Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [149]
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Nancy said.
“No,” Marilyn said. “There’s an ashtray on the patio.”
She got up. As Sheppard passed by Marilyn’s chair she reached out to him, taking his forearm in her fingers and gliding her nails down his wrist and across his palm.
“We’re going to fix his airplane,” Sheppard said.
“Before you do that,” she said, “will you lock the patio door?” But Nancy was already locking it, the ashtray in her other hand.
In the basement, Sheppard turned on the light, led the boy over to his workshop, got his Elmer’s glue, and explained to Chip how to spread it lightly across the bottom of the wing, struggling to keep his patience as the boy squirted the white liquid onto the tabletop. “You have to squeeze it carefully,” Sheppard said. He found a bunch of clothespins in a bucket by his tools and handed him two of them. “Now,” he said, “how can you clip these on so the wing holds its original shape?” He watched, so exhausted he thought he might fall asleep right here, as the boy pinched the wing between the clothespins and looked to him for confirmation, thinking again that something was wrong with him. There was a fissure in his character that made him manifestly uncertain of everything. When he fixed the clothespins on each side of the wing, pinching it back into shape, Sheppard was sure that the plane was permanently crippled.
“Do you think it will fly again?”
“We’ll see,” Sheppard said, turning the plane upside down with the broken wing atop a tin can, the weight of the body helping to restore its aerodynamic line.
Chip’s shrug was a perfect imitation of his mother. “At least we tried,” he said.
Upstairs, Sheppard handed him off to Marilyn, who took him to his room, and then he sat down in her chair and crossed his arms.
“Are you cold?” Nancy asked.
“A little,” he said. On the television screen, a man in a suit was standing next to the Planters Peanuts character, talking to the mascot as if he weren’t dressed in an absurd costume, his only replies coming in hand signals and dance moves. “What are we watching?” Sheppard said.
“A brief word from our sponsor,” Nancy said.
“Is there anything else?”
“There’s a movie coming on in a second.”
Feeling Nancy’s eyes on the back of his head, he turned around and saw her lying on their sofa smoking a cigarette, the top two buttons of her blouse undone.
“I’m sorry about the boy,” she said.
“I am too,” he said.
“Do you dream about it—about things that happen to you during the day?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
He’d always found Nancy attractive. She seemed to realize this, acted like she felt the same way about him, and always spoke very intimately whenever they were alone. This, however, made their conversations weirdly stilted.
She nodded at him weightily, utterly stumped.
There was a time when he’d looked for sex everywhere, trying to sniff out discontent or interest in every woman he met, as if every interaction was like a door to a new opportunity, another possible reality, every conversation not about the thing itself but something else. Now everything had shifted back.
Marilyn came downstairs. “I think he’s going to sleep,” she whispered, then sat in his lap and buried her face in his neck, putting her lips to his ear. “He’s going to sleep,” she said, and the words themselves made him shiver in pleasure.
Behind them, Don clapped once and winced in guilt at the noise he’d made. “Sorry,” he said. “The Indians won,” and then he looked at Sheppard and Marilyn and then at his wife, who said, “I need some affection too.”
He cleared his throat and moved over to the sofa, where she laid her head across his lap. “How’s that?” he said, and patted her shoulder.
Nancy looked at Marilyn and shook her head.
“Well, it’s something,” she said.
The movie was called Strange Holiday and from what Sheppard could gather—with Marilyn nuzzling his cheek and neck—it was about a man who goes off on a fishing trip in the deep woods and returns to find the country taken over by fascists. He could’ve poked