Sleep, page 3
“This okay with you?” the man asked her.
So Margaret shrugged, okay. She followed him down the driveway and turned left.
“I’ll bet you’re a kid who knows all the shortcuts and secret spots around here. That right?”
“I guess.”
“And what’s your name again?”
“Margaret,” she said, then: “Margo.”
“Now, Margo: If you were the world’s tiniest goat, where would you go?”
“Well…I wouldn’t go far.”
“Right. Not on those stumpy legs.”
He whistled up and down while she thought.
“I would find somewhere with lots of grass…”
“Yup.”
“Or clover. Somewhere cool.” It was already too hot, the sun stunting their shadows on the road.
“I’ll bet that she’s barely made it off the property. Let’s do another sweep, yes? Of all the cool and shady places.”
“Okay. So—you’re Mrs. Ricci’s dad?”
“I am. I’m visiting for the week.”
“From Maryland.”
“Good memory. Baltimore.”
“Do you like it there?”
He thought it over, as if he was really considering the question. “I do like it, yes,” he said. “But my wife died, so.”
“Will you move here now?”
“Here?” They had come to the Riccis’ driveway. “Ha,” he said—not a real laugh, just the word for a laugh. “No.”
She felt like she knew what he meant. The brick house was too big, like the goat was too small. They were made not for function or survival, but for something else—to make an impression, to overwhelm or endear. Only someone very rich could have things so frivolously big and small.
They walked down the driveway around to the back, where they stopped and surveyed. There was the stone patio and the barbecue grill. There was the goat’s pen and its suspiciously wide-open gate. There was the wall of hedges that encircled the pool, and then beyond it the industrial-size lawn. On either side was a wild strip of nature—five or so feet of forest hiding the neighbors’ houses. Hiding the houses was the point of the forest, the only reason the trees had been spared in that landscape of grass and mulched flowers. This was the fanciest thing about the property—fancier even than the pool and the fountain and the pretend farm in the backyard—the fact that there was no visible evidence that other people existed.
* * *
—
“I’ll take the right, you take the left?”
Under the trees was a different world, things furling and unfurling, sprouting and decaying, green on top and black underneath. She skirted the poison ivy with its poison-waxed leaves. She was good at identifying which leaves were for sure poison ivy but less good at identifying which leaves were for sure not poison ivy, which made everything suspect and walking hard.
She bent down and peered through the branches, clicking her tongue like for a cat. The more she looked for the goat, the more she wanted to find it. She would bundle it into her arms and present it to the mothers. She was proud to have a test, a quest, a purpose. The dads and the boys had gone. The goat would bleat, and she would find it, save it, keep it safe.
But it wasn’t there. Maybe it didn’t want to be found. She had gone all the way down to the end of the lawn and all the way back up again, and she was thirsty. On the other side of the yard she could see the old man doing the same thing as her. Walking and stooping and looking and walking again. She could take a break. She wouldn’t get in trouble for that. She would go put her feet in the pool.
She walked through the gate in the hedge, kicked off her sandals, and sank her feet into the water. Immediately she felt less thirsty. She swished her legs up and down so the cold got in around every toe. Then she looked up. The goat was lying under one of the deck chairs.
In the slats’ striped shadows it looked weirder and wilder than she’d remembered. She’d imagined it a sweet lamb, all silky wool and soft rooting nose, like the lamb that sat in Mary’s lap in The Secret Garden. But it wasn’t a lamb, it was a goat, and not just a goat, a pygmy goat. She had thought that being small and fragile would make it cute, but up close it wasn’t cute at all. It had dirty gray hair and odds-and-ends-looking legs, joints that made her think of tangled-up bone, and staring yellow eyes too far on either side of its face.
She did not want to bundle the goat in her arms. It didn’t look like a creature that could be bundled. It looked like it might bite or die. She felt no desire to protect it. If anything, she felt the opposite: repulsed and somehow threatened. The animal kept looking at her, without fear or curiosity. The pupil in its eye was a thick horizontal line, like someone had drawn a strike through the eye, tried to cross it out to start over.
