Amanda Bright @ Home (13 page)

“Come with Mommy,” Amanda said, fetching Sophie, who had unspooled the paper towels and was using them to shine the front of the fridge. “We’re all going to the store.”

“I’m almost finithed,” the little girl replied, brimming with self-importance. “We being mommieth today, right?”

“Oh, mommies do other things too, sweetie,” Amanda said reflexively. “Great big important things like … fly airplanes, run for president, and …”

Sophie gazed up at her.

“… clean the kitchen.”

At the supermarket, Amanda bought chicken, broccoli, and a box of couscous—items she knew how to cook. Impulsively she threw in a package of scented candles and capitulated to Sophie’s demand for some wilted, plastic-wrapped marigolds to make the table look “pwetty” and Ben’s counterdemand for chocolate cupcakes for dessert.

Back home, Amanda found the recipe she had clipped from the Sunday
Times
—one that she’d been meaning to make for weeks. It was nothing fancy, just breasts of chicken marinated in lemon, oil, and oregano and baked in the oven. Amanda fished out the flowers from the shopping bag.

“Do you want to put these in a vase for Mommy, sweetie?”

The little girl eagerly arranged the marigolds in a small chipped vase that Bob and Amanda had been given as a wedding present. While the chicken soaked in its herbal bath, Amanda asked Sophie to set out mats on the dining room table and place the flowers in the center.

Amanda was just turning down the couscous when she heard Bob’s key in the front door. His voice called out “Hello!” and then muttered, with surprise, “Jeez!” Amanda’s anger had subsided, but she didn’t rush to greet him.

The children came running downstairs.

“Do you like what we did, Daddy?”

“I thet the table!”

Bob’s footsteps followed the children into the dining room.

“Wow, look at this place! Are we eating in here tonight?”

“Mommy wanted to.”

“Where is Mommy?”

“In the kitchen. Cooking dinner.”

Bob poked his head through the dining room door.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she returned, checking the couscous.

He entered and poured himself a drink.

“Would you like one?”

“I don’t like Scotch.”

“I could open some wine.”

“I’ll have some with dinner, thanks. Not yet.”

“What are we having?”

“Chicken.”

“Mmm.”

Bob busied himself with uncorking a bottle of wine and filling a bucket with ice. Amanda kept her back to him, ostensibly monitoring the pots on the stove. She was sick of fighting but felt Bob should be the first to make amends.

“You’ve been busy today, I see.”

She didn’t like the way he said that—with a hint of smugness, as if she had spent her day cleaning to atone to him for the night before.

“I had some extra time.” She shrugged. “Ben came home early.”

Amanda had not meant to introduce the topic of Ben yet—not until they were on better terms—but there, it had slipped out, and frankly, she wasn’t altogether sorry.
Don’t think you’re the only one who’s had a long, tense day.

“Ben? Why was Ben home early?”

“Because he was suspended.” Amanda said this calmly but her hands were trembling. She switched off the pot of couscous and began hunting through the cupboards for a serving dish, studiously ignoring Bob’s look of alarm.

“Suspended? Five-year-olds don’t get suspended!”

“Apparently they do.” Amanda found the bowl she was looking for and began emptying the couscous into it, spilling a few grains onto the counter.

“What happened? Amanda, please—talk to me!”

Sophie wandered in, followed by Ben. Amanda handed the bowl of couscous to Sophie and asked her to take it to the table. “You can carry in the salad, Ben,” she said, adding, in a terse whisper to Bob, “I think we’d better discuss this later.”

She reached into the oven and removed the chicken to the countertop.

“Here,” Amanda said, thrusting the oven mitts at Bob. “Why don’t you take in the chicken?”

At dinner, Bob reverted to defendant mode. Evidently the extent of his apology to her was the offer of a drink. Amanda served him his chicken with an air of defiance, as if daring him to compliment her about it. He didn’t. The children, unaware, burbled on.

“Do you like the flowerth, Daddy? I picked them.”

“I helped Mommy with the salad.”

“We have a special dessert.”

“I chose it.”

“No you didn’t—I did.”

