Amanda Bright @ Home (15 page)

“Now may I go to sleep?” He switched off the light again. Amanda simmered for a few minutes in silence. Finally she summoned the courage to ask him, “So is that what you think of me? That I’m a ‘consumer,’ not a ‘producer’?”

“Oh, Amanda. Why do you take everything I say as a statement about you?” He tried to reel her back into his arms but she resisted.

“That’s what you were trying to tell me—in the car. Wasn’t it?” The shock of the light was still playing patterns with her eyes; the room was a jumble of black shapes that made no sense.

Bob sighed heavily. “No, I wasn’t saying that. I was saying—I
said
some pretty harsh things, which I regret. You just made me angry with your jealousy and all. We’d had such a great evening.”

“
You
had a great evening.”

“Okay, so I had a great evening, and I thought you did, too. Sussman and Chasen—did you see the way they were talking to me? It’s taken me ten years at Justice to get to the point where people speak to me as if I matter. Sussman wants me to appear on
Left/Right
on behalf of the whole department—he’s grooming me to be the spokesman for this case …”

Bob’s hand fumbled for hers in the darkness and settled for her forearm. “I know it’s been hard on you. I know—” he paused and continued, “I know if I left government I could earn more, a whole lot more. But I thought you supported what I do. You’ve always said you’d hate to see me sell out to the private sector.”

“I
do
support you. It’s just that—”

“It’s just that my idealism imposes a lot on you. I know. I feel really guilty about that. But God, Amanda, I can’t leave now. This Megabyte case is historic. It’s going to be argued in classrooms a generation from now. I would never get a chance at a case like this at some law firm. That’s why I came to Justice. It may even lead to me being appointed assistant attorney general one day, who knows?”

“I understand that—”

“So I guess what I was trying to say is this: all I want for you is to be happy—in whatever you’re doing. As happy as I am right now.”

She didn’t reply right away but lay there thinking about what he had said. When she next checked, the glowing red digits of the alarm clock indicated nearly an hour had passed. Bob’s breath was steady—he had fallen asleep. She had just begun to sink into sleep herself when a tiny voice jerked her back awake.

“Mommy!” it whispered. “I wet the bed.”

Chapter Ten

“THAT’LL BE EIGHTEEN dollars.”

The cashier tapped his fingers on the countertop to some silent rhythm in his head while staring blankly into the mall behind Amanda. Nothing, apparently, bored him more than accepting her money. His flat expression contrasted with the cheery colors of his striped uniform and the overhead banner of a happy clown riding a choo-choo, welcoming one and all to PlayZone.

“Eighteen dollars?” Amanda replied incredulously. “For
two
children?”

“Uh-huh.”

Amanda fished through her wallet and saw that she was down to her last twenty. She hastily counted her single bills: after paying the entrance fee she would be left with only twelve dollars to last her until Friday. Today was Tuesday. Her credit card had reached its limit, and Amanda was reluctant to borrow from Bob—it would be the third time in two weeks.

“C’mon, Mommy.” Ben was pushing against the turnstile. A line was building behind them.

Amanda surrendered her twenty and accepted two creased bills in return. A few feet in, they were stopped by another attendant who ordered them to remove their shoes and checked their pockets for “sharp objects” as thoroughly as if they were entering a prison. Once cleared, Ben and Sophie plunged into a vast play area. Straight ahead of them was a tangled mass of climbing equipment and bright plastic sliding chutes; off to one side was a little carnival setup with flashing arcade machines and a miniature train ride. The chatter and screeches of children echoed around them like a jungle coming alive at dawn.

“We need to buy tokens,” Ben told her.

“Tokens? But I just paid for our tickets!”

“For the
games,
” Ben said, as if it were obvious. This was his second visit to PlayZone; the first time was for a classmate’s birthday party that Amanda had been spared from attending.

Sophie clapped her hands with excitement. “I want to ride the twain!”

Ben led his mother to a small booth beside a counter selling pizza and soft drinks. The token attendant was engaged in a lively personal conversation with the girl at the pizza register. It took Amanda two theatrical coughs to catch the attendant’s attention. Slowly he redirected his neck in her direction and adopted the same dead stare as his colleague at the entrance.

“How many?”

“How much are they?”

