Among the Ten Thousand Things (12 page)

Their first morning in Jamestown no one set an alarm, and still everyone woke up early. Hard to sleep through new places.

In the bathroom where Jack had done the tiling—tiny, white hexagons and black grouting, both dizzying and spartan—Deb relearned the eccentricities of the shower, fogging the mirror and making the faucet sweat over the sink. Out of it, dripping, she stood and examined her approximate shape in the mirror. Still the right shape, still in and out the right places. She rubbed clear her reflection and arched her spine, turned to look at the long back over her shoulder. And maybe she’d finally done the right thing, in bringing them here. Hopefully she had. With her hands gathering up her hair, she wondered how long they’d stay.

She took the kids (neither showered) to a cheery breakfast place where the juice came in rich colors, deep cranberry and orange bright as to have a light bulb inside.

“I thought we could go out on the water this afternoon,” Deb said, “explore around.”

“Beautiful out there, my gosh,” said the waitress, weighted on either side with orange- and black-handled pots of coffee. Her skin had that downy look of age plus makeup, cheeks pinked with powdery moons. “You all been out to Newport?”

“Oh, years ago, I have,” Deb said. “But not these two.”

“You’ll want to see the mansions there. And Trinity Church, that’s something. Lotta history.”

“We haven’t had a chance to see much of anything yet,” Deb said.

Simon and Kay stayed pointedly quiet. The waitress looked at them around the table. “Well then. Anyway, I’m sorry, what’ll you have?”

Then everyone asked for omelets. Kay asked her mother for a pen.

“I don’t want to go see churches,” Simon said when the waitress was well enough away.

“What I
really
want you both to see is Rose Island.” The islands were what Deb liked best about the bay, so many uninhabited patches of land with romantic, Brontë names: Patience, Hope, Prudence. Despair. Her first summer in Jamestown, she and Jack and baby Simon had gone over in the brown-and-gold rental boat that sputtered, and the man who did the weeding there had let them walk all around.
Careful of the gulls
.
They’ll attack when they’re nesting.
Deb remembered walking the perimeter, how the island really was shaped like a rose. Then a seagull ran at them and Simon cried, five months old and in her arms.

She leaned across the table, toward where her son was watching her daughter ink outlines around the drawings of cocktails on her paper place mat. “Simon, you’ve been to Rose Island before.” She disclosed this like a good secret, gossip about someone else, someone famous.

“That’s not how you do shadow,” Simon said at his sister’s drawing. He dragged a finger over the heavy line she’d scratched around a Tom Collins, smudging it. “You have it so the sun is coming from both directions.” He made a move for the pen.

“Stoppit,”
Kay said, angling her body away from him. “They’re not trying to be shadows.”

Then the eggs came and covered the place mats, and they could not fight about shadows anymore.

Instead they fought about watering cans at the hardware store, souvenir magnets and ugly fleece pullovers at the gift shop. Take it, you’ll be cold at night. You think you’ll ever use that? I’m sure we have things like it at home. Where are those energy efficient ones, the ones that look coiled like telephone cords? But I want it. Gross. Put it back. It isn’t a fashion contest; you’ll be cold. No. I said no. I said enough.

At a bookshop that sold miniature electric fountains and miniature Zen gardens and even a few books, mostly titles from small presses about local lighthouses and walking tours, but also some fiction in back, Deb told the kids to pick out some summer reading.

Simon reappeared with a thick paperback. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Why not?” He thrust it at her.

Deb was about to make a case for why not, but her eyes had already shifted focus to Kay, who was by the register turning the chirpy wire stand of bookmarks, a deck of them already fanned out in her hand. “All right, give it to me,” she said, and added his book to the pile.

The sky began to look like rain, but if they were quick they could beat it to the supermarket, which was at the end of a long parking lot, spotted with a few sedans and a red pickup under blue tarp. A kind of junior-league strip mall, with a video rental store and a custom sign shop that advertised gold-leaf lettering for yachts.

“Stay by me,” Deb told them. Inside it was cold and bright and hard to find their way. With her kids filed behind her, Deb felt more alone, remembering they weren’t her company but her charges. Every time she led them down the wrong aisle, she tried to find something there they could use. She trundled the cart around corners and perused the flyer that had been left in it. She didn’t know what to get, so she bagged a lot of fruit and took what was on sale that week, a brand of seltzer she’d never heard of. Supermarkets outside the city left so much squandered space between the aisles. Once, in a time before cellphones, she’d lost Jack’s mother at a Sam’s Club in Houston and was twenty minutes paging her at the register.

