Little Children (16 page)

“At this particular point in time,” he said, “I think it’s fair to say that we are experiencing an era of definitional instability. The whole concept of a quote unquote just and equitable marriage is pretty much up for grabs. Your generation has no choice but to reinvent the wheel and discover workable new ways for men and women to live together in a long-term domestic relationship.”

To illustrate his point, he took an impromptu poll of the students, asking how many of them expected to marry and have children. About half the class raised their hands. The professor waited patiently, an amused look on his face. After a brief hesitation, Kathy joined the second wave of future procreators.

“About three-quarters of you. That sounds about right.”

Next the professor asked how many women in the room expected to pursue a full-time career during their childbearing years. About half of the prospective mothers raised their hands, Kathy among them.

“Okay, then,” continued the professor. “That’s a pretty substantial number of women who expect to follow a traditionally male career path. I ask this next question simply out of curiosity. How many of you men would be willing to stay home and raise the kids while your wives go off to work? Change the diapers, take care of the cooking and the laundry?”

The guys glanced around—many of them were football players, a tribute to the professor’s well-deserved reputation for generous grading and a shockingly light reading load—trading
Yeah, right
smirks, leading the women to shake their heads and roll their eyes in mock exasperation.

“Any takers?” the professor asked.

By that point, though, the whole class was already in the process of turning to face Todd, who was sitting in the back row, between two other football players, all three of them dwarfing their little wooden chair-desks. Unlike his teammates, however, Todd’s hand was raised high over his head, his long arm stretching toward the ceiling.

Kathy thought at first that he must be joking, pulling a little prank for the amusement of his buddies. Her indifference to Todd had remained constant over the past couple of years, as he fulfilled his early promise to the letter, developing into an old-fashioned B.M.O.C., the object of much swooning speculation and feverish pursuit from the sorority girls and sports groupies who made up the least imaginative sector of the undergraduate female population.

Oh, grow up, would you?
she thought.

As if responding to this request, Todd looked right at her and smiled. Not the smug, mocking smile she expected, but something sweeter and more complicated, as if he were apologizing for not being the person she thought he was, for failing to embody her low expectations.

I’m not kidding,
his face replied.

Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occurred. This was certainly the case with the silent communion that passed between Todd and Kathy in sociology class on that dreary March afternoon. The whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds, during which Kathy was aware of nothing more than a pleasant sense of possibility, the beginning of an unexpected flirtation. Ten years later, however, as she lay in bed beside her sleeping son, it seemed to her that everything that had happened afterward—the whole course of their lives—had been contained in that single charged moment, Todd’s hand in the air, his eyes on Kathy, almost as if he were volunteering to be her husband.

“There he is, ladies,” the professor had announced, in a tone of mild but genuine surprise. “There’s the man you’re looking for.”

The old woman answered the door after the third ring. She didn’t seem unduly surprised to find two men—one of them with a bruised and puffy eye, the other with a bag of ice pressed against his cheek—standing on her front stoop at two-thirty in the morning.

“What now?” she demanded. Her gaze was sharp and alert; she must not have been sleeping.

“Good evening, Mrs. McGorvey.” Larry sounded like a polite drunk, the kind of guy who wasn’t fooling anyone but himself. “We were wondering if Ronnie was home.”

“You leave him alone,” the woman snapped.

“We just want a moment of his time.” Larry smiled, as if to underscore the modesty of this request. “Just a little chat.”

Mrs. McGorvey turned to Todd as if he were the one who had spoken. He shrugged, but what he really wanted to do was apologize—for bothering her so late, for the eggs, the posters, the burning bag of shit. The poor woman just looked so sad and ravaged standing there in the doorway, breathing raggedly through her nose, all the indignities of her advancing age nakedly on display—the hamhock arms, the thinning, badly colored hair, the Ace bandages wrapped around her swollen ankles. If she had dentures, they were floating in a glass somewhere. With a certain amount of amazement, it occurred to him that she probably wasn’t much older than his stepmother, who played tennis three times a week and kept standing appointments with a masseuse, an acupuncturist, and a personal trainer. Helena’s dental work alone could have put a couple of kids through college.

“This is my house.” The old woman spoke firmly, her head held high. “I paid the mortgage, and I say who is and isn’t welcome.”

Larry cupped his hands around his mouth. His voice sounded playful and commanding at the same time.

“Yoo hoo, Ronnie! Get your sick, perverted ass down here!”

Mrs. McGorvey tried to slam the door in his face, but Larry caught it with his foot and kicked it open even wider. A musty odor of hard-boiled eggs and stale ashtrays—the warm, rancid breath of the house—came surging out, mingling unpleasantly with the leafy coolness of the summer night.

