Other People's Houses(66)
“Or a birthmark,” added Milo, turning to head back to his homework, this crisis having been averted.
“Or termites,” concluded Michael. “You might not always be able to see them, but they’re nearly always there.”
Frances threw a piece of spaghetti at the ceiling, where it stuck next to the one that had been there since before Lally was born. She waited, but it stayed.
Twenty-nine.
It was Saturday again. There was a kids book Frances liked, where the alphabet decided to wing it for once and go in a different order from usual. A started it off, but then one of the other letters got pissy and they all ran about and picked their own places. It got completely out of hand, but Frances often wished things could be more like that in real life. Let’s throw Tuesday out completely one week, and have two Thursdays instead. Tuesday is a pointless, soul-destroying day, the day when you’re brokenhearted that the week still has so much to go, and none of this work is going to do itself. Tuesday is the day you stare at the wall and wonder if you should have chosen a different major. A different husband. A different haircut. Wednesday you get your shit together emotionally because, let’s face it, you’ve been doing days in this order your whole life, and what’s the point of fighting the system? At work, however, it’s touch and go all day. But Thursday? Thursday you can see the weekend ahead and you get a second burst of steam and plow through everything so you can leave early on Friday. Frances gave this kind of thing a lot of thought, and if there were a “Random and Totally Useless Thoughts” category on Jeopardy!, she would crush it.
Frances was back at AYSO again, having thrown scissors against Michael’s rock. They used rock, paper, scissors to settle everything, and it had reached the point where they would throw the same thing for about six turns, then one of them would throw scissors and the other would throw rock. She wondered if when they were eighty it would take them thirty identical throws to get to a decision, which was another question for that Jeopardy! category, if Alex Trebek ever called. Occasionally she would play “crazy” rock, paper, scissors with Lally or Milo, where they would throw nutball things like shark (one hand making biting movements), spider (obvious), flames (upside-down spider), or rabbit (again, if you need a diagram this isn’t the game for you). She’d tried this against Michael one time and he’d vetoed it instantly.
“How can you say for certain that shark would beat scissors?” he had asked, incredulously.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Frances said. “Could it be that sharks are one of the world’s most efficient killing machines, with super tough skin and teeth that constantly replace themselves, and scissors—even if they’re incredibly, surgically sharp—are still just scissors? PLUS you would need to be very close to the shark to deploy them, and then it would just eat you. Particularly if you had just stabbed it with a pair of scissors, which it would probably consider unfriendly.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he’d said. “But if we start going outside the norms of rock, paper, scissors I think we’d be playing a dangerous game.”
“Rather than a childhood game?”
“Yes. Who knows where it could lead. You could throw karate chop and I could throw finger guns and all of a sudden it’s a Tarantino movie.”
Suddenly Frances got hit in the head with a soccer ball, which jolted her out of her pleasant replaying of Idiotic Conversations with My Husband, a channel she watched a lot in her head.
“Sorry!” A small boy ran up to her and retrieved the ball. “Sorry, Frances!”
She looked down. It was Lucas. She smiled. “No problem, sweetheart, I wasn’t using my head for anything right then anyway.” He ran off. Frances waved at Bill, who was standing on the goal line of Lucas’s game, and then looked over to see if either of her own kids was injured. She wasn’t asking for a broken leg or anything, a badly skinned knee would cut this shit short.
“Hey, Frances, anyone injured yet?” It was Lilian, clutching an enormous cup of coffee.
“Hey there, no, sadly, all hale and hearty and running around this morning.” Frances looked around. “Did you bring Mr. Edam?”
Lilian nodded, pointing one finger from her coffee-gripping hand. “He’s over there, watching Clare. Her team are the Pink Dolphins. He’s holding a Pink Dolphin. That’s how you’ll pick him out.”
Frances spotted him. “He’s very tall.”
Lilian nodded. “Yup.”
“And quite broad in the shoulders.”
Lilian sighed. “Yup.”
“And handsome and all that stuff. I can see why you’re ambivalent.”
Lilian clicked her tongue. “But look at him waving a stuffed dolphin! Isn’t that questionable behavior in a grown man?”
Frances shrugged. “I think it’s cute. I think he’s cute. I think Clare likes him, judging by the way she’s clutching him around the knees.”
Lilian smiled. “Yes, the kids like him a lot. Annabel wasn’t sure at first, but now it’s like he was her idea all along. I don’t know why I’m reluctant about him, he’s really nice.”
Frances shrugged again. “Because you’re as nuts as the rest of us? Because why let yourself be happy when you can get in your own way and question it? Because you feel guilty for being happy when there is so much misery and suffering in the world?”