There was something wrong with the goat, or something wrong with the world to have made it. Its defenselessness was a kind of test, a test that everyone was going to fail or had already failed. The fact that it was so easy to hurt made her feel that someone, maybe Margaret, would have to hurt it. The sun caught the gold on its collar and glinted. Silently, she crept out of the hedges.
4
The old man had been the one to return the goat to the pen. He didn’t pick it up. He just hooked a finger under its collar and tugged until it came. He gave Margaret full credit. “Genius,” he said, though she’d explained it was an accident. He hit his forehead with his palm and sighed at the grown-ups’ stupidity. “Of course it would have been lounging by the pool, like every other kid in this family.” He winked, because kid was a pun, and getting the pun was almost as good as finding the goat.
Mrs. Ricci cried again when she got home and saw the goat. She ran to it and fell on her knees and nuzzled its weird face. The goat just stood there, tolerating the caresses, the flat line in its eye never wavering. Margaret and Elizabeth stood together at the fence. Elizabeth was still in her gardening clothes, and there was dirt on the seat of her shorts. Her blond hair was wild in the heat, and clipped half back behind one ear. Margaret risked a direct glance at her face.
Her mouth looked funny, like she was moving something gross around inside it, something she didn’t want to be rude and spit out but didn’t want to taste either. A heavy, satisfied feeling settled over Margaret’s head and shoulders. She and her mother had something in common: They felt the same way about the goat. They could never have loved it like Mrs. Ricci loved it.
* * *
—
As a thank-you for finding the goat—the poor baby could have drowned!—Mrs. Ricci invited them all for a swim after Neal and the Ricci boys got home from their camps. So in the early evening they went back, Margaret heroic in her Speedo. Philip was nice about it: “We heard you found Gambol. Mom must have been freaking out.” Jeremy held his palm up and wouldn’t put it down until she submitted to the high-five. She would have bet money that one of the boys had left Gambol’s gate open. If Margaret did that, she’d be dead meat, but in the Ricci family it seemed like no one got in trouble.
Soon the boys were ignoring her, throwing around a Nerf football, groaning when they dove and missed. Margaret bounced on the diving board, delaying the moment of entry. The water was so clear it might have been a sunk pool of nothing at all. She was just up there, mindlessly boinging. It was nice to be sprung into the air, to jump without trying. At the top of each bounce she could see over the line of hedges, over the prestigious lawn, and down to the road at the bottom of the hill with a tiny stop sign at the end of it as if to say: That’s it, you can’t see any farther. Then down she would go and then up again, ever-so-slightly higher.
She noticed suddenly that the pool was quiet. The boys were looking at her, watching…what? Oh god. Had it been sexy, what she was doing? But there was nothing in the Speedo, nothing to catch anyone’s attention. She came down from the bounce—it seemed to take forever to come down—and twisted her ankle on the edge of the board in her hurry to get off it. Water everywhere, water up her nose. Stupid pool water, why did it have to be so clear? There was nothing to hide behind but the bubbles of her own exhaled breath. She wanted lake water dark with mud; she wanted to be down in the weeds. She brought her knees to her chest in cannonball position and floated there, refusing to surface.
But suddenly, underneath her, two hands on her ass. She had never thought the word ass in relation to her own body before, but now for the first time she did, and just thinking the word seemed to change her body, as if the muscles there tensed into a new shape and would not relax again. Two hands on her ass lifting her up, up through the water and flinging her out of it into the air. The air stripped the water from her skin and her legs flailed open and so did her eyes. She was up in the green landscape of the hedges again, but not high enough to see above them. The black sheen of the boys’ heads went by below her, round as river stones. And then down she hit the surface halfway to the shallow end.
