Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

They set out on the broken road, inching along at first, trying to keep pebbles out of their open shoes. When that grew tiresome they let the outside in to mingle with their feet. A grassy field, tall and thick with ticks, thrived beside a dead meadow, as though the two lived in different atmospheres.

Deb stopped every so often to point out a flower she couldn’t name or the way light changed the color of the leaves. “Look at that. Isn’t that beautiful?” She’d always wanted to be a person who felt close to nature. Such a practical bond to have; nature was free and it was everywhere.

Kay answered, “Uh-huh,” or nodded vaguely. She didn’t suspect that she’d ever wish to grow such interests.

“You remind me of what you used to say, about where you wanted to grow up. Do you remember what you’d say?”

“That was stupid.”

“Why? I don’t think so.”

“Mom, because. Nobody lives in Times Square.” But Kay had wanted to, to live where the lights were always on and there were always people and so you were never lonely.

“Well. I understood,” Deb said, thinking the city had done that to her daughter: safety in other people, safety in strangers. “I thought it made a lot of sense.”

Forest green siding, BAR & GRILL neon never turned on — Central Bay Pub had not changed a day, apart from having reversed itself completely. Deb was sure it had been on the other side of the road.

Inside, the different wood tones bounced off the shuttered windows and brass, turning the day into night. Deb led the way to the bar, where they had their pick of where to sit, and watched her daughter struggle onto a high stool. A faded Orangina poster hung on a wall through the kitchen. They ordered two of those.

“Honey,” Deb started. “I’m sorry. I’m going to bring this up again, and I don’t want you to get mad at me.”

“I know what you’re going to say already.”

“Well, okay, but it’s not about that. Sweetie? It’s about what you have to say. And, I just want to listen. And, any questions you might have — about anything, all this stuff, sex stuff— Don’t roll your eyes at me. I mean it.” She squeezed her daughter’s knee. “Anything that you have questions about or, because, believe me, you aren’t going to shock me, all right?”

Kay was quiet. Then to her glass she said, “I just don’t get what’s the big deal.”

“About what?”

“Like, if this is just what happens. I don’t get why we have to be so upset.”

“You don’t have to be upset — I’m glad if you’re not.”

“No, but I am. I just don’t get why.” Kay covered her face and breathed out her nose. “It’s so stupid.”

“I know. It’s strange. You want to think that what someone does with someone else has nothing to do with you. And yet it does. That’s why we have these rules, to protect us from getting hurt.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Am I hurt? Um, hm…Would yes be too scary an answer?”

Kay swished her hair, no.

“Then yes. I was hurt. Yes, what your father did was very hurtful to me.” Maybe it wasn’t right to let Kay see her angry, letting her know that this was a thing to be angry about, but Deb, sorry, wasn’t a saint, and did, maybe, in bursts, want her daughter to be a little bit angry too. It hurt to see Kay, after everything, reach for that telephone, want Jack anyway, want to love him. It was where her daughter looked most like herself. She thought of her own mother, how she’d overheard Ruth once telling a friend, Well, you know Deborah. She was the child who learned to walk by never letting go of anything.

Kay began scrunching the paper wrapper down her straw. “So why do they do it, if it’s going to hurt us? Because it feels good? That’s it ?” She wet the wrapper with a few soda drops and watched it unfurl like a snake.

“There are a lot of reasons,” Deb said, though her daughter’s had bottom-lined them all.

—

On the walk back, the telephone poles began to look like stripped, alien trees, without the armor of bark. They could see the coves of Newport across the bay, the roads that wound around them, in perfect miniature, cars with their high beams curving in and out of sight and new ones replacing them, as if on a loop.

“We don’t have to call him,” Kay said. “Dad.”

Deb stopped. “Why not? It’s perfectly normal if — I mean, we still can. We totally, totally can.”

“I just don’t want to anymore.”

Jack thought they were going to a studio, but Jolie was passing the studios, also a sign for metal shop and another for neon, and when they got to the third floor, he understood they were going to a reception. Always there was a reception — everywhere he was being received, couldn’t anymore just arrive. And then never a very elaborate reception — nothing like what the Very Famous Architect would get if he came, if he were alive with nothing better to do outside Tempe. A reception was an evaluation he hadn’t wanted, his career laid out in rows of weak, sweet supermarket wine, prepoured a third of the way, his worth measured in cheapie plastic cups on a tablecloth made of hospital gown.

Here the four or five faculty members also wore name tags, and the students, not that there were many of them, not more than twelve, they wore tags too. The only one aside from Jack without a label was Jolie, who had him wrapped up in her little arm now, taking him in turns around the room like a show pony. And it wasn’t that the nearer she got to him the more he wanted to run. On the contrary — paradoxically! the inverse! — he found the more he wanted to run, the nearer he let himself be. He tuned out the room, drank wine when he was led to it, let Jolie answer his questions and brush his tail. He neighed every time, on cue.

—

A long hour later, they were at a dark bar across the road from the Super 8, brass-stemmed lampshades reaching down from the ceiling. Jolie had announced, in the elevator down from the reception, “I don’t know about you, but I could use a stiff one.” By which it turned out she meant a Sex on the Beach, ordered loudly. Jack drank Scotch and together they split a basket of fries.

“So I’m sorry to hear about your show,” she said. Jack looked at her and swallowed loosely, letting some spirit linger on his tongue, sink into the space where his gums met the soft slippery insides of his cheeks. “The explosion and all that.”

“Yes, I knew what you meant.”

“We still want the piece, if that’s what you were worried about.” She sucked in her cheeks as she drank. A smidge of lipstick kissed off on the straw. “If that’s why you came all this way.”

“I told you, I wanted—”

“To see the space. I know.” She broke a fry in two — they were the thick kind, wedge cut — and held the halves to her lips. “Just saying.”

Jolie ate more fries and Jack drank more Scotch. She said no to another drink, and Jack pushed back his stool and walked over to the bar.

He ordered two, took one like a shot right there. Jolie had her head down, her phone to one ear, and a finger in the other.

“My son,” she said, hanging up as he came back with his third.

“You could’ve stayed on.”

“No, it’s fine. It was a message. I was leaving a message.” She looked around the room. “You think it’s quiet enough that he heard?”

A jukebox in the corner looked like it was just for show, with at best a radio inside it, and there was no one at the pool table either. “I’d say there’s very little noise.”

She nodded. “He’s — you know, he’s wanting to join the army. Or, the navy, he’s wanting to join. They say that’s supposed to be safer. He says.”