Some Possible Solutions Page 14

  “Well,” I say, “maybe you can’t play on it, but you can walk on it. Go ahead, Lu. Walk on the grass. Walk on it. It’ll feel nice.” I push her gently forward.

  Lulu pauses at the boundary between the paved path and the grass. She dips her foot in its jelly sandal onto the grass as though the grass is a body of water with a dangerous current.

  “It tickles,” she whispers.

  “It’s nice, right?” I encourage. “It’s nice. Go ahead. Walk on it.”

  I place my own foot on the lawn, the prickles of grass poking up between the holes in my sandals. In a sudden fit of exuberance, I throw myself down. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized that Lulu is old enough to find me embarrassing. I can see the love and the embarrassment fighting on her face as she watches me. But there’s no one nearby, and I decide to go all the way. I fling my legs out and lie star-shaped on the grass.

  “Yodeleheho!” I say.

  “Danny,” Sarah says. She too is half-ashamed, half-admiring the way I am. The joy I can contain. She points at a second wooden sign: NO WALKING, SITTING, OR LYING ON THE GRASS.

  “There’s a guy coming,” Lulu says.

  “Hello, guy,” I say unconcernedly. But I stand up, hoping I’ve gotten at least a couple of grass stains on my khaki shorts.

  The Botanical Gardens employee changes course.

  “Does this remind you of anything?” I ask Lulu, gesturing wide to encompass the rolling lawn, the trees and trellises, the prettiest place I have to offer her. I’m thinking of a print book we like to read together, an old textbook called Flora.

  Lulu follows the sweep of my arm as it directs her gaze toward more green than she ever gets to see in one place.

  She grabs my other arm and looks up at me soberly, hopefully, aiming to please.

  “It reminds me of money,” she says.

  * * *

  I don’t know if Lulu meant money because money is green, is the sort of green she sees more often than the other sort of green, or if she already understands that rich people have lawns whereas people like us don’t whereas some people don’t have produce or computers or homes. I didn’t want to probe, back there at the Botanical Gardens, but my mood did a nosedive, that’s for sure, a nosedive that’s landed me in the concrete enclosure behind our apartment building at ten o’clock at night, but I’m not out here to dump trash or recycling, I’m just checking on the moon, orange through layers of smog. The moon never looked this awesome when I was a kid. I stand there looking at it, challenging myself to ignore the smell of over-warm trash, until the moon scoots a couple inches and gets obscured by the wall.

  On the other side of the wall, where the moon is still visible, the Stanhopes are splashing in their pool. I can hear it, alongside the noise of their generator, humming as it always hums, purifying the air on their lawn, incinerating the mosquitoes.

  How do I know all this about the Stanhopes’ lawn? Well, there’s a hole, believe it or not, a tiny peephole at the place where the Stanhopes’ amalgamated quartz and rubber wall meets the side of our concrete enclosure, a fact that came to my attention some months ago, a fact that I haven’t shared with Lulu or Sarah because what good would it do them to see this. It is a wrong thing, one of the wrong things, how near to each other the rich and the not-rich live. Steve Stanhope is an inventor, or not an inventor, an investor in inventors—he finds the scientists who are doing the cool things and figures out how to get them to the people. I think you have to admire that.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” the sons (twins) cry out as Steve Stanhope throws them again and again into the pool. I scoff at the irresponsible parenting—who lets their kids stay up this late? Sure, Lulu’s bedroom might be a cubbyhole carved out of our bedroom with a temporary wall, and sure, maybe I was a little wounded when Lulu proudly led a new friend into her room and the girl said, “Why is your room so dark and small?,” but at least we put her to bed at a healthy hour, and read her print books beforehand, and give her a little bit of the special organic kids’ toothpaste, arm and a leg but worth it, god, well worth it, for her. And now I’m remembering the time a few weeks back when I happened to peek through the wall during the twins’ birthday party, and who should I see there but Marshmallow—looking maybe a little bit cleaner, sure, but skinny old Marshmallow nonetheless, marching wearily up and down that lawn just as he’d marched up and down the sidewalk for Lulu.

