by Kate Walbert
“Excellent!” Fran says.
From behind Matilda’s door comes a shriek of giggles.
“Besides, they’re having fun!” Fran says.
“So are we!” Liz says.
Fran disappears to the kitchen and Liz stands to stretch a bit, to look out the windows. The apartment faces west, she believes, though she gets turned around at these heights. She still isn’t used to apartment views or high floors, and the ease with which you can see other lives: how even now, across from here, a boy sits reading at a dining room table while an old woman—a nurse? a grandmother? a nanny?—moves around him, straightening up, stepping in and then out of Liz’s sight. A diorama, they are; what you might see at the American Museum of Natural History: early twenty-first century, NYC, USA. They’re dead, actually—stuffed mammals, the old woman on some sort of a moving track.
And what of Fran in the kitchen? Liz in the living room? Urban/suburban women circa 2007 participating in/on playdate, an urban/suburban ritual intended to alleviate boredom/loneliness among children/women while encouraging/controlling social engagement—
“What?” Liz yells.
“Chilled?” Fran yells.
“Wonderful,” Liz yells. She turns away from the windows; there are other things to do. She pokes around the taupe room. On a wide bookshelf are the usual histories and paperbacks and framed photographs: an infant Matilda; an earnest-looking boy in mortarboard and gown, Richard?; a teenage Fran leaning against a giant redwood, her hair not yet streaked with gray but solely black, her posture sophisticated, worldly—she’s in college, possibly, or a Manhattan high school. I live on a narrow island, her posture says. I live at the center of the world.
On the secretary are bills and Post-it notepads and loose receipts and whatnot. Liz has a strong feeling, a hot spot, an itch to be scratched, and, sure enough, there it is among them: Fran’s anxiety journal. It’s as she expected, a steno notebook generally used for reportage. Liz resists for only a moment.
“Voilà!” Fran says. Liz turns to see her carrying a tray, the TV-dinner kind; it makes Liz anxious.
“What have you got?” Fran says. She’s pouring and doesn’t notice.
“Oh, nothing,” says Liz. “Your anxiety journal.”
Fran stops. “You were reading it?”
“Oh, God, no. Of course not. I just saw it here and picked it up. I mean, I was thinking, Good for you, and remembering that I’ve been meaning to buy one, or get one. I’d write, ‘TV-dinner tray.’ ”
“What?”
“ ‘TV-dinner tray.’ Like the one you’re holding. It makes me nervous and I can’t tell you why.”
Fran looks down. “It belonged to Richard. He liked to eat in front of the news.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe it’s the news you associate it with.”
“Maybe.”
“See? She had a point,” Fran says. “Cheers!” They toast and sip the wine, which is delicious chilled, Liz says—she never thinks to do that. “You should,” Fran says. She takes the anxiety journal and tucks it beneath one of the sectional cushions. “To playdates!” she says, toasting again.
* * *
It’s near the dinner hour and the girls are getting hungry; they haven’t heard a peep from their mothers. Pinkie Pie and Sun Sparkles have been to the castle about a zillion times; they’ve flown in the blue balloon, late for the costume ball, and then arrived, the My Little Pony theme song playing as Pinkie Pie and Sun Sparkles twirl on the special pink plastic revolving disk within the castle walls. Caroline lies on her back, pedaling her legs in the air, her finger working her nose. Matilda is reprimanding her imaginary sister, Beadie.
“Get down from there,” Matilda says. Beadie perches dangerously close to the window ledge, threatening to jump, and even though she has wings on her back and little ones at her ankles, Matilda pleads with her to stop.
“Goodbye, my friend,” Beadie says. “Goodbye!”
Beadie takes a tremendous leap and falls, tumbling, toward the street. Matilda screams an imaginary scream, though Beadie, she knows, won’t splat; she’ll fly with her little wings right back to Matilda’s room. Still, Matilda feels scared.
“Help! Help!” Matilda yells. “Thief! Help! Thief!”
The door swings open.
