Little Children (7 page)

She asked this question so abruptly and matter-of-factly that it took May a couple of seconds to realize that they weren’t talking about Congressman Howdy Doody anymore.

“Spray paint?”

“You didn’t know?” Bertha couldn’t quite conceal her pleasure at being the bearer of bad news. “You got some new graffiti last night.”

“Oh no. Is it disgusting?”

“Just one word,” said Bertha. “But it’s not a very nice one.”

May started to rise from her chair, then thought better of it. The word—she could imagine which one it was without too much trouble—could wait. There was no sense spoiling her lunch, getting herself all worked up for nothing.

“The nerve of these people,” she muttered.

“The tuna’s good today,” said Bertha, though she’d only taken a few tiny nibbles of her sandwich. “Is it StarKist?”

“The store brand,” May replied distractedly.

“I don’t buy the store brands.” Bertha shook her head with great vehemence, as if she’d learned this lesson the hard way. “You save a couple pennies, but I’d rather have the peace of mind.”

“It’s the same product,” said May. Her heart wasn’t in the argument, which she and Bertha revisited every time they ate tuna fish. “They just slap different labels on the cans.”

“Don’t be naive,” said Bertha, but her attention shifted suddenly to the steno pad in the center of the table with the red pen resting on top. She picked up the pad and examined it. “What’s this?”

“Ronnie’s personal ad. I need to find him a girlfriend.”

“Hmmm.” Bertha seemed impressed. She squinted at the page and read aloud.
“‘SWM, 43, nice eyes and smile. Likes biking and long walks on beach. I’m not perfect and don’t expect you to be, either.’”

“What do you think?” May asked. It sounded pretty good to her.

Bertha pondered the matter for a few seconds before shaking her head.

“It’s not gonna work. You need to say
handsome.
”

“I wanted to. Ronnie wouldn’t let me.”

“Trust me,” said Bertha. “If you don’t, they’re just gonna think he’s ugly.”

“That’s what I said. But you know how stubborn he can be.”

Bertha uncapped the pen and scrawled a quick correction to the ad.

“There,” she said. “He’ll have to beat them off with a stick.”

May stood in the midday sun and stared at the awful word painted on her driveway. It wasn’t the one she’d expected. Her legs felt weak.

“Where do people learn their manners?” she wondered. “This used to be a nice town.”

“It was never that nice,” Bertha told her. “It just liked to pretend it was.”

“But vandalizing someone’s driveway?”

“Probably teenagers,” said Bertha. “They go drinking in the woods, and then they run amuck.”

“No,” said May. “It’s that creep in the van. He’s always driving past, honking the horn, stapling those damn posters everywhere.”

May knew that Ronnie had seen the word on his way out of the garage. He must have ridden right over it on his bike. She hoped it wouldn’t spoil his day or make him any more depressed than he already was.

“I’ll go to the hardware store,” she said. “I can spray right over this with some black paint.”

“I can loan you a gun if you want,” said Bertha. “Allen has three of them.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to hold it,” said May.

“It’s easy,” said Bertha. “I could teach you in a few minutes.”

May shook her head. She didn’t want to think about guns. She wanted to think about the day she moved into this house. It was a long time ago—over thirty-five years. She was pregnant with Carol; Ronnie had just started school. It was the first house she’d ever owned.

It wasn’t like she had any illusions about her life even then. She already knew that she’d married the wrong man—at the beginning he’d at least been a charming drunk, but by then the charm was all used up—and that her son wasn’t going to have an easy time of it in school. There was something about him that people didn’t like.

But in spite of everything, she’d felt hope. They were moving into a place of their own in a nice neighborhood near a good school. Maybe things would be different there; maybe they would be happy. She stood on the front lawn in the early evening and whispered a prayer that her family would thrive on Blueberry Court, that her marriage would improve, that her children would grow up into healthy, successful adults.

And this is what her prayer had come to: the word
EVIL
spray-painted in gigantic Day-Glo orange letters at the foot of her driveway, along with an arrow pointing straight to her house.

“God help us,” she said, reaching for Bertha’s arm so she could steady herself for whatever was coming next.

