Strangers at the Feast (28 page)

Then everyone, Denise included, had to agree that Masood seemed quite nice and normal.

“Did you hear about that Muslim teacher at Jefferson that vanished?” Douglas asked a few nights later. “There was a piece in the paper. He went to Brown, but his family apparently still lives in Jordan. Either the guy is a psycho Arab criminal, or a total victim.”

She considered telling him everything. Confession was in the air then. People wanted to come clean, to repent. “We had lunch a few times,” she said.

“And he never said anything like ‘I hate this satanic, capitalistic American macaroni and cheese’?”

“I’m glad to hear you joking.”

They lay in bed. Douglas touched her cheek, his hand warm and clammy. “You and the kids mean everything to me, you know that? My job, the long hours, the commuting, I know I’m not around as much as you’d like, and I know I’ve screwed some things up. But I’m doing it for us.” In the soft glow of the night, she saw his eyes fill with tears. “This, you, it’s my whole world.”

For months, at the gym, at cocktail parties, all anyone talked about was 9/11. Denise watched the news, listened to the theories and accusations. But no matter how many warnings she heard, no matter how many red alerts she saw flash across the screen, she never felt as afraid as she was supposed to. She didn’t buy gas masks. She didn’t put
a change of clothes into the emergency duffel. Because when she lay in bed at night, looking back on the past year, she realized the loss of all that money and the prospect of her children growing up poor had terrified her more than the ghastly scenarios described on the news. And Douglas seemed more afraid of screwing up their finances again and of her walking out on him than he was of terrorists. And yet they moved into a larger house, they soon conceived Laura, and for a while they stopped speaking about what really terrified them. They’d found a bogeyman.

It was around that time Douglas bought the gun.

ELEANOR

What a moment of absolute delight, thought Eleanor, when the smell of roasting turkey finally drifted into the living room. The light through the windows had faded to black, the football game had ended, and Douglas and Gavin were arguing about some final throw. Their team had lost and they sat frowning at the blank television screen. Douglas finally slapped his thighs and thumbed a remote control that turned on each lamp. Piece by piece, the room came to life with soft yellow cones of light, revealing the twins, exhausted from shouting at the screen, blinking groggily.

“Anyone for Ping-Pong?” she asked.

Laura climbed down from her chair, grabbed a box from the corner, and splayed herself out on the thick white carpet. She began assembling a gray, plastic castlelike house that looked shockingly like her own.

“Well, what a simply delicious smell,” Eleanor said. “Has anyone ever smelled anything so scrumptious? Rosemary and tarragon.”

“You know, he could have an injury,” said Douglas.

“Who has an injury?” she asked.

“The way Favre was running. Something has to explain it.”

“Son, sometimes the underdog takes it,” said Gavin, retrieving something from beneath the sectional.

She could see Denise stride from the kitchen to the table suspending the platter above her shoulder like a waitress; Ginny trailed cradling two loaves of French bread.

Eleanor rushed to help.

“We’ve got it, Eleanor,” said Denise. “Just go ahead and grab a seat.” Normally, Eleanor sat at the table’s head, but since it was not her house, she opted for one of the sides.

The silver pitcher steamed with gravy. A pile of golden corncobs glistened with butter. And yet the excitement that had carried her like a wave all day, the anticipation of this very moment—her entire family sitting down together for a meal—was beginning to falter. The sun had set, and soon (she glanced at her watch; how late!) they would load their cars and go their separate ways, driving off into the darkness. Already, she saw the naked corncobs, the emptied gravy pitcher.

No, no, no.

Twenty-seven days until Christmas. Fourteen days until she bought her tree from Mr. Menand at Pinecrest Farms, before she could rescue from the attic the tissue-wrapped glittery orbs she had collected over the years from shops in Newport and Mystic and Cape Cod. Fourteen days before Gavin strung the beautiful white lights along the front porch, and, if she begged him, the front oak tree. How long before she could wear her snowflake sweater? The children mocked it—
Mom, is that an asterisk?—
but she refused to hide her holiday cheer. Masked men could torture her, they could throw her in prison with flesh-eating rats, never would Eleanor renounce her love for the holidays!

