Refund (13 page)

H
ER HUSBAND CAME HOME THAT EVENING IN A CHEERFUL, DETERMINED
mood, armed with a new digital camera. He wanted to take pictures of them in the garden and arrange them on a website that would record the children's growth as well as that of the various vegetables and flowers they had recently planted. The routine quality of his new job sometimes filled him with a manic, expansive
energy. So many parts of him were unused. The camera had cost $345. “We can do this every few days,” he said. “We can tell people about it. They can click from everywhere and see our garden. We can start a trend!” He tried, with difficulty, to arrange the children beside the plot of dirt.

She did not want him to take a picture of her. She did not want to see a picture of her face on this day.

“We need more good pictures of you,” he said, irritation flickering across his face.

“I look tired,” she said.

“No, you don't,” he said. “You need a picture with pearls. Holding a rose. Jackie Kennedy. A socialite surrounded by her darling cherubs.” He laughed.

“Oh, right,” she said. It was a sweet but clichéd worldview that he reverted to when he felt uprooted, and it comforted him. He had nurtured it when he was alone and neglected as a child and had formed his ideas of happiness, what his family and love should be.

She had been the daughter of nervous parents who cut up apples in her lunch so she would not choke and drove only on the right side of the road, and she had been drawn to his point of view when they were dating. She remembered the first time she saw his childhood house, in a suburban tract in Los Angeles—it was a small house that attempted to resemble a Southern mansion, with columns on the porch and a trim rose-bed in the front. There was something in the stalwart embrace of other people's tastes that made Jane envious—not of the house so much as the purity of longing.

She heard the children shriek, and there was no such simplicity. Your own family was the death of it.

“Come on,” he said. “Throw something on. Wash your face.”

She looked at him.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

She did not want to injure his perception of himself as a good person. But she knew that now, at night, he clutched his pillow as though he were drowning.

Her family stumbled around the barren garden, hair lit up by the late-afternoon sun. He was clutching his camera, eager to record the physical growth of his children. “Look,” she said to him, wanting him to see everything.

T
HE CHILDREN WERE IN BED, SLEEPING
. S
HE BROUGHT BLANKETS TO
their chins, watched their breath move in and out. Their eyelids twitched with fervent dreams. The sight of her children sleeping always brought up in her a love that was vast and irreproachable. No one could question this love. She remembered the first time she and her husband hired a babysitter and went to dinner, two months after their boy was born. They had walked the streets, ten minutes from their home. They had hoped that when they sat down in a restaurant, they would enjoy the same easy joy of self-absorption. But they realized, slowly, that they would never in their lives forget about him. The rest of the date they spent in a stunned silence understanding, for the first time, how this love would both nourish and entrap them for the rest of their lives.

She sat beside her husband in bed. She was still cramping; she went to the bathroom to urinate, and there was still blood. She was relieved as she felt the blood leave her, pretending that it was just another period, but she did not want to look too closely at the material that came with it. The names they might have used came to her: Charles, Wendy, Diane. But they were names for nothing now, air. There was no kindness she could offer it now, and that made her feel dry, stunted. She went to the children's rooms and kissed them again.

She could not sleep. She was sitting in the darkness when she noticed a light go on in her neighbors' house. Their houses were side
by side, about ten feet apart, and the neighbors' blinds were usually closed. Tonight she saw that they were open as though they were trying to enjoy the new warmth. The mother had put up curtains, but they were sheer, and Jane could see right into their room.

She saw Mary Grace's mother sitting on her bed. Their bedroom had been decorated with the lukewarm blandness of a hotel room and was so clean as to deny any human interaction inside it. The mother wore a frilly aqua nightie that made her resemble a large, clumsy girl. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and suddenly pulled the nightie over her head. She was watching the husband, who wore bright boxer shorts and no shirt. The curtain lifted in the warm wind. The husband walked over to the wife, and she lifted her face for a kiss; the husband pulled her breast as though he were milking a cow. The wife's face was blank.

“I know what you forgot! The detergent!” she exclaimed, in a clear voice. The husband drew back. His shoulders slumped as though he were begging. There was quiet, and Jane waited for his answer.

“Sorry,” he said. There was a plaintive quality to this word, his inability to come up with any sort of excuse; it seemed to designate everything about their future. The lights went off.

Jane got out of bed and went downstairs. She told herself she needed to take out the garbage, but she just needed to get outside. Opening the door, the night was thick and black and the air was fresh. She threw the bag of trash into the can and stood in front of her house. The cicadas sounded like an enormous machine. The sky was a riot of stars. She glanced around the empty street and began to run.

The neighborhood was beautiful at this hour, flowers and bushes randomly lit by small spotlights, as though each family wanted to illuminate some glorious part of itself. It was ten thirty, and the only discernible human sound was the canned television
laughter floating out of windows. The houses looked anchored to these neat green plots of land. How much longer would her neighbors wake up, shower, eat their cereal, argue, dress their children, weep, prepare dinner, sit by the television, make love, sleep? She ran quietly, the sidewalk damp under her naked feet; she smelled the flowers, the jasmine, honeysuckle, magnolia, sweet and ferocious and dark.

She ran one block like this and stopped, breathing hard. Her forehead was sweating. She was a middle-aged woman in her pajamas, running from her house at ten thirty at night. Looking at her house, she saw the small night-light in her son's room cast a lovely blue glow through the window. From here, the room looked enchanted, as if inhabited by fairies. Her breathing slowed, and the night air felt cool in her lungs. When she glanced up at the neighbors' bedroom window, she noticed that their blinds were now shut.

