The Barter (16 page)

Her cell phone is ringing in the kitchen. Bridget picks up Julie, who wails at being removed from the scene of so much large, exciting machinery, and carries her into the living room, where most of her toys are. Then she jogs back to the kitchen and snatches at the phone just before its final ring.

“Hi, Mom,” she says immediately, coming around the corner again back into the living room. “Sorry again if I worried you.”

“It's Mark.”

“Oh.” Bridget is caught up short, both by her surprise at the sound of his voice, and by the fact that the ghost is visible at the top of the stairs and the black eyes are looking down at her steadily.
She's been standing there watching Julie. Waiting for her to come back into view from the landing.

“What is your mom worried about?” Mark asks suspiciously, and suddenly all of Bridget's annoyance is back, triggered by anxiety and fear, but also ready and waiting to leap from its shelf like a canned snake. Bridget shuts her eyes tight to block out the ghost and hears terrible things begin to tumble out of her own mouth.

“Well, I haven't really told her anything to worry about, but if I felt like it, I could. I could tell her my husband moved all of our money into an account I can't access, so I'm totally and completely broke unless he
elects
to get some cash out for me on the way home.” She hears Mark groan at this—
too little, too late, buddy
—and then continues mercilessly. “I could tell her I'm not sure I'll even
see
said husband anytime soon because he's home so late these days I could almost believe he's having an
affair,
if he ever smelled like perfume or booze instead of, I don't know, conference-room takeout and whiteboard markers.”

“Funny,” Mark says.

“Oh, am I? I've sure felt fucking funny all day long. I guess that explains it.”

“I'm sorry about the money. I knew as I was doing it that I should have checked with you first. I
knew
I was doing something wrong.”

“Well, it's all your money, I guess,” Bridget says bitterly. “I suppose you can do what you want with it.”

Mark coughs. “That's a hell of a thing to say, Bridge. I said I was sorry. Don't be shitty.”

“
You
don't be shitty,” Bridget counters nonsensically.

“You're picking a fight with me.” He sounds tired.

“No, I'm not. I'm
having
a fight with you. Over a thing that you did that really affects me, really sincerely makes my day harder.”

“My day isn't exactly easy, you know. I'm not just sitting here playing
Angry Birds,
Bridget. I did the bank thing quickly in between meetings the other day, and I fucked it up. Whatever. Give me an inch, here. Give me a little room for error.”

“I don't have
any
room for error. Not even a little bit. All day long. If I don't watch Julie every minute these days, she might get hurt”—
or snatched up by a ghost.
“She's all over the place now that she's cruising. If I don't keep the house clean, I get little
comments
from you. If I don't stay on top of the laundry, you whine about not having anything to wear to work. If I don't make all the dinners and do all the grocery shopping and all the meal planning and all of that everything, no one else is going to do it and we waste money we don't have on takeout and restaurants, where, fucking, if we go,
I'm
the only one who ever seems to notice when Julie's putting a goddamn
pea
up her nose.” She is aware, as she fumes, of how she sounds. She sounds like a pissy housewife. Like a cartoon of a woman, with a rolling pin and an apron. “Where's
my
inch?”

Mark is quiet. It's all too easy to picture him sitting on the desk in one of those open-plan work pods they have at PlusSign, instead of real offices where grown men can have respectable, dignified arguments with their wives, holding his forehead in the triangle between his thumb and first finger and looking down into his lap, where a silver laptop sits, six windows open, all of them pulsing.

He finally says, “She stuck a pea up her nose?”

Bridget laughs, relieved and ashamed. As she laughs, her eyes open—she's been squinching them shut, as if to help her focus on her sense of maltreatment and injustice. The ghost is now halfway down the stairs and is looking right at her. Into her.
Jesus, Jesus, where is Julie, where is Julie?

“Bridget? Was that Julie?”

She must have made some kind of sound into the phone—a yelp? A screech? She can't wonder about it now. Bridget crashes around the banister into the living room, where Julie is leaning over her toy bin, trying to reach the bottom. She snatches the little girl into her lap (Julie squawks) and holds her, clutching the phone to her ear and watching for the ghost to finish her descent.

