by Ann Packer
That kind of talk usually bummed me out, but there was something about hearing it in a happy house: it made me optimistic. Not about finding a wife but because he’d said it. He couldn’t tell I was someone you didn’t say that to, someone who had no future. Maybe I did.
When the weather changed, the monthly meetings moved indoors. In November we met at the Smith-Berkoffs’ house, and suddenly the kids dominated. They were everywhere, and even when they were out of sight they were still in mind.
“Notice how the girls sit and the boys run? I didn’t truly believe in gender differences until I had kids.”
“She’s having trouble with the baby.” “Nursing trouble?” “No, she loves him more. She thinks the other two know.”
“They met with the teacher, and it turns out the twins aren’t being bullied, they’re bullying.”
I moseyed around, picking up bits of conversation and wondering how I’d feel about the whole thing after six months indoors. Rain hammered at the windows. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the sky was the color of wet concrete.
Stan Kinsella joined me at the fireplace. He and his wife were the oldest couple—midfifties—and didn’t have kids. “Lots of small fry,” he said. “Hope you’re not overwhelmed.”
“No, no. I have a niece and two nephews.”
“Beth and I debated about this. Did such a kid-oriented group make sense for us. But our only other option was a group of folks in their sixties and seventies, sort of an ad hoc retirement community. Their bylaws included mandatory advance directives.”
“You had options?”
“This is where we’re all headed. Or should be. No one goes to church anymore, so we have to make our own congregations. You know what ‘congregate’ means? It’s from the Latin. ‘Greg’ means herd. ‘Con’ means with. We’re with our herd.”
“Huh,” I said. “One thing that really got me after 9/11 was Bush saying we should all go to church. ‘Go to your churches and temples and mosques—go and pray.’ Something like that. It pissed me off so much.”
“Like you didn’t count?”
“Like I didn’t care.”
Stan nodded. “If something like that happened again, I’d want to be with these people.”
I thought of my life at the time of the attacks, how bad it sucked. I was living in Santa Rosa, washing dishes at a lousy restaurant and fucking the bartender. I didn’t like her very much, and she alternated between scorn and indifference toward me. There was a lot of stuff in the media about people drawing together and being kinder and whatnot, but things between this woman and me went downhill. I finally just walked off the job—punched my time card one last time and drove away. When I arrived at my pit of an apartment, I realized I hadn’t even taken off my apron.
Across the room, ten-year-old Rosie Rankin-O’Sullivan caught my eye and stuck out her tongue at me. I put my fingers in my ears and crossed my eyes. She lolled her head sideways and let her tongue hang out the side of her mouth. I reached my arms behind my neck and simultaneously wiggled my right earlobe with my left fingers and my left earlobe with my right fingers. This made her laugh.
Later, she tracked me down in the kitchen with two younger kids in tow. She directed me to “do that thing again,” and when I reached behind my head for my earlobes, they all squealed.
“How long are your arms?”
“How do you do that?”
“I want to try, I want to try!”
This led to a discussion of proportion and flexibility, and finally to a step-by-step demonstration that attracted so much kid attention we had to move to another room. “Look, everyone!” Rosie called. “Look what the Blair can do!” A little later, I was lying on my back on the rug and four or five children were pulling and bending my limbs, and from the doorway tiny, dark-eyed Celia Norton smiled at me.
Half a dozen weeks went by. Rebecca offered me a plane ticket so I could go home for Christmas, but I didn’t want to use any vacation days. Plus I knew at least half the Barn would be gathering. “What will you do instead?” Rebecca said, and because I hadn’t told any of my siblings about the Barn, afraid they’d mock me or disapprove, I said I was going to work, prepping the store for the huge sale starting December 26. In fact, I went to a feast at the Batchelors’, and it turned out to be the happiest Christmas I’d had in a long time.
“You seem to be getting the hang of this,” Celia said one Thursday in January when I stopped at her house for my dinner basket. We didn’t always see the cook when we picked up, but she happened to be on her porch, gathering her mail.
“Guess I am.”
“You’re a natural.”
“Oh, that’s funny. For a sec I thought you said You’re unnatural.”
She smiled. “No, you’re very natural. And you’re a natural.”
“Phew, I like to be more than one thing.”
“Oh, you’re definitely that,” she said, blushing slightly. “No question.”
Another time, on a workday, she was boxing books in the corner of a cramped living room, and I asked if I could help her. “It’s kind of crowded back here,” she said, and I said, “I can stand it if you can.”
We started chatting every time the Barn met. Harmless, I thought. Light. I was attracted to her, but that was fine, that was just being alive. I hadn’t seen the dance professor in a while and I had to have someone to think about.
In March we were able to have our monthly meeting outside. We gathered at Alton Baker Park, everyone happy to be in the thin spring sunlight. We spread tarps on the ground to protect the blankets, and our butts, from moisture. I ended up sitting with a small group of women, Celia and two others. They were the young moms: among them they had seven children under the age of seven. One was nursing an infant. We all watched as Celia’s husband, David Fielding, tried to run a soccer game for a bunch of kids. The kids didn’t want to play by the rules, and he was having a tough time keeping them focused.
