Connie Willis - Time Out

“Mom, it’s a quarter to six,” Wendy said.

“I know the feeling,” Carolyn said.

“And I know you,” Sherri said. “You’d never run off with anybody. You’re crazy about Don, and your girls are two of the nicest girls I know.”

“Mom ,” Wendy said, pointing at the kitchen clock.

“I’m in kind of a hurry,” Carolyn said. “Can I call you back?”

“You don’t have to do that. I just wanted to warn you that Heidi Dreismeier’s mother called. She heard you were doing tests and wanted to know how Heidi should study for them. I told her not to worry, but you know how she is. She’ll probably call you next. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.

Carolyn pulled her coat on and fished her car keys out of her purse. The phone rang. She handed Liz the keys and picked up the receiver.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Don said. “How was your first day of work?”

“Fine,” she said, waving good-bye to the girls. “We moved equipment all day. And chairs. I’m still not sure what this project is all about. There’s one machine that looks like a giant lava lamp. And the guy I work with—” She stopped.

“The guy you work with what?”

“Nothing. Did you know Brendan James’s mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man? And there have been two cases of chicken pox in Henley.”

“Great,” Don said. “The girls will probably both get it. You’ve had it, haven’t you?”

“What? Chicken pox?” Carolyn said. “Of course I—” She stopped. “I don’t remember.” She frowned. “I must have. I had to have had it as a kid: I mean, all those times the girls were exposed when they were little, I was exposed, too, and I never got it, but … isn’t that funny? I don’t remember whether I’ve had it or not.”

“It’ll come to you if you don’t think about it,” Don said. “You’re probably just tired.”

“I am,” she said. “Wendy had her orthodontist appointment and then dragged me all over the mall looking for volleyball shoes, and then Sherri called and Wendy had to go to practice.”

“And you moved equipment all day. No wonder you’re exhausted. Linda says she doesn’t know how you do it all, taking care of the kids and all and now this job. She said she wondered if you had any time left over for being a wife.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I said you were a terrific wife and I—” Don said something to somebody else and then came back on the line. “Sorry. Linda just came in. She went out to get us some sandwiches. That’s what I called about. I thought I was going to make it home early, but Linda is feeling real insecure about the meet tomorrow. She wanted to go over the floor ex routines again. But, listen, sweetheart, I can tell the girls to come in before school tomorrow.”

“No, that’s okay,” Carolyn said. “I’m just being tired and cranky.” She had a sudden thought. “I’ll make myself a suicide,” she said.

“A what?” Don said.

“A suicide,” she said. “We used to drink them in college when we’d had a bad day.”

She told Don good-bye, hung up, and opened all the bottles of pop.

We used to drink them in college, she thought, pouring some Coke into the glass. She added some orange and a little root beer. My roommate Allison and I used to sit on the floor and drink them and talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I do not remember our ever discussing driving people to the orthodontist or volleyball practice or the mall. She added a dollop of grape, filled the glass up with lemon lime, and stirred it with the knife she had used for peanut butter.

I don’t’ remember us ever discussing being married to a coach with a snotty assistant.

She took the suicide into the living room, sat down on the floor, and took a sip. It didn’t taste anything like the suicides she and Allison had made, probably because Allison was the one who always made them. That one fall quarter when Allison was in Europe, she had had to experiment for days before she got the recipe right. That had been a bad fall quarter. It had snowed all the time, and she had sat by the window and drunk suicides and thought about falling in love, and being pursued by handsome men, and sex.

Which reminded her. She set the suicide on the coffee table and went and got the flashlight and put the batteries in.

Andrew got to school early, hoping he’d have a few minutes to try to figure out why he kept thinking he knew Carolyn Hendricks, but she was already there.

“I brought the flashlight,” she said. “Where shall we put it so we both know where it is in case of emergency?”

“How about the top of the piano?” he said.

She set it on end between two gray boxes that didn’t plug into anything. She didn’t look familiar today, which Andrew was grateful for. It was bad enough working on a nutty project without behaving like a nut yourself.

“We’re just going to do some screening today,” he said. “The Idelman-Ponoffo Short-Term Memory Inventory. It consists of reading strings of numbers, letters, and words and having the child repeat them back to you, forward, backward, from the middle—”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “Dr. Young gave it to me when he tested me last year.”

“Oh,” Andrew said. He had had the idea Dr. Young didn’t know her, that she had been picked at random by the elementary school. “Good. You’ll be asking the questions, and I’ll be monitoring their responses. They’ll be hooked up to an EKG and autonomic response sensors, and I’ll be videotaping the testing.”

“Don’t you think all this equipment is liable to scare five-year-olds?”

“That’s what you’re here for. They know you already, and you’ll be the one interacting with them. Don’t start the test immediately. Talk to them awhile, and then we’ll hook them up as unobtrusively as possible and start the test.”

She went and got the first kindergartner and brought him in. “This is Matt Rothaus,” she said.

“Wow, neat!” Matt said, racing over to look at the temporal oscillator. “Star Trek: The Next Generation !”

Carolyn laughed. She leaned forward. “Do you like Star Trek ?”

I know you, Andrew thought. I’ve never seen you before, but I’ve heard you laugh and lean forward just like that.

“What did you do in Show and Tell today?” Carolyn was asking Matt.

“Heidi threw up,” Matt said. “It was gross to the max.”

At lunch Dr. Lejeune set her tray down next to Sherri’s. “How’s Heidi?” she asked. “It isn’t the chicken pox, is it?”

“No. Nervous stomach. Her mother—”

“Don’t tell me. She ran off with the man who installed their cable TV.”

“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “Where did you hear that?”

“I was kidding. What about her mother?”

“Oh, she just lessons Heidi to death. Ballet, tap, swimming, tae kwon do. The poor kid probably wishes her mother would run off with somebody and leave her alone.” She sighed. “I wish somebody would run off with me.”

“What about Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Old Paperwork? Are you kidding? He’s never even looked at me.” She took a bite of macaroni, hamburger, and tomato sauce. “I think my timing must be off or something. I always meet guys after they’re already married or engaged. Would you believe I was out with strep throat when Dr. Young did all that testing last March or I could have been the one down there in that cozy little music room with Dr. Simons?”

“All what testing?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“The testing he did to find somebody to work with Dr. Simons,” Sherri said, eating her peach slices. “He did all kinds of interviews and stuff and then gave the finalists all these psychological tests. If I’d known how gorgeous Dr. Simons was, I’d have taken a few tests myself, but I thought whoever Dr. Young picked was going to work with him !”