Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“Deb. Deb Deb Deb Deb Deb.”

Some new creature filled the space now. Deb looked away, looked back at him, closed her eyes, stared at the bare bulb over the sink and followed the afterimage as it drifted. She was holding this new thing up against the rest of their life, certain memories. She had to decide what she could live with, what could fit, be made to fit.

“How’s the woman? They take her to the hospital?”

“She’s fine.” Jack breathed into his hands, the sound of snot and expelled air against and between his fingers. “Her arm — it doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”

“Don’t be stupid. You better care.”

“Deb.”

“What.”

“I went to the park.”

“Just now?”

“Yesterday I went. I watched the kids climbing. It made me think of us when we used to take them. They were so little.”

“Kids are little.”

Again they fought and again it went the same place as before. How many times can I say it? Everything I do is wrong and I don’t know how. It’s just so much more than I thought it was going to be. I’m sorry. More and also worse. I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking, like I was two people and one died and forgot the other. The kids were so little and you were so old and you what, Jack, you felt jealous of them? What time is it? I’m sorry. I love you, do you believe me that I love you? God it’s almost ten. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The word had lost meaning to Deb somewhere in the air, she suspected to both of them. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Like a wrap — what are those, a sari? Like a wrap for everything.

“Get off your knees,” she said, louder than she’d meant to.

She didn’t want all this sorry in her life, in her bathroom, her bedroom, the kids’ rooms. She climbed into the bathtub and leaned her head against the wall. There were long hairs, her own, stuck dead to the sides of the ceramic. She didn’t clean the drain out, and Jack never said anything. So, see. She wasn’t so easy to live with either.

When she was pregnant, in this tub, Jack had washed her hair. He changed a million ways but that was what she remembered most, that at some point both times he’d started climbing into the tub and washing her hair, one hand cupped over her forehead to keep the soap from running into her eyes. When she remembered it now she couldn’t even picture him, behind her, just the faucet skimming the waterline — two bodies upped the level — and the water falling in little splashes behind her and his hands learning the shape of her skull.

“The kids, they treat me like I’m a stranger.” He was still on the floor.

“Well, you’ve made it very hard for them to feel like they know you.”

“I’ve ruined everything.” His voice was flat.

He had made so many mistakes. Maybe her own was to think of the past, or maybe the past was not to be discounted. But she could feel it softening her. She used to do okay on her own. More than that. Only after she’d met Jack had she ever felt really lonely. Lying awake on that awful twin bed in her first apartment and him asleep for barely an hour beside her, she thought she’d made a terrible mistake, loving. She’d wanted to go brush her teeth, but that would have meant getting out of bed with his warm body, and she hadn’t gone.

She thought about what she would say next. It was a bit of a gift. “But hopefully, they could get over it.”

Jack nodded as if to say yes, he’d thought of this, they were kids, their hearts were open still, there was time to make it up. “And you?”

Deb was in the tub, which was a boat, and Jack was on the floor, which was an ocean, and she had to decide if she would let him drown or bring him aboard. Maybe. She had to be practical. If he swabbed the deck, she thought. There was so much hair in the drain.

—

Ruth took them the eight blocks home in a taxi. While the cab idled outside their building, a roll of tissue materialized from inside her blouse and opened up to reveal a smaller roll of bills. She gave them each two tens, which they stuffed into their pants pockets, and put the tissue in the zippered front compartment of her purse.

Simon wanted to kiss his grandmother and whisper to her, Sorry, sorry for how he’d behaved at the diner, poorly, but Kay was between them, so he couldn’t kiss her, and if he’d whispered she wouldn’t have heard. It wasn’t just that she was generous — Simon knew, though wasn’t supposed to, that his parents gave her money — but that she’d put the roll of tens there, wrapped in Kleenex, when she was getting dressed that afternoon before coming to meet them, and that it had been there all the time, even when he’d been mean, and for what? So she could give it to them like this, not from anyplace so vulgar as a wallet but from actually almost her heart.

“Call me when you get upstairs so I know she’s home,” Ruth said.

“She’s home.”

“You two didn’t eat.” She was the smallest person in the world and also probably the very best, the most concentrated good in one package. She just loved him. His mother loved him too, in that open oozing way that she must have learned from Ruth, but his mother’s love embarrassed him, made him feel somehow pathetic.

—

“I keep — it’s crazy, but I keep thinking about what it would be like, to have another baby with you.”

“Don’t.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m just. I miss it, is all I’m saying.”

She was almost disappointed to hear him back away from the idea so quickly, because she understood what he meant when he said he missed it. She missed it too. Not that it was a thing she’d consider — it would be too obvious a distraction from what was wrong, like making a window out of the mirror they were standing in, just so they wouldn’t have to look at their own reflections.

It had been a little that way the first time she was pregnant. The timing was terrible — she said it, everyone said it — but inwardly she knew the timing was also so good. It was the summer after Izzy made soloist, and everyone was moving up the ranks or moving on, south or west, to start families or join smaller companies. Deb had been in the corps seven seasons without any sign of rising up out of it, and it thrilled her to think of never going back, that her ticket out was growing inside her.

Children brought new problems, a respite from the old ones, and made them tender toward each other. It had been true with Simon and again with Kay, though not as much maybe, the second time. It was possible that with a third there would be less still, and there was the fear of diminishing returns. Because if that didn’t fix everything then nothing would, ever.

“Maybe,” she said, “you should be more concerned with the kids you have now. You don’t just screw up a pair and have another.”

“Don’t say that, Deb. Don’t tell me I’ve done that.”

—

The avocado had browned and would have to be thrown away. Simon and Kay were surprised to find their father in the back bedroom, sitting up on his side of the bed, head lowered even when they stood in the hall and he knew they were there. Deb came out from the bathroom, her face and her hands a little wet from washing, and shepherded them to the kitchen.

“Hey,” she whispered, “your dad wants to stay here tonight, but I want to know what you guys want.” It was true. She could not bear the burden of a wrong decision, and whatever her children wanted was inherently right, for all of them. “Hm?” She bent down between their two heights. “Whatever, seriously. He has the studio, he’s more than fine. I have no problem sending him.” She snapped her fingers, like that, but they didn’t make any sound.

“If he goes he’ll just do it again.”