by Rumaan Alam
“Twenty minutes?” G. H. looked at his own watch. It was that long into town, more if you drove slowly, as a man who didn’t know the place might. “He’ll be back soon.”
“Should I make lunch?” Amanda was less hungry than bored.
“I can help.” Ruth was already on her feet. Hard to discern even to her whether she wanted to or felt she had to. She did like cooking, but was that because convention forced her into the kitchen until she’d learned to enjoy time spent there?
“The more the merrier.” Amanda didn’t want the woman’s company, but maybe it would distract her from thinking about her husband.
It was cooler inside, though Ruth had adjusted the thermostat so that it wasn’t too cold. She felt this was wasteful. “You shouldn’t worry, you know.”
This was a kindness, Amanda understood. Clay had bought brie and chocolate. There were sandwiches, a particular favorite of Rose’s, a recipe he used to make on New Year’s Day for some reason; traditions just begin, somehow, then they end. “I’ll warn you, this recipe sounds odd, but it’s so good.” She laid out ingredients.
Ruth was the one who submerged the Thanksgiving bird in salty water. She was the one who stretched bacon on the rack and let it crisp in the oven. She was the one who used a knife to sunder the flesh from the grapefruit’s membranes. This was her room. “Chocolate?”
Amanda looked at the things arrayed on the counter, each individual chocolate chip somehow lovely, the soft wedge of cheese remarkable. “Salty and sweet, some kind of magic there.”
“Opposites attract, I guess.” Was Ruth flirting? Maybe she was. Were she and Amanda actually opposites? Random circumstance had brought them together, but wasn’t everything random circumstance in the end? She chopped basil.
Ruth filled a bucket with ice. She produced cloth napkins, folded them into precise squares, and laid these out on a tray.
Amanda sniffed the fragrant tips of her fingers. “You’re the gardener?”
“You won’t catch George doing any of that old-people stuff.” Ruth thought her more grandmotherly inclinations—the crossword, gardening, fat paperback histories of the Tudors—didn’t seem evidence of anything. She was just a woman who liked what she liked. She wasn’t old.
Amanda tried to guess. “He’s in law? No, finance. No, law.” She thought the expensive watch and neatly groomed salt-and-pepper hair and fine spectacles and luxurious shoes explained just what type of man G. H. was.
“Private equity. Should I slice this cheese?” Ruth had explained this before many times. It still meant very little to her. So what? G. H. didn’t understand the particulars of what she had done at Dalton. Maybe no one, however much in love, cares about the minutiae of someone else’s life. “So, finance, you could say. But not for a big bank. A small firm, a boutique operation.” This was her way of explaining it to people who were as confused as she was.
“Just slice it thin, for a grilled sandwich.” They had enough for four but not precisely enough for six. She’d make one and leave it aside for Clay. For no reason but thinking of him, tears welled in her eyes. She wanted the news he would bring, but also she just wanted him back.
“At least the children are enjoying themselves.” Ruth didn’t want these people here, but she couldn’t help but feel some human connection to them. Ruth worried about the world, but to care for other people felt something close to resistance. Maybe this was all they had.
Amanda melted butter in the black skillet. “There’s that.” Archie was almost a man. A century ago, he’d have been sent to the trenches of Europe. Should she tell him what was happening, and what would she tell him if she did?
“I found this onion dip. Maybe as a snack?” Ruth took out a bowl and a big spoon, and they worked in silence.
Amanda could not bear it, and so she broke it. “What do you think is happening out there?”
“Your husband will be back soon. He’ll find out something.” Ruth tasted the dip with her pinkie, an elegant gesture. She didn’t want to play guessing games. She suspected Amanda didn’t believe them. Ruth didn’t want to be embarrassed.
