Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

He sat on her bed with the box in his lap. Kay knelt behind him so she couldn’t see the changes in his face but could see what he was reading, how slowly he pored over the letter to their mother, he must have read it three or four times, and the sudden speed with which he read the rest, thank you for yesterday, until he was crinkling pages, probably getting only the gist of things, i can’t explain why i get so sad when you make me so happy, pushing through the sea of it, careless, so that some spilled over the cardboard sides. He was angrier than she thought he’d be, and when he’d read enough, without saying anything to Kay, who was about to ask what did he think, without even a word to her, he pushed down on the pages and lifted his chin and shouted: “Mom!”

She didn’t even look at most of it. That was something Simon couldn’t believe, how his mother didn’t pore over every page. As furious as he was with his father, he was furious with her too, for reasons he couldn’t explain yet but that had something to do with how her reaction was not enough, not nearly enough. Though he didn’t know what would be.

This is a letter about Jack. This is a letter Deb held against her lap, in case her hands wavered. I began sleeping with your husband last June, and Deb began feeling grateful her children could not see through to her stupid heart, how it lurched there. It’s just that sometimes, he needed me.

You get migraines, right? He told me you do.

From Kay’s bed, she lifted her face to where her son was standing, defiant with his arms crossed, defiantly not crying, and where her daughter was shrinking into the wall, trying to press through plaster.

“Okay, just.” She stood. “Guys, I need. Just give me a minute.” She picked up the box like it was furniture and considered it there, as if deciding where it should go, as if the whole idea wasn’t to be with it somewhere her children weren’t. “I’ll be right back in a minute.”

Simon and Kay watched her go, listened to her footsteps travel the hall, heard the bedroom door creak a little open, then closed. They waited like it was all Kay’s room was for, waiting, like they should have had magazines. Each minute took all its time.

—

Above the bed, Deb weighed the box in her arms and tried to decide if the pages were a lot or a little, for all those months.

—

“Where’d she go, ” Kay moaned at the floor.

“She didn’t go anywhere.”

“But what’s happening?”

“She’s upset, dork. Be quiet.”

Kay was and still Simon said, “Quiet.”

—

Subject: about yesterday

somebody braver would do this on the phone, or in person.

Deb wanted to protect her children. She wanted to put shoes on their feet and coats over their shoulders, coats though the weather had warmed already.

yesterday might be something you do all the time. i’ve never been married — i don’t know what that’s like.

She wanted to carry her children someplace safe, her mother’s or the movies, carry them though they were fifteen and eleven and too big for her to carry.

i’ve been thinking of how you pressed my hand against your neck. it seemed like such a kind thing to do, like you wanted to make yourself vulnerable to me too.

But her first impulse about the box had been to hide it. She was the victim, yes, but in front of her children, she understood at once what else she would become, which was a guilty party, and she began to notice her breathing.

—

Their mother’s private sounds grew more and more frightening, the longer it seemed they’d never stop. Sometimes just a page turning, and they wondered which page. Or when something slammed — a lighter object colliding against a heavier one, a cascade — what was that? A hand, a fist, a stack of books.

—

The wound which Deb had tried to tourniquet had reopened, and she’d been so stupid for thinking she could tie it off there, and what were these words her kids had read, these awful words they’d seen? show me your cunt.

show me your cunt.

hi! i’m working

i can see your bald cunt.

haha no you can’t

i close my eyes and i see it. you’re wearing the white skirt and no underwear.

She imagined Simon reading it, and she could scream. Kay reading it, and she could hammer Jack’s head into the ground. She pictured them together in some small, dark space, reading, and they were younger in her mind, both somehow three or four, before they even could read. The ages they’d been when she sat with them on the ugly old sofa they used to have to watch PBS and eat. When Jack came home, he’d ask what had happened to the buttons on the remote, the surface of everything shining from grilled-cheesy fingers. They were taller and tougher now, her children, more angled — Simon especially — but it was those kids she imagined the words hurting, growing them up in the worst way.

And she hadn’t done anything, but that was the problem. Stupid, idiot woman.

—

A shrill sound pierced the air, making them jump, what both hoped, horribly, wasn’t their mother’s voice, what turned out to be the smoke detector singing.

Deb came running out to the kitchen, and Simon and Kay found her at the stove saying, “Shit shit stop it stop,” bullying the pot of pasta that gurgled hot foam onto the range. She flapped a dish towel at the little white disk mounted near the ceiling. “Could someone please open a window please!”

Simon leaned over the sink to push out the pane of glass, which got the air to where it was almost circulating. Deb went on flapping. Within their panic it was a relief to have a small, solvable problem, something actionable. When the alarm stopped, the other problems were still there.

She got them both to the table. Simon sucked down glass after glass of soda, so that Deb eventually brought the two-liter bottle out from the fridge and left it to sweat on the wood. Kay wound pasta into a mass on her fork, her face intermittently crumpling into the mask of tragedy. Deb wished she could hear what words rang in her daughter’s ears, what thoughts kept breaking through, breaking her pink, round moon face. She began to doubt even this decision, dinner, a sad stab at order where it did not exist, and got out of her chair to crouch between them. She touched the backs of their necks, which felt hot, or maybe she was cold.

Simon was watching the bubbles cling and lose their grip inside his glass. “You’re going to get a divorce.”

Deb could feel all the insides of her throat, saying, “When Dad gets home—”

“I don’t want to talk to him. I hate him.” So Simon wouldn’t talk and Kay couldn’t, could make only a wet whistling sound with her breathing.

“Don’t cry. We—” And here Deb looked at Simon too, stressing the word. “ We didn’t do anything wrong.” The sharp eyes her son made back at her made her wonder if he disagreed, if maybe he thought she had done a few things wrong.

—

They gave up on dinner. Kay cried in the mirror, watching herself brush her teeth. Deb gave her two Tylenol PMs and sat with her as she fell asleep. She touched her daughter’s face with a bent finger. The girl’s skin felt like a wettish peach.

In the living room, Simon splayed out on the floor with his videogames, the buzz of his hair silhouetted against the light of the screen. Deb stood over him. The time glared on the cable box: 9:28. Jack, so near an opening, would not be home for another several hours. “Which game is this?”

“Battlefield.”