Among the Ten Thousand Things (9 page)

(Though Simon would keep Donald out of it, he’d also managed a way of inviting the rest of the world in, with that stuff he’d said in the elevator, and now several of the building people, moms mostly, had begun to look at him funny. They looked at his parents that way too, and at Kay, though his family, surprise, hardly noticed.

The moms looked at him on afternoons in the elevator, where he felt himself cornered by their grocery bags and laundry baskets. He stared out the little round window with wire netting as the floors fell away behind it. Swallowing hard.

They looked at him and thought, Poor kid.

They looked at each other and thought, With a husband like that, might have guessed. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist, no. Doesn’t take a Freud.

They looked at their watches and thought, Two-thirty, what are you doing home from school?

16B was the only one to ask him questions. Like their medium, if he were a ghost.

She asked: “How are we doing?”
We.

And then not just questions but mottoes, like, “One day at a time.” This she said to no one, to the air.

Well wasn’t it what he wanted, attention? Yes, in a way it was. But just as important now was to show how much he didn’t need any. That he was handling it, without his too-young sister and too-dumb mother and his father who was the problem. And without 16B. Because he’d seen this story before, on night soaps and in his friends’ parents’ living rooms. He knew what came next, and he wanted to show the world and the building people, everyone, that he was ready. Divorce!)

Jerry and Elaine are married and living in Jerry’s apartment with George next door instead of Kramer. George gets a letter by mistake from a woman who is having an affair with Jerry. He goes to Monk’s to tell Elaine, and she is like, So? George says: “But she said she is sleeping with your husband! Jerry!” And Elaine’s still like, Yeah, so? LAUGHS. George says: “She said she wanted him to lick her on the nipples!” Elaine puts her hand on the table like she’s about to leave and says: “Listen, Peterman has me writing about urban riding crops. I don’t have time for this.” And George shouts: “She said she was going to suck him off until he came and that she would swallow it and that he tasted good and then that he should fuck her hard against the wall!” Everyone at Monk’s is staring at them. Elaine says: “George, I don’t know why you are shouting.” LAUGHS.

“What are you writing?”

Kay snapped back into the mustardy yellow bus rumbling down the West Side Highway, delivering her class to the planetarium. Two braids hung above her head: Chloe Haber looking over the back of Kay’s seat, squinting to read.

Kay shook her head, nothing, and tried to turn the page, but Brett Haber had popped up too, curious, and nodded at her sister, whose arm darted down and grabbed the notebook away.

“Stop,” Kay shouted. She turned around on the seat and got up on her knees. “Stop, you guys. Just give it.”

Up front Mr. O’Toole was standing with his back to the driver, counting heads. He had long hair for a man, and he was the one she pictured whenever anyone mentioned Shakespeare.

Kay slumped back in her seat, afraid to turn around again in case they were reading it. The year before, for her birthday, she had taken the twins on a trip to Six Flags. There had been room only for two more in the rental car, with her mother driving and her brother riding shotgun (her father, who’d hurt his shoulder and who didn’t like roller coasters anyway, had stayed home to ready the cake and streamers). She’d invited Chloe and Brett because at the time it seemed possible that they together would become her best friend or that she could become their triplet. But it is not easy to come between twins, who grew up with their own language and sometimes still use it, on long car rides especially, a language punctuated with laughing fits they swear are not about you but your brother, who has been very quiet in the front seat and is probably afraid of them.

Still, she could not look. What if they were looking at her? The bus was traveling south now down Riverside Drive, they were so near her house and she wished they would just let her off.

Maybe the twins could help. There were things in the box that she hadn’t understood. Maybe Chloe and Brett would be able to explain what, for example, was cuming? Coming? Coming where? And going down—again, down to where?

Across Amsterdam and Columbus, toward the park. The bus eased into the curved drive reserved for visiting groups, and Mr. O’Toole raised his voice over all their heads, flapping open a garbage bag and saying to bring their trash to the front with them.

