by Tom Perrotta
“If you have an erection that lasts for more than four hours,” she told him, “I’m probably gonna need a break.”
* * *
IT WAS funny—once Kevin knew that pharmaceutical assistance would be available in case of emergency, he realized that he probably wouldn’t need it. He sensed this even before they left the bar, and his optimism only grew on the way to Melissa’s house. It felt good to be walking down a dark, tree-lined street, holding hands with an attractive woman who’d made it quite clear that he was welcome in her bed. It felt even better when she stopped him in front of Bailey Elementary, pushed him against a tree, and kissed him long and hard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d experienced that distinctive, double-sided sensation, warm body softening against his front, cold bark jabbing roughly into his back. Sophomore year? he wondered. Debbie DeRosa? Melissa’s hips were rocking gently, creating some sweet, intermittent friction. He reached around and cupped her ass; it was soft and womanly, heavy in his hand. She made a purring sound as her tongue swirled around the inside of his mouth.
Nothing to worry about, he thought, picturing the two of them on the living room floor, Melissa on top, his cock as hard as a frat boy’s. I got this covered.
It was the smell of smoke that made them pull apart, a sudden awareness of company. They turned and saw the two Watchers hurrying toward them from the direction of the school—they must have been hiding in the bushes by the main entrance—moving with that strange sense of urgency they all had, as if you were an old friend they’d just spotted at the airport. He was relieved to see that neither one of them was Laurie.
“Oh, Jesus,” Melissa muttered.
Kevin didn’t recognize the older woman, but the younger one—a thin girl with a bad complexion—was familiar to him from the Safeway, where she’d worked as a cashier. She had a strange name he couldn’t quite remember, something that always seemed misspelled on her name tag.
“Hi, Shana,” he said, trying to be polite, treating her the way he’d treat anyone else. “It’s Shana, right?”
The girl didn’t answer, not that he expected her to. She hadn’t been all that chatty even when she’d been free to talk. She just locked eyes with him, as if she were trying to read his mind. Her partner did the same to Melissa. There was something harsher in the older woman’s gaze, Kevin thought, a smug note of judgment.
“You bitch,” Melissa told her. She sounded angry and a little drunk. “I warned you about this.”
The older Watcher brought her cigarette to her lips, the wrinkles around her mouth deepening as she inhaled. She blew the smoke right in Melissa’s face, a thin, contemptuous jet.
“I told you to leave me alone,” Melissa continued. “Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Melissa.” Kevin put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do this.”
She jerked away from his touch. “This bitch is stalking me. It’s the third time this week. I’m sick of it.”
“It’s okay,” Kevin told her. “Let’s just walk away.”
“It’s not okay.” Melissa stepped closer to the Watchers, shooing them like pigeons. “Go on! Get the fuck outta here! Leave us alone!”
The Watchers didn’t retreat, nor did they flinch at the foul language. They just stood there, calm and expressionless, sucking on their cigarettes. It was supposed to remind you that God was watching, keeping track of your smallest actions—at least that was what Kevin had heard—but the effect was mostly just annoying, something a little kid would do to get on your nerves.
“Please,” Kevin said, not quite sure if he was addressing Melissa or the Watchers.
Melissa gave up first. She shook her head in disgust, turned away from the Watchers, and took a tentative step in Kevin’s direction. But she stopped, made a hawking sound in her throat, then whirled and spit in the face of her tormentor. Not a fake spit, either—the kind that’s more noise than saliva—but a juicy schoolboy gob that struck the woman directly on the cheek, landing with an audible splat.
“Melissa!” Kevin cried out. “Jesus Christ!”
The Watcher didn’t flinch, didn’t even wipe at the foamy spittle as it dripped off her chin.
“Bitch,” Melissa said again, but the conviction had gone out of her voice. “You made me do that.”
* * *
THEY WALKED the rest of the way in silence, no longer holding hands, doing their best to ignore their white-clad chaperones, who were following so close behind it felt like they were a single group, four friends out for the evening.
The Watchers stopped at the edge of Melissa’s lawn—they rarely trespassed on private property—but Kevin could feel their eyes on his back as he made his way up the front steps. Melissa stopped by the door, reaching into her purse, groping for the keys.
“We can still do this,” she told him, without a whole lot of enthusiasm. “If you want to.”
“I don’t know.” There was a melancholy weight in his chest, as if they’d skipped right past the sex to the disappointment afterward. “You mind if I take a rain check?”
She nodded, as if she’d suspected as much, squinting past him to the women on the sidewalk.
“I hate them,” she said. “I hope they all get cancer.”
Kevin didn’t bother to remind her that his wife was one of them, but then she remembered it herself.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I just don’t understand why they have to ruin it for the rest of us.”
“They think they’re doing us a favor.”
Melissa laughed softly, as if at a private joke, then kissed Kevin chastely on the cheek.
“Give me a call,” she told him. “Don’t be a stranger.”
The Watchers were waiting on the sidewalk, their faces blank and patient, freshly lit cigarettes in their hands. He thought about making a break for it—they usually wouldn’t chase you—but it was late and he was tired, so they set off together. He sensed a certain lightness in their steps as they moved beside him, the satisfaction that comes from a job well done.