Bob lavished upon them the praise he withheld from Amanda and helped himself to seconds. Amanda, meanwhile, silently took in the spectacle of her tidy rooms, which had given her such a sense of satisfaction just an hour ago. She had dug up some old framed family photographs to line the mantel, and regrouped the furniture so it didn’t look quite so much as if it had been dropped in place by the movers. Even their dirty sagging sofa, with its cushions plumped and straightened, looked vaguely respectable—like some small ruffian forced into a jacket and tie to await the arrival of company.

At the end of the meal, Bob rose to clear. The children ran off to play in their newly immaculate bedrooms, and Amanda followed Bob into the kitchen.

“Now are you willing to tell me about Ben?” he asked, pouring himself another Scotch.

“It’s not about being willing—“

“Amanda—” Bob seemed as weary of fighting as she was. “Just tell me, okay? Let’s stop making a federal case out of everything.”

She wanted to challenge that last remark, too, but restrained herself; instead she described what had happened to Ben that morning with the matter-of-factness of a reporter. She saw Bob growing outraged.

“So they suspended him over a
cookie?
”

“The way he
used
the cookie,” she corrected. “You know, they think Ben is violent.”

“How is Ben taking it?”

“It’s hard to say. He seems fine—or at least, he did when we got home and I let him watch TV.”

Amanda began scraping and rinsing the plates.

“It’s just so ridiculous!” Bob fumed. “I did those things as a boy. We all did those things!”

“We did a lot of things that are now considered wrong.”

“Do you think we ought to get him out of there? Change schools, maybe?”

“You’re always saying yourself we can’t afford a different school.”

“I don’t mean private school. Won’t he be old enough for public school next year?”

Amanda stopped what she was doing and looked at him incredulously. “Is that what you really want for him?”

“We may not have much choice from the sounds of it.”

“But you saw the public school!” Amanda was now stacking the dishwasher, but with such force that Bob edged in and took over the job. “We were both there! The syringe in the playground … all those kids crammed into one class … the teacher who couldn’t spell …”

Amanda filled a pot with warm soapy water and started to scrub at it angrily.

“Then what do you think we should do?” Bob said with rising exasperation. “I’m not getting your point. You know our finances as well as I do. I’m happy to go over them again—”

“No—”

“So what are you saying?”

“Just that I don’t want to put him in public school.”

“So you want to keep him at the center?”

“No.” She placed the pot on the rack to dry, and started in on another. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Yes, yes you do—you seem to be suggesting there’s another choice. What choice are you suggesting?” He closed the dishwasher and switched it on. “Because the only other choice is for me to leave government and find a job that will pay for private school. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“That’s
not
the only choice.” In her hotness, Amanda realized that she had backed herself into a corner.

“So tell me another.” Bob was waiting for her answer, patiently drying the second pot she had smacked down on the counter.

“
I
could get a job.”

To her surprise, Bob did not treat this as an absurd proposition.

“That would work,” he agreed, putting the pot away. “If that’s what you want to do, then yes, you’re right, we do have another choice.”

“I don’t know if it’s what I want—” she said helplessly.

“Oh boy. Let’s not go back to that again. I think we covered that ground fairly extensively last night.”

“Well, you obviously don’t appreciate anything I do here,” she shot back. And as she marched off, leaving him with the rest of the dishes, Bob called after her, “Hey,
you
were the one not speaking to
me
.”

Chapter Nine

SHE FOUND CHRISTINE sitting peacefully in the backyard, paperback and glass of white wine in hand, enjoying the lazy passage of Sunday afternoon.

“So remind me,” Christine said, glancing up with a wry smile. “What were our mothers complaining about?”

This was, Amanda had learned, Christine’s long-running joke with herself. At age forty Christine had become “everything my twenty-year-old self would have considered my worst nightmare.”

“So Tuesday’s my big day,” she said as Amanda pulled up a chair beside her. “Wine?”

“Sure, thanks.”

To one side of the terrace, the mottled blue surface of a rectangular pool sparkled invitingly; to the other was an elaborate jungle gym, partially hidden by a tall hedge. A slight breeze nudged the empty swings back and forth. The children were inside, watching television.

“You’re really going to go through with it?”

