Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

She kneels by their blanket. “Hi, how are you?”

“I’m good. And how are you ?” Elizabeth says. The emphasis on “you” crept into her voice after the book came out. It makes Molly suspect she’s warming up to proselytizing.

“Actually I’m wondering if you can do me a favor. Kate’s been upset since my grandmother died and I guess she talked to Sarah about it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry about your grandma.”

“Thank you.” Molly pauses to regroup. “The thing is, Kate is a little upset because…”—she flips her palms up to indicate she might have this wrong—“…Sarah said Kate is going to h-e-l-l.”

“Oh no!” Elizabeth gasps.

“I was wondering if you could please ask her not to say that kind of thing to Kate. She’s pretty freaked out.”

“Of course.” Elizabeth nods vigorously. “I will definitely talk to Sarah.” She touches Molly’s hand. “Also though, I would appreciate it if you ask Kate not to tell Sarah God doesn’t exist.”

The game has restarted and the first batter connects. Elizabeth claps. “Way to run, way to hit, Kate!”

Molly glances behind her. Kate’s already made base. She looks back, aware she should simply say yes, of course, and let it go. Instead she says, “I can’t stop Kate from telling people what she thinks. I’m not asking you to stop Sarah from saying she believes in God.”

Elizabeth claps for a girl who’s tagged out. “Does Kate really not believe in God?” Her voice is sympathetic. “Or is it your husband? He’s told her not to believe?”

Molly shrugs. “And you tell your kids to believe. That’s what parents do, they poison their children with their own convictions.”

Elizabeth’s face goes stony and Molly attempts to recover by explaining her brain/jail theory. “Our minds are like jails without a jailer. There’s no one to let you out. Trying to believe something that strikes you as false is like asking the mouse nibbling on crumbs outside your cell to unlock the door.”

Elizabeth scowls. “So I’m a mouse?”

“No, no. I mean you can’t make your brain think differently just because you want it to.”

Elizabeth continues to frown.

“It’s like a cat,” Molly tries again. “Like asking a cat to do something.”

Elizabeth wipes the baby’s mouth with the edge of her blankie and focuses her attention on the game. Molly looks over her shoulder. The teams are changing and on her way to the outfield Kate shouts, “Did you see my hit, Mom? Did you see it?”

“It was great!” Molly says. Elizabeth gives her a soft, knowing look, as if granting dispensation for the lie. This angers Molly more than anything else.

The next week when Molly arrives to take her grandfather to the grocery store she finds him on his knees in the basement. “I was changing the furnace filter, and I couldn’t get back up.”

Molly helps him to the sofa. “How long have you been stuck?”

“Only about four hours.”

“Four hours! On your knees?” She tries to keep her voice light, like Mary Poppins in distress.

“I guess these old legs aren’t what they used to be.”

Molly brings up subscribing to an emergency service. Her grandfather scoffs, “It’s silly to pay all that money every month, and I don’t want to be calling strangers. They’d send those ambulance folks and have my whole door busted up just getting inside.”

“Maybe you should consider moving in with us, then.” Molly knows Simon won’t like this.

“No, I’m fine just where I’m at. You don’t need some old fart hanging around.”

“I don’t like the idea of you being hurt and no one there to help.”

“People get old. You can’t worry. You just got to accept it.”

She buys him a cell phone, tells him to carry it in his pocket, but he has trouble with the buttons, and a week later Molly finds it on his dresser. “You’re supposed to carry this all the time.”

“Oh honey, that’s too bulky.”

That afternoon Molly picks Kate up at the Randolphs’. The girls are making habitat dioramas for an end-of-year project. While she waits for Kate to gather her work, Molly tells Elizabeth about her grandfather.

“You should try the thing I bought my mother after she broke her leg,” Elizabeth says. “It’s an automatic dialer your grandpa wears around his neck. If he pushes the button, the machine calls you with a recorded message to let you know he’s in trouble. No monthly fee and no strangers.”

Before they leave Kate and Molly go out to the rear deck to get a papier-mâché tiger Kate’s left to dry in the sun. Adoo is standing at the bottom of the wooded ravine. The sun, which has emerged following hours of rain, strikes his face, making it glow. In the moment before he turns away, she sees the dashed lines again on his cheeks, but he’s too far off to tell if they’re the same as before.

Grandpa Hank agrees to the automatic dialer. Molly gets it wired up and helps him record a message. “Molly, it’s Grandpa. I need help.” The prefiguring of illness and injury unsettles her, but her grandfather pronounces the system “very practical,” and hangs the button on a chain around his neck.

During summer vacation Sarah becomes a fixture in the house. Molly can’t think of a reason to object. There’s been no more talk of hell. The girls spend hours alone, Emma a tolerated arbiter, gofer, test subject, the third leg of their otherwise intense twosome, heads bent together over braids of thread or yarn, twenty fingers sorting plastic gems and letters. Molly never interrupts. Neither does the phone. No one calls to invite the girls swimming or ask Simon and her to a cookout.

While the sun rides its reliable path through the upper leaves of a neighbor’s elm, Molly lies on a musty futon in the screened porch reading about the history of places that aren’t usually thought of as having a history. Switzerland. Canada. Zimbabwe. Before Kate was born, she’d been working on a Ph.D. in history, but no matter what subject she tried, Molly couldn’t find a beginning or an end. History just went on and on in infinite directions, a recursive, progressive web spun at a hundred trillion points of ricochet. There was no point from which to make a sensible judgment. When she got pregnant, Molly felt relieved to stop trying.

In the porch, she just reads the facts, makes no attempt to judge them. One day she looks up from her book and sees that the elm’s ten thousand pods, which blanketed the gardens in late May, have sprouted. Somehow this mindless, unwanted propagation make being lonely okay. Even in the form of a plant, the world has violence and invasion at its core. Being lonely is the least you can expect. It’s so light a disappointment, it almost counts as a blessing.

One Friday Simon invites two professors from his department over for dinner. Despite her supposed brilliance, Helen looks like a truck-stop waitress — bloodshot hyperthyroid eyes in a pale narrow face and a bony chest she advertises in midriff tank tops. Her husband, Dugan, twenty years older, wears his hair in big waves like a ’70s porn star. Helen was Dugan’s PhD student before they married. The rumor is he’s number four.

“Maybe she doesn’t believe in premarital sex,” Simon joked.

Helen has two PhDs, in anthropology and English. She wrote her thesis on Gertrude Stein. “What I’d really like,” she announced the first time Molly met her, “is to be a lesbian.”

Molly laughed. “I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you choose.”

Helen shrugged. “When I was twenty I moved to Israel. For two years I was a Jew.”

Dugan is near retirement and Simon has caught wind of Helen scouting positions out East. Hence the dinner invite — as Chair it’s his job to make sure she stays. Molly serves pasta and brie with cheap white wine. Outside, on the patio, overgrown bushes along the edge crowd the chairs, requiring her and Dugan to scoot off axis to avoid being scraped on the neck. Helen winds her pasta around her fork like paint on a brush and scans the yard. A sparse patch of sun-starved lawn has greened up in the temporary gap between winter’s cold and summer’s worst heat. Within a few weeks it will be brown again, except for places where crabgrass has taken over.