“YOU SHOULD TAKE VITAMIN C,” Randi tells Mirella.
Mirella promises that she will, then carries her cup of tea into the dining room, where she has spread papers all over the table. Randi was planning to polish the table with lemon oil today, which will now need to wait until tomorrow. It worries and slightly irritates Randi that Mirella doesn’t take better care of herself. Or rather, it bothers her when she gives Mirella perfectly good advice—like taking vitamin C, which has been proven in medical studies to prevent the common cold—and Mirella doesn’t follow it. Yesterday Mirella bought a bottle of Windex at the grocery store when Randi has told her that plain vinegar and old newspaper do just as well, and are so much cheaper. The same is true for Play-Doh, which you can make yourself with flour and water, salt and food coloring. Randi prides herself on being able to make whatever is needed out of ordinary household supplies. “Resourceful” had been one of the adjectives next to her senior class yearbook photo, along with “prompt” and “considerate.” But when she mentioned the Play-Doh recipe to Mirella, Mirella just laughed and said she was incredible. Today Randi has promised Pearl they will make a doll out of a white gym sock stuffed with lint from the dryer’s lint trap, with buttons for eyes and orange yarn hair.
Though it’s a Monday, Mirella is at home. She has a spring cold, and she says it’s a good day for her to work at home; she can write her brief without all the calls she gets at the office. Some man keeps calling her anyway, a man with a soft, shaky voice that Randi finds offensive. The first time he called, she had thought—just for one black second—that it was Burton, that he and DeeDee had finally tracked her down. For some reason it has been weighing on Randi lately, the matter of the sapphire ring, which she took a year ago from her mother’s underwear drawer, the ring having been promised to Randi someday, which actually made it hers.
But no, the man only wanted Mirella.
Mirella says she might try working at home one day a week. “I won’t get in your way,” she promised Randi this morning at breakfast. And even though Mirella smiled, there was something about her expression that made Randi feel as if she might have accused Mirella of getting in the way before, which she hadn’t, of course.
Randi carries the laundry basket upstairs to Jacob’s room. Jacob is asleep in his crib for his afternoon nap. His chest rises and falls, rises and falls. He looks sticky and worried, his eyebrows drawn down, one of his hands balled into a fist. She has noticed that when Jacob is asleep his face takes on a more alert expression than when he’s awake. Several times she has meant to mention this fact to Mirella.
She puts Jacob’s socks in his dresser, then puts away his ironed pants, folding each pair carefully. Downstairs Mirella is talking on the kitchen telephone again. “That judge is a dinosaur,” she says. And a moment later laughs and asks, “What’s a simple custody issue?”
Randi stops listening. Jacob’s room reeks of A&D Ointment and a half-eaten cherry lollipop stuck to a paper towel near his crib. Carefully she wraps the paper towel around the lollipop and tucks it far down inside the trash can, inside an empty diaper bag. No use attracting ants. Ants have been crawling across the kitchen counters lately, probably because Howard and Mirella leave plates and cups around that still have food on them. The whole house was a wasteland when she arrived: mealy bugs in the breadbox, Howard’s boxer shorts pale pink, the refrigerator grimed with dried milk and spilled apple juice. Clumps of dog hair blowing through the house like tumbleweeds, the dog herself with ticks swollen to gray jelly beans.
It took her a week to give the house a proper cleaning—that cleaning crew Mirella hired was hopeless; in fact Randi is thinking of telling Mirella that she saw one of those Puerto Rican ladies take something, a spoon maybe, so that Mirella will fire them, just a waste of money and besides she doesn’t like the unfriendly, knowing looks the ladies give her when they come in with their rags and brushes, especially when she tries to remind them to scrub the tub well to get rid of the yellow. No comprendo, they always say, crossing their arms. Puta, one of them, the darker one, mumbled last week. Which Randi caught the meaning of exactly.
After she’d finished cleaning the house she’d started on the cellar. It took three days to clean the cellar. First she threw out old cardboard boxes, magazines, and dead leaves; then she organized all the recycling bins so that the right bottles were in the right bins and the newspapers were stacked and the cans were flattened. For the children, she put up shelves for paper and poster paints, crayons in a red coffee can. Then shelves for car wax and boots and gardening things. She even put up a shelf by the washer/dryer for laundry detergent, bleach, and fabric softener. This shelf is just for her, for her own convenience, and whenever she looks at it she imagines a tiny version of herself, curled up there asleep.