“Twenty-five cents each. Five for a dollar.”

“I’ll take ten.” Amanda unhappily handed him her two dollar bills.

“That won’t be enough,” Ben complained.

“It will be plenty. Thanks.”

Amanda divided the tokens between the children, and they approached the arcade. Sophie repeated her desire to ride the train, while Ben pointed to what looked like a glass aquarium of stuffed animals.

“It’s easy, Mommy. You just have to use this big crane to pick one up. I’m good at cranes.”

The game cost five tokens. Amanda glanced around and saw that all the signs posted on the games indicated a minimum of five tokens each.

“Well, I guess you’ll both be allowed just one,” she tried to say brightly.

Ben wasn’t paying attention to her; he was too consumed with the possibility of winning a garish plush dog. He fed his tokens into the slot and placed his hand on the stick that controlled the crane. The machine jolted to life, lights blinked, the crane lurched and buzzed, and before Ben had even the wit to move the stick, the crane returned empty. The machine switched off.

“I want to do it again,” Ben said, stunned.

“No. That’s it. It’s Sophie’s turn.”

“I wanna do it again!”

“No, Ben. I told you—that’s it. Only one game each.”

Ben hurled himself upon the machine and pounded his fist against the inanimate toy faces. Amanda led Sophie away to the little train. It was dark and out of order. They returned to Ben.

“I want a puppy,” Sophie announced.

“Why don’t we try a different game, sweetie?”

“No. I want a
puppy.
”

Ben lit up at the prospect of another try and edged Sophie aside, saying sweetly, “Here, let me help you.”

Sophie fumbled with her tokens, pushing them one by one into the slot, and the two fixed their eyes on the crane. The machine repeated its performance—the crane dipped and lifted without grasping the coveted puppy—and when it rattled to a stop, the children stared in disbelief that the game could betray them a second time.

“Well!” Amanda exclaimed, as if surprised herself. “Let’s go see if we can find the others.”

The others were Amanda’s play group, which was meeting for the last time before the start of summer holidays. Ben and Sophie followed her silently, too seared by their loss to show much enthusiasm for the rat’s maze of tunnels and slides. A boy shot through a tube and rolled into Sophie’s feet, knocking her down. Before Amanda could say anything, he had vanished down another plastic hole. Ben whined that he wanted to go home.

Amanda found the mothers seated on stubby stools around a table shaped like a flower. Patricia looked the most out of place: she was wearing a navy-and-white linen suit with a silk scarf patterned in gold horseshoes, as if she had been deceived into dressing for a charity luncheon. Kim and Ellen were slightly less conspicuous in their sherbet-colored capris and slides. Amanda, in a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt, fit in only too well. Christine had not come—she was having her “before” photos taken by her plastic surgeon.

“Whose idea was this again?” Amanda grimaced as she pulled up a stool.

“Meredith’s,” Patricia sighed. “Sometimes I have to indulge her in ordinary children’s tastes.”

“Where are Ben and Sophie?” Kim asked.

Amanda turned and saw that she had lost her children. She scanned the play equipment and after a moment pointed them out crawling across a net.

“I think my head is going to explode from the noise,” moaned Ellen.

“We don’t have to stay long. We could all go to my house afterward,” Kim suggested. “I’m not far from here.”

“When is your renovation starting?” Patricia asked.

“Not until the end of July. I’m taking the kids to Nantucket for August, so we’ll miss the worst of it, thank God. David has to stay and work, so he can deal with the contractors.”

Faces, houses—what did these women
not
renovate? Amanda wondered.

“You’re lucky you
have
contractors,” Patricia remarked. “I had to wait two months just to get my painter to repair a patch on my ceiling. Two months! And even then, he insisted on coming by on a Saturday evening when we were having a dinner party, if you can believe it. But what was I going to tell him—no?”

“A friend of mine was fired by her painter.”

“How do you get fired by your painter?”

“She told him she didn’t like the job he was doing on some trim, and he walked out on her, right there, leaving the paint bucket and brushes behind. She and her husband had to finish the job themselves. It was pretty funny, actually—her husband makes four hundred dollars an hour, and there he was, up on a ladder rolling the walls.”

“We need a recession,” observed Patricia, adjusting herself uncomfortably on her stool, “otherwise I’m never going to get my new addition built.”

