Among the Ten Thousand Things (13 page)

But the cat had gotten away. Deb watched it go while Kay was off looking for Simon. She’d asked it to stay, pretty-pleased it to, she’d even tried standing in its way. Kay pouted when she came back and blamed her mother, as Deb knew she would, and the nice time they’d been having came to a close.

“You keep doing it,” Kay said on the walk back. “There, like that.”

“I swear, I’m not looking at you any
way.
I don’t mean to.” It was their first chance to really talk since Kay’s trouble at school, and Deb was often quiet, finding words to form the sentences. “Susan Haber called me.”

Kay said nothing, seemed to quicken her pace.

“Chloe and Brett’s mom.”

“I know who,” and she was definitely moving faster.

“So do you want to tell me, about what happened?”

“That’s okay.” Kay was nearly running now. They were almost to the house.

“Well, would you talk about it anyway, please?” Deb hurried after. “I’d like it, to talk about it.”

“No! Mom—” At the drive she stopped, looking wildly around. “The only reason you
know
about it is because they were being spies on me. That’s the only reason!”

Deb was about to say that it didn’t matter how she knew, just that she did, and that she wasn’t mad, not at all, but Kay’s attention seemed to have darted away.

From the house, two weedy legs, blondly fuzzed, were barreling down the small hump of lawn, alongside but without heed to the flat stone steps, made no use of by this man who’d built them—who’d paid for them, anyhow. And he was still handsome, still startlingly well made, with his light eyes and strong jaw. Gary, Deb thought, looks so much the same.

“Sight for sore eyes,” he said, spreading his arms wide. He swooped his tall and narrow frame down to Kay. “And you! Where you been, huh? All my life.” With both hands he cupped the whole of her head, so it became a clay pot he was making. “Amazing.”

“Yeah, we like her okay.” Deb laughed. “We plan on keeping her.”

The three spent an awkward moment around the kitchen table.

“I remember your age,” Gary told Kay, as though this could mean much to her. “I hated school—hated having to get up that early.”

“Oh, please!” Deb said. “Mornings are the worst. But I don’t know”—trying to draw a smile from Kay—“you don’t give me
nearly
as bad a time as your brother. For him I need a bugle.”

“And what is it for you now? Junior high?”

“Middle school,” Kay answered.

“They’re hard years,” Deb said. “Much harder this time around than they were for Simon. Girls can be so, I don’t know,
unkind
at this age. Gossip and what have you. It’s tough. But we’re hanging in there, right, babe?” She reached across the table to stroke her daughter’s arm.

Kay drew both hands into her lap. That the two adults exchanged glances she knew without looking.

“Well,” Deb said after a pause, “how’s Nancy?”

“
That
…isn’t really happening anymore.”

“You broke up?”

“We just sort of petered out.” He shrugged. “Didn’t see a future.” To Kay he added, “Nancy’s my girlfriend. Was my girlfriend.”

Kay thought that, whatever his age, it was too old for a girlfriend: There should have been another word for it.

Then Gary suggested he and Deb scare up some wine from the cellar.

“Sorry it’s a total dust bowl down here,” he called from the unlit flight of stairs. Deb was surprised how immediately it made her nervous, being alone with him. He pulled a chain that hung from the ceiling. A single bulb threw light onto the honeycomb of dark bottles and, over it, one of Gary’s landscapes, which he rarely showed and didn’t sell except through hotels and restaurants in town. Mostly fine, precise oil paintings of local harbors, lighthouses on the sound. They suggested an appreciation for small and simple things, one she didn’t have herself but that she admired, hoped to cultivate. Jack said Gary lacked imagination, and vigor. Energy! He doesn’t have any energy.

“Okay,” Deb said, crouching down to survey the lowest rack. “What’ll it be?”

He squatted beside her. “Deb, listen. Your email, it didn’t mention…I heard what happened, about Jack’s show.”

“I guess maybe a white?” There was so much she didn’t know about wine.

“He must be in a pretty bad state.”

“Or red! Red we won’t have to chill.”

“Hey. Talk to me.” His hand on her wrist. He might have been asking the time.

“It’s not about the fucking show.” She kept her eyes fast on the shelf, the shadowed cubbyholes. “There’s been—someone else, you know?” Gary would know, wouldn’t even have to ask whose someone else, hers or Jack’s.

There had been a time, as Jack’s first marriage was ending, when everywhere they went it was tables for three. They went to the opera and to shows, the twenty-six-year-old and her fortyish escorts. Three was supposed to be a bad number for groups—whenever Simon or Kay fell into trios at school, there was always one kid left unhappy—but they’d never been a true triangle, more a line of three connecting dots, with Deb at the center, the leader dot in vee formation, if they were geese. She’d liked the feeling, looking over her shoulder, of these men following behind. She thought they’d liked it too, being both geese or both college boys again.

