by Sonya Cobb
“No worries!” Sophie rubbed his shoulder briskly. “Have a great ride. I’ll let you know what Steve says.” She waved to him as he rode off in the wagon, wishing, too late, that she’d boarded it with him, realizing now how crucial he was to her enjoyment of the outing. Without him there, the whole thing seemed silly. Lucy loved eating the strawberries, of course, but she could do that at home, and Elliot didn’t care if he was on a farm or in the playground around the corner from their house.
She pulled out her phone, checked for missed calls, then slid it back into the diaper bag. Elliot had crawled into another row and was headed toward the Christmas trees. Sophie scooped her arm between his legs and set him down facing the other direction; he continued crawling without missing a beat. She followed him in circles around Lucy, redirecting him when necessary, until she began to feel her breasts becoming uncomfortably full—which probably meant Elliot was becoming uncomfortably empty. She lifted him up and fed his thighs through the leg holes of the baby carrier, clipping it shut against her now-aching chest. “Come on, Lucy,” she said, crouching to pick up the few strawberries that had made it into the basket. “We’re getting the next wagon.” Lucy nodded, suddenly sapped of energy. Her expression had turned inward, as if she were monitoring some kind of development in her mood. “You okay?” Sophie asked. Lucy nodded again.
Back at the farm market, Sophie found a small fenced playground with two empty benches in the shade of some oak trees. A sign was nailed to an honor box at the entrance: “Playground admission $5.” Sophie snorted and shoved a five-dollar bill through the slot. She would call Steve while Elliot ate.
Lucy ambled indifferently toward the jungle gym, while Sophie untangled herself from the baby carrier, her blouse, and her nursing bra. Elliot huffed and grunted; he was shuddering with hunger. As he started to nurse, she pulled her phone out of the bag and checked it for missed calls. Nothing.
A shriek came from the direction of the jungle gym. “Mommy!”
“What is it?” called Sophie, squinting at Lucy, who was standing next to the glaring metal slide, arms straight out, legs wide apart, her body stiff. “Come over here. What’s wrong?”
But Lucy was crying, and it wasn’t tired crying or plaintive crying or nobody-loves-me crying. It was gasping sobs, raw and edged with fear. Sophie threw the phone back in her bag, pulled Elliot off her breast, and lurched toward Lucy. The smell told her everything before she got close enough to see what was dripping from Lucy’s shorts. Lucy, champion potty trainer, enthusiastic consumer of toilet paper, avid proponent of toilet seat covers and antibiotic gel, was frozen in horror, tears streaming down her face, her juice-stained mouth turned down and quivering.
“It’s okay, honey,” Sophie said, trying to button her blouse with one hand. “Don’t worry. You just ate a few too many strawberries. Let’s go to the bathroom and clean you up.” Elliot began to snuffle desperately at Sophie’s neck. When she lifted him into the baby carrier, his confusion coalesced into outrage; his screams drowned out the sobs of his sister. Sophie stabbed uselessly at his mouth with a pacifier, then gave up and hoisted the diaper bag over her shoulder, pulling Lucy toward the bathrooms.
The women’s room was at the back of the market, requiring a slow walk down long aisles of pickled rhubarb and apple butter, Elliot wailing, Lucy bent stiffly at the waist and whimpering. Sophie was half expecting to find an honor box nailed to the restroom door, but this part of the experience, at least, was free.
Sophie led Lucy into the handicapped stall, feeling, for the first time in her life, legitimately guilt-free about this incursion, and used the handrail to lower herself slowly into a squat, knees cracking. It would have been silly to bring a stroller on a tractor ride, but she really could have used a place to store her son. She gingerly removed Lucy’s soiled underpants and socks, then lifted her onto the toilet seat, holding her as far from Elliot’s hands and feet as possible, her back twanging with pain. “Hold on to that rail.”
“I don’t want to touch anything!” screamed Lucy, digging her fingernails into Sophie’s arms. Lucy’s scream startled Elliot, whose sobs shattered into shrill, breathless shrieks. Then, from the depths of the diaper bag, mingling with the children’s cries, came a more reasonable and musical sound: Sophie’s phone.
