Big Little Lies (8 page)

I
’ve invited Jane and Ziggy over for a playdate next week.” Madeline was on the phone to Celeste as soon as she hung up from Jane. “I think you and the boys should come too. In case we run out of things to say.”

“Right,” said Celeste. “Thanks so much. A playdate with the little boy who—”

“Yes, yes,” said Madeline. “The little strangler. But you know, our kids aren’t exactly shrinking violets.”

“I actually met the victim’s mother yesterday when we were getting the boys’ uniforms,” said Celeste. “Renata. She’s telling her daughter to avoid having anything to do with Ziggy and she suggested I tell my boys the same.”

Madeline’s hand tightened on the phone. “She had no right to tell you that!”

“I think she was just concerned—”

“You can’t blacklist a child before he’s even started school!”

“Well, I don’t know, you can sort of understand, from her point of view. I mean, if that happened to Chloe, I mean, I guess . . .”

Madeline pressed the phone to her ear as Celeste’s voice drifted. Ever since Madeline had first met her, Celeste had had this habit. She’d be chatting perfectly normally, and then she’d suddenly be floating off with the fairies.

That’s how they’d met in the first place, because Celeste had been dreaming. Their kids were in swimming class together as toddlers. Chloe and the twins had stood on a little platform at the edge of the swimming pool while the teacher gave each child a turn practicing their dog paddle and floating. Madeline had noticed the gorgeous-looking mother watching the class, but they’d never bothered to talk to each other. Madeline was normally busy keeping an eye on Fred, who was four at the time and a handful. On this particular day, Fred had been happily distracted with ice cream, and Madeline was watching Chloe have her turn floating like a starfish when she noticed there was only one twin boy standing on the platform.

“Hey!” shouted Madeline at the teacher.
“Hey!”

She looked for the beautiful mother. She was standing off to the side, staring off into the distance. “Your little boy!” she screamed. People turned their heads in slow motion. The pool supervisor was nowhere to be seen.

“For fuck’s sake,” said Madeline, and she jumped straight into the water, fully dressed, stilettos and all, and pulled Max from the bottom of the pool, choking and spluttering.

Madeline had yelled at everyone in sight, while Celeste hugged her two wet boys to her and sobbed crazy, grateful thanks. The swim school had been both obsequiously apologetic and appallingly evasive. The child wasn’t in danger, but they were sorry it appeared that way and they would most certainly review their procedures.

They both pulled their children out of the swim school, and
Celeste, who was an ex-lawyer, wrote them a letter demanding compensation for Madeline’s ruined shoes, her dry-clean-only dress and of course a refund of all their fees.

So they became friends. And Madeline understood when Celeste first introduced her to Perry and it became clear that she’d only told her husband that they’d met through swimming lessons. It wasn’t always necessary to tell your husband the whole story.

Now Madeline changed the subject.

“Has Perry gone away to wherever he’s going this time?” she asked.

Celeste’s voice was suddenly crisp and clear again. “Vienna. Yes. He’ll be gone for three weeks.”

“Missing him already?” said Madeline. Joke.

There was a pause.

“You still there?” asked Madeline

“I like having toast for dinner,” said Celeste.

“Oh yes, I have yogurt and chocolate biscuits for dinner whenever Ed goes away,” said Madeline. “Good Lord, why do I look so tired?”

She was making the phone call while sitting on the bed in the office/spare room where she always folded laundry, and she’d just caught sight of her reflection in the mirrored wardrobe on one side of the wall. She got off the bed and walked over to the mirror, the phone still held to her ear.

“Maybe because you are tired,” suggested Celeste.

Madeline pressed a fingertip beneath her eye. “I had a great night’s sleep!” she said. “Every day I think, ‘Gosh, you look a bit tired today,’ and it’s just recently occurred to me that it’s not that I’m tired, it’s that
this is the way I look now
.”

“Cucumbers? Isn’t that what you do to reduce puffiness?” said Celeste idly. Madeline knew that Celeste was spectacularly disinterested in a whole chunk of life that Madeline relished: clothes, skin
care, makeup, perfume, jewelry, accessories. Sometimes Madeline looked at Celeste with her long red-gold hair pulled back any-old-how and she longed to grab her and
play with her
like she was one of Chloe’s Barbie dolls.

“I am mourning the loss of my youth,” she told Celeste.

Celeste snorted.

“I know I wasn’t that beautiful to begin with—”

“You’re still beautiful,” said Celeste.

Madeline made a face at herself in the mirror and turned away. She didn’t want to admit, even to herself, just how much the aging of her face really did genuinely depress her. She wanted to be above such superficial concerns. She wanted to be depressed about the state of the world, not the crumpling and creasing of her skin. Each time she saw evidence of the natural aging of her body, she felt irrationally ashamed, as if she weren’t trying hard enough. Meanwhile, Ed got sexier each year that went by as the lines around his eyes deepened and his hair grayed.