Moving down the stairs. Coming for them.

A low moan of terror escapes her. Julie squirms.

“Bridget? What's the matter? Is Julie okay?”

“Mark—” Bridget's throat is bone dry. She coughs. “I can't talk. I can't talk now. Please hurry home. Please don't stay late tonight, if you can. Please.”

“Okay. I'm sorry. I really am. I'll—I'll try to get home in time to put Julie to bed. I promise.” She realizes that he thinks she's choking up about—oh, who knows, the fight, the money, the things she might have cared about once but can't even make room for in her mind now with that shuffling noise coming down the steps—
that sound that dead body in my house she wants her payment.

If her first offering—the one single object in the house that held the most value and meaning for her—was not acceptable, then what would it take? What was it after?

Fine. We'll try something of Julie's. But it's going to be something
she doesn't care about—something she can afford to give. And that's all you get. I'm her mother, goddamn it, and that's all you get of her.

“Okay. Do that little thing,” Bridget somehow croaks. She swallows hard. She decides to close her eyes. She is aware that in her lap, Julie has gone very silent, very still. “Mark? Are you still there?” It's better with her eyes closed, within the comforting darkness, as she sits in her sun-bright living room in the middle of the day with her baby in her arms, thinking of ways to negotiate the impossible.

“Yes. Bridge. I'm really sorry.”

“I know. Just—I love you. I'm sorry I yelled at you. It's all stupid stuff. It doesn't matter.”

“I love you, too, Bridge. Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“Do I?” Without opening her eyes, Bridget clears her throat. The baby in her lap doesn't move.
Snake charmer, pied piper, it's like a spell.
“Mark. Is there something you can think of—something of Julie's—that you think we might not need anymore? Or right now? Like a . . . toy or something? A doll?”

“Um.” Mark pauses delicately, clearly wanting to make the effort to answer the question despite its nonsensical flavor.

“I'm thinking of giving some of her stuff away. There's a charity looking for donations,” Bridget lies. It's easy, as it always is. She is listening hard. The shuffling on the stairs has ceased abruptly.
She's listening to me. Oh God, what if this is it, what if this makes her stop and go away.
She can hear Julie's breathing, soft and slow.

“Um. Sure. There's a bunch of soft baby books she probably doesn't care about anymore—or
Pat the Bunny
; she's always looking at me like, ‘Dad, this is for
babies
, what is
up
with this,' when we read that. Or the monkey thing from my mom. Or how about those dangly things that were on her activity mat.”

Bridget allows that Mark has surprised her. He's right. Those are all exactly the things Julie has outgrown. He does pay attention. Of course he does. He's not an idiot, this man she married.

“That sounds good. Thanks,” Bridget says quietly. Her eyelids relax over her eyes; they are no longer smashed tight. Then she adds, because he has reminded her of it, “But I love the line ‘Bunny is eating his good supper.'”

“I've always thought that book was a little weird. Judy feels her daddy's face? Paul puts his finger through his mommy's ring? Aren't these kids young to be wife-swapping? Get that filth out of my house.” Bridget snorts. “But you might want to do one last reading with Julie to see if she likes it again. She's always changing her mind.”

The smell is gone. Julie shifts in her lap, squirms, tries to make a break for her toys on the rug in front of them.

Bridget opens her eyes.

“Thanks. You're surprisingly observant.”

Mark sounds wounded. “Well, it's not like I never play with her. And I'm really sorry I stranded you and Julie without any money. I'll stop at the bank. And I'll be home before seven. I'll try. I really will.”

“Okay.” Bridget stretches out on the rug next to her daughter, who looks at her archly, delighted. “Uh-oh. I think I have to play mommy pile.”