Sophie pried Lucy’s fingers open and planted them firmly on the safety bars. She reached into the diaper bag for one of the plastic grocery bags folded up inside the central pocket and dropped Lucy’s shorts and underwear into it. She knotted the bag shut and wrapped it in two more grocery bags, which she shoved into the diaper bag. This did nothing to dispel the swampy stench that filled the stall; nor did it muffle the trill of the phone. She pulled out a packet of wet wipes and used them to swab Lucy’s legs as well as she could while Lucy balanced on the toilet seat. “You done?” she asked Lucy, who shook her head miserably. Sophie stood and awkwardly leaned over to kiss Lucy’s forehead, then left the stall to toss the wipes in the trash and wash her hands.
After a few more tries she persuaded Elliot to accept the pacifier, which transformed his shrieks into furious grunts and sucking noises. Sophie checked on Lucy one more time, then dug out her phone and flipped it open. Steve. Of course. She dialed in to voice mail.
“Sophie, hey, sorry this is so last-minute, we were having fax machine problems. Anyway, good news, they have counteroffered, and I think it’s reasonable. Call me back ASAP.”
Sophie felt herself levitate, momentarily, above the echoing bathroom stall, then become heavy again with the realization that the counteroffer would, by definition, be way over their budget. “Ready to get up?” she asked Lucy. Lucy shook her head, so Sophie leaned against the wall and called Steve back.
“I think it’s fair,” he said. “For the neighborhood, the size, it’s a good price.” Sophie could hear the optimism in his voice, and she allowed herself to be lifted back up by it, away from the stink and ache, into a pearly cloud of excitement far above the creeping suburbs of Chester County. The number wasn’t bad…the number was just a number, really. Bland, silent, you could invite it into your life without too much disruption. You could learn to live with it, move some things around, make space. “You should look into one of those new low down payment loan products I told you about,” Steve said. “My mortgage guy can work wonders. Call Brian, then get back to me.”
But Lucy was inching her way off the toilet seat, so Sophie stood her up and finished wiping her legs. She had a pair of clean underwear in the diaper bag, but no shorts, so she had to persuade Lucy that her T-shirt, thankfully on the large side, was long enough to pass as a dress. Lucy seemed too drained to protest, and even consented to put on her sneakers without socks. On the way out of the market, Sophie bought her a bottle of Gatorade, which cheered Lucy enormously because it was blue and it wore a garish, neon-scrawled label.
Sophie led Lucy back to the playground. “I just need a chance to finish feeding Elliot,” she said. “Then we can all go home and take a long nap.” She held the gate open for two boys with buzz cuts and sleeveless camouflage shirts. They barreled past her and began chasing each other in circles around the jungle gym while their mother pulled five dollars out of her wallet with exaggerated slowness and stuffed it in the honor box, making brazen eye contact with Sophie.
“I paid before,” said Sophie, but this sounded feeble, and the woman pulled back one side of her mouth and hooded her eyes. “Oh, whatever,” Sophie muttered, hurrying to the only bench that was still in the shade. She situated Elliot on her breast and called Brian, but the call went right to voice mail. She tried again; same thing. One of the boys came to stand in front of her and watch her breast-feed. His mother stalked over, slapping her platform flip-flops on the dusty ground, and grabbed him by the arm.
“Don’t look at that,” she said, turning him toward the jungle gym and hitting him on the rear.
Sophie tried Brian again but it was useless; he�
�d ridden out of range. Anyway, she knew how the conversation would go. He’d want to walk away. But Brian had not seen the same house she’d seen. He’d seen water damage, knob-and-tube wiring, an oil-gulping furnace. Sophie, on the other hand, had seen an address for their future. She’d walked through dozens of other houses in the past months, but this one had set something vibrating in her, some long-forgotten string that was now playing its note in her head day and night.
