Want Not (43 page)

When Matty returned it was clear that he’d been pondering Talmadge’s situation; he wore a gently worried expression, and when he asked Talmadge how he was feeling it was with therapeutic warmth. “It’s just, like, this is for keeps now, you know?” Talmadge blurted, three weeks of desperation finding sudden vent. “I mean, look, I admire Micah’s principles more than I can even—” He stopped at that edge, because he
did
admire Micah’s fundamentalism, and he didn’t want to insult it with hyperbolic bullshit. “Go to hell, mustard!” they heard someone bellow, and both he and Matty glanced to the field where ketchup was leading mustard on a dash around the bases with relish far behind, the foam costumes bouncing atop stocking legs. “I mean, she’s right,” he said. “She’s totally
right,
dude. Her way of living—our way I mean. It’s the only moral way to even
exist
in the world right now.”

Matty shook his head and looked away toward the field, where ketchup was now claiming an oversized check for charity and the Yankees were jogging out to claim their positions. “I don’t get how that matters.”

Talmadge ignored this. “But you bring a kid into it,” he went on, “no fucking
way,
man. Right? Battle’s over. It’s one thing to take on these sacrifices, and, like, put your money where your mouth is—”

“More like your anti-money.”

“Fine, whatever. But you get what I’m saying, dude—removing yourself from the system, living below it or above it or whatever we’re doing. The whole anti-civ bit. You can do that when it’s just
you,
or just us—when you’re making your own choices about how to flip off the world. I mean, I
believe
in what Micah’s saying. She’s right. She’s a hundred percent right. You’d have to be a blind prick to look at the world and not agree with every damn thing she says.”

Matty raised a protesting finger, which Talmadge also ignored. “But you bring a kid—a
baby
—into it? Uh-uh. You can’t hand those sacrifices down, you know? Maybe you can—write letters. March. Give money to, like, groups or someshit. Start groups, I dunno.” He hesitated, disliking the path he’d just gone down, before gathering the force for the conclusion he’d been flailing toward: “But you gotta ease that kid into the world as it is.”

Matty went quiet for a while, squinting into the sun dipping slowly into the upper deck above third base. “You tell her that?”

“Yeah,” Talmadge said. “Of course. That was the epic throw-down we had Saturday night.”

“I knew something was up. That’s why I broke loose.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to
do?
” In his voice was a choked urgency, a deep blue wretchedness that until this very moment he hadn’t fully unleashed. “She won’t bend. And that’s my kid.”

The Indians were already down two outs. Matty leaned back in his seat, propping his legs over the open seat in front of him. Talmadge felt his chest heaving, and the sweat on his face was cold and still. When he brought his beer to his lips the cup was shaking; the harder he gripped it, the harder it shook. “Fuck,” he said, by which he meant everything, and Matty turned and gave him a hangdog look that felt as consoling as Matty taking his hand in his would’ve felt. “You’re gonna need some cash, you know. Doctors’ bills. Diapers. That sorta shit.”

“I been thinking about it.”

“I’m guessing you guys won’t be disposable diaper people.”

“Fuck off, dude,” Talmadge said gently, with the faintest curve of a smile.

“It’s not hard to get, you know. Same trash bags. Same dumpsters.”

Talmadge wagged his head no, though his insides surrendered immediately to the idea. “It’s like I told her,” he said. “We can live pure and change the fucking world, or we can have this baby. But not both.”

“I think you’ve nailed it, dude,” Matty affirmed.

“Yeah?” Talmadge said, watching Matty purse his lips and nod contemplatively. They took synchronized sips of their beers, their heads turning in further tandem as a Cleveland batter knocked a pop fly out to left field, where Matsui nabbed it effortlessly from the sky, closing the inning. The woman beside Talmadge slipped off her heels and angling her leg toward him she flexed her toes in what remained of the sunlight. It was such an obvious violation of his space that she murmured an apology, which Talmadge accepted with a nod and then added, clumsily, “Go on and let those dogs loose.” On her face there was zero reaction, but the golden legs crept forward, releasing their ache into the oily heat of the stadium. The call of a roving hot dog vendor came drifting down from the stands above, as measured and ancient-sounding as a church bell tolling on a Mississippi Sunday morning:
hawt dawgs, hawt dawgs, get yeh hawt dawgs heah.
Rotating to search the stands, Matty asked, “You wanna vegan hot dog?”

With a crooked smile Talmadge said, “Fuck off.”