Mirella is still on the phone. “Jerry,” she says, her voice rising. “The judge is the judge. She can decide whatever she wants to decide. In the meantime, you and Sylvia agreed to a four-way meeting—”
As Randi picks up the laundry basket, one of Pearl’s socks leaps out onto the floor. Maybe she and Pearl should make two sock dolls, sock sisters, little friends. They could make a whole sock family. She bends down to retrieve the sock, and in doing so scratches her arm on a splintered edge of the laundry basket, where the wicker has come unwoven. A faint line of blood rises to the surface of her skin. “Look at that,” she whispers, squeezing the scratch with her fingers. After a moment, she licks her arm, and squeezes again.
Randi has noticed that the Cook-Goldmans go in for a lot of things—like wicker laundry baskets—that may look attractive but are not practical. Like that teapot in the kitchen with the little bird on the spout that’s supposed to sing when the water boils but burns your fingers when you try to pull it off. And that old clock in the dining room that Howard said was historic but never tells the right time. Plus that chain you have to pull to flush the upstairs toilet and all the gaps between the floorboards filled with beads, sand, and sticky pennies. Randi flushes, feeling a pleasant harassment at the responsibility of caring for so much impracticality, and also a nagging unease. No matter how she tries to understand the Cook-Goldmans, the closest she gets is teapots and laundry baskets.
“Of course,” Mirella says downstairs. “Of course she can ask for child support.” She stops to blow her nose. “So will you. In the meantime, we’ll file a motion for early partial division of assets—” Randi stops listening. Whenever she hears Mirella use legal terms, Randi feels like she is listening to snow falling.
Before leaving the room, she takes another look at Jacob in his crib. He has rolled onto his side, one arm resting across his face. The other arm cradles the bottle he still likes to take to bed. Mirella has told her that she didn’t get to nurse Jacob as long as she would have liked. Jacob loved nursing; he cried for days after she weaned him. Randi can tell Mirella worries about this. That’s why she lets him have a bottle, even though Randi told her about a Parenting magazine article that says sleeping with a bottle promotes tooth decay.
“Night, night, sweet boy,” Randi whispers. “Sleep well, my darling.” She likes saying loving things to him; it feels like good practice for when she has her own babies.
And it also makes her feel, just for a moment, that he is her baby. There is something about him, maybe it’s his sharp little chin or the bony nubs of his shoulder blades, that tells her it’s all right to pretend he is her baby. He seems to need it, this pretending.
Mostly she pretends he’s her baby when they take walks, Jacob in his stroller in his little Red Sox cap she bought him; he liked it so much he even took off his Indian headdress. Randi plans to have five children. She’s already picked out their names: Sam, Tyler, Julia, Sophie, and little Emma. Her husband, she hopes, will be named Matthew or Dave. He will have light brown hair and a shy smile. They will live in a big brick house with carpeting and flocked wallpaper. A secretary will answer the phone when Randi calls him at work. Oh hello, Mrs. (Andrews? Carter?). Your husband’s been waiting for your call. How are those darling children?
People in the village smile at her whenever she takes Jacob out, thinking what a good young mother she is already, stopping to rub sunblock on Jacob’s face, adjusting the cap so the sun stays out of his eyes. “You first?” said a Chinese woman in the park the other day, and, without exactly meaning to, Randi had nodded. Most of the neighbors are gone during the day, the children all in camp or day care. Sometimes the neighborhood feels like a ghost town, just Randi with Jacob riding down the burning gray sidewalk in the stroller. At those times, he is her baby—her practice baby. She’s the one he says words to. Juice. Ball. Cookie. He doesn’t talk to anybody else. Rannee, he called her just this morning, while they were sitting on the floor in the living room, looking at a book. He put his hand on her arm. Rannee. “Mirella,” she had called out. “Jacob just said my name.” And it was true, he had, although he wouldn’t say it again when Mirella came running. He hadn’t said “Mommy” yet. They’ll have to work on that.
Her scratch has stopped bleeding, although her arm still stings. Smiling to herself, she shuts Jacob’s door and steps into the hallway.
THE LILACS BEHIND the Cook-Goldman house have long finished blooming; now it’s fat red roses and honeysuckle. Jacob and Randi are lying on their stomachs in the grass near the lopsided apple tree, staring up at its knobby branches.
They have just finished sitting in Mirella’s Jeep, bouncing up and down on the seats, Martha the dog in the back, pretending they are driving to California. Jacob held the steering wheel and Randi said vroom-vroom. They love driving to California; sometimes Randi packs them a picnic of raisins and ginger ale, which they eat “on the road.”
