THE SUN CREPT ACROSS THE SKY AS EVER IT HAD. THEY WELCOMED it; they worshipped it. The prickle on the skin felt like punishment. The sweat felt like virtue. Cups collected on the table. Towels were used and abandoned. There were sighs and feints toward conversation. There was the plash of water and the sound of the door opening and closing. It was the kind of heat you could almost hear, and in that kind of heat what could you do but swim?
Amanda worried fresh sunscreen into her chest and could feel the stuff of herself, ropy and fibrous, beneath her skin. It was an improvisation. Someone in the audience’s shadows had shouted out this scenario. It made no sense, and she was tasked with performing as though it did. Clay driving into town. She was doing this. She thought of that movie where the man pretended for his son that life under the Nazis was normal, beautiful even. Something about that seemed prescient now that she thought about it. You could fake your way to a lot.
Ruth told the children there were more pool floats in the garage. They returned with sagging plastic mini Oldenburgs. Archie put the little nub between his lips (it was meant to look like a doughnut, sprinkled, with a bite taken out of it), the effort of exhalation exposing the filigree of his ribs.
It was so unfair, how much more capable Archie was. Three years of advantage. Rose couldn’t get a single breath into her float, which was just a round raft, but looked comfortable. It was annoying. Archie was basically a grown-up, and she was stuck being just herself.
“I’ll do it, honey.” Amanda took the limp thing between her legs and, perched on the edge of the wooden chaise, coaxed it into shape.
“I like the doughnut one better.” Nothing went her way and she couldn’t stop herself from noting it.
“Too slow, stupid.” Archie tossed the ring onto the surface of the pool. He bounced from the diving board, landing only half on the thing as though he’d meant to. He was unbothered by his sister’s protests, had long learned how to ignore most of the things his sister had to say.
“The raft is more comfortable.” Rose was the sort of plain, chubby girl Ruth couldn’t help feel sorry for. Ruth thought Archie so like every boy she’d seen troop through the halls of her school, convinced of his own charms. Maybe this was something mothers did to sons. She worried about her grandsons, mothered/smothered twice over.
Rose was old enough to know how to feign manners. Still, she whined. “But the doughnut is funny.” Rose spoke in that particular mode kids deploy when appealing to adults who are not their parents.
“Funny is no good in the long run.” At the umbrellaed table, Ruth crossed her legs. She wore her clean things. She’d stalked into the master bedroom, wincing at the unmade bed, the spent washcloths on the bathroom floor, the scattered dirty laundry. She felt better. Almost relaxed.
“This is harder than it looks.” Amanda thought of Clay’s cigarettes, stealing her breath. She knew it wasn’t fair, not to have a vice. The modern world was so joyless. When had they turned into parents to each other?
Rose was impatient as any thirteen-year-old. “Mom, hurry.”
She pulled the translucent nipple, shining with saliva, from her mouth. “Here you go.” That was good enough.
Rose stood on the steps, tepid water to her shins. She and Archie vanished into their game, the private conspiracy of childhood. Children sided with one another, the future against the past.
Amanda often thought that siblings were like long-married couples, all those shorthand arguments. This endured only in childhood. She had little to do with her brothers beyond the occasional too-long email from her older brother, Brian, the rare misspelled text messages from her younger brother, Jason. “How long has he been gone?” Amanda checked her phone. At least the clock was working.
“Twenty minutes?” G. H. looked at his own watch. It was that long into town, more if you drove slowly, as a man who didn’t know the place might. “He’ll be back soon.”
“Should I make lunch?” Amanda was less hungry than bored.
“I can help.” Ruth was already on her feet. Hard to discern even to her whether she wanted to or felt she had to. She did like cooking, but was that because convention forced her into the kitchen until she’d learned to enjoy time spent there?
“The more the merrier.” Amanda didn’t want the woman’s company, but maybe it would distract her from thinking about her husband.
It was cooler inside, though Ruth had adjusted the thermostat so that it wasn’t too cold. She felt this was wasteful. “You shouldn’t worry, you know.”
This was a kindness, Amanda understood. Clay had bought brie and chocolate. There were sandwiches, a particular favorite of Rose’s, a recipe he used to make on New Year’s Day for some reason; traditions just begin, somehow, then they end. “I’ll warn you, this recipe sounds odd, but it’s so good.” She laid out ingredients.
