Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom.

When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only “boom” in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old. She meant to ignore him but after a while he proved too much for her. When finally she snapped, screaming “Stop that!” he only looked at her. He had the most enormous brown eyes, and loose, loopy brown curls that made him look like a cartoon animal.

“I’m serious,” she said, making an effort to steady her breathing. “You have to stop that.” She tried to find within her own voice a sound that was reasonable, parental, but when she turned to walk away she heard the small, quiet chug, “ Boom chicka-boom.”

Beverly thought about killing him. She thought about killing a child. Her hands were shaking. She went to her room, wanting to close the door and lock it and go to sleep, but from the hallway she heard the thwack of a tennis ball, the roar of a crowd. She stuck her head around the doorframe. “Cal?” she said, trying not to cry. “I need my room now.”

Cal didn’t move, not a twitch. He kept his eyes on the screen. “It’s not over,” he said, as if she had never seen a tennis match before and didn’t understand that when the ball was in motion it meant the game was still going on.

Bert didn’t believe in television for children. At its most harmless he saw it as a waste of time, a bunch of noise. At its most harmful he wondered if it didn’t stunt brain development. He thought Teresa had made a huge mistake letting the children watch so much TV. He had told her not to do it but she never listened to him when it came to parenting, when it came to anything. That’s why he and Beverly had only one television in this house, and why it was in their bedroom, which wasn’t open to children, or wasn’t open to her children during the regular course of the year. Now Beverly wanted to unplug the television and cart it off to what the realtor had called “the family room,” though no member of the family ever seemed to light there. She went down the hallway, Albie following at a safe distance, churning his music. Did his mother teach him that? Someone taught him. Six-year-olds didn’t hang out in strip clubs, not even this one. Beverly went into the girls’ room but Holly was there reading Rebecca .

“Beverly, have you ever read Rebecca ?” Holly asked as soon as Beverly stepped into the room, her little face bright, bright, bright. “Mrs. Danvers is scaring me to death but I’m going to keep reading it. I don’t care if I had the chance to live in Manderley. I wouldn’t stay there if someone was being that creepy to me.”

Beverly nodded slightly and backed out of the room. She thought about trying to lie down in the boys’ room, the room that had once been Franny’s, but it had a vaguely nutty smell reminiscent of socks and underwear and unwashed hair.

She went downstairs again and found Caroline banging around the kitchen in a rage, saying she was going to make brownies for her father and mail them to him so he’d have something to eat.

“Your father doesn’t like nuts in his brownies,” Beverly said. She didn’t know why she said it. She was trying to be helpful.

“He does too!” Caroline said, turning on her mother so fast she spilled half a bag of flour on the counter. “Maybe he didn’t when you knew him but you don’t know him anymore. Now he likes nuts in everything.”

Albie was in the dining room. She could hear him singing through the kitchen door. His single-pointed focus was astounding. Franny was in the living room, pulling the cat’s front legs through the armholes of a doll’s dress and crying so quietly that her mother was sure that every single thing she had ever done in her life up until that moment was a mistake.

There was no place to go, no place to get away from them, not even the linen closet because Jeanette hadn’t come out of the linen closet since surrendering the cat. Beverly took the car keys and went outside. The minute she closed the door behind her she was underwater, the summer air hot and solid in her lungs. She thought about the back patio of the house in Downey, how she would sit outside in the afternoons, Caroline on her tricycle, Franny happy in her lap, the smell of the orange blossoms nearly overwhelming. Fix had had to sell the house in order to pay her half of what little equity they had and make the child support. Why had she made him sell the house? No one could sit outside in Virginia. She got five new mosquito bites just walking to the driveway and each one puffed up to the size of a quarter. Beverly was allergic to mosquito bites.

It was easily 105 degrees inside the car. She started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, turned off the radio. She lay across the scorching green vinyl of the bench seat so that no one looking out the front window of the house could see her. She thought about the fact that if she were in the garage rather than the carport she’d be killing herself now.

Because California public schools ran slightly longer than Virginia Catholic schools, Beverly and Bert had had five days alone in the house between her children’s departure and his children’s arrival. One night after dinner they made love on the dining room carpet. It wasn’t comfortable. Beverly’s weight had steadily dropped since their move to Virginia, and the bony protrusions of her vertebrae and clavicles were so clearly displayed she could have found work in an anatomy class. Every thrust pushed her back a quarter inch, dragging her skin against the wool blend. But even with the rug burns it made them feel daring and passionate. It hadn’t been a mistake, Bert kept telling her as they lay on their backs afterwards, staring up at the ceiling. Beverly counted five places where the glass crystals on the chandelier were missing. She hadn’t noticed it before.

“Everything that’s happened in our lives up until now, everything we’ve done, it had to happen exactly the way it did so that we could be together.” Bert took her hand and squeezed it.

“You really believe that?” Beverly asked.

“We’re magic,” Bert said.

Later that night he rubbed Neosporin down the length of her spine. She slept on her stomach. That was their summer vacation.

Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The Cousinses did not prefer the company of Cousinses and the two Keatings could have done without each other entirely. The four girls were angry about being crowded together into a single room but they didn’t blame each other. The boys, who were always angry about everything, didn’t seem to care that they were in the company of so many girls. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.

The only one who was troubled by this fact was Franny, because Franny had always loved her mother. During the regular part of the year they sometimes took naps together in the afternoons after school, spooning so close they fell asleep and dreamed the same dreams. Franny would sit on the closed toilet lid in the morning and watch her mother put on makeup, and she would sit on the toilet lid again at night and talk to her mother while her mother soaked in the bath. Franny was secure in the knowledge that she was not only her mother’s favorite daughter, she was her mother’s favorite person. Except in the summer, when her mother looked at her as if she were nothing more than the fourth of six children. When her mother was sick of Albie, she announced that all children had to go outside, and “all children” included Franny. Ice cream had to be eaten outside. Watermelon — outside. Since when had she not been trusted to eat watermelon at the kitchen table? It was insulting, and not just to her. Maybe Albie couldn’t eat a dish of ice cream without dropping it on the floor but the rest of them were perfectly capable. They went outside all right. They went outside and slammed the door and took off down the street, loping across the hot pavement like a pack of feral dogs.