By midday, Bob had realized he couldn’t make himself wait even one more day to share his news. For days and days he’d been on the verge of decision but hadn’t wanted to tell Rachel. It was hard enough to tell himself. Even though he’d already decided that night when he had looked out the window and saw a man walking a dog at two o’clock in the morning and wanted to know, Do you do that every night? And as the days went by and he got used to knowing that he’d already made the decision, it got less scary and even more exciting, and then he caught the reproof in Rachel’s postscript: It’s your place too, by the way.
But it wasn’t by the way at all, and it wasn’t really a postscript either. Because it wasn’t really his place too. It wasn’t even hers. It was the school’s.
He had planned to make the grand announcement over dinner, but when he saw Elizabeth too as the three came into the house, he changed his mind. This first announcement should be to family only. He’d tell Rachel later, when they were in bed. They both would tell Sylvia in the morning.
Now dinner was over and the girls were downtown at the movies, and at last he had his wife to himself. As she climbed into bed, he lit a fire in the bedroom’s fireplace, one of the few aspects he liked of this enormous, too institutional house. It made this one room feel like a home they owned together. (It also provided just the right amount of light for making love.) He crossed the room from the fireplace and climbed into the right side of the bed. It was the side he’d claimed on the first night of their marriage, after Rachel had claimed the left. They had never thought of trading.
He hadn’t even pulled the covers up when Rachel said, “Syl and Elizabeth and I went downtown today.”
“So?” Now he’d have to wait even longer to tell her his news.
“We met her homeless man.”
“Her homeless man?”
“Yes, hers. The one she couldn’t talk about in September.” Rachel went on to tell him what had happened: how Elizabeth had denied that it was the same homeless man and Sylvia had admitted it was.
Now he was feeling guilty for being annoyed. It was their daughter. “You say Elizabeth said it could be a different one?”
“Yes, she did. She basically told me that maybe he was or maybe he wasn’t—you can’t tell anymore. She implied that homeless people have figured out that Fieldington is where the money is so they’re coming in bunches. I told her not be sarcastic. You should have seen how she stared at Syl when Syl said he’s the one.”
“What difference could it make whether it was the same one or not?”
“You tell me.”
“Some kind of attachment? Maybe they meet him on a regular basis and give him money?”
“Maybe. But what’s there about that for Elizabeth to want to hide?”
Bob gave Rachel a look. “Maybe they were afraid I’d find out and give them another boring lecture about not giving handouts to individuals.”
“Yes, when you talk like that, you do sound a little bit like the people Elizabeth says she’s going to offer free lobotomies to when she gets to be president.”
He giggled. “She said that?”
“She did.”
“She’s got a tongue, that one.”
“She does. It grates on Sylvia sometimes.”
“Of course,” Bob said. “It’s always going to be Elizabeth who comes up with a line like that, and it’s always going to be Sylvia who wishes she could. You ask Sylvia was this the same guy she saw last September and was upset enough not to want to talk about it, and she says it was. Why shouldn’t she? What’s there to hide? You ask Elizabeth and she has to make a smart-ass political remark.”
“That’s it? They’re just different?”
“Yeah, except they both care. They’re both kind. They’ve got that in common. We should be glad.”
“So we shouldn’t worry?”
He turned on his side, drew her close, foreheads touching. “Oh, we’ll always worry. Even when she’s a grown up. That’s what parents do.”
She was silent then, still thinking, he supposed. The firelight flickered on the ceiling. It seemed wrong, as if he didn’t care about his own daughter, to switch away from talking about her to talking about himself. Should he wait until the morning?
No. He could not. “I’ve got something to tell you,” he said, his tone casual, as if he were predicting the weather.
“About Sylvia?”
“No. I’ve decided to sell.”
“Sell?”
“Yeah, Best Sports.”
She sat up straight.
“I’m through,” he said.
“Through?”
“Yeah,” he said, sitting up too. “It’s time.”
She brought her knees up under the covers and hugged them.
“I know. We were talking about Sylvia. I shouldn’t have changed the subject. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about it a long time.”
She turned to him, a look of amazement on her face.
“What?”
“When did you decide?”
“A while ago.”
“A while ago?”
“Yeah, a while ago, while I was looking out the window in the middle of the night.”
“But you’d been thinking about it a long time.”
“Yeah. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but ideas will come. Main thing is, though, I’ll do whatever it is in Hartford, or maybe New Haven. I’ll be home every night.”
She didn’t answer. Just kept looking at him, seeming even more amazed.
He frowned. “You can say you’re happy now.”
“I will be, I suppose—when I figure out what it means that you’ve been making one of the biggest decisions in your life and you didn’t tell me one word.” She lay back down, stared straight up at the ceiling.
