I
t’s thinking about the music his mom hates that gave Pete the idea, actually. Knowing he has to do something. Knowing how mad he is and how few options he has.
Next morning when he gets up, Pete puts on his baggiest shirt. Also a pair of his sister’s old pants with the cuffs rolled up. He straps his backpack on his back and stuffs an old asthma inhaler belonging to his friend Benny in his pocket. If he gets caught, which he doesn’t plan to, he’s going to act like he’s having some kind of seizure and start swallowing his tongue. Then they’d be so glad to get him out of their store they’d forget all about the shoplifting part.
His mother must be out walking with Nancy—talking about him, most likely—or she would’ve stopped him. Either that or she’s up in her office reading faxes.
He heads for the highway leading to the mall. He pedals hard, listening to the Beasties on his Walkman to get psyched.
He parks his bike—no lock in case he has to make a quick getaway. The spaced-out girl is at the cash register.
Yes
.
He heads to the videos first, looking for Van Damme, and finds the tape he wants. He holds it up as if he’s studying the names of the cast. Now he turns around so he’s facing the back wall. Lifts his shirt slightly. Pushes the tape into his pants.
He heads for the pop music section, with his backpack looped over his shoulder, unzipped partway. He picks up a Nirvana tape, and Green Day while he’s at it.
The hardest part is walking out the door. They have this metal detector set up, like at airports, with an alarm that goes off if you try to take something you haven’t paid for. But the space cadet at the cash register is on the phone and flipping through a copy of
Rolling Stone
. When she turns her back for a second, he knows it’s now or never. He tosses the backpack over the top of the detector. He’s out of there.
After he’s down the block, he stops to catch his breath, although he can still feel his heart beating double time. It’s like the first time he jumped off the bridge at Ryan’s Quarry last summer, and when he and his dad rode on that roller coaster at the Deerfield fair. He was so scared he almost wet his pants.
He has to do it again.
O
ne of Claire’s favorite times with her children when they were small was reading to them. Even when she and Sam had very little money, she always bought them books. Not paperbacks, either. She loved the thick smooth paper of a full-sized hardbacked picture book, the smell even. Their collection was vast and wonderful: Russian fairy tales with gilt-edged illustrations, every Chris Van Allsburg, every William Steig, Frances the badger,
A Chair for My Mother, Harold and the Purple Crayon, James and the Giant Peach, In the Night Kitchen.…
Bedtimes at their old house, Claire used to pile Sally and Pete under the covers with her after their baths and they would have what they used to call a book festival. When they were very little, they often wanted her to read the same story over and over again.
Blueberries for Sal, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
. But later—on snowy days especially, if there was no school, or Sunday nights—they would pile a tall stack of picture books on the quilt and go through every one. When they begged Claire for just one more chapter of
Matilda
or
Half Magic
, she would usually say yes because the truth was, she also wanted to know what happened next. And not just that, either: She loved the feeling of her two children, one on each side, snuggled up against her with the wind howling outside and the quilt pulled up around them.
A few months after Sally and Pete had settled into their new house in Blue Hills with Claire, she had called up Sam one night to say she wanted to pick up the children’s books at their old house.
“You can have some of them if you want,” Sam told her. “But they aren’t all yours. There’s a lot of them I want to hold on to.”
This was a shock. Not simply because Sam had never been a big one for reading to the children when they were little. At that moment all Claire’s sense of loss and violation concerning her marriage rose from her like a great, billowing cloud so dark it covered her sky. And when the cloud finally dissipated, what was left was the image of those books.
Her children’s books were, for Claire, the most tangible evidence she possessed of her hours and years as a mother. She could trace her life with her children through their pages: the way the eighteen-month-old Sally loved to stick her finger in the hole of the wedding ring when Claire held her on her lap and read
Pat the Bunny
, the way Pete placed his finger to his lips and mouthed “Shh” at that page in
Goodnight Moon
with the quiet old lady murmuring “Hush.” The tune she had made up and attached to the mother’s song in
Love You Forever
, and the way Pete had stopped her in the middle of singing it one night and with his eyes full of real tears said, “No more. Please. It makes me too sad.”
