Little Children (17 page)

Richard liked to sleep in on the weekends; he was still in bed when Sarah left the house on Saturday morning, leaving Lucy in front of the TV with a big bowl of dry Cheerios for company and instructions to wake Daddy if she needed anything.

“Mommy has to run some errands,” she said.

Her first stop was Starbucks, a journey back in time she preferred to avoid whenever possible. For years after she stopped working there, just a glimpse of that tasteful beige-and-maroon interior—the bags of featured coffee, the shelves full of upscale accessories, the customers lined up like addicts at a yuppie methadone clinic—could throw off her whole day, stirring up a sediment of bad memories that otherwise lay dormant in her mental attic, covered by several protective layers of dust. (She used to feel the same way about her old high school, devising all sorts of elaborate detours to keep from having to lay eyes on it.) But she’d slept badly and was suffering from a low-level headache that only a serious dose of caffeine could cure.

“Vente house,” she said to the girl at the register, a punky earth mother with a jet-black pageboy and a tongue stud.

“Vente house,” the girl repeated a moment later, sliding the gigantic paper cup across the counter.

“Don’t worry.” Sarah smiled in rueful solidarity. “You won’t work here forever.”

“It’s not that bad,” the girl said, eyeing Sarah with suspicion, as if she were some sort of troublemaker.

Todd’s address, Sarah had learned from the phone book, was 24 Angelina Way. She found the place without much difficulty and parked across the street in front of Number 19, in what felt to her like an unobtrusive patch of shade beneath a maple tree. Sipping her coffee and listening to NPR’s
Weekend Edition
, she settled back in her seat and stared at the house where her boyfriend lived.

It was nothing special, what would have been an average-sized colonial if it hadn’t been divided into two mirror-image condos, powder blue with pale yellow trim. Instead of a lawn there was a large driveway sloping down to a two-car basement garage. On either side of the driveway, cement walks led to the respective entrances, identical except for the fact that one said 24 and the other 26. The higher number also sported a decorative straw hat on the door.

Sarah shouldn’t have been surprised to find Todd living in a duplex with a beat-up Toyota on his side of the driveway—she knew that his wife supported the family with some kind of low-paying work as a documentary filmmaker for public TV—but the house just didn’t fit into her idea of his stature in the grand scheme of things. He carried himself like a natural aristocrat, a person for whom nice things came as easily as good looks. In some fundamental way, it didn’t make sense that someone as unremarkable as she was should be living in a bigger house and a better neighborhood than Todd.

It wasn’t an awful house, not by a long stretch. It had skylights and scalloped woodwork over the front doors and windows, the sort of small touches that marked it as a “quality home,” modest though it was. Maybe it felt right for them to be living there at that particular point in their lives. Maybe it was even romantic in a way, to be a young family together, sharing burdens, moving up in the world. Years from now, Todd and Kathy would be able to drive Aaron down Angelina Way and say,
There’s the old condo, can you believe we ever lived like that?
Sarah had skipped that particular phase of life, moving straight from a shared apartment with annoying roommates into a mini-Victorian full of furniture from Pottery Barn, and she couldn’t help resenting Kathy for the fact that she got to suffer with Todd through their lean years, creating a history they could look back on with pride and maybe even a touch of nostalgia.

Unless he leaves her
, she thought, her chest swelling with a strange feeling of lightness, as if hope were helium.
Unless he leaves her to be with me.

It wasn’t the first time she let herself consider this scenario, of course, but it was the first time she’d let herself believe it was a real possibility.
He could divorce Kathy. He could marry me. I could divorce Richard. Todd could marry me.
She kept extending the sequence, playing out the permutations, imagining the logistics involved to the best of her ability—the lawyers, the custody battles, the financial arrangements, the emotional trauma—until Todd startled her by stepping out the front door, hugging a picnic cooler to his chest, his brow furrowed with worry.
He can divorce her
. He carried the plastic box down the steps and placed it in the trunk of the Toyota.
I can divorce him
. It took all of the self-restraint she possessed to stay inside the car, to keep herself from running over to him and shouting out the wonderful news.

We can divorce them and marry each other!

He made three trips in all—beach umbrella, toy pail and shovel, two canvas totes, a football—and had just shut the trunk when Aaron emerged from the front door, looking serious and oddly unfamiliar without his jester’s cap, and joined his father by the car. Kathy stepped out into the sunlight a moment later. She was barefoot, wearing tight blue jean shorts, a black bikini top, and Italian movie star sunglasses, looking taller, thinner, and more glamorous than Sarah had let herself imagine in her worst self-loathing insomniac nightmare. She was one of
those
girls, the ones from high school who made you stick your finger down your throat after lunch, the ones who made you look in the mirror and cry.

Kathy stood on the porch for a long time, giving Sarah a fair chance to contemplate her folly. She interlaced her fingers overhead and tilted her lithe torso from side to side. Then she spread her arms wide and yawned, the way people do when they’re sleepy but happy, and ready to embrace the day.

“Okay, boys,” she called out. “Let’s get moving.”

Sarah felt herself deflating, a Thanksgiving Day float pierced by an arrow.
Oh God
. Her dream of happiness suddenly seemed cruel, a joke she’d played on herself.
He’ll never leave her
. She barely managed to hold herself together until Todd and his family had backed out of the driveway and headed off down the street.
Not for me
. She covered her mouth politely with one hand, as if she were coughing instead of sobbing.
Not for anybody like me
.

