day Larissa’s life ended, she didn’t even know it. The day it ended she was wearing sweatpants. And not Juicy Couture sweatpants, snug and velour, with satin accents, maybe a little heart appliqué on the buttocks area, embroidered in gold silk with little sparkly crystals to make a married woman’s rear-end moonlight as a young filly’s: maidenly not matronly. No. She was wearing her should’ve-been-thrown-away-ten-years-ago faded gray sweats, frayed at the hem, baggy, worn paper thin, procured at college where you either wore sweatpants or were naked and having sex.
Two months ago in November, before Thanksgiving, it snowed. Ice cotton fell out of the sky, ruining all her plans for a bike ride, a walk, a stroll to the store. The winter coats were still deep in the attic, the gloves, the hats, the winter galoshes far away.
But the dog was happy. Galloping like an overjoyed beast, Riot held in her teeth one of Emily’s stuffed cats, muddied, blackened, thoroughly mangled.
Snow in November. Didn’t bode well for the winter ahead in land-locked Summit. That was the one bad thing about living here. Sometimes out of the sky came ice and didn’t stop till late March. New Yorkers were lucky: they were closer to the water. Water tempered everything.
Oh yes, and when they lived in a walk-up in Hoboken, with two babies, an old car with no muffler and one tiny paycheck, like it didn’t snow? It snowed like they were in the Ninth Circle of Hell. And they had no money. It doesn’t snow only on the well-to-do, Larissa, she muttered to herself, limping to the storage room to get some book boxes. And all things being equal, better to be on a golf course in swank Summit than in a tenement in Hoboken. She used Jared’s tape gun to fix a half-dozen book boxes and then hobbled over to the bookshelves in her master bedroom, her glance toward the windows.
Larissa pressed her face to the Arctic windowpane, her silent house behind her. Every day some form of freezing rain fell from the sky. Yesterday, warm weather came and turned all to slush, until today, when a freakish gale made it twenty below and a hockey rink. The coiffed blonde chick on the six o’clock news last night forecast that it would feel like forty below. Apparently not good for wet faces. And Larissa’s face every time she went outside was wet, because for some reason when the chill sun caught her eye, she would start to weep.
The kids had barely got off to school in the morning. That was true for most mornings. By 7:00, Jared was already up and shaved and showering, all hummy and spring-steppy. So cheery. Damn him. Larissa opened the doors to the children’s bedrooms, made some noise to get up, stumbled downstairs, put the cereal bowls out, let Riot out, the dog bounding outside into the cold, full of exuberance for the day ahead. Everyone should be a dog. But Larissa’s kids, usually spectacularly unobservant, grumbled about how glum it was outside, and freezing, and refused to leave their cozy beds. Larissa almost let them stay home. What’s one day? What are they going to miss? The atomic weight of magnesium? The three branches of government? They should be so lucky as to learn that. Asher spent the entire seventh grade social studies on American History and didn’t read a word of the Constitution. Not a word. He couldn’t tell her what Plymouth Rock was, or the Pilgrims. Or Mayflower.
Ah. Except Emily had a science quiz, and Asher a clay project on the Egyptians, and Michelangelo his beloved art class. So she cajoled them into rising, herself dreaming of falling back into the down quilts after they left for school.
Would it all be different had she let her children stay home for gray snow day? Even the inscrutable atoms moving doggedly on their inexorable path through the universe were occasionally given to unexplained and random swerves—jumps and diversions from the steady path, unpredictable yet permanent. Was letting her children stay home a break in the pattern of the atom? Or was sending them to school the break? There was no way to know.
They got ready for school.
The next forty minutes, a litany of supplication. “Asher, take your glasses from the bathroom.” “Em, remember your cello.” “Michelangelo, drink your milk.” “Asher, brush your hair.” “Em, I don’t know where your shoes are. Probably where you left them.” “Michelangelo, drink your milk, we have to go.” “Asher, take your Egyptian pyramid. Yes, the thing we were working on all weekend, that one.” They named him Asher because it meant happy. The placid boy looked like his mother, tall and lean with a steady gaze. “Asher, have a yogurt.”
“I hate yogurt, Mom. It’s disgusting.”
“Since when? You used to love yogurt.”
“Yeah, and I used to suck my thumb. Things change, Mom.”
“No, you can’t have a cookie. Have apple sauce. Emily, so put on a different pair of shoes. You must have another pair or two, don’t you?” Emily looked like her dad, but with a round face and pixie bangs. “Michelangelo! Finish your cereal.” They broke the mold to make their youngest son with his mystifying blond curly mop of hair and the most unaccommodating demeanor. “Riot! Stop jumping!”
Jared was long gone. Then the two older younglings were running through the wind, running up the long narrow street for the middle school bus at the corner of Bellevue and Summit. It was a three-minute Olympian sprint, for which they left precisely ninety seconds. Like Larissa said, getting to school, a (perhaps not such a minor) miracle. She herself limped down the driveway with Michelangelo in tow with his bookbag, though without a scarf or gloves (the absence of which would dub her a bad mother in the parents’ lounge, which she didn’t frequent). She drove him the mile and a half to Lincoln, parked and limped alongside him, holding his small cold hand.
The crossing guard asked her how her leg was. “Getting better finally?”
“Yes, thanks,” she said, though it wasn’t, not at all. That it was her left leg and not her right was the only good thing you could say about it. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to drive.
Michelangelo was only ten minutes late. “Oh, good morning, Michael. So nice of you to stop by,” said the passing principal, and he turned, smiled impishly at his wan, waving mother, and gunned it down the hall even though he wasn’t supposed to gun.
It was in the hours between the missed Pledge of Allegiance and the afternoon food foraging that Larissa stood with her freshly made cardboard boxes near the windows where she put on her makeup. The leg was still too sore to stand on for long even after four weeks. Her bedroom faced the front of the house, and past the tall bare oaks she could see the rolling sloping hills of the golf course, and beyond them the highway, and the mall. The view so convenient: beauty and utility, both natural and man-made. Larissa placed her palm on the cold window, to feel the life outside.
Stepping away, she glanced at her books. They’d been freshly dusted and stood spines out and shiny. Ernestina was so meticulous. In three hours she and her team of two licked the house clean. Muy limpio. The books were never dusty. There was never a speck on them.
Or, for that matter, a dog’s ear.
Larissa had forty shelves of books in her house, not including those of her children, not including those of her husband. One for every year of her life. Twenty-four shelves held books she’d already read. The other sixteen …
In her bedroom four shelves housed just the books she was meaning to read. They had to be cast into categories finally, into a hierarchy of value, like castes of Punjabis, so it would be easier to know in what order not to read them. There was the non-fiction subsection, itself separated into memoirs, general interest, religion and philosophy. There was a section of commercial fiction, enough for the next two years. There was serious hardcover fiction she was planning on not reading in the next three. It had been four, five years since she touched a book on these shelves. She bought the books and cataloged them like an efficient librarian, hoping that someday she would have the time, find the time. Her house was impeccable and the children were in school and the husband would have dinner tonight, and clean white ironed shirts, and every project would be on time, and each drawer organized. How was she ever going to find the time to open One Hundred Years of Solitude, the annotated Lolita, The Executioner’s