kate.
“Not scheduled,” Kate said. “But he gives me a backrub and I give him sex. Basically, it’s a trade.”
“Does Dan know how you feel about your sex life?” Brooke asked Mave.
“Dan? He knows nothing. I could have a lover, for all he knows.” She raised her chin and cast her eyes upward. To an imaginary lover, she said, “Meet me at Yankee Donut.”
“It feels like homework,” Kate said.
“Exactly like that.” Mave snapped her fingers.
“Oh, come on.” Brooke poured more coffee all around. “Try some new positions or something. Trey and I do. All the time.”
“Fantastic,” Mave said. “Wow, am I happy to have that information. No, but seriously, good for you. And Trey. What a stud. And on that note, I should take off. I have to teach a class today at some point; can you believe it?”
“Good for you,” Kate said.
Brooke said, “I do not miss going into an office.”
“I sometimes miss it,” Kate said.
“I’m just not cut out for it, I swear. I’d so much rather do what I do.” Brooke looked around her beautiful kitchen.
“What do you do, Brooke?” Mave put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. Then: “Just teasing.”
“I manage the household,” Brooke said. “And I consume. I support the economy! I’m a consumer. That’s what I do. No, really,” she said, “it’s like running a small business.”
“It must be challenging,” Mave said, “managing a staff of six.”
“I know I’m copping out in a way, but it’s fun. Being home with the kids. Why not just …” Brooke shrugged. “It’s totally personal. It’s a personal choice.”
“Ideally,” Mave said.
“It’s only fun if you have money, though,” Kate said. “And have someone to do all the crap. Laundry, cleaning the house, et cetera.”
“I guess.”
“And,” Kate said, “do you really feel right about not being out there? In the workplace, in society? I mean, I don’t; I don’t feel right about it. I feel like I’m causing, I don’t know, women to lose ground. Or something.”
“I am in society, though,” Brooke said. “I have a job. Raising five responsible citizens. That’s my job.”
“Five little consumers?” Mave said.
“Yup.”
“But don’t you feel like you’ve given up power, in a way?” Kate asked. “Being financially dependent?”
“I don’t think of it like that. It’s a collaborative effort. A business. It’s like, I’m the director and Trey is the producer. Or …” Brooke thought for a moment. “I’m the developer and he’s the bank. The kids, they’re the project. So I get developers’ fees, in exchange for my contribution and my work. But I’m in charge. And Trey respects that.”
“So you work for him?” Mave said.
“I think what she’s saying is he’s where she gets her funding,” Kate said. “I see what you mean, Brooke.”
“I’m being a bitch,” Mave said. “Sorry. I’ll stop. I really have to go anyway.” She stood up.
“The Pilates machine!” Brooke cried.
“Shit!”
“Stay just a few more minutes?”
“Next time. Next time Pilates.”
Mave departed and Brooke looked hopefully at Kate.
“I don’t think I’m in the mood for Pilates,” Kate said. “I’m sorry. This cake is really good, though.” She took another piece. “What about sleeping? Your kids. How do they sleep?”
“They sleep well.”
Of course—of course they slept well.
“Don’t get me wrong. I worked at it,” Brooke said. “It wasn’t magic or anything. You have to get them when they’re babies. Discipline. No eye contact after seven p.m. No playing after six p.m. N
o sleeping in the bed.”
“Oh, God, they sleep in our bed every night. Or I in theirs.”
“It’s what works for you. That’s what matters.”
“It works okay for me. Not for Colin.”
Kate suspected that his aversion to the kids in the bed was linked to the fact that their presence canceled out his already extremely small chance of getting spontaneously laid. But she loved them warmly next to her; she wrapped her limbs around their heated small soft ones; she let Robin, then Lila into the bed. She couldn’t or wouldn’t say no. She’d make room and hold them, open her eyes in the dark. Considering the years ahead, the years with Colin and her growing detachment from their physical relationship, she’d feel, mawkishly but sincerely, that this, the contraband snuggling with her girls, was to be her last experience of bodily love—of physical intimacy—on this earth.
And he—Colin—wanted to take even that from her!
“So what happens?”
“They run out of their rooms. I walk them back. They run out again. I walk them back and sit with them for a while. I go back to bed. They run out again. Like those toys. Weebles. Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down. I give up and make room in the bed. Then Colin makes a fuss.”
“Bedtime?”
“The same. Eventually they fall asleep in their beds, knowing of course that they’ll come into ours later. I just never know if they will fall asleep in the first place. They know that. They can feel that.”
Games to Play After Dark Page 10