“Are you surprised?” She pulled an inky green-glass bottle from the wall of inky green-glass bottles and blew the dust off it.

“You’re an amazing woman, Deb.”

Everything, that was how much she didn’t know about wine. “We should probably head upstairs.” It felt like they were hiding, down there in the dark.

In the small garden, Gary lit two glass lanterns, casting shadows to dance on the white-stone table. Simon was back from wherever he’d been. He and Kay leaned over the low brick wall, pointing out fireflies and arguing over who saw them first. You are lucky. You are lucky, you are lucky, you are lucky.

The next morning at airport security, Jack drained his coffee, deposited his laptop into a bin, and smiled at the guard, militant but for a French braid running the length of her skull. Taking off your shoes was one thing. Now apparently they could ask for clothes.

In terminals people hemorrhage money, on magazines, eight-dollar trail mix, batteries, and packs of gum. The confines make them desperate for these things. Glowing amber bottles of duty-free perfume: They slow to look. Flight attendants herd past the shops, monitoring the sales. That personal gumball machine, $39.95. Not low enough yet.

Jack bought a slippery pack of Raisinets and ate slowly.

He found his gate and a row of chairs nearby. Across from him a young couple stood kissing, the woman with tangled hair and a flannel shirt buttoned halfway, the man in tight black jeans. Easy to tell Europeans from the Americans. His own family looked American but not garishly so, not in the way the rest of the world used the word, as a derogatory term. Though still they were, recognizably
American.
It had to do with what was square or self-serious about them. Optimistic in their ability to circumvent misfortune. Neither he nor Deb would ever take up smoking again, beyond the occasional puff, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Ride a motorcycle period.

It is ridiculous to watch the planes take off. Heartbreakingly clunky and hopeful seeming.

A lifetime later, his section called, Jack walked the connecting hallway of large accordion-like segments, feeling like lint pushed through a vacuum cleaner. A quick glimpse of ergonomic chairs and entertainment consoles and private islands and on to the narrower aisle in coach. Then they were lifted up, as though seized by the hand of some giant. Always a miracle when it worked, every time a breakthrough in physics.

“Light bird today,” he said to the flight attendant as she passed. He’d heard one of them say that once.

“We’ll be fine,” she answered dully, and kept moving.

As an eight-year-old he’d fallen in total love with a Pan Am stewardess who’d pinned him with a pair of wings. This was when stewardesses were younger and wore those costumes and when people were still allowed pins on planes. It had been his second time flying, the return flight from New York, the only time his father had taken him on one of his trips. They’d lived in a suburb of Houston, and Jack Senior was always flying to different cities to meet with clients, see factories, take the general manager’s family out to eat. The New York trip had been scheduled over young Jack’s birthday, which was why he got to go along.

Of the city he remembered next to nothing. He knew they’d stayed three days and two nights, but not where, and that they saw a musical, but not which one. Jack did remember, because of his birthday, that it was near to Christmas, and that they went sight-seeing on a tour bus and then an observation deck, so he could see the building tops all lit up. His father gave him a coin to put in the telescope and Jack had looked, as far left and right as the machine would let him, for the Empire State Building, but he could not find it. “And why do you think,” Dad had asked, “why do you think you can’t find it?” Jack kept looking until the time on the telescope ran out, not because he still believed he would find the Empire State Building, but because his face was upset and he didn’t want his father to see.

When Jack couldn’t travel with him, which was the rest of the time, his father always brought back some trinket from the hotel gift shop. Jack knew, even then, how it enraged his mother to watch her son run to the door when the car pulled into the garage. The trinket would clutter the boy’s room, become something she’d have to pick up off the floor. I am a single mother in this house, she’d say. Single mothers have jobs, his father would answer.

His father’s job had sent him away sometimes five days a week, but it had paid for
all this,
and it really had been
all this,
plenty of space (too much space, his mother said), a maid who came by once a week to do the hard jobs, a banana-yellow Cadillac for his mother to drive around in. They had a color television and dimmers in the living room and a beautiful bar cart that his mother got the most use out of during the week, always going to the liquor store on Fridays to restock before his father got home. There were times also when she forgot, or slept late and didn’t have a chance to go, and those times Jack remembered watching her hold a bottle of something amber under the faucet to get the level up, returning it to the cart a shade too light. All of five and he knew the color of bourbon.

They soared, higher. Somewhere a tray that should not have been open during takeoff rattled. Jack looked out at the sky and had to stop himself from smiling whenever the wing broke through another school of clouds. Flying was the same, even if the airlines had changed. They were run less like hotels now, more like branches of government. Stewardesses had become flight attendants had become security guards. They tell us that a nail clipper is not a nail clipper, a nail clipper is a weapon, and we become people who have had to imagine how a nail clipper might be a weapon. Maybe by splitting it down the middle, pressing the sharp end into the jugular of somebody. Of some body.