She switched Elliot, now in a limp daze, to her other breast. Her mind seesawed between excitement and preemptive guilt, feeling the thing she wanted so badly just within reach, knowing she should sit back and wait just a little bit longer. With time and persistence, she knew she could win Brian over. She just needed to find the words to explain why, exactly, this house was so necessary. Why she believed it could protect her from the lonesomeness of her childhood. Why she felt it could anchor her to the earth in a way that would ease that whirling, plastic-bag-in-the-wind feeling she’d had all her life. She needed him to know that buying this house was her way of giving Lucy and Elliot the childhood she’d missed; that the house might even serve as tangible proof that she was doing this thing right—this maddening, baffling, improvisational performance called parenting. She needed to make him understand that some day she wanted to look upon her grown children with pleasure and satisfaction, maybe even pride, instead of the sort of acidic regret that would force her to turn away from them forever. And that this house—with its honest proportions and solid bones—had somehow become home to this motley collection of yearnings.
Eventually she’d figure out how to explain it all in a way that actually made sense. And Brian, she knew, would get that soft look, and he would say yes, if it will make you happy, yes, of course, yes.
It seemed a little ridiculous to delay things, just so he could cautiously sidle up to a decision she’d already made.
A decision made in the wrong way, perhaps, but for the right reasons. She only wanted what was best for her family.
Sophie opened the phone, her blood buzzing with a cocktail of adrenaline and oxytocin. With a rubbery pop, as if crushing a tiny bubble, her thumb pressed the green button. Steve answered on the first ring.
Two
The sun was already sizzling like a snare drum as Sophie climbed the seventy-two stone steps to the museum, her back to the wide swath of Parkway that led to downtown Philadelphia. In front of her, butterscotch columns stretched into the hard blue sky, supporting a huge triangular pediment on which verdigris griffins perched like overgrown pigeons. Groups of campers in matching T-shirts scattered across the wide-open plaza, their shouts echoing off the museum wings.
Inside the east entrance Sophie gave the security guard her name, and he called Brian’s office to announce her arrival. She waited at the base of the Great Stair, looking up toward the entrance to the European Decorative Arts galleries. A group of chattering children galloped down the wide steps, carrying folded stools under their arms. Behind them, negotiating the stairs more deliberately, came Marjorie, a volunteer who worked in Brian’s department. Sophie watched her slow descent, smiling encouragingly.
“You’re early,” Marjorie said when she reached the bottom. Her straight gray hair was cropped into a boxy bob, her acrylic cardigan squared off at her hips, and her flat-front skirt fell straight to her knees. Even her wide, sturdy loafers were composed of right angles. “Brian’s still in his committee meeting.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Sophie said as they started up the stairs. “I could have waited for him. I just wanted to go over some insurance stuff. Did he tell you about the house?”
Marjorie nodded but didn’t answer, either because she was winded or because she was just being Marjorie. She paused at the top of the stairs, patted her chest, and briefly closed her eyes, then escorted Sophie through the galleries and into the warren of offices and workrooms hidden behind a set of locked steel doors. To Sophie, it was a journey that felt like wandering behind the set of an elaborate opera production. Up front it was all soaring, gilded spaces and artful lighting, whereas behind the scenery, among the pulleys and catwalks, it felt cramped and dank under dingy fluorescent lights.
Turning the corner into Brian’s low-ceilinged hallway, Sophie almost crashed into a line of bulky carts parked along one wall. Roughly constructed of wood, they were mottled with dents and scrapes that suggested many run-ins with heavy doors and filing cabinets. Their upper and lower trays were lined with grimy gray carpet, and within the trays lay a tarnished jumble of inkstands, spoons, snuffboxes, and saltcellars—a collection of elegant silver that, to Sophie, looked dismayed by its ignominious surroundings.
“What’s all this?” she asked Marjorie, who stopped, looked at the carts, then looked at Sophie as if trying to decide whether Sophie was actually asking her what silver was. “I mean, why’s it all out in the hall?”
“They’re emptying this storage room,” Marjorie said, indicating a room opposite Brian’s door. “Turning it into an office.”
“That’ll be nice, to have more space.” Sophie peered through the door, which she’d never seen open before. Two women wearing thin purple gloves stood among rows of tall steel shelves. One of them was turning a coffeepot over in her hands while the other sorted through a stack of Rolodex-sized cards. “Who gets the office?”
