The Barter (4 page)

Gennie checks her phone again for the time. “We have to go soon. You're coming to the mommy yoga class, right?”

“Yep. My only exercise.”

“You get plenty of exercise just chasing her around,” Gennie says cheerfully.

“Do I?” Bridget watches Julie plump herself down on the floor, in frowning study of a found, probably unclean plastic cup lid that
will within moments make its way into her mouth. She honestly cannot think of a single occasion when she's chased Julie around. Bridget thinks this is something that mothers of boys do and assume that all mothers do also, because otherwise they'd try to trade their sons in for girls.

“Well, you're doing something right. You look great.”

Bridget manages not to roll her eyes, but as she removes the cup lid from Julie's chubby fist, prompting a bellow from the girl, she is forced to acknowledge that this is precisely the sort of blithe, perhaps willful generosity that Bridget associates with Gennie, because Gennie is the one who looks great. She's actually slimmer now than she was before she had Miles—Bridget has seen her wedding pictures, over at the house. Gennie has milkmaid skin, chestnut hair, and a twinkly air, and wears only delicate, handmade jewelry. Just looking at her makes Bridget happy. And, of course, jealous. But mostly happy.

“Gennie, you are a force for good,” Bridget says, again without quite thinking what she's saying, but this time she means it.

Gennie's cheeks flush prettily, and she smiles with real pleasure. “So I guess that means I should go punch that huffy guy with the newspaper right in the neck.”

*   *   *

O
h, it takes them many, many long minutes to gather all of their things, all of their snack cups and sippy cups and half-finished lattes. And the act of stuffing the rest of the apple crumb pastry that Bridget has forced herself to eat only half of into a paper sack and thence into the trash causes her a real pang (three dollars, plus think how delicious it would have tasted after yoga,
warmed in the car by the sun), to add to the pangs already in process: The pang of guilt for poor Floppy Bunny, destined for some ghostly subsummation that Bridget can't think about right now, not when an hour's worth of normalness with Gennie and the kids have pushed the ghost to the back of her mind. An ongoing, aching pang of love, constantly tolling like a huge distant bell, for her darling baby. And with it, a similar, nonstop pang of low-level remorse or something like it for her old life and her old job, which wasn't God's work but was hers, in a way that she liked. Pangs for Mark, even, of the sexual, envious, and doubting varieties. Part of the reason she's been going to yoga classes with Gennie is to try to recapture some of her own former spryness and energy, her
vim,
as they might have called it in the nineteen fifties, because some stubborn part of her persists in believing that Mark might actually notice.

But in fact there is a text from Mark on her phone, as Bridget discovers once she has gotten Julie into her car seat and settled herself behind the wheel to follow Gennie's car to the yoga studio. (Could they have carpooled? Would it have saved a polar bear if they had carpooled? Index under “pangs: first-world problems, caused by.”)

b home late tonite. sorry. love.

It's not his fault.

It's not anybody's fault. But it would almost be easier if she believed he was having an affair—with, say, some frisky young developer at his mobile gaming company, a pixieish, overpaid recent college graduate bending over for him in the heat of the server room late at night.

It's not another woman, though; it's just work. She knows because she was the same way before she quit her job to stay home with Julie. Bridget and Mark have been married for two and a half years
now, and before Julie was born, they had still had appliances from Bridget's bridal shower they'd never used. Vacation time they'd never taken accrued like cholesterol in their calendars; unread magazines piled up in slick stacks under the coffee table, so high sometimes that it seemed the table's legs must be about to lift off the floor.

They still haven't taken a vacation, actually. That's the joke. How could they now, on one income?
Ha ha ha. A week full of ha's.
It's not his fault. And she's not so cruel as to throw that irony in Mark's face.

