Before You Know Kindness (34 page)

Oh, how she missed the summer, and those long and wondrous days in July when she had no greater challenges before her than getting Charlotte into a decent swimsuit or figuring out what she could serve her difficult eaters for dinner.

Twenty-four

“I
want to do something special for Charlotte,” Spencer said. “We completely ignored her birthday two and a half weeks ago.” He was sitting in one of the ladder-back chairs in the kitchen that surrounded a round cherry table about the size of a manhole cover. Catherine was cubing a great block of tofu and putting the squares into a bowl with scallions, zucchini, and okra. Their daughter was rehearsing at Brearley.

“We did not completely ignore it,” Catherine said, hoping she didn’t sound too defensive. They had only been back in the city a couple of days when Charlotte’s birthday rolled around, and with Spencer’s painful convalescence, the familial strife, and the chaos that greets any family when they return after an unexpectedly long time away—the towering mountains of mail, the canceled appointments that have to be rescheduled—the day itself had been downplayed. Besides, there was that small issue that the girl had nearly killed her father. Granted, it had been an accident. But it still seemed inappropriate to Catherine to make a major production of her birthday this year.

Nevertheless, she had rounded up a few books and DVDs and found her a jazzy sweater and scarf. Last year the child had been elevated (emancipated, Catherine knew, in Charlotte’s opinion) from the Brearley elementary school jumper to the middle school skirt—which allowed for some fashion autonomy and accessorization—and so she also had purchased a couple of blouses that matched the uniform garment. The family hadn’t had a party. They hadn’t even had a cake. But she had managed to wrap the presents and offer them to Charlotte over éclairs she’d picked up at their favorite bakery on Columbus. And so while they hadn’t done anything particularly special, neither had they (as Spencer put it) ignored their daughter’s birthday.

“You know what I mean,” Spencer said. “We didn’t do as much as we usually do.”

“Fair enough. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I guess that’s the problem. I can’t decide what we should do. I called Ticketmaster, and there’s nothing available for any of the shows she wants to see until the end of November. So I think the theater is out—at least if we want to do something soon. What else do you think she might like?”

“Were you thinking with just the two of us or with her friends, too?” she murmured. She was so focused on making dinner that she answered a question with a question to stall for time: This way she could redirect her thoughts for the moment on what their daughter might enjoy. She wasn’t sure she had ever come across a vegetable as slimy as okra. It was leaving an oily residue on her fingertips that reminded her a bit of beef jerky.

“Either, I guess,” he said. “Tell me: If she could have one thing in the world right now, what do you think it would be?”

“Breasts.”

“I’m serious.”

“I am, too. She wants to be older than she is. Actually—” She put the knife down and turned toward him, the scraggly start of his beard once more nonplussing her. “Actually, that’s not quite true. She wants to be small and young-looking until the school play is behind her so she’s a convincing Mary Lennox. Then, between the final performance and the cast party, she wants to mature completely into a well-endowed Brearley senior. That is what our no-longer-little girl wants.” She was reminded of the arguments she and Charlotte had had when the child had been in the third grade and had started to demand that she be allowed to have her ears pierced. Somehow she and Spencer had managed to hold firm against her increasingly desperate entreaties until the day before she started fifth grade. They might have caved in even sooner that summer, but Charlotte had been in New Hampshire with her grandmother and Willow for two weeks, which had given them a much needed respite from her pleas and her howls.

“Do you think she wants a party?” he continued.

“You mean something here in the apartment?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She hasn’t wanted something like that since . . . since Connecticut.”

“She had that sleepover here three years ago. That was a real hit.”

She barely remembered that night, because she always associated those weeks with her daughter’s newly pierced ears. When she recalled it now she realized that it had been a pretty terrific evening: Charlotte had had three of her best friends spend the night, and they had watched movies until two or two thirty in the morning, and then all four girls had brought their sleeping bags into her and Spencer’s bedroom because . . . because Spencer had actually been out of town the night of the party. Yes, he’d been around the night of Charlotte’s actual birthday, but the evening when she had her sleepover he’d been at a conference in San Diego. Catherine knew she had been furious with him before he had left and then self-righteous when he’d returned, because the party had been a ripping success. Two of Charlotte’s friends had piled onto her and Spencer’s bed with her, and Charlotte and another girl had curled up in their sleeping bags on the plush carpet between the bed and the walk-in closet. They’d had waffles for breakfast, and she had made them with real milk and butter she’d bought the moment Spencer had left for the airport, for no other reason than the fact he was leaving again and she was mad.

