Other People's Houses(10)

Bill sighed. If she didn’t want to talk about something, she wouldn’t. That was the way with her. She was like a cat, his wife, in many ways. Mysterious. Beautiful. Happy to be alone. And totally disinterested in pleasing anyone else unless she wanted to. Not in a mean way, at all, but in a way that didn’t expect anyone to do anything for her, either. He felt a mild frisson of anger, but ignored it. They’d fought hard for a long time, and now they were trying to keep the peace. He certainly wasn’t going to be the one to throw the first stone.

“The people at the agency didn’t give the Danish a backstory. The brief is simply this: ‘The music cue is twenty-four seconds long, should have a polka rhythm, and suggest energy and happiness.’”

Julie snorted. “Well, that’s plenty of background. The Danish enjoys polka music. The Danish is happy. The Danish feels energetic.”

“Which is sad, seeing as, presumably, it’s going to get eaten shortly.”

“Not that one. That one got plucked from obscurity to star in a commercial.”

There was a pause. He could hear her drinking water. “Is the cough really better?”

“I didn’t say it was better, I just said it wasn’t worse. It’s fine, don’t worry about the cough. Tell me about Lucas, what did he say this morning?”

“He repeated his request for a cat.”

“That was all he said?”

“No, he said he doesn’t like Cheerios anymore, then he said he wanted to wear different shoes than the ones I could find, and then, when he had me on the ropes about the shoes, he suddenly zigged and mentioned the cat.”

He could hear her smile. “Are we going to get him one?”

“Maybe. Maybe when you come home.”

A pause. “Or maybe if I don’t.”

“You will.”

“OK.” Bill heard voices in the background. “Hey, Adelaide just showed up. I gotta go.”

“Busy day?”

She sighed. “Same old same old.”

“Will you be able to Skype tonight? Lucas loved you reading to him last night.”

“I don’t know. I’ll text you, OK?”

“I love you.”

“I love you more.”

“I love you most.”

He heard her smile again, and then she hung up.



* * *



? ? ?

Lally and Lucas had apparently been hooked up to a sugar IV during the last hour of preschool, which seemed unlikely, but was empirically indicated. Both of them were in that state of little kid laughter where at any moment one of them might throw up. Frances watched them in the rearview mirror, torn between letting them laugh because, you know, children, and trying to calm them down so they didn’t implode. It was unclear why they were laughing, but apparently that shit was comedy gold. They were also amused by the enormous amounts of toilet paper and paper towels on the floor of the minivan. Momma went to Costco.

Of course, by the time they pulled up in front of Frances’s house, they were pale and angry with each other, and only the immediate application of an episode of Blue’s Clues (classic Steve, on Netflix) and some goldfish crackers settled the waters. As she made them lunch, Frances answered in her head for Blue, and wished she had a handy-dandy notebook. This world, the world of the preschooler, was where she felt most comfortable these days. After going through this phase twice before she knew resistance was futile, and mommy-ninja’d her way through most of the challenges Lally threw at her.

With a fourteen-year-old, a ten-year-old, and a four-year-old, Frances finally felt she had some kind of paradigm for understanding her experience of parenthood: Raising kids was like warfare. Not in the “dramatic death of millions” kind of way, obviously, but in the “struggle for peace” kind of way. Babies and little kids were like trench warfare. It was physically exhausting, psychologically draining, and there was a lot of flying mud and screaming. Shit went everywhere. Your clothes were ruined. You ate when you could, slept when you could, and got interrupted at the whim of the enemy.

Elementary-age kids were like campaign warfare. You knew there would be times of stress—like forcing a child to get a shot at the doctor, or to do their homework, or to give up on the concept of becoming a Pokémon trainer in the real world—but in between those intense sessions there was a lot of boring routine. One minute it would seem as though you were making progress, with promising overtures on both sides, but then two minutes later someone chucked a grenade and everything caught fire.

The big change, however, was what happened when the hormones kicked in. Then it was a guerilla war against an unseen counterinsurgency. Everything seemed much calmer on the surface, but any minute an improvised explosive device could cut you off at the knees or a sniper could get you in the back of the neck. You could never fully relax, and there was a lot of tiptoeing about and quizzing other kids for intel.

Sighing, Frances filled three little bowls with mac and cheese and joined Lally and Lucas on the sofa. She watched Steve do his thing, and continued her inner debate about how Salt and Pepper could have managed to conceive and produce both Paprika and Cinnamon. Salt was a crystal, pepper was a seed pod from a plant, paprika was also a seed pod. OK, so yes, she could see that, but cinnamon was the inner bark of a tree. She had wondered this before, which is why she had Wikipedia’d all that stuff and had, in fact, a fairly high level of knowledge about the international pepper trade as a result. It still bothered her, and she worried that Mrs. Pepper was a little tough on Paprika, especially once the baby came.