At checkout, she found the food was definitely cheaper than in New York. A teenager with feathery brown hair and a divot in one eyebrow double bagged everything.

“Oh, wait,” Deb said, stopping a can of Sprite midair. “You want that now, squirt?”

Simon shook his head no and turned away from the cashier, who asked, “Need this taken out to your car?”

“We’re fine,” Deb answered. They had four bags of groceries, another from the hardware store, and a paper sack filled with books. That there was no car, she was glad the kids didn’t say.

In the parking lot again, the air had turned a live yellow. Deb would have stopped to call attention to it, how pretty, but they weren’t walking anymore: They were carrying. No rain yet but the wind had picked up, catching the tarp on the red truck so that it billowed. Strange, the way it sounded like thunder.

Jack could see his mother-in-law from inside the revolving doors—could see, at least, the helmet shine of her white-blond hair poking up over the back of a leather chair at the far end of her marble lobby. After Stanley, he hadn’t been able to go back home without having what to do there, because he knew what he’d do, which was laze on the couch and eat and watch TV while Deb continued to not call. Instead, at the studio, amid the beginnings of
Sculptural Improvisation,
he improvised too a reason for going away.

The lobby was where Ruth had agreed to meet him ten minutes from now. Jack was early because he knew Ruth would be. He carried Travolta in the cat box, thinking of the girl somewhere with her guinea pig in a box, and how this was what happened to animals when their owners found new ways of being selfish.

He’d meant to walk to Ruth’s, but on the second or third block this had struck him as unkind, hearing the cat’s claws drag against the plastic floor as she slid around. He’d put a dish towel in to homey the place, but it didn’t sound like it was getting much use. He tried hailing a cab, but so close to rush hour there weren’t any, and when the bus pulled up a few feet ahead, he got on.

On the bus, Travolta
mrowwww
ed and the other passengers looked in on her, making sympathetic faces. Jack stuck his fingers into the gated front and tried plucking the towel forward, so people could see it was there. She’s eight, he wanted to tell them. We must be doing something right. As to the masking tape on the side,
TRAVOLTA
in black marker from the last trip to the vet, to that he wanted to say: My son, he used to love the movie
Grease.

Jack caught the eye of the yawning doorman/concierge behind the desk and nodded toward the blond head across the room. No doubt Ruth had announced that she was expecting company, Jack S-h-a-n-l-e-y, and that they shouldn’t turn him away when he came. She liked to make a production, his mother-in-law. She liked to think of all the things that might go wrong and plan against them. For fifteen years he and Ruth had enjoyed defying all that was conventionally known about husbands and their mothers-in-law. While Deb had preserved an adolescent sensitivity to Ruth’s small digs and asides, Jack was able to laugh everything away.
Your mother’s a
riot,
he’d say, which Deb hated.
Debby, don’t be mad; it’s only that she and I, we’re the same generation.
His wife hated that even more, not least because it was almost true.

What would he and Ruth be to each other now?

Jack came around the side of her chair, cat box aloft like a peace offering. Ruth pushed her headphones off her ears and stopped her Discman. “My tapes,” she said, though she meant CDs. Ruth listened to books. There was one she especially liked about Aristotle on ethics, and another called
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
that she lent once to her daughter and that Deb had returned unplayed.

Jack held the handle high so that Ruth could see in. “Look who’s here,” she cooed. He felt Travolta’s weight recede toward the back of the box and set the whole caboodle down on the glass-topped table.

“Made it in one piece.” He sat beside her, trying to seem easy, though the depth of the chair into which he sank surprised him. He was feeling very low. From his jacket pocket he pulled two golden cans of Ocean Whitefish Feast. “I can go and pick up some more now with the litter—”

“I’ve got litter.” Ruth had had cats once too, though hers were dead some years.

“Don’t you want some new? You’re not going to carry that all from the store—”

“Jack, honey, I’ll tell you a secret. They deliver my groceries. Don’t worry.” She laughed. “I don’t carry a
thing.
” The laugh was tired and a little angry, as if it bothered her, this truth about herself. She’d never signed off on getting old.

“Good.” He nodded. “You shouldn’t carry. I mean, you absolutely could, if you wanted, but it’s good you don’t.”

“My friend Lorraine, you know Lorraine? She’s the one that started me on it. She said, ‘Ruthie, why are you killing yourself carrying?’ But Lorraine, she has her own problems. She’s not a well woman. Her feet—nothing serious. Anyway you know me, I’m such a dope, I said what did I need to be paying extra for? So I should hurry home and miss them? So they should forget a bag? Never did it. Never. Always carrying these big bundles home.
Years.
”

“That can be difficult.”