Amanda removed a finished sandwich. “My kids rely on their phones to tell them how the weather is. To tell them what time it is, everything about the world around them, they can’t even see the world anymore but through that prism.” But even Amanda did this. She’d mocked the television commercial in which Zooey Deschanel seemed not to know whether it was raining, but she’d done the very same thing. “Without our phones, it turns out we’re basically marooned out here.” That’s what it was. The feeling was withdrawal. On planes, she turned off airplane mode and started trying to check her email once you heard that ding that meant you were fewer than ten thousand feet aloft. The flight attendants were buckled in and couldn’t scold. She’d pull and pull and pull at the screen, waiting for the connection to be established, waiting to see what she had missed.
“You’ll believe it when you can see it on your phone.” Ruth didn’t even blame her for this. All these years debating the objectivity of fact had done something to everyone’s brains.
“We just don’t know anything. I’ll feel better once we do. Do you think it’s taking Clay a long time?”
Ruth put the dirty spoon in the sink. “There’s an old idea, you’re trapped on a desert island. You’re far from society and people and maybe you have to choose the ten books or records you can take with you. Sort of makes the thing seem like paradise instead of a trap.” A desert island sounded nice to her, though the seas were rising; maybe all such islands would vanish.
“But I don’t have ten books. If we had the internet, I could get into my account and download all the books I’ve bought for my Kindle. But we don’t have that.” What she didn’t say: We have the pool, these brie and chocolate sandwiches, and though we’re strangers to one another, sure, we have one another too.
18
AMANDA BROUGHT OUT WINE. IT WAS A VACATION. ALSO: the hair of the dog. When the children complained it was too early to eat, Amanda let them vanish into their game, relieved. She poured pale pink wine into acrylic glasses and handed them around, ceremonial, almost religious. Someone attentive and patient had pressed the cloth napkins. She wondered if it had been Ruth.
“Your children are so polite.” G. H. considered this the highest of praise.
“Thank you.” Amanda was not sure this was not flattery, or just something to say, but she was pleased. “You’ve got a daughter?”
“Maya. She teaches Montessori in Massachusetts.” G. H. still wasn’t entirely certain what this entailed, but he adored her.
“She runs the school. She doesn’t just teach. She’s in charge of the whole operation.” Ruth bit into a baby carrot. She felt light. Maybe some part of her remembered reading once that people with fatal diagnoses entered a period of remission, calm, almost good health, once that’s been established. A honeymoon. An interlude of joy.
“That’s wonderful. We used to send Archie to a Montessori when he was small. It was amazing. Changing into their inside shoes. Washing hands. Saying good morning like colleagues at the office.” She’d loved how he’d referred to play as “work.” Those bumbling toddlers practicing for adulthood by lifting glass beads with a teaspoon, sponging up lunchtime spills.
“They say it’s important for development. Maya is very passionate about it. The boys will start there, goodness, in only a couple of weeks, I suppose it’ll be.” Ruth was defensive.
“It can’t be already!” G. H. knew that every cliché turned out to be true, that they do, in fact, grow up so fast.
“September.” Ruth said it with hope. Her mother would have brought God into it—God willing, a reflex like drawing breath. They hadn’t scorned it, but they hadn’t learned that woman’s devotion. Maybe she was onto something. Maybe it was a folly to assume anything happened without someone—God, sure, why not him—willing it.
Why did Amanda think of the Earth, Wind and Fire song, or why did the thought seem racis
t? No, some of their best friends were not black. Their friend Peter was married to a woman named Martika, whose mother had been a famous black model in the 1970s. Their neighbor on the ground floor was black, but also transgender, or nonbinary, or—Amanda always referred to this person by name just to be safe: Jordan, so good to see you; Jordan, how is your summer going?; Jordan, it’s been so hot out lately. “It does fly by. Older parents always said that to me when Archie was a baby, and I would think, Well, I can’t wait for this to go by. Because I was exhausted. But now I realize they were right.” She was babbling.
“I was about to say as much to you. You beat me to it. I remember Maya at this age.” G. H. was wistful, but also he was worried. They’d had fine lives, long lives, happy lives. Maya and her family were the only thing that it amounted to, of course, and that was something. A father should protect, and as he’d driven the night before, he’d worked through what he might do for her from the distance of Long Island and realized there wasn’t much. But Maya wasn’t the one who needed help; they were. Maya and the boys were fine.
