Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

The stairs creaked again as he made his way back up.

“Dad?” he thought he heard from inside his daughters’ bedroom, and his heart lightened.

“Yes?” he said, standing outside their door.

“Go to sleep,” said one of them. “You’re making the floors creak.”

“Right,” he said, mortified. “Sorry.”

How odd this mixture of loneliness and longing to be left alone. He poked his face in their room because he couldn’t resist, but they were already asleep again, facing opposite directions, strands of long blondish brownish hair, just like their mother’s, intertwined.

Andy stood at the sideline, watching Rachel race up and down the field in her muddy cleats and shin guards, her body skinny and angular in blue rayon shorts and the yellow T-shirt with the penguins on it she’d brought home from a field trip to the Camden aquarium. Her ponytail achieved liftoff as she chased after the ball, until she was whooshed out of the way by another girl, bigger, faster, with less-aerodynamic hair. They were running drills. The coach called out praise for the other girl, and Rachel looked down at her feet; Andy felt crushed for her even as she picked herself up again and began a new sprint down the field.

The only other parents who came to practice seemed to come for the sideline gossip as much as they did to watch their ten-year-olds drill. Big-boned farm ladies who’d recently taken up jobs at the Target in Marlton—some of them still wore their smocks—or worked at the liquor store in Glassboro or the souvenir shop in Chatsworth, they drove thirty miles back and forth to their jobs, early morning hours, and by the time they got to the soccer fields their feet were aching and so were their hearts for a little companionship, a little chitchat. He heard them bellow in riotous laughter. They wore stiff dark jeans, dyed their hair.

If Lou were still alive they wouldn’t live in Mount Deborah. If Lou were still alive they would have picked one of the fancier towns. She would have inspired him to make enough money to make it work. Or maybe they would have picked a house by the sea.

At the playground by the far end of the soccer field, Belle sat on top of the jungle gym and surveyed the landscape. She was the master of all her eye could see. A few kids, their mothers, wandered beneath her: her subjects. She shouted, “Hey, Daddy!”

“Hey, Belle!”

“Is Rachel done yet?”

“Almost!”

“I’m sick of always waiting for Rachel!”

“What?” She was almost too far away to hear clearly.

“I’m sick of it!”

“Sick of what?”

He sat down on the bleachers, away from the clique of Mount Deborah moms, the cold wetness of the aluminum cutting through his pants. September and the very first leaves were considering change, the birch trees scattered among the pines. Above the briny soccer field flew Vs of Canada geese, then a thicket of sparrows. Sheila never made it to practice; she worked until six most days. But sometimes Andy saw her ex-husband in the stands, watching Jeremy with an intensity that worried him.

“Wow! Rachel’s doing well today!” said Janet Goldsmith.

“She’s been kicking balls in the backyard.”

“You can tell,” said Janet. “She’s really improved. I bet she makes the traveling team this year.”

“Dad!” Belle came running to him from the jungle gym. She had scratches on her legs, mosquito bites on her arms—her beautiful round face blighted by little red marks. “Can I go have pizza with Madeline’s family? Madeline’s mom said I should ask you.” From the playground, Madeline’s mother raised a hand in greeting, a semaphored “is that okay?”

“Here, let me give you some money.” He handed Belle a five and off she ran, back toward the playground, to Madeline and Madeline’s mother. His girls had friends in Mount Deborah. They had soccer teams, people to eat pizza with, a school they seemed to like. A swimming pool of their very own. By the end of their two weeks in Ohio, Belle was starting to get anxious, antsy. “I want to go back to our house,” she said. “I don’t like it here anymore.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him like it should be obvious. “I miss New Jersey.”

Occasionally, when he was feeling maudlin, he asked Rachel if she could remember Miami. “A little,” she would say. “It was hot,” or “we lived in an apartment,” or “we went to Disney World that one time.” She didn’t say, “I remember how Mama used to sing me to sleep, Woody Guthrie songs.” She didn’t say, “I remember the way my mama’s hair fell in curls down her face.” She didn’t say, “I remember how much she loved me.” But oh how much she had loved those girls.

Rachel was three and Belle was one and she had left the house that night to pick up some McDonald’s, because neither Andy nor Lou liked to cook back then and it was too late to scrounge up anything better than a couple of Big Macs and fries. Andy’s chronic worries about their money would slip in moments like this: obviously, it was cheaper to just boil some macaroni (a box of macaroni at Publix was forty-nine cents on special; they had stocked up over the weekend and now macaroni was spilling out of the cabinet they used as a pantry) but he’d been working so hard at the lab, and putting together job applications, and the idea of a McDonald’s burger and some beers…

Belle was asleep in the small room the girls shared overlooking the pool in their complex. Rachel was playing. The apartment was pastel and Florida-bright and they always kept the air-conditioning on too high and this was another way that Andy should have been more vigilant about their finances but he hated to come home and be hot, he really did.

Their last conversation: “I’ll go.”

“No, you’ve been drinking.” And that was true, he had been drinking, but just a little: three and a half bottles of Heineken in the two hours since he’d been home, during which he’d watched Dora the Explorer with Rachel while Lou nursed the baby, bathed the baby, teased him for singing the “I’m the Map” song, and put the baby down. It was easy to go through beers while watching Dora the Explorer. It was easy to drink too much in the air-conditioned escape from the Florida heat.

“You sure?”

“It’ll be good to get out of the house a little,” she said. She’d stopped working in the NICU once Belle was born, and now she taught yoga on Saturdays at the Gold Fitness on Palmetto (forty dollars per class and that was their AC bill right there) but spent most of her weekdays at the Publix, at the library, at the playground, at the pool. Lou always said that what surprised her the most about the girls was how physical the labor was: so much carrying, so much moisture. Little children were always damp. But then, when they slept: Belle in her crib, Rachel in the little bed they’d bought her off craigslist, shaped like a pink Corvette—their eyelashes so long and black against their white skin it was like they’d been painted on, their cheeks so rosy in their sleep, their chests moving up and down in unison. Nothing was sweeter.

Andy gave her a five from his wallet—neither one of them ever carried much cash—and went to check on the girls, one of his greatest pleasures. He imagined, in the next few years, he’d find a job somewhere—he was hoping Ohio, to be close to his mother, or maybe California. Lou looked like she belonged in California. They would buy a small house. They would have at least one more kid, probably a girl (he had a sneaking suspicion he could only make girls) but maybe, fingers crossed, he’d have a son.

He’d get tenure, they’d buy a bigger house, in Ohio, in Wisconsin, in California. There were jobs that year at Kenyon, Claremont McKenna, the University of Cincinnati. He’d also applied to schools in New Jersey, Maine, and Connecticut, because the job market was so tough and he wanted to hedge his bets.