And more. The way Sally fell in love with that phrase in
Babar
where Babar’s suit is described as “a becoming shade of green” and the way, on the page where Babar brings Celeste to a pastry shop, Sally would choose the pastry she’d get, if it was her. Her gut-splitting laughter over the line in
Caleb and Kate
, where “the cart said farewell to the wheel.” Her tears at the death of Old Yeller.
Claire thought about all of these things when Sam told her he was keeping half their children’s books. It wasn’t even so much a matter of thinking about them: She
felt
them, and how it felt was that she had to have every book, every single one.
• • •
One day when the children were on a camping trip with their father, she drove to the old house. She knew he never locked the door. Neither of them ever had
.
She wasn’t expecting Melanie to be there in her short shorts and the tank top she wears with no bra. Never mind, Melanie hadn’t expected her, either
.
Claire greeted her pleasantly enough. Then she walked into the old house and began packing up the books. She filled the boxes and the two garbage bags she had in the back of her station wagon and there were still more books left
.
So she began piling books on the seat of her car. Piling them on the floor. Making piles so high she could no longer see out the rearview mirror
.
Melanie stood there saying almost nothing while Claire did this. She must have known Sam wouldn’t want Claire doing this. But Melanie was nineteen years old. Claire was thirty-six. What was she going to do?
“I think I gave Pete that book,” she said quietly as Claire was carrying out one of the last piles. It was a Berenstain Bears paperback
.
“Oh, really?” said Claire. The sweetness in her voice must have been scary as a gun. “Well, then, maybe you’d like to keep it here?” She tossed the book on a lawn chair
.
“Give Sam my best,” Claire said as she slammed the door of the trunk
.
“I’m just house-sitting,” Melanie said. “I’ll be heading back to school pretty much as soon as they get back from Maine.”
“Too bad,” Claire said. She was drenched with sweat. Were her eyes yellow? Did her hair resemble the bride of Frankenstein’s? Probably
.
She climbed into the car. Heading down their old driveway, she could feel how the weight of the books had dragged down her car. Its belly scraped the dirt
.
T
he first time Sally and Travis did it was in his car. Sally hadn’t been planning on it. In fact, she had pretty much decided that she wouldn’t, at least until they’d been going out a year, and maybe not then either. But when he got to the part where he always said, “I’m begging you, Sal, just let me put it in a little ways, I won’t come,” she was as surprised as he was when she heard herself say, “Okay.”
He did come, but he had a condom on. And of course once you’ve done it one time, you never go back to not doing it.
It hurt actually. She knew from her friend Kim that this was likely to be the case, but since it’s never that way in the movies, it surprised her how much. She thought it would be like putting in a Tampax, but it was worse.
And still she keeps doing it. Who can say why? She doesn’t like sex exactly, but she likes how powerful she feels that he wants her so badly. Sally herself is pretty much the same person she always was before, but Travis is a totally changed person. It isn’t just that he’s calling her up so much now or the way he’s always there waiting for her at her locker after fourth period, and parked out front when she gets out of ballet class, to take her home. Well, not home maybe. Not right off.
It’s more than that. What has changed about Travis is the way he looks at her and the feeling it gives Sally that she could make him do anything, so long as she’s having sex with him. He’s an addict. Brainwashed.
They used to do all sorts of things together. They went skateboarding, for instance. They went miniature golfing, and one time they made a video of these scenes from “I Love Lucy,” with him being Ricky and her being Lucy. They talked about music and their friends and their parents and school even. He told her about Mr. Sullivan, the shop teacher, who’s always telling horror stories about people cutting off their fingers or getting their sleeve stuck in the planer. She told him about her father and Melanie and her mother’s wimp boyfriend and his whiny daughter. They’d order pizza and hang out.
Now what they do is have sex, mostly. At first they did it in his car. She was always bumping into the gear shift or getting a charley horse from having to do it in such a weird position.