She kept her voice even now, almost light, but she felt she had to remind Spencer of the small detail that he had been on the other side of the continent the night of that sleepover party. “You’re right, it was a hit. I’m glad you heard such good things about it when you got home.”

“Oh, we’re not going to kick that old dog, are we?”

“No,” she said, and she was indeed resolved to let the issue disappear. She’d made her point. But the memory alone had made her testy. Or maybe it was the contents of the bowl before her that suddenly she found annoying: the zucchini and tofu and okra. She would douse the blocks of tofu with enough soy sauce and sesame oil to make them tolerable, but it would take more than Chinese seasonings to make zucchini edible. She loathed zucchini and was only putting it in the stir-fry because Spencer liked it.

“So, what do you think? A sleepover, but maybe this time we go to someplace like Planet Hollywood first?”

“Spencer, they have nothing vegan on the menu, remember? Or almost nothing: I think you had a salad the time we went there, and you left seething.”

“I did, didn’t I? I’d forgotten.”

“Yes, you did. It just wouldn’t be much fun for either you or Charlotte, because there isn’t enough on the menu. Besides, I think she’s outgrowing places like that.”

“You think so? She’s only thirteen, you know. Barely.”

Only thirteen.
She shuddered. She knew what thirteen-year-old girls were capable of. “My sense is you either have to be eight so you can appreciate the pop rock and the video screens or twenty-one so you can get hammered in the bar,” she said. “In between, the place is hell.”

She turned back to the wok on the stove and tossed in a capful of oil. She had no intention of lighting the burner until her daughter had returned, but she was about to set the table and she wanted everything ready in the kitchen. She took a breath, and suddenly something in the zucchini—its seeds, its translucence, its profound and impertinent greenness—caused her whole body to tense.

“Do you think anyone else in this whole apartment building is eating tofu and okra and zucchini tonight?” she asked, pouring brown rice into a measuring cup. She was careful to focus on the lines on the glass so she didn’t have to look either at him or the small torpedo-shaped grains. The truth was she preferred white rice to brown. She didn’t know anyone other than Spencer and his FERAL friends who actually liked brown rice.

“Excuse me?”

“All this vegetable nonsense. Do you really think anyone in this whole big building is eating what we are tonight?”

She heard him rustling uncomfortably in his chair. “I guess. I believe the Youngs are vegetarians. And the Rosners. I mean the Rosners have never served meat when we’ve been to their apartment for dinner parties. And I can’t believe they’d deny their other guests salmon or steak just because I’m present.”

“I can.”

“Really?”

She grabbed a handful of silver from the drawer by the sink and then three place mats from the cabinet above it. “Absolutely. Sometimes it’s just easier to go along with your . . . your beliefs . . . than to listen to your lectures.” She inhaled deeply through her nose, unsure why she was taking a perfectly innocuous conversation about what they should do for their daughter’s belated birthday and twisting it into something angry—especially since Spencer seemed to have no stomach at the moment for a fight. She didn’t cry often, but she felt the desire to howl now.

“I don’t think they’re secret meat eaters,” he said softly. “I guess it’s possible, but the idea of someone hiding meat—”

“I hide meat!”

“What?”

Her eyes were starting to tingle and so she dropped the place mats and the silver on the counter and dabbed at them with her middle fingers. Then she repeated herself: “I hide meat. I have a couple of Slim Jims in my purse right now and a couple more in a shoe box in my closet—the box with my dress heels. Why do you think I scarf down Altoids the way you scarf down Percocet? So you can’t smell the meat on my breath!”

“I didn’t know,” he said, and he didn’t sound angry and he didn’t sound hurt. He didn’t even sound betrayed. He seemed merely surprised, and this was too much for her since she’d expected something like rage.

“No, of course you didn’t know, because it was just easier to eat my cheeseburgers where no one could see me, or my bologna, or my Slim Jims. It was just easier! But you know what? I’m tired of sneaking around, I’m tired of trying to accommodate you and your vegan pals. I’m tired of this whole vegan nonsense, and that includes eating tofu and zucchini, or sneaking Slim Jims like I’m some closet binge drinker. I’m tired of watching you humiliate my brother and embarrass our daughter by making a public exhibition of your lawsuit! I’m tired of . . . I’m just tired of everything!”