“Do not even start with that,” Fran says. “It makes me insane.” Behind Fran, Liz looks in. “Caroline,” she says. “Gold-star day, remember?”
Caroline pulls her finger out of her nose.
“Are you girls happy?” Fran says.
“We’re hungry,” they say.
“We’re staying for dinner, how’s that!” Liz says.
The girls hop up and down holding hands; they wear only their underwear.
* * *
Chicken nuggets are served. Somewhere in Matilda’s room, Fran is saying as she prepares the tray, live a round table and two chairs, Little Bear size, ordered from one of those catalogues which arrive daily in the mail; this one featured three child models, she’s saying, two girls and one boy, sipping tea at the table, sunlight streaming through windows that looked out on what appeared to be Russian countryside. The girls were dressed beautifully; the boy served in a monogrammed apron. Or maybe it came from the other one, Fran says, knocking on the door, the one where the child models introduced themselves and listed their goals. “I’m Zelda,” Fran says in a wavery falsetto. “I’m going to be a rock star.” Fran opens the door; inside, the girls huddle within the gauzy tent, apparently hiding.
“I can’t remember which,” Fran continues, “but the point is, it’s really cute, and it cost a fortune, and it must be here somewhere. I mean, you can’t just lose a table and chairs.”
Fran wades through stuffed animals and clothes and artwork and books, to a stack of pillows and blankets in the center of Matilda’s room, excavating until she finds the ensemble buried beneath. They were making a fort.
“Jesus,” she says, flushed. “Can you believe all this crap?”
“Yes,” Liz says.
Fran sets down the tray and calls the girls over. “Okay, ladies,” she says. “Which princess?”
“Jasmine,” Matilda says.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Fran says, rotating the plates.
“Ketchup?” Liz says; she holds the bottle at the ready. The girls nod, and she lurches toward them, ready to squirt.
* * *
“I can’t say that anything really happened with Richard,” Fran says. “It was just, you know, the feeling.” She lies on the floor in the now dim light of the apartment, balancing her wineglass on her chest, her feet propped on the sectional. “The elephant-in-the-room feeling.”
“The wha?” Liz says. She can’t remember the last time she drank so much wine in the afternoon; usually, she waits until Caroline’s asleep, the twins with Lorna in the nursery, Ted back at the office (the demanding life of a children’s television executive!) before pouring her first glass. Then she might have another, and another, enough to erase the day, or the parts of it she doesn’t want to remember: Caroline standing with her backpack on Lafayette, the neon-scrawled windows of the gay bar next to the bus stop, the public-service poster of an unattended bag, like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, shoved beneath some unsuspecting person’s seat.
“The elephant-in-the-room feeling,” Fran says. “You know, the thing that’s just, God, there. It’s big and heavy and real, somehow, though unnamed. It’s just there, is all, this blob of feeling; the feeling from the Black Lagoon.”
Fran rolls over on one elbow. “Did you ever ruin your life for a feeling?” she says.
“I don’t know,” Liz says. “I hope not.” She has closed her eyes to watch the tiny red pricks of light behind her eyelids. It’s a trick she likes to do, a habit; she likes to count them, pretend they’re sparks. She’s combustible, perhaps—she’s burning up.
“I miss Richard,” Fran is saying. “I miss him every day. There’s nobody to tell anything to anymore. Nobod
y.”
Liz opens her eyes and the sparks die out; she is back where she was, things reassembling around her—bookshelf, secretary, radiator, carpet, floor lamps.
“I mean, there never was anybody to talk to, really,” Fran is saying. “But there sort of was. I thought there was. For a while I used to. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Liz says, closing one eye and then the other; it changes her perspective. “I think so,” she says. She is a highly trained artist, she could tell you. She has training up the wazoo. She got a fellowship, even, and there were many, many applicants. She majored in art history, in case you’re interested.
“Do the others look like you?” Fran asks.
“What?” Liz says.
“The twins. Do they look like you? Or, you know, like the smarter, younger egg woman?”