“I’m calling the police,” she said.

Larry laughed. “I hear they’re well disposed to child molesters.”

All the air went out of the old woman.

“Ronnie didn’t hurt anyone. Why can’t you just leave him in peace?”

“Ronnie didn’t leave that Girl Scout in peace. Do you think he deserves any more consideration than he gave her? And what about little Holly?”

Before Mrs. McGorvey could reply, Ronnie himself appeared in the hallway behind her, blinking and bewildered, wearing a short-sleeved pajama top over blue work pants. He looked like a loser in the sickly yellow light, a middle-aged dork with a hopeless combover and a slouching, cringing demeanor, as if he expected to be beaten at any moment. It was hard for Todd to connect him with the otherworldly creature he’d seen at the pool, the masked and flippered invader who’d struck fear into the hearts of grown-ups and children alike.

“It’s okay, Ma.” He came forward, gently insinuating himself between his mother and the visitors. “Can I help you gentlemen?”

“Hey,” said Larry. “Aren’t you gonna show me your dick?”

Ronnie appeared to give the matter some serious thought before shaking his head.

“I’m sorry.” Larry affected a puzzled expression. “It’s just that I was told that you like to show your dick to people who ring the doorbell.”

Todd looked down in embarrassment and found himself staring at the old woman’s boat sneakers, one of which had a jagged hole cut into the canvas, apparently to relieve the pressure on her big toe.

“Maybe I’m too old,” Larry speculated. “Maybe you only show it to little kids. Is that how it goes?”

Todd tried to fight off a rising wave of sympathy for McGorvey by picturing his crime, but his imagination faltered. Did he answer the door with his pants already down? Or did he talk to the Girl Scout a little while, place an order for Thin Mints, and then spring his little surprise on her? Did he say anything? Did he try to touch her? The fear and horror on the little girl’s face, that was easier to imagine. Little Holly—Todd didn’t even want to think about that.

“You listen to me, you piece of shit.” Larry grabbed Ronnie by his ears and yanked his face forward until it was within an inch of his own. “You stay the fuck away from the Town Pool, you hear me? Or I will personally fix it so that you no longer have a dick to show anyone, is that clear?”

Todd laid a gentle hand on Larry’s arm.

“Come on, Larry. Let’s go home. I think he gets the point.”

“I fucking hope so.” Larry made a hawking sound deep in his throat, and spit in Ronnie’s face before shoving him backwards into his mother. “You got the point, scuzzball?”

Ronnie nodded. His face was blank, as if none of this bothered him in the least. From the way he acted, you wouldn’t have known that another man’s saliva was sliding down the bridge of his nose.

“Okay, then.” Larry took a deep breath and tipped an imaginary hat at the old woman, who was holding one hand over her sunken mouth and making a strenuous effort not to cry. “You have a nice night, Mrs. McGorvey.”

SARAH AND JEAN WERE THE FIRST GUESTS TO ARRIVE AT THE JULY
meeting of the Bellington Ladies’ Belletristic Society. The gathering was being held in a townhouse on Waterlily Terrace, a small development of six attached units sharing a grassy yard and a fenced-in swimming pool. The complex felt far more pleasant and secluded than Sarah could have imagined from its location, just off a busy street leading into Bellington’s downtown business area.

Their host, Bridget, was a bright-eyed, squat-bodied woman in an African-print mumu; her haircut looked like it had been administered by a blind barber working with toy scissors. She hugged Jean, then moved on to Sarah without missing a beat, closing her eyes and purring with pleasure as she gathered the younger woman into the lumpy cushions of her body.

“So good to
see
you,” she murmured, as if Sarah were a long-lost member of her family. “We’re looking forward to your insights.”

She led them into her living room, an airy, art-filled space lit solely by the evening sun, which filtered in through floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening onto a tiny patio. Kitchen chairs supplemented the regular furniture, creating an intimate circle around a coffee table brimming with wine, cheese, fruit, and crackers.

“So how are you liking the new place?” asked Jean.

“I love it,” said Bridget, who was having some trouble opening a bottle of white wine. “It already feels like home.”

“Did you just move in?” Sarah asked. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

“February.” Bridget grimaced as she extracted a crumbling cork from the neck of the bottle. “My husband passed away last fall.”

“I’m sorry.”

Bridget gave a philosophical shrug. “It was such a relief to escape from that stuffy old house.” She filled three glasses with chardonnay and handed two of them to her guests. “I could hardly breathe in there.”

Trying to ignore the flecks of cork floating in her glass, Sarah sipped her wine and thought of her own mother, still living in the musty old house on Westerly Street, the last holdout on the block. She didn’t know any of her neighbors anymore, and spent entire days locked up like a fugitive from justice, the windows shut, the shades pulled down. She talked about soap opera characters as if they were real people, and wondered why her plants kept dying.

