Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

She glanced back; the doppelgängers were all packing up and dispersing.

* * *

Back from thepark, navigating through the screen door into the kitchen, Mimosa felt weak, awkward. The car seat banged hard against the door frame and The Queen awoke with a shriek, her body rigid in its devotion to the screams.

She clutched the writhing baby and ran down the hallway to the bathroom and hit the switch and stared at the mirror. The Queen’s rash was worse than ever, spreading across her face; Mimosa felt it pressing upward as though through her own pores.

But meanwhile The Queen’s screeching self was warm and strong, tried and true, and Mimosa couldn’t contain all these sensations, the overlapping positive and negative and positive and negative. There was no room in her for such love; it was explosive, almost identical to panic.

She slammed the light switch downward. In the darkness, The Queen quieted. The desolate evening twined itself around them. Mimosa wondered what they looked like in the black mirror.

Sam.

“I’m beat,” she confessed.

“I’ll take the baby,” he said. “You take a nap.”

“What about dinner?” she said.

The Queen was limp, gentle, in his arms. Mimosa walked to the bedroom and plummeted into sleep.

* * *

When Mimosa awoke,she felt strangely refreshed, as though she had slept for years. The bedroom was cool, the heat wave broken. She couldn’t wait to see them.

The house was dark. The car was gone. Outside, the last of the day was draining away swiftly, as it does in late August — or, wait, had September arrived?

She called out for them, even used The Queen’s given name, but the words felt foreign on her lips.

The kitchen was invisible, silent.

It was no wonder that he had left her. She had been awful to him, hadn’t she? Yet she couldn’t remember how she’d been. All she remembered from the entire summer was The Queen’s face, its thousand different expressions.

She didn’t want to have to survive without him, but she could.

The other, though — that she could not survive.

* * *

There was onlyone place she could think of to go. In the ever-weakening light, she hurried down sidewalks no one ever walked. She couldn’t tell where the night ended and she began.

* * *

Approaching the house,Mimosa anticipated a scene identical to the one she’d fled: Mary Rogers standing alone in her own unlit kitchen, orphaned. But when she looked through the screen door, she saw that Mary Rogers’s kitchen was all Technicolor — the brilliant red of the tablecloth, the intense white gleam of the refrigerator. There sat Mary Rogers, glorious, at the small breakfast table in the corner, beneath the glow of an orange plastic shade, with her husband and her baby. They were just finishing dessert. Mary Rogers held the baby — almost but not quite as beautiful as The Queen. Mary Rogers’s husband’s back faced Mimosa. It could have been Sam’s back — the post-work slump, the hair just beginning to dull.

Mimosa wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything, to slip into Mary Rogers’s body, hold her baby, eat her last spoonful of ice cream.

Mary Rogers stood and passed the baby to the husband. As she turned to walk out of the kitchen into the hallway, Mimosa noticed the mouth-shaped marks on the back of her neck.

When Mimosa pressed, the screen door into Mary Rogers’s kitchen opened with a squeak she recognized from her own screen door.

“Well hello,” said Mary Rogers’s husband with an odd matter-of-factness. He twisted around to smile at her.

He looked just like Sam.

The baby on his lap began to whimper. She felt her milk come down. Her fingertips went electric with desire. She rushed across the kitchen and seized the baby. The man’s only protest was a wry half-laugh.

“Oh baby,” she said. “Where’d your mama go?”

She sat down across from him and unbuttoned her sundress. The baby latched. That ecstatic buzz of oxytocin; she could feel it spreading through her blood, making her toes and fingers tingle, opening the valves of her heart and the ducts in her breasts, a downpour of milk and sympathy.

He watched her in that flat, cool way of his. She enjoyed his gaze. She felt grand, maternal, untouchable, like a woman from before human history.

When the baby had taken its fill, she buttoned her sundress and stood up, holding the baby close, its head in the nook beneath her chin. He too stood and they stepped away from the breakfast table, out of the circle cast by the hanging lamp.

He placed his forehead against her forehead.

“What if she comes back?” she said.

“Who?” he said. His breath on her eyelid. “Who are you talking about?”

Eva was in the kitchen, placing a pile of dirty dishes beside the sink, when a silence fell across the dinner table in the other room, the deep silence of people waiting for someone to pull a photograph of his child out of his wallet — or, more likely, waiting for a YouTube video to load. Moments before, there had been escalating banter about the sexual indiscretions of a once-beloved politician and the dubious merits of an art-house film. Frankly, it had been a relief to escape to the kitchen, to scrape the nauseating scraps into the trash can. She hid behind the idea that she alone had carried the dirty plates into the kitchen because she alone was a gracious dinner guest — a pleasing alternative to her knowledge that she alone had carried the plates into the kitchen because she alone did not belong here, among these dazzling, merciless people.

Eva embellished her good-guesthood, rinsing the plates, lining them up in the dishwasher, all the while waiting for the silence to break, for a roar of laughter to pummel outward. Yet the silence held, and it became clear to Eva that she’d have to reenter the other room.

Stepping through the doorway, she couldn’t contain her gasp of shock. What an odd, odd joke for them to play on her — all seven of them frozen in place, the host half-standing to pour cream into coffee, forks held in various positions between apple pie and mouth, a hand thrown upward in emphasis, a head thrown backward in laughter, fingers wrapped fervently around wineglasses: a flawless tableau of the messy joy of the final throes of the dinner party.

She tiptoed toward the table, waiting for them to break scene, turn toward her with faces that demanded the correct response. Yet the tableau remained utterly perfect, still, disconcerting. Eager to catch a blink, Eva stared at the eyelids — and realized that most were halfway or three-quarters open or closed, stuck at different stages of a blink.

She turned her attention to the host, the exact sort of no-nonsense All-American handsome that was never attracted to her. It was then, gazing at the cream he was pouring, that she understood: the cream, suspended in its arc, absolutely unmoving, its white tip just barely touching the dark surface of the coffee.

This was no joke, no performance. Everything was frozen. Except for her.

She lifted her hand, waggled her fingers in her host’s face. No response.

At that point her terror should have overwhelmed her. But what she felt was glee.

First she walked over to her husband, her beloved unshaven husband, he whose eyes were nearly shut as he drank deep from a glass of red wine. She kissed him on the forehead, stroked his cheek; a strange place to start, perhaps, in this roomful of seven, with the one person she actually had the right to touch. But he wasn’t always amenable to having his face stroked or his forehead kissed.

Next, back to the host, he who enjoyed his opinions. Eva seized this opportunity to put her lips against his, giving him and all his fraternity brothers a one-sided kiss.