The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [89]
“Some help with the dishes?” He tries to make it sound like a suggestion, yet one that cannot be ignored.
“Sure,” Michelle says.
“In a minute,” Lisa says.
Nothing moves except their thumbs. He thinks of the heroine of Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, imagines a generation of girls with giant thumbs, hypertrophied from overuse. What he can’t imagine is his daughters hitchhiking. Not because it’s forbidden, but because that’s way too much effort.
“Leave the girls alone,” his mother calls down the stairs. “There’s not that much to do. And it’s easier to clean up when there aren’t so many bodies in the kitchen. Do the girls want some more cookies or chocolates?”
They look up, dazed. Certain words, such as cookie, can penetrate the force field around them. “OK,” Michelle says, as if conferring a favor. All three continue to sit.
“Well, you can at least go upstairs and get them yourselves,” Tim says.
A pause. “That’s all right,” Michelle says. “I’m not really that hungry.” But Doris is already bustling downstairs with her “goodie” jar, a huge Tupperware container that holds opened bags of cookies and a selection of miniature candy bars. The goodie jar is a long-standing tradition in her household, but Tim has noticed on recent visits that sometimes the items are quite stale. This was true even before Go-Go died, but it troubles him. He asked the girls not to mention it. They said they hadn’t noticed.
Doris spoils all her grandchildren this way. To be fair, she spoiled her sons almost as much. They had few responsibilities in the house and only marginal ones in the yard because their father loved his lawn mower and did not want to entrust it to them. They were savages. Or so Arlene said in the early years of their marriage, when she discovered that Tim did not know how to do anything domestic—wash his clothes, sew a button, scour a pan, run the vacuum.
He did not think Arlene should have been surprised. She had seen his apartment, after all, even pretended affection for his bachelor ways. But Arlene, like a lot of women, had one set of standards for her boyfriend, another for her husband. The difference was that Arlene really did manage to change him. Everyone said that people couldn’t be changed and perhaps it was all semantics, perhaps Tim had chosen to change. Still, he believed that Arlene transformed him by the simple act of loving him. Despite being raised in a household where nothing was expected of the males and everything was given, he learned to shoulder household tasks and, when the time came, child care. If anything, he did more than Arlene around the house because she left all traditional masculine chores to him. He was, after all, the only man in the house.
He often wonders now if his mother felt similarly isolated as the sole female in a house of men. In the years since his father’s death, Tim has put in a lot of time helping his mother create the pretty, well-maintained house she never really had. The basement rec room was one such project—white paint brightened the inevitable knotty pine paneling, his father’s beloved bar was replaced with a craft table, the crappy old sofa was tossed. He also helped her wallpaper the dining room and do some modest updates in the kitchen. Mother and son paid lip service to the idea that these renovations were geared toward an eventual sale. Yet Tim knew his mother would never move. Because if