Matty stood, raising two fingers high in the air, as the Indians took their places on the field. “How you feeling, Herpes?” he shouted while waiting. Ortiz threw his head back, rippling his neck muscles in mutely indignant response, as Matty’s call sparked an erratic chorus to detonate in the higher seats:
“Herpes! Herpes! Herpes!”
Matty climbed up onto his seat, exhorting the crowd by raising his outspread arms high and then higher, an orchestral conductor urging mayhem with a wide cocky smile emerging from the top of that lavish black slab of a beard, looking “nuttier than a squirrel turd,” as Uncle Lenord would’ve put it, and as the crowd roared in beery, full-throated obedience, the chant spreading from section to section, Talmadge saw Matty glance down at him, to prod Talmadge into joining his choir. But he didn’t need to. Talmadge was already shouting.

S
ARA WAS AT LUNCH
with her sister Liz when she said it. The restaurant, set inside the three-story Soho: Kitchen & Home department store on lower Broadway, was called ’Vore, though it didn’t bill itself a restaurant:
A SUSTAINABLE CURATION
, rather, at least according to the menu which was printed on FSC-certified post-consumer paper and stapled to squares of cardboard recycled from the store’s delivery boxes that (also according to the menu) would be composted at day’s end along with all the placemats, sugar-cane fiber napkins, and leftovers. Sara had ordered a “massaged” raw kale salad with Meyer lemon, black walnuts, and mint, joking to Liz that at least some part of her would be massaged that day, while Liz sent back her kasha and orzo with veal meatballs for being “kind of gummy,” confiding to Sara afterwards that she hated “to be a bitch but they’re composting it anyway.” Her backup choice, housemade falafel with garam masala and Long Island apricot, was also gummy, and though the waiter offered to compost that too, Liz reluctantly said she’d stick with it, and went about nibbling the edges like a martyr. She was fresh from hot yoga, her skin still weeping sweat despite the restaurant’s glacial air conditioning, and before Sara had even thought to reach for her water Liz had drained three glasses along with a watermelon-ginger-lemongrass “cooler” out of a Mason jar that, again according to the menu, had been reclaimed from a defunct Amish jammery in Middlefield, Ohio, not fifteen minutes from where Liz and Sara had been raised. They noted this in passing, thinking the coincidence might hold significance, but finding none settled languidly into inventorying their standard laments: Jeremy’s on-again depression (Liz blamed his job at the Rainforest Protection Network, noting that at the end of their recent ten-day vacation to Costa Rica, during which she’d barred him from both laptop and phone, he’d said, “Of course it was a great time. Only 1,370 species went extinct while I was gone”); the apparent futility of behavioral therapy for Aidan’s autism (“thirty grand a year to get the same kid coming out as the one going in”); and, on Sara’s end, the twined hardships of living with an increasingly frustrated husband and an increasingly reclusive teen daughter. “I swear,” Sara said, ribbons of kale speared on the fork hovering just below her mouth, “sometimes I think Alexis loves Dave more than I do.”

This wasn’t what she’d meant to say. From across the table she saw her sister’s face warping with a mixture of confusion and concern. What she’d meant to say instead was, “Sometimes I think Alexis loves Dave more than me,” though even that sounded ambiguous as she realized upon correcting herself. “What I
mean,
” she re-amended, “is that it feels like she loves Dave more than she loves me. Sometimes. Oh hell.”

Liz swallowed dryly and rearranged the napkin on her knees. She’d never been good at hiding her distaste for Dave, although Sara (who characterized herself as a “staunch independent” to mask her lack of interest) had always chalked the divide up to politics, to the Sunni-Shi’a split of the contemporary American electorate: Dave’s rigidity clanging against Liz’s. Cautiously, Liz said, “Maybe that’s because Dave isn’t the disciplinarian.”

“Oh God he isn’t,” Sara agreed. “He’s like—her enabler.”

“So it makes sense in a way. Of
course
Alexis seems drawn to him. Whenever you’re saying no, he’s throwing her a big life-ring of yes.”

“That’s probably it,” Sara said, lifting the kale into her mouth and chewing it without registering any flavor. She knew this theory was insufficient—Alexis wasn’t
really
a discipline problem; Dave didn’t
really
have authority in parenting matters to begin with—but she liked its cleanliness. The muddier truth—that her husband and daughter seemed at times enjoined against her, a two-person cabal trading inside jokes and sneaky remarks and furtive glances—had a paranoiac smudge to it, and risked the impression that Sara was swamped with self-esteem issues:
No one likes me,
et cetera. Which she wasn’t; no more than the average American woman, she figured. “Teenagers,” she groaned, wanting suddenly to close this subject she’d so awkwardly opened. “Just you wait.”

