Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [57]
She almost laughs and then she quickly speeds through a catalog of people who could harm me in this world.
—Rapists, arsonists, hackers—don’t laugh, I’m serious—identity thieves, murderers, for Christ’s sake, Ponzi artists, biographers.
—You have to calm down, I say. —No one’s writing my biography. And I can always take Mark along.
The clerk, who has been waiting for an opportunity to interrupt, steps over to us with an ingenuous smile and asks if she can show us anything.
—Cotton balls, I say, indicating my botched effort with the eye pencil.
All of my fingertips are blue with color. From a drawer this woman puts three cotton balls into a tiny plastic bag and says that will be a dollar. I give her a look but Allison pays out before I can stop her.
—You’re not the parent, she tells me when the woman has gone. —Don’t tell me to calm down like that in front of other people.
The lines around my eyes smear badly as I work away. But I catch something of Allison’s expression in my peripheral vision and know I better look at her.
It’s obvious that she’s doing her best to keep it together.
—This rule, that you can’t marry anyone else, it’s obscene, I say.
Not that I want another father, certainly not another gladiator.
—Uxor Totus, she says, almost in tears again.
—Do they just sit around someone’s back office down in New York and make this shit up by the hour? It’s probably botched Latin at best.
—It’s been harder lately, she says. —It’s been hard to believe I’ve made any good decisions at all. About anything.
—You’re fine, Allison.
—Look what I’ve done to you—this whole situation.
I hand her a clean cotton ball. She wipes her eyes. Threads of cotton stick in her wet lashes. I tell her to be still as I gently pull the bits of white out.
—I’ll take Mark with me to the match, and I’ve got the dress. Everything’s cool.
Sometimes it’s a toss-up as to who takes more energy, Allison or Thad.
—I’ve been trying to figure it out, how it happened, you know? I don’t mean the sequence of events but my complete lack of thinking. You know I always wanted to have a family. That was the important thing. That’s the one thing I can say I did right.
—I know that.
—And I didn’t go out and pick a Glad for a husband. You know that too, don’t you?
—Tommy kind of explained that.
—Tommy did?
She looks away, considers this, and continues.
—Things will work out, I say. —You’re just tired.
Maybe I say this to get away from the counter, from the store, the hunt.
I’ve started to have that feeling I get about Thad. I’ve called Julie three times already to check on him. But I just want to get home, make his favorite dinner, and watch something idiotic with him on TV.
I’m aware of my mother’s voice again as if she’s calling me from the far end of a hallway.
—You think you’ll ever be able to forgive me? she asks.
I’ve thought about what it would be like if she told me one day that she had screwed this whole business up. But I assumed she’d be eighty or something. Allison looking back. Allison’s work of creative nonfiction. And when I anticipated her atonement I thought I’d be relieved, that I’d have a sense of clarity or peace. I imagined saying I understood because in many ways I do and I feel nothing but sad for her. But now that she wants me to say this, my throat feels dry and I start coughing.
So we stand there with our eyes completely messed up in this stupid store on Newbury Street. I’m hacking away and she’s sealing and unsealing the bag that holds the last cotton ball. After a while I stop coughing and I can see she’s given up waiting for me to say something. Her arms kind of go slack and she hoists her purse up on her shoulder again.
And if I were to ask Allison to forgive me for something? Maybe it would be about cracking my head open and letting the monster out of my skull—the one that doesn’t want to be her. I don’t even want to pretend I do anymore. And that’s shearing right through the cord that binds us.
—We better pick up Thad, she says.
CHAPTER
21
We train in secret every night at five