Other than the ghost, the only thing that makes Bridget feel terror, real terror, is the thought of how dependent they are on the guys—young, slick, prone to handing out business cards—who own Mark's company, PlusSign. (
It's called “PlusSign” because it's a digital gaming company,
Mark once explained to her, in an email from the office his first week on the job.
If they made dog collars or shoehorns, they'd be called “Plus Sign.”
) The little boat of Bridget and Mark and Julie is now entirely afloat on the sea of PlusSign; for better or worse, they have entrusted their small family's fortunes and future to two young men in their late twenties who made an enormously popular mobile game in which you run from house to house in an increasingly complex warren of animated subdivisions, sneaking into people's homes and robbing them, the old-fashioned way, while they sleep. Stuffing their belongings into a sack—which, in a metaphor that Bridget supposes is the analog of Mary Poppins's carpetbag, expands infinitely to accommodate your loot—while you caper and cavort and race the sunrise and other robbers. In this game, you get extra points if you stop to clean out your victim's refrigerator.

Bridget rereads the text from Mark on her phone, then turns her eyes to the rearview mirror to gaze at Julie, snug in her rear-facing car seat and looking expectantly into the mirror Bridget has affixed to the
car's back window, so that both of them—just inches away from each other but cocooned in their separate seats and facing in different directions—can look at reflections of each other, just like they're doing now, whenever the fancy strikes them. Bridget raises her phone to the rearview mirror and takes a picture of Julie, smiling into two mirrors at her mother. She sends it to Mark. She doesn't expect a reply, although a reply would be nice. She looks at the picture of her daughter, her daughter with her clear hazel eyes and her beautiful lashes and the curls of dark hair just now growing long enough to fringe her shell-pink ears.

“Baby girl,” Bridget announces, “we are not going to yoga.”

Because the strange fact is, sometimes she wants to see the ghost as much as the ghost seems to want to see her.

R
ebecca Mueller, pretty and much admired, married at an age that was not exactly young. She didn't marry for money, although she probably could have. But what made her accept John Hirschfelder, with his handsome wood-frame house and his large acreage west of town shot through with feathery cypress trees and sunburned grass, was not exactly love, either.

She married two months after her twentieth birthday, in the second year of the century. She left her father's immaculate brick house in town—the unused piano, the gas lamps, the heavy, severe parlor furniture, the lock of her mother's hair—and moved to the new house that John Hirschfelder had inherited along with sixty acres of good land when his parents died. In the months leading up to the wedding it was said, and Rebecca herself often felt, that if her mother were still alive she might not have married a farmer.

Why did she marry him then. Well. Rebecca and John had always known each other. They'd gone to school together in the stout brick schoolhouse in town. But she'd gone to school with other boys, too, whom she'd always known, who had annoyed her when she was
younger, and who had grown into men who stopped by the house to try to impress their suitability on old Dr. Mueller and his daughter. At the time that Rebecca Mueller married him, she couldn't articulate why she'd chosen John over the others. He had a handsome face, and a good sense of humor, and long, browned hands. She liked him. She'd always liked him. She wasn't especially easy to please—oh, yes, some might say she was impossible—and she liked him.

In fact John was generally well-liked among the few hundred Texans—mostly second-generation and immigrant Germans—who peopled their town, a thriving ten-road outpost in the lower-central latitude of the state. Even before he somehow managed to convince Rebecca Mueller to marry—and to marry him, of all people—the town loved to tell and retell how young Hirschfelder had lost both parents to influenza within days of each other. The town loved even better the story of how he, their only child, barely well enough to walk himself, had made sure his parents were buried properly. He was a favorite in town. He was a favorite of Dr. Mueller's, and Rebecca's, too.

Rebecca knew that her old friend had seen a terrible year. The deaths of his mother and father had made him grave and intent. John's father had purchased a new acreage the spring before his death, and John was now responsible for the improvement of that land, besides the acres that were already producing. He had two outbuildings to construct, and half of the upstairs rooms in the new house still weren't finished. The farm's prospects excited and terrified him at once, and John was smart enough, even at his age, to admit that. But not to just anyone.

He admitted it to her, one soft evening early in the spring following the hard months in which he'd buried his mother and father. He
came by the Doctor's house to take Rebecca for a drive—or, rather, to steer them both out to where the town's perimeter met the roads that led out toward the farms and then relinquish the reins to her so that she could drive, as she loved to do. Riding down these country lanes in his parents' buggy was something they had done together since before they were teenagers. Better to do it in the evenings, when the earth seemed to give up in a long, slow gasp the heat it had collected all day.