They don’t have to do it in the car so much anymore, though. Not now that Sally has figured out where her mother goes at night.
So now after her mom leaves, Sally calls up Travis and tells him the coast is clear. His parents would be suspicious if they heard his car start, but he lives close enough that he can ride his skateboard over.
At first she thought it was too risky. Her mother could come back anytime, she figured. But now she knows her mother never comes back until close to sunrise. They take off their clothes and everything.
Lying there on her bed, she sometimes thinks about her mother and Tim. She doesn’t want to, she just can’t help it. These pictures keep popping up in her brain, of the two of them doing the stuff she and Travis do. It’s hard to believe her mother would do these things, but then her mother would probably never believe the things she does, either.
At least they always use a condom, anyway. All but that one time when they’d already done it three times and he ran out. Sally is sure she must have been safe then. What could he have had left in him anyway after all that screwing? Sally isn’t sure exactly how it works, but she doesn’t see how a person that already came three times in one night could have any more active sperms left in their balls. Plus she figured she was due to get her period sometime soon, although it’s hard to predict with Sally because she isn’t very regular.
That was three weeks ago, and she hasn’t got her period yet.
C
laire’s life by day and her life by night are so disconnected it’s as if she were a double agent or a bigamist.
She sees her kids off to school, although days go by that Claire barely sees Sally, between the time she spends on the phone and the time she spends in the bathroom. Pete’s suspension is over, but he no longer kisses his mother good-bye when he goes off to school mornings, and after school he always seems to be out on his bike. Tim still sends her faxes sometimes, but though his expressions of love and lust are more extravagant than ever, there is a heaviness to them now. They no longer lift her heart.
“I live in fear of not being a good enough man for you,” he writes. “I don’t ever want to fall in love again the way I’m in love with you. It’s just too draining.”
Claire lives with a different fear—the fear that she cannot be a good enough mother. She lives with the guilty dread that her own pleasure is drawn directly from the well that was meant to quench her children’s thirst. If the price of her happiness is their own, she knows it’s too high.
She no longer stops for coffee with Tim, and she seldom invites Ursula over anymore to bake brownies or putter around with her at the children’s museum. Tim may stop in to see her at the museum and he always calls her up several times during the day, but they seldom lay eyes on each other during daylight hours anymore.
Tim is busy, too. Money’s so tight he’s taken another job proofreading a computer programming manual so he can meet his rent money. After school he tries to be around for Ursula, who has made only one friend in the third grade—a girl named Brianne who hardly ever says anything and eats only dry cereal. “Where’s your mom?” she asked Ursula the first time they had her over. When Ursula told her New Zealand, she said, “Where’s your TV?”
He tries to make a healthy dinner every night, and they say grace now, the way Claire does. Tim gave up serving meals on TV trays after Claire told him it wasn’t very cozy and familyish. But the two of them sitting in the fluorescent glow of their tiny kitchen eating macaroni is not so cozy and familyish, either. Ursula doesn’t ask him so much anymore, “When do we get to go over to Claire’s house?” She knows the answer is, “When her kids are away.” And not always then, either. “I wonder how Jenny’s doing,” she says, and leaves it at that.
He has tried to make their bleak apartment a little more cheerful. That idea of Claire’s about checking reproductions out of the library, for instance—he did that. He and Ursula have started some begonias from cuttings he took at Claire’s house. He has found a rug at a yard sale. (“A rug is important,” she says. “So you can play board games on the floor.” She has a hundred rules like this, of how to make a happy home. All these years, he sees, he has been operating without the manual. No wonder he screwed up.)
Also in the interests of making his place homier, Tim has bought Ursula a beanbag chair and an easel that he found at a yard sale. Ursula has hung up a couple of her dresses on the wall in her room, the way Claire does, although the room itself is still a mess. Tim can’t keep up with the laundry. The trash. The grant proposals. The bills. For three weeks in a row he has missed the recycling day, and now milk cartons spill out of the kitchen into the hall. Tim never dreamed he could feel like this much of a loser.