The Barter Page 15

  “You don’t be shitty,” Bridget counters nonsensically.

  “You’re picking a fight with me.” He sounds tired.

  “No, I’m not. I’m having a fight with you. Over a thing that you did that really affects me, really sincerely makes my day harder.”

  “My day isn’t exactly easy, you know. I’m not just sitting here playing Angry Birds, Bridget. I did the bank thing quickly in between meetings the other day, and I fucked it up. Whatever. Give me an inch, here. Give me a little room for error.”

  “I don’t have any room for error. Not even a little bit. All day long. If I don’t watch Julie every minute these days, she might get hurt”—or snatched up by a ghost. “She’s all over the place now that she’s cruising. If I don’t keep the house clean, I get little comments from you. If I don’t stay on top of the laundry, you whine about not having anything to wear to work. If I don’t make all the dinners and do all the grocery shopping and all the meal planning and all of that everything, no one else is going to do it and we waste money we don’t have on takeout and restaurants, where, fucking, if we go, I’m the only one who ever seems to notice when Julie’s putting a goddamn pea up her nose.” She is aware, as she fumes, of how she sounds. She sounds like a pissy housewife. Like a cartoon of a woman, with a rolling pin and an apron. “Where’s my inch?”

  Mark is quiet. It’s all too easy to picture him sitting on the desk in one of those open-plan work pods they have at PlusSign, instead of real offices where grown men can have respectable, dignified arguments with their wives, holding his forehead in the triangle between his thumb and first finger and looking down into his lap, where a silver laptop sits, six windows open, all of them pulsing.

  He finally says, “She stuck a pea up her nose?”

  Bridget laughs, relieved and ashamed. As she laughs, her eyes open—she’s been squinching them shut, as if to help her focus on her sense of maltreatment and injustice. The ghost is now halfway down the stairs and is looking right at her. Into her. Jesus, Jesus, where is Julie, where is Julie?

  “Bridget? Was that Julie?”

  She must have made some kind of sound into the phone—a yelp? A screech? She can’t wonder about it now. Bridget crashes around the banister into the living room, where Julie is leaning over her toy bin, trying to reach the bottom. She snatches the little girl into her lap (Julie squawks) and holds her, clutching the phone to her ear and watching for the ghost to finish her descent.

  Moving down the stairs. Coming for them.

  A low moan of terror escapes her. Julie squirms.

  “Bridget? What’s the matter? Is Julie okay?”

  “Mark—” Bridget’s throat is bone dry. She coughs. “I can’t talk. I can’t talk now. Please hurry home. Please don’t stay late tonight, if you can. Please.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll—I’ll try to get home in time to put Julie to bed. I promise.” She realizes that he thinks she’s choking up about—oh, who knows, the fight, the money, the things she might have cared about once but can’t even make room for in her mind now with that shuffling noise coming down the steps—that sound that dead body in my house she wants her payment.

  If her first offering—the one single object in the house that held the most value and meaning for her—was not acceptable, then what would it take? What was it after?

  Fine. We’ll try something of Julie’s. But it’s going to be something she doesn’t care about—something she can afford to give. And that’s all you get. I’m her mother, goddamn it, and that’s all you get of her.

  “Okay. Do that little thing,” Bridget somehow croaks. She swallows hard. She decides to close her eyes. She is aware that in her lap, Julie has gone very silent, very still. “Mark? Are you still there?” It’s better with her eyes closed, within the comforting darkness, as she sits in her sun-bright living room in the middle of the day with her baby in her arms, thinking of ways to negotiate the impossible.

  “Yes. Bridge. I’m really sorry.”

  “I know. Just—I love you. I’m sorry I yelled at you. It’s all stupid stuff. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I love you, too, Bridge. Are you okay? You sound funny.”

  “Do I?” Without opening her eyes, Bridget clears her throat. The baby in her lap doesn’t move. Snake charmer, pied piper, it’s like a spell. “Mark. Is there something you can think of—something of Julie’s—that you think we might not need anymore? Or right now? Like a . . . toy or something? A doll?”