Because tomorrow would begin the slow, dull transition to normal. There might be a phone call to Ginny or Denise: compliments and thank-yous. But by Monday, Gavin would return to his office, Douglas would be too harried to take her calls. The days would get shorter, darker. Ginny would whisk Priya back to Mamaroneck. Eleanor would sit alone in her house, as she now sat alone at the table.

She poured herself some wine.

Get outside! Go do something!
her family always told her. How easy they made it sound.

She once loved nothing more than to wander in and out of boutiques, rummaging for a nice hat on sale, or to buy herself a cup of tea and sit and read her
Country Gardens
or
Family Circle
. But now she found it unpleasant to leave the house.

When had it begun, her slow exile?

A few years ago, she noticed that the music everywhere had become unbearably loud. In the malls, the angry thud of electric disco seemed to be telling her to stay away. The shops no longer sold her size, or the clothes were manufactured with so much elastic that only a curveless preteen girl could wear them without spilling out indecently.

Her friend Marybeth noticed the same thing: this menopausal cloak of invisibility. They were a forsaken demographic. Too thrifty in their mind-set to be courted by stores or manufacturers. Eleanor and her friends opted for wardrobe staples, plain gray skirts and ivory blouses, and clung, like the drowning, to the sale racks. They refused to exceed their credit limits.

So during the day, after getting the groceries, they would tuck themselves away in the quiet corners of their homes, browsing the Chico’s and Talbots catalogs—greatly relieved that when they picked up the phone and asked for a size fourteen there would be no teenage shopgirl to look them over, no slight sway of her long glittery earrings against her slender neck as she swore to herself that she would never let herself get that big.

For the same reasons, Eleanor rarely watched television: most characters were her children’s age. Women in their thirties who wore clingy sweaters and dusted for fingerprints. If a woman her age appeared, she was comic background. Or, in the serious dramas, she was dying slowly, usually of Alzheimer’s.

“We’ll give it a couple of decades,” said Marybeth, “and then we can all start watching
The
Golden Girls
reruns.”

But Eleanor preferred not to watch television at all. Even the ads erased women of her generation. Her friends weren’t nervous new
mothers trying to decide on baby food; they weren’t young men looking to buy cars. They weren’t fathers choosing family cell-phone plans. Decades ago, they had settled on the laundry detergent they would use until they died. After all, they were women still married to the men they met at nineteen. They were, by nature, loyal.

But Eleanor did not believe in complaining. She merely sat with Marybeth and other friends in one of their living rooms, reminiscing about the days they wore miniskirts—oh, how Eleanor had loved showing off her legs. The days when waiters promptly appeared at their tables and flirted. When salesgirls eyed their pocketbooks and asked, eagerly, how they could be of help. When they opened magazines and turned on televisions and recognized their beautiful, trim selves.

But Eleanor shook away any regret: she had been a wife, a mother. She had done wonderful and important things. How could she be sad that the world didn’t congratulate her for what was a reward in and of itself?

Still, she sometimes wished she had known that a time would come when the world would quietly brush her under the rug, suggest she kindly step out of its way. Perhaps she would have done more, gone more places, while she still felt welcome.

KIJO

Since the bang of all the car doors, they’d been flanking the threshold, listening for footsteps. But they had heard only the faint sounds of a television, which had just been turned off. They sat with their backs against two massive wooden doors, staring at the domed ceiling above them. Now they could smell food.

“They’ll be sitting still,” whispered Spider. “We gotta bust. Out that window.”

Kijo had been staring at the window awhile now; he knew that was what Spider would suggest. He had tried to will himself toward a vision of escape. A vision in which he swung his legs into the night and reached the tree. But the thought of all the empty space below, the weak branches on which he’d clumsily try to brace his feet, made him tremble.

“You know I can’t.”

“Jesus, Kij! They find two niggers up here, we’re dead. They’re gonna come up here sooner or later.”

But he’d make too much noise trying to climb down; or he’d fall and break his leg, lie there helpless. Either way, they’d come after him. “You go. The police catch you, they’ll send you to juvie.”