“Maybe I’ll move here,” said Jean. “If something happens to Tim, I mean.”

“We’re all widows on Waterlily Terrace.” Bridget smiled, as if this were somehow a comical idea. “Four of us were schoolteachers, Ellen was a social worker, and Doris was a housewife. She has a degree from Smith, though.”

“Do you get along?” asked Sarah.

“Most of the time. There’s been some tension this summer about the pool. There’s a heater, but I don’t like to use it. The cold water is so much more invigorating.”

“Especially when you’re skinny-dipping,” Jean added knowingly.

Bridget laughed. “I don’t even wear a bathing cap. I’m such an outlaw.”

Jean looked around, surveying the cozy interior of the townhouse with a wistful expression.

“Must be nice, not having to clean up after anyone.”

“And eating whatever you want.” Bridget smeared a generous quantity of goat cheese on a Swedish cracker that looked like a rectangle of stiffened burlap. “My late husband, Art, God rest his soul, thought it was his mission in life to keep me thin.” Bridget looked down, contemplating her plumpness with affection. “Does this look like a body that was meant to be thin?”

Jean dipped a carrot spear in a bowl of hummus. There was a barely perceptible edge in her voice.

“So how was Provence?”

Bridget flashed Jean a quick look of sympathy.

“Heavenly. I didn’t want to come back. In my heart of hearts, I believe I’m actually a French peasant.”

“She went with Regina and Alice,” Jean explained to Sarah. “You’ll meet them later on.”

“We’re going back next year,” Bridget told Jean. “This time you’ll have to come.”

Jean turned to Sarah. “Tim wouldn’t let me go. He said it was too expensive.”

“Life’s too short,” Bridget huffed. “What’s the old fart saving his money for? A silk-lined coffin?”

“The super-premium cable package.” Jean didn’t sound like she was joking. “He’s going to die right there on that recliner, switching back and forth between that A&E biography of Churchill and an infomercial for a stain remover.”

“Art was big on exercise shows.” Bridget smiled sadly. “Not that he ever exercised.”

“I’ve never lived alone,” said Jean. “Not even for a day.”

“It can get lonely,” Bridget allowed, though it sounded to Sarah like she was just trying to cheer Jean up. “But that’s the nice thing about a place like this. There are always people around if you want some company. Doris and I are taking a ceramics class. You should join us.”

“Maybe I will,” said Jean.

Bridget shifted her attention to Sarah.

“Jean says you have a Ph.D. We’re honored that you decided to join us.”

“I don’t actually have a doctorate,” Sarah explained, sorry to disappoint her. “I did all the coursework, but I never wrote my thesis.”

Bridget shrugged this off as a mere technicality.

“I’m so curious,” she said. “Did you like the novel?”

“It’s complicated,” Sarah began. “I had such a strong reaction that it doesn’t seem right to just say I liked it or I didn’t like it, you know what I mean? It just goes way beyond that.”

Bridget seemed pleased by this response. She reached across the table and squeezed Sarah’s hand.

“I think we’re going to get along just fine,” she said.

The doorbell rang. Bridget set down her glass and extracted herself with some difficulty from the deep indentation she’d made in the couch.

“Drink some more wine,” she said, caressing Sarah’s shoulder on the way to the door. “We find the conversation’s livelier that way.”

Jean flashed Sarah an I-told-you-so look as she refilled their glasses.

“See?” she said. “Aren’t you glad I dragged you here?”

For weeks now, on their nightly walks, Jean had been bugging Sarah about
Madame Bovary
. Had she obtained a copy of the Steegmuller translation? Had she started reading it yet? Had she given any thought to the five discussion questions each “little sister” had been asked to contribute to the meeting?

Until a couple of days ago, the answer to all these questions had been a resounding no. Because she felt like she was being rail-roaded—to the best of her knowledge, she had never actually agreed to be Jean’s “little sister”—Sarah had avoided the novel for as long as possible, in the hope that an unexpected circumstance would arise and free her from the obligation: Maybe Richard would get sent on a last-minute business trip, or Lucy would catch a cold; maybe she herself would go blind or get run over by a bus.

It wasn’t just the book group she dreaded; it was the book itself. She had read
Madame Bovary
in college, for a seminar called Sexism in Literature, which cataloged the multifarious strategies male writers had used throughout the ages to oppress and marginalize their female characters. Emma Bovary was Exhibit A—right up there with Ophelia and Isabelle Archer—a dreamy, passive, narcissistic figure enthralled by paralyzing bourgeois notions of “love” and “happiness,” utterly and indiscriminately dependent upon men to rescue her from the emptiness of her useless life. To make matters worse, she turned her back on the empowering consolations of sisterhood: She had no female friends, mistreated her servant girl and wet nurse, and neglected her poor little daughter.