JEAN MCGINNISS, THE NEWLY RETIRED SECOND-GRADE TEACHER
who lived next door, was marching in place on Sarah’s welcome mat, pumping her knees and elbows like a majorette for the AARP band.

“Ready to roll?” Jean was an energetic dumpling of a woman with a relentlessly upbeat personality that must have gone over well with the seven-year-olds. For the past several months, the two women had been going on brisk after-dinner fitness walks that had rapidly become the highlight of Sarah’s day, even if Jean’s chattiness sometimes got to her. “There’s a supernice breeze out.”

“Could you wait a few minutes?” Sarah asked. “Richard’s in his office again.”

By this point in the summer, both of them knew to factor in a half hour delay to accommodate Richard, who had recently begun exhibiting strange workaholic tendencies after years of pontificating about the sacred importance of leisure time and contemplative space in a fast-paced, moneygrubbing culture. Even so, Jean kept showing up on Sarah’s doorstep at seven on the dot. Her husband Tim, a retired shop teacher, was one of those
we’re-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket
types who worked himself into a lather watching the TV news, and Jean preferred to be out of the house when he started muttering about politicians and minorities. She set her one-and-a-half-pound dumbbells on the porch and followed Sarah inside.

“Helloo?” Jean called out in a warbly singsong. “Is there a cute little girl in the house?”

“She’s a terror tonight,” Sarah warned her. “I couldn’t get her to nap again.”

“Oh dear.” Jean couldn’t have looked more sympathetic if she’d just found out that Lucy needed a kidney transplant. “Poor thing.”

“Poor Mommy,” Sarah corrected her. “I’m the one who suffers. She’s completely unhinged. Like a character out of Dostoevsky.”

But the little girl who poked her head out of the living room just then seemed more like a creation of Norman Rockwell than a brooding Russian epileptic. Her face blossomed into a bright smile at the sight of the visitor; she scampered down the hallway and flung herself into the older woman’s arms as if they were lovers meeting in an airport. Jean sniffed Lucy’s hair, then dropped to one knee and gave her a long, searching look.

“Did you nap today?”

Lucy shook her head sadly.

“Are you sleepy?”

Lucy shook her head again, this time in fervent denial. Except for a ring of grape juice staining her mouth like a drunk’s lipstick, she looked adorable, a wide-eyed waif in a sleeveless Barbie nightgown (a gift from Richard’s mother that Sarah strongly disapproved of, and that Lucy, naturally, cherished beyond reason).

“She must have gotten a second wind,” Sarah observed.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Jean. “Because if you were tired, I couldn’t give you your present.”

Lucy snapped to attention. “What present?”

Jean cupped one hand around her ear, as if she were listening to far-off voices.

“Do you hear barking? Is there a dog in your house?”

Lucy checked with her mother, just in case there was a dog she hadn’t been told about.

“Not that I know of,” said Sarah.

“Maybe it’s coming from in here.” Jean rotated her extra-large fanny pack—it was an elaborate contraption, with multiple compartments and attachments for carrying two water bottles and a flashlight—so the main storage pouch was facing forward. Sarah didn’t know what possessed her to wear something big and lumpy like that on her ass.

“Oh my.” Jean tugged slowly on the zipper. With a flourish, she reached in and removed a cute little husky with a heart-shaped tag dangling from one ear. “Look what I found.”

“A Beanie!” Lucy shouted, as if she needed to notify the whole neighborhood.

“His name’s Nanook,” said Jean. Lucy released a small whimper of joy as Jean placed the dog in her cupped hands.

“You didn’t have to do that,” said Sarah.

“I got one for Tyler,” Jean explained. Tyler was her four-year-old grandson who lived in Seattle. She only got to see him twice a year, but she talked about him every day, and began Christmas shopping for him in April. “And I know Lucy collects them, too.”

“Well, that was really thoughtful.” Sarah turned to her daughter. “Say thank you to Jean.”

“Fank you, Jean,” said Lucy, in her softest, sweetest voice. There was a look of ecstatic gratitude on her face that made Sarah cringe. You would have thought she’d never received a gift before in her life.

