Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

Nothing moves except their thumbs. He thinks of the heroine of Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, imagines a generation of girls with giant thumbs, hypertrophied from overuse. What he can’t imagine is his daughters hitchhiking. Not because it’s forbidden, but because that’s way too much effort.

“Leave the girls alone,” his mother calls down the stairs. “There’s not that much to do. And it’s easier to clean up when there aren’t so many bodies in the kitchen. Do the girls want some more cookies or chocolates?”

They look up, dazed. Certain words, such as cookie, can penetrate the force field around them. “OK,” Michelle says, as if conferring a favor. All three continue to sit.

“Well, you can at least go upstairs and get them yourselves,” Tim says.

A pause. “That’s all right,” Michelle says. “I’m not really that hungry.” But Doris is already bustling downstairs with her “goodie” jar, a huge Tupperware container that holds opened bags of cookies and a selection of miniature candy bars. The goodie jar is a long-standing tradition in her household, but Tim has noticed on recent visits that sometimes the items are quite stale. This was true even before Go-Go died, but it troubles him. He asked the girls not to mention it. They said they hadn’t noticed.

Doris spoils all her grandchildren this way. To be fair, she spoiled her sons almost as much. They had few responsibilities in the house and only marginal ones in the yard because their father loved his lawn mower and did not want to entrust it to them. They were savages. Or so Arlene said in the early years of their marriage, when she discovered that Tim did not know how to do anything domestic-wash his clothes, sew a button, scour a pan, run the vacuum.

He did not think Arlene should have been surprised. She had seen his apartment, after all, even pretended affection for his bachelor ways. But Arlene, like a lot of women, had one set of standards for her boyfriend, another for her husband. The difference was that Arlene really did manage to change him. Everyone said that people couldn’t be changed and perhaps it was all semantics, perhaps Tim had chosen to change. Still, he believed that Arlene transformed him by the simple act of loving him. Despite being raised in a household where nothing was expected of the males and everything was given, he learned to shoulder household tasks and, when the time came, child care. If anything, he did more than Arlene around the house because she left all traditional masculine chores to him. He was, after all, the only man in the house.

He often wonders now if his mother felt similarly isolated as the sole female in a house of men. In the years since his father’s death, Tim has put in a lot of time helping his mother create the pretty, well-maintained house she never really had. The basement rec room was one such project-white paint brightened the inevitable knotty pine paneling, his father’s beloved bar was replaced with a craft table, the crappy old sofa was tossed. He also helped her wallpaper the dining room and do some modest updates in the kitchen. Mother and son paid lip service to the idea that these renovations were geared toward an eventual sale. Yet Tim knew his mother would never move. Because if Doris moved, where would Go-Go go when he boomeranged, as he did every few years or so? That was one room they never touched, Go-Go’s little bedroom at the head of the stairs. Through high school, college, and two marriages, Go-Go’s room remained the same, waiting for him to fail again.

Yet although Go-Go’s intermittent homecomings should have been disappointing to their mother, she never quite saw it that way. Doris was thrilled to have him back, and Go-Go, whatever his faults, was good company for their mother after their father died. So Tim did the work, standing in for the father who had died too young, and Go-Go made their mother laugh, the perpetual baby of the family. Yet it is Sean, far away, who still gets to be the good son, the perfect son, the pride and joy. How does that figure? Maybe being perfect can be achieved only at a distance.

Tim wipes down the counters, letting Arlene carry the conversation with his mother. It’s mindless, maddening chatter-analyzing various mutual acquaintances, discussing that morning’s Mass. Tim may not have standing as the best son, but there’s no doubt that Arlene’s the best daughter-in-law, steady and reliable. Doris likes Lori, too, or did before she threw Go-Go out. Doris can’t take the side of anyone who has hurt one of her sons, no matter how justified it might have been. Sean’s wife, Vivian, is on Doris’s permanent shit list because Doris thinks it was her idea to move to Florida. Funny, because Sean was for it. So why does Doris blame Vivian? Probably because Sean told her as much. A lot of lying goes into being perfect.

As a prosecutor, Tim feels he has a particular insight into lying. People lie to him all the time. Perps, of course, but also cops who don’t want him to know about corners cut, rights violated. Even colleagues lie. Tim lies, too. Everyone lies. It’s a cardinal rule of homicide investigation, but he feels this maxim has broader applications. He lies to Arlene-harmless things, not for advantage, just to keep the peace. He lied to her, for example, about “loaning” Go-Go money a year or so ago. They do OK, with her back to teaching school, but they don’t have money to throw around. Loaning-OK, giving-money to Go-Go was, by definition, throwing money around, out, away. But Go-Go was never more sincere than when he promised to pay back a loan, and Tim couldn’t bear not to reward Go-Go’s belief in himself, wan and flickering as it was. Had Go-Go ever been truly confident? He was loud and brash, yes, but that’s not confidence. When Tim tries to talk to his daughters about the dangers of the world, they roll their eyes, wholly convinced that they know everything. Go-Go was never like that. He was bold, but not fearless. He knew the world could hurt him. He just didn’t know how.

Doris and Tim Senior made it clear that Tim and Sean were never to speak of what happened the night of the hurricane. They led by example. If someone mentioned Hurricane David, his parents would pretend to need to be prompted on the date. Eventually it didn’t even seem a pretense. “Oh, that storm,” Doris might say. “That was the night that we went to the Robisons’ house and stayed because the power was out and the street in front of their house filled with water.” Tim and Sean were more than happy to leave it at that. If Go-Go was never molested, then Chicken George never died. It was almost as if Chicken George never existed at all.

In law school and later, preparing for the bar, Tim sometimes laid out the facts of that night as if it were a case he might one day prosecute. A man who had been sexually assaulting a child chased him and another child through the woods. He slipped and fell, injuring himself fatally. The children dutifully reported this to their fathers, who trekked back into the woods and found his body. There was no crime in this. Well, Mickey pushed Chicken George. She admitted as much. But she was acting in self-defense. She was not even fourteen, a child by the standard of the law at the time. No, they committed no crime that night. Still, as an adult, as a father, Tim has often longed to speak of it. Not to Go-Go, never to Go-Go. That would have been unfair to him.

He can’t tell Arlene either because they have been together too long now, the time for such secrets is past. There’s Sean, but Sean is even more adamant than their parents that they must not speak about the night of the hurricane. Tim thinks it’s because it doesn’t jibe with Sean’s version of Sean. Gwen, Mickey-now-McKey?

Gwen . Despite his habit of teasing her, he likes and respects her. As a kid, he was even a little into her, and not just out of envy for whatever sexual favors his brother was being granted. Tim liked Gwen before, when she was a plump little girl. She was smart beneath all her girly mannerisms. He doesn’t have any present-day yearnings for her. Arlene is the love of his life, and he is grateful for the clarity with which he sees that, accepts the compromises required by monogamy. He’s a man. He thinks frequently about other women, wonders what it would be like to fuck this one or that one. There are things, extreme things to be sure, that he has never done, and it now seems unlikely that he will. It’s okay. He has a good imagination, which serves him well when he’s alone. Still, he would like to talk to Gwen, just talk.