  Right as I’m trying to get myself onto my high horse about what great parents Sarah and I are, Mara Stanhope steps out onto the patio in these soft gray harem pants, and I realize with a start that she’s pregnant, pregnant as a pumpkin but still somehow so lean, standing in the light of her double glass doors.

  Three children. Imagine that. It was already a luxury to have two. Even if we could somehow get the money together again for the fertility treatments (which no way could we), no way could we afford a second. It had taken Sarah two years to conceive. “Plastics,” the doctors explained. So you go home and it’s like, the yogurt’s in plastic, the shampoo’s in plastic, the toothbrushes are plastic.

  Mara Stanhope bore the twins surrounded by a pod of dolphins at sunset in the ocean off a black volcanic sand beach in Hawaii. The pics were gorgeous, and public, on the Internet, with her privates blocked out. DOLPHIN-ASSISTED CHILDBIRTH SUCCESS! DOLPHIN MIDWIFERY LEADS TO DREAM BIRTH! “It’s about coexistence,” Mara Stanhope was quoted as saying. “It’s about total relaxation.”

  “Boys!” she says now, resting a hand on her pert belly. “Aiden! Landon! Bedtime!”

  * * *

  When Sarah was pregnant she would always say, “I’m starving for something but I have no idea what it is.” One night I spy Mara Stanhope lounging on the torch-lit lawn with a tray of small bowls, eating a bit from this or that with a tiny fork, but I can tell she’s just like Sarah was, starving for something that hasn’t yet been tasted by anyone on this planet. She reaches into the stainless-steel cooler, then settles back into her lounge chair with plain old Coca-Cola in a can.

  “Hey witness,” Sarah says, coming up behind me.

  I startle. It’s nearly midnight—Lulu has been in bed for hours, and so has Sarah. She’s wearing her great little blue robe.

  “There’s a peephole here,” I say stupidly.

  “I know.” Sarah smiles in the slight light. “Pretty fun, huh?”

  I love my wife.

  “She’s had some wild cravings,” she says. “All those capers.”

  Above us a spot of light moves across the purple clouds.

  “Another fucking searchlight,” she whispers. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”

  * * *

  Sarah and I, we get sad about different things.

  Like that night, later on, I think about how Lulu doesn’t recognize stars except as a shape in coloring books and on stickers and stuff. I say that to Sarah. “Isn’t that sad?” I say.

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t make you sad?”

  “Everyone has lots to learn about everything.”

  * * *

  When I get home from work that Friday, Lulu is sitting on Sarah’s lap, helping her order the groceries. Lulu has outgrown this activity a bit, her legs splaying awkwardly over Sarah. I remember going to the grocery store with my mom, helping her choose the honeydew based on how hollow they sounded when you knocked on them.

  “No, Mom!” she says to Sarah, both of them staring at the screen. “Rutabaga only gets two and a half stars this week.”

  “It’s on sale, Lu,” Sarah says. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

  Lulu jumps off Sarah’s lap and runs over to me.

  “Daddy! Let’s search for something!”

  This is it: getting home from work on Friday, better than cool water.

  “Sure thing. Hmm, how about…”

  “The world’s tiniest marsupial?”

  “Sure thing,” I say.

  “Okay, but after dinner,” Sarah says.

  “Lemme guess,
” Lulu says. “Rutabaga?”

  “You bet,” Sarah says curtly.

  After dinner Lulu and I search the Internet to find the world’s tiniest marsupial.

  “Don’t touch,” I say when she goes to press her fingertips against the close-up of the creature’s fur. “You’ll leave marks.”

  She pulls her hand away from the screen.

  * * *

  Sarah takes the trash out after Lulu goes to bed but she doesn’t come back. After ten minutes I go to look for her. I find her in the concrete enclosure, face glued to the hole in the wall.

  “Hey witness,” I say, pushing her aside so I can see.

  “Hey addict,” she counters, pushing me back.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Mara Stanhope’s low moan stretches over the wall, over the noise of the generator.

  “No, sicko,” Sarah hisses. “You think I’d wanna watch that?”

  I arrange myself above Sarah, like the next head up on a totem pole, so that we can peer through the hole at the same time.