“Okay. I'll see you later.” Mark pauses. “We should talk.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Bridget puts the phone to one side and rolls onto her back. She closes her eyes again and says “Eh,” and pokes her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. This is their game, and not until today has it ever seemed to Bridget funny or strange that she would play dead with their little girl. It just felt good: To make a game out of lying on
the floor with your eyes closed? Genius. And of course Julie loves it. She puts her hand on Bridget's stomach and giggles.

Bridget peeks at Julie with one eye, then says “Eh,” and flops back into dead pose again.

Julie lets loose one of her trucker chortles.
Heh heh heh.
She climbs up on Bridget's belly. Bridget says “Oof,” then “Eh.” Julie chortles again and rolls down so that her face is close to Bridget's, her little mouth breathing sweetly near Bridget's nose.
Heh heh heh. Ooof. Eh.
Eventually, Julie touches Bridget's face with her small fingers, Bridget's cue to come back to life, opening her eyes and squeaking,
Mommy pile, Mommy pile, Mommy pile
. Tickling. Whereupon Julie just about falls out, and Bridget hugs her daughter's small warm body tight against her chest, still tickling, until Julie says “pie” and rolls off.

Then they do it again.

And again.

Bridget hears her cell phone ringing somewhere and lets it go to voice mail.

*   *   *

I
t is dark. Julie is in bed. Bridget has taken a shower and watched some television and eaten a little bit of dinner—she's not hungry, which is unusual for her—and gone into Julie's room to pull
Pat the Bunny
from Julie's low white bookshelf. Her ears are ringing, and she is very, very carefully avoiding anything like real thought. If she thinks about how Mark broke his promise to come home on time, she might start looking for something of his to break, or shred, or stand over and hate like a ghost.

She places
Pat the Bunny
on the floor in the middle of the archway leading to the unlit living room, where she can smell but not see
the ghost in the darkness. She will be standing in her corner, the ghost, gazing out the window onto the empty suburban street, perhaps listening for crickets over the faint whoosh and whir of the air-conditioning.

Without waiting to see whether her latest gift will be well received, Bridget am-scrays upstairs and climbs into bed, where she intends to wait with a stack of magazines at her elbow for her husband to come home. At which point she is unsure what she will do: tear into him, or treat him to stormy, tearful, girlish silence, or give him up to the ghost as a hostage.
If she'll even take him. She's already got Bunny.

The best thing about
Pat the Bunny
,
of course, and certainly its grubbiest, most well-handled feature in the copy that Bridget has just abandoned on its informal altar downstairs, is the book-within-a-book, “Judy's Book,” which the audience is invited to read over little Judy's shoulder, and which the preverbal infants for whom the book is written tend to recognize as a miniature version of something familiar—always a delight for the miniature-human demographic. Judy's Book contains Bridget's favorite line: “Bunny is eating his good supper,” which in the early, exhausted months of Julie's life often reduced Bridget to inane, helpless giggles. She admitted to Martha once that, probably due to sleeplessness, it took her several readings of
Pat the Bunny
to understand that the Bunny of the title, and the hero of Judy's Book, is actually Judy's stuffed animal Bunny, which explains why his physical attitudes while sleeping or listening to a clock or eating his good supper look nothing like a real bunny's—Bunny's arms and legs are always stiffened into a forward-facing position, as if he wants to touch Judy with all four paws at once. Martha's response was: “That's funny. I was so
goddamn tired when I read that book for my kids I kept thinking, ‘Who the fuck is Pat?'”

“Well, the other thing I couldn't figure out is who
wrote
Judy's Book, you know? She's reading the book, but it's about her stuffed animal Bunny? Wasn't 1940 or whatever too early for postmodern metafiction?” Martha didn't laugh—whereas if she had been talking to Gennie, that would've been a layup.

“It
is
meta,” Martha claimed, quite serious and yet quite not, the way she always is. “The book you see Judy reading isn't the same book we're reading. Judy's Book is the one she's imagining reading—she's the narrator. In fact
Judy
is writing the book as she quote-unquote reads it. The act of telling stories about Bunny is what creates Judy's Book.”

“The rituals she has with Bunny are the book.”