“Someone other than me,” said Marjorie, unlocking Brian’s door. “You can wait in here. I have to get back to Ted’s files.”
Brian’s office was a long, narrow room lined with bookshelves on one side and a large metal cabinet on the other. The department’s copier occupied the wall to the right of the door, and to the left, Brian’s tuxedo, draped in dry-cleaner plastic, hung from the top of a framed poster. Sophie cleared a pile of books off of a chair next to Brian’s desk and sat down. She squared the stack of insurance quotes on her lap, knowing Brian probably wouldn’t have time to go over them with her. But the agent’s office was just down the hill from the museum, and anyway, she’d always enjoyed dropping in on Brian during the day. Here, among the dusty typewriters and exhibition catalogs, surrounded by scholars and conservators and old Philadelphia money, Brian was always at his best: happy, absorbed, as close to giddy as his reserved personality would allow. Also, he was less likely to be made irritable by house-related conversations.
“Hey there.” Brian rushed into the room balancing a laptop on a pile of file folders and bent to kiss her on the forehead. “My committee gave me the green light on that vase.”
“The…”
“The Milan vase. The majolica. Now I just need to raise the funds. The auction’s coming up quick.” He surveyed the hill of papers and books under which, somewhere, his desk lurked.
“Oh right,” Sophie said. “Congratulations.” She was sure Brian had told her about the vase, had detailed its condition and provenance, had probably even shown her pictures at some point. He was like a cat, bringing her dead mouse after dead mouse, seeking her approval in the best way he knew how. To her the mice all looked the same, but this didn’t diminish the pleasure she took in seeing him so proud and excited. “I knew they would love it.”
Brian sat down, putting his laptop on the floor next to his chair. “Where are the kids?”
“With the sitter. I had a meeting with the insurance guy. I thought you might want to look at the options.” She began paging through the stack of papers, trying to explain structure limits and deductibles in a way that was helpful but not condescending, ushering Brian as gently as possible toward her already-made decision. At first he seemed interested, but whenever his email pinged he leaned over the side of the chair to look at his screen, and when the phone rang he snatched it up with a semiapologetic eye roll.
“It’s not a good time, is it,” Sophie said after he’d taken two more calls.
Brian wiped a hand down his face. “I didn’t realize all this would be happening today. Do you—I mean, do you feel like
you have a handle on all that?”
“On the insurance?”
“Because I really don’t mind if you just take care of it. I mean, if you don’t mind.”
Sophie slid the papers back into their folder. It had always been her nature to manage their finances, and it had always been Brian’s nature to let her. But in matters related to the house—a house that meant everything to Sophie, and nothing but headaches to Brian—he was sinking to new depths of passivity. “All right,” she said, helping him to shore up a sliding pile of CDs. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks, Soph. I promise I’ll have more time for this stuff after the auction.” He reached out and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I’ve been waiting such a long time for this.”
“I know.” She knew. Most people had a hard time understanding Brian’s relationship to his job—the way his work was woven into his very being; the way his life could never be compartmentalized into “work” and “home,” or “job” and “life.” The objects, the chase, the careful detective work, and the diligent pursuit of donors to pay for each acquisition—it was an obsession, if not a full-blown addiction. Just the other day Sophie’s friend Carly had asked if she ever felt jealous or resentful of Brian’s job, but in fact the opposite was true. She loved Brian for it. It might have been different if he’d been obsessed with pork futures or golf balls. But Brian’s work made her proud. He knew more about art history and cultural expression and stylistic movements than she could ever fathom, and she found this deeply attractive.
Sophie kissed Brian, then left his office to find Marjorie. Along the way to Ted’s office she found herself drawn to the object carts lined up against the wall. Brian often talked about the vast quantities of artwork in museum storage: unwanted gifts left in people’s wills; objects rotated out of the galleries to make space; entire collections bought and stored, just so one good piece could go on display. He’d also told her that his department could barely keep track of the good stuff, much less the rest of it, with their antiquated system of yellowed object cards and a computer database too slow and clunky to be of any use. Sophie picked up a tall silver candlestick, marveling at its weight. An embarrassment of riches.