She sat back down on the spare bed and began folding clothes.

“Bonnie came to pick up Abigail today,” she told Celeste. “She came to the door and she looked like, I don’t know, a
Swedish fruit picker
, with this red-and-white-checked scarf on her head, and Abigail ran out of the house. She
ran
. As if she couldn’t wait to get away from her old hag of a mother.”

“Ah,” said Celeste. “Now I get it.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m losing Abigail. I feel her drifting, and I want to grab her and say, ‘Abigail, he left you too. He walked out on both of us.’ But I have to be the grown-up. And the awful thing is, I think she is actually happier when she’s with their stupid family, meditating and eating chickpeas.”

“Surely not,” said Celeste.

“I know, right? I hate chickpeas.”

“Really? I quite like chickpeas. They’re good for you too.”

“Shut up. So are you bringing the boys over to play with Ziggy? I feel like that poor little Jane is going to need some friends this year. Let’s be her friends and look after her.”

“Of course we’ll come,” said Celeste. “I’ll bring chickpeas.”

Mrs. Lipmann:
No. The school has not had a trivia night end in bloodshed before. I find that question offensive and inflammatory.

I
want to live in a double-decker house like this,” said Ziggy as they walked up the driveway to Madeline’s house.

“Do you?” said Jane. She adjusted her bag in the crook of her arm. In her other arm she carried a plastic container of freshly baked banana muffins.

You want a life like this? I’d quite like a life like this too.

“Hold this for a moment, will you?” She handed Ziggy the container so she could take another two pieces of gum out of her bag, studying the house as she did. It was an ordinary two-story, cream-brick family house. A bit ramshackle-looking. The grass needed a mow. Two double kayaks hung above the car in the garage. Boogie boards and surfboards leaned against the walls. Beach towels hung over the balcony. A child’s bike had been abandoned on the front lawn.

There wasn’t anything all that special about this house. It was similar to Jane’s family home, although Jane’s home was smaller and tidier, and they were an hour’s drive from the beach, so there wasn’t
all the evidence of the beach activities, but it had the same casual, simple, suburban feel.

This was childhood.

It was so simple. Ziggy wasn’t asking for too much. He deserved a life like this. If Jane hadn’t gone out that night, if she hadn’t drunk that third tequila slammer, if she’d said no thank you when he’d slid onto the seat next to hers, if she’d stayed home and finished her law degree and gotten a job and a husband and a mortgage and done it all the proper way, then maybe one day she would have lived in a family house and been a proper person living a proper life.

But then Ziggy wouldn’t have been Ziggy. And maybe she wouldn’t have had any children at all. She remembered the doctor, his sad frown, just a year before she got pregnant. “Jane, you need to understand, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for you to conceive.”

“Ziggy! Ziggy, Ziggy, Ziggy!” The front door flew open and Chloe, in a fairy dress and gum boots, came running out and dragged Ziggy off by the hand. “You’re here to play with me, OK? Not my brother Fred.”

Madeline appeared behind her, wearing a red-and-white polka-dotted 1950s-style dress with a full skirt. Her hair was pulled up in a swinging ponytail.

“Jane! Happy New Year! How are you? It’s so lovely to see you. Look, my ankle is all healed! Although you’ll be pleased to see I’m wearing flat shoes.”

She stood on one foot and twirled her ankle, showing off a sparkly red ballet shoe.

“They’re like Dorothy’s ruby slippers,” said Jane, handing Madeline the muffins.

“Exactly, don’t you love them?” said Madeline. She unpeeled the lid of the container. “Good Lord. Don’t tell me you
baked
these?”

“I did,” said Jane. She could hear Ziggy’s laughter from somewhere upstairs. Her heart lifted at the sound.

“Look at you, with freshly baked muffins, and I’m the one dressed like a 1950s housewife,” said Madeline. “I love the idea of baking, but then I can’t seem to make it a reality, I never seem to have all the ingredients. How do you manage to have all that flour and sugar and, I don’t know, vanilla extract?”

“Well,” said Jane, “I buy them. From this place called a supermarket.”

“I suppose you make a list,” said Madeline. “And then you remember to take the list with you.”

Jane saw that Madeline’s feelings about Jane’s baking were similar to Jane’s feelings about Madeline’s accessories: confused admiration for an exotic behavior.

“Celeste and the boys are coming today. She’ll hoover up those muffins of yours. Tea or coffee? We’d better not have champagne every time we meet, although I could be convinced. Got anything to celebrate?”

Madeline led her into a big combined kitchen and living area.

“Nothing to celebrate,” said Jane. “Just ordinary tea would be great.”

