Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“They won’t listen.” He rubbed his face.

She thought she would reach out, touch his shoulder, but didn’t. And then he moved, out of reach, to the caution tape, which he took a tall step over. “Jack.”

He touched the wall with just his fingers, then with the whole of his hand. Deb watched him walk up and down, crouching, reaching, now running his palm along the surface, as though looking for a wire to trip. Then inside the house, and he was only feeling things, and she imagined ducking under the tape and stepping through the large hole on the side to follow him.

Thinking it, she found she had. In the room now, she bent down and picked up one of the books he’d made, leather bound, the pages creamy and blank. She thought it would make a good journal for Kay, cleaned up.

Jack was sitting in a chair he’d built on a carpet he’d hired someone to weave. There was a second chair, on its side, and Deb thought she should turn it right and sit with him, take his hand. But on the floor, too, was a toy, the Tigger with the missing eye that she recognized as Simon’s, something she thought they’d lost or thrown away. The leg was torn off and she didn’t know where he’d found it.

She stood and turned slowly toward the door.

“Deb?”

She didn’t like the bits of glass under her shoes or the air she was breathing. She could not fix the Tigger any more than she could fix anything else, and wasn’t sure anymore that she wanted to.

What Deb wanted was to go home to her kids, but the apartment was dark when she got there, except for a green light, minute and glowing on the living room floor, the Xbox Simon always left on. She dialed his cell.

“Hello” was how Simon always answered her, soberly, never betraying that he knew who was calling. It was something she’d always meant to ask him about, why never “Hi, Mom,” why not even “Hey,” like she heard him answer his friends.

“Where are you guys?” She tried to sound sunny. There was a lot of ambient noise wherever they were.

“Everything’s fine.”

“That’s good. Where’s that?” She carried her bag to the counter in the kitchen and switched the light on.

“Just a diner.” Plates clattered around him. “With Grandma.” Ruth used to be Ommy, a name Simon had shied from over the years, saying it less often and more quietly before stopping altogether. Kay took the cue from her brother not long after, and thus was Ommy replaced with the generic.

“That’s good,” Deb said again, pulling open the refrigerator. “About how long do you think you’ll be?”

“Well, we just sat down.”

“Which diner?”

“We ordered already.” The soft magnetic strip suctioned the refrigerator shut the rest of the way. “I mean, come if you want to.”

“Nah, I’ll just be here when you get back.”

“Or we could bring you something—”

“No, please, there’s plenty of food in the house.” Simon was speaking to someone. She thought she heard her mother’s voice. “I’ve got all that fresh broccoli and avocados from yesterday.”

“Hang on. Grandma wants to talk to you.”

“Tell — say I’ll call her in the morning. And say I might go to bed early so not to come up.”

“Okay.”

“I love you. Tell Kay I love her.”

“Hey, Mom loves you,” Simon said unceremoniously. Then, “Yeah, she loves you too.”

“Okay, I love all three of you.”

Simon hung up, and Deb, as though he could see her, went about enacting the things she’d contended she’d do on the phone, setting a pot of water to boil on the range. She fished an avocado out from its crinkly produce bag and cut it open lengthwise, turning it in the palm of her hand. She hit the pit with the blade of her knife and pulled it out this way, a trick Jack had taught her.

She wouldn’t go to bed early. She’d call Stanley in an hour, ask what had happened to that poor woman. Could Jack be charged for a thing like that? Assault?

She wished the kids were there with her. They would have been nice to come home to, just to feed and to sit with while they read or played or groaned over their homework. It would have been so obviously the better decision, Simon and Kay and the living room, instead of Jack and the gallery and his rubble. Her mother was always going a step too far. Deb had asked her to check in with the kids, not to take them somewhere away. Now she was alone in the house, alone with the box, sentient on the rocking chair in the back bedroom.

She was picturing it, slicing avocado in parallel lines, when she heard a key in the door.

—

At the diner they ordered like it was the last supper, but no one could eat. Simon got waffle fries, and Kay got waffles, and they both got milk shakes even though one would have been enough, they were so big and came with extra in frosty metal cups. Their grandmother ordered a bowl of matzah ball soup, cutting the ball in two and spooning the bigger half onto Simon’s plate. Ruth was five foot nothing, bird boned, and it was sometimes strange to think of her as their protector now that even Kay stood taller.

When she first turned up, around five-thirty, Ruth said she’d been shopping in the neighborhood and needed to use the bathroom. She stood at the living room mirror and ran a comb through her dyed blond bob in little pulls. Simon and Kay sat on the couch and listened to the soft rasping sound as the teeth of the comb brushed through hairspray. She didn’t know anything, they didn’t think, and for a horrible moment, each thought the other would break and tell her, but neither did, and by the time they’d climbed into the mauve vinyl booth, they felt secure that neither would. And their grandmother, they were quite sure now, knew nothing at all. Her indulgences with them required no special purpose. She loved to be Ommy, to bring parties wherever she went, mainly in the form of chocolate and cake.

They used to sleep at her house every New Year’s Eve while their parents went to this and that social function. Ommy would buy poppers of confetti and plastic hats and those cookies with the rainbow pieces, and they all three would watch the ball drop together. The first year that Simon defected, to go to a party of his own, Kay promised her grandmother they’d always spend New Year’s together. “No,” Ommy had said, “you’ll go too, to your friends’,” and when Kay protested, Ommy had added, “It’s natural you should go with your friends,” and still Kay had sworn inwardly that she never would. But this past year she had, to a sleepover at Racky’s where the girls drank sparkling cider in plastic champagne glasses, played Cranium, and gossiped in corners about each other.

“Terrific,” their grandmother muttered. A small child at another table had started to wail. Ruth brought her hands up around her ears. She loved children but only her own, her own’s own. Babies crying, big crowds, people walking on the wrong side of the street— tumult. “Oh no. Not good. Why do they bring them into restaurants?”

“ Res taurant,” Simon repeated, mocking, his point being that this wasn’t one. He thought he’d meant it to be funny (had he?), but it came out rude and cruel.

No one said anything. Kay’s fingers webbed with maple syrup and her thighs stuck to the plasticky booth. Across the room the child howled.

—

Jack was kneeling on the bathroom tile where Deb had gone to get away from him. He was six one and solid and slow moving; the floor did not come naturally. He covered his face. She hated to see him cry and hoped she wouldn’t, that he’d keep his hands where they were until she’d slipped away again. A bad place to have a scene, the bathroom. Too bright. The bathroom was where they’d first kept Travolta when she was still kitten enough to get lost or trapped under things. They set out food and water, a blanket and a litter box, made sure the toilet seat was always down. They took turns sitting with her, letting her learn the feel of their hands, the smell of their skin and cuffs of their jeans.