What the hell is he doing up there?
Sarah wondered, as seven-thirty came and went. She didn’t care how busy he was, it was a simple matter of equity. He’d been out of the house all day, being an adult, talking to people, lunching with clients in a nice restaurant. Couldn’t he just turn off his computer and let her go for her goddam walk, the one thing she looked forward to all day? Couldn’t he spend an hour a day with his three-year-old daughter? Was that too much to ask?

At least Jean didn’t mind. She’d been kneeling on the rug for the past half hour, helping Lucy introduce Nanook to the rest of her twenty-seven Beanies. (How had she managed to accumulate twenty-seven Beanies, anyway?) Now they were arranging the animals in chronological order, according to the “birthdays” printed on their name tags. No, Jean actually
liked
Lucy, a fact that struck Sarah as a fresh surprise every time she saw them together. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Lucy, it was just that Sarah wasn’t in the habit of thinking of her daughter as a particularly lovable child.

It wasn’t Lucy’s fault. She and Sarah just spent too much time together. Of course they got on each other’s nerves. Today, for instance, they’d been stuck together like Siamese twins since 6:13 in the morning. Three meals, two snacks, five diapers, a trip to the supermarket (tantrum on the checkout line), some unproductive time on the potty, a visit to the merry-go-round playground (which Sarah despised, but had no choice but to frequent now that Mary Ann had declared her
persona non grata
at the Rayburn School), a dozen Berenstain Bears books with their suffocating platitudes and hideous illustrations (Lucy adored them and would read nothing else), some finger-painting, a bath, no nap, and a late-afternoon meltdown (Lucy dumped a box of crayons in the toilet; Sarah had to fish them out)—that was the sum total of Mommy’s day.

What the hell is he doing up there?

A half hour of
Blue’s Clues
after lunch was the only time Sarah could have plausibly gotten to herself—a little time to read the paper, call an old friend, maybe practice some yoga stretches—but instead she’d sat beside Lucy on the couch and watched the show, fantasizing the whole time about Steve, the boyish host, who seemed like a guy she might actually hit it off with if they ever got a chance to meet. He reminded her of herself: a smart, somewhat passive person who’d somehow gotten trapped in Kidworld. He pronounced his words a little too clearly and made big exaggerated faces as he dished out halfhearted compliments to his viewers (
Wow! You’re really smart!
). A rumor had recently gone around the playground that Steve had a drug problem, and who could blame him?
Oh, Steve, run away with me! We can hole up in a flophouse and smoke crack for a couple of days.

How pathetic was that, fantasizing about a lost weekend with a guy in a rugby shirt who interacted with a cartoon dog? But at least it was better than thinking about Todd all the time, the way she had for days and days after that ridiculous kiss. Mr. Big Handsome Frat Boy. Who the hell was she kidding? Jean looked up from the Beanies, which she and Lucy were now arranging by color.

“I saw the UPS truck this afternoon,” she said. “Did you get the bathing suits?”

“Finally,” said Sarah.

“Well?” Jean seemed a little too interested. “What’s the verdict?”

“I haven’t had a minute to try them on.”

“Do it now. I’d love to see how they look.”

“I don’t think so,” said Sarah.

“Come on.” Jean frowned and patted her hips. “I graduated a long time ago to the ruffled skirt club. I like to see what a real bathing suit looks like once in a while.”

There was really no way out of it, so Sarah carried the J. Crew box into the bathroom and began to undress, wishing she’d never mentioned her bathing suit quest to Jean in the first place. She hadn’t been able to stop herself, though. At the time—not even two weeks ago—her mind was consumed with thoughts of Todd, and talking about bathing suits was the closest she could come to talking about him, without having to mention his name or explain the circumstances that triggered her sudden and desperate desire to visit the Town Pool.