BLUE RIBBON
NORA DURST HATED TO ADMIT it, but SpongeBob wasn’t working anymore. It was probably inevitable—she’d seen some episodes so many times she basically had them memorized—but that didn’t make it any easier. The show was a ritual she’d come to depend on, and these days rituals were pretty much all she had.
For about a year—the last year they had together—Nora and her family had watched SpongeBob in the evening, right before bed. Erin was too young to get most of the jokes, but her brother, Jeremy—he was three years older, a kindergarten man of the world—stared at the TV with an awestruck expression, as if a miracle were unfolding before his eyes. He chuckled at almost every line, but when he really cut loose, the laughter exploded from his mouth in loud whoops that mixed approval and amazement in equal measure. Every so often—usually in response to physical violence, bodies being stretched, flattened, spun, distorted, dismembered, or propelled at high speed across improbable distances—hilarity got the better of him, and he had to launch himself off the couch and onto the floor, where he could pound on the rug until he managed to calm down.
Nora was surprised by how much she enjoyed the show herself. She’d gotten used to the bland crap her kids insisted on watching—Dora and Curious George and the Big Red Dog—but SpongeBob was refreshingly clever, and even a bit edgy, a harbinger of better days down the road, when they’d all be liberated from the ghetto of children’s programming. Because she was such a fan, she was puzzled by her husband’s indifference. Doug sat with them in the living room, but rarely bothered to lift his eyes from his BlackBerry. That was the way he was those last few years, so absorbed in his work that he was rarely more than half there, a hologram of himself.
“You should watch,” she told him. “It’s really pretty funny.”
“No offense,” he said. “But SpongeBob’s a little retarded.”
“He’s just sweet. He gives everyone the benef
it of the doubt, even if they don’t deserve it.”
“Maybe,” Doug conceded. “But retarded people do that, too.”
She didn’t have much more luck with her friends, the mothers she went to yoga class with on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and occasionally out for drinks with at night, if their husbands were around to hold down the fort. These women didn’t share Doug’s Olympian disdain for childish things, but even they grew skeptical when she rhapsodized about her favorite cartoon invertebrate.
“I can’t stand that show,” Ellen Demos said. “But the song at the beginning’s a real hoot.”
“The squid is awful,” added Linda Wasserman. “He’s got that creepy phallic nose. I hate the way it just dangles there.”
After October 14th, of course, Nora forgot about SpongeBob for a long, long time. She moved out of her house and spent several heavily medicated months at her sister’s, trying to come to grips with the nightmare that had replaced her life. In March, against the advice of her friends, family, and therapist, she returned home, telling herself that she needed some quiet time alone with her memories, a period of reflection in which she might be able to answer the question of whether it would be desirable, or even possible, to go on living.
The first few weeks passed in a fog of misery and confusion. She slept at odd hours, drank too much wine to substitute for the Ambien and Xanax she’d sworn off, and spent entire days wandering through the cruelly empty house, opening closets and peering under beds, as if she half expected to find her husband and children hiding out, grinning like they’d just pulled off the best practical joke ever.
“I hope you’re happy!” she imagined scolding them, pretending to be upset. “I was going out of my mind.”
One evening, aimlessly flipping through the channels, she happened upon a familiar episode of SpongeBob, the one where it snows in Bikini Bottom. The effect on her was instantaneous and exhilarating: Her head was clear for the first time in ages. She felt okay, better than okay. It wasn’t just that she could sense her little boy in the room, sitting right beside her on the couch; at times it was almost as if she were Jeremy, as if she were watching the show through his eyes, experiencing a six-year-old’s wild pleasure, laughing so hard she almost lost her breath. When it was over, Nora cried for a long time, but it was a good cry, the kind that makes you stronger. Then she grabbed a notepad and wrote the following:
I just saw the episode of the snowball fight. Do you remember that one? You liked playing in the snow, but only if it wasn’t too cold or windy out. I remember the first time we went sledding on that old wooden toboggan, and you cried because you got snow on your face. It was a whole year before you let us take you again, but then you liked it better because instead of the toboggan we had snow tubes, which took a really long time to blow up. You would have enjoyed watching SpongeBob tonight, especially the part where he jams a funnel in his head and turns his face into a snowball machine gun. I’m sure you would have tried to imitate the sound he made while he was shooting them, and I bet you would have done it really well, because I know how much you like to make funny noises.
The next morning, she drove to Best Buy, picked up a complete set of SpongeBob DVDs, and spent the better part of the day watching several episodes from Season One, a marathon that left her feeling cranky, hollowed out, and in desperate need of fresh air. For this very reason, she’d been careful about rationing her kids’ TV time, and understood that she needed to do the same for herself.
Before long, she’d developed what turned out to be a surprisingly durable strategy: She allowed herself to watch SpongeBob twice a day, once in the morning and then again at night, never failing to write a brief entry about each episode in her notebook. This practice—it came to feel vaguely religious—gave structure and focus to her life, and helped her not to feel so lost all the time.