  “Um.” Mark pauses delicately, clearly wanting to make the effort to answer the question despite its nonsensical flavor.

  “I’m thinking of giving some of her stuff away. There’s a charity looking for donations,” Bridget lies. It’s easy, as it always is. She is listening hard. The shuffling on the stairs has ceased abruptly. She’s listening to me. Oh God, what if this is it, what if this makes her stop and go away. She can hear Julie’s breathing, soft and slow.

  “Um. Sure. There’s a bunch of soft baby books she probably doesn’t care about anymore—or Pat the Bunny; she’s always looking at me like, ‘Dad, this is for babies, what is up with this,’ when we read that. Or the monkey thing from my mom. Or how about those dangly things that were on her activity mat.”

  Bridget allows that Mark has surprised her. He’s right. Those are all exactly the things Julie has outgrown. He does pay attention. Of course he does. He’s not an idiot, this man she married.

  “That sounds good. Thanks,” Bridget says quietly. Her eyelids relax over her eyes; they are no longer smashed tight. Then she adds, because he has reminded her of it, “But I love the line ‘Bunny is eating his good supper.’”

  “I’ve always thought that book was a little weird. Judy feels her daddy’s face? Paul puts his finger through his mommy’s ring? Aren’t these kids young to be wife-swapping? Get that filth out of my house.” Bridget snorts. “But you might want to do one last reading with Julie to see if she likes it again. She’s always changing her mind.”

  The smell is gone. Julie shifts in her lap, squirms, tries to make a break for her toys on the rug in front of them.

  Bridget opens her eyes.

  “Thanks. You’re surprisingly observant.”

  Mark sounds wounded. “Well, it’s not like I never play with her. And I’m really sorry I stranded you and Julie without any money. I’ll stop at the bank. And I’ll be home before seven. I’ll try. I really will.”

  “Okay.” Bridget stretches out on the rug next to her daughter, who looks at her archly, delighted. “Uh-oh. I think I have to play mommy pile.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later.” Mark pauses. “We should talk.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Bridget puts the phone to one side and rolls onto her back. She closes her eyes again and says “Eh,” and pokes her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. This is their game, and not until today has it ever seemed to Bridget funny or strange that she would play dead with their little girl. It just felt good: To make a game out of lying on the floor with your eyes closed? Genius. And of course Julie loves it. She puts her hand on Bridget’s stomach and giggles.

  Bridget peeks at Julie with one eye, then says “Eh,” and flops back into dead pose again.

  Julie lets loose one of her trucker chortles. Heh heh heh. She climbs up on Bridget’s belly. Bridget says “Oof,” then “Eh.” Julie chortles again and rolls down so that her face is close to Bridget’s, her little mouth breathing sweetly near Bridget’s nose. Heh heh heh. Ooof. Eh. Eventually, Julie touches Bridget’s face with her small fingers, Bridget’s cue to come back to life, opening her eyes and squeaking, Mommy pile, Mommy pile, Mommy pile. Tickling. Whereupon Julie just about falls out, and Bridget hugs her daughter’s small warm body tight against her chest, still tickling, until Julie says “pie” and rolls off.

  Then they do it again.

  And again.


  Bridget hears her cell phone ringing somewhere and lets it go to voice mail.

  * * *

  It is dark. Julie is in bed. Bridget has taken a shower and watched some television and eaten a little bit of dinner—she’s not hungry, which is unusual for her—and gone into Julie’s room to pull Pat the Bunny from Julie’s low white bookshelf. Her ears are ringing, and she is very, very carefully avoiding anything like real thought. If she thinks about how Mark broke his promise to come home on time, she might start looking for something of his to break, or shred, or stand over and hate like a ghost.

  She places Pat the Bunny on the floor in the middle of the archway leading to the unlit living room, where she can smell but not see the ghost in the darkness. She will be standing in her corner, the ghost, gazing out the window onto the empty suburban street, perhaps listening for crickets over the faint whoosh and whir of the air-conditioning.