“You know what I’ve noticed about you?” Celia said to me after the other women had wandered away.
“What’s that?”
“You can’t sit still.”
I was surprised—actually kind of flattered—but tried to hide it. “ADD, no doubt, but even my pediatrician dad didn’t think of it back then.”
“What would happen if you just sat here for half an hour?”
“No problem. If you’ll sit with me, I won’t even be tempted to get up.”
“Did you fidget when you were little?”
“I was a perpetual motion machine. With a snotty nose. Youngest of four.”
“Yeah, you already told me that.”
“I did?”
“A couple weeks ago. You have two brothers and one sister. You don’t remember?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“James, slow down.”
I hadn’t been aware I was talking fast. It was because of her. She was small but voluptuous, with a heart-shaped face and a sweet chin. She wore a gold chain around her neck with a seagull hanging from it, which already didn’t seem like her even though I hardly knew her. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try.”
“No harm done. It’s not for me, it’s for you.”
“You’re sort of healer-ish.”
“Actually, I’m not.”
At that point there were shouts from the soccer game; Theo, her older son, was jumping up and down in front of one of the goals. David waved his hand back and forth over his head, and when he saw that Celia was watching he pointed at Theo and stuck his thumb in the air.
She said, “Ah, thank God.”
“Competitive?”
“You can’t imagine. And I’m not talking about my son.”
“James,” shouted one of the other men from the field. “Come join us.”
“The moment of truth,” C
elia said.
“Oh, I’m not going.”
“But you want to.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You don’t feel all coiled and ready to spring?”
I did, but not in the direction of the soccer game. In my mind she and I were rolling around naked together. Charming guy that I was, I might have said so to a different woman. I wanted her to tell me a secret and I tried to think of a question that would prompt one.
“So how about you? I’ll bet you were never a perpetual motion machine with a snotty nose.”
“What makes you say that?”
I let myself look at her body before I answered. What I mean is, I let myself look at her body in such an obvious way that she couldn’t miss the fact that I was looking at her body. It wasn’t that I couldn’t resist being the asshole I knew myself to be; it was more, it felt like the honorable thing to do. To admit my attraction. When I met her gaze again she gave me a sorrowful smile.
“I just have a hunch,” I said. “I’ll bet you were calm and quiet.”
“Not really. I cried a lot.”
“Cried like you threw a fit? I did that.”
“No, cried in fear. Or relief. I spent a lot of time in fear or relief.”
“What were you afraid of?”
“Crying.”
I sighed and lay back on the ground. She was too lovely to bear. The blanket was thin, and a rock dug between my shoulder blades. I scooted sideways and found a smooth spot. More cheers from the soccer field, and she turned to look. She had a mole high up on her neck, right at the corner of her jawbone. I wondered what it would feel like against my tongue.
“Twenty-three more minutes,” she said.
“Piece of cake.”
• • •
Joe Rankin, the triathlete grandpa, graduated from physical therapy, and we started biking together on Monday mornings. He kicked my ass in every way, but I couldn’t deny it felt good to be riding. I used an old bike that belonged to his son-in-law, who’d recently gotten a beautiful new two-thousand-dollar Cannondale. We cruised around the hills south of town. One Saturday we got a whole group of Barners to go out with us, and afterward, sitting on the Rankin-O’Sullivans’ front porch, we talked about doing a longer ride sometime, maybe to a campsite where we could spend the night. I thought this sounded great, and Priscilla Lee, the group’s most avid cyclist, said that if I would start polling people on possible dates she would help me figure out a good destination. On our next workday, Celia’s husband told me he’d heard about the idea and would like to be on the list, and as he talked I saw her out of the corner of my eye, standing by herself watching us.
I was becoming a regular at the Rankin-O’Sullivans’ dinner table. In addition to Rosie, they had twin eight-year-old boys who missed no opportunity to replay the limb-twisting game. One evening as I lay on the living room rug letting my muscles and joints recover, Sarah asked where I’d lived before Eugene. Normally I didn’t talk much about the endless moving I’d done since I dropped out of college, but I ended up spilling my whole long, pathetic story.
“After my dad died I counted the addresses he had for me. Thirty-one. And there were some places I lived where I didn’t send an address because I knew I’d be moving on too soon. Thirty-one addresses, probably twenty different zip codes. A couple dozen phone numbers.”
“Listen,” Joe said. “How will you ever get married when you move around all the time?”
“That’s sexist, Grandpa,” one of the twins said. “Women can move.”
“He could marry Margo,” the other twin said. “Then instead of the Komarovs and the Blair we’d have the Komarov-Blairs.”
Rosie threw a pillow at her brother. “That is totally stupid. He doesn’t even like her. He likes Celia.”
