Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

(Though Simon would keep Donald out of it, he’d also managed a way of inviting the rest of the world in, with that stuff he’d said in the elevator, and now several of the building people, moms mostly, had begun to look at him funny. They looked at his parents that way too, and at Kay, though his family, surprise, hardly noticed.

The moms looked at him on afternoons in the elevator, where he felt himself cornered by their grocery bags and laundry baskets. He stared out the little round window with wire netting as the floors fell away behind it. Swallowing hard.

They looked at him and thought, Poor kid.

They looked at each other and thought, With a husband like that, might have guessed. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist, no. Doesn’t take a Freud.

They looked at their watches and thought, Two-thirty, what are you doing home from school?

16B was the only one to ask him questions. Like their medium, if he were a ghost.

She asked: “How are we doing?” We.

And then not just questions but mottoes, like, “One day at a time.” This she said to no one, to the air.

Well wasn’t it what he wanted, attention? Yes, in a way it was. But just as important now was to show how much he didn’t need any. That he was handling it, without his too-young sister and too-dumb mother and his father who was the problem. And without 16B. Because he’d seen this story before, on night soaps and in his friends’ parents’ living rooms. He knew what came next, and he wanted to show the world and the building people, everyone, that he was ready. Divorce!)

Jerry and Elaine are married and living in Jerry’s apartment with George next door instead of Kramer. George gets a letter by mistake from a woman who is having an affair with Jerry. He goes to Monk’s to tell Elaine, and she is like, So? George says: “But she said she is sleeping with your husband! Jerry!” And Elaine’s still like, Yeah, so? LAUGHS. George says: “She said she wanted him to lick her on the nipples!” Elaine puts her hand on the table like she’s about to leave and says: “Listen, Peterman has me writing about urban riding crops. I don’t have time for this.” And George shouts: “She said she was going to suck him off until he came and that she would swallow it and that he tasted good and then that he should fuck her hard against the wall!” Everyone at Monk’s is staring at them. Elaine says: “George, I don’t know why you are shouting.” LAUGHS.

—

“What are you writing?”

Kay snapped back into the mustardy yellow bus rumbling down the West Side Highway, delivering her class to the planetarium. Two braids hung above her head: Chloe Haber looking over the back of Kay’s seat, squinting to read.

Kay shook her head, nothing, and tried to turn the page, but Brett Haber had popped up too, curious, and nodded at her sister, whose arm darted down and grabbed the notebook away.

“Stop,” Kay shouted. She turned around on the seat and got up on her knees. “Stop, you guys. Just give it.”

Up front Mr. O’Toole was standing with his back to the driver, counting heads. He had long hair for a man, and he was the one she pictured whenever anyone mentioned Shakespeare.

Kay slumped back in her seat, afraid to turn around again in case they were reading it. The year before, for her birthday, she had taken the twins on a trip to Six Flags. There had been room only for two more in the rental car, with her mother driving and her brother riding shotgun (her father, who’d hurt his shoulder and who didn’t like roller coasters anyway, had stayed home to ready the cake and streamers). She’d invited Chloe and Brett because at the time it seemed possible that they together would become her best friend or that she could become their triplet. But it is not easy to come between twins, who grew up with their own language and sometimes still use it, on long car rides especially, a language punctuated with laughing fits they swear are not about you but your brother, who has been very quiet in the front seat and is probably afraid of them.

Still, she could not look. What if they were looking at her? The bus was traveling south now down Riverside Drive, they were so near her house and she wished they would just let her off.

Maybe the twins could help. There were things in the box that she hadn’t understood. Maybe Chloe and Brett would be able to explain what, for example, was cuming? Coming? Coming where? And going down — again, down to where?

Across Amsterdam and Columbus, toward the park. The bus eased into the curved drive reserved for visiting groups, and Mr. O’Toole raised his voice over all their heads, flapping open a garbage bag and saying to bring their trash to the front with them.

The twins stood over her. Kay looked up but couldn’t quite tell. “Did you—”

“Don’t talk to us.”

“Perv.”

Okay then. Right, okay. Chloe pushed up the aisle behind her sister, whose hand she was already taking, leaning in to whisper. Kay looked into the seat behind her and found no notebook there. And from the Haber twins, word would spread, to Chelsea and to Jess and to Racky, which meant to everyone, and they would call her weird and a perv and gross, and the thing is, maybe she was?

As Mr. O’Toole’s students sat in the planetarium, watching supernovas become black holes under a great dark dome, Deb was passing the fountain at Lincoln Center, where water climbed and fell down a tower of itself, white in the broad day.

The guards smiled and nodded her in. They had been old then and were even older now. She walked around and down to the dressing rooms, through the maze of emptied halls. She didn’t come around as much as she used to, though when Simon was born the girls had all fussed over him, the little prince. None of them had children — they still were children. There were so many new faces now, too many to keep straight, ones that looked at her without recognition. And what faces she did know were changing.

“Sit sit, five minutes,” Izzy said, already turned half away as the door fell open. It looked like it would take more than five, with Izzy still in underwear and a bra bandaging her chest. She’d grown so small. When they’d danced together, Deb had been the thinner one.

They were going to lunch because each had been waiting for the other to cancel. Making dates only to call them off, it was how they kept in touch. You’re the only one I don’t feel bad about bailing on, Izzy had told her once, because you’re like me and I know you don’t mind. The comparison flattered Deb, and it was true, that for her there was a sense of relief in finding her time unexpectedly free, in being allowed off duty.

But Deb, today, had not canceled. She thought it might be good to talk to Izzy, who’d known her when. “I thought you’d be in Saratoga?”

“Oh, I’m going, I’m going,” Izzy said, as if Deb were the one dragging her.

Sixteen years ago almost exactly, Deb had been in Saratoga too, rehearsing Serenade. She’d left the studio feeling dizzy and walked alone down the hill to the family-owned drugstore in town. There were pregnancy tests swaddled in a Love Pharmacy bag under her bathroom sink back in New York — she often missed periods — but none with her there. She drank half a liter of water and peed in a public restroom and sat in the stall, still dizzy, until there were lines she could clearly see. Then the five-hour bus ride to the Port Authority, which felt interminable and also like no time, because next thing she was home and calling Jack, and next next thing there he was, there for her to tell him what, what is it? what? She knew by then what she wanted, probably had known for some time what, and the question was whether the universe would let her have her way, whether Jack would act as she wanted him to. (It would; he did. Remember that: Deb got what she’d wanted.)