“And news flash, Jack, I’m not rich. Lorraine travels, no kids, two husbands divorced—and wealthy men we’re talking, not like my Norman.” It was the kind of conversation Ruth could never have with her daughter, who considered such micromanaging of finances depressing, who would have found her mother’s story tedious and self-exonerating. Fine, do it, Deb would say, but why do we have to
talk
about it? Jack had never minded Ruth’s soliloquies. He had an idea of what it might mean to be lonely, of how bad it could feel. Ruth, widowed, had not remarried, as his own mother had. He understood that there were people who liked talk, who needed it more than others. And he did think she was funny.

“You’re right, though. It makes more sense that you get them delivered.” He felt relief that she could still be normal with him, and when the ethics of delivered groceries had been exhausted as a topic of conversation, when again they had fallen silent, he wondered if she was surprised at having slipped into their old ways so quickly, if she was even now regretting it.

“Look at him,” Ruth said, turning her attentions on the cat. “Her, I mean. Isn’t that bad? Well, mine were boys.”

“I don’t think she took offense.”

“So,” she said, picking an invisible thread from her blouse. “Deborah knows about your going?”

Jack held hands with himself in his lap.

“Honey, look,” she said, leaning closer. “I don’t get involved. Okay?”

“Thank you.”

“I think you’re an
ass,
and a
moron,
” she said plainly, her voice higher but no louder than before, “but I know my place, and this is not my place.”

“I appreciate it.”

“My girl’s grown up, better or worse.” She laughed that tired-angry laugh. “She has her reasons. What’ll happen, who knows?”

The Shadow knows.
Something Jack’s dad used to say. Jack had never heard the radio show firsthand, but his father always made the line sound noirish and pulpy, with a backdrop of heavy rain.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Back at the studio, he called Deb.

“Hey,” she said on the fourth ring. She still sounded like herself, and not so far away. Like she could have been just at home, and not in Rhode Island. Not on some other planet he couldn’t reach. “What’s up?”

“How are you? How’s everybody?”

“Good. The kids are good. It’s raining.”

“And our buddy Gar? How’s pretty boy?”

“Don’t, don’t do that.”

“What shouldn’t I do?”

“Gary’s not here until tomorrow.”

“Well, and you? How are you?”

“What do you want, Jack?” There it was. The other planet, orbiting.

When he told her he was flying out to the university that had given him the new commission, to meet the deans and see the space, she didn’t sound all that surprised, even though she knew how seriously he didn’t take them, these commissions.

“My mom can feed Travolta.”

“I took her over there already. So she doesn’t have to go back and forth.”

“Whatever you guys work out.”

“We worked it out, I told you.” He wandered into the little half kitchen. Opened and closed a cabinet for no reason. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“What do you expect me to say to that?”

Jack said: “You sound really far away.”

Deb said: “I am.”

When they were off the phone he dialed easy, laughing Jolie, to make her guess who was coming to town.

Howard Roark laughed.

His mom, as usual, had been wrong—wrong in this case about the ferry, which did not run every day, not until high season, and so they could not go to Newport, where supposedly there were shops and movie theaters and actual things to do. They couldn’t go to the islands either, not that he wanted to. His mom talked about these stupid islands like the whole world was poetry. Simon thought that if nobody lived on them, it was probably for good reason. What a moron.

Howard Roark laughed.

And she also didn’t think he’d like this book, which was why he was going to.

Deb had taken Kay on one of her walks, which, by now, hour forty-eight in Rhode Island, he’d already learned to decline. Simon wanted to be found reading in full view when they came back, but his mother would never catch him on the bird-shitty porch swing, so he’d gone down by the docks, where the ferry wasn’t, and where there were a few small shops in a row, two of which sold real estate. He sat at the round green table outside the sandwich shop that was closed. The table had a hole in the middle for umbrellas, the size of his fist.

He turned the book over in his hands.
“A writer of great power.
This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”
This was what Simon needed, to be dispensed a philosophy, a way of thinking and living and winning. He did not yet know precisely what objectivism was, but he knew it had something to do with ruthlessness as a way of getting what one wanted. Something to do with not being a tool. The cover art, besides, reminded him of Rockefeller Center, a man of gold gripping the sun, or fire. It made him think of ice-skating and of Radio City Music Hall, where he’d gone once to see the Christmas Spectacular.

