Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

What she had thought at that moment, naked in the water, the shampoo running down her neck, was that Leo Posen had listened to her, that he had found Cal’s death worthy of his further reflection. He reached into the water, ran his finger in a circle around her small soapy breast.

What she hadn’t thought of in the shower was that one day she would be fifty-two and have to watch the outcome of her smiling acquiescence play out on a screen. Cal’s character wasn’t dead yet, that was waiting up ahead. Albie’s character had been drugged a couple of times by the other children, the character who was Caroline had slapped and pinched the character who was Franny every time the camera panned in their direction, and the movie wasn’t even about the children. It was about the mother of one family and the father of the other and how they looked at each other at night from across the driveway. The character who was Franny’s mother pushed her hand repeatedly through her long blond hair while staring off into the distance, proof that she struggled with the weight of her infidelity. She wore blue surgical scrubs that seemed to have been tailored to her pretty figure. The mother in the movie was pulled in so many directions: the hospital, her children, her neighbor who was her lover, his wife who was her friend. Only her hapless husband seemed to ask nothing of her. He moved along the edges of the screen, picking up the children’s dishes as she cut a line through the center of the kitchen. She was being called away again.

“Enough,” Fix howled. He pushed himself halfway up to standing, as if he meant to walk out of the theater on his own, but his feet were still on the paddles. Caroline shot from her seat, catching him just as he pitched forward into the wide open space in front of handicapped seating, breaking his fall with her body. They were clambering around in the darkness, each with a knee and both hands on the sticky floor. Franny had her arms around her father’s chest but he was thrashing, fighting her off.

“I can get up!” he said.

The collective eyes of the movie theater fell upon them. No one hushed them. Up on the screen the scene had changed. Now Cal’s character was running down the street past the neighbors’ houses in the middle of the day, his brother running behind him, trying to catch up. There was for that moment enough light that the patrons could see the noise was coming from an old man in a wheelchair. There were two women trying to help him up. No one knew that they were the movie.

“Get out of here,” Fix said, his voice keening. “Get out!” They had him back in his seat but his legs were still twisted. He kicked at Franny but she got his feet back on the paddles. Caroline got behind the chair and Franny grabbed their purses. They were not exactly running with their father but they were going as fast as they could. Franny raced ahead and held open the door to the long, carpeted hallway, and then they were through the lobby, past the crazy neon rainbow pulsing above the popcorn stand, past the teenaged ticket-takers in their brown polyester vests. Bang! They burst through the glass double doors and out into the unbearable flood of sunlight.

“Fuck that!” Fix screamed at the parking lot. A mother with two children was crossing towards them but then stopped, reconsidered, and went the other way. Franny laughed and then buried her face in her hands. Caroline bent from the waist, putting her head on the curve of her father’s shoulder.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said. She gave him a small kiss on the neck.

“Fuck that,” Fix said again, this time discouraged.

“Yeah,” Franny said, and rubbed his other shoulder. “Fuck that.”

After the movie they went to the beach. Franny and Fix were against it. They said they were tired and wanted to go home, but Caroline was the one who was driving the car.

“I will not allow that to be my memory of Dad’s birthday,” she said, tapping at the accelerator to remind them what the car was capable of, what she was capable of. “I want to wipe that movie off my eyeballs. We’re going to go look at the ocean.”

“Turn on Altamont,” he said. His voice half-vanished, as if the roar of his invective to the movie theater parking lot was all he had left.

“Do you think we might kill him, going to the beach now?” Franny said to Caroline.

Fix smiled. “That’s how I want to go. I want to die at the beach with my girls. We could call Joe Mike to come out and give me last rites.”

“Joe Mike’s not a priest anymore,” Caroline said.

“He’d do it for me.”

It was harder getting their father out of the car the second time. He wasn’t as able to help them, but Franny and Caroline managed. Caroline had, of course, been right about the beach. Almost all of the days in Santa Monica were beautiful, and this one, by virtue of the fact that it was no longer playing out in a movie theater, was more beautiful than most. Fix had a permanent handicapped placard for the Crown Victoria and they got a magnificent parking space when no parking spaces were available.

“Writing out a two-hundred-dollar ticket to some able-bodied asshole in a handicapped spot.” Fix shook his head. “That is a pleasure you’ll never know.”

Franny pushed the chair down the sidewalk blown over with sand. They took it all in: the gulls and the waves, the bikini-clad girls, the boys in board shorts, the lifeguard in his wooden tower watching over them like a god. Young people so beautiful they should have been making commercials for tanning lotion or ever-lasting youth played volleyball with no one watching. People ran with their dogs or ate sno-cones or stretched out on brightly patterned towels the size of bed sheets and baked.

“Don’t you wonder who all these people are?” Caroline marveled. “It’s Thursday. Doesn’t anyone have a job?”

“They’re celebrating my birthday,” Fix said. “I gave them all the day off.”

“Why aren’t those kids in school?” Caroline looked at a half dozen children with buckets beavering away on the rearrangement of sand.

“Do you remember when I used to bring you girls to the beach?” Fix said.

“Every year,” Franny said.

Fix looked out at the waves, at the tiny figures of men skating the water on bright-yellow boards. “I don’t see any girls out there,” Fix said.

“The girls are lying on their towels,” Franny said.

Fix shook his head. “That isn’t right. I would have taught you to surf. If you had lived out here with me I would have taught you to surf.”

Caroline reached out and combed back her father’s hair with her fingers. All she had ever wanted when she was young was to live with her father and no one would let her. “You didn’t know how to surf.”

Fix nodded slowly to the waves, taking it all into account. “I wasn’t a good swimmer,” he said.

They watched a boy with a pink-and-red dragon kite that raced straight up, spun in wild circles, and then plummeted down. They watched two girls in bikinis roller-blade past them, their long legs nearly brushing Fix’s knees.

“Your mother wasn’t like that,” Fix said, his eyes still on the surfers.

Franny didn’t know what he was talking about, the roller-blading girls? but Caroline picked it up. “Mom wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon?”

“Your mother was better than that, that’s all. I’m not one to go sticking up for your mother but I want you to know, she wasn’t the way that woman played her in the movie.”

The two sisters looked at each other over the wheelchair. Caroline gave her head a sideways tilt.

“Dad,” Franny said. “None of those people were us.”

‘That’s right,” Fix said and patted her hand as if to say he was glad she’d understood.