He leaned his forehead against the window. At this angle he could see a sliver of a woman a few rows ahead, the pulse of her temple. Probably trying to keep her ears from popping. Jack’s own ears popped a little.

Maybe they’re right, and we will be safer when we finally think of everything, of all the things that can do us harm, and make rules against them.

One hour later and thirty thousand feet in the air:

The
SkyMall
catalog had lost its charm. He felt cold but did not like the blankets in their plastic bags. They reminded him of felt, of a school project. He did not like the pillows either, in their gauzy cases.

The screen overhead showed they were leaving Eastern Daylight Time. The red arc on the screen began in New York, New York, and ended in Phoenix, Arizona, the little white plane blinking somewhere in between.

A few more hours, a little closer to the ground:

Jack woke to something cold and wet in his lap. His tray was open, a plastic cup spinning on its side, the orange juice he’d ordered everywhere, seeping.

“Excuse me,” he called toward the front of the plane. A man across the aisle was staring. Jack gestured, palms up, toward his lap:
Can you believe this?

“Hey. Excuse me,” he called again. He pressed the silver button on the armrest, which made the seat recline, gave up, and went to the bathroom, pushing the door to make it fold open at the middle and punching it shut behind him. Waited for the light to come on.

He was wrong to believe he would ever evolve beyond those moments of wondering how he’d come to a particular place in life. Specifically, here, in this sallow light, rushing handfuls of water onto his shorts.

He dropped lumps of soggy paper towel into the toilet below the sign that said to please not drop paper towels in it. When he flushed, the bowl filled with blue and the sound was frighteningly loud.

The plane landed and no one clapped for the pilot. Off it, they stood together, all twenty of them, on the tarmac, or whatever that area was around the tarmac, and waited for the shuttle to arrive. Some fanned themselves. To Jack the blazing heat was a welcome respite from the cold on board the plane. It was thawing his insides, bringing him back to normal.

He did not think his shorts would stain.

Simon, because he was older, retained a stronger impression of Gary than his sister had. It was a negative impression, which is not to say it was bad, only that Gary’s presence had always signified a sort of absence—the absence of his mother’s attention, of his father’s, the absence of any conversation directed toward himself. He found that to be true again the next morning, over breakfast—Gary-scrambled eggs and Deb still in her robe, laughing too hard at Gary’s jokes and trying too hard to bridge lulls in the conversation—and then it was true in the afternoon, when Simon had announced he would be bringing his book to lunch down by the docks, and his mother, who couldn’t take a hint, suggested they all go along with him.

God did him the small favor of filling the green table with fat old people who left no room, so they couldn’t sit in front of the shop directly. “They’re getting up over there,” Kay said, pointing to a bench in front of one of the real estate places (their father had taught them to point with a finger hidden behind the other hand, which his sister actually did around people). Simon prayed the bench was far enough away that Teagan would not hear his mom when she said the day looked like a painting.

“Order me a turkey provolone,” he said, not wanting to get so near as to read the chalkboard menu. He’d angled himself absurdly on the bench, legs to one side, his back to the store.

“But they have all these cute specials.” Deb squinted at the sign. “Sea something…Sea Treasures? That’s probably tuna.”

“I think it’s crab,” Gary said.

“Turkey provolone and Sprite,” Simon said, wanting to be done with it. He was wondering what the back of his head looked like, how long his hair had gotten on his neck and whether his shirt was wrinkled. Whether he was very recognizable from behind.

“The Beauty and the
Roast Beef,
” Gary read. “Kay, that sounds like a good one for you. What do you think’s in a Beauty?”

Deb shook her head. “Roast beef’s too tough for her.”

“It’s too much you have to chew.” Kay’s arms were crossed and she hopped foot to foot, holding her elbows.

“Kay,” Deb said, “I
asked
if you had to go before we left.”

“I
don’t.
”

Simon ignored them as they walked away, opened his book to the where it was dog-eared. He was finding he had a lot in common with this character Peter Keating.
He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love.
He’d brought the book thinking it would give Teagan something more to say to him. Also because he knew, though not why, that his reading it irritated his mom (“So, you’re liking that?”).

They came back with a Cool Hand Cuke and two B-L-Ta-Da!s, which did look better than his no-name sandwich. “Sy, we were just talking about our new houseguest,” Deb said.

“Mm.” All morning a great gray cat had been turning up in the closet where Kay kept her clothes (mostly on the floor, his sister too stupid for hangers).
He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons.