Ruth was the one who submerged the Thanksgiving bird in salty water. She was the one who stretched bacon on the rack and let it crisp in the oven. She was the one who used a knife to sunder the flesh from the grapefruit’s membranes. This was her room. “Chocolate?”
Amanda looked at the things arrayed on the counter, each individual chocolate chip somehow lovely, the soft wedge of cheese remarkable. “Salty and sweet, some kind of magic there.”
“Opposites attract, I guess.” Was Ruth flirting? Maybe she was. Were she and Amanda actually opposites? Random circumstance had brought them together, but wasn’t everything random circumstance in the end? She chopped basil.
Ruth filled a bucket with ice. She produced cloth napkins, folded them into precise squares, and laid these out on a tray.
Amanda sniffed the fragrant tips of her fingers. “You’re the gardener?”
“You won’t catch George doing any of that old-people stuff.” Ruth thought her more grandmotherly inclinations—the crossword, gardening, fat paperback histories of the Tudors—didn’t seem evidence of anything. She was just a woman who liked what she liked. She wasn’t old.
Amanda tried to guess. “He’s in law? No, finance. No, law.” She thought the expensive watch and neatly groomed salt-and-pepper hair and fine spectacles and luxurious shoes explained just what type of man G. H. was.
“Private equity. Should I slice this cheese?” Ruth had explained this before many times. It still meant very little to her. So what? G. H. didn’t understand the particulars of what she had done at Dalton. Maybe no one, however much in love, cares about the minutiae of someone else’s life. “So, finance, you could say. But not for a big bank. A small firm, a boutique operation.” This was her way of explaining it to people who were as confused as she was.
“Just slice it thin, for a grilled sandwich.” They had enough for four but not precisely enough for six. She’d make one and leave it aside for Clay. For no reason but thinking of him, tears welled in her eyes. She wanted the news he would bring, but also she just wanted him back.
“At least the children are enjoying themselves.” Ruth didn’t want these people here, but she couldn’t help but feel some human connection to them. Ruth worried about the world, but to care for other people felt something close to resistance. Maybe this was all they had.
Amanda melted butter in the black skillet. “There’s that.” Archie was almost a man. A century ago, he’d have been sent to the trenches of Europe. Should she tell him what was happening, and what would she tell him if she did?
“I found this onion dip. Maybe as a snack?” Ruth took out a bowl and a big spoon, and they worked in silence.
Amanda could not bear it, and so she broke it. “What do you think is happening out there?”
“Your husband will be back soon. He’ll find out something.” Ruth tasted the dip with her pinkie, an elegant gesture. She didn’t want to play guessing games. She suspected Amanda didn’t believe them. Ruth didn’t want to be embarrassed.
Amanda removed a finished sandwich. “My kids rely on their phones to tell them how the weather is. To tell them what time it is, everything about the world around them, they can’t even see the world anymore but through that prism.” But even Amanda did this. She’d mocked the television commercial in which Zooey Deschanel seemed not to know whether it was raining, but she’d done the very same thing. “Without our phones, it turns out we’re basically marooned out here.” That’s what it was. The feeling was withdrawal. On planes, she turned off airplane mode and started trying to check her email once you heard that ding that meant you were fewer than ten thousand feet aloft. The flight attendants were buckled in and couldn’t scold. She’d pull and pull and pull at the screen, waiting for the connection to be established, waiting to see what she had missed.
“You’ll believe it when you can see it on your phone.” Ruth didn’t even blame her for this. All these years debating the objectivity of fact had done something to everyone’s brains.
“We just don’t know anything. I’ll feel better once we do. Do you think it’s taking Clay a long time?”
Ruth put the dirty spoon in the sink. “There’s an old idea, you’re trapped on a desert island. You’re far from society and people and maybe you have to choose the ten books or records you can take with you. Sort of makes the thing seem like paradise instead of a trap.” A desert island sounded nice to her, though the seas were rising; maybe all such islands would vanish.
“But I don’t have ten books. If we had the internet, I could get into my account and download all the books I’ve bought for my Kindle. But we don’t have that.” What she didn’t say: We have the pool, these brie and chocolate sandwiches, and though we’re strangers to one another, sure, we have one another too.