There were a couple of hundred episodes in all, which meant that she saw each one three or four times in the course of a year. It was okay, though, at least until recently. Nora still had something to write after each rerun, some fresh memory or observation triggered by what she’d just seen, even the handful of shows that she’d grown to actively dislike.
In the past few months, however, something fundamental had changed. She almost never laughed at SpongeBob’s antics anymore; shows that she’d found amusing in the past now struck her as desperately sad. This morning’s episode, for example, felt like some sort of allegory, a bitter commentary on her own suffering:
Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over SpongeBob’s body. To do this, he climbs inside SpongeBob’s conveniently empty head, then pulls off SpongeBob’s arms and legs so he can replace them with his own. Yes, I realize that SpongeBob’s limbs can regenerate themselves, but come on, it’s still horrible. During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and SpongeBob’s body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?
In her heart, she understood that the real problem wasn’t the show so much as the feeling that she was losing her son again, that he was no longer there in the room with her. It made sense, of course: Jeremy would be nine now, probably past the age where he would be watching SpongeBob with any real enthusiasm. Wherever he was, he was onto something else, growing up without her, leaving her more alone than she already was.
What she needed to do was retire the DVDs—donate them to the library, put them out for garbage, whatever—before SpongeBob and everything associated with him got permanently poisoned in her mind. It would have been easier if she had something to replace him with, some new show to fill the empty space, but every time she tried to ask her old friends what their boys were watching, the women just hugged her and said, Oh, honey, in their smallest, most sorrowful voices, as if they hadn’t understood the question.
* * *
BEFORE LUNCH, Nora took a long ride on the Mapleton-to-Rosedale Bike Trail, a seventeen-mile stretch of land that used to be a railroad line. She liked riding there on weekday mornings when it was relatively uncrowded and the people using it were mostly adults, a lot of them retired, out for some joyless, life-prolonging exercise. Nora made it a point to stay far away on sunny weekend afternoons, when the path was crowded with families on bikes and Rollerblades, and the sight of a little girl with a too-big helmet, or a scowling boy pedaling furiously on a bike equipped with rickety training wheels, could leave her bent over and gasping on the grassy margin of the path, as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
She felt strong and blissfully empty gliding through the crisp November air, enjoying the intermittent warmth of the sun as it filtered down through the overhanging trees, which were mostly stripped of their foliage. It was that trashy, post-Halloween part of the fall, yellow and orange leaves littering the ground like so many discarded candy wrappers. She’d keep riding into the cold weather for as long as she could, at least until the first big snowfall. That was the lowest time of the year, dim and claustrophobic, a funk of holidays and grim inventories. She was hoping that she could escape to the Caribbean or New Mexico for a while, anyplace bright and unreal, if she could only find someone to go with who wouldn’t drive her crazy. She’d visited Miami on her own last year, and it had been a mistake. As much as she liked solitude and strange places, the two of them together did a number on her, releasing a flood of memories and questions that she managed to keep a fairly tight lid on at home.
* * *
THE PATH was more or less a straight shot, a car’s width of aging blacktop that took you from Point A to Point B without a whole lot of fanfare. In theory, you were free to double back at any point, but Nora either went halfway—turning around at the edge of Mapleton for an easy sixteen-mile round-trip—or all the way to the terminus in Rosedale, for a grand total of thirty-four, a distance that was no longer the least bit daunting to her. If the path had continued for another ten miles, she wou
ld have followed it to the end without complaint.
Not too long ago she would have laughed if someone had suggested that a three-hour bike ride would become an unremarkable part of her daily routine. Back then her life was so crowded with tasks and errands, the everyday emergencies and constantly expanding to-do list of a full-time wife and mother, that she could barely squeeze in a couple of yoga classes a week. But these days she literally had nothing better to do than ride her bike. Sometimes she dreamed about it right before falling asleep, the hypnotic sight of the ground disappearing beneath her front wheel, the jittery sensation of the world humming up through her handlebars.
One day she’d have to get a job, she understood that, not that there was any particular hurry on that front. With the generous survivor’s benefits she’d received—three lump-sum six-figure payments from the federal government, which had stepped in after the insurance companies had ruled the Sudden Departure an “Act of God” for which they could not be held accountable—she figured she’d be okay for at least five years, even more if she ever decided to sell the house and move into someplace smaller.
Still, the day would eventually come when she’d have to start supporting herself, and she did her best to think about it sometimes, not that she ever got too far. She could see herself getting up in the morning full of purpose, putting on clothes and makeup, and then heading out the door, but her fantasy always petered out right there. Where was she going? To an office? A school? A store? She had no idea. She had a degree in Sociology and had spent several years with a research firm that rated corporations based on their records of social and environmental responsibility, but the only thing she could really imagine herself doing at this point was working with children. Unfortunately, she’d tried that last year, helping out a couple of afternoons a week at Erin’s old day care, and it hadn’t gone very well. She’d cried too much in front of the kids, and hugged a few of them a little too hard, and had been gently and respectfully asked to take a leave of absence.