She had always loved being thrown in the pool. Her dad would toss her and she’d buoy up laughing, demand to be thrown again. But this was different.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“Just messing around,” Jeremy said.
She looked at Neal. “Chill,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to her or to Jeremy.
“Hey, catch,” Philip called, and held the football up in one hand, cocked it back, mimed the spasm of an arrested pass. But his brother ignored him, and so did hers. “Hey, Jeremy,” Philip tried again. “Let’s play.”
Jeremy lowered himself so that only his nose and eyes were above the surface.
“I don’t want to be thrown,” she said.
He ducked his head under and swam. Something about his too-broad white back coming toward her freaked her out. It was like a shark but grosser. The ripples made the edges of the colors wiggle, the blue of the tiles penetrating the skin and the skin penetrating the tiles. He just wanted to play. He wanted to toss her in the air like a football. What was the big deal? But she thought she couldn’t bear for him to touch her again. She kicked backward, but there was nowhere to go; she was trapped between the pebbles of the pool wall and the smooth, rubbery wetness of his body.
“What the fuck did you do?” Jeremy shrieked. Now Jeremy was the one sputtering out of the water like something had shocked and hurt him there. Across his chest and shoulder were red lines, dark with blood, each scratch surrounded by spreading, stinging, valentine-pink, as if trimmed with a border of ribbon. She lifted a dripping hand out of the water and turned it around, inspected her fingernails. A lot of his skin must be under there.
Right then the mothers walked up. Margaret swished her hand underwater. Mrs. Ricci had a pitcher and cups on a tray, Elizabeth a pile of white towels in her arms. Behind them came the old man. The mothers looked young in an ancient way, Margaret thought, like serving girls painted on a wall. She looked hard at the mothers so she didn’t have to look at Neal or Jeremy. She thought the word mural. No, fresco. It had something to do with their bare shoulders, and the miniature green leaves of the hedge behind them, and the white stone under their sandals. They looked like serving girls painted on a fresco in a temple in Rome, which was a place Elizabeth had visited as a girl and always wanted to go back to, because that’s where you could really see history, in the ruins.
Elizabeth placed the towels down on a chair and then she saw Jeremy. She looked from the cuts to Margaret and back again.
“You’re bleeding,” Mrs. Ricci said.
“Margaret! Did you do that?” Elizabeth assumed it was Margaret, and this time she was right. She looked at Neal, and he shrugged: Yeah, it was her.
“Why were you playing so rough?”
“He threw me,” she said.
“So?” asked Elizabeth, genuinely baffled. “Apologize to Jeremy. You hurt him!”
Whatever credit she had gained with Mrs. Ricci for finding the goat was gone. She had saved the goat but scratched—perhaps scarred—her son. He heaved himself out of the pool like a wounded soldier coming out of some trench in her dad’s war movies. The mothers bustled around him. They pressed a white towel against his chest, as if they needed further proof that the blood was real. When it came away red, they looked even more surprised.
The old man had sat down on a lounge chair, and he was looking at his daughter, who was looking at her son. Margaret couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He wore the same short-sleeved button-up but had exchanged his boots and blue jeans for swim trunks. His white legs were skinnier than she would have expected. Under his chair, the shadows lay in jungled stripes.
Elizabeth stepped to the edge of the pool. The sun was behind her. “Apologize,” she said. Her hands twitched, but she couldn’t reach Margaret; she was too deep in the water. “Come here right now and say sorry.”
Margaret took a step forward but then stopped. No. She wouldn’t come. She wasn’t sorry. She had made those marks in the surface of the world. She had not been thrown again.
She backed away instead, step by step, to the far side of the pool.
Mrs. Ricci had her hands on her face again; apparently that was just a thing she did, it didn’t take much. Margaret hated her then, and the old man too, who had been so nice but now couldn’t possibly like her anymore. Even Elizabeth had made a fuss about the goat, and now Margaret hated her most, for being so concerned that it was safe, for joining in the motherly fluster.
