I stared right into the center of events or looked out to the frayed edge, she was time out of control. Certainly out of mine, perhaps out of Jane’s. I don’t know if I can speak for the rest.
Livvy hit the remote and the barking laughter went off and the screen went gray. Just then, Mona lost her balance and went flying, landing hard against Livvy’s right leg, pressing it against the chaise lounge. The cat launched off the end.
—Mona! Livvy complained.
—Can I get a bandage? I asked.
—No, I’m all right.
I crouched beside Livvy and asked if she wanted ice. Livvy had Jane’s complexion. Sometimes I stared at it too long. She had Jane’s energy, and Mike’s eyes, constantly framing. But she had her own blue hair, select piercings.
Before she could say anything, Mona told me:
—You have to crush the ice cubes.
I couldn’t find the hammer in the pantry. I tried pounding the ice with a jar of dry-roasted peanuts, but knew it might shatter. I got a box of Popsicles out of the freezer. Back in the living room, I looked at the bruise coming up and wrapped a dish towel around the box.
—It’s really okay, Livvy said.
—Can I have a Popsicle? Mona asked.
I had to list the flavors for Mona more than once to be understood in TV-time, since the set was on again. She picked raspberry.
—Can you peel off the wrapper?
Livvy said she’d do that and I went off to the kitchen to make the girls’ breakfast. I knew they liked the croissants that pop out of a tube and bake in an oven. Livvy and I appreciated the golden look, Mona wanted hers pale and doughy. Jane had picked up several tubes, which she had stored in the vegetable chiller. I made eggs, whipped up orange juice in the blender to give it the froth Mona wanted, and called the girls.
At the table Livvy pushed her eggs around with her knife. Periodically, Mona gave her sister’s plate a little bump.
Livvy didn’t react. Mona did it again.
As I lifted the glasses to wipe up the orange-juice rings on the table, I told them their mother had gone on a short working trip to keep up with her Peter Pan deadline. Mona stopped what she was doing and watched Livvy’s unbroken stare as she tracked my cleanup job. Livvy asked for details. I made up a couple of things to satisfy her. I couldn’t tell if she knew something, or suspected something.
Mona revved into a conversation about Peter Pan, saying she loved Tiger Lily, stressing the importance of the clock inside the alligator’s belly, the way it hypnotized Captain Hook. She loved the cartoon.
—Dad knows how to hypnotize people, she said. I asked him to hypnotize me, but he said it’s too powerful.
—I understand, I said, wiping down the stove.
—He can even hypnotize someone while they’re driving.
Mona poked her index finger into her croissant while I was left to picture this.
Livvy went out to the deck. She had barely touched her plate.
......
Mike overshot breakfast by a half hour. I had already opened my laptop and logged on to the Internet. An e-mail from my former employer, closer to making that job offer. Trying to move some money around to pay me.
Pop-ups. Urgings to gamble, to save, to insure myself, to lose weight, to find a car. One e-mail from a prospective human being, a leftover from a time when I had rashly listed myself with a dating service. He was a tall, bearded man who had answered most of his survey questions with: I’ll tell you later.
Do you have children? I’ll tell you later.
He wanted to know in this, our first and only exchange, if I’d consider relocation overseas. He had so much love to give, he said.
When Mike came downstairs I blanked the screen. Sometimes he exuded a manic, survivalist energy, as though he needed to get back to a delivery truck and all he wanted was a signature in the right place. That was how he hit the carpet in the living room. Maybe he was looking for something but didn’t know what to lift, how to pry it up. He gathered the mail and put it down unopened.
Mona tossed a red throw pillow at Livvy’s head.
—Mona. Settle down, Mike said.
—She’s driving me a little crazy, Livvy said to her father.
—We’ll go for a swim in a while.
—Mona, you need to go for a swim, Livvy said.
Mona went off to look for her swim noodles. Mike stood by the French doors. I couldn’t see his expression with the backlight. I didn’t understand his wavering movements, as if he were standing before a carnival mirror. He came back to where I was seated at the table, supported his weight on his arms, his back to the girls. He looked as if he wanted to say something.
Just then Mona returned to the living room, noodleless, and threw another pillow at Livvy’s stomach. I went off to the kitchen so Mike could work it out. There I curled my toes around the handle of a bottom drawer. The girls’ documents were still where I had buried them, under the cloth napkins; I hadn’t gone entirely mad. When I came back to the living room, I handed him a cup of coffee and some sugar packets.
Then I lifted one of Mona’s legs to get to the marble box on the coffee table. Some filtered cigarettes, some menthol, probably all stale. I think he took one to please me.
—I’ll be right back, I said.
I threw together the kinds of food stocked for such occasions: a couple of easy spreads for the leftover croissants, smoked salmon, strawberries with stems in place. The cheese I put on the breadboard with a single slice cut off. I tied on one of Franny’s party aprons before I realized what I was doing and returned it to its hook. I primped in the downstairs bathroom, where I found the old cosmetics. The pressed powder smelled of overuse, a skin slicked on its surface. The lipstick was a hideous gumdrop-red. I gave up and returned to the living room, still in Jane’s robe. I thought about true and false radiance.
The girls had gone to suit up. I watched Mike blow on his coffee, and look at me. We both noted the boxes. I tried to think about the chaos of sorting, but my mind began to stutter and misfire as we stood there. I fantasized him sending the girls out to the beach in a little while, that he would draw the blinds, climb out of his clothes, look halfheartedly for his swim trunks. I thought of objects from Pompeii. The bowl of a pipe carved into the shape of a man. I wanted to take a long draw from the pipe.
I started to hand him something to eat, but one of the strawberries rolled to the edge of the plate. I tipped it back toward the center as if I were trying to get a tiny silver ball into the dip of a child’s game. Watching it come to rest, I realized I had become awkward with him.
—What are you doing? he laughed.
—Balancing.
I said something about the beach being empty. Not a dog out.
Nearly