It was Amanda’s habit to let her mind wander when the mothers’ conversation turned to decoration. She rarely had anything useful to contribute on the debate over bullion versus tasseled fringe, or whether chintz can be paired with toile, but today she followed the discussion with interest. One of the reasons she was so short of money this week was that, having cleaned her house, she had decided to buy some things to fix it up—not much, just a few baskets for the magazines and toys, a couple of table lamps for her living room, and some throw pillows to enliven the sorry sofa. While everything had been bought on sale, even sale items added up, and they cumulatively exceeded the limit of her credit card. The sting, however, was that the expenditure did not purchase any improvement. To Amanda’s dismay, the new objects only drew attention to their tattered surroundings. Many times Patricia had noted that Amanda’s house had “such good bones” and could be “a real little jewel” if only her decorator could be given the chance to “do it over.” Amanda had dismissed her comments just as she had learned to dismiss the other mothers’ pitying glances at her old furniture, or the way they let their children rampage through her rooms, as if to say,
Go ahead. It’s all broken anyway.

But as Kim burbled on about “maple cabinets” and Ellen, fresh from a kitchen renovation of her own, mused about turning her bedroom into a “master suite,” Amanda asked herself: how had it happened that these women could redo entire houses while her credit card could not cope with some pillows and lamps?

“What are your plans for the summer, Amanda?”

Ellen’s voice cut into her thoughts.

“Me? Oh—” Amanda cast around for a suitable answer. Patricia, she knew, would be off next week to her family’s estate in the Algarve; Kim, as mentioned, went to Nantucket; and Ellen owned a converted mill house on one of the fashionable rivers of the Eastern Shore.

Their faces looked politely expectant; Amanda felt a surge of resentment. Where did they think she was going to go?

“Actually, I’m going to spend the summer redecorating my house.” Amanda could not quite believe that she had put it that way, but now that she had said it, she enjoyed watching the women’s reactions.

“How wonderful!” Kim exclaimed.

“What a great idea,” said Ellen.

“Who are you getting to do it?” Patricia asked suspiciously.

Again they looked to her expectantly, and Amanda hesitated, a smile frozen on her lips. Who, indeed?

“Well,” she said slowly, “I thought I’d do it myself.”

The interest immediately drained from the women’s expressions but Amanda barreled on, having learned from her friend Liz that you could make any domestic task sound less dreary by describing it as if it were a hobby. “I’ve always enjoyed painting, so I thought I’d experiment with the walls a little …”

“Please God, no sponging—it’s so overdone,” Patricia interjected.

“… and I came across an easy way to do curtains, you know, on one of those home shows when I was flipping through the channels …”

“Martha Stewart needs a good dose of Ativan,” chortled Ellen.

“In any case,” Amanda continued, trying to keep up a breezy tone, “Bob’s going to be so busy this summer with Megabyte that we simply won’t be able to get away.

“Did any of you see his press conference?” she added hopefully.

The women shook their heads, except for Patricia, who glowered. “I do hope this Megabyte nonsense is going to end soon. We’ve taken a beating on the stock.”

They were interrupted by Meredith Ripley, who dumped a handful of prizes on the table. The little girl looked as triumphant as a gambler who had just cleaned up at the baccarat tables.

“Where did you get these?” Patricia asked, glancing with distaste at the pile of cheap novelties—whistles, fake teeth, rubber balls, an elastic bracelet.

“I won them,” Meredith answered proudly. “I need more money.”

At that moment Ben and Sophie arrived, trailed by the other children. Ben immediately fixed his eyes on the prizes and, looking wildly at his mother as if he had missed out on some benevolent fairy’s generosity, demanded to know, “Where did these come from?”

“They’re Meredith’s,” Amanda replied calmly. “She won them.”

Ben cast a surly glance at Meredith, but to Amanda’s relief, he did not further contest the girl’s ownership.

“I’m hungry,” Sophie said, tugging at Amanda’s sleeve. “I want pizza.”

“Pizza!” the others agreed in chorus.

The mothers immediately reached for their purses and dispensed bills to the eldest children. Amanda didn’t open her purse but instead said in a low voice to Ben and Sophie, “You just had lunch. You don’t need pizza. We’ll have a snack later.”