Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“I’m sorry,” she breathed heavily into the phone. “I can’t talk like this, about the weather.”

“Okay.”

“Can you hang on a second? Just, hold on.”

What was she doing? There was a sound like something dragging across the floor, and then the white noise around her changed, became more outside. She was in the yard, or out the window. “Hello? Deb, hello?” There was more jostling, and why the hell had she called, then, if she didn’t care that it was hot in Arizona? If she didn’t care that he was hot in Arizona.

“Mr. Shanley?”

Jack turned, his elbow catching in the hole in the wall so that he had to twist back and try again. A spindly Asian man with a thin smile was walking toward him, hand out, thumb at the sky. That he should be in a suit was strange, with a jacket even in this heat.

“Deb?” Jack gripped the phone. “Honey? Can you hear me?” No answer. The Asian man stopped in front of him. He had a sticker over his left lapel, HELLO MY NAME IS with “Kevin” spelled neatly in red marker. “I have to get off here, honey. I’ll call you later. All right.” He put the phone in his pocket and shook spindly Kevin’s hand. “Sorry, the wife.”

“Know how that is.” Really? You look twelve.

—

The museum, on the way in, had been appropriately dim, but upstairs, where they kept the faculty and staff, it looked like any office, white lights and low, gray dividers. It took a few tries to get them to stop calling him Mr. Shanley. Kevin offered him a bowl of candy, little Bazooka gums and squares of Now & Later. Jack answered, “Maybe later,” and Kevin laughed. So did HELLO MY NAME IS Lissa, standing over by the copier, and HELLO MY NAME IS Missy at the desk with the most phones. Both Melissas, wasn’t it funny? “What are the odds?” Jack said.

When Jolie emerged from her corner office, there was no surprise about how she looked. Her voice fit her just right: dark blond hair that hung flat, skin deeply tanned but yellowy, maybe the wrong makeup. Big girl, though not quite in the way he had imagined — big on bottom, like a pear, with not much chest and stubby little arms.

The little arms she spread out at him. “Jack!”

He went in for the hug. “Jolie!” They were old friends.

That the line was dead by the time Deb got back, this was another of the steps she took away from the man she was married to, from the hope that he would ever stop behaving like the sun. She said his name a few times into the phone and was aware, on the outskirts of her vision, of her daughter’s hand, waiting to take it from her, his daughter who wanted to talk to him. Deb had gone to ask her, Do you still want to talk to Dad, because I’ve got him on the phone, and you don’t have to, he doesn’t even know I’m asking.

Kay was here, for him, and now Deb would have to tell her that actually he was gone, that actually never mind. She redialed, but the phone rang and went to voice mail. “Shit.” She brought the phone down to her lap. “Sorry,” she said, and for a moment it seemed she was sorry just for cursing. “He must’ve lost service.”

Kay swallowed, nodded seriously.

“He’s in Arizona for that project, you know? The reception, he must be roaming.” She touched Kay’s hair, smoothing the front piece down her cheek and curling it around her chin like a comma, after this face and before the next one, all the faces her daughter didn’t know she would have. “Hey. Hey. Isn’t it beautiful out here, the country? Let’s go for a walk.” But her hand stayed where it landed, on Kay’s shoulder. “Whatever, however things— What’s important to me is that you’re happy. That’s the number one thing in the world to me.”

“I know.”

“Okay. Okay, good,” Deb said and let her go. “Head on down. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Kay’s footsteps disappeared down the stairs. Deb would talk to her daughter now, finally. She would hear all she had to say. But first she tried Jack once more, this time getting nothing, not even the rings.

Jolie gave Jack a grand tour that afternoon, safe within the confines of her arctic SUV, cold air pouring from every vent and blowing motes into his mouth and up his nose. She drove him in circles around the empty square where his piece would be, not even stopping to get out and walk around. Then up to the school’s prize building, an auditorium that had been one of the last designs of a Very Famous Architect. He felt like he was on the plane again, anytime his arm drifted toward the ledge of the rolled-up window, Jolie looking at him like she was afraid of getting sucked out.

“Okay!” She parked, and only from the gutted square on the other side of the curb, a dirt hole where there should have been a palm tree, could Jack tell they were in a different lot from before. Jolie was between the seats, twisted as far around as her seat belt would allow, grabbing a large patent leather purse with one hand and stirring everything around in it with the other.

“What’s next?” Jack drummed his fingers on the computer in his lap (no babies, dogs, or electronics were to be left in the heat). Did he sound genial? Genial was what he was aiming for.

“Next…” Her voice trailed off and she forgot to answer. “Shoot. Ah! Herewego.” She wriggled back the other way, holding forth one of the five or six worst things Jack could imagine, outside of, you know, a shiv. A digital camera, lime green. “Next we’ll go up and talk to some of the grad students real quick.” She licked her finger and scraped dirt off the screen with her nail.

“You know, this visit, it was just to see the space. I haven’t prepared anything.”

“You just be yourself.” The camera bugled on. “You don’t have to say a thing.”

Fathers have a way with daughters that mothers never do. Deb had never known Kay to stay mad at Jack, or to deny him anything. And Deb couldn’t hold it against her; things had been the same way with her own dad. If her mother dressed Deb’s wounds, her father was the one who kissed them to make them better. It was Ruth who’d scratched the satin from Deb’s first pair of pointe shoes, who’d singed the ribbons to keep them from fraying and knelt with her daughter on the driveway, pounding the toe boxes against the asphalt while Norman sat in the living room with his tray dinner and TV. “Who won?” he’d say when they came in after.

Women were the real workers of the family; men got to be allies to their children. It was Ruth who’d scheduled Deb’s audition at the school in New York, who waited among the other nervous mothers in the room outside, hands folded with mysterious calm over her handbag that always had gum and Band-Aids and tissues in it. And when the call came, when Deb was accepted, it was Ruth who drove the hour each way into the city, four, five, then six days a week, for classes after school and all day Saturday. Deb still didn’t really know what her mother had done those Saturdays. Maybe took herself to eat, took herself shopping, window-shopping.

Norman came to this and that performance. He said, You’ll be great. You were great. You were the prettiest. You had the nicest what-do-you-call-it. Your shape was the nicest of any of them, all those bunheads. Best legs in the group. My girl. And she’d loved him for it.

—

On their walks Deb and Kay went no particular where. This time Deb asked the clerk at the souvenir shop down the road about a piney old pub where she and Jack used to drink red ale, marooned on a residential street that the town had since grown away from. Through the shop window he pointed and she traced a line from his finger with imaginary string, across the water, where the coast curved and ebbed out again.