Parallel Play Read online

  “But I don't smoke.” I could already hear Harvey's puzzled response.

  And then I would explain to him how what he wore was the fashion equivalent of our relationship, and if he put on something that looked and felt special then maybe what we did next would look and feel special too, especially if we drugged Ann first with Infant Tylenol and locked her in a closet. Also dropped a nuclear bomb on the state of Florida. It made perfect sense to me, although I did have trouble visualizing anything so seductive actually on him, especially when we came to a headless mannequin in a wild paisley jacket with shiny silk lapels.

  “And the silk, of course, continues on the inside as a quilted lining.”

  “Of course.”

  “Would this be for any particular club? Because we do offer to monogram in a variety of organizational insignias.”

  “No. It's just for … sitting around the menorah.”

  “I see.”

  I didn't really know what Hanukkah was. I mean, I knew the relevant text (II Maccabees 3:6) but had no clue what people did to celebrate. It wasn't a big issue, Harvey being Jewish and me being a former Tertiary Baptist. Unlike Marjorie, when he learned how I'd been raised, he only asked a few questions and didn't pry, which I appreciated. I was so used to people's rude curiosity. “What was it like?” they'd ask. Just like your childhood, I wanted to answer, except more pure, the hard liquor of Faith and Fall, not the warm beer of “growing up.” But I found it impossible to even think about the Colony, much less put what had happened to me there into words. Instead, I'd mumble something about Bible Studies and make it sound as boring as possible. That was beginning to change, though. A month ago, he had asked if I wanted a tree.

  “What, one of those little ones the Japanese grow?”

  “No, not a bonsai,” he explained patiently. “A Christmas tree.”

  “You mean an evergreen? That's not Christian, it's pagan.”

  “Oh. I didn't know.”

  “No Christmas trees in the Bible.”

  “So was there anything special you did around this time of year?”

  “Fasting and prayer,” I said, with sudden vehemence.

  “Fasting and prayer.” I could see him translating that into some sane-world equivalent. “Well, you want to do that? Would it make you happy?”

  What would make me happy is you, in this smoking jacket, I answered now, fingering one that was crushed red velvet with orange stripes. I liked how hideous they were. Men trying to be pretty. Their dark secret. It tied with two lengths of thick ribbon. I imagined pulling the knot apart with my teeth.

  “That's a Sulka.”

  The salesman pretended to admire my good taste.

  “How much is it?”

  “Seven-ninety-nine.”

  Material would be the major expense. Then there was the padding. The shoulders were absurdly square. I really didn't know how to do collars that well, either. Not this kind. It was going to be harder than I thought.

  “Can I try it on?”

  There was an awkward moment.

  I had always worn the item. It was part of my routine when I was ripping something off. Asking was never a problem. I would go into the dressing room and examine myself from all sides. I realized though, in this setting, how the request might seem odd.

  “Just to see how it hangs.”

  “We don't have a changing area for women.”

  “Well, I'm not going to get naked. I could just slip into it right here.”

  He put his hand on the empty sleeve, protecting the crushed velvet, and looked me up and down.

  “I think not,” he said.

  • • •

  Before, you would have found a way, I scolded myself, back on the street. Before, you didn't mind making a fool of yourself, as long as you were a holy fool.

  They weren't afraid of me, anymore. I had gone from being all dangerous potential to becoming one plain disappointing fact. Even without Ann, when I was given a day off and tried making a pilgrimage to my former self, they saw right through me, as if I had the word MOTHER tattooed on my forehead.

  Where to go? A coffee shop, that's where I used to hole up when I felt this way. Sit at the counter, have a cup of coffee and a toasted corn muffin, bland, comforting tastes and textures. But now I was so sensitive about my weight, paranoid my whole metabolism had slowed. Just walking, I noticed people refusing to acknowledge my personal space, that thin lubricating boundary between myself and the world. They stepped on my heel or clipped my shoulder as they went by, not even saying, Sorry. I was traveling at a different speed, or maybe not even traveling at all, a rock in a stream. I kept going, adjusting my stride, searching for that lost rhythm, the way I used to connect with the city, the way in I used to have that once, not so long ago, I took for granted.

  I could go back to all my old apartments. I could revisit every place I used to work. I could walk to Greene Street and, even though he didn't live there anymore, stand under the window of Mark's old loft. I knew how it would feel, though. I knew how everything would feel. Every thought my mind came upon felt used, not a thought at all, really, but a memory. The depressing fact was I couldn't go back to being a single girl in Manhattan, letting chance choose my direction, trusting the lights would guide me toward my goal. She was gone, that Eve, and replaced by nothing, no one, yet.

  I gave up and went down into the subway.

  I couldn't believe it. All this time I had groaned about being tied to a kid and then, the one day I was given away from her, I couldn't think of anything to do. My main accomplishment so far was confirming how empty my old life had been. That's why the past echoed so harshly in it. Before, there had been nothing to absorb the sadness or the happiness. Now, being a mother, it was the opposite. Every little thing that happened to me stuck. I could feel myself getting bigger and bigger, becoming encased in layers of history and emotion.