The only thing that was holding her back was her five-year-old Speedo, which had seemed perfectly satisfactory and even reasonably sleek right up until the morning after the kiss, when she tried it on in front of the mirror and saw how hopelessly ugly it was. After the moment they’d shared, it would be insulting to present herself to Todd in a frumpy blue one-piece with tufts of unruly pubic hair curling out around the crotch (the hair was a separate matter from the bathing suit, of course, but it wasn’t helping any). She considered showing up at the pool in street clothes, or wearing some kind of dress or baggy T-shirt over the Speedo, but she didn’t think the fantasy she was envisioning permitted half measures. The thing was to wear a bathing suit and look good in it, to somehow make yourself worthy of the scenario you were volunteering for.

She took Lucy to Filene’s the following morning, but it was a disaster. Lucy hated shopping, and Sarah spent more time making sure she wasn’t losing visual contact with her daughter than she did looking at swimwear. When she finally made her selections, she dragged Lucy into the fitting room and told her to stay put while she tried the suits on over her generously cut gray cotton panties, which kept poking out and spoiling the effect, not that there was much to spoil. The first suit hugged her hips and waist perfectly, but looked about three sizes too big on top. The second fit nicely across her chest, but drooped off her ass like a tote bag. She thought the third suit looked okay—it was a black one-piece, daringly low-cut with a series of oval cutouts traveling up the side—but when she left the fitting room to consult with the saleslady in front of the three-way mirror, the woman hesitated for a long time before answering.

“I wouldn’t,” she said finally.

Sarah returned to the fitting room in a funk, only to find that Lucy had disappeared. Trying not to panic, she began calling out her daughter’s name in a loud voice. When she got no response, she checked all the nearby fitting rooms, pulling open doors and peering under the ones that were locked, drawing indignant stares from women in various states of undress.

“Have you seen a little girl?” she asked. “She’s got a Band-Aid on her knee.”

Then, out of nowhere, she remembered the posters—
There is a pervert among us!
—and panicked. Still wearing the bathing suit, its price tag bouncing off her right thigh, she burst out of the dressing room and began running up and down the aisles of the store in her bare feet, calling out, “Lucy? Where are you?” Whenever her fellow shoppers looked at her with the puzzlement she deserved, she’d clutch her head and wail, “I’ve lost my daughter!” She imagined Ronald James McGorvey patting her on the head and offering to buy her an ice-cream cone. Lucy loved ice cream.

“Lucy? Where are you?”

In the electronics section, she was accosted by a young black security guard who took her by the shoulders and told her to please calm down. He explained that her daughter was safe, and waiting by the cash registers.

“We’re watching her,” he said. “So why don’t you just go back to the dressing room and put your clothes on.”

When she told the story to Jean that night, she left out the part about Lucy getting lost. She just talked about how hard it was to buy a bathing suit under the best of circumstances, let alone with a little kid in tow.

“I really need a new one,” she said, startled by the level of emotion in her voice. “The old one doesn’t look right.”

“Why don’t you just order a bunch from a catalogue?” Jean suggested. “That’s what my daughter-in-law does. You can try them on at home when Lucy’s asleep, and send back the ones that don’t fit. Save you a lot of trouble.”

Having worn solid color tank suits for most of her adult life, Sarah was bewildered by the cornucopia of styles and colors featured in the catalogue. Bikinis were back, apparently, with numerous variations on the basic theme—bandeaus, tank tops, underwires, plus a variety of bottoms, each offering more or less in the crucial area of “rear coverage.” Once she wrapped her mind around the options, though, she found it liberating not to be restricted by the limited inventory available in a particular store, or inhibited by the scrutiny of her fellow shoppers or the salesclerks, who never failed to raise a disapproving eyebrow if you lingered too long in front of an item they considered inappropriate for a woman of your age or body type.

Her selections were bolder and sexier than anything she would have dreamed of trying on in a department store (or actually wearing in public for that matter). Her mental audience as she flipped through the catalogue was Todd and Todd alone. He was sitting shirtless on a towel in the grassy area adjacent to the Town Pool—the whole complex was mysteriously deserted except for the two of them—watching with unconcealed pleasure as she emerged, dripping, from the deep end, Aphrodite in a black underwire bikini with hipster briefs, size medium or maybe small. She placed her order over the phone with a feeling of almost shameful excitement, her voice trembling as she recited the numbers on her VISA card.