The twins stood over her. Kay looked up but couldn’t quite tell. “Did you—”

“Don’t talk to us.”

“Perv.”

Okay then. Right, okay. Chloe pushed up the aisle behind her sister, whose hand she was already taking, leaning in to whisper. Kay looked into the seat behind her and found no notebook there. And from the Haber twins, word would spread, to Chelsea and to Jess and to Racky, which meant to everyone, and they would call her weird and a perv and gross, and the thing is, maybe she was?

As Mr. O’Toole’s students sat in the planetarium, watching supernovas become black holes under a great dark dome, Deb was passing the fountain at Lincoln Center, where water climbed and fell down a tower of itself, white in the broad day.

The guards smiled and nodded her in. They had been old then and were even older now. She walked around and down to the dressing rooms, through the maze of emptied halls. She didn’t come around as much as she used to, though when Simon was born the girls had all fussed over him, the little prince. None of them had children—they still were children. There were so many new faces now, too many to keep straight, ones that looked at her without recognition. And what faces she did know were changing.

“Sit sit, five minutes,” Izzy said, already turned half away as the door fell open. It looked like it would take more than five, with Izzy still in underwear and a bra bandaging her chest. She’d grown so small. When they’d danced together, Deb had been the thinner one.

They were going to lunch because each had been waiting for the other to cancel. Making dates only to call them off, it was how they kept in touch.
You’re the only one I don’t feel bad about bailing on,
Izzy had told her once,
because you’re like me and I know you don’t mind.
The comparison flattered Deb, and it was true, that for her there was a sense of relief in finding her time unexpectedly free, in being allowed off duty.

But Deb, today, had not canceled. She thought it might be good to talk to Izzy, who’d known her when. “I thought you’d be in Saratoga?”

“Oh, I’m going, I’m going,” Izzy said, as if Deb were the one dragging her.

Sixteen years ago almost exactly, Deb had been in Saratoga too, rehearsing
Serenade.
She’d left the studio feeling dizzy and walked alone down the hill to the family-owned drugstore in town. There were pregnancy tests swaddled in a Love Pharmacy bag under her bathroom sink back in New York—she often missed periods—but none with her there. She drank half a liter of water and peed in a public restroom and sat in the stall, still dizzy, until there were lines she could clearly see. Then the five-hour bus ride to the Port Authority, which felt interminable and also like no time, because next thing she was home and calling Jack, and next next thing there he was, there for her to tell him what, what is it? what? She knew by then what she wanted, probably had known for some time what, and the question was whether the universe would let her have her way, whether Jack would act as she wanted him to. (It would; he did. Remember that: Deb got what she’d wanted.)

“We’re doing ‘Diamonds,’ ” Izzy said, perched on a chair tipsy with dirty clothes. “Poor Ash had to do it with Naomi all week because of this damn leg.”

“I haven’t seen Naomi. She’s a little stiff, isn’t she?”

“Stiff? She’s a hulk. I have muscles too, but they don’t
show.
”

Deb leaned against the white block wall and watched them together in the lighted mirror. “They show a little.”

“I know, I know. I can’t keep it on. Anyway, Saturday’s the gala. I just want to stay home with the dogs.”

“Parties are nice, though.”

“It’s so boring and everyone’s so old. I’ll probably just start screaming.” She sighed and began pinning back her hair. “
And
it’s standing around all night that I really feel the tendonitis.”

Sixteen years ago, Deb had gone back to Saratoga to finish out the summer season and found herself at last set apart from the others, as the one who would soon be two. She’d never been a leader, but for those few weeks she almost led, by natural happiness, by what people called
that glow.
Quitting the company gave it back to her, the love she’d felt and the fun of it. She stopped worrying about steps and became part of the whole. The music was new again. And Lincoln Center, when she got back, became new. Chagall and his angels floating in red skies. The cratered limestone of the buildings that seemed to her made of moon.

