Women and Children First Read online

  “Special connection?” she says.

  Eric’s gesture takes in the room. “You know,” he says.

  “Do you have kids?” asks Janet.

  Eric jumps slightly, then says, “Three. They live with their mother. I get them alternate weekends.” He says this with some bewilderment, as if he hasn’t yet figured out why this should be. Janet finds it encouraging, and goes back to considering his question. Special connection? There was that night just before she went into labor, when the baby’s kicking woke her up, and she knew—she just knew—he was miserable, he didn’t want to be born. But maybe mentioning this will label her right from the start as an unreliable subject.

  So she tells him about the first incident actually witnessed by bona fide–scientist Will. “This is a crazy story,” she says. Eric moves his chair nearer hers. “I was breaking up with my husband. At that time I thought I’d stay in D.C. For Kevin. Will was helping me find an apartment. The first place we saw was full of eyeballs. Everywhere—the kitchen counter, the toilet tank, every surface was covered with plasticene eyeballs. It turned out that the woman who lived there made models for a medical supply house and she’d gotten a big order. My husband is a doctor, he’d used models like that in medical school, so they had lots to talk about. I knew I couldn’t live there, even though she was taking the eyeballs with her, and on the way home my husband and I had a fight, because otherwise it was a perfectly good apartment, and why was I being so squeamish? We picked Kevin up at my friend’s. And she was in a bad mood because her kid was Kevin’s age and couldn’t draw a straight line and Kevin had spent the whole afternoon drawing these perfect eyeballs.”

  “Wow,” Eric says. “Is that really true?”

  “Every word,” says Janet, though she’s left out the fact that the eyeball-apartment woman was young and pretty.

  “How did your husband feel about it?” Eric asks.

  “He hated it. He acted like I did it on purpose, coached Kevin. I stopped telling him when things like that happened, but sometimes, when they happened in front of him, he used to say he felt like an actor in one of those disaster movies with the Titanic sinking and everyone yelling, ‘Women and children first!’ except that his wife and kid had already gone and left him standing on deck, watching their lifeboat float off.”

  Janet realizes she has never even told Gordie about Will saying this. She only mentioned it once, drunk, at a D.C. party. Someone was talking about the actual Titanic, and she stopped the whole conversation by quoting Will. There was a terrible silence, till finally some lefty lawyer type said something lame and solemn—meant, nonetheless, as a halfhearted come-on—about the whole male sex being stuck on a sinking ship.

  “I used to feel awful when he’d say that,” Janet says. “I’d think: Hey, he’s a doctor, he has enough in his life without envying me and Kevin. But I don’t know. I guess he felt left out; I guess everybody wants everything.”

  Janet pauses, slightly embarrassed and pleased that saying “everybody wants everything” may have made her sound like a greedy slave of appetite. She doubts that it’s even true. One night last fall, when Kevin was in D.C., Janet went home with a man—a candlemaker—she met at a Charlottesville crafts fair. After a while, he showed her into his bedroom; he’d lit mushroom candles all over. Though touched by his attempt at romance, she was appalled by those hideous glowing mushrooms, and she couldn’t go through with it; she excused herself and left.

  What she wants to tell Eric is how, in the end, Will was really the prescient one. Because, finally, wasn’t he right? Janet and Kevin in one boat, Will in another, an ocean—all right, a highway—between them. Sometimes it astonishes her that her strongest—her only—connection is with a child. It’s common enough, she knows, just not what she expected. And now, when she imagines those disaster films, it’s the women’s faces she sees, the looks on their faces as they climb down into the boats: fear mixed with amazement that when the order came, they so readily, so instinctively complied. But saying this might make her life with Kevin sound impenetrable, closed-off, full-up. It’s why, she sometimes thinks, she’s so adamant about not accumulating lots of stuff. What man wouldn’t hesitate in the doorway of a house where a woman and child live surrounded by perfect antiques?

  Eric says, “Was that part of what came between you?”

  “The tiniest part,” she says. Then they both fall silent. Janet remembers a magazine article which claimed that one sign of sexual interest is the reflected gesture: she picks up a glass, he picks up a glass, he crosses his legs, so does she. She hopes that shared silence counts. She thinks about Kevin and Dr. Wilmot on the other side of the wall: if she’s been taking his medical history, they would have finished long ago. Then a red darkroom light blinks on the wall, and Eric gives her the stack of cards and says, “Here’s the story. Simple geometric images—triangles, squares. We’re trying to eliminate the variables.”