She stared at him, at the small, scruffy tufts of beard, and at the defenseless alarm on his face. At his wounded arm in its sling. At his limp, forever useless fingers. For a long moment neither of them said a word, and the only sound was the traffic outside the window.

“How long have you felt this way?” he asked finally.

“For years,” she said.

“Always, huh?”

She nodded. “You know what I wish?”

“No.”

“I wish years ago someone had told you to see a shrink so you could just get over your lobster fixation. Just talked out your . . . your guilt or your whatever, so you could have gotten on with your life instead of becoming this fanatic.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then: “In the hospital—in New Hampshire—I had a similar thought.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. When I was having those dreams about lobsters. Those nightmares. And I wondered if I was starting to lose it.”

“What did you decide?”

“Well, I will see someone. A therapist. Paige needs me to see someone for the lawsuit. But my sense is that it wouldn’t have changed anything if I went to one ten or fifteen years ago. If it hadn’t been the lobsters, you know, it probably would have been something else. I still would have given up meat.”

“But maybe you wouldn’t have been so extreme.”

He surprised her. “Maybe,” he agreed.

She heard their front door opening, the hinges groaning with the precise whine she knew well from their years in the apartment, and then the jingle of keys on a FERAL fob—that hand grenade–shaped logo with all the animals on it—and she realized that Charlotte was home. She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or disappointed by her daughter’s return: Had she been a few minutes later, who knew where her series of confessions might have progressed. She doubted she would have revealed that as recently as hours before the accident she believed their marriage was in such desperately sad shape that she was wondering seriously if it was winding down. But she hadn’t planned to tell him about the Slim Jims, either, so who could say what she might really have said? Perhaps, she thought, she might have dropped a bombshell that big.

“We should probably just ask Charlotte what she’d like to do for her birthday,” she said simply. “If anything. For all we know, she’ll tell us it’s more than two weeks past and she feels no need to celebrate it now. Okay?”

“Okay,” Spencer agreed, his voice barely above a whisper.

She called out into the living room that she and Spencer were in the kitchen, and in a moment their daughter pushed her way through the swinging door, bringing with her a shimmering array of stories about rehearsal and the voice coach and the handsome older boy from Buckley who was going to play Archibald Craven.

Twenty-five

T
he obsessions will get you every time when they’re not human—and sometimes, Sara thought, when they are.

She flipped off the small tape recorder with the remarks she had made to herself that morning immediately after Eleanor Holmes had left her office. Eleanor was a thirty-two-year-old woman with an eating disorder who was only now beginning to struggle with the fact that when she was eight she’d spent a full day alone at a New York State Thruway rest area because neither of her divorced parents was willing to cave in to the other and go pick her up. Her father had left her there a day early and just presumed that her mother would drop everything and come get her: Mom hadn’t. Mom had refused to be bullied by her ex-husband and wouldn’t change her plans. It was a game of chicken, and one result was that little Eleanor had lived on whopping plates of nachos in cheese sauce that day, because she was afraid she would be abducted if she left the rest area’s snack shop and cafeteria. The woman believed now—and Sara thought there was some truth to this—that this was why she had become a compulsive eater and tried to use food to reduce anxiety and stress.

Sara closed her eyes. Upstairs she presumed that Willow was sleeping as deeply as Patrick, while John was . . .

John was probably staring at the pages in his book in bed. She’d noticed lately that it took him long minutes to turn the pages in whatever novel or history he was reading. When she’d first noticed the trend in their bed two or three weeks ago, she had presumed he had fallen asleep and that was why he had been on, say, page 216 for fifteen minutes. But then she’d realized that his eyes were open, staring aimlessly at the wallpaper or the window—a blank screen, inevitably, because the shades would be drawn—or simply the foot of their bed.

