by Kate Walbert
“All right,” Ginny says. “Just this once. Because we’re here. But not if there’s a line.”
“Yeah!” the girls say. Olivia takes Maggie’s hand and leads the way. Ginny watches them step onto the escalator with their identical ponytails, their small shoulders, their fleeces tied around their waists. From the moment they were born, they looked like her or they looked like their father, or, sometimes, they looked like a combination of both: her hair and his eyes, his mouth and her nose, her chin and his smile. But from behind now they look just like little girls: sisters in a portrait, or Renoir’s beauties in flat black hats, poppies sprung from their ballet shoes. They are timeless, somehow, though too fast growing. “Zoom Zoom is shrinking,” Maggie had said. “Wasn’t Zoom Zoom once bigger?” They ascend and Ginny feels the catch of love unbearable: she never imagined this, she thinks, her heart suddenly thudding, as if stepping down a stair or two, hard, and then a pause and then another thump, or a clump, her heart clumping down the stairs—caffeine, maybe, or nerves.
She follows them up but they are already out of sight. The crowds thick, people speaking different languages, laughing, dancing with the employees. Where is she? What is this? At the top of the stairs, Olivia waits to show her. “Look!” she says, holding up a green Statue of Liberty M&M. “You pull the torch.”
“Cool,” Ginny says.
“Are you looking?” Olivia says. “The torch!”
“I saw,” Ginny says. “It’s cool.”
“And they have purple ones.”
“Cool.”
“Can we get some?”
“Where’s your sister?”
“With the guy. Can we get some?”
“What?”
“The purple ones! They’re grape!”
* * *
She and the girls’ father had discussed at length how to explain it to them. He had thought it best to be as honest as possible, to sit them down and simply tell them that he was moving out. “They’re old enough,” he had said.
They’re too young, she’d said. She could barely look at him. He was all secrets; they slid around beneath his expression like tectonic plates. He was all the things he wouldn’t say to her that she wanted to know, all deception and cunning. It made her crazy to look at him and so she stared at her feet, at her ubiquitous galoshes. At least she should find some more contemporary ones, the ones with the thick matching socks turned down over the top, the ones in strong solid colors that came from the British Isles or somewhere—Brittany?—and suggested other lives, lives spent mucking stalls or milking cows, or even striding with a fishing rod and a rough-hewn basket through streams where the trout still ran as they once had, before, in other places, they grew strange scales and forgot to spawn; lives spent striding and oblivious of the wet, oblivious of the hard stones that would have pierced the soles of lesser girls. Boots that suggested strength or, at the very least, a day’s catch.
“It’s not like they don’t get the concept,” he had said.
She looked up at his face and squinted, and the girls were there, too: in his eyes, his eyebrows.
* * *
“Maggie!” Ginny shouts. She can’t see her. The line for a photograph with the M&M is endless, and she can’t see Maggie anywhere.
“What guy?” Ginny asks, turning to Olivia. “What do you mean, ‘the guy’?”
“I didn’t say that,” Olivia said. “I don’t know. She was here a minute ago.”
“Where?”
“Right here,” Olivia says, and starts to cry.
“Don’t,” Ginny says. “We’ll find her. Please. She wouldn’t just disappear. She’s got to be somewhere. Maggie!”
“Maggie!” Olivia says.
“Maggie!” Ginny says.
* * *
There are too many people in M&M World. There should be some requirements, some restrictions. She’s quite sure that numerous fire codes are being broken. She plans to write a letter, to get someone’s attention—she’ll call 311. There are hundreds of people, if not thousands, in this place. How can anyone see a thing? She looks around at the racks, the ascending columns of stuff, the stacks and piles beneath the garish lights, and she suddenly thinks she spots Maggie, but it’s not her; it’s another child. She yanks Olivia here and there. “Maggie!” she calls. She is trying to remain calm. She’ll find an employee in a minute; there must be an intercom system. “Maggie!” This must happen all the time, as it does at Disney World and places like that. The store can automatically lock the doors. “Maggie!” She sees an employee, a girl no more than seventeen or eighteen in M&M green with a pierced nose and spiky blond hair. “My daughter,” she says, breathless, flagging her. “She’s gone.” The girl’s name tag says WENDY, KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN. Thank God, a midwesterner.