  It was dark by the time I turned onto Seventh Avenue. People were buying last-minute ingredients for dinner, hurrying home. Footsteps rang out: all this purpose, clacking and clattering around me. I willed myself back into the flow of things, not bumping into strangers anymore. I let the current carry me along, falling in behind a perfect family: husband, wife, child. That's what I wanted to be. They looked so right together. A unit. I studied them, as if I could learn something. How he pushed the stroller. How she walked in step with him.

  I thought I felt a snowflake hit my forehead, but couldn't tell; maybe it was just a bead of sweat. I stopped and gazed at a streetlight to see if anything was outlined against it, that first dusting that brings a crowd together. I wanted to be the one to say, “Look, it's snowing!” and have everyone go, “Ah!” But it wasn't. I squinted into the halo of glare. There was nothing. When I started walking again, the perfect family was farther ahead, turning down the same street I was going to take. The man's face became visible as they crossed, and it was Harvey, pushing Ann. My whole body instantly adjusted to the outside temperature, became 10 degrees, a solid square of puckered sidewalk. I could feel people walking over me, their boots and heels hammering my heart. He was saying goodbye to the woman. She was going in a different direction. He gave her a quick hug. She looked up at him. Both their expressions were grave, as if they had been through some super-serious life-altering ordeal together. He kissed her, on the cheek. She walked away.

  It was Mindy

  Chapter Four

  New Year's Eve never came to Iowa. Once, I snuck out of theold abandoned summer camp where our group had settled and ran into town. At a bar with a TV near the window, I stood outside, panting so hard the glass fogged up, and thought, I made it! But I hadn't. I had forgotten about the time difference. The new year was already old. It had begun an hour ago, in Times Square. Instead, the local station trained its one camera on a big clock. When the second hand finally got to twelve, they played music— I could hear it inside, mixed with drunken cheering—and fingertips you weren't supposed to notice sprinkled confetti in front of the lens
, just a pinch, like a condiment.

  Harvey was still surprised.

  “I can't believe you said yes.”

  “Why? Do you mind?”

  “No. I think it's a good idea. But you've been so against doing anything, going anywhere.”

  “I thought it might be fun. We don't get out enough.”

  He shook his head. I knew what he was thinking. Here it was, the end of the “holiday season” and we hadn't done a thing, just counted off the days as if they were an ordeal, something to get through, both of us sensing it was a minefield, the family gatherings, the fake religion, the gift-giving. And then, just at the end, when it looked as if we were past whatever we were so determined to avoid, for me to blow it this way …

  “I'm not good on the phone,” I lied. “He caught me off guard.”

  I wanted to take his hand, but he was pushing the stroller.

  What I'd seen hadn't sunk in. I tried to explain it away, view it in a positive light. He was having his own harmless flirtation, maybe lamenting a move he'd never made, one of those alternate lives he thought only women could have. That's when I was feeling charitable. The other twenty-three-and-a-half hours of the day I wanted to make an appointment with my friendly family pediatrician and scratch her eyes out. Then I'd pull out of it for whole minutes at a time and realize I was making most of this up. I'd seen nothing, just a hug and a kiss. Not some passionate smoldering embrace. I was deliberately trying to make myself paranoid and miserable. Harvey was the one positive thing in my life. Why was I so determined to destroy that? Why, when Mark called, had I practically jumped at the chance to go to his party?

  “So what does he do again?”

  “He's a carpen— a contractor.”

  “And his wife?”

  “I've never met her. I think he said she was a dancer.”

  I could feel my heart racing as we got closer. This was not a good idea. At least he had moved, so going to the new loft wouldn't be some momentous return. Not that it would have been anyway. My time with Mark was a memory that shrank as I approached it. Set next to what had happened since, it wasn't that big a deal at all. I had just chosen to make it one, in retrospect.

  He's a sign of my own maturity, I decided. I see him now for what he is, what he always was: a nice guy, but sad.

  I walked faster, strengthened by this new way of looking at things. We were heading downhill, toward the water. By the time we found the building, I felt infinitely superior in every way. Poor Mark. All he could do was break my heart. That's a pretty pitiful skill when you think about it, compared to Dr. Harvey Gabriel, who had put it back together again. You tell me, who's the better choice?

  You didn't have a chance to choose Mark, a pesky voice reminded. He dumped you, remember?

  No. Technically, I made it so he had no other option but to stop calling.

  Or pick up the phone when you called. Or answer his buzzer, for a straight forty-five minutes.

  That was one time and it was more of a joke, really.

  Then how about when you stood under his window an entire night until he had to come down with a sweater and—?

  “Pretty funny, him living in a place called Dumbo.” I tried drowning out the evil-bitch-twin-sister inside me.

  “It stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.”

  “I know. But still, why would you want to call your neighborhood that? I mean, is it reserved for people with low IQs?”

  Harvey smiled. “You wouldn't know about Dumbo, growing up where you did.”

  “You mean he was a person?”

  “Dumbo was a flying elephant. His ears were so big they could flap like wings.”