Ruth wondered what version of the girl was in her husband’s mind. She didn’t want to ask. It was too private in front of this stranger. It was odd enough that they were all sitting there in their swimsuits.
“It must be fun to be grandparents. You get to do all the spoiling and don’t have to get up all night or scold them for bad report cards or whatever.” Amanda’s own parents discharged that office with indifference. They didn’t dislike Archie and Rose, but they didn’t dote upon them. They were two of seven cousins, and her parents had retired to Santa Fe, where her father painted terrible landscapes and her mother volunteered at a dog shelter. They were determined to enjoy the liberty of their old age in that strange place where it took longer for water to boil.
“These sandwiches are good.” Ruth had doubted they would be. Also she wanted a change of subject. The truth was, Maya guarded Beckett and Otto. She thought her parents feeble, or conservative, unable to comprehend the philosophy of it, what she and Clara had agreed upon. Ruth would come bearing bags from Books of Wonder, and Maya would pore over them like a rabbi, searching out their sins. It was well intentioned. Her distrust was not of her parents but of the world that they had made, and maybe she was right. Ruth could not resist buying them adorable things—little gingham shirts, like you’d put onto a teddy bear—and Maya would try to conceal her disdain. No matter, Ruth just wanted to be humored, and hold the boys’ clean-smelling bodies close against her own. It was remarkable, how that made her feel. Invincible.
“They are good,” G. H. agreed.
“Well, we do some spoiling,” she allowed. “When we get the chance.” That’s what she wanted, the chance to see her family.
Amanda no longer thought they were con men, but was this the precursor to dementia, the first warning sign, like keys left in the refrigerator or socks worn into the shower or thinking Reagan was still president? Wasn’t that how it worked: first fiction, then paranoia, then Alzheimer’s? She felt the same way about her parents—their volition seemed suspect. They’d moved to Santa Fe after skiing in New Mexico once or twice a decade earlier; it made no sense to her, and their contentment seemed a bit like delusion. “It’s the whole point of being a grandparent.”
“George is worse than I am—”
“Wait.” She was more rude than she’d meant to be, and gave the people a sheepish look. “I just realized. Your name is George Washington?”
There was no particular shame in it. He’d been explaining it for sixty-plus years. “My name is George Herman Washington.”
“I’m sorry. That was rude of me.” It was the wine, maybe? “It’s just that it seems somehow fitting.” She couldn’t explain it, but maybe it was self-evident; someday there would be an anecdote, the time she sat poolside with a black man named George Washington while her husband went forth to figure out what had gone wrong in the world. They’d traded their disaster stories the night before, and this would just be one more of those.
“No apologies necessary. Part of the reason I settled on using my initials early in my career.”
“It’s a fine name.” Ruth was not insulted, just marveled at the familiarity with which this woman talked to them. She knew it made her sound even more like an old woman, but she missed a sense of propriety about things.
“It is that! A fine name. And wonderful initials, I think. G. H. sounds like a captain of industry, a master of his business. I would trust a G. H. with my money.” Amanda was overcompensating now, but also a little tipsy, the wine, the heat, the strangeness. “Clay should be back soon, don’t you think?” She looked at her wrist but was not wearing her watch.
19
THE CHILDREN WERE BORED BY THEIR LEISURE. OUTNUMBERED, archie and Rose rediscovered some connection, were again a five-year-old and two-year-old cooperating toward some unstated goal. They’d left the pool, left the grown-ups, were into the grass, the shade the relief the pool had not been.
“Let’s go in the woods, Archie.” She thought about what she’d seen. It didn’t make sense, even to her. “I saw something this morning. Deer.”
“They’re everywhere, dumbass. They’re like squirrels or pigeons. Who cares.” She wasn’t terrible, his sister, and she was still a little kid, so she couldn’t help being a dumbass. Had he been that stupid at thirteen?
“No. I mean like. Come on.” Rose looked over her shoulder at the adults eating lunch. She couldn’t say “Please” because begging would turn him off. She had to make it sound appealing. She wanted to pretend they were exploring, but they actually would be exploring, so it wasn’t even a game. “Let’s see what’s out there.”
