The Objects of Her Affection

by Sonya Cobb

  An hour and a half later she would reverse the process: peeling off the wet swim diaper, pulling on sun-baked clothes, letting herself be yanked down the hill by the stroller, the shade scrubbed away from the glaring sidewalk, the kids irritable, emptied out of anticipation. Every time they did this, Sophie wondered if there was any net benefit of going to the pool at all.

  Personally, she would have been happy to spend the rest of the summer at home, in the rattling cool of the air conditioner, finishing up some home improvement projects. She’d found a collection of porcelain keyhole covers, and she needed to screw them on to all the doors. She also wanted to strip the paint off the decorative heating vents, and add some bronze sash pulls to the window frames. But the kids never left her alone long enough to accomplish anything. After about twenty minutes they would tire of their toys and markers, and focus their full attention on the only other living, breathing, and thus potentially interesting presence in the house. They wanted her to read to them. They wanted her to play with them. They begged her to become a queen, a horse, a puppeteer. She would oblige them for a little while, forcing herself to be fun when she didn’t feel fun, finally decreeing that they were now going to play “sick mommy,” a game in which she lay on the couch in a dead faint while Lucy ministered to her and Elliot draped himself over her hot torso, occasionally touching her lips with utmost care and whispering, “Shhh, sick.”

  At least when they were going places the kids would occasionally turn their gaze away from her and out into the world. And so she would take them on long walks through the city, the huge, rubbery stroller like an extra appendage she had grown used to hauling around. It wouldn’t fit through most café doors, and couldn’t squeeze between clothing racks in any store, so she kept moving: past the neoclassical porticos of Spruce Street, under Delancey’s decorative pears, through the sprinkler-soaked lawns of Washington Square. Sometimes she would announce a destination, just to give the day a sense of purpose. They would walk to the Falls Bridge, collecting sticks and leaves along the way, then throw them into the water and watch them float away. Or they would walk to the Italian Market, where they would buy a pint of strawberries to eat in the grass at the Palumbo ball field. Every day it became harder for Sophie to summon enthusiasm for these outings, and when Lucy would ask, at breakfast, “What are we going to do today?” Sophie would say, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” and Lucy would shrug and return to her cereal, comfortable in the knowledge that something would eventually be decided by some adult.

  Sophie tried to engineer a social life for her children, inviting other kids to the house for playdates. She herself hadn’t had many friends growing up; she realized, now, that her nonchalant independence had probably made her unapproachable. And of course, whenever she discovered like-minded kids her age and started to experience the thrill of budding friendship, her mother would get that moody look, and Sophie knew it would soon be time to haul the cardboard boxes back out of the basement.

  Of course, Lucy and Elliot were too young to make real friends; they played alongside the other kids, not with them. But Sophie liked to imagine some of them walking to school with Elliot in a few years, or taking Lucy to a dance. She imagined Lucy saying of her husband, “We’ve been friends since we were four.” Sophie’s oldest friend was Carly, and they’d barely known each other ten years. Her kids, she decided, would form lifetime friendships, starting now. She and Brian would become close with the parents; they would take group vacations, have the kids over for sleepovers, weave their lives together in a way that seemed to belong to a previous, less transient era.

  Of course, these friendships would have to wait until Brian stopped traveling so much. First there was an auction in London, then a collector to visit in Italy. He went to the National Library of France, then spent a week in Connecticut, looking for clues among the Wilder family correspondence, which was being maintained by one of the magnate’s descendants. Brian felt guilty about the travel; he apologized constantly, and always came home burdened with silk scarves, fancy chocolates, and oversized stuffed animals. “It’s okay,” Sophie reassured him again and again, wincing at the price tags he always forgot to cut off. “We’re fine.”

  But when he wasn’t around, the days lost their shape completely—afternoons melting into evenings, evenings evaporating into night. Sophie allowed herself certain indulgences to make up for her loneliness. She ate dinner with the kids—fish sticks, mac and cheese, chicken nuggets—and put them to bed half an hour earlier than usual. She poured herself extra helpings of wine, let the dishes pile up, watched bad TV late into the night. She stopped shaving her legs.

  She also found herself thinking more and more about her trip to New York: the cold, biting martinis; Harry’s redheaded charm; the oily twirl of the dial on his safe. These thoughts had a tinge of pornography to them…a complicated mixture of shame and excitement, disgust and desire. They were only thoughts, she reassured herself, as she turned to them again and again. Thoughts never hurt anyone.

  Her listlessness was compounded by lingering anxieties about the mortgage. The irony did not escape her: in her eagerness to create a stable home, she’d created a mess that could end with her family being thrown out into the street. She’d managed to make the last two mortgage payments, but there were no freelance jobs in sight. Her phone calls and letters to the mortgage servicers continued to go unanswered. And the latest electric bill, thanks to the air-conditioning units, was an assault on reason.

  She went online and found a list of local firms on the American Association of Advertising Agencies website. She’d worked with most of the big ones in the past, but she was amazed to find hundreds of tiny shops she’d never heard of, scattered throughout office parks in suburbs she’d never visited: Malvern, Exton, Conshohocken. She went to all of their websites, narrowed down which ones were doing digital marketing (or claimed to be), and sent messages to whatever email addresses she could find—in the best cases, a director of web development; in the worst cases, she just sent it to “info@QuirkyAgencyName.com.”

