Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

—

She took the kids (neither showered) to a cheery breakfast place where the juice came in rich colors, deep cranberry and orange bright as to have a light bulb inside.

“I thought we could go out on the water this afternoon,” Deb said, “explore around.”

“Beautiful out there, my gosh,” said the waitress, weighted on either side with orange- and black-handled pots of coffee. Her skin had that downy look of age plus makeup, cheeks pinked with powdery moons. “You all been out to Newport?”

“Oh, years ago, I have,” Deb said. “But not these two.”

“You’ll want to see the mansions there. And Trinity Church, that’s something. Lotta history.”

“We haven’t had a chance to see much of anything yet,” Deb said.

Simon and Kay stayed pointedly quiet. The waitress looked at them around the table. “Well then. Anyway, I’m sorry, what’ll you have?”

Then everyone asked for omelets. Kay asked her mother for a pen.

“I don’t want to go see churches,” Simon said when the waitress was well enough away.

“What I really want you both to see is Rose Island.” The islands were what Deb liked best about the bay, so many uninhabited patches of land with romantic, Brontë names: Patience, Hope, Prudence. Despair. Her first summer in Jamestown, she and Jack and baby Simon had gone over in the brown-and-gold rental boat that sputtered, and the man who did the weeding there had let them walk all around. Careful of the gulls. They’ll attack when they’re nesting. Deb remembered walking the perimeter, how the island really was shaped like a rose. Then a seagull ran at them and Simon cried, five months old and in her arms.

She leaned across the table, toward where her son was watching her daughter ink outlines around the drawings of cocktails on her paper place mat. “Simon, you’ve been to Rose Island before.” She disclosed this like a good secret, gossip about someone else, someone famous.

“That’s not how you do shadow,” Simon said at his sister’s drawing. He dragged a finger over the heavy line she’d scratched around a Tom Collins, smudging it. “You have it so the sun is coming from both directions.” He made a move for the pen.

“Stoppit,” Kay said, angling her body away from him. “They’re not trying to be shadows.”

Then the eggs came and covered the place mats, and they could not fight about shadows anymore.

Instead they fought about watering cans at the hardware store, souvenir magnets and ugly fleece pullovers at the gift shop. Take it, you’ll be cold at night. You think you’ll ever use that? I’m sure we have things like it at home. Where are those energy efficient ones, the ones that look coiled like telephone cords? But I want it. Gross. Put it back. It isn’t a fashion contest; you’ll be cold. No. I said no. I said enough.

At a bookshop that sold miniature electric fountains and miniature Zen gardens and even a few books, mostly titles from small presses about local lighthouses and walking tours, but also some fiction in back, Deb told the kids to pick out some summer reading.

Simon reappeared with a thick paperback. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Why not?” He thrust it at her.

Deb was about to make a case for why not, but her eyes had already shifted focus to Kay, who was by the register turning the chirpy wire stand of bookmarks, a deck of them already fanned out in her hand. “All right, give it to me,” she said, and added his book to the pile.

—

The sky began to look like rain, but if they were quick they could beat it to the supermarket, which was at the end of a long parking lot, spotted with a few sedans and a red pickup under blue tarp. A kind of junior-league strip mall, with a video rental store and a custom sign shop that advertised gold-leaf lettering for yachts.

“Stay by me,” Deb told them. Inside it was cold and bright and hard to find their way. With her kids filed behind her, Deb felt more alone, remembering they weren’t her company but her charges. Every time she led them down the wrong aisle, she tried to find something there they could use. She trundled the cart around corners and perused the flyer that had been left in it. She didn’t know what to get, so she bagged a lot of fruit and took what was on sale that week, a brand of seltzer she’d never heard of. Supermarkets outside the city left so much squandered space between the aisles. Once, in a time before cellphones, she’d lost Jack’s mother at a Sam’s Club in Houston and was twenty minutes paging her at the register.

At checkout, she found the food was definitely cheaper than in New York. A teenager with feathery brown hair and a divot in one eyebrow double bagged everything.

“Oh, wait,” Deb said, stopping a can of Sprite midair. “You want that now, squirt?”

Simon shook his head no and turned away from the cashier, who asked, “Need this taken out to your car?”

“We’re fine,” Deb answered. They had four bags of groceries, another from the hardware store, and a paper sack filled with books. That there was no car, she was glad the kids didn’t say.

In the parking lot again, the air had turned a live yellow. Deb would have stopped to call attention to it, how pretty, but they weren’t walking anymore: They were carrying. No rain yet but the wind had picked up, catching the tarp on the red truck so that it billowed. Strange, the way it sounded like thunder.

Jack could see his mother-in-law from inside the revolving doors — could see, at least, the helmet shine of her white-blond hair poking up over the back of a leather chair at the far end of her marble lobby. After Stanley, he hadn’t been able to go back home without having what to do there, because he knew what he’d do, which was laze on the couch and eat and watch TV while Deb continued to not call. Instead, at the studio, amid the beginnings of Sculptural Improvisation, he improvised too a reason for going away.

The lobby was where Ruth had agreed to meet him ten minutes from now. Jack was early because he knew Ruth would be. He carried Travolta in the cat box, thinking of the girl somewhere with her guinea pig in a box, and how this was what happened to animals when their owners found new ways of being selfish.

He’d meant to walk to Ruth’s, but on the second or third block this had struck him as unkind, hearing the cat’s claws drag against the plastic floor as she slid around. He’d put a dish towel in to homey the place, but it didn’t sound like it was getting much use. He tried hailing a cab, but so close to rush hour there weren’t any, and when the bus pulled up a few feet ahead, he got on.

On the bus, Travolta mrowwww ed and the other passengers looked in on her, making sympathetic faces. Jack stuck his fingers into the gated front and tried plucking the towel forward, so people could see it was there. She’s eight, he wanted to tell them. We must be doing something right. As to the masking tape on the side, TRAVOLTA in black marker from the last trip to the vet, to that he wanted to say: My son, he used to love the movie Grease.

Jack caught the eye of the yawning doorman/concierge behind the desk and nodded toward the blond head across the room. No doubt Ruth had announced that she was expecting company, Jack S-h-a-n-l-e-y, and that they shouldn’t turn him away when he came. She liked to make a production, his mother-in-law. She liked to think of all the things that might go wrong and plan against them. For fifteen years he and Ruth had enjoyed defying all that was conventionally known about husbands and their mothers-in-law. While Deb had preserved an adolescent sensitivity to Ruth’s small digs and asides, Jack was able to laugh everything away. Your mother’s a riot, he’d say, which Deb hated. Debby, don’t be mad; it’s only that she and I, we’re the same generation. His wife hated that even more, not least because it was almost true.