“There’s nothing out there.” Still, he kind of wondered what was out there. Indian arrowheads? Money? Strangers? He’d found, in various woods he’d visited in his life, some weird shit. Three pages torn from a dirty magazine: a lady with old-fashioned hair, tan skin, immense boobs, pouting and bending her body this way and that. A dollar bill. A jar filled with not-quite-clear liquid he was sure was piss but didn’t know how to prove that because he didn’t want to open a jar that might contain someone else’s piss. There were mysteries in the world, was all Rosie was saying, and he knew it but didn’t want to hear it from her.
“What if there is? Maybe there’s a house back there.” She was imagining something as yet unclear even to her.
“There’s no other houses anywhere near here.” Archie said it like he couldn’t believe it, or like he regretted it. He understood. He was bored too.
“There’s that farm. We saw them selling the eggs, remember?” Maybe those farmers had kids, maybe they had a daughter, maybe her name was Kayla or Chelsea or Madison and maybe she had her own phone, and maybe she had money, or an idea for something that would be fun to do. Maybe she’d invite them inside, and it would be air-conditioned, and they would play video games, and eat Fritos, and drink Diet Coke with ice cubes in it.
Rose was hot and itchy. She wanted to go into the woods with her brother, to go where the adults couldn’t see them, bother them. She imagined evidence out there. Footprints. Tracks. Proof.
Archie retrieved a stick from the ground, heaved it into the trees like a javelin. Kids loved sticks the way dogs did. Take a kid to the park, and they pick up a stick. Some kind of animal response.
“There’s a swing. Cool.” It hung from a tall tree. There was a small shed that could have been a playhouse or full of tools. Beyond, the grass ebbed until there was nothing but dirt and trees. Rose trotted toward it and sat.
Archie swore and felt like a man, complaining about the knots and rocks under his feet. “Shit.”
“What’s in that thing?” Something about the shed made Rose cautious. Anything could be inside it. Rose had started pretending, or she never stopped pretending.
“Let’s open it and see.” Archie sounded confident but privately shared his sister’s awe at the thing. It could have been the playhouse of some kid who was dead now. The
re could be a person inside it, waiting for them to open the door. It was something from a movie, or the kind of story they didn’t want their life stories to be.
The adults were behind the fence; it was like they had ceased to be. Rose hopped from the swing and stepped toward the little structure. She broke a spiderweb, invisible until it was not, felt that terrible shiver you do in that moment. The body knew what it was doing. It was scaring you away in case the spider was poisonous. She told herself not to scream—her brother had no patience for girlie things like that. A sound emerged all the same, a kind of strangled disgust.
“What?” Archie looked at his sister, some concern mixed with his disdain. That, too, was an animal response, the big brother’s.
“Spiderweb.” She thought of Charlotte’s Web. She knew spiders did not have human personalities and voices, but worried about the spider she might have displaced, could not but imagine it a kindly female spider. She did not know that she limned generosity with femininity, part of the moral of that particular story. She did not know that her mother objected to that, when rereading it aloud a few years ago, when they were small enough to be read to at night.
The boy and the girl moved together through the thick grass, their bodies near naked and pinked from the sun, prickled from the cooler air beneath the boughs, goose fleshed from the spider’s silk and the fear that was the best part of exploration. Seen from far away, they looked as the fawns did when you saw them early in the morning, young, hesitant, ungainly, but graceful for being only what they were.
Archie thought, but did not say, Pussy. It was a reflexive response to the perception of weakness, but she was his little sister. “Open it.”
Rose hesitated and then did not. She had to be brave, that was the game. There was the kind of notch you depress with your thumb, over a handle she gripped but lightly. The metal was weathered, and the touch felt charged. Rose pulled open the door, which made a loud creak. Inside: nothing, a scattering of dried leaves in the corner that looked almost deliberate. Rose’s heart was thudding so that she could hear it. “Oh.” She was a little disappointed, though she couldn’t say what she had expected to find in there.