  “You're kidding. How'd they do that? With wires and stuff?”

  “It was a cartoon, Eve.”

  “Oh.”

  A freight elevator came down, a big rusty box where you could see the exposed brick of the shaft. Harvey locked the stroller wheels as if we might be swung from side to side. Ann gazed from one of us to the other, so trusting.

  “So what else don't I know about, besides flying elephants?”

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don't know. Lately, I get the impression something's eating you.”

  “She is. About six times a day.”

  “That's not what I meant.”

  Words crowded into my brain. All the wrong ways of putting it. All the wrong ways of introducing the subject. I love you, was what I really wanted to say. I love you and please don't leave me. But those words, the simplest of all, I had to practice a million times before I could let them out, before I could loose them on the world. Words that used to come so easily, that had never even needed to be said.

  The doors opened.

  I was wrong about the loft. Even though he had moved, it was exactly the same, perfectly preserved, like one of those displays in a museum that show an ancient landscape, a diorama, with maybe a stuffed animal or two, and some native hunched over a fire or performing a ritualistic dance.

  Harvey's stare was fixed on the ceiling.

  “They're Gro-Lites,” I explained.

  I realized I should have prepared him more, that the stuff I had taken so much for granted might seem to him, an outsider, strange.

  They were the same lamps as on Greene Street, attached all along the pipes of the sprinkler system. Each was focused on a plant, one of forty or fifty pot plants in big plastic tubs. The leaves broke out into five points that spread like fingers.

  “Eve!” Mark was half hidden behind a large bush. He was plucking leaves one by one and dropping them into a shiny metal bowl. “You're early. Hold on a sec, I'm still getting ready. Io!”

  He was shirtless.

  Oh, this is not a good idea, I thought again. Why hadn't I pictured what it would be like?

  My eyes followed the pattern his muscles made from where he did his sit-ups each day. It was the same as what was painted on an airport runway, showing the planes where to go, as they coasted forward and down with their engines practically shut off, their wheels lowered, their lights flashing…. A landing strip.

  Since I was momentarily tongue-tied, Harvey moved ahead, pushing Ann in. Then I got past the little blip seeing Mark always seemed to produce in me and introduced them. Almost immediately, more guests came, so he moved off without really saying much. That gave us a chance to look around some more. Harvey was grinning.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  A sink, a stove, and some countertops were set up. Otherwise, it was still a construction site. Sawdust and nails had been cleared away for the party. Sections of raw Sheetrock formed a bedroom wall. We stood in the workshop. There was a table saw and all Mark's tools, which I recognized because he spray-painted every handle fluorescent pink, so on a job there would never be any confusing what was his.

  “This is great,” Harvey said with real enthusiasm, looking around.

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah, it's so not me.”

  That softened me a little, sensing he felt trapped, or at least encumbered, by his situation too. It gave me a thrill. I liked having something to fix, a mission. Rescue Harvey, I put on my mental To Do list.

  The floor was scorched black in places. It rippled. The grain of the wood had risen to the surface.

  “Fire,” Mark explained, coming back. “Then water. A long time ago. I took off about sixteen coats of paint. I was going to sand more, but it looked nice this way. Like a map.”

  Then he saw Ann and just lit up. I'd never met a guy so into kids.

  “Can I hold her?”

  “Sure.”

  He bent over. She laughed, gave a short pleased giggle. Of recognition? I looked at Harvey to see if he noticed, but he had walked over to the first row of plants. Mark balanced her with one palm under her belly. She floated, arms waving, staring down at the floor.

  “Male/female?” Harvey asked.

  “T
hat's right.”

  “Why alternating?”

  “It works better that way. For pollination.”

  I was torn between disgust at his nipple ring, which I would never have allowed him to get, and sadistically wanting to see what would happen if she grabbed it. She had a strong grip. Sometimes I thought she couldn't tell the difference yet between her mouth and her hands. Touching was like chewing to her. So was staring. So was everything. She was chewing up the world, digesting it, making it hers.

  “What are you two talking about?”

  “The plants,” Harvey said. “They're male and female, alternating.”

  “Plants have a sex?”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “It's biology. The ones with … tassels”—he looked over— “are male?”

  Mark nodded.

  “And the ones with flowers are female.”

  “Oh, so it's just what you call them.”

  “It's science.” He rubbed a leaf between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Which is just what you call things,” I insisted, lumping them together for the first time as Men. “Why is it so hot in here, anyway?”

  I was trying not to look at the nipple ring. The way it went into him and then came out, the other side. It sent this involuntary shiver through me.

  “The whole heating system's out of whack. I got to wrap the pipes. The plants like it, though. They're out of control.”

  They started talking, this conversation about buildings and mortgages and wiring. I was grateful to Harvey. It wasn't his natural thing, but he was definitely making an effort. Mark, meanwhile, was less embarrassing than I'd feared, except for his nakedness, which seemed to grow as he swooped and dipped Ann with one hand, bending low and brushing her past a plant, sticking his arm way out and rotating her in a half circle, like an ad for some trendy new exercise fad, Small Child Tai Chi.