“Oh my God, and how are the babies?” Izzy asked, rubbing a wet wipe in small circles over her skin.

“Huge. Adults. I wish they were babies.”

“Horrifying.” She leaned close to the mirror, peered into invisible pores. “That you gave birth to something that’s going through
puberty.
”

Izzy was a personality, and Isabel Davey an altogether different one. The ditz and the diva—together they owned rooms. Deb had always been told that onstage she didn’t have any presence, flash. Not an actress. Pretty face but shy, and serious. She couldn’t help it—she was
thinking.
There was a brazenness she was missing, whatever mysterious quality allowed Izzy to play make-believe in front of thousands night after night. Every year that Deb was passed over, people told her not to feel bad, that these things were so often political. But she knew she’d never get the politics to work in her favor. She wasn’t one of those girls, didn’t really have wiles.

“Jack’s opening was last night.” On edge just broaching the subject, knowing where it might go, feeling she’d confess everything.

“Oh poo! I’m sorry I missed it. If I’d known I was going to be here…”

“Really, it’s not—honestly things are a little up in the air right now, with Jack.”

“Well, I’m sure it isn’t dull.
God,
I miss that big, bohemian husband of yours. So smart you were, marrying someone just completely not from this world. You know, this is it for me. I’m not doing my legacy or whatsit any favors dragging it on. That’s what Ash says, and he’s right. Of course he’s staying, if you think I
like
the idea of him here all hours with Marina Slutsanova.”

“What will you do?”

“Get fat! Pump out a few kids maybe.” That was just how she said it, and Deb felt doors close inside herself. “And this book that already I regret.”

“What book?”

“Oh come on, I told you about it.” She was picking at a spot on her cheek where there was no spot, only cheek. “It’s my, not a biography, like a nonfiction—like memoirs. I’m writing it myself, and this woman from the publisher is helping me. Ash wants to do
Firebird
in the spring, to time it to the release.”

“Iz, that’s amazing. A book.”

“Mmm.” A hairpin in the corner of her mouth.

Deb looked away from her, looked at herself. “Do you want kids?”

“Oh, who knows? If I even can,” she said, her hands in her hair. “I’m just talking, don’t listen.”

That afternoon Deb dialed Jack’s cellphone, which rang unheard in the empty studio where he’d left it. Jack had spent the day working distractedly and didn’t realize he’d forgotten his phone until he was off the subway. Climbing the steps he had a few minutes to spare but couldn’t know it, and he set off in broad strides toward the planetarium, that giant, off-white aluminum sphere that seemed to levitate within a larger glass cube. The whole building had been redone about ten years earlier, paid for and named after a family that owned half of New York, his mother-in-law’s apartment complex included, and had done similar work for the public library and Lincoln Center. The building it replaced had been brown brick and had looked a bit like a high school; Jack had wanted not to like the new one, but he did. The right thing for a planetarium. Like the Death Star embalmed.

In the lobby area where school groups were meant to collect, Jack waited amid the rainbow minefield of backpacks. The bags were cartoon huge, packed to capacity even on a day when the kids didn’t need their books. They came in highlighter colors with reflectors on their outer pouches for crossing the street at night. Some were embroidered with initials: JSR, ASB, even SAD.

A clot of girls stood a few yards away, playing some type of game where it was his daughter’s turn. She was spinning around and around as a blonde with thin arms trailed behind her, hands clamped over Kay’s eyes. His daughter’s legs tripped right over left, and Jack realized the blonde was actually leading, dragging Kay, whose pleated skirt twirled too high and whose body looked reluctant to follow her head. Some sort of dizzying game, though he thought she was laughing. Laughing and crying can look about the same.

Jack started to dig around for his daughter’s backpack, which he did not think bore her initials but which he knew was pink. Pink or else red. When he found it, he hooked his fingers through the loop up top and looked to where the girls were still playing.

“Babe, let’s go,” he heard from one of the mothers, a woman in a long, black coat—though it was practically summer—whose approach to parenting seemed more assured than his own. She called again, “Babe,” and the tiny blonde who’d been fastened to Kay let go and galloped over.