“I mean, she was with me. And now I don’t know where she is.”
“Was she here?” Wendy says.
“Yes, she was. With me. And I can’t—” Ginny breaks away. “Jesus, is there someone else?”
“I’ll help you find her,” Wendy says.
“Is there a manager?”
“Don’t panic,” Wendy says.
“I’ve got to—”
“Barbara,” Wendy is saying into some kind of apparatus she’s wearing around her neck.
* * *
She and the girls’ father sat across from each other at the kitchen table, the light above them harsh, the hour late. From time to time, an ambulance sirened by, or someone shouted in the street; it was the weekend. The girls slept in the other room, Olivia with the quilt wrapping her ankles—she tossed and turned—and Maggie with Zoom Zoom and her other animals positioned around her. Zoom Zoom in the doll cradle, perhaps, or tucked in a towel on the floor, its head on a pincushion or a neatly folded Kleenex.
He talked and talked. She needed a change in subject; she needed to go to bed. It was all so banal, wasn’t it? So ordinary? Predictable? An intern? A true love? She looked down at her unvarnished nails: in college she had worn leather moccasins and, on occasion, feathers in her ears; she’d won a prize for her dissertation. Most days, she carried a tote bag, black, with the name of her favorite nonprofit in white.
She listened for a while, and then she did not. Then she said, “Maybe we could tell them it’s like what happens when they argue about the fort. How they each want to push the other out of the fort, how there’s never enough room in the fort. We could tell them you’re taking a break from the fort,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
“This, of course, makes me the fort,” she said.
“You are not the fort,” he said.
“I was joking,” she said.
Outside, a bottle shattered.
“But they might understand the thing about the fort,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
“They might,” she said.
“That’s good,” he said.
* * *
“Maggie!” Ginny yells. She feels Wendy touch her arm, right behind her.
“Don’t leave,” Wendy says. “That’s the first thing.”
“What?”
“Don’t go out of sight.”
“She’s out of sight,” Ginny says. “My daughter. She’s five years old. Please.”
Olivia cries beside her. “I’m sorry,” Olivia says. “It’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Ginny says. “Sweetheart, it’s not your—Maggie!” Now Ginny’s screaming, her voice swallowed by the wall of sound, the same song, the same rapper, repeatedly singing. Customers stop browsing, unsure what to do. They step back and multiply, as if viewing an accident.
Wendy is speaking into the gadget around her neck. She looks up. “Barbara’s on her way,” she says, as if delivering good news. “She was in inventory.”
* * *
After the whale swam away—disappeared, really—Ginny couldn’t quite explain to the girls’ father why she hadn’t called him immediately. He had promised to call her, he
said, so why hadn’t she called him? He had been just on the other side of the boat; he had the camera, after all. He hadn’t seen a thing, he said. By the time he heard the other tourists shouting, the hubbub, the whale was gone and Ginny was standing there, red-handed. “You were red-handed,” he teased her afterward. “A whale hoarder.”
“Was not a whale hoarder,” she’d said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Whale hoarder.”
And for a while, in the early years of their marriage, when she spent too much time reading, or rose early to walk alone in the park, or drifted off when the two were having dinner in a restaurant, he’d kick her ankle and say it again. “Whale hoarder,” he’d say. And she’d laugh and then she would not. She’d remember the whale’s expression, how it lay on its side and drifted in the current, how it had been so close that she could see the raised scars of its skin, the mottled gray color of it and the sheen of evaporating water, and its massive head, how the whale’s eye, onyx black, had looked directly at her, unblinking, and she had thought, If I can stand here long enough, if I can just look hard enough, I’ll understand. What, she wasn’t sure, but she felt it was something she was meant to know, something beyond the noise of everything else, something as clear as the sounds carried across the ocean. “What?” she had said to the whale. “What?”