“So how did the move go?” asked Madeline. “We were away up the coast when you were moving, otherwise I would have offered Ed to help you. I’m always offering him up as a mover. He loves it.”

“Seriously?”

“No, no. He hates it. He gets so cross with me. He says, ‘I’m not an appliance you can loan out!’” She put on a deep voice to imitate her husband as she switched the kettle on, her ponytail swinging. “But you know, he pays money to lift weights at the gym, so why not lift a few boxes for free? Have a seat. Sorry about the mess.”

Jane sat down at a long timber table covered with the detritus of
family life: ballerina stickers, a novel facedown, sunscreen, keys, some sort of electronic toy, an airplane made out of Legos.

“My family helped me move,” said Jane. “There are a lot of stairs. Everyone was kind of mad at me, but they’re the ones who never let me pay for movers.”

(“If I’m lugging this freakin’ refrigerator back
down
these stairs in six months’ time, then I’ll—” her brother had said.)

“Milk? Sugar?” asked Madeline as she dunked tea bags.

“Neither, just black. Um, I saw one of those kindergarten mothers this morning,” Jane told Madeline. She wanted to bring up the subject of the orientation day while Ziggy wasn’t in the room. “At the gas station. I think she pretended not to see me.”

She didn’t think it. She knew it. The woman had snapped her head in the other direction so fast, it was like she’d been slapped.

“Oh, really?” Madeline sounded amused. She helped herself to a muffin. “Which one? Do you remember her name?”

“Harper,” said Jane. “I’m pretty sure it was Harper. I remember I called her Hovering Harper to myself because she seemed to hover about Renata all the time. She’s one of your Blond Bobs, I think, with a long droopy face. Kind of like a basset hound.”

Madeline chortled. “That’s Harper exactly. Yes, she’s very good friends with Renata, and she’s bizarrely proud about it, as if Renata is some sort of celebrity. She always needs to let you know that she and Renata see each other socially. ‘Oh, we all had a
marvelous
night at some
marvelous
restaurant.’” She took a bite of her muffin.

“I guess that’s why Harper doesn’t want to know me then,” said Jane. “Because of what happened—”

“Jane,” interrupted Madeline. “This muffin is . . .
magnificent
.”

Jane smiled at Madeline’s amazed face. There was a crumb on her nose.

“Thanks, I can give you the recipe if you—”

“Oh, Lord, I don’t want the recipe, I just want the
muffins
.”
Madeline took a big sip of her tea. “You know what? Where’s my phone? I’m going to text Harper right now and demand to know why she pretended not to see my new muffin-baking friend today.”

“Don’t you dare!” said Jane. Madeline, she realized, was one of those slightly dangerous people who jumped right in defending their friends and stirred up far bigger waves than the first tiny ripple.

“Well, I won’t have it,” said Madeline. “If those women give you a hard time over what happened at orientation, I’ll be furious. It could happen to anyone.”

“I
would
have made Ziggy apologize,” said Jane. She needed to make it clear to Madeline that she was the sort of mother who made her child say sorry. “I believed him when he said he didn’t do it.”

“Of course you did,” said Madeline. “I’m sure he didn’t do it. He seems like a gentle child.”

“I’m one hundred percent positive,” said Jane. “Well, I’m ninety-nine percent positive. I’m . . .”

She stopped and swallowed because she was suddenly feeling an overwhelming desire to explain her doubts to Madeline. To tell her exactly what that 1 percent of doubt represented. To just . . . say it. To turn it into a story she’d never shared with anyone. To package it up into an incident with a beginning, a middle and an end.

It was a beautiful, warm spring night in October. Jasmine in the air. I had terrible hay fever. Scratchy throat. Itchy eyes.

She could just talk without thinking about it, without feeling it, until the story was done.

And then perhaps Madeline would say in her definite, don’t-argue manner:
Oh, you mustn’t worry about
that
, Jane. That’s of no consequence! Ziggy is exactly who you think he is. You are his mother. You know him.

But what if she did the opposite? If the doubt Jane was feeling right now was reflected even for an instant on Madeline’s face, then what? It would be the worst betrayal of Ziggy.

“Oh, Abigail! Come have a muffin with us!” Madeline looked up as a teenage girl came into the kitchen. “Jane, this is my daughter Abigail.” A false note had crept into Madeline’s voice. She put down her muffin and fiddled with one of her earrings. “Abigail?” she said again. “This is Jane!”

Jane turned in her chair. “Hi, Abigail,” she said to the teenage girl, who was standing very still and straight, her hands clasped in front of her as if she were taking part in a religious ceremony.

“Hello,” said Abigail, and she smiled at Jane, a sudden flash of unexpected warmth. It was Madeline’s brilliant smile, but apart from that you would never have picked them for mother and daughter. Abigail’s coloring was darker and her features were sharper. Her hair hung down her back in that ratty, just-got-out-of-bed look and she wore a shapeless sack-like brown dress over black leggings. Intricate henna markings extended from her hands all the way up her forearms. Her only jewelry was a silver skull hanging from a black shoelace around her neck.