“Move. We’ve got karate and your brother.”

The girl swung her head so her hair fanned out around her. She pointed at Jack. “He has my bag.”

The black coat descended on him, and then Kay was there too, but blondie hung back, like a shy person, though Jack didn’t believe she was shy.

“I’m sorry. I thought it was hers,” he said, pointing at his daughter. It came out strange,
hers,
like he didn’t know her name.

The blonde’s mother took the bag by one strap and slung it over her shoulder, where it hung incongruous with the coat. “How’s Deborah?” she asked, to show him that they knew each other.

“Great. Very good. And you?”

The mother nodded. “Well, we’ve loved having Kay over. We’ve loved having all the girls.” By which she meant, I have fed your daughter pizza and frozen waffles and rented her movies and put her in a warm bed or sleeping bag at night, and you do not know my daughter’s name. By which she also meant,
We
equals myself and my husband together,
we
who are happy, and
all the girls
equals we have a house with many rooms and are popular at PTA meetings.

“Thank you, yeah,” Jack said. “They’re good kids,” though they could have been monsters, how could he really know?

“Which friend was that again?” he asked when the black coat and blondie had left.

“Racky.”

“And the mother?”

“Arlene. Mom doesn’t like her.” Kay found her own bag. It was purple. A purple monkey dangled from the zipper.

Out she walked with her head down, not calling goodbye to anybody. Jack wanted to ruffle her hair but was afraid she’d pull away.

“So what’d you guys see at the planetarium?”

She shrugged.

“Isn’t it Robert Redford who does the space show there?”

“I don’t know.”

The afternoon was golden, sun filtered through the trees. They were on the edge of the park. “Hey, kid, it’s summer vacation. Want to go to the playground? I mean, to the pond there? Feed the ducks?”

She was watching her feet, fitting each step into the octagons that tiled the pavement.

“Where’s the fire?” He wanted them to have a nice time. “Ice cream stand over there.”

“No,” even though she did sort of want an ice cream. She was afraid that if she spoke more than a word at a time now, she’d cry. The day kept showing up in her mind in rushes, how on the tour her friends had kept as far as they could away from her and how at lunch they’d disappeared with her notebook into the bathroom. And how at the end of the day Racky had grabbed her with so much angry energy in her arms, like she was out for revenge, only Kay didn’t know for what.

They were passing the pink brownstone wing of the natural history museum when Jack tried again. “Let’s go in a minute. Let’s see Brown Bear.”

Kay was thinking she should have just said yes to ice cream, but she knew she couldn’t eat it in front of him. She didn’t want her father to have the satisfaction of meeting any one of her needs.

“Come on. We haven’t gone to see him in so long, he might be Gray Bear by now.”

She liked his bad jokes, but this minute she didn’t want to.

“Might be Geriatric Bear.” He felt her crumbling. “AARP Bear.” He’d recently begun receiving their mail at home.

A smile was near to forming on Kay’s lips, but really she didn’t want to smile. Smiling wouldn’t be true.

“Bet they’ve given him a cane.”

“Fine. Whatever,” she said, only to make him stop.

She waited for him on a hard stone bench under the
Barosaurus
while he bought tickets and found a map. They needed a map; it really had been a long time. They walked without speaking to the Hall of North American Mammals. Jack watched her out of the corner of his eye.

There was a deep-underwater feeling in the hall, lights barely strong enough to reach the green stone floors. The real brightness came from the dioramas, long-ago animals in faraway places. The bighorn sheep watched from rocky mountaintops. Two wolves were forever bounding through the snow. It was nighttime for the frozen wolves and their world glowed blue.

Brown Bear was really the Alaska Brown Bear, and really there were two, one up on his hind legs and the other on all fours, but it was the standing one they always meant, because of the way he faced them, looking interested and close to human, while the other chewed fish.