“It’s one day at a time, with Aidy,” Liz said, poking through her falafel for specks of apricot. “The challenge for us, I think, is going to be separating out what’s neurotypical—you know, hormonal—and what’s the disease. What’s normal and what’s not. Jeremy and I have been taking this online course, through UMass, on behavioral intervention in autism.” She posed this last bit as a question, as though the prestige of the program might be known to Sara; it wasn’t. “Well,
I’m
taking it at least. Jeremy’s just going through the paces.” With a frown, she dug a finger into her mouth to pluck something from her back teeth. “I really should’ve sent this back too. What’s the deal? All the reviews made this place sound like nirvana.”

“Mine’s good,” Sara offered.

“Speaking of that,” Liz said, not clearly at all, “how’s the whole, you know, sex issue?” The leer on her face was the exclusive product of her Midwestern inability to broach the topic of sex without sniggering; neither her issue nor Sara’s was particularly leer-worthy.

“Ugh, the same,” Sara said. “The pressure’s so intense that even when we
do
have it it’s not enough for him. It almost makes things worse, because then he thinks the next night’s in play. Let’s not even go there. You?”

Liz shrugged. “He still claims it’s because of the antidepressants. Though he won’t ask his doctor for, you know, the other pills. For . . .”

“Right.”

“So nothing’s changed on my end, either.” She sighed, staring at her falafel as though it represented her gummy, send-backable sex life. “Still
nada.
”

“If only we could trade husbands,” Sara said clumsily, regretting it even before Liz’s face warped again, this time from undisguised revulsion. She could see Liz picturing the scene the way Sara had once uncharitably described it to her—Dave entering the bedroom nude and hairy-bellied with his penis already stout and erect, having prepped it in the bathroom to signal his desirous expectation the way beach flags signaled surf conditions—and felt a stab of defensiveness, her imagination retorting by throwing up images of Jeremy asking meekly and creepily to rub her feet, maybe, if that was okay, just a little bit. Sara was about to claw back the remark when the waiter appeared tableside, wanting to know if everything was all right.

“Don’t ask,” Liz said blackly, and when the waiter probed further to see if the falafel was to blame, Liz and Sara broke into a familial concert of blushing laughter, forcing his baffled retreat from the table. This had always been their way: laughter ricocheting between them, no matter the strains it covered, bound and sustained by their sisterly ties. As teenagers they’d sometimes interrupted screaming matches with cackling and joyful-sounding time-outs, before resuming the quarrel to the confoundment of their parents. After an inherited baritone snort Liz blurted, “Oh shit I’m turning into Mom,” refueling their laughter so that neighboring diners must’ve thought them the happiest sober women in New York City.

It didn’t occur to Sara until halfway through her train ride home that this—the Main Line train out of Secaucus Junction—was the very place she’d met Dave. Possibly this very car, in fact, except no—it’d been one of the newer cars, if she was remembering right. She’d been shopping in the city that afternoon—and could list everything she’d bought that day if pressed: the Christian Louboutin suede platform pumps and ivory Loro Piana metallic evening shawl from Bergdorf Goodman; the double-pocket calfskin Prada hobo purse from Neiman Marcus; and the Badgley Mischka sequined bodice gown from Saks that she hated not being able to wear anymore owing to her augmented bust—and had to squeeze herself onto a rush-hour train, needing but failing to receive wide berth for all the shopping bags she was carrying. At least a dozen men refused eye contact with her, studying imaginary text messages or pretending to look out the window at the black tunnel walls while she’d stood there, crooked beneath the weight of all those bags, before Dave, whom she hadn’t noticed at all, rose up behind her. With merely a tap on her shoulder, not so much as a single word, he’d directed her into the seat he’d just vacated for her—out of
instinct,
or so it’d seemed to her then, and while later he’d profess to have done so out of admiration for her rear, she didn’t quite buy that claim. That brash and boorish side of him struck her as overcompensation for what she still considered (if less confidently) his decent and vulnerable heart, all that jock posturing a means of obscuring a fundamental goodness that (she suspected) his father had tried hardening off. She’d always found that combination irresistible in a man—the Alpha exterior masking the Beta interior, the hard candy shell around the nougaty center—and it flattered her to think this revealed something complex about her, something that harked back to the high-school incongruity of her quarterback-craving cheerleader self dating the clove-smoking drama boys on the side: the very breadth of her attractions suggesting an essential and untypecastable wholeness.