Now Martha is sleeping under the Jeep, drooling onto the driveway gravel, and they are resting from their trip. Randi has been imagining picking apples from the apple tree in the fall and baking apple pies, making apple sauce. All organic. But it will be months before the apples are ripe. Maybe she could try baking bread.
All day it’s been hot and cold, hot when the sun is out, then right away it’s cool if a cloud passes overhead. Randi feels everything. Every breeze, every blade of grass under her elbows. She feels her own body against the bumpy ground, the softness of her breast through her T-shirt, pressing against her arm. She sighs, stretches, then rolls over and stares at the sky. The breeze is picking up. A storm might be blowing in. She pictures boats in the harbor with waves breaking over them, people in yellow slickers being thrown into the sea. It always makes her feel safe, even cozy, to think about other people in distress. She remembers reading a book in eighth grade about a pioneer family starving on a prairie during a terrible winter; she ate a whole bag of potato chips while she read, even after she stopped being hungry.
Reaching over, she tickles Jacob beside her. “Eeek,” he says, opening his mouth wide.
She peers into his mouth at his perfect little white teeth. Then very lightly she presses her thumb to the raised round mark on his forehead. “Beep,” she says. “I’m turning you on.”
Randi has drawn up a whole schedule for the two of them—playing with blocks, reading for an hour every day, and doing what she calls word drills, which are funny games they play where she gets him to pretend to eat different animals and objects. Jacob likes pretending, she’s found.
“Rat,” Randi whispers into his ear. “R-r-rat.” She waits for a moment to see if Jacob will say “rat” after her. “You are a c-c-cat. Chewing up a rat. Squeak squeak.”
“Eeek,” he says again, as she tickles him under the arm.
Jacob rolls over and gets on his hands and knees to look at something in the grass. His face goes blank, which it often does when he’s concentrating. Now he raises his hand closer to his face; a black ant is crawling along his thumb and he blinks at it, keeping his hand absolutely still, letting the ant travel across the tips of his fingers, up and down, like a miniature mountain range. Randi shudders, but Jacob doesn’t mind at all, not even when the ant starts crawling up his forearm and disappears inside the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“Ant,” says Randi.
“Ahn,” says Jacob.
He doesn’t cry hardly ever. And he really is sweet, the way he puts his head on her shoulder when he’s tired and sometimes fingers her hair. Jacob has gone back to inspecting the grass, frowning a little, the ant gone who knows where inside his shirt. Much sweeter than Pearl, who acts like a spoiled brat half the time, although she’s gotten much nicer. Last night Pearl was lying all over Randi’s bed, wanting to try on her makeup and paw through her necklaces. “Don’t tangle those up,” Randi told her. And Pearl drew her hand back neat as a kitten. Randi never has to lose her temper with Pearl the way Mirella sometimes does. The way she’s doing now.
Inside the house, Mirella and Pearl are arguing over whether Pearl can have a popsicle before dinner. Howard is out all day walking around some property with clients, or he would have come in by now to yell at them for making noise. Ever since Mirella picked Pearl up at school and brought her home this afternoon, they’ve been at it. First it was about Pearl’s sandals—they’re dirty, take them off in the house. No, I want to wear them. Honey, I said take them off. NO. Screaming, crying. Then it’s a sweater. Pearl wants to find her winter clothes. I’m cold. I’m afraid it’s going to snow. Honey, it is almost eighty degrees outside. I’m COLD.
Randi pulls up a small handful of grass and trickles it over Jacob’s head. He sits back on his heels while she does it again. Soon she’s created a little bald patch in the lawn. “R-rat,” she says again.
“Raaa,” says Jacob. Across the street, the two little Indian neighbor girls and their little tan mother have trotted one, two, three single file out of their front door and onto their brick front stoop. Both little girls have their own computers. Randi can see into their bedroom windows from hers and has glimpsed them sitting up straight, peering at blue screens. The father is in computers; he probably got them for free.
Today the girls are wearing matching purple culotte dresses with purple ribbons in their hair. Parvati and Aparna. When Randi asked their names they answered Parvati and Aparna, like children reciting world capitols. Their shiny pigtails are the color of motor oil.
Inside the Cook-Goldman house Pearl has begun to howl, her voice high and ropy. Randi sees the Indians halt, mother bumping into her daughters, who bump into each other. For a moment they stand very still, their faces tilted up as if they are checking for signs of rain. Then they turn in unison, the mother’s hand on the youngest child’s back, and one, two, three they slip back inside. Their front door closes.
“I hate you,” screams Pearl.