* * *
It is Olivia who spots Zoom Zoom after Barbara has arrived and the doors have been manned, after Ginny has sunk to the floor with her head between her legs, after the tourists, English-speaking and those with no idea, have come forward, rallying around the woman with the missing child and the child that remains, a gorgeous girl, freckled, tall, her hair loosened from its ponytail, her face puffed with tears. It is Olivia who sees Zoom Zoom’s ear, and then Maggie’s shoes, or the bottoms of them, beneath the dressing room curtains, Maggie covered by a heap of discarded M&M wear, an M&M beach towel over her head. She hadn’t heard her mother or her sister, she said, howling. She thought they’d gone, too.
“Too?” Ginny says, hugging her youngest to the floor, hugging her small arms and legs, folding her into her own arms as tight as she can bear. “Too?” she says, crying, laughing, pulling Olivia in as well, so that the three form a kind of solid thing, a weight, a substance, as round as a boulder, which, for the moment, fills in the empty space that was there just before. And suddenly everything returns: the buzzy air, the lemony chocolate scent piped through the store, the rapper’s song, the rainbow wall of colors, the crowds.
“Let’s go,” Ginny whispers. The girls are sniffling, their faces hot. She stands then, a daughter gripped in each hand. They ride the escalator down in silence, staring out the large windows toward Broadway, toward the familiar thickening rush-hour crowd, until they reach the bottom and step off. Ginny lets go first, leading them, pushing hard on the glass door against the wind, against what has become more than a blustery day, because in truth it is not yet spring, exactly; there is still the possibility of a freeze.
She squats to zip the girls’ fleeces to their chins, to kiss their cheeks—their eyes still wet with tears—then pulls them close to her, again. How soon the whale dissolved into its darkening sea. How soon she was left on her own, waiting.
THE BLUE HOUR
Today I’ve been watching it snow and thinking of Katharine. This was in Rochester, before your sister was born, when you were four or five and your father worked most weekends. (I have always thought it ironic that your father made our living as an efficiency expert, a job that required so many hours of overtime.) We lived in a pink-brick Georgian at the end of a cul-de-sac called Country Club Road. Your father had flown out from Detroit to find it and had bought it over one weekend. You were too young to travel at the time so we stayed behind. I remember he called from the Holiday Inn to let me know he had found a house and how, when I asked him to describe it, he said it had an “expansive den.”
We moved the following weekend and I suddenly found myself in a pink Georgian in the middle of a Rochester winter. I tried to keep my spirits up. I went around to some of the homes where snowmen had been built, ostensibly looking for playmates for you. Katharine lived in one of those grand cold Tudors with leaded windows and azaleas and box hedges trimmed into spades. Her Christmas decorations were still out—garlands of evergreen wrapped with white lights and a red-ribboned wreath on the front door. I rang the doorbell and Katharine opened the door as if expecting me. I remember thinking how much she looked like Audrey Hepburn.
“You’re here.”
“Marion Clark,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Oh,” she said, shaking it. “I’m sorry.”
“You thought I was someone else?” I said. She nodded. “Forgive me, it’s cold. Come in.”
She was a woman who could say forgive me without batting an eye.
The inside of her house felt nothing like the outside; it held a sweet thick smell I recognized as incense. There were large pillows scattered around the floor in the living room and plants whose tendrils grew up and over the windows. I accepted her drink offer, though it was two o’clock in the afternoon and, for those years at least, your father and I had a rule about no cocktails before six.
I asked for an old fashioned. It sounded right. She nodded when I said it as if I had passed a secret test; then she led me into the living room. “You are who I was waiting for,” she said, ducking out. I sat on the couch. It was draped with a batik fabric that had hundreds of tiny mirrors stitched into it, and I remember how I thought that if light ever got through those heavy webbed-green windows the mirrors would reflect it like so many diamonds, as if the couch were afire.