“I thought you might point that out. Well, I’m not going to apologize. It’s just the way I am. And you are too. All you ever told me is that something’s missing.”
“And you didn’t prod.”
“Nope. I didn’t. And I think I won’t. When you quit. Or don’t quit. Or whatever, I’ll find out after you’ve made up your mind and I promise I won’t act surprised.” He lay back down beside her. Watched the flickering glow on the ceiling.
“So we’re in trouble?”
He didn’t answer.
“Bob?”
“The only way not to be in marriage trouble is not to be married.”
He waited for her to respond to that; and when she didn’t, he said, “So, please, repeat after me: ‘I’m glad we will be together all the time, not just weekends’—and then we’ll go to sleep.”
“I’m glad we will be together all the time, not just weekends.”
“Thank you.”
“I really am, you know.”
“That’s good.”
“But that’s not why you quit, is it?”
“No. I quit because I’d run out of gas. But I will be home every night.”
“That is good,” she said. “That’s very good.”
She reached for his hand. He took it in his, gave it a tender squeeze, and drifted toward sleep. But then, still holding her hand, he heard his own question again: What’s there to hide? He remembered the weird feeling he’d had about Sylvia’s reaction to Gloria Buchanan’s news that the stolen stuff had been returned. And Marian’s too. Like something was off-key It was just a tickle of suspicion, a little itch. Maybe more of an idea than an actual suspicion.
Nevertheless, he felt a tinge of guilt again for speeding through Rachel’s news of Sylvia so he could get to his own. If he had waited longer, maybe he would have admitted that sometimes he could actually visualize Sylvia and Elizabeth stealing stuff to give away to a homeless guy. But then why would they return the stuff exactly as winter arrives? That there was no answer to that question should have been comforting enough to allow him sleep, but the surprise that he was disappointed that they were not the ones who’d stolen the stuff kept him awake—until his thoughts drifted to his satisfaction at having made the decision to sell Best Sports and his joy that he would spend every night—every night!—with his wife and daughter. Then he was finally able to sleep.
RACHEL LAY AWAKE dealing with her realization that she’d known all along that when he went away on Mondays, it was to Mars. Now he wouldn’t disappear anymore. Grateful, she drifted toward sleep.
But then was wide awake again. How did he do it? Best Sports was his life. He could just stop? Could I do that? Will I still be able to focus on Miss Oliver’s School for Girls with him around all the time?
“YOU KNOW THE only way not to fall asleep while watching fantasy?” Elizabeth asked on the way home. They had just finished the movie and Sylvia was driving. “Or how not to laugh so loud everybody turns to you and tells you to shh and you’re so embarrassed you wish you were dead? You just have to turn your brain totally off. Like, blank. Don’t think of anything.”
All the while Elizabeth was talking, Sylvia had been getting up the nerve to tell her about what she’d done. “I gave Christopher my cell phone,” she blurted when Elizabeth stopped to take a breath. “He’ll call you if he needs our help—which you know he will.” But Elizabeth had been so totally into what she was saying, she didn’t get it. “Shut up about the movie, please,” Sylvia said, and gave her news again.
“You what?”
“You heard me.”
“You put it in the cup?” Anybody who didn’t know Elizabeth would have thought from her tone that she believed there was a better place to put the phone—like maybe one of Christopher’s pockets? Or directly into his hand?
“And I know you liked the movie,” Sylvia said. Anything to change the subject. “You were just practicing taking the opposite—”
“How do you know he won’t sell it?”
Sylvia was stunned. “He won’t. That’s a terrible thing to even think.” She turned the car into the Head’s House driveway.
“Why? He needs the money, doesn’t he? I bet you’d sell it in his shoes. And anyway, I know one thing that’s true.”
“Yeah, I know. When my mother asks me why I don’t answer when she calls, I’ll have to say I lost it.” Sylvia drove into the garage and turned the ignition off.
“And guess what she’ll do then.”
“I know. The Find My Phone app. I didn’t think of it when I gave him the phone.”
“Well, your Mom’ll think of it in about one second and she’ll want to know why you didn’t tell her you lost it right away, and then she’ll want to go out there with you and help you find it,” Elizabeth said, getting out of the car. “So you better hope he did sell it, preferably to someone about to leave for Australia.” She went into the house and straight upstairs to her bedroom without another word.
“HELLO, SWEETIE. SLEEP well?” Sylvia’s mom said, smiling from her chair at the kitchen table as Sylvia appeared in the doorway the next morning. Sun poured in through all the windows. Her mom and dad were still in their bathrobes. It was eleven o’clock. Elizabeth was still upstairs in bed.
“Umm,” Sylvia answered.
“Want some eggs?” Her dad had a lilt in his voice. “I’ll scramble you some.”
Sylvia nodded.
