Other People's Houses(20)

“A kind of ‘once I was the student, now I am the master’ kind of thing?” There was a pause, and Lili grinned. “Sorry, it all goes back to Star Wars for me, you know that.”

“Yeah,” said Frances. “But it is kind of like that. Like when you’re teaching them to ride a bike and you’re running along behind and then suddenly you feel them get it, and they glide away and that’s something you’ll never get to do again.”

Lili gestured to the waitress, who came over. “Can I get another chocolate croissant? And another latte. Thanks.” The waitress looked at Frances, who shook her head. Lili continued, “But you want her to be independent, right? You want her to make decisions for herself.”

“Of course. She’s fourteen, it’s time for her to do it. I just didn’t think she would take over so suddenly and completely. I’m worried that there’s something going on, and now I don’t know how to bring it up.” She told Lili about running into Ava at school. Lili frowned at her.

“Well, it doesn’t sound like you’ll need to bring it up. She’ll give you the third degree the minute she gets out of school.” She smiled at the waitress, and took a bite of her second croissant. “Jesus, why do they make these things so delicious while at the same time offering kale salad and green smoothies? How am I supposed to pick that over this?” She paused and reached across the table, brushing at something on Frances’s arm. “You have a . . . mark . . . on your arm. Doodling on yourself again?”

Frances looked at where she was pointing and smiled. “I never told you that story?” Lili raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “That’s where my brother stabbed me in the arm.”

“Uh, no, I’m pretty sure you never mentioned that. I didn’t even know you had a brother.”

“I don’t really have him anymore. He died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Frances looked at the tiny blue-gray dot on her inner arm. “He was younger than me and I was supposed to be helping him with his homework. He was being his usual pain-in-the-ass self and procrastinating using every trick in the book, including sharpening his pencil to the point where the lead was longer than the wood, do you know what I mean?”

Lili nodded. “Sure.”

“And I kept bugging him and getting more and more impatient and eventually he stabbed me in the arm with his pencil.”

“Seems a little harsh.”

“Worse still, the lead was so long it just stuck there, standing straight up, as a single drop of blood oozed out and ran down onto the kitchen table. It wasn’t really painful, but it was visually pretty impressive.”

“What did he do?”

“Howled and begged me not to tell Mom.”

“And did you?”

“Of course. And the lead broke off in my arm and left this mark which, now that I look at it closely, is starting to fade.” She touched it with her finger, her skin totally smooth and soft on her inner arm. “He died a few years after that, but I always think of him when I see this.” An image of her brother gazing in horror at the blood jumped into her head and she smiled. She looked up at Lili and wanted to change the subject. “Hey, I heard you’re dating someone, is that true?” Lili had lost her husband in a car crash. Frances knew that, but she didn’t know much more than that. It had happened before they had met, when the kids were very small, she thought. All these losses, all in the past, but still present every day.

Lili made a face. “I guess so. I don’t know. Yes, I am. I think. Not really.”

Frances laughed. “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.”

“It’s really early, it just started over the summer. I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“What’s his name? Tell me details.”

Lili sighed. “His name is Edward. He’s Dutch.”

“Is he stoned all the time?”

“No. Nor does he wear clogs. He’s a gardening teacher. I find him very, very attractive, but I just don’t know. The kids like him.”

“Well, that’s good.” Clearly Lili didn’t want to talk about this. “What else is new?”

“Lots, for once. I went freelance, I think my sister is going to get married, and the dog has worms.”

“Again?”



* * *



? ? ?

It was eleven when they left the café, and it felt as if they’d solved the world’s problems, if not their own. Frances considered what she could get done in the hour, and eventually went to the grocery store. Default setting: grocery shopping.

Frances and Iris had once spent an entire afternoon planning out three months’ worth of meals so that they could be sensible about shopping, and not spend so much money on food. It didn’t seem right that they had cupboards full of cans and freezers full of food yet never knew what to make for dinner. Yes, a first world problem, but still, a problem. Having made these extensive meal plans they both felt fantastically free to think about more important and useful things than groceries, but fell off the wagon about three weeks into it.

Why was it so fucking hard to be consistent about anything? Literature and popular culture were full of montages of people sticking to things, working out every day, practicing in leg warmers, carrying around railroad ties, clambering over obstacles . . . yet consistently sticking to a meal plan was apparently beyond her. Drenched in self-loathing, Frances pushed the cart around the store, hating herself for picking up Oreos rather than baking from scratch, for choosing Honey Nut Cheerios rather than plain because plain was over once her kids tasted honey nut, for buying wasteful and doubtless polluting tampons instead of wearing some kind of weird internal plastic cup thing. She threw in a big container of salad then immediately took it out. It would just rot in the fridge and when she threw it away she would feel guilty for the waste of the food itself and for the wasted labor of the poor underpaid fucker who’d picked it. It was all very well educating oneself about the trials and problems of the world, but it then became impossible to just blindly go on. At some point she’d decided to swallow the red pill and the rabbit hole just got deeper and deeper.