  In the light of many moon-shaped paper lanterns, Mara Stanhope is crouched naked on all fours, clinging to the thick grass of the lawn, rolling her hips around and around, emitting groans that swing back and forth between pleasure and pain. A slender woman in a gray shift pours golden oil onto her back and kneels to rub it in. A second slender woman in a gray shift crouches in front of Mara, also on all fours, groaning along with her.

  “Those are the doulas,” Sarah whispers. Sarah had wanted a doula (just one) for a hot second, until we learned how much they cost. Not a biggie, she’d said back then.

  “I guess they got sick of the dolphins,” I say, hoping Sarah hasn’t noticed the rose petals floating in the pool.

  I await her laugh but she ignores me.

  “Wonder where he is,” I say.

  Whatever else you might say about Lulu’s birth—that the nurses had cold and impatient hands, that the anesthesiologist didn’t inspire confidence as he poked the needle yet again into Sarah’s spine, that the doctor yawned seven times while stitching up Sarah’s vagina—I was there, instant by instant, and as she pushed Lulu’s head out I said to her, I didn’t think I could be in more awe of you than I already was.

  Music swells up from the Stanhopes’ outdoor speakers, music that sounds like it was composed by the cosmos, and Steve Stanhope strides out of the glass door. Mara Stanhope’s moans unite with the chords of the music, and he comes over to her, and the doulas tactfully move aside, and he gets down on all fours facing his wife, and he too moans the moans of the universe, and believe me, I wish it was a laughable sight but somehow it’s not.

  “You are now ten thousand times more relaxed than you’ve ever been,” the doulas chant.

  If only Sarah would laugh. Instead she mutters something.

  “What?” I demand.

  “The rich still get to be animals,” she says.

  * * *

  Lulu emerged with the assistance of K-Y Jelly, but the Stanhopes’ daughter is born into a rush of imported organic olive oil, the doulas pouring cupful after cupful of it to serve as lubrication, and as the baby’s head emerges onto the candlelit lawn, Mara Stanhope seems to be having the deepest orgasm of her life, and I’m ashamed by my hardening, but more ashamed by the way Sarah waggles her butt against me to acknowledge the hardening, but mainly turned on by the idea of going inside with Sarah and filling her up with triplets.

  Two people in medical coats race onto the lawn to collect the blood from the umbilical cord. Which, yes, will cost the Stanhopes 75 percent of our monthly income to store in a private blood bank.

  “Please no,” Sarah says when the doulas present to the Stanhopes the disk of the slimy, wound-up umbilical cord (Once it dries out, it’s the ideal chew toy for the baby!).

  * * *

  By Saturday afternoon, Mara Stanhope is stretched out in her lounge chair beneath an umbrella. She looks like a woman at a spa, not a woman who gave birth less than twenty-four hours ago. That smell of newly cut grass. She’s holding a tall glass containing a bloodred drink, sipping the liquid through a long straw.

  “OMG,” Sarah says after taking a peek. “A placenta smoothie. Let me take Lu to ballet today, okay? All these good vibes are killing me.”

  I saw Sarah’s (or, I guess, Lulu’s) placenta for about five seconds before it was tossed into a container of organs and wheeled away.

  A nurse carries a woven basket out onto the lawn. It takes me a minute to realize that the baby is inside the basket. The nurse places the baby on Mara Stanhope’s chest and Mara pulls her robe aside and the newborn takes the nipple easily, almost lazily, like an old pro. Those early days with Lulu, when she barely nursed, and then there was the heat wave, I prefer not to think about, Sarah hooked up to the breast pump for hours every day, me trying to pretend the pump didn’t freak me out. “What’s wrong?” Sarah sobbed, her nipples extending and retracting inside the plastic tubing. “Nothing, sorry, sorry,” I kept saying, cradling Lulu.

  The nurse leaves and Steve Stanhope comes out. He looks happy, healthy. He sits at the base of Mara’s lounge chair, stroking her shin. They smile and talk quietly. I can’t tell what they’re saying, except that I keep hearing the word “lake,” “lake,” “lake,” the syllable punctuating their every sentence.

  He wanders off and she reclines, closes her eyes. Their vegetable garden is thriving already, even this early in the season. I can see the kale and mint from here.