  Janet is disappointed: the experiments she’s read about used images like camels in the desert, the Alamo, rockets in outer space. Though maybe that’s why they never got conclusive results. Eric explains that in the first round Kevin will send, Janet receive. He tells Janet to close her eyes and concentrate, and call out whatever comes to mind. Janet imagines triangles, squares. They all seem equally likely. None of them flash on and off or in any way signal her as beaming from Kevin’s brain.

  Her only thoughts are of Eric, how conscious she is of him awaiting her answer; she desperately wants to do well. She thinks: Everything is backwards. Here she is, going through this with her kid, and the only telepathy she cares about is with the guy running the test. It’s hopelessly distracting, but when it’s her turn, sending seems somewhat easier. She fixes her eyes on the triangle and wonders if Kevin will blame her for making him do yet another boring thing that she’d thought would be fun.

  Finally Eric says, “Well, that’s it.” They look at each other a moment too long. Janet looks away. There’s some complicated timing here, much more finely tuned than who picks up the wine glass first. They leave the room together; Dr. Wilmot and Kevin are already in the hall. When Kevin pouts, as he’s doing now, he looks like a much younger kid. Janet has a moment of hating herself for the disloyalty of dragging Kevin here, making him sit through this, and, on top of all that, wishing he would act friendlier for some guy she’s just met.

  Dr. Wilmot asks if Janet and Kevin will bear with them for just a few more minutes in the waiting room. Janet and Eric exchange a quick heavy look, embarrassingly reminiscent of suburban-adultery movies. Janet says, “No problem.”

  Gordie glances up when they enter, and for a moment Janet wonders what he’s doing there. He looks so out of context, so far from the Victorian burgundy-reds of his bedroom. It reduces him, the way baseball stars look smaller when you see them in business suits on the evening news. “How was it?” he says.

  “Tons of fun,” says Kevin. Janet is about to ask Gordie if he met up with his friend when Dr. Wilmot and Eric walk in.

  “Eric,” says Gordie.

  Eric looks a little blankly at Gordie, then says, “Oh, hi.”

  “You guys know each other?” says Janet. Eric looks from Janet to Gordie, somehow managing to pay them both that same serious attention Janet felt from him back in the room. Well, you can never tell. Janet reminds herself not to jump to conclusions. Eric might not even be gay; Gordie is always developing these sudden impossible crushes.

  Dr. Wilmot tells them that the final results aren’t in yet but right now the quick match-ups indicate an unusually high score, at least in one direction—Janet sending, Kevin receiving. Janet feels wronged: in fact she knows Kevin’s thoughts as often as he knows hers. She has a childish desire to say that it’s Eric’s fault for ruining her concentration. But she can only smile lamely as Dr. Wilmot says she’ll be in touch with them about follow-up tests, and they can expect payment shortly. “The check’s in the mail,” she says, and they all laugh. Everyone says goodbye and shakes hands ex
cept Kevin, who stands in the doorway, impatiently rolling his eyes.

  On the way to the car, Kevin walks ahead. “Watch out, it’s a parking lot,” calls Janet.

  Gordie says, “What did you think about Eric?”

  “Very cute,” says Janet.

  “No,” says Gordie. “I mean, you’re the one with ESP. Do you think he’s gay?”

  Janet should be cheered by this. Maybe there is some basis to whatever she felt in that room—maybe Eric will call, maybe anything else is in Gordie’s mind. Then she remembers how Eric looked at them, both of them. She thinks: Maybe Eric is just your basic compulsive seducer. Suddenly she feels exhausted. It occurs to her that if you heard what was said in any hospital parking lot on any average day, you would hear lots of bad news. And suddenly she can’t bring herself to give Gordie one bit more. “Yes,” she says. “I do. He couldn’t keep his eyes off you.”

  “Really?” says Gordie.

  “Trust me,” says Janet.

  They find Kevin sitting on the hood of Gordie’s car, his long legs dangling. He gets in the back, and Janet slides in beside Gordie.