A door slams. And suddenly everything is quiet, save for the watery sound of wind through the maple leaves.
“Can you say Mommy?” says Randi. “Mom-mee.”
Jacob looks at the little bare place she has made in the grass.
The ant has emerged from the collar of his shirt and is crawling up his neck. Gently, Randi brushes it away. Together they watch the ant struggle tinily away through the grass.
“Come on, kitty. Eat this rat. Dee-licious rat.” She wants Jacob to have a computer like the one in the library; he could do those maze games and solve cartoon problems. He should have those things, she thinks, feeling her face heat up. He should have whatever those little girls have.
“Raa-aa,” Jacob says, sounding so forlorn that Randi sits up and gathers him into her lap. So sweet, his head against her chest, the way he reaches up to cup her chin. She likes how he smells like a new package of bread; even his pee smells clean when he forgets at bathtime and pees on the mat while she’s running the water. They linger together for another minute on the cooling grass, long, green shadows falling around them.
HOW IS IT THAT Mirella tells Randi, this very afternoon, that she is pregnant, when she has not yet told Howard? She is over three months’ pregnant and Howard does not know.
Upstairs Pearl is in her room, wailing. Downstairs Mirella sits at the kitchen table, her face in her hands, a cup of chamomile tea beside her.
Randi sits next to Mirella, patting her shoulder and looking at the vase of white snapdragons she picked that morning for the table. Jacob is in her lap eating a pear. It is deeply exciting to be in on a crisis, to be in the middle of such warm confusion, like a bird in a nest. Randi has to force herself not to smile at the snapdragons. Her heart is beating fast. She has never been in such a position, where she gets to pat the shoulder of someone she admires as much as she admires Mirella, fix chamomile tea, put pear slices on a china plate, and make consoling noises. To know a secret that has not been shared with anyone else.
Jacob slides off her lap and does his funny, dipping walk across the room to sit down by the aquarium with his wooden trucks. Mirella confides how much she loves her family, how much she wants to do for each one of them. She would do anything for them. But sometimes it is all too much. Next month, she whispers, is Jacob’s third birthday. When will she have time to buy him presents, or plan his birthday party? She has two depositions this week; she has a hearing and a pretrial memo to draft. New clients are coming in. Then there is the Happy Faces’ bazaar, for which she has forgotten to make flyers. She has an appointment at the dentist’s to be fitted for a crown. And now a baby.
Randi says she understands. “You are a Capricorn,” she tells Mirella sagely. Randi has looked up the zodiac signs of each Cook-Goldman family member so that she can follow their horoscopes for them in the newspaper. Howard is an Aquarius—creative but a dreamer—while Pearl is, of course, a Taurus. Jacob is a Cancer; she herself is a Virgo. Randi explains that Krystal Anne is into astrology and has been telling her about rising planets and moons during her cigarette breaks, and what they do in different houses. She is still patting Mirella’s shoulder, trembling a little, wishing this moment could go on and on, yet worrying that she still has not thought of the right thing to say, the thing that will convince Mirella that Randi really does understand.
Mirella wipes her eyes, takes a sip of tea. Encouraged by this show of interest, Randi eats a pear slice herself and reveals that once she had her horoscope read in Boston. You will be significant in the lives of many people, she says the astrologer told her. You have a gift for nurturing.
The astrologer had looked disappointingly ordinary: bouffant red hair, blouse with gold horseshoes on it, pink nail polish, like a secretary in an insurance office. When Randi told Krystal Anne this story, the astrologer’s prediction was that Randi was going to be loved by a good man and own a vacation home. What the astrologer really said, as best as Randi can recall, was that the past never leaves you and that she should watch her step.
Mirella starts to cry again. Randi offers to make more tea. She offers to take care of Jacob’s birthday. She quotes the poem Dolores Anne Spicer published in North American Grain:
Do what you can,
Do what you must.
If you do anything else
Your life might just—
BUST.
“He’s not going to want it,” says Mirella, putting her hands over her face again. “He doesn’t want it.”
“Well I do,” says Randi, softly indignant, gazing at Mirella over the top of Jacob’s head. Although she is already wondering about where the baby will sleep. Right now Jacob is in the nursery, still sleeping in the crib under a mobile of stars and teddy bears. All that’s left is a little room at the end of the second-floor hall where Mirella and Howard throw everything they don’t know what to do with, tubes of wrapping paper, broken toys, a gym bag full of yellowish sneakers. Maybe tomorrow, while Jacob is napping, she’ll take a little time and see what she can do.