“Well, sit down then, hon.” He patted the table with his hand.
Sylvia pulled out a chair and sat. She hadn’t slept well at all. What had made her so impulsive as to give her cell phone to Christopher? How was she going to get it back? And what was making her parents so irritatingly cheerful this morning?
“Shall I make them the usual way?” he asked.
“How was the movie?” her mom asked.
Sylvia shrugged. “It was okay.”
“Wow! She talks!” her dad said, grinning. He pushed back his chair and came around the table to Sylvia, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. On the way to the refrigerator for the eggs, he said, “How about Elizabeth? Did she like the movie?”
“She liked it okay.”
“No diatribe about how stupid it was?” Sylvia’s mom asked. “That’s a surprise.” Then, after a pause: “Anyway, your dad has something to share with you.”
“He does?” Alarms went off. Her mother must have called. And Christopher had answered.
“Yes, but wait until I finish cooking these eggs,” her father said, proving that telling her she’d been caught red handed was clearly too heavy for him while performing such an everyday task as scrambling eggs.
It was typical of her parents to try to make such a moment light by assuming cheerfulness. It’s how liberals do it, she was sure Elizabeth would explain later. Conservative parents would glower like it’s the end of the word—which, for them, it would be. In a minute the eggs would be done and her dad would bring them to her, a big smile on his face to show her We love you anyway, and wait until she’d had a few bites and then he’d say, We called you last night. It seemed a little late for a movie to get out, and we just wanted to make sure you were okay. But a man answered and said, Hello? Elizabeth? He’d stop right there and look at her mother and her mother would wait for her to say something, and when she wouldn’t her mother would say, We know who it was. It was easy to figure out: you and Elizabeth were the ones who stole that stuff. And it would all be over. It would be done.
Her dad spooned the eggs from the frying pan onto a plate and put it down on the table in front of Sylvia. “You ready to hear it?”
“I’m ready, Dad,” she said, forcing herself to look him in the face. She couldn’t breathe.
“I’m going to sell Best Sports.”
“…What?”
“I’m going to sell Best Sports. I’m not got going to live in the City anymore,” he said, just as Elizabeth walked sleepily into the kitchen. “I’m going to live right here with your mother and you.” He reached across the table and clasped her mother’s hand.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” her mother said.
Halfway to the table, Elizabeth stopped walking. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No, it’s all right, come on in,” Sylvia’s mom said. But Elizabeth waited for a cue from Sylvia.
Sylvia, by now no longer in disaster mode, ignored Elizabeth. “Dad! That’s great!” She leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek. So what if he didn’t know the real reason she was so happy and how fast her heart was beating?
“Really, I can wait,” Elizabeth said, standing where she had stopped. “You guys obviously have something to talk about.” She was still looking at Sylvia.
“No, please, sit down,” her mom said again.
Elizabeth sat. She glanced at Sylvia. Sylvia looked away. The phone was still out there. Waiting for her mother to call it.
“Bob just told us he’s going to sell Best Sports,” her mom said.
“Really!” Elizabeth said. She turned to Sylvia’s dad. “You’re going to sell?”
“I am.” He looked proud.
“Well, good for you, Bob. I’m glad you knew you were the one who had to make the move.”
He laughed. “Oh Liz! So glad you are going to run as a Democrat. As a Republican, you wouldn’t have a chance.”
Sylvia’s mom, however, didn’t seem amused. She looked thoughtful, maybe even perturbed. Her dad was quick to change the subject. “What should we do today?” he asked. “Whatever it is, let’s do it together.” For the next few minutes, while Elizabeth had another helping of scrambled eggs and another muffin, and Sylvia kept putting her hand in the empty pocket of her jeans, they discussed the options—until finally, with a barely perceptible impatience in her tone, her mom said, “Bob, why don’t you decide?”
“All, right. Let’s go to New Haven to the Yale Art Gallery, then to an ice rink to go skating, then out to dinner.”
That’s how they spent the rest of the day. HOW DO YOU fit seventy-three candles on a birthday cake? The answer Rachel came up with on Sunday evening: Don’t even try.
Stick one big fat one in the middle? Everybody mentally does the arithmetic?—fifty-five plus eighteen. Maybe one of those funny ones that you blow and blow and blow on, spraying germs all over the icing, and the flame just gets stronger?
But she didn’t have one of those candles. And it was too corny anyway. So she used the little tube of red icing her baker-friend John had put in the cake box to write HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB AND SYLVIA on the white icing.
No. Too ordinary. She wanted to start over, but that would make a mess. Instead, she added the two words that flew into her brain, right then without her even thinking—CARPE DIEM—and immediately wondered why she wrote this on their cake. Bob had already seized the day. Maybe Sylvia had too, when that homeless man showed up. Rachel didn’t want to answer that question right then, not in the middle of her husband’s and daughter’s birthday party.