  Without waiting to see whether her latest gift will be well received, Bridget am-scrays upstairs and climbs into bed, where she intends to wait with a stack of magazines at her elbow for her husband to come home. At which point she is unsure what she will do: tear into him, or treat him to stormy, tearful, girlish silence, or give him up to the ghost as a hostage. If she’ll even take him. She’s already got Bunny.

  The best thing about Pat the Bunny, of course, and certainly its grubbiest, most well-handled feature in the copy that Bridget has just abandoned on its informal altar downstairs, is the book-within-a-book, “Judy’s Book,” which the audience is invited to read over little Judy’s shoulder, and which the preverbal infants for whom the book is written tend to recognize as a miniature version of something familiar—always a delight for the miniature-human demographic. Judy’s Book contains Bridget’s favorite line: “Bunny is eating his good supper,” which in the early, exhausted months of Julie’s life often reduced Bridget to inane, helpless giggles. She admitted to Martha once that, probably due to sleeplessness, it took her several readings of Pat the Bunny to understand that the Bunny of the title, and the hero of Judy’s Book, is actually Judy’s stuffed animal Bunny, which explains why his physical attitudes while sleeping or listening to a clock or eating his good supper look nothing like a real bunny’s—Bunny’s arms and legs are always stiffened into a forward-facing position, as if he wants to touch Judy with all four paws at once. Martha’s response was: “That’s funny. I was so goddamn tired when I read that book for my kids I kept thinking, ‘Who the fuck is Pat?’”

  “Well, the other thing I couldn’t figure out is who wrote Judy’s Book, you know? She’s reading the book, but it’s about her stuffed animal Bunny? Wasn’t 1940 or whatever too early for postmodern metafiction?” Martha didn’t laugh—whereas if she had been talking to Gennie, that would’ve been a layup.

  “It is meta,” Martha claimed, quite serious and yet quite not, the way she always is. “The book you see Judy reading isn’t the same book we’re reading. Judy’s Book is the one she’s imagining reading—she’s the narrator. In fact Judy is writing the book as she quote-unquote reads it. The act of telling stories about Bunny is what creates Judy’s Book.”

  “The rituals she has with Bunny are the book.”

  “That’s right. And we’re also cowriters of the book; we observe her play with Bunny, and as she narrates what she’s doing, we’re her audience. We’re the pages.”

  “You are totally losing me.”

  “It’s totally obvious. See, this is what happens to your brain when you quit your job and the biggest thing you have to think about is whether your kids are eating too much sugar. Like, of course they’re eating too much sugar, any sugar is too much for those little fiends. Listen,” Martha went on in her courtroom tones, “the real problem in Judy’s Book is this: In a book that’s all about exploring the world, and, and basically grabbing things, there’s a little girl who’s written a book for herself—who’s trapped in this book inside of a book—and what is her book about? There are like five fucking pages, and each of them is about being a little mommy to a bunny: feed the bunny, pet the bunny, watch the bunny grow, put the bunny to bed, watch the clock.”

  “‘Hear the tick-tick, Bunny?’” Bridget quoted. She was neither agreeing nor disagreeing at this point, just signaling that she understood. She didn’t entirely like the idea of Judy trapped in her own story—she thought it went a bit too far to say that little Judy was trapped. She didn’t say so at the time. But ever since Mark mentioned giving it away—this book, this particular book out of the many he could have named—she’s been revisiting what Martha said about it. Would a ghost trapped in a house be appeased by a story with a trapped little girl, or not?

  “Exactly. And like I said, we’re the pages—just by listening to it, we are helping Judy write this story about herself that traps her in place. In a book about tactile discovery and taking risks and play, Judy is stuck in a circular story about taking care of a bunny. And the fucking bunny is just going to grow up and put her in a fucking nursing home anyway.”

  This is the kind of half-serious abuse Bridget enjoys taking from Martha and no one else. Sitting up in her bed, unread magazines on Mark’s pillow, her teeth brushed and her hair still damp, she briefly considers calling Martha. Getting her read on the situation.

