Amanda took off her shoes at the door; she felt strongly about taking your shoes off at the door. “This is beautiful.” The photographs on the website were a promise, and it was fulfilled: the pendant lamps hovering over the oak table, in case you wanted to do a jigsaw puzzle at night, the gray marble kitchen island where you could imagine kneading dough, the double sink beneath the window overlooking the pool, the stove with its copper faucet so you could fill up your pot without having to move it. The people who owned this house were rich enough to be thoughtful. She’d stand at that sink and soap up the dishes, while Clay stood just outside grilling, drinking a beer, a watchful eye on the children playing Marco Polo in the pool.
“I’ll get the things.” The subtext was clear; Clay was going to smoke a cigarette, a vice that was meant to be a secret but was not.
Amanda wandered through the place. There was a great room with a television, French doors out to the deck. There were two smallish bedrooms, color schemes of aqua and navy, Jack and Jill bath between them. There was a closet with beach towels and a stacked washer and dryer, there was a long hallway to the master bedroom, lined with inoffensive black-and-white beach scenes. Leaving aside tasteful, everything was thoughtful: a wooden box to hide the plastic bottle of laundry soap, a huge seashell cradling a cake of soap, still in its paper wrapper. The master bed was king-size, so massive it never would have rounded the stairwell to get into their third-floor apartment. The en suite bath was all white (tile, sink, towels, soap, a white dish of white seashells), that particular fantasy of purity to escape the reality of your own excrement. Extraordinary, and only $340 a day plus the cleaning fee and refundable security deposit. From the bedroom Amanda could see her children, already wiggled into their quick-drying Lycra, hurtling toward the placid blue. Archie, long limbs and acute angles, barely convex chest sprouting brown twists at the pink nipples; Rose, curvy and jiggling, downy with baby hair, her polka-dot one-piece straining just so at the legs, pudendum in relief. An anticipatory scream, then they met the water with that delicious clack. In the woods beyond, something started at the sound, fluttered up into view from the general brown of the scene: two fat turkeys, dumb and wild and annoyed at the intrusion. Amanda smiled.
3
AMANDA VOLUNTEERED TO GO TO THE GROCERY. THEY’D passed a store, and she retraced that path. She drove slowly, windows down.
The store was frigid, brightly lit, wide-aisled. She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared! She bought a three-pack of paper towels, and a spray-on sunscreen, and aloe, because the children had inherited their father’s pale skin. She bought those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and those carrots that are tumbled around until they’re the size of a child’s fingers. She bought packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you could while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, a bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberries, a dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes and a sandy bundle of cilantro even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. It was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind.
“I’m going to need some help.” The man placing every item into brown paper bags was maybe in high school but maybe not. He wore a yellow T-shirt and had brown hair and an overall square affect, like he’d been carved from a block of wood. There was some stirring, watching his hands at work, but vacations did that, didn’t they, made you horny, made everything seem possible, a life completely different than the one you normally inhabited. She, Amanda, might be a mother temptress, sucking on a postadolescent’s hot tongue in the parking lot of the Stop and Shop. Or she might just be another woman from the city spending too much money on too much food.
The boy, or maybe he was a man, put the bags into a cart and followed Amanda into the parking lot. He loaded them into the trunk, and she gave him a five-dollar bill.
She sat, the engine idling, to see if she had cell-phone service, and the endorphin rush of the arriving emails—Jocelyn, Jocelyn, Jocelyn, their agency director, one of the clients, two missives sent to the entire office by the head project manager—was almost as sexual as that flutter over the bag boy.
There was nothing important happening at work, but it was a relief to know that for certain rather than worry that there was. Amanda turned on the radio. She half recognized the song that was playing. She stopped at the gas station and bought Clay a pack of Parliaments. They were on vacation. That night, after hamburgers and hot dogs and grilled zucchini, after bowls of ice cream with cookies crumbled on top of them and maybe some sliced strawberries too, maybe they’d fuck—not make love, that was for home, fucking was for vacation, sweaty and humid and tantalizingly foreign in someone else’s Pottery Barn sheets, then go outside, slip into that heated pool, and let the water wash them clean, and smoke one cigarette each and talk about what you talked about after you’d been married for as long as they’d been: finances, the children, fever dreams of real estate (How nice it would be to have a house like this all their own!). Or they’d talk about nothing, the other pleasure of a long marriage. They’d watch television. She drove back to the painted brick house.
4
CLAY BOUND THE TOWEL AROUND HIS WAIST. THE GESTURE of opening double doors was inherently grand. It was cold inside, and very hot outside. The trees had been pruned to keep the shade from the pool. All that sun made you lightheaded. His damp feet left marks on the wooden floors. They melted away in seconds. Clay cut through the kitchen and out via the side door. He retrieved his cigarettes from the glove box, wincing at the gravel. He sat on the front lawn in the shade of a tree and smoked. He should feel bad about this, but tobacco was the foundation of the nation. Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.