There was a silence, and I felt Sarah Rankin’s gaze grow pointed. Hot with shame, I lay as still as I could. Evenings lately, I’d been too restless to watch movies and also embarrassed that my taste ran so consistently to the stupid. I’d started surfing the Web, bouncing from Monster.com (maybe I could get a different job) to Craigslist.org (maybe I could find a better apartment) to REI.com (I want shit) to Walmart.com (I’m poor) to Dictionary.com (does “congregate” really mean “with the herd”?). That last had taken me down a path that led to “egregious,” which in my mind meant “really, really bad; unforgivable” but had the same root as “congregate” and began life with the value-neutral meaning “outside the herd.” I didn’t want that and knew I had to watch myself with Celia.
At work I was given a promotion. This was only the third promotion of my life and I debated calling Rebecca. I went so far as to bring up her number on my phone, but there was something pitiful about calling with good news, almost more pitiful than calling with bad news.
The Barn was excited for me. At our April meeting there was a homemade sheet cake with “Congratulations to the Blair” written on it in shaky blue icing. I could see the hand of a Barn child or two in the huge volume of colored sprinkles covering the cake.
“I can’t thank you guys enough,” I said. “I don’t want to go all gooey on you, but you opened your arms and—”
“Group hug!” shouted Adam Smith-Berkoff, the lone teenager in the group.
“Adam!” his mom said.
We were sitting in a jagged circle on the grass at University Park, kids sprawled in front of their parents, the younger ones with little bags of crackers to keep them occupied.
“It was a win-win,” someone said.
“We love your energy.”
“And your employee discount.”
Smiles all around: I’d purchased a huge supply of biodegradable plates and cups and utensils.
“Any other business?” Greg O’Sullivan said. He was running the meeting that day. We traded off, household by household.
“Actually, I have one thing,” David Fielding said. “Weren’t we talking about a group bike ride some weekend? We should probably choose a date if we want it to happen.”
“Oh, sorry, my bad,” I said. “I was going to do that. I saw a really cool bike at a shop on East Thirteenth—dream on, right? But no, sorry, I’ll definitely get to it.”
He gave me a tight smile. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t know if you ever read our bylaws, but we’re big on follow-through.”
Fuck you, too, I thought, but it didn’t really bother me. “I’ll post something tonight,” I said.
It was time to eat, and as people started getting up from the circle, I saw a tense-looking exchange between David and Celia. Then she put her hand on his shoulder, and I thought maybe I’d read it wrong, maybe it hadn’t been tense. Maybe, long married, they simply didn’t smile at each other all that much. But then she unfolded her legs and began to stand, and I realized she was just using him for stability.
“Sorry about my husband,” she said to me a little later. We were bussing the same picnic table.
“No worries.”
“He doesn’t have the best social skills.”
“Really, no worries. You’ve got enough for two.”
She smiled and touched my arm, then drew her hand back and said, “Did you know that across cultures the elbow is the most neutral place to touch another person?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it is,” she said. “It’s very neutral.”
It would’ve been nice to think there was still nothing to any of this, just a promise of friendship if either of us had the time or desire to pursue it. But my heart pounded when I saw her, and she stared at me across rooms and lawns, and there wasn’t nothing to it at all.
“You know what I love about the Barn,” Sarah Rankin said to me one night in her kitchen when I was helping with the dishes. “It’s how much respect we all have for each other’s families. We’re connected but we’re also
distinct entities that come first, ahead of the community.”
Got it, Chief, I thought.
And I avoided Celia. A few times she approached me with a comment or question and I was maybe a little curt. I emailed the dance professor and we started up again, a relationship that was more booty call than anything else, mostly her calling me. She was in her forties and knew what she wanted, which was sometimes sex and sometimes a foot rub and a mug of chamomile tea.
The last Thursday in April it was my turn to do dinner baskets. I’d become really good at cooking strips of chicken for fajitas, and I got discounted tortillas at work, so once every two months that was dinner for the Barn. I felt guilty making people come to my apartment in Springfield, so I used the Kinsellas’ house as the pickup point for my meals. I generally waited through the pickup period to ensure there’d be nothing left behind on the Kinsellas’ porch (which had happened the first couple of times and which I knew only because Sarah Rankin told me about it; she was a little like Rebecca, but with long, frizzy hair and three kids). The first five baskets went fast, and then I sat with the final two, the Lees’ and the Norton-Fieldings’, for about half an hour. It wasn’t unusual for there to be a few stragglers, but when Priscilla Lee showed up at six-thirty and took their basket and there was just the one left, I began to wonder what I’d do if no one came. The Norton-Fieldings lived fairly close by, and I argued with myself about the wisdom of running their basket over to their house so I could be finished with the whole thing and on my way. It wasn’t really much of an argument.
“You came,” Celia said, answering the door in the kind of sweatpants women wear, tight on the hips and thighs and flared at the cuff. Hers had a seagull on one thigh, and I thought I’d never asked her about her seagull necklace and also that I was in deep, wondering about her seagull necklace.
I held up the basket. “Home delivery.”
She looked upset. “I wasn’t sure if you would. I thought so but I wasn’t sure.”