Liz laughs. She doesn’t mean to, but she laughs and tips over the wineglass that she forgot she’d balanced beside her. There’s just a little left, just a drizzle to darken an already wet spot; she’s a well-trained klutz is what she is, a social miscreant fluent in art history, trained in art history. “Sorry, sorry,” she says. “I did it again.”
“Forget it,” Fran says.
Liz blots the wet spot with her shirtsleeve. “Not at all is the thing,” she says. “The twins don’t look like either of us. They’re blond and blue-eyed, for one. I mean, adorable. Absolutely adorably wonderful, but people think they’re adopted.”
“That’s so funny,” Fran says.
“I forgot to laugh,” Liz says.
“But you’re lucky,” Fran says.
“God, I know,” Liz says. “I am in the ninety-ninth percentile of luck.”
“You tested out,” Fran says.
“I am among the gifted and talented.”
From Matilda’s room there’s the sound of a thud.
“You guys happy?” Fran yells.
“We’re okay!” Matilda yells back.
“Caroline?” Liz yells.
“Yes?”
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Caroline says.
“I thought she might have disappeared,” Liz says. “Sometimes I think she’ll just disappear.”
“They’re fine,” Fran says. “More?”
“Just a skosh,” Liz says.
“A skosh?” Fran says.
“Japanese for ‘a little,’ ” Liz says. “Sukoshi.”
“Oh,” Fran says. “Do you speak it?”
“My dad was in the service. Stationed there. I used to think it was Yiddish. He’d say ‘Just a skosh’ whenever you offered him wine. I miss him, too,” Liz says. “Like Richard.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes.”
“Here.” Fran pours; they’ve finished one bottle and opened another. What they are celebrating they have no idea.
* * *
“Lemme at it,” Liz says. She crawls along the sectional on all fours. She hasn’t been able to locate the floor lamp switch, but it doesn’t matter; she’s a cat who can see in the dark. “It was here, I saw it. You took it away from me.”
“Oh, God!” Fran shrieks. “The whole thing is so stupid. Please.”
“Lemme, lemme, lemme,” Liz says.
“You’re going to hate me,” Fran says.
“Are you kidding?” Liz says. “You’re my new best friend.”
“You have to promise,” Fran says.
“I promise, I promise,” Liz says.
“Not to laugh. Really. No. I mean it. Don’t laugh. You’re going to laugh. I know it. I can just—”
“Bluebird’s honor,” Liz says. “Bluebird, Brownie, Girl Scout, Kappa Kappa Gamma. God, can you believe me?”
“Wow,” Fran says. “Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious,” Liz says. “I’m never not serious. I’m a never-not-serious Ohioan, Ohioette gal, aren’t I? I remain alert.”
“Do you think if we lived there or, like, Montana or something, things would be, I don’t know, different?” Fran says.
“Ta-da!” Liz says.
“Shit,” Fran says.
“I found it!” Liz says.
“Shit,” Fran says.
“You said I could.”
“Go ahead, just please. You promised.”
“I’ll be dead serious,” Liz says. She swings her bare feet around. “I am dead serious,” she says. “I am a deadly serious, dead-serious, never-not-serious person. I repeat, I remain alert.”
What is she saying? She has no idea, really, though it feels good to speak, the words tumbling out of her mouth and knocking around in the darkening room, high above the city where she has spent the afternoon with a new friend, a sophisticated friend, a woman who grew up here, a woman with a streak of natural gray, a divorced single mother with a legal, razor-sharp mind who can look down on the lights and know where she is, know all the cross streets and the avenues, know the best places to buy things, the best things to buy, a woman who used to bicycle to Greenwich Village, who met Bob Dylan, even, in one of those places where people met Bob Dylan, back when the Village was the Village, and Bob Dylan lived there, or, at least, sang there, but then that would have been Fran’s mother, maybe, or an older brother who didn’t mind Fran tagging along, who took her even, rode with her balanced on his handlebars. And now look! This! The promise of the journal in her hands! Fran made notes! She caught all the things that Liz missed—the meeting room overheated and crowded, the acoustics so bad it was impossible to concentrate. And afterward—this is now Liz talking, Liz continuing to talk, Liz babbling—Dr. Friedman had been so mobbed, so impossible to get to, that she had actually waited in the school lobby and followed her out, down Madison and then some, then over, to Lexington, the subway entrance there, Dr. Friedman walking with such robotic—
“What?” Fran says. “What?”