Spider sniffled, wiped his nose with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “I’m not leaving my ace.”

Kijo, who didn’t, in fact, want to be left alone, said nothing. But in the silence that followed, he could hear Spider’s breathing quicken, the nervous pants of a runner. Spider drew his knees to
his chest. Spider leaving was the only chance either of them had of escaping.

“Here’s what you do,” Kijo said. “Go out that window and down that tree, real quiet, and make your way to the van.”

“I ain’t leaving—”

“Then fast as you can, get back here and create a diversion. Get in that van and start blaring that horn. Drive in circles till they all come pouring onto the lawn. Drive up on the lawn, do figure eights, make like you’re crazy. I’m gonna come down the stairs and find a back door. Give me ten minutes after your diversion and I’ll find you in the van back in the woods and we ride off. If I don’t come in time, I’ll meet you back on Merrell Ave.”

Spider, who had been steadily rocking while Kijo detailed the plan, came to an abrupt stop. “Kij, what if they get in your way?”

“They’re gonna be so worried about the crazy nigger on their lawn, they won’t be looking at the stairs.”

Spider thought for a minute, then tugged the panty hose back over his head. “Dinner with Grandma Rose, right?”

Kijo fought back his mounting terror, tried to steady his voice. “I’ll see you outside.”

Spider jumped to his feet and made his way across the room. Beside the dark window, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial; he snapped the cap, peeled his panty hose back, and took a sniff.

“You can rip me later.”

Spider lifted the window, and then, without another word, Kijo’s best friend disappeared into the night.

GAVIN

The game had depressed him. Watching those young players run and tackle made him feel old. Even the fans in the bleachers, jumping at every touchdown in the bitter cold, were half his age. His knee, he had to stop thinking about his damned knee.

Gavin settled back and thumbed through the journal for Ginny’s article. “The Emasculation of the American Warrior.” Some title. What did his daughter know about warriors, or war?

The print was small—he’d forgotten his glasses—so he leaned close to read:

The hunter theory of human evolution has long been used to explain the societal phenomenon of male aggression and female submission, and modern-day gender roles. Believing that early hominid males hunted animals for food, many have argued that females were forced to stay home and tend the young.

However, paleobiologist Joel Pethica recently proposed that the turning point in hominid evolution came 3 million years ago when climate changes pushed our ancestors out of the trees and into the predator-infested savanna. Pethica argues that it was not the need to hunt that prompted hominid evolution (
Australopithecus afarensis,
he points out, lacked the dental adaptation to eat meat and probably lived primarily off seeds, tubers, and vegetation). Instead, the need to defend
against man-eating animals caused the development of the hominid brain.

Primates, and humans especially, lack the sharp teeth of large felines, the tough skin of elephants, the lancing horns of buffalo, the swiftness of antelopes; the great strength of the hominid lies in its gray matter. Menacing predators would have forced hominids to band together, making threatening noises and gestures as modern-day campers will do with a bear. Over time, the need for vigilance would have brought about group living, language, community, kinship, family. Even Darwin argued that if early humans had been tough enough to withstand predators on their own, they might never have evolved as social animals. Safety in numbers.

The family unit, therefore, actually emerged as a means of defense.

It is unlikely in a predator-laden environment that males would have gone off to hunt, leaving women and children alone; more plausible is that the kin network and family unit remained together, with both sexes scavenging for meat and defending the young. In a predator-infested environment, successful mothering would include the ability to repel attackers.

Scientists now recognize that humans were preyed upon almost as soon as they began walking upright 3 million years ago. In fact, 6 to 10 percent of early human fossils show traces of teeth or talon marks. Only three hundred thousand years ago, with the widespread use of controlled fire (sites in Israel, China, and South Africa yield lower Paleolithic evidence of charred wood and seeds), could humans begin to shed their terror of nocturnal menaces. Only fifteen thousand years ago did our ancestors develop effective action-at-distance weapons such as the bow and arrow. And only in the past two thousand years did humans fully eliminate their predators—allowing them to become full-time predators.