Long after she’d stopped crying, Sarah sat in the parked car on Angelina Way, wondering how she was going to get through the next two days. Weekends were brutal under the best of circumstances, forty-eight-hour prison stretches separating one happy blur of weekdays from the next. But this one was going to be unbearable, now that she’d be able to torment herself with the thought of Todd spending every second of it in the company of his gorgeous wife—at the beach no less—while she was stuck at home with the panty sniffer.

Richard was sitting on the front lawn with Lucy when she pulled into the driveway, and just the sight of him filled her with disgust—his pleated shorts and Italian sandals, the polo shirt with the collar turned up as if it were 1988 on Nantucket, his little potbelly. They were having a tea party around a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, along with one of those hideous American Girl dolls and a stuffed frog named Melvin (both the doll and the miniature ceramic tea set were gifts from Richard’s mother, a woman who still believed that “dainty” and “ladylike” were the conditions to which all little girls should aspire). He looked up from the game as she approached, a demitasse of nothing raised halfway between a saucer and his mouth, his pinky sticking out with a primness that didn’t seem satirical.

“Where were you?” he asked, his face artfully blank, no hint of accusation in his voice. Ever since the incident in his office, he’d been a lot less imperious around the house, a little more considerate of his wife and child.

“I had some things to do.”

“You could have left a note. I didn’t know if you were coming back in fifteen minutes or two hours.”

You’re lucky I’m back at all
, she thought. She looked from Richard to Lucy, smiling as if touched by the sight of them.

“Well, I’m glad to see the two of you having so much fun. I think you needed a little father-daughter bonding time.”

He nodded, as if to concede her the round.

“It’s been wonderful,” he said. “But I was hoping you could take over in a few minutes. I have some work to do for that Chinese restaurant. The presentation’s next week.”

“Could you do it later?” she said. “I need a little time to myself.”

“Sarah.” She could hear the irritation creeping into his voice. “This is a big account.”

“Spend the day with your daughter,” she snapped. “It won’t kill you.”

“I don’t think this is fair,” he spluttered. He seemed genuinely baffled, as if Sarah had no business in life beyond taking care of Lucy and making things convenient for him. “Is there something particular you need to do?”

She only had to hesitate a second or two.

“I joined a book group,” she told him. “We’re reading Flaubert.”

Based on the name alone, Sarah had developed a completely erroneous impression of the Ladies’ Belletristic Society. She’d expected it to be stuffy and pretentious, fatally suburban, a garden club nightmare of watercress sandwiches and polite snobbery, well-preserved matrons in golf visors and pearls who used the word
darling
as an adjective.

Instead, the atmosphere inside Bridget’s condo was warm and welcoming, full of laughter and intellectual curiosity. Over here an informed conversation about the films of Mike Leigh. Over there an impassioned discussion of third-world debt relief. Despite the age of the members—the “ladies” were in their sixties and seventies—Sarah sensed a collective vibrancy in the air that seemed vaguely reminiscent of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

As the only little sister present—everyone kept assuring her that another was on the way—Sarah found herself in great demand. Jean ushered her around the room like a visiting celebrity, introducing her to each new arrival: Regina, a tall bony woman with a hearing aid and an owlish smile; Alice, whose iron gray hair only emphasized the uncanny youthfulness of her face; and now Josephine, plump and frumpy, with a tight helmet of curly hair and mismatched orthopedic splints on her forearms.

“Oh no,” said Jean. “Don’t tell me you got carpal tunnel.”

“Repetitive stress,” Josephine replied with a sigh. “Too much typing.”

“She’s writing a novel,” Jean explained to Sarah. “She always said she would.”

Josephine gave a rueful nod. “Only forty years behind schedule.”

“This is Sarah, my neighbor,” said Jean. “She’s a literary critic.”

“In my dreams,” said Sarah. “In real life I’m the mother of a three-year-old girl.”

“An
adorable
three-year-old girl,” added Jean.

Josephine stared at Sarah for a long moment. There was something probing in her gaze, but tender too, as if she were attempting to move beyond conversation into some more intimate realm.

“She won’t be three forever, honey. When she goes to school, you can get back to your work.”

“My work,” said Sarah. The words felt good in her mouth. She just wished she knew what they referred to.

“Don’t be like me.” Josephine reached for Sarah’s hand and gave a feeble, but still somehow encouraging squeeze. “Don’t let your whole life go by.”

Before Sarah could reply Josephine was besieged by concerned friends peppering her with questions and medical advice. Regina recommended acupuncture. Alice said she should try dictating her novel into a tape recorder. Bridget said she hoped Josephine’s grip was strong enough to support a wineglass. Jean said she knew lots of people with similar injuries who had complete recoveries, no disability whatsoever.

“You just have to be patient,” she said.

And all at once, it came to Sarah: It was like being back at the Women’s Center. For the first time since she graduated from college, she’d managed to find her way into a community of smart, independent, supportive women who enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t need to compete with one another or define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. It was precisely what she’d been missing, the oasis she’d been unable to find in graduate school, at work, or even at the playground. She’d searched for it for so long that she’d even come to suspect that it hadn’t actually existed in the first place, at least not the way she remembered it, that it was more a product of her romantic undergraduate imagination than anything real in the world. But it had been real. It felt like
this
, and it was a huge relief to be back inside the circle again.