  “Excuse me,” the voice says, or rather the mouth, the mouth right against my eye, breath in my pupil.

  I leap back and cover my eye as though it’s been burned.

  “Pardon me,” the mouth says. “I noticed this hole the other day. I’ll have our guy seal it up ASAP.”

  Steve Stanhope speaks graciously, maybe even with compassion, as though he knows it isn’t good for me or anyone else in my building to witness the activity on his lawn.

  “Oh, no problem,” I say, annoyed with myself for how grateful I feel that he’s playing it as though he’s inconvenienced me rather than the reverse.

  Then it’s his eye at the hole. His eye upon the deteriorating brick, the row of trash cans swollen with garbage, Lulu’s hand-me-down scooter chained to the communal bike rack. The eye lingers.

  “Hey, screw you!” I say.

  The eye doesn’t react. Had I whispered it too softly for him to hear? Had I said it at all?

  “Say, neighbor,” Steve Stanhope says. “My wife gave birth to a baby girl last night, and I’d love to give you a little something as a kind of celebratory gift, because, well, there’s nothing like having a baby girl.”

  As if I don’t know.

  “Sort of like the way I’d’ve given you a cigar back in the day, you know?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Just a sec,” he says. And even though I don’t want anything from Steve Stanhope, I stay there at the peephole, waiting. Maybe if he hadn’t said “Say,” I might not have stayed. But it’s a tic of mine too sometimes, to say “Say.”

  I’m keeping an eye on the peephole when suddenly I sense a flutter at the top of my head, like a bird just pooped on my hair. I look up to find the tiniest drone I’ve ever seen hovering above me. The drone beeps and drops something small onto the concrete beside me.

  “Hey, pick it up,” Steve Stanhope requests. I bend down to retrieve the object. It’s a perfectly round pebble, pure white, like the moon of my boyhood. “You can plant it between the cracks in concrete. It’ll grow wherever.”

  “Ste-eve!” Mara sings out across the lawn. “Ste-eve!”

  “Gotta run.” The eye winks. “Enjoy, okay? Nice chatting with you. And don’t worry, the hole will be repaired any day now.”

  “Does it need water?” I remember to ask only once he’s out of earshot.

  * * *

  “You can do it!” I say to Lulu. Dusk on Saturday, and we’re standing above the seam between two slabs of concrete in the enclosure behind the building. Sar
ah refused to come outside.

  “A weird random magic pebble seed thingy?” Sarah had said, scrubbing hard at the nonorganic apples in the sink. “From Steve Stanhope? No thanks.”

  “It’s a gift,” I countered. “From a neighbor.”

  “Isn’t he the one who put those radioactive fish in the canal to eat the other even more radioactive fish?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

  “Well don’t let Lulu touch it,” she said.

  Now, as we stand at the back of the building, I drop the seed into Lulu’s palm.

  “It’s cold!” she gasps.

  “Looks like the moon, right?” I say. “I mean, that’s what the moon used to look like.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  Okay.

  “So,” I say. “Plant it.”

  “Where?” She looks around the concrete enclosure. “Is there some dirt?”

  “Well actually,” I explain, “this is a special kind of seed. It doesn’t need even the teensiest bit of dirt.”

  “Okay,” she says again. Sometimes I worry about Lulu. She doesn’t seem like a child at all. She never uses words like “teensiest.”

  “So all you have to do is just plant it right here between these pieces of concrete. See?” I stroke the seam with the tip of my sneaker. I’ve never seen anything green in our backyard, not even weeds poking up between the cracks.

  “So, I should plant it?” she says. “Like, put it here?”

  Carefully, she places the seed on the seam.

  “Well,” I say, trying to pull my mood up by my own bootstraps, “is that where you want your plant to grow? You have to think these things through.”

  “Well,” Lulu says, “I guess someone might step on it when they were taking their trash out. So maybe we should—put it somewhere else?”

  I get the distinct feeling that she’s humoring me. Lulu is so good at love. I’m the oldest in our household, followed by Sarah and then Lulu. But in terms of souls, Lulu’s the oldest and I’m the youngest.