Now that they were older, of course, this kind of behavior actually meant something—it wasn't the companionableness of childhood, or even the stormy friendship of their adolescence, but two grown people, a man and a woman, climbing into a buggy together to ride out into the country. In other, less wild and independent places, they would already be considered a scandal. They were no longer children.

All this Rebecca knew. That night in the buggy, she wore a sage-colored dress and a fierce look. She could see the road opening out in front of her, and she almost felt that she could see straight through the man next to her on the unembellished, flat seat. The boy she'd grown up with had been completely transformed, wrung out by what the winter had done; for the first time in his life he had been made to understand what it meant to be a man. The change in him was so absolute, she saw, that he expected everything else in the world to have undergone a similar shift of gravity. Including her.

Maybe there was something scandalous about them after all, she thought. They made each other nervous.

“I'm feeling tired and different these days, Beck,” John said to her that night, when he'd finished telling her about his plans for the farm, and about how certain smells or tunes, certain slants of light,
affected him in ways he couldn't always predict or account for—“peculiar moments,” he called them.

“Are you?” Rebecca's eyes, a gray that her many would-be beaux swore reminded them of everything from storm clouds to silverware, turned back to the road out ahead of the horse's ears. She was afraid. Or, even if she wasn't afraid, she sensed in herself all the physical symptoms of being afraid—the shortness of breath, the lightness of head, the quickened clumsiness of perception, which all, perhaps, amounted to the same thing, regardless. “You don't seem much changed.”

“I don't?” John had to laugh. It wasn't a happy sound.

“All right, you do.” Rebecca sighed. “I don't know why I said that.” But she did know why she'd said it—she was determined not to let John Hirschfelder say anything she would have to agree with. She felt she had to stop him from asking her anything, any question at all, that she might say yes to. “I just mean to say that
I
think of you the same way as ever,” she said relentlessly.

John cleared his throat, but she was too uncomfortable at the thought of causing him pain to look at him. Instead Rebecca blinked down at her gloved hands, holding leather reins, which were, really, among the strangest things on earth, when you thought about them for a minute—that these rough straps had been made by some human hand for this purpose exactly: to connect her to an animal, to let her express her wishes to an animal without their being able to communicate in any other real way.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm being untruthful. You're different. Everybody knows it. I know it, too,” she added quietly. But John had already decided to speak.

“Well, the honest fact is I think I'm frightened, Beck.” John
was now the one whose gaze had turned out toward some distant point across the fields. His admission had been sudden, and it aroused an unfamiliar sensation in them both.
Is this what it's like. Is this what it would be like, us two.
In an instant she saw the two of them at the kitchen table at his house, in the morning, at breakfast. She saw herself passing him something, some little thing. She saw him reach for it, his brown hands. “I don't know how I'm going to manage.”

“Manage what?”

“Everything. There's too much . . . land. I sometimes think I'm killing myself at it,” he said, and he meant it as a joke, but of course one didn't say such a thing as a joke, particularly if it were true.

She was alarmed but tried not to show it. “Oh. I—I know so little about farming,” Rebecca said, lamely. “You know—we've always lived in town, my father and me. Everything I know about farms I know from listening to—to you,” she rushed on. “You seem to know everything, you always make it sound so easy. You practically ran the place even before . . . your parents' passing—I'm sorry. I don't mean to bring it up that way. But I believe you can do it. If anyone can do it, you can.”

The funny thing was, of course, she meant it. For all his fears he was considered the most capable of the young men in their community, and he probably knew it, and if he didn't, well, there, she'd told him. Dark-eyed John Hirschfelder and his easy, competent, surprising— Goddamn it. This was his way; this was how he got to her when she didn't mean to let him think she could be got to.

She'd be a terrible farmwife, and she knew it even then, even that night in the buggy, on the road between the fields.

