Heads of the Colored People(25)
Ryan had enjoyed the shopping less since Lisbeth started double-and triple-checking the labels and the receipts. Still, there was something comforting about the expansive space of a Walmart, despite the unrelenting brightness: the sight of an old woman with a heavy lipstick line drawn just above the vermillion border bouncing an orange in her hand or squeezing a melon for firmness, the heavy, genetically modified cotton shirts and sweatpants that came in extra-large sizes, the rows of colorful school supplies and greeting cards printed with animal-tested inks and artificial dyes.
So today, the trip to Walmart felt just as right as the Frozen-branded sleeping bag in their shopping cart. Lisbeth would want a point-by-point summary of their excursion, but she’d pantomime for the cameras, wait until the crew left to explode. He pulled Inedia out of the self-checkout line, the sleeping bag and pineapple still in the cart, and retreated back into the comfort of the crowd. “Let’s look at the toy aisle,” he said to Inedia.
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Per Mike’s direction, Lisbeth pretended to spell-check the post before pushing Submit and flipping through her handwritten notes for ideas for Wednesday’s installment. She read some of the ideas aloud directly to the camera, then explained that the blog had picked up a lot of traffic ever since she’d started including pictures of Inedia and the neighborhood, as if the images crystallized the rhetoric.
She stared at the man behind the camera in a way that Mike read as flirtatious before continuing, “When he first started formatting the website, Ryan was always whining that he and Inedia should have been in the picture, too, to emphasize the familial part. But I said, ‘As the principal researcher and author, I don’t think I should undermine my credibility with a traditional Western hausfrau picture.’ Now he doesn’t even want to be on the site—or in this show,” she said, lowering her voice.
“Talk more about that,” Mike stalled.
“Well, the blog was Ryan’s idea, but you would never know it. I had come home crying after a meeting with my dissertation adviser. After I passed my orals, she said she thought I should seek a new direction. Whatever. The IRB—this review board that makes sure you’re doing ethical research—wouldn’t approve of the project. So Ryan suggested that I choose a different official research project and keep my interests in detachment parenting alive in some other form; hence the blog and the vlog.”
She continued, “We’re like our own focus group. Inedia takes agency over her homeschooling, and she’s good—for a seven-year-old, she’s good. Ryan does the Web design, shopping, food prep, deals with the produce vendors. I told you about the harvesting.”
“You did,” Mike said, realizing that he was sweating. “Tell us about some of the stuff you put on the websites and people’s responses to it.”
They shot an hour and a half of footage of Lisbeth reenacting responses to comments on her various Internet platforms. She was not a good actress. She tried to squeeze out a tear as she recounted the “many, many people” who asked how any self-respecting upper-middle-class family could live like this. Mike still couldn’t pinpoint who she reminded him of, someone weather-beaten and frazzled. The tearfulness seemed insincere, but when Lisbeth cursed the entire child-welfare system of Palo Alto and Northern California more generally, her anger was genuine.
“I swear it was Alice Faye, two houses down, who made the phone call,” Lisbeth said, looking past the cameras and directly at Mike. “That was after the first time Inedia ran off and they found her in the neighbor’s yard eating grass. I could have made her a green juice if I had known her body needed the chlorophyll.”
Mike shot a look at the crew member who’d elbowed him. With his eyes, he said, “Just humor her for a minute.” He didn’t tell Lisbeth that they would incorporate content from the blog later, that her computer screen would interfere with the camera, making wavy lines; he let her keep talking for a while before asking her to try Ryan’s phone again.
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With the Frozen sleeping bag, the pineapple, and now a trinket for Inedia in his hands, Ryan and Inedia made their way back toward the registers. The self-check line was short but barely moved as customers struggled to find bar codes or as the machine told them to “please place the item back in the bagging area” and to “wait for the attendant.” Ryan thought what a spectacle it all was, how Lisbeth would criticize him for returning home with not only an Elsa bag, but one from Walmart, for his own kid, whom he took care of better than she did.
“Inedia,” he said—and realizing the unkemptness of her black curls, the crusty smear of something orange near her chin, he felt self-conscious—“don’t tell Liz where we got this, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, playing with a box of pink Tic Tacs.
“It’ll be our secret, like the others.” He nodded with her, almost wishing he could buy her some candy, something king-size and chocolate, but that would add to the number of secrets, not conceal it.
A woman in front of them, black and middle-aged, turned around and looked Ryan over, judgmentally, he thought. Then, still half turned to him, she said to Inedia, “That’s a pretty sleeping bag, sweetie. You going to a sleepover or camping?”
Inedia became more sullen when strangers spoke to her. She put down the mints and looked at Ryan as if for permission to speak, then said, “No.”