In August the manhole covers began to seep. Summer had the same texture
as the local Eyewitness news, thought Sonia. A section of highway had
collapsed in the heat like a biscuit. A tragic fire in a condemned
Woonsocket warehouse where a boy and girl, five and three, had been
sleeping. In a reddish photo they were looking up like shelter puppies
from a bare mattress. “It appears their parents had problems related to
homelessness,” said the female newscaster, jaw thrust forth, the
charred remains behind her. “There’s Lorenzo—” she waited out the wind
in her mic. The girl filled the screen, “Her little name was Amy.”
The same wind raised a thin wing of the newscaster’s hair and she
snarled, “What I’d like to see is an app that saves children.”
She took a breath, then went on at once brightly and gravely, “It’s VJ
Day here in Rhode Island—”
***
Sonia called upstairs, “Boys? Are you ready?”
She stepped outside ahead of them. The wind was conducting the giant
manes of the trees, stirring them every which-way. Her husband had said
that she should stay in the house; she loved the house, he told the
mediator. All those years she had staunchly kept to herself her dismay
at 748 Weymouth, and now, when she tried to protest, he copped concern,
“You’ve always had a strange sense of yourself, Sonia.” How did men
learn this trick? To make strange someone’s knowledge of herself in
order to justify their failure to know her. He promptly installed
himself in a condo with a view of the river.
The boys slid wordlessly into the car. The air conditioner blasted heat
for the first five minutes.
***
Outside the office supply store there was some nature so denatured it
didn’t know how to ask for rain. The doors shuddered and parted. Right
away there were specials on mini staplers and pencil pouches and
caramel nut bars. Sonia’s sons drifted off and then popped up in the
aisles of phones and touches, but mid-divorce they wouldn’t ask for
anything, not even a gadget. They were like Diana’s sons, navy blue and
blond and brass, mute, mysterious.
She filled the demi cart with three-ring binders. She put her hand out
to stop the slack-bodied employee so white, under the glaring lights,
he was lilac.
“Do you know where I’d find a graphing calculator?” She fell in step
behind him. He gestured vaguely, then left her alone to study the
clamshell packages.
The parking lot stuck to their shoes when they crossed the grid back to
the car. Hot wind blew air into plastic shopping bags and lifted them
into trees like cheap bamboo back-scratchers. Her sons spread out; it
wouldn’t have been clear that the three of them were together.
***
The specialty running store was on treeless thoroughfare with carwashes
and night clubs. She parked on the street. The wind seemed intent on
blowing the air off the face of the earth, she said in general.
Her older son had taught himself to raise an eyebrow.
There was a young soldier next to them on the padded bench trying on
Adidas. They waited for their salesman to bring up the boxes. He was
the same age as the soldier, only with long hair and the slight build
of a doe. He paused to assess the gait of a bare-legged boy trotting
down the section of track you could try your new shoes on.
“Busy this morning,” said Sonia mildly.
“VJ Day,” he snorted. She caught his darting glance at the soldier.
Theirs was the only state that observed the holiday. “An excuse for
slaughter,” he said, louder, flipping his hair out of his eyes to lace
the shoes. He took a knee to help her son stick his foot in.
The soldier was quiet.
***
Sonia’s paternal grandfather had been an ambulance driver in World War
II; her mother’s father had been too old to serve and had stayed home
with his daughters. White Protestant males were finally being
de-centered. They also had a harder time with divorce, the shame of
cans of food that tasted like ketchup. At least statistically, her
friend Ruth had told her. Sonia understood that her husband was now
more central to his own life than ever, but in his absence, she found
herself considering all the things she’d never done, she said to Ruth,
like be a Supreme Court justice, one of the finest jobs available to
women.
Why was she so chippy? As if her inner life was one of those shouty
re-runs, a manufactured, mean-girl mentality.
The mediator’s office was in the same metal building as the campaign
headquarters of the woman candidate for governor. Spray-on carpet had
been applied to the walls and the floors; you had to use a communal key
for the restroom. With the mediator present, her husband had said that
it was because he could no longer make her smile. For a moment, she was
stunned by his sneakiness. Then she tried to smile and found that
indeed she couldn’t.