  It took several evenings to get through the list, from 11point Design to ZeroSum Marketing Solutions. She got a few polite emails in return, promising to keep her information on file. The creative director at Big Red Ball Communications called to ask if she did design work, too; she told him sure, she could do whatever he needed, but that her background was in code, not design, and she didn’t really have a portfolio. He told her he’d keep her information on file.

  “The problem,” said Carly one day over coffee, “is that the big shops with serious web business have their own developers on staff now. And the small shops want more bang for their freelance buck, so they’re looking for designer-developers who can do it all.”

  “Lame,” said Sophie, stacking creamers into a tower for Elliot to gleefully knock down. “You can’t be good at both.”

  Carly shrugged. “I’m doing a lot of design these days, actually. I did some as a favor for the people at Skunk Design, and then that turned into another job, and another, and now I’ve got a little mini portfolio. So…”

  “It’s hard enough trying to learn the new version of Silverlight without having to become a designer at the same time,” grumbled Sophie. She tried to direct Elliot’s attention to the toy basket.

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. And don’t take this the wrong way, but people are more used to the idea of a girl designer than a girl developer.”

  “Shut up.”

  Carly raised her hand. “Just sayin’.”

  “That’s the worst reason I ever heard for giving up my coding cred.”

  “Fine. Keep your cred. Cred won’t buy diapers.” She cocked her head at Elliot.

  “Pffffff…” Sophie let out a long exhale. She wondered what Carly would say if she told her about the mortgage debacle. Carly probably had no idea what an adjustable rate mortgage was, having lived her whole life in h
ouses that had been given to her as birthday presents.

  “Do you really think that’s why people aren’t calling me? ’Cause I’m a girl?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “What?”

  “Sophie, please, don’t be naive. Of course you’re up against that.”

  “Well okay, being the caregiver and taking time off has hurt me. But a guy would have the same problems. It’s not the fact that I’m a woman; it’s the logistics of parenthood. The logistics suck.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the tech world. The geek club. No girls allowed. Hello?”

  “I don’t know…maybe.”

  Carly rolled her eyes and went to the counter for more coffee. Sophie sank back into the couch. Carly was probably right. Sophie had never been bothered by the testosterone-rich atmosphere of her field. Even in college, while her dormmates were starting a campus charter of NOW, and women’s studies was the hot new major, Sophie had cheerfully ensconced herself in the computer lab with her fellow geeks, where reproductive rights and equal pay were the furthest things from her mind. Naturally, she enjoyed some benefits of being one of the only female computer science majors: she became the exclusive focus of her classmates’ romantic attentions, which she enjoyed on some level, but consistently rebuffed. She preferred liberal arts men.

  It only occurred to her now, her forehead thumping against something that was beginning to look like a glass ceiling, that her mother had utterly failed to prepare her for the possibility that some women got a raw deal in the working world. This was probably because Maeve had always flown above the glass ceiling. Once she’d made a name for herself with the Boeing 747SP’s single-slotted flaps, she’d had her pick of dream projects: the DC-10 Super 60, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. Nobody seemed to care that she was a woman; they just wanted a piece of her aerodynamic artistry.

  Maximize lift, reduce drag: it was an approach Maeve applied as diligently to motherhood as she did to her career. Sophie went into day care when she was six weeks old, and as soon as she could reach the kitchen counter she was expected to pull her weight at home: washing dishes, mowing grass, answering the door when the guys from the electric company came.

  Carly’s loud, ringing laugh exploded on the other side of the café. Sophie turned to see her friend resting an elbow on a high two topper, languidly stirring her latte while directing the full force of her tall blond charm at a man seated on a stool. Sophie didn’t need to see his glasses to know it was Keith. “Shit,” she muttered, waving frantically at Carly, who ignored her. She slumped back into the couch. She knew what she was up against. Introducing Carly to married men was like planting a bomb with a three-to-six-month timer.

  Eventually Carly came sashaying back to her seat. “Sorry,” she said. “I got to chatting…”

  “I hope there was no exchange of information.”

  “What? We were talking about running. I think I’m going to start. I need to get in shape.”

  “Please. If you lose any more weight you’ll evaporate.”

  “There are cardiovascular benefits. It’ll be good for my heart.” Carly busied herself with sugars and creamers.

  “Carly, I am telling you, I will not be able to stay friends with you if you have an affair with Keith.”

  “What. I’m not having an affair. It’s innocent flirtation. Anyway, how long have you known him and his wife? Are they like your best friends now?”

  “No, that’s exactly the point. I want to be friends with them. Their daughter is the same age as Lucy, they live in the neighborhood, they know everyone.”

  “Well, I don’t see what I have to do with any of that.”

  “Just—don’t.”

  “Okay! Okay! Calm down.”

  Sophie narrowed her eyes at Carly, who looked more annoyed than she really had a right to be, considering the damage her previous romantic collisions had caused. Carly needed to work on her heart, all right, but taking up running was the wrong way to go about it.