  A block from the hospital, Gordie stops at a crosswalk and waves some pedestrians across—an Italian or Hispanic family, formally dressed, walking slowly so as to wait for a little girl in a white communion dress who is limping, straggling behind, stopping every few minutes to pop her white pump off her heel and lift her foot and examine it. Even from the car, Janet can see the angry blister on the girl’s heel. Suddenly she wishes Will were there—or maybe not Will, just someone, a husband or lover she trusted to know what she couldn’t begin to say about that little girl, that white dress, that blister.

  From the back seat, Kevin says, “What’s the point of having ESP if you can’t tell when girls like you?”

  He sounds furious, and this surprises Janet more than what he has said, or that he should have said it at all. There’s a silence. Finally Gordie says, “Good question.”

  Janet knows she could blow the moment completely by asking, “Like who? Like which girls?” She takes a deep breath before she says, “Well, you can. A lot of times you can. You just learn how, that’s all.”

  “How?” Kevin says.

  “Take your father,” Janet says. “We were eating in a restaurant with these friends who were introducing us—”

  “Who?” asks Kevin.

  “You didn’t know them,” she says. “They moved when you were little. They had a kid they let run everything. He even got to pick the restaurant, so we ate at a diner he liked because it had mirrored walls. But that night he didn’t care about the walls. He wouldn’t sit in his chair; he ran around, getting under the waitresses’ feet, and our friends kept having to jump up and drag him back. Each time, one of them would say, ‘You go, I went last time,’ so things were a little tense. From time to time they’d tease your dad about having a kid, having to do what they were doing; I guess he had a reputation for not liking kids. Finally he called the kid over and sat him down between us—we were on the same side of the booth. He cut the kid’s hamburger up for him, in little pieces, and the kid was so surprised that he shut up and ate his whole meal. Our friends didn’t say a word. They must have been wondering what had come over your dad. But I knew he was doing it for me, to show me he was the kind of guy who could be nice to kids.”

  “Right,” says Kevin. Right about what? Janet wonders, but lets it go. Will was always nice to Kevin, or, anyway, an acceptable balance of nice and not nice, no more or less nice then she was. Anyway, she doesn’t want to think about that, she just wants to sit and remember that night in the restaurant—not the noisy kid, the bickering parents, but this: how Will’s hands shook as he sawed away at that burger, and how she had thought: Here was a surgeon, a man with steady hands, and look, look, what power she had.

  “Aren’t you ever wrong?” Kevin says.

  Gordie says, “Not about that. If there’s one thing your Mom’s psychic about, it’s that.”

  Janet looks out the window. They’re almost at the Park ’n Ride where she’s left the truck; she wishes she’d used the bathroom in the medical school. Now there are only gas stations from here on out. She is frightened of public bathrooms and mostly tries not to use them. The only time they didn’t scare her was when she was pregnant with Kevin. Then nothing bothered her, not the grime or the buzzing fluorescent lights or the empty shine of the tiles, the pin-scratched initials, the rust like drops of blood on skin. Nothing frightened her then. She had company.

  They say good-bye to Gordie and drive off. A few miles past the beltway, Kevin says, “Could you pull over somewhere?”

  Janet drives onto the shoulder and Kevin climbs down from the truck. As Kevin heads towards the edge of the woods, he keeps stopping, crouching down. It takes her a while to figure out: he’s looking for ants. She watches till he’s hidden by trees, and she can no longer see him.

  It seems like a long time till he reappears, and though she tells herself that nothing could have happened, she is beginning to get anxious when she spots his blue baseball cap. Emerging from the woods, he waves at her—a broad, enthusiastic wave, as if from miles away.

  Other Lives

  CLIMBING UP WITH A handful of star decals to paste on the bathroom ceiling, Claire sees a suspect-looking shampoo bottle on the cluttered top shelf. When she opens it, the whole room smells like a subway corridor where bums have been pissing for generations. She thinks back a few days to when Miranda and Poppy were playing in here with the door shut. She puts down the stars and yells for the girls with such urgency they come running before she’s finished emptying it into the sink.

  From the doorway, Poppy and her best friend Miranda look at Claire, then at each other. “Mom,” says Poppy, “you threw it out?”