  No, this much she knows better than to do. She can imagine all too easily what Martha would say if Bridget were to tell her that she hasn’t seen her husband awake to talk to in probably more than a week, that her house is haunted, that she doesn’t have enough money of her own to fill up her gas tank so that she can drive to her mother’s . . . and even if she could drive to her mother’s, she’s afraid of the message that might send to Mark. Have they really drifted so far apart, the two of them, that she believes he wouldn’t notice or care if she left? Hadn’t she seriously considered, just this morning, lighting out for Kathleen’s house for a week without so much as telling him that they were going? Isn’t she, after all, the one who’s guilty of thinking about leaving?

  Martha would say, This is what the word “breakdown” sounds like, Bridge.

  Why would she leave? She has everything she could ask for here. Pretty little house. Healthy, funny, lovely child. Nice friends, a social life of sorts. Family nearby, or all the family she has, anyway. A handsome young husband willing to make money for her so she can stay home and raise their daughter.

  But there are other things, other things she wants. It sounds terrible—Who could ask for anything more? as the song goes. But yes. She wants more. She wants—uninteresting things, nothing special. That’s the worst part, maybe—she’s not even thinking about saving the world or living up to some smothered artistic potential or fulfilling some long-held dream. She’s not gifted, she’s not going to do anything miraculous with her happiness, but she still wants it.

  You’re allowed to want things. You don’t have to be special, and you don’t have to be a monster to want more in your life than your baby and your house and your marriage. Even if those things are stupid, even if they aren’t helping anyone or changing the world.

  Well, naturally I am. Bridget feels impatient with herself again. These pangs, they are pointless, they lead nowhere, they are the luxury of the woman who leads the kind of privileged life she knows herself to have. And therefore these pangs are beneath her. She knows better than to self-indulge in regret when she’s been given a lifestyle that many people would be grateful for—grateful! She should be grateful. She is.

  She’s had happy times at home with Julie, though, yes, she has. Nothing could have prepared her for the shocking joy that sometimes floods her when she is holding Julie, or giving her a bath, or watching her eat, or doing any one of the simple, silly things they do with their days together. It’s the kind of happiness, bone-deep and fleeting, that makes Bridget wish for strange technologies: a chip in her brain, for example, that could record Julie’s expressions or the sound of her squeaky voice for mental play
back later, when both of them are older and less loving. Or a time machine, but a time machine that only works in increments of one minute so that you could relive a bit of goofy, wonderful goodness with your baby over and over until you’ve wrung every drop of joy there is to express from it, drunk it all up, and declared yourself ready to move on to the next minute, whatever it might bring. Or some kind of virtual consciousness currency that lets you barter moments of lazy thinking or inattention for heightened consciousness when it really counts: Imagine some bank where you could trade in minutes of wasted waking life, those hours spent pulling out of the driveway or changing diapers or walking up flights of stairs, and those minutes could be exchanged—not one-for-one, but at some rate that made you want to earn your own life—for superconsciousness that you could flick on, like a switch in your mind, when you sensed that you’d come upon a moment of daily joy, in this good old, sweet old world, and you wanted to really live in it, absorb its preciousness. Regular consciousness is not good enough for the kind of dumbfounding joy that parenting introduces, at its best moments. And, okay, regular consciousness is perhaps too much for the kind of repetitive, hourless routine that parenting also introduces, at its most mundane: the endless washings of small plastic containers, the tired-out play, the hours spent with a preverbal person when nothing, nothing is coming into your brain or out of it that is worth assigning value to. So, yes: Imagine a bartering mechanism whereby the good stuff can be made even better, and the boring stuff, the flatline stuff, the un-alive moments of being alive can be turned in, trimmed, released. Made into harmless dead matter, lint floating under the dresser.

  Frustration and sleepiness overcome her simultaneously, and she eyes her phone, lying beside her on the covers, for distraction.

  The message from this afternoon. She discovers it the way you might find a forgotten scrap of cash in your raincoat pocket. Better yet, she sees that the message is from Kathleen. Bridget prepares herself to relish the sound of her mother’s voice—to make it the last thing she hears before sleep, how delicious, how lovely a gift. The magazines are swept off the bed, the light is dimmed, and Bridget snuggles into her pillows in the darkness. This is how a blessed child goes to bed every night. Mother.