thinking of thirty and beyond, haven’t any more time to spare. Their wartime training stands them in good stead. They are lean and strong. They are up at sunrise, uncomplaining.
“I like to make your breakfast,” Laura says. “I feel fine.”
“I can make breakfast. Just because I have to get up at the crack of dawn doesn’t mean you have to.”
“I want to.”
The refrigerator hums. A bee thumps heavily, insistently, against a windowpane. Laura takes her pack of Pall Malls from the pocket of her robe. She is three years older than he (there is something vaguely disreputable about this, something vaguely embarrassing); a broad-shouldered woman, angular, dark, foreign-looking, although her family has been failing to prosper in this country for over a hundred years. She slides a cigarette out of the pack, changes her mind, slips it back in again.
“Okay,” he says. “If you really want me to, tomorrow I’ll wake you up at six.”
“Okay.”
She pours herself a cup of the coffee he’s made. She comes back to him with the steaming cup in her hand, kisses his cheek. He pats her rump, affectionately and absentmindedly. He is no longer thinking of her. He is thinking about the day that lies ahead of him, the drive downtown, the torpid golden quiet of Wilshire Boulevard, where all the stores are still locked up and only the most cheerful and dedicated figures, young early-risers like himself, move through sunlight still innocent of the day’s smog. His office will be silent, the typewriters in the secretarial pool still shrouded, and he and a few of the other men his age will have a full hour or more to get caught up on paperwork before the phones start ringing. It seems sometimes to be impossibly fine that he should have all this: an office and a new two-bedroom house, responsibilities and decisions, quick joking lunches with the other men.
“The roses are beautiful,” Laura tells him. “How did you get them this early?”
“Mrs. Gar is in her shop at six. I just kept tapping at the glass until she let me in.” He looks at his watch, though he knows what time it is. “Hey, I’ve got to go.”
“Have a good day.”
“You too.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
He stands. For a while they are all absorbed in the ritual of his leaving: the taking on of jacket and briefcase; the flurry of kisses; the waves, he from over his shoulder as he crosses the lawn to the driveway, Laura and Richie from behind the screen door. Their lawn, extravagantly watered, is a brilliant, almost unearthly green. Laura and Richie stand like spectators at a parade as the man pilots his ice-blue Chevrolet down the short driveway and into the street. He waves one last time, jauntily, from behind the wheel.
“Well,” she says, after the car has disappeared. Her son watches her adoringly, expectantly. She is the animating principle, the life of the house. Its rooms are sometimes larger than they should be; they sometimes, suddenly, contain things he’s never seen before. He watches her, and waits.
“Well, now,” she says.
Here, then, is the daily transition. With her husband present, she is more nervous but less afraid. She knows how to act. Alone with Richie, she sometimes feels unmoored—he is so entirely, persuasively himself. He wants what he wants so avidly. He cries mysteriously, makes indecipherable demands, courts her, pleads with her, ignores her. He seems, almost always, to be waiting to see what she will do next. She knows, or at least suspects, that other mothers of small children must maintain a body of rules and, more to the point, an ongoing mother-self to guide them in negotiating the days spent alone with a child. When her husband is here, she can manage it. She can see him seeing her, and she knows almost instinctively how to treat the boy firmly and kindly, with an affectionate maternal off handedness that seems effortless. Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can’t always remember how a mother would act.
“You need to finish your breakfast,” she says to him.
“Okay,” he says.
They return to the kitchen. Her husband has washed his coffee cup, dried it, put it away. The boy sets about eating with a certain tractorish steadiness that has more to do with obedience than appetite. Laura pours herself a fresh cup of coffee, sits at the table. She lights a cigarette.
… the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
She exhales a rich gray plume of smoke. She is so tired. She was up until after two, reading. She touches her belly—is it bad for the new baby, her getting so little sleep? She hasn’t asked the doctor about it; she’s afraid he’ll tell her to stop reading altogether. She promises that tonight she’ll read less. She’ll go to sleep by midnight, at the latest.
She says to Richie, “Guess what we’re going to do today? We’re going to make a cake for your father’s birthday. Oh, what a big job we have ahead of us.”
He nods gravely, judiciously. He seems unconvinced about something.
She says, “We’re going to make him the best cake he’s ever seen. The very best. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”
Again, Richie nods. He waits to see what will happen next.
Laura watches him through the meandering vine of cigarette smoke. She will not go upstairs, and return to her book. She will remain. She will do all that’s required, and more.
Clarissa carries her armload of flowers out into Spring Street. She imagines Barbara still in the cool dimness on the far side of the door, continuing to live in what Clarissa can’t help thinking of now as the past (it has to do, somehow, with Barbara’s sorrow, and the racks of ribbons on the back wall) while she herself walks into the present, all this: the Chinese boy careening by on a bicycle; the number 281 written in gold on dark glass; the scattering of pigeons with feet the color of pencil erasers (a bird had flown in through the open window of her fourth-grade classroom, violent, dreadful); Spring Street; and here she is with a huge bouquet of flowers. She will stop by Richard’s apartment to see how he’s doing (it’s useless to call, he never answers), but first she goes and stands shyly, expectantly, not too close to the trailer from which the famous head emerged. A small crowd is gathered there, mostly tourists, and Clarissa positions herself beside two young girls, one with hair dyed canary yellow and the other with hair dyed platinum. Clarissa wonders if they intended to so strongly suggest the sun and the moon.
Sun says to Moon, “It was Meryl Streep, definitely Meryl Streep.”
Clarissa is excited, despite herself. She was right. There is a surprisingly potent satisfaction in knowing that her vision was shared by another.
“No way,” says Moon. “It was Susan Sarandon.”
It was not, Clarissa thinks, Susan Sarandon. It may have been Vanessa Redgrave but it was certainly not Susan Sarandon.
“No,” says Sun, “it was Streep. Trust me.”
“It was not Meryl Streep.”