The mediator looked like clergy, his eggshell chin tucked into his
collar. She suspected their sinless case bored him. He was white like
they were but because he was gay he could go home to his partner and
say, over his reading glasses, “White people problems.” She imagined a
preening silence.
She was a middle school English teacher. 12% of her students met grade
level expectations in literacy, 8% in math. There were schools in the
district that did even worse. Her goal for them was that they fall in
love with one book over the course of middle school, even Captain Underpants, and write one cool sentence. The last five
minutes of every period she just covered her ears. “What you say,
Miss???” they called out to her.
She insisted that she wasn’t depressed; she just lacked energy.
The clergyman pressed his lips together. Her husband said, “Come on,
Sonia.” The two men stared at her.
Why, if he was divorcing her, was her husband still allowed to dislike
her?
She wondered if the mediator rented his office by the hour. Not a
single picture on the wall, not even a diploma from an online
university.
“You got my best years,” said her husband.
A building like this could be folded flat and sold back for scrap
metal. They could burn the carpet off with a blowtorch. The air was
more chemical than oxygen. It was the same building where she’d once
delivered an anonymous letter, crept down the same low-lit hallways,
trying to figure out how she’d hand the hot evidence to his secretary.
An older girl, a sophomore in high school, had convinced her then
thirteen-year-old son to shoplift from a liquor store in exchange for a
certain sexual favor. His soft face pumping heat before tears. He’d
grabbed his hair in agony and pulled until Sonia could see his scalp
stretching. “Am I going to go to jail?”
Did he not sense her boundaries? Did he have no respect for his
mother’s innocence?
“Tell me the name of that girl,” she’d said finally.
Google divulged everything. The girl’s father was a low-rent CPA, also
an organizer for the local 5K for breast cancer. Breast-a-thons, her
husband called them.
“Dear Mr. Vitti. Writing an anonymous letter is by far one of the
strangest things I’ve done as mother, but I wanted you to know that
your daughter may have a drinking problem.”
It had felt so good to lash out, especially as she posed as
fair-minded. “I’m writing because I would want to know if it was one of
mine—”
But she had refrained from telling Mr. Vitti that her son had stolen a
bottle of vodka.
Her husband had played it cool. She knew her shock had annoyed him.
“There’s going to come a time when he’ll regret leaving that blowjob on
the table.”
***
Where was she?
She still hated driving off, leaving the boys home alone as if she were
abandoning them.
***
At lunch with Ruth and Elena—Elena worked for the State historical
society and had the Monday holiday—Ruth said it was common for the
estranged wife to want to rescue the husband.
“Really?”
“Oh I don’t know,” said Ruth, and they all laughed.
By which she meant, what was this day about, anyway?
She didn’t know if Ruth’s and Elena’s grandfathers had served. It
wasn’t the kind of thing women asked each other. Imagine: they had six
grandfathers between them. Half a dozen young men, a squad, a task
force.
She confessed she was taking a little extra thyroid to brighten her
personality, to prove she still cared, and Elena looked worried. Ruth
rolled her eyes, “Try whiskey.” If only she were not herself but either
one of them. Ruth had got her divorce out of the way ten years ago and
was leaner and funnier because of it; Elena and Tim were inviolable,
dear Tim, an honorary woman.
***
She drove home through the poorer part of the city. There was a
rattletrap Toyota angled onto the curb under an overpass, an uncertain
array of matching Buddhist monks wandering around the casualty. Across
the road under the low wing of the highway heroin ghouls eyed the men
in yellow robes. She drove carefully between the factions.
***
She pulled into the parking spot that the Realtor, long ago, had the
balls to call a driveway. The back half of the car obstructed the
sidewalk. No neighbor had ever complained, which she appreciated more
than ever now that her husband was gone. She would have to remember to
remind her royal sons to wheel out the trash. The house next door was
owned by a Chinese family, and there was a fake flower cone, an
autumnal cornucopia, on the front door. All the blinds stayed closed,
but Sonia could see from her bedroom a pearly glow in an upstairs
window like a beacon, or a live-feed Skype call.
Lately they’d put up a sign in front in Chinese, with a phone number.
It had surprised her. “I guess they’re appealing to their countrymen,”
she’d said drily to Princess Di’s younger son. He turned to his
brother,
“Hey did you know Mom’s a racist?”