  Eight

  One oppressively humid morning in late August, Sophie dropped Lucy off for a playdate with Mathilda, then strolled Elliot to the Azalea Garden behind the museum. She spread a small blanket under a magnolia tree and emptied Elliot’s travel bag of toys onto the blanket. Elliot ignored the jumble of brightly colored plastic and headed straight into a nearby flower bed, trampling hostas and coral bells and digging his fingers into the mulch. Sophie picked him up and redirected him toward the grassy lawn, but this became a funny game, Elliot running shrieking back into the flower bed and Sophie pulling him back out, her stern “no” an occasion for more delighted laughter. It irked her more than it probably should, to be laughed at when she was trying to be serious. But where was there to go, after delivering her meanest face and deepest growl? Was a smack on the rear the next logical step in the arms race?

  Sophie left Elliot in the flower bed and began gathering all of his toys in the travel bag. Then, without a glance backward, she walked out into the middle of the grass and began tossing toys to and fro. The cheerfully smiling fire truck landed with a clatter; the Duplo blocks sailed through the air like candy from a parade float; stacking rings whizzed like Frisbees. From the flower bed, an enraged howl; she didn’t even have time to turn around before the bag had been snatched from her grasp, and Elliot began staggering across the lawn to retrieve his toys: it was like an Easter egg hunt, only angrier. Sophie retreated to the shade and sat on the blanket, feeling partly triumphant and partly guilty. Maybe it was wrong to exploit her son’s controlling, tidy nature. But he shouldn’t have laughed at her.

  Elliot finally sat down in the grass, absorbed in arranging the stacking rings in the proper order, and Sophie lay back, propped on her elbows. Small spots of sun pricked the dense mat of waxy leaves overhead; long knobby branches, mottled with lichen, created a low canopy. It was a good climbing tree. As a child, Sophie would not have hesitated to clamber into its branches, searching for a comfortable joint where she could lean back, legs dangling, and gaze into the high-ceilinged rooms of her shady mansion. So much of childhood, she realized, was spent imagining or assembling shelter: the blanket-draped chairs in the living room; the cardboard box castle; the large, hollowed-out boxwood in the backyard in Bethesda. Even Lucy had created a nest in her bedroom closet, piled deep with blankets and stocked with dolls and markers and a lovingly curated collection of business reply cards.

  An airplane crawled across the shimmering sky and disappeared into the branches, drawing her thoughts to Randall. She’d never even had a chance to see his personal effects. She’d always wondered what they’d recovered. His Casio watch? His wedding ring? Whatever was left of him, it had disappeared along with Maeve after the funeral. There had been a few sporadic postcards for a while; Maeve was “taking time off,” living with friends in the Southwest, experimenting with alternative lifestyles, whatever that meant. Sophie assumed Maeve was running from her guilt, which was ridiculous. Her father’s plane was a 747, but not the variant her mother had helped design. Just an evolution of it.

  She glanced back at Elliot. He was walking with an all-too-familiar hitch in his step. “Come here, babe,” she called, spreading the changing pad out on the blanket. Elliot toddled over, and she realized his face was bright red from the heat. She gave him a sippy cup of water to suck on while she changed his diaper; he drained it within seconds.

  “Let’s go visit Daddy,” Sophie said. “It’ll be nice and cool in his office, and we can get some more water.”

  Marjorie greeted them at the museum’s handicap-accessible entrance, where Sophie pushed the stroller up a ramp into the bracing air-conditioning. All of the curators were in a meeting with the director. “They should be out soon,” Marjorie said, leading Sophie to the elevator. When they got upstairs, Sophie set Elliot on the floor, swung her diaper bag over her shoulder, and collapsed the stroller. Propping it against
a wall, she led Elliot down the hall to the watercooler, where she refilled his sippy cup. Four object carts lined the hallway on the other side of the cooler; Elliot reached toward a shiny crystal chalice, but Marjorie grabbed his hand. “No touching, please!” She shook her head, sighed, and pulled a pile of small cards from her jacket pocket.

  “What have they got you doing now?” Sophie asked, nodding toward the cards.

  “I’m trying to match each piece to its object card so we can put it into off-site storage,” Marjorie answered. “Then I have to submit paperwork for it all, so they can keep track of what’s been moved. These are all good to go.” She indicated the cart nearest the cooler, which held a footed crystal bowl, some silver pieces, and a carved wooden clock. Each object had a small yellowed card propped against it. Marjorie walked further down the hall, pointing to three more carts. “Halfway there. No cards to be found. Haven’t even started.” She turned back to Sophie. “It’s a mess.”

  “Why is it so hard to match the cards?”

  “Well, let’s see. The object number is worn off half of them, and some were tagged, and the tags have fallen off. And then these—” She held up the stack in her hand. “Mystery cards! Look—this one says ‘silver spoon.’ There’s no photo, and we have a hundred silver spoons.” She pulled a stack of cards from her other pocket. “These are things I just can’t find. Yet. I’m sure they’re in there somewhere, but I’m only one person.” She smoothed her already smooth bob.

  Sophie widened her eyes. “Is anything missing?”