Okay.

Howard Roark laughed.

Inside the sandwich shop, someone also laughed. He turned but saw only metal shutters.

Back to Howard, naked and on a cliff high up above a lake. So already that was pretty impressive. Definitely a cool opening. Simon looked out over the bay where the water was splashing, not like Howard’s, which was so still as to look stony. Or no—it was that there
was
stone, around the lake, and that the water was more still than the stone. He was confused by
a pause more dynamic than motion,
but imagined it was like in
The Matrix
where the bullets are flying and everything slows.

Laughter again from somewhere inside the shop and again he turned. Two voices, both girls’. He stood and moved a little ways down on the dock, nearer the water.

Howard was thinking how all the nature around him would be destroyed and put to use—the trees and rocks, for building—but not in the way Simon usually heard people talk about it, like it was something wrong or sad, like the animals would go extinct and the ozone would tear open and we would fry.

Just then a set of feet came slapping down the hill. He lowered his head and stared into his book.

It was only Kay, hurtling toward and then past him, to the pebbled edge where dock ceded to water.

“Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you?”

“We found a cat,” she said, pointing. “Up the road. Mom’s watching it, come see.” She doubled over to breathe, like the low air would come easier.

“I don’t want to come see. I don’t care. The cats are everywhere here.” That morning he’d already seen one skulking around the yard across the way.

The voices in the sandwich place were louder now, the door suddenly open.

“You’re late” was the first thing she said to him, this girl the sun made hard to see, so that she was only a shape at first, hovering over him like a wave. “Lunch service ends at three.” She stepped back into shadow, and Simon pressed his palms against the dock, turning himself around.

“Oh, we weren’t—” he started. “I mean, I was just out here reading.”

“Anything good?” Her lips were chapped and pale, and her hair blew a blond banner behind her, thick like it carried a lot of salt in it. She looked like someone who spent a lot of time outside, this girl, in shorts and a big T-shirt, sleeves rolled to freckled shoulders. She would know how to tie knots for sailing.

Simon held the book up, felt dumb about it.

“She can’t read,” called the other voice—the other girl, darker and smaller, now coming out from the shop.

“Shut the ef up, Laura. I read.”

“Not books,” the other one—Laura—shouted, and began locking up.

Simon looked back at the first girl to find her staring at him seriously. “What?” she said. “You don’t think I read either?”

“Yeah, no…I mean, I just don’t know you.” He slipped a finger out from where he’d been holding his early place. “I don’t know what you like.”

“Well, now you do,” she said, holding out her arm. “I’m Teagan.” She must have been eighteen or nineteen. She had that friendliness, an ease that came with things like college, and time.

Simon stood and shook her hand. He was just barely her height.

“Here’s where you tell me your name, if you want.”

“Simon,” Simon said, feeling his heartbeat visible.

“Teegs.” Laura, by the door, windmilled her arms. “Can we
go,
please?”

“You asshole!” Teagan’s smile buoyed everything she said. Simon wanted her to call him asshole. “Is this your sister?” To Kay she said, “I like your sandals. Where are they from?”

Kay looked down at her feet, and for a moment they all did, contemplating the hot-pink jellies that passed for shoes. “They’re from Harry’s.”

Simon explained that Harry’s was in the city, then added,
New York
City, to be clear and just maybe to impress her. Kids he used to meet at summer camp, kids from places like Michigan, they’d always seemed impressed, assumed untrue things. “We’re here on vacation.”

“Yeah, no duh,” Laura said, arms now crossed like for leaving. “That’s what everyone here is on.”

Teagan took a step away. “Well, New York. Don’t be late next time.” Where the shirt pulled tight, he could see the curved cup of her bra—like the sun, he could see it without looking. “The wraps here are
pret-ty
good.”

Simon didn’t say he’d come back, hoping to preserve any air of mystery the city might have lent him, but he was anxious already, knowing he would. He watched them go, and repeated her name to himself, Teagan Teagan Teagan, so as not to forget.

“She’s cool.”

Simon started, remembering his sister. “Isn’t Mom, like, waiting for you somewhere?”

Kay grinned, reaching to pull her foot up behind her. “She’s cool, and you’re not.”

Simon looked at her, teetering on one leg. He could see the day’s sun already on her face, pinking her nose and cheeks, and he was about to say she looked like a hot dog, but she rocketed off quick as she’d come, up the hill, jelly shoes almost flinging themselves off behind her. She had never heard of cats that didn’t belong to anyone. She thought they might as well be hers.