“Dad is picking me up,” said Abigail.

“What? No he’s not,” said Madeline.

“Yeah, I’m going to stay there tonight because I’ve got that thing tomorrow with Louisa and we have to be there early, and it’s closer from Dad’s place.”

“It’s ten minutes closer at the most,” protested Madeline.

“But it’s just easier going from Dad and Bonnie’s place,” said Abigail. “We can get out the door faster. We won’t be sitting waiting in the car while Fred looks for his shoes or Chloe runs back inside to get a different Barbie doll or whatever.”

“I suppose Skye never has to go back inside for her Barbie doll,” said Madeline.

“Bonnie would never let Skye play with Barbie dolls in a million years,” said Abigail with a roll of her eyes, as if that would be obvious to anyone. “I mean, you really shouldn’t let Chloe play with them,
Mum; they’re, like, badly unfeminist, and they give her unrealistic body-shape expectations.”

“Yes, well, the ship has sailed when it comes to Chloe and Barbie.” Madeline gave Jane a rueful smile.

There was a beep of a horn from outside.

“That’s him,” said Abigail.

“You already
called
him?” said Madeline. Color rose in her cheeks. “You arranged this without asking me?”

“I asked Dad,” said Abigail. She came around the side of the table and gave Madeline a kiss on the cheek. “Bye, Mum.”

“Nice to meet you.” Abigail smiled at Jane. You couldn’t help but like her.

“Abigail Marie!” Madeline stood up from the table. “This is unacceptable. You don’t just get to choose where you’re going to spend the night.”

Abigail stopped. She turned around.

“Why not?” she said. “Why should you and Dad get to choose who
gets the next turn of me
?” Jane could again see a resemblance to Madeline in the way Abigail quivered with rage. “As if I’m something you
own
. Like I’m your car and you get to share me.”

“It’s not like that,” began Madeline.

“It
is
like that,” said Abigail.

There was another beep of the horn from outside.

“What’s going on?” A middle-aged man strolled into the kitchen, wearing a wet suit rolled down to his waist, revealing a broad, very hairy chest. He was with a little boy who was dressed exactly the same way, except his chest was skinny and hairless. He said to Abigail, “Your dad is out front.”

“I
know
that,” said Abigail. She looked at the man’s hairy chest. “You should not walk around like that in public. It’s disgusting.”

“What? Showing off my fine physique?” The man banged a proud fist against his chest and smiled at Jane. She smiled back uneasily.

“Revolting,” said Abigail. “I’m going.”

“We’ll talk more about this later!” said Madeline.

“Whatever.”

“Don’t you
whatever
me!” called out Madeline. The front door slammed.

“Mummy, I am starved to
death
,” said the little boy.

“Have a muffin,” said Madeline gloomily. She sank back down into her chair. “Jane, this is my husband, Ed, and my son, Fred. Ed, Fred. Easy to remember.”

“Because they rhyme,” clarified Fred.

“Gidday,” said Ed. He shook Jane’s hand. “Sorry about the ‘disgusting’ sight of me. Fred and I have been surfing.” He sat down next to Madeline and put his arm around her. “Abigail giving you grief?”

Madeline pressed her face against his shoulder. “You’re like a wet, salty dog.”

“These are
good
.” Fred took a gigantic bite from his muffin while simultaneously snaking out his hand and taking a second one. Jane would bring extra next time.

“Mummy! We neeeeeed you!” Chloe called from down the hallway.

“I’m going to go ride my skateboard.” Fred took a third muffin.

“Helmet,” said Madeline and Ed at the same time.

“Mummy!” Chloe shouted.

“Coming!” said Madeline. “Talk to Jane, Ed.”

She went off down the hallway.

Jane prepared herself to carry the conversation, but Ed grinned easily at her, took a muffin and settled back in his chair. “So you’re Ziggy’s mum. How’d you come up with the name Ziggy?”

“My brother suggested it,” said Jane. “He’s a big Bob Marley fan and I guess Bob Marley called his son Ziggy.” She paused, remembering the miraculous weight of her new baby in her arms, his solemn
eyes. “I liked that it was kind of out-there. My name is so dull. Plain Jane and all that.”

“Jane is a beautiful, classic name,” said Ed very definitely, making her fall in love with him just a little. “In point of
fact
, I had ‘Jane’ on my list when we were naming Chloe, but I got overruled, and I’d already won on ‘Fred.’”

Jane’s eyes were caught by a wedding photo on the wall: Madeline wearing a champagne-colored tulle dress, sitting on Ed’s lap, both of them had their eyes screwed shut with helpless laughter.