She hadn’t spoken to Spencer since they’d left New Hampshire five weeks ago, and she knew John hadn’t, either. This was yet another source of torment for her poor husband. It was a wonder he hadn’t become a compulsive eater himself. (Instead, alas, he’d simply lost almost all of his appetite.) She tried to imagine how the brothers-in-laws’ feud—though it was actually a pretty one-sided squabble since John wanted desperately to be on speaking terms with Spencer—would play itself out. She had to believe that the next time they saw each other would not be in five or ten or fifteen years. This lawsuit would have to bring them together at some point, wouldn’t it? And what about Christmas in three months or the Seton New England Boot Camp next summer? The McCulloughs actually didn’t visit them all that often in Vermont, largely because when they came north everyone gathered at Nan’s place in New Hampshire, but Sara and Willow and John had a long history of seeing the McCulloughs in Manhattan. Willow loved New York City, and the three of them went there at least twice a year and stayed at Nan’s. They’d see lots of Catherine and Charlotte and—when he was in town—Spencer.

Still, Sara guessed that it was possible with a man as stubborn as Spencer that he’d find a way never to speak to her husband again. It was, of course, ridiculous. Childish and ridiculous. And it was only making things worse.

She was about to head upstairs herself and get ready for bed, when she heard a knock so soft on the living room door that she knew instantly it was Willow. The girl was awake, after all.

“Come in,” she said, just loud enough to be heard through the door.

Willow’s bangs were falling across her eyes, and she was squinting against the light in the living room. Though it was only the middle of September, it had been chilly the last couple of days and the girl had started to wear her winter nightgown, a red and white Lanz which last year had dragged on the floor but now, Sara noticed, didn’t even reach her daughter’s small ankles.

“Are you having trouble sleeping?” she asked, as Willow moved with the awkward gait of a sleepwalker over to the plush armchair in which she was sitting, and perched herself on the wide armrest.

“A little. But that’s not why I came down.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think I know what I want to do for my birthday.”

“Oh, good. Tell me.”

“Today in art class Ms. Seeley was telling us about the Cloisters—in New York City. Have you ever been there?”

She shook her head. “Believe it or not, I haven’t. I should have by now, I know. Certainly your father has. Probably any number of times.”

“She was showing us slides of the statues and paintings they have there, and the way the light moves in the stone hallways, and all these gold goblets and candlesticks that are works of art themselves. Everything’s from the Middle Ages, you know. I’d like to go there for my birthday.”

She was pleased that Willow wanted to see a museum on her birthday, but she was also realistic enough to understand that her daughter knew well that any trip to Manhattan would include far more than a visit to a museum. There would be dinner at a restaurant sufficiently fancy to allow Willow to wear one of her dresses she loved that were far too elegant for Vermont, perhaps lunch at a more rowdy venue such as the Hard Rock Cafe, shopping at the great palaces of consumption—Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s—and a detour to a downtown boutique (almost certainly Alice Underground) that would have exactly the sorts of hip, inappropriate children’s clothes you couldn’t find in Vermont but every girl wanted on her eleventh birthday.

“We can do that,” she said, and instantly she began to outline the logistics of the trip in her mind. Today was Tuesday, the fourteenth. Willow’s birthday was the twenty-seventh—a Monday. “Your grandmother will be back in the city by your birthday. I think, as a matter of fact, she’s being driven home in a couple of days. This Thursday, maybe. So we could go either the weekend before your birthday—drive down on Friday, the twenty-fourth—or the weekend after. That first weekend in October. We can check with Daddy and see if one of those weekends is better for him than the other.”

“The thing is . . .”

“Yes?”

“We’d need to go this weekend—if we decide to do this for my birthday.”

“This weekend? Why?”

“Ms. Seeley—she grew up in New York City, you know . . .”

“Yes, I know,” she said, smiling when her daughter paused in midsentence. Grace Seeley, the school’s art teacher, was a statuesque blond no older than twenty-five or twenty-six with a small blue stone in the side of her nose. She regaled her students in the weekly art class with her tales of art school in Manhattan and the strange and wondrous things people did there that they considered . . . art. This was Seeley’s second year in Willow’s school, and the girls, especially Willow, adored her.

“She said this is the Saturday that the Cloisters and the park right next to it—Fort something—is having a medieval harvest festival. They do it every year, and it’s only this one Saturday. That’s it. But she said it’s really cool: It feels like you’re living in the Middle Ages, except there are always a few people who forget to turn off their cell phones.”

“So you want to go this weekend?”

“If we can . . .”

“This is awfully spontaneous. And your father and I are many things, but we’re not exactly spontaneous people.”

“I know.”

She looked at the girl, saw—despite her drowsy eyes—her consuming interest in the idea.