“Come back here this instant. Come back here or you’ll be—”
Margaret had reached the other end of the pool. She put her palms behind her on the edge, lifted and scooched her new ass backward.
“Margaret, don’t you dare.”
But she was running for it, running home, not bothering with a towel, through the hedges and down across the lawn, grass clippings sticking to her feet and legs, knee-socked in the cut-down green.
5
The next day they went to the mall. They needed new shoes for the school year, new jeans and tops too, and Elizabeth didn’t want to leave it to the last minute. Their dad was supposed to come—he’d told Neal they would go to Brooks Brothers together—but had too much work at the last minute, so it was only the three of them, the children and their mother.
Margaret was bothered by the mall. There were so many things she wanted, but she couldn’t have everything—it had to be something Elizabeth approved of, and even within that category it was so hard to decide: Why this thing over that thing? And still when they walked into the expensive air, she wanted it, that, maybe that thing over there.
The mall was a square, and the stores were arranged in order of ascending (or, if you walked in the other direction, descending) expense. You could start at Old Navy, where the shirts were piled in bins, and then walk up to the Gap, where the same shirts were on hangers, and then to J.Crew and Banana Republic, with their soft sweaters forever refolding. In Abercrombie & Fitch, body spray hung in the dark rooms like rain. Would Victoria’s Secret have training bras? She was too embarrassed to ask; the posters out front were angel porn, and Neal was openly staring.
Finally, at the pinnacle, was Nordstrom. Oh, Nordstrom! At Christmas they bought gloves from glass cases for their oldest relatives. As if it were another century, it even sold hats—hats for horse races, with wide brims and ribbons, and jaunty black ones that could be meant only for lady detectives. Margaret had never seen anyone shopping for hats, but it was crucial that the hats be there. From the Estée Lauder counter they would buy Elizabeth’s face cream in its precious white jar. And then they would go up the elevator to the floor where Elizabeth bought her dresses.
Elizabeth did not believe in the color black. She did not believe in anything cheap or skimpy. If it didn’t cost enough, she wouldn’t buy it. She liked a tailored sundress. She liked buttons and belts and visible stitching and silk linings. When she really loved a dress she would buy it in multiple sizes—a six for herself, a zero for Margaret, and a two for Margaret to grow into. This was why Margaret had many dresses that would have been appropriate for a husband’s boss’s cookout or an evening at the theater but none of the low-rise khakis (cheap) or spaghetti-strap tops (skimpy) that she deeply desired.
After an hour in the mall Margaret no longer desired anything except to be free of desire, to desire nothing ever again. By the time they made it to the shoe section she was the new owner of a knee-length A-line belted sundress in blue and white toile that would have to be taken in because she was too short-waisted and a duckling yellow sheath dress with a matching cap-sleeved jacket that Elizabeth called a bolero. Neal had three sweaters that he wouldn’t be able to wear for three more months. Her throat hurt. She felt like she was breathing in the threads of his sweaters, some airborne slurry of acrylic fibers and ground-down sequins. Her throat was like the inside of a sleeve. She wanted to sit down; she really wanted to sit down.
* * *
—
“My daughter despises shopping.”
“I don’t, I’m just tired.”
“Oh, you’ll see, she hates it.”
“Mom, please don’t tell people that. I really don’t.”
The salesman, on his knees to check her size, had big wrists and quills of gel-hard hair and a firm hold on Margaret’s ankle. “We’ll just have to change her mind, then, won’t we?”
Margaret’s feet were right on the line. She could wear the largest kid sizes or the smallest adult size. How to proceed? She definitely wasn’t going to wear light-up Disney sneakers, but she wasn’t going to wear purple velvet stilettos either. She finally chose a pair of navy Adidas that showed up on both sides of the age divide, which seemed therefore ageless, and which were very similar, actually, to a pair Danny had worn the year before. “I love them,” she said, and kissed Elizabeth’s cheek. “Thanks, Mom.”
