You Think It, I'll Say It(51)

“Ehh—I don’t think anyone would mind.”

I stared between them. I had felt certain that Karen would agree with me.

“Don’t worry so much.” Alaina punched my shoulder. “It’ll give you wrinkles.”

The second floor was a corridor with two rooms on either side, like a dorm, but none of the rooms had doors. Inside were bunk beds, as many as four in a row; I knew they made the families double up. The first room on the right was empty. I glanced through the doorway on the left and saw Mikhail’s mother hunched on a bottom bunk, painting her nails, her infant daughter lying next to her. I wondered if the nail polish fumes were bad for the baby, and as I was wondering this, my eyes met Mikhail’s mother’s. Her mouth was pursed contemptuously, and her eyebrows were raised, as if she’d sensed me judging her.

In the second room on the left, two mothers were sleeping. As I passed that doorway, continuing to follow Alaina, who was still singing, and Mikhail, who was still playing the kazoo, one of the mothers rolled over, and I hurried by—let her see someone else when she looked for who’d awakened her. In the last room on the right, Alaina found her audience. She knocked ceremoniously on the doorframe.

“Excuse me, ladies,” she said. “I have with me a group of patriots eager to show you their artistic creations. Will you permit us to enter?”

After a pause, one woman said, “You want to, you can come in.”

We filed into the room—there were so many of us that Karen had to remain in the hall—and I saw that Derek’s mother and Orlean’s mother were sitting on the floor with a basket of laundry between them and piles of folded clothes set in stacks on a lower bunk.

Derek yelled, “Mama!” and tumbled into her lap.

“Would someone like to say the Pledge of Allegiance?” Alaina looked around at the children. “Who knows it? ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag…’?”

“?‘…of the United States of America,’?” Orlean said, but then he didn’t continue; only Alaina did.

It was excruciating. When she got to the end, the room was silent, and I couldn’t look at the mothers. How loud and earnest we must have seemed to them, how repugnantly bourgeois, clutching at their children. I started clapping, because I didn’t know what else to do, and then the kids clapped, too.

It wasn’t just that the mothers intimidated me; they also made me jealous. I’d once heard Tasaundra and Dewey’s mother having an argument on the pay phone about buying diapers, and as she yelled and cursed, I couldn’t help but be impressed by her sheer forcefulness. The mothers’ lives were complicated. And by definition, they all had children, who had come from having sex. Even when they lived in New Day, a place where men were prohibited from entering, romantic entanglements found these women: problems they thought about hard while sitting on the front steps, smoking. Other people were so unsuccessful in fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students I’d known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians, then graduated with boyfriends—to give in to such love represented, for them, a capitulation or a betrayal, yet apparently the pull was so strong that they couldn’t resist. That was what I didn’t understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each other’s lives to mattering.

Another thing that impressed me about the mothers was their sexiness. Derek’s mother wore sweatpants and T-shirts, but some of the others, whether or not they were overweight, dressed in tight, revealing clothes, and they looked good: tank tops and short skirts, no stockings and heeled mules, gold necklaces and bracelets and rings.

Back in the playroom, Alaina beamed and giggled, and I could tell that she considered the parade an unqualified success. “Frances, are you always such a stickler for the rules?” she asked in a teasing voice.

“I guess I am.” Though what happened later might make this a dubious claim, I already knew that it wasn’t worth it to have conflicts with people you weren’t invested in.

“No hard feelings, right?” Alaina said. “It seemed like the moms were totally psyched to have us come through.”

I said nothing, and turned away from her.

At the end of the night, Derek waited with me when the others went upstairs, and Alaina said, “I’ll get the lights. You can go up.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m usually the one to stay behind.”

“All the more reason for you to go up.” Her tone was friendly, like she was doing me a favor.

“Actually,” I said, “I prefer to stay.” I was standing by the sink, and I turned on the water.

“You always wash your hands, huh?” Alaina said.

“Gotta watch out for cooties,” I said. “Ready, Derek?”

“I’ve noticed that about you, how much you wash your hands,” Alaina said.

I turned and looked at her, and I could feel that my mouth was a hard line. “You’re very observant,” I said. She took a step back. I said, “Derek, do you want to turn off the lights?”

Normally, I wouldn’t have picked up a child after washing my hands, but I liked Derek so much that it was a kind of visceral distraction; plus, it was a way of proving Alaina wrong. Besides, I told myself, I could stop on the way home to wash my hands again at a café on Eighteenth Street.