“Quit acting so shocked. You’ll be doing it, too, before you know it.”

Amanda’s sunglasses concealed her look of doubt. “How long will it take you to recover?”

“Not long—but I’ll be in hiding for about three weeks, until the bruising disappears. Then I plan to reemerge—like a butterfly from its chrysalis. You wait. You’ll be so jealous you’ll be begging me for the name of my plastic surgeon.”

Amanda smiled. “I may well need one. After Friday I don’t know that I actually want to show my real face around the school again.”

“So I heard.”

“You did? From who?”

“Austen told me Ben got in trouble and didn’t come back from the office. I was going to call you—then Kim phoned with the whole story.”

“How did
she
know?”

“She heard it from Ellen. Ellen’s on the rules committee, so she would be informed right away.”

“And she took it upon herself to inform everyone else?” Amanda was aghast.

“They take the peanut policy very seriously. It’s a warning to the whole school not to be careless.”

“And you agree with it?”

“Of course not. I think it’s ridiculous.” Christine lifted the bottle of wine from its plastic bucket to check how much was left—about half—and placed it back. “Cheer up, Amanda. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Everyone thinks it’s stupid. But it’s the rule.”

“Ben may have to leave because of it.”

“Really?” Amanda thought she detected more prurience than sympathy in Christine’s surprise.

“I might be wrong,” Amanda said, attempting to backpedal. “It’s just that Burley and Phelps and Dr. Koenig—well, they seemed so angry. I don’t know …”

“Oh, they can overreact. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure, given your family connections, that Ben will be protected.”

Amanda’s eyes darted at Christine’s. Did Christine know?
How
did she know? Christine, like some private eye, was in the habit of asking dogged questions to which Amanda had always been deliberately vague in her answers. She had not discouraged Christine’s emerging theory that she was the estranged, bohemian child of a rich father. (What business was it of Christine’s, after all, that Amanda’s real father—whom she rarely heard from—was the bohemian? He had long ago given up practicing psychiatry in Manhattan and moved with his second family to a cottage in Maine.)

She could feel Christine scrutinizing her. “I don’t know what you mean,” Amanda replied evenly, keeping her gaze on the pool.

“Isn’t Phelps a good friend of your mother’s?”

“They were activists together in the seventies.”

“Uh-huh.” Christine apparently already knew this, and Amanda worried that she would push further. “The whole sisterhood thing. I think you’re safe.”

She poured more wine, and to Amanda’s relief the conversation seemed to have ended.

“Do you mind if I take a dip? I’m getting hot sitting here.”

“Go ahead.”

Amanda stripped down to her bathing suit and descended the half-moon steps, slowly immersing herself in the lukewarm water. Aware of Christine’s critical gaze upon her, Amanda duck-dived to the bottom, following the slope of the pool to its deepest point, and resurfacing at the far end. She pulled herself up on the edge and waved across to Christine, who was still watching her. Water trickled off her thighs and seeped into the sunbaked bluestone.

“It’s gorgeous,” Amanda called out. “You should come in.”

“I don’t really like swimming.”

Amanda toweled herself off and rejoined Christine.

“I’ve been thinking,” Christine said. “You should probably join a committee. It’s the best way of protecting Ben—Sophie, too. You’re going to need a good reference from the center if you want to send them to a really top elementary school. Where is Ben going to go, by the way? I’ve already sent in Austen’s forms to Beauvoir and Maret, although of course I hope he’ll eventually go to St. Alban’s.”

“But it’s still a year away!”

“You mean you haven’t applied anywhere yet?” Christine removed her sunglasses to underscore her astonishment.

“I hadn’t realized—” The truth was, Amanda had not yet figured out how Ben was going to avoid public school. It seemed pointless to start up with private schools where tuition began at fourteen thousand dollars a year.

“Oh, Amanda.” Christine seemed truly anxious on her behalf. “Laura Crabbe actually took a
job
at Beauvoir—in the library, part time—to improve Sam’s chances at getting in.”

“I don’t know—”

“You
must
apply for a committee—right away. The auction committee is pretty easy to get on—I’m on that one—and they like people who raise money for the school.”