“Sweetie, that’s fine if you feed him,” Deb said. “We’re just saying you can’t do it in the house.”

“I’m not, Mom,
God
.” Kay slumped nearer her sandwich. “Gosh.”

Simon filled his mouth with meat and cheese. If he chewed hard enough, he could almost tune out the conversation.
Mother means well, but she drives me crazy.
He wasn’t very far yet, but he thought when he finished that the book would be his favorite.

“The real stumper to me,” Gary was saying, “is how he gets in there by himself, Kay.”

“The front door doesn’t always close.”

“
None
of the doors close,” Simon pronounced through his food. “Because Dad painted over the locks, like an idiot.” He took another mouthful and did not look at them. Easy because of how they were lined up on the bench, like ducks. Dad was not someone they’d talked about yet.

Deb sighed. “So.”

“What?”
Simon exploded. “It’s not like he’s dead.” He felt great saying it because he was so right.

A stroller at the next bench began to cry. Deb shrunk from the sound.

“That’s exactly what Grandma does,” Simon said, lips curling. “You look exactly like her.”

“Sy.”

“I’m just saying.”

Now his chewing was the only thing to listen to. After a minute Deb said, “I don’t know, do you all
want
to talk to Dad?”

“It’s whatever,” Simon answered.

Deb was about to say something else, only there wasn’t time because here, of course, came the inevitable.

The inevitable Teagan.

And what was she saying?

She was saying:
Folks.

“Folks, how we doing? Hi.” She said the last word directly to Simon, and it must have been obvious to his mother, to anyone listening, that she spoke differently to him, like she meant it,
Hi.
Then: “How are you guys liking everything?”

“Everything’s wonderful,” Deb said, and Simon could see all her teeth. “We love the names! Who comes up with them? Do you?”

“No, no, I wish,” Teagan answered kindly. Simon was sure she didn’t wish. “That’s Brian—my manager, Brian.”

“Well, tell Brian they’re
great.
” (Enough, Mom. She doesn’t care.) “So yum,” Deb went on. Now Simon did want to die. Goodbye and die. To Kay, she said, “Aren’t they yum?”

Simon could see the slight nod of Kay’s head, but Teagan, who did not know Simon’s sister, who perhaps did not know what it meant to be shy, leaned closer, awaiting the affirmation that had already passed.

“Kay?” His mother was on that kick that came around every so often in which she tried to toughen her children up. Such phases were always triggered by friendly young people like Teagan and never lasted more than a few hours, at which point she’d feel guilty and indulge them the other way. At fifteen Simon had her all figured out.

“She said yes, she thinks they’re great.” His next look, to Teagan, said, I’m sorry for them, for this; I’m not my family, believe me. It tried to say all that.

“Well, thank you,” Teagan said, more waitress than person. She lifted her arm, slid a pen from her ponytail. “Actually, though, we’re just closing up the kitchen.”

“Oh, dessert?” Deb looked up and down the bench like this was some kind of actual problem.

“Teagan!” the other girl, Laura, shouted from just inside the shop, where she was tearing apart a cardboard box. “Can you come help me break these down?”

Teagan clicked the pen on and off, saying they could think it over. When they were alone again, Kay said, “I wouldn’t mind.”

“Dessert?”

“Talking to Dad.” They were back to that. “I wouldn’t mind it.”

Deb looked down at her pita and parsley and cucumber, what bits were left on the paper plate that had turned translucent in places, where the oil had touched it.

“I think,” Gary started, “if your mother and father need some time apart—”

“No, it’s—okay. Sure.” She turned a cucumber crescent around with her finger. It became the beginning of a parenthesis, the bottom half of a smiley face. “We can do that. And we can call Ommy.” She nodded like some kind of progress was being made. “She’d like that.”

They were all unbearably slow at emptying their trays into the trash, Deb shaking drops from a can for recycling, not that there was any kind of hurry. It was only a little after three and once again there was nothing to do.

They’d just started up the hill when Simon heard his name being called and turned back around.

Teagan stood outside the shop waving at him, hair waving too in the sea breeze. She saw that they’d stopped and jogged after them. Simon stepped forward like a chess piece to meet her.

“You should come over tomorrow night, if you aren’t doing anything. My mom’s house.” There followed a discussion of certain landmarks, the white church, the library—that’s that low brick building, right?—and when you see the swing set with the yellow seats, that’s it, across from the yellow swings.

“Yeah, I mean, I just have to see if I can. I mean, if I’m not doing anything.”

When she’d gone, Simon wouldn’t look at his mother or sister or Gary, his cheeks tight with wanting to smile. Instead he walked through them, opening his book, keeping the good feelings between himself and the page.
He thought that the world was opening to him now, like the darkness fleeing before the bobbing headlights. He was free. He was ready.