Laura Lippman - Don’t Look Back

‘Are we snack family today?’ she asked, imperious as a duchess.

‘No—’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes—’

‘It would be horrible to forget,’ Iso said.

‘Horrible?’ Eliza echoed, trying not to smile.

‘Almost as bad as the first time we were snack family and you brought that disgusting jerky.’

‘Biltong from Daddy’s trip to South Africa,’ Albie said, dreamy with remembering. ‘I liked it.’

‘You would,’ his sister said.

‘Don’t squabble,’ Eliza said.

‘I don’t.’ Albie was not only keen to be fair, but accurate. His sister was the instigator in almost all their disagreements. Iso rolled her eyes.

They never used to fight, even in this one-sided fashion. They had been close, if only because Albie worshipped Iso, and Iso enjoyed being worshipped. But when they left London, Iso decided she had no use for Albie’s adulation. To Eliza’s dismay, she appeared to have conducted a ruthless inventory of her life, jettisoning everything that threatened her newly invented self, from her little brother to the last syllable of her name, that innocuous and lovely ‘bel.’ (‘Iso?’ Peter had said. ‘People will think it’s short for Isotope. Shouldn’t it be Izzo?’ Iso had rolled her eyes.) A freckled, redheaded little brother – prone to nightmares and odd pronouncements, not English, but not quite American again, not yet – did not fit Iso’s new image. Nor did her mother, but Eliza expected no less. It was the slights against Albie that she found unbearable.

‘Did you remember our chairs?’ Albie asked his mother.

‘They’re in the—’ She stopped herself from saying boot . ‘Trunk.’

Iso was not appeased. ‘It’s not a trunk. It’s a luggage compartment.’

Eliza hustled the children into the car, a Subaru Forester in which she already spent much of her days, and would probably spend even more hours once school started.

At 8:30 A.M., the day was already hot; Eliza wondered if the camp would cancel, after all. There was some sort of formula, involving temperature, humidity, and air quality, that mandated the suspension of outdoor activities. Other mothers probably checked the Internet, or had an alert programmed into their mobiles – cell phones – but Eliza had long ago accepted that she was never going to be that kind of a mother.

Besides, this was a private camp, and a very macho one, with serious aspirations and a pronounced Anglophilia. Iso’s six years in London provided her great cachet, and she pretended to a much grander knowledge of UK soccer than she had acquired while living there. Eliza had marveled at how she did it: a few sessions at the computer, reading the UK newspapers and Wikipedia, and Iso could pass herself off as quite the expert, chatting about Manchester United and Arsenal, professing to be a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, which she breezily called the Spurs. Eliza was torn between admiration and disapproval for her daughter’s social ambitions, not to mention her ability to execute them. She tried to tell herself that Iso’s adaptability would keep her safe in this world, yet she worried far more about calculating Iso than she did about trusting Albie. Cynics fooled themselves into thinking they had sussed out the worst-case scenarios and were invariably surprised by how life trumped them. Dreamers were often disappointed – but seldom in themselves. Eliza had installed spyware on the computer and monitored Iso’s IM sessions, which appeared benign enough. Now Iso was pushing for her own phone, but Eliza wasn’t sure if she could track text messages. She would have to seek the advice of other mothers – assuming she eventually made friends with any.

On the shade-deprived field, she set up the portable camp chairs, casting a covetous glance at the in-the-know mothers who had umbrellas attached to their chairs or, in the case of one superprepared type, a portable canopy. Eliza wished she had known, back in June, that such things existed, but she probably wouldn’t have availed herself of them anyway. She had felt decadent enough purchasing chairs with little mesh cup holders. She and Albie settled in under the unforgiving sun, Albie reading, with no sense of self-consciousness, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Eliza pretending to follow Iso’s progress through the drills. She was actually eavesdropping. Although the other mothers – and it was all mothers, with the exception of one laid-off father who inhabited his Mr Mom role with a little too much gusto for Eliza’s taste – were kind, they had quickly ascertained that Eliza’s children were not attending the same schools as theirs, which apparently meant there was no reason to befriend her.

‘– on the sex offenders list.’

What? Eliza willed the other ambient noises to fall away and honed in on this one conversation.

‘Really?’

‘I signed up for telephone notification with the county. The guy lives five doors down from us.’

‘Child sex offender or just regular sex offender?’

‘Child, third degree. I looked him up on the state’s site.’

‘What does that mean, third degree?’

‘I don’t know. But any degree has to be bad news.’

‘And he’s in Chevy Chase?’

Long pause. ‘Well, we do have a Chevy Chase mailing address.’

Eliza smiled to herself. She knew from her family’s own real estate search how people fudged certain addresses, that even within this very desirable county, one of the richest in the United States, there were hierarchies upon hierarchies. Which was worse: having a child sex offender on your block, or admitting you didn’t live in Chevy Chase proper? The Benedicts lived in Bethesda, and Peter had made sure there wasn’t a sex offender, child or adult, within a six-block radius, although one of their neighbors, a sixty-year-old civil service employee, had been picked up for soliciting in a bathroom at the Smithsonian.

The game done – Iso won it for her team on a penalty kick, a victory she carried lightly, gracefully – the Benedicts got back into the car and headed into the long, endless summer day. The heat was pronounced now; it would reach into the upper nineties for the third day in a row, and the lack of trees in this raw, new development made it feel even hotter. That was one thing Eliza loved unreservedly about their new house, the greenness of the neighborhood. Full of mature shade trees, it felt five to ten degrees cooler than the business district along nearby Wisconsin Avenue. It reminded Eliza of Roaring Springs, the revitalized Baltimore mill village where she had grown up, which backed up to a state park. Her family didn’t even have air-conditioning, only a series of window fans, yet it was always cool enough to sleep back then. Then again, her memory might be exaggerating. Roaring Springs had taken on a slightly mythic air in the Lerner folklore. It was to them what Moscow had been to Chekhov’s three sisters. No, Moscow was a place where the sisters were always intending to go, whereas Roaring Springs was the place that the Lerners were forced to leave, through no fault of their own.

Eliza stopped at Trader Joe’s, which the children considered a treat in the way the ‘real’ grocery store was not. She let them pick out one snack each while she roamed the aisles, bemused by the store’s arbitrary offerings, the way things came and went without explanation. At summer’s beginning, she and Albie had discovered the loveliest ginger cookies, large and soft, but they had never appeared again, and it seemed wrong, somehow, to inquire after them. ‘It must be a relief,’ the wives of Peter’s new coworkers had said upon meeting her, ‘to have real grocery stores again.’ American attitudes about England seemed to have gelled circa 1974, at least among those who hadn’t traveled there. The wives assumed her life abroad had been one of cold deprivation, huddling next to an inadequate space heater while being force-fed kidney pie and black puddings.