“Go ahead and ask them what the sign says,” she’d retorted.
At the same time, a Xeroxed Polaroid of a black cat with red highlights
had appeared on every telephone pole in the neighborhood. “Lars” was
beloved and missing, and a typewritten paragraph described a larger
pattern of cats being stolen from these very sidewalks for use as bait
in dog-fighting rings—in other neighborhoods. Keep cats
indoors. Report suspicious persons.
She could hardly open the car door against the Chinese peoples’ fence,
so narrow was the driveway. She angled out as if she were the two sides
of an arrow.
A heterosexual couple with tiny clothes, mussed hair, and hosiery of
tattoos paused before the sign with the Chinese characters.
Suddenly she wished she hadn’t wasted so much energy trying to fit in.
It did her no good now to have been skinny long ago. Her brain was a
chicken breast, her headache wrapped with cellophane. She had been
listening to Leonard Cohen’s Hallejulah over and over.
The Chinese mother came around the side with a rake and a bucket. Sonia
had not even officially introduced herself. Just some friendly little
waves. Why was it easier to love strangers? Just the other day, in the
hushed, lunchtime line at the post office, everyone resigned to wait
their turn for the ageless witch with porcelain cheeks and horse hair
behind the counter, Sonia had been an emissary from Planet Smile.
Behind her a young university dad wore a Baby Bjorn, the straps crossed
between his shoulder blades, and she smiled at the baby—Japanese dad,
Japanese baby, Japanese address on the Manilla envelope in need of
sending. She’d smiled at the Botox lady in beige wearing sculptural
sunglasses; at the slabby hipster chasing green Martians up stairs and
around corners on his phone. What would the Japanese baby remember from
his first few years? What overheated ice age was he headed for? Wasn’t
it the truth, as Ruth said, that Botox made white people look like
aliens?
There was a weedy old shack-dweller with his back to the room filling
out labels. Unwashed jeans, uncut gray hair. Suddenly he turned around
and faced his flock, “Nobody talks to each other anymore!
Unbelievable!”
Nobody looked at him.
“I was liking the silent camaraderie,” said Sonia.
He pretended he didn’t hear her and lurched toward the door, cutting
through the line where she stood and tripping over her boxes. He had to
put a hand on the dirty floor to catch himself. The Japanese dad bent
instantly to right Sonia’s boxes, and the baby, suddenly lying on his
back in a hammock, stared up at his father.
***
The Chinese mother was inspecting the thorn tree that grew in the strip
of grass between the street and the sidewalk. Its leaves were secondary
to its thorns. In fact, thought Sonia, the whole tree must have been an
accident, a weed that had escaped notice until it put wood on its
bones.
The Chinese mother jerked her head at Sonia, and Sonia did her
windshield-wiper wave. They were fifteen feet away from each other.
Sonia could see her elbow fat. Calves cinched at the bottom by white
socks, plastic shower sandals. A bruise like the Nike swoosh underneath
one eye.
A bullet-proof Escalade rolled slowly up their narrow street. Sonia
heard the deep, dusky honks of a fire truck on the busier cross-street.
What does your sign say? she imagined herself saying. How would she
demonstrate that she respected the mystery of the Chinese characters?
The sirens were getting louder and wilder, and the hook-and-ladder
rotated onto their street, got its footing, and hauled up behind the
Escalade.
“Pull over!” cried Sonia. The hulking Escalade was impervious, crawling
along at five miles an hour. There was so much injustice, so many brave
firemen and soldiers! Her heart was pounding. The firetruck leaned into
its horn now, and suddenly the SUV accelerated and roared off through
the intersection.
“That makes me so mad!”
Sonia realized she was staring at her neighbor. The childlike nose. It
wasn’t negative. Asian women had beautiful skin, black women had
beautiful shoulders, and white women—not Sonia, unfortunately—had
beautiful eyebrows. There was no deeper meaning.
“What does your sign say?” she asked before she could stop herself.
The Chinese mother rushed to lean her rake against the thorn tree. Then
she stood perfectly still before Sonia except for her hands, which were
thrown into a flying frenzy.
She didn’t speak English. How was that possible? How was she not living
in terror, right next door?
Sonia climbed her wooden stairs and pushed open her front door. “Boys?”
she called into the darkness. She whispered, “Princes?”