She picked up the cake and marched into the dining room, where the only light was from candles on the table, and presented the cake with outstretched arms like a Pagan priest with a sacrifice, placing it in between Sylvia and Bob. She stood between them with a hand on Bob’s shoulder, the other on Sylvia’s, ready to start the singing. But the “usual suspects”—Michael Woodward, Eudora Easter, retired faculty members Francis and Peggy Plummer, and Gregory van Buren—all stared at the big red CARPE DIEM. “I know,” she admitted. “Weird, isn’t it? It’s those martinis before dinner and all that wine during that made me write it.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Elizabeth mocked. “At my back I always hear. Boohoo. Boohoo,” and everybody smiled. Except Bob, a mere businessman, who knew nobody expected him to know the reference. He glanced bemusedly at the cake, and then lifted his eyes to each face, one by one, around the table, beaming his thanks.
“Happy birthday to you,” everybody sang. “Happy birthday to yooooou.”
“We are so glad you were both born,” Michael Woodward announced.
SYLVIA, WHO HAD been careful for the last two days never to get far enough away from her parents to cause a reason for them to call her, had lost track of the conversation long before her mother had gone into the kitchen. Until her mother reappeared with the cake, the picture in Sylvia’s head of Christopher in his lean-to with the cell phone in his left hand and the forefinger of his right aiming at the list of contacts on speed dial had been taking more of her attention than any real scene she had been a part of.
But now Francis Plummer was asking her, “How does it feel to be eighteen?” sounding provocative, as if he were trying to help her discover a truth, the way he must have in class when he was still the most storied teacher in the school, if not the world, even more legendary than Gregory van Buren. She was sick of all those stories. And what did Francis want her to say? One day she’s seventeen, the next eighteen, and it’s some kind of magic passage?
She wasn’t about to tell him she felt nostalgic already. For her dad’s New York City apartment as her connection to the larger world “out there.” And because you can’t give shelter in a girls’ school to a homeless man, especially one who is maybe crazy. She’d been imagining her father taking Christopher into his apartment to give him shelter there. Even though that was definitely crazy and would never happen. Now her father was going to sell the apartment, she guessed, since he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. It wouldn’t be there for her to escape to. I feel closed in, she would tell Francis—if she wanted to. Sealed in by walls all around in hermetic space. Hermetic. Use it in at least three sentences, each differently structured. Everybody at this table was a part of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. Even Francis who didn’t teach anymore, a has-been, but still a legend. Now even Dad. Not one person from the outside. And she was still enclosed in the same old question: what college to attend? At least a month until the acceptances or rejections would be known. And then what?
Yes, her father had seized the day. Sylvia wasn’t so sure she was glad. She glanced across the table at Elizabeth, wondering what her reaction was to such a strange admonition on a birthday cake, but Elizabeth, still angry about the phone, refused to meet her eyes.
“In some states, reaching eighteen is when you are legally an adult,” Francis said, still prodding, wanting to know what made her tick at this stage in her life. That’s what had made him a legend, she supposed: caring about each kid more than about himself. So what? It was none of his business,
“In Connecticut?” Gregory asked, challenging Francis, like in all those old stories. He cared as much as Francis ever did about what made his students tick. “Let’s look it up. Sylvia, you’re never without your phone. Can I have it for a second?” He reached his hand out to her.
Sylvia froze for an instant while everybody at the table naturally turned to her, and she had no idea what to do. Then the idea coming, along with a huge relief, she patted at the back pocket of her slacks and managed to look surprised that her cell phone wasn’t there. “That’s strange. I must have left it upstairs.”
“Here, use mine,” Elizabeth said, handing her phone to Gregory.
“Actually, it’s the idea I was getting at,” Francis said. “Not which particular state.”
Hearing that, Gregory seemed even more interested in finding the answer. He thumbed in the question. Francis sighed an irritated sigh while Gregory watched the phone, waiting for the answer to arrive. Then, nodding his head: “Yes, just as I thought: eighteen.” He held up the phone toward Francis. “See?”
“So what?” Francis said.
“So congratulations to Sylvia, that’s what.”
Francis thought for a moment, clearly seeking a truce. “Well, I’ll second that.”
“And congratulations to Bob,” Eudora said, as she and Elizabeth handed their plates to Rachel for seconds. “He’s been a grown-up for a very long time.”
AFTERWARD, AS THEY were clearing the dishes, Francis edged close to Sylvia and whispered, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.” And later, in the kitchen while they were cleaning up, during another moment when they were out of everyone’s earshot, Elizabeth asked Sylvia,
“Was that close enough for you? And by the way, what are your plans for getting your phone back before your mother calls you and the shit hits the fan?”