M
ARY
G
RACE KNOCKED ON THE DOOR AT THREE THIRTY THE NEXT
day. Jane thought she was dressed up early for Halloween, with a short blue accordion-skirt and a T-shirt decorated with a halo made of rhinestones, but it was actually a cheerleader outfit. She was going to a practice for Halo Hoops, the church basketball team. “I have to go to our basketball game at church,” she said. “I have ten minutes. That is all.” Jane held open the door, and Mary Grace jumped inside and did a twirl.

“Can I marry you, Mary Grace?” her son asked.

“No,” said Mary Grace. “I'm older than you.” She looked at Jane. “I'm going to be a superstar singer. I'm going to be in the top five. Wanna hear—” She belted out a few words of a pop song. She was stocky, tuneless, and loud. Jane's son was enchanted and requested more. He grabbed Mary Grace's hand, and Jane's heart flinched.

“Can we make cookies?” Mary Grace asked. “Quick?”

They bustled into the kitchen and proceeded to bake. No one came to take the girl to Halo Hoops. The kitchen suddenly smelled like a bakery. Mary Grace stood too close to her. “Do you like my singing?” she pleaded.

“Sure,” said Jane.

“Me, too,” said the girl. Jane felt Mary Grace's breath on her arm. The girl's breath had the warmth of a dragon or another unnatural beast. The girl's belief in Jane's worth was awful. “You have pretty hair,” said Mary Grace, reaching up to Jane and touching a strand. The girl had a startlingly gentle touch. Her hand smelled of sweet dough and chocolate.

“Thanks,” said Jane. The boy and the baby stared at Mary Grace. The baby, hanging on Jane's hip, reached out and swatted Mary Grace away. Mary Grace's face tightened, aggrieved.

“Do I have pretty hair?” asked Mary Grace.

The baby yanked Jane's hair. “Ow!” said Jane, grabbing the tiny hand.

“Do I?” asked Mary Grace; it was almost a shout.

Before Jane could answer, her son stepped forward and grabbed Mary Grace's arm. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” he asked.

Mary Grace recoiled from his touch. Jane saw all of the girl's self-hatred light up her eyes: that she had no other friends besides this five-year-old, that her parents did not want her at their table. “No,” she snapped, “Ick. Why do you keep asking me!”

Her son dropped his head, wounded. Jane slapped her hand on the table. It made a clear, sharp sound. “Then just go home!” she yelled at Mary Grace.

The children were suddenly alert. Jane was frozen, ashamed. The girl slowly picked up her jacket and, shoulders slumped, eyes cast downward, trudged to the door, a position already so well-worn it had carved itself into her posture. Her son screamed, “Stay!”
and skidded toward her, arms open, but Mary Grace moved to the door and was gone.

T
HAT NIGHT
J
ANE SAT BESIDE HER HUSBAND AND REALIZED THAT
they had known each other for fifteen years. She wanted to tell her husband something new about herself, something she had never told anyone before. She wanted to tell him a secret that would bring them to a new level of closeness. What else could she tell him? Would he be more grateful for a humiliating moment in her life or a transforming one? Did people love others based on the ways they had similarly debased themselves or the proud ways they had lifted themselves up?

“What?” he asked, sensing a disturbance.

“I yelled at the girl,” she said. “She was mean to our boy, and I couldn't stand it. I shouldn't have. She turned around and left.”

“They already hate us,” he said, calmly. Then he returned to his book.

She was now revved up for an argument.

“I'm wasting my life picking up towels,” she said. “For every ten towels I pick up, you pick up one. I'm sick of it, and they smell like goats.”

Now he looked up. “I pick up towels,” he said. “Plenty of them.”

“Not as many as me,” she said.

He jumped out of bed, standing on the balls of his feet, like a boxer who had been secretly preparing for this barrage, and then grabbed a robe and tossed it over himself. “What do I give up for this family! Look at this leg.” He held it out. “If I had any time at all to exercise, then I would be able to get in great shape. I could run a marathon! I could make love ten times a day.” The edge in his voice, the raw and bottomless yearning, was so sharply reminiscent of her own father's during her childhood that she felt time as a funnel: she'd been emptied into her old home, the same person but just a
different size. He sank down into his chair and began to tap his foot nervously, looking anywhere but at her.

“We would have had a third child,” she said. “I stopped it.”

He looked at her.

“This week,” she said.

She remembered the night that she and her husband had brought their son home from the hospital. They had cupped him in their hands, a person just two days old. When he began to cry, his first human wails rising into their apartment, she and her husband realized that they were supposed to comfort him. It was them. They gazed with longing into his hopeful eyes.

He stared at her. Carefully, he clasped his hands. His eyes were bright; she realized there were tears in them.

“Did you forget about me?” he asked.

His voice was soft, and it sounded as though it came directly out of the black night outside. “We couldn't have done it,” she said.

“You didn't want to,” he replied, sharply.

“You didn't either,” she said. “I know you.”

“Do you?” he asked. “Look at me. What am I thinking right now?”

She looked into his dark eyes. When they got married, she wanted to know, to own everything about him.

She leaned toward him and looked closer. She and her husband were sitting beside each other, half-dressed, their windows open. Outside, the leaves on the trees gleamed in the orange street-lights. Jane touched his hand. She thought she heard weak laughter in the neighbors' house, carried through the streets on a warm and fragrant wind.

M
ARY
G
RACE WAS BACK THE NEXT AFTERNOON, WASHING UP AT
their door as inevitably as the tide. There was something ancient about her, the way she smiled warily at Jane, scratching her leg and
pretending that yesterday had not happened. She loved them simply because they opened the door.

“Could we make a lemonade stand?” Mary Grace asked. “We could sell lemonade for twenty-five cents.”