Katharine returned with an ornate tray and sat down across from me on one of the floor pillows. “So,” she said, handing me my drink. “Let me guess. You’re new. You’re bored. You’re looking for playmates for your child but you’re really looking for company.”
“I suppose you could say that.”
“Well, cheers then,” she said, lifting her glass. “To playmates.”
“Salud,” I said, I’m sure wanting to sound continental. I felt paltry in comparison to this creature in black silk. I had worn my usual wool slacks and snow boots. How could I have known?
I sipped my drink. She had made it quite strong, and from the first taste I felt transported.
“So,” she said. “Let me tell you what there is to know. First off, I’m Katharine. I don’t think I ever said that. Not Kathy or Katie, please, but Katharine. My mother was very particular about this. Anyone who would call me anything but got a talking-to, including teachers and boyfriends. She named me Katharine after Katharine Hepburn, whom I believe goes by Kate. But Mother’s lost so there you have it. Second, I live in this monstrous house with a husband, Rick, and twin sons, Richard and Ross. It was not my idea to go with R. In fact, I was completely against it, but Rick insisted so what could I do. I had just been through forty-one hours of labor and you might say my mind was a little foggy, and besides, he’s from Canada of all places.” Katharine paused and took a sip of her drink. Behind her, through the thick glass, I saw that it had begun to snow again, and wondered if she wasn’t cold in nothing more than silk.
“We moved here about seventeen months ago and the boys think it’s great and Rick plays golf and I am bored out of my mind. Rochester, for God’s sake. Who would have thought I would end up here? I am the daughter of missionaries. I grew up everywhere, including Calcutta and Beijing, and I am the first to tell you that life is elsewhere. My mother ran away to find it.” She took a deeper sip. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I suppose so,” I said. I felt hot in my coat, but she hadn’t offered to take it. I felt as if I had entered some sort of circus fun house and Katharine sat before me as the reflection of what I could become, if I squinted my eyes, if I poured a drink at two o’clock and burned incense in Rochester.
“Oh, I’m not saying there’s nothing to do here. There’s the club and a good bridge group and dances every Saturday and aro
und Christmas they have the Bachelors’ Ball, which is really for all the married folk who go and get blasted to the hilt and switch husbands and that sort. We’ll talk about that into the next year and the spring and it will give us something to think about come fall, again, when we are feeling kind of blowsy and old and when we unpack the ornaments and find two shattered, again. Too bad you weren’t moved in before that; you could have met the gang and added your own rumor to the mill.”
I must say it got to a point where I simply watched her mouth move. I could not get past a woman using the word blowsy in a sentence and getting away with it. She sounded so grand. She reminded me of a lone exotic fish, the type you might see in one of those overpriced pet stores swimming around and around and around an aquarium, the glass sides of which are nearly opaque from algae let to grow, as if the poor thing has been forgotten.
“Come on,” she said at last, draining her drink. “The boys won’t be home for an hour and I need to shop. You come. I want help.”
I stood. I’m not sure how much time had passed, but I remember thinking that you would be fine, set with a new babysitter. Katharine walked to the hall closet and put on a very full raccoon coat. Then she opened the front door and stepped out. I followed her around to the garage.
“Don’t you need the air?” she said, lighting a cigarette. She stood by the garage door and smoked. “Rick doesn’t let me do this in the house and who can blame him, the plants and all. Terrible habit, really. My teeth are yellow. But it gives me something to do, don’t you think that? If nothing else, this is something to do.” We shared the cigarette, then stamped into the garage and got into her car, the make of which I cannot remember. She was not a woman who would take much stock in automobiles, though she did love clothes and had the most elegant wardrobe of anyone I had ever known, before or since. I remember when I got the news that she was dead my second or third thought was of those clothes, of what they would have chosen to put her in for her burial.