Even if Sarah had been inclined to revisit this depressing material, it wouldn’t have been easy. Despite its racy subject matter,
Madame Bovary
was densely written and slowly paced; like any nineteenth-century novel, it placed serious demands upon the reader’s time and concentration. Ever since she’d begun her affair with Todd, Sarah had developed some sort of adult-onset attention deficit disorder. She’d pick up the newspaper and get maybe two paragraphs into an article before finding herself completely at sea, the words on the page dissolving into a fantasy of travel, just herself and Todd, no children, complete freedom—two lovers laughing on a crowded bus in India, sipping champagne in a first-class train compartment in Europe, barreling down the interstate in a red convertible, singing along with the radio. She’d turn back to the paper and reread the same two paragraphs, only to be waylaid by a daydream of grocery shopping, cruising down the aisles of Bread & Circus with Todd at her side, filling a cart with organic produce, fresh pasta, free-range chicken, sinful desserts, Australian wine. She’d force her attention back on the paper with a feeling of growing annoyance—what did she care about a shark attack in Florida, rolling blackouts in California, George W. Bush’s love affair with his Texas ranch? All she wanted to think about was hiding in the balcony of an old-fashioned movie palace, Todd’s hand inching up her thigh as the calvary charged across a Western landscape. Finally, she just tossed aside the paper and turned on the TV, which seemed so much more accommodating of her fantasy life, and not nearly so judgmental.

Knowing that she was no match for Flaubert, she’d resigned herself to winging it at the meeting, skimming the novel for an hour or two, scrawling down a handful of boilerplate questions, keeping her mouth shut during group discussion. But then something happened on Saturday morning that put her in a serious funk. In an effort to distract herself, she picked up
Madame Bovary
and discovered an entirely different novel from the one that existed in her memory.

“What does your wife look like?”

Todd seemed surprised by the question, at least partly because he was licking Sarah’s navel when she asked it.

“My wife?”

“The woman living in your house?” Sarah said, attempting to make a joke out of a subject that had become a source of obsessive speculation on her part. “The one you sleep with every night?”

“What does she look like?” Todd repeated skeptically.

“I’m just curious, that’s all.”

After several evasive maneuvers, Todd attempted to describe Kathy as if she were a criminal suspect—five-nine, straight brown hair, brown eyes, no visible scars or tattoos—but Sarah remained unsatisfied.

“Is she pretty?”

He gave the matter some serious consideration, as if it were open to debate. Sarah found this encouraging.

“I guess so,” he said. “Objectively speaking.”

“Is she a knockout?”

“We’re married. I don’t think about her like that.”

“What about other guys? If they saw her walking down the street, would they think she was hot?”

“Depends on the guy, I guess.”

“Do you have a picture?”

In a transparent attempt to distract her, Todd kissed her from the base of her throat down to her sternum. With a gentle tug on her bikini top, he freed her left breast, flicking his tongue playfully at her nipple, waking it from its afternoon slumber.

“Come on,” she persisted. “You must have one in your wallet.”

“Jesus.” Todd looked up in bewilderment. “Why is this so important to you?”

Sarah felt a warm flush of shame surging into her face. She knew it was a bad sign, this jealousy she was feeling toward a woman she’d never met, who’d never done anything to hurt her.

“I don’t know,” she confessed, wondering if she was about to burst into tears. “I wish it wasn’t.”

Todd pressed a finger to his lip, shushing her as if she were a small child. Looking straight into her eyes, he slipped his other hand inside the waistband of her bikini bottom and reached between her thighs, cupping her gently from below, exerting a slight upward pressure. It always came as a shock when he touched her down there, the pleasure of it so much more intense than she’d anticipated. She opened her legs to give him room.

“She’s a knockout,” he confessed, slipping one finger inside of her, then another, making her gasp out loud. “But beauty’s overrated.”

At the time, Sarah barely registered the comment, giving herself up to the strong sensations flooding her body. Later that night, though, it came back to her:
Beauty’s overrated
. He’d meant it to be comforting, but at three in the morning it had precisely the opposite effect. He had a beautiful wife,
a knockout
, and she was sleeping beside him right now, their legs intertwined beneath the covers. And where was Sarah? Wide-awake in the dark, listening to the wheezy, tedious breathing of the man she no longer considered her husband.
Beauty’s overrated
. Only someone who took his own beauty for granted could have been able to say something so outrageously stupid with a straight face.