She would be the first to admit it: She didn't know how to do
anything. Her father, the town doctor, had raised her himself, with the help of his poor spinster cousin Fräulein Adeline, whom Rebecca had always half respectfully, half irreverently called Frau and who oversaw all the cooking and washing and housekeeping and made sure the Doctor had coffee at three o'clock. Frau kept house pretty well, but she hadn't made it her especial priority to teach Rebecca how to do it. Oh, Rebecca could sew, at least she could do that. The thought of marriage made her miserable, even shy—she, who cared so little about what people thought. She supposed she'd have to do it eventually, get married. She supposed she could do worse than to marry someone who loved her well enough to overlook the fact that he'd have to survive on cornmeal cake and boiled potatoes.

Oh, for God's sake.

“You don't have to tell me anything,” Rebecca blurted.

“I know. I know, Beck. I want to, though. You know I do,” John said tiredly. Her heart ached with pity for him then. The air was purple, and the fields stretched out to either side of them like long hounds under a tent of sky, and her childhood friend sat next to her on a wagon bench, weary and worried and still grieving for his mother, and longing for
her
, for Rebecca Mueller of all people, without much hope. How could she be so cruel, she wondered, not to love him back. How could she be so foolish, when half the women in town would dearly love to take her place, take his hand, here in the dust and clatter where no one but the two of them existed or cared.
You stupid girl. You know what you have to do.

So she held the reins with one hand and with the other reached over and clasped John Hirschfelder's hand with her gloved fingers and
squeezed hard, harder than was strictly romantic. Too hard. Dark-eyed John Hirschfelder, with his beautiful face and his strong back and his good heart. The poor man.

*   *   *

W
hy do women marry, anyway. To make a house? To have babies?
It was a question she couldn't answer yet herself. Unless it was to build a life with the one person who seemed to understand you even a little bit. She wasn't sure she loved John, but she knew she admired him. And he wasn't afraid of her, old Dr. Mueller's daughter with the odd temperament, the pride and the vagueness and the sharp gray eyes, and—as she was forced to admit—the confounding ignorance about how to do most of the things women were supposed to know how to do.

They were to be married in the Lutheran church in town, and in the short weeks before the wedding that spring Rebecca took steps to avail herself of some little understanding of what might be expected of her as a farmwife. She consulted Frau, who managed in the amount of time they had left under the same roof to teach her how to tend the stove and bake a loaf of bread, which at least gave Rebecca some confidence that she and John wouldn't starve. Also she got a few lessons in cooking and laundering, which went as poorly as she thought they would—not because the principles themselves were especially difficult but because laundering was as backbreakingly boring as Rebecca had always suspected it to be, and because the kitchen in the Doctor's house was infamously smelly and hot and unventilated. Rebecca began to grasp with some disappointment that she probably could run a farmhouse, after all. Not
well enough to please her own pride but well enough that she might not kill her husband or his hired men through her own negligence or ignorance.

Frau taught her as much as she could about managing a kitchen garden, which was considerable. Frau had accepted the humiliations that life had forced on her as a foreign spinster—and an ugly one at that—who spoke little English and lived on the charity of a distant widower cousin, and she compensated for the long hours of boredom and halfhearted work and scripture reading by becoming a remarkable gardener. (Or it might have had nothing to do with Frau's ugliness and unmarriedness. It might have just been in her all along to grow a lovely, abundant garden, given the opportunity and the leisure.)

Still, it was difficult for Frau, an instinctive expert in pruning and soil moisture, to take a long-enough step back from her own intense interest in her growing things to be able to explain to a newcomer just what she was doing or how she did it. The hours were beautiful, anyway. They spent quite a few of those May afternoons in the kitchen garden, Frau talking mostly in German, Rebecca half-comprehending and meditative, pinching bright-green leaves and breathing in the scent of the sweet earth and its good promises.

“I wish I were as good at something as you are at this,” Rebecca said one afternoon a few days before she was to be married to John Hirschfelder. The bees were drowsing around in the grass, and Rebecca was trailing Frau through the vegetable beds.

Frau turned on her the warm, indulgent expression she'd worn half her life. Frau was the Doctor's favorite aunt's only daughter; her true name was Adeline. She said, charmingly, in English, “Oh, your mother wasn't good at anything, either.”