“Robotic,” Liz says.
“Oh,” Fran says. “Right, robotic. Go on.”
—purpose, that she quite literally couldn’t catch up. She just couldn’t catch up, she says again, before Dr. Friedman flew down the stairs to the subway.
“A flying robot,” Fran says.
Liz turns to the journal. “It must be done,” she says. “The consensus has been reached.”
“Okay,” says Fran, who has moved to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her.
“It won’t hurt,” Liz says.
“Please.”
“Well, just a little.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll make it quick,” Liz says.
“All right,” Fran says.
“These are difficult times, terrible times. Someone’s got to police the world.”
Liz opens the journal to read, but the truth is, it’s difficult to see what’s written in the near dark, and her eyes have started to go. She brings the page to her face, and squints:
Crowds
School
Shadows
Playdates
Lunchrooms
Anniversaries
“What?” Fran’s saying. “What? Oh, God. What did I write?” She moves closer to Liz, scoots in, so that Liz imagines Fran might next crawl into her lap as Caroline does, settle there between her legs to practice reading in the way she’s been instructed at school: Read It Once to See; Read It Twice to Comprehend; Read It Again to Fully Absorb Its Meaning.
Go-Go appears from nowhere. He scratches and scratches, biting at the hot spot on his leg, gnawing. “Stop!” Fran says, clapping her hands. “Stop!”
Liz closes the journal and stands up a bit unsteadily. “Jesus, it’s dark,” she says. “I can’t believe it got so late.” She hands the journal to Fran. “I promised Lorna I’d be back earlier.”
“Right,” Fran says, taking the journal. “God, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no. This was fun. I mean, this was really fun, and the girls—”
“They seem to hit it off,” Fran says.
“Caroline!” Liz yells in the direction of
Matilda’s room, the shut door. “Shit. We had piano. I totally forgot.”
“Oh, my God. I’m really sorry,” Fran says. “I started—”
“Don’t apologize. Caroline hates piano. Anyway, it wasn’t your—are these my shoes?”
“Here,” Fran says. “They’re here, with Caroline’s backpack.”
“Caroline!” Liz yells.
“It’s impossible to get them—”
“Caroline, now!”
The door opens slowly and the girls, or what looks like shadows of the girls, drift out, fall out, into the hallway.
“Are Thursdays better?” Fran is saying.
“I’m sorry?”
“Thursdays. We could do Thurs—”
Liz feels a kind of draining away, as if the ebb of the twilight has returned to the night all that is loose, unmoored. She has always fought the feeling of this time of day, when her father would remain in the garden and her mother did what mothers did then in the house. Liz would ride her bike up and down the driveway, waiting for her father to call her, to tell her to come quick, to come see the misshapen gourd, or the earthworm, or the potato bug before it got too dark, and she would, before it went black as pitch. She would hurry, she would pedal like the wind to get to what her father held: this thing unknown, random, discovered in the dirt and now there for her in her father’s hand. A miracle. It’s what placed her squarely in the world, what kept her from being sucked out.
“Yes,” Liz says. “Sure, whatever.” She ties up Caroline’s sneakers, yanks the laces tight. “I’m sorry about Richard,” she says, straightening.
“Oh, it’s fine,” says Fran. “Really. Matilda and I are a team, aren’t we, Matty?”
“Rah-rah,” Liz says.
“Thursdays,” Fran says. She has found Caroline’s jacket beneath the coatrack and now holds it out for her. “We’re going to do Thursdays!” she says to Matilda.
“Let me check at home,” Liz says. “I never know which end is up.”
“Oh,” Fran says.
“Thank Matilda,” Liz says to Caroline.
“Thank you,” Caroline says.
“Thank Fran,” Liz says.
“Thank you,” Caroline says.