  Claire wants to ask why they’re saving their urine in bottles. But sitting on the edge of the tub has lowered her eye level and she’s struck speechless by the beauty of their kneecaps, their long suntanned legs. How strong and shaky and elegant they are. Like newborn giraffes. By now she can’t bring herself to ask, so she tells them not to do it again and is left with the rest of the morning to wonder what they had in mind.

  She thinks it has something to do with alchemy and with faith, with those moments when children are playing with such pure concentration that anything is possible, and the rest of the world drops away and becomes no more real than one of their 3-D Viewmaster slides. She remembers when she was Poppy’s age, playing with her own best friend Evelyn. Evelyn’s father had been dead several years, but his medical office in a separate wing of their house was untouched, as if office hours might begin any minute. In his chilly consulting room, smelling of carpet dust and furniture polish and, more faintly, of gauze and sterilizing pans, Claire and Evelyn played their peculiar version of doctor. Claire would come in, and from behind the desk Evelyn would give her some imaginary pills. Then Claire would fall down dead and Evelyn would kneel and listen to her heart and say, “I’m sorry, it’s too late.”

  But what Claire remembers best is the framed engraving on Evelyn’s father’s desk. It was one of those trompe l’oeil pieces you see sometimes in cheap art stores. From one angle, it looked like two Gibson girls at a table sipping ice cream sodas through straws. From another, it looked like a skull. Years later, when Claire learned that Evelyn’s father had actually died in jail where he’d been sent for performing illegal abortions, she’d thought: What an odd picture to have on an abortionist’s desk. But at the time, it had just seemed marvelous. She used to unfocus her eyes and tilt her head so that it flipped back and forth. Skull, ladies. Skull, ladies. Skull.

  Dottie’s new hairdo, a wide corolla of pale blond curls, makes her look even more like a sunflower—spindly, graceful, rather precariously balanced. At one, when Dottie comes to pick up Miranda, Claire decides not to tell her about the shampoo bottle.

  Lately, Dottie’s had her mind on higher things. For the past few months, she’s been driving down to the New Consciousne
ss Academy in Bennington where she takes courses with titles like “Listening to the Inner Silence” and “Weeds for Your Needs.” Claire blames this on one of Dottie’s friends, an electrician named Jeanette. Once at a party, Claire overheard Jeanette telling someone how she and her boyfriend practice birth control based on lunar astrology and massive doses of wintergreen tea.

  “Coffee?” says Claire tentatively. It’s hard to keep track of what substances Dottie’s given up. Sometimes, most often in winter, when Joey and Raymond are working and the girls are at school, Dottie and Claire get together for lunch. Walking into Dottie’s house and smelling woodsmoke and wine and fresh-baked bread, seeing the table set with blue bowls and hothouse anemones and a soup thick with sausage, potatoes, tomatoes put up from the fall, Claire used to feel that she must be living her whole life right. All summer she’s been praying that Dottie won’t give up meat.

  Dottie says, “Have you got any herbal tea?” and Claire says, “Are you kidding?” “All right, coffee,” says Dottie. “Just this once.”

  As Claire pours the coffee, Dottie fishes around in her enormous parachute-silk purse. Recently Dottie’s been bringing Claire reading material. She’d started off with Krishnamurti, Rajneesh, the songs of Milarepa. Claire tried, but she just couldn’t; she’d returned them unread. A few weeks back, she’d brought something by Dashiell Hammett about a man named Flitcraft who’s walking to lunch one day and a beam falls down from a construction site and just misses him, and he just keeps walking and never goes to his job or back to his wife and family again.

  When Claire read that, she wanted to call Dottie up and make her promise not to do something similar. But she didn’t. The last time she and Dottie discussed the Academy, Dottie described a technique she’d learned for closing her eyes and pressing on her eyelids just hard enough to see thousands of pinpricks of light. Each one of those dots represents a past life, and if you know how to look, you can see it. In this way, Dottie learned that she’d spent a former life as a footsoldier in Napoleon’s army on the killing march to Moscow. That’s why she so hates the cold. Somehow Claire hadn’t known that Dottie hated the winter, but really, it follows: a half-starved, half-frozen soldier cooking inspired sausage soup three lives later.