“But you really want to go to this harvest festival, don’t you?”

“I do. I’ve been imagining it all day.”

She, too, had been thinking about Manhattan just before Willow had come downstairs. She didn’t believe this was a sign precisely, but she had the amused suspicion it was something more than a coincidence: an indication, perhaps, of her and her daughter’s connectedness.

Moreover, she recalled that no one had done a whole lot for Charlotte’s birthday at the end of August—she had ordered online a CD of some musical and had the company tape one of those ten- or eleven-word greetings to the wrapped disc—and if they went to Manhattan this weekend, the two girls could do something special together. A sort of joint birthday celebration. Certainly they could invite Charlotte to join them for the day at the Cloisters. She liked that idea. Even if their fathers weren’t speaking—perhaps
because
their fathers weren’t speaking—it was important to do all that they could to give the girls opportunities to see each other. And while she knew that Spencer didn’t want to see John, it was always possible that with her husband in the city he’d have to. They could all descend on the McCulloughs’ apartment when they picked up Charlotte—assuming she wanted to go with them to the Cloisters—and she couldn’t imagine Spencer hiding in the bedroom. Maybe they’d even get there a little early, so he couldn’t sneak out before they arrived to see his physical therapist or run errands or torment the keepers of some nearby fur vault.

She saw in her mind the awkwardness that would infuse any encounter between the two men, and she sighed. It would be pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. The male stripped of any semblance of social grace. It would be embarrassing for anyone who had the misfortune of witnessing the small spectacle.

Then again, she guessed she was kidding herself if she honestly believed there was any chance at all that Spencer would tolerate her husband’s presence long enough for embarrassment to become a dominant sensation. Her family might visit Manhattan this weekend, but the only McCulloughs they would see would be Catherine and Charlotte.

“Do you think we can go?” Willow was pressing her now.

“Okay, sure, if that’s what you really would like. Maybe we can celebrate your and Charlotte’s birthdays together. I know your aunt Catherine didn’t have a chance this year to do a whole lot for your cousin. We’ll see what your father has on his schedule, just to make sure it’s okay. What do you have at school on Friday afternoons this year? Just gym and library, right?”

Willow nodded.

“Well, then. If it’s okay with your father, we could pick you up at school at lunchtime and then go straight to the city. We could be at your grandmother’s in time for dinner. How does that sound?”

“That sounds great, thank you! Thank you so much!”

“You’re welcome. It’ll be fun.” She slipped her small tape recorder and her notes into the attaché on the floor beside her, and rose from her chair. She shook out her leg which had fallen asleep and said, “Now let’s get you back into bed. Do your sheets need to be tucked in again?”

The child nodded, hopped off the armrest with the grace of a gymnast, and then ran up the stairs to her bedroom.

AS WILLOW FELL ASLEEP
that night she thought of the slide of what she believed Ms. Seeley had called a reliquary shrine: a gold box with blue enamel, angels in the corners, and a little statue of the Virgin Mary as the knob to open the lid. The box sat on what looked like a dollhouse-sized stage, with a tiny wall of stained glass behind it. She wondered what people stored in such a beautiful box. She’d have to ask someone at the Cloisters on Saturday.

She was looking forward to visiting the place, but the truth was that it wasn’t something she would normally have wanted to do on her birthday. It was simply an excuse to get her parents to take her to New York City sooner rather than later so she could see Charlotte. The idea had first started to form in her mind when Ms. Seeley had mentioned that the harvest festival only lasted a single day, and that day was this coming Saturday. She still didn’t know quite what she would accomplish with her cousin, but she wanted to see her before they faced their depositions. She wasn’t making much headway getting resolution on what she would say—on what they would say—over the phone, and she thought she might make more progress if they spoke face to face. Sometimes she could get her way with Charlotte when they were together. She thought it was possible that her cousin appeased her because she was younger and the older girl wanted to be magnanimous, but Willow didn’t care: She didn’t want to lie at the deposition if there was any way she could avoid it.

She wondered what Charlotte would say when she told her she was coming to New York this weekend. She liked her mom’s idea that she and her cousin might celebrate their birthdays together. It might be a little strange with her father and Uncle Spencer not talking to each other, but they’d work it out. They were grown-ups. Besides, that was their problem. Not hers. With that deposition looming, she had enough to figure out on her own.