“—probably costing a thousand dollars a minute. Can I see them? Birthday kid?”
“Both napping.”
“Lucky you.”
She picked up the phone and flipped the screen and panned over Viv, asleep on the couch, still embracing the queen of clubs. He made a sound of love.
“Lucky kind of.” It was easiest, she discovered, to fall into their regular patter. “If you consider sorting through a bunch of fish crap for party bags restful.”
“So,” he said, “what’s going on?”
They had always prided themselves on their mutual brutal honesty: Your breath stinks, You messed it up, You’ve got lint in your belly button.
There’s another version of me: Why not say it right now, swiftly, courageously?
But she could already tell it would feel wrong to say it, to bestow upon the situation the words that would give it shape. Her panic flared and her courage evaporated.
“It’s getting fuzzy again,” she lied.
“Can I see your face?” he said.
“What?” she feigned.
“Your face.”
She zoomed the phone in front of her, giving him the briefest glimpse before putting it back on the counter. It wasn’t candles behind him, it was three bare bulbs jutting out of an unfinished wall.
“Coy,” he accused.
“Tired,” she rejoined. “Fatigued. Circles under my eyes. You really want to see the evidence of how exhausting it is for you to be gone?”
“Seriously.” His voice was curt with worry. “What happened?”
“Well,” she said. “I broke two mercury light bulbs and she had a tantrum in the grocery store. What’s it like there?” She couldn’t even imagine it, some wondrous place on some other continent where he played music in the middle of the night.
“Lots of plazas and churches and the coffee’s superstrong, okay? So tell me.”
“I’ve got to wash a million strawberries before the party. I still have to fill and hang the piñata.”
“You’re breaking up,” he said. “Piña colada for a four-year-old’s birthday party?”
She was relieved to be breaking up.
“Okay, okay, okay, you win, Moll, fine, go,” he said. “I can tell you’re not in the mood.”
Moll. He had called her that only a handful of times in the past twelve years.
Stunned, she held the phone up in front of her. His face was pixelated again. The little window for her face had gone dark.
12
She knew from The Why Book that Earth was rotating at a speed of one thousand miles per hour while simultaneously orbiting the sun at a speed of sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, and after he hung up she felt these two speeds in her body at once, and had to crouch down on the kitchen floor.
Perhaps those twin velocities, she hypothesized, explained the occasional dizziness that had haunted her ever since she became a mother, as though bearing children had somehow made her body excruciatingly attuned to Earth’s double revolutions.
But it had never been this bad, a woman trapped on her kitchen floor, the tiles tilting beneath her, a kaleidoscope of trillions of Mollies, a Molly singing with perfect pitch, a Molly smoking a cigarette, a Molly tending a vegetable garden, a Molly in the middle of a car crash, a Molly failing to catch her baby as he falls off the bed, a Molly running shrieking into the ocean as her daughter gets pulled out by the undertow.
She forced herself to imagine a hand on her shoulder, a still and solid presence, and the vision of that hand enabled her to at last open her eyes.
But it was not a vision. It was the hand of Viv.
“Mother?” Viv said, which she never said.
13
It was Viv’s job to remove the strawberries from the colander after Molly rinsed them in the sink. It was Viv’s job to arrange them in a bowl. Viv wanted many bowls of strawberries, very many bowls, too many. She positioned three strawberries in one of the yellow bowls and stalked around the living room, speculating about the most ideal placement for this particular offering.
“We could fit them all in two big bowls,” Molly said. “That’s how people usually do this kind of thing.”
“No,” Viv said.
Molly was in no state to resist. She reached up into the cupboard and pulled down the entire stack of yellow bowls and placed it on the counter near Viv’s stool.
Then Molly laid out the ocean-themed plates and cups and napkins on the table. She taped the streamers to the walls. The waste of it all, and the magic on Viv’s face as the room transformed. The tape had gotten stuck to itself and Molly needed to peel more off, but her nails were too short, bitten.
The buzz of her phone in her back pocket launched a swift hysterical shiver through her body.
But it was just a text from Erika: on front steps won’t ring bell don’t want kids to see me
Molly glanced at Viv, who was deeply absorbed in arranging yet another bowl of strawberries, and snuck off to open the door.
Erika held aloft an enormous bunch of silver balloons.
“Surprise,” Erika whispered.
“You didn’t need to get