Something did seem changed about Brown Bear, though he was no older. Kay was the one who’d grown, and the bear was different to her for it. His claws, which had always been long and black, were longer and blacker and disturbingly thick. He was more real bear than she’d remembered, less toy bear and also less alive, as though her imagination could no longer animate him. Hadn’t he used to look directly at her? He looked now somewhere in the middle distance, and she got the feeling if she pushed him, he would tip over.

“Same Brown Bear,” Jack said. “You think he’s had Botox?”

She hadn’t wanted to show any interest, but she did ask what Brown Bear was like on the inside, and was he heavy?

“Not very, I’d imagine. You know, they take out all the organs—have they taught you taxidermy? Where they take all the blood and organs and everything out? They put formaldehyde inside to keep him looking good. Formaldehyde’s like Botox. Then they use a mold to make the form, so it looks just like the real thing. See how shiny the eyes are?”

“They’re real?”

“Glass.”

She reached down to touch the raised letters:
ALASKA
. “So it’s like what you do.”

“A little.” He wasn’t sure if he should agree to this. “A little bit. And this way he’ll last forever.” Jack leaned over to look at the bitten fish, how they’d painted the scales iridescent.

Brown Bear, whose eyes of course were glass, though Kay hadn’t realized it till now, it wasn’t his eyes that had changed but hers. She looked at her father, who’d changed too. She wasn’t sure why the things he’d done had hurt her, only that they had, but she could believe now, watching him, that he hadn’t meant to, and maybe that mattered. She was eleven, and it was hard to be eleven, but also she knew that eleven was young, and if they could stay this way, these ages always, like the bear, she wouldn’t mind, really.

There was an exhibit of live butterflies in another part of the museum, and they left Brown Bear to go to that. They stopped first in the Hall of Gems and the Hall of Minerals, where Kay wanted to look at sparkling things in their cases, pressing fingerprints over the amethyst and emeralds and yellow diamonds, pretending she was at Tiffany’s.

“Choose one thing in the room to take home,” Jack said, and she wondered if she’d played her game too clearly. “That one’s mine.” He nodded to the room’s highest point, up three carpeted steps where a block of brown-and-blue rock had been mounted. The rock was something weather had done to copper, with a rough enough surface to scrape you up bad if you heaved yourself at it.

Kay made a face. “It’s ugly.”

“Well, good, you can’t have it.”

She chose the Star of India, a milky blue sapphire with a star blooming out from its center. “Five hundred and sixty-three carats,” Jack read. He whistled. It looked like it would be warm to hold.

They went quickly past the meteors, more things Jack might take home with him; the early monkey people so shamefully naked; and the American Indian collection, totem poles and grim little masks carved from wood.

At last they reached the butterfly conservatory, with sun-lamps that hung from the ceiling. Their eyes had to adjust at first to the colors—magenta and violet buds, so many greens on broad, waxy leaves—but then the butterflies emerged, or their eyes became able to see them. Shapeless white ones fluttered plant to plant like bits of tissue. A monarch perched very still on a plastic dish of something netted.

“It’s eating,” Kay said. “They eat with their feet.”

“How do you know that?”

“We did them in school.”

Beside a sign that read
DO NOT DISTURB FEEDING
, a brown-and-black butterfly was unrolling its tonguelike thing onto an orange slice. White stripes and orange dots festooned either wing.

Standing over a stained-glass-looking one, blue with black trim, Jack said, “You know people frame them, hang them up. No taxidermy required.” He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

She clapped both hands over her mouth, and Jack thought something was wrong, she was avoiding his eyes. Only then he looked to where she was looking, a little down. There was the monarch, moored but so gently on the uppermost button of his shirt, near to where a bowtie might be. It opened and closed its wings. Other visitors began to notice, to gather around him and pull out their phones for pictures. Jack stood still as he could, and proud, smiling like an idiot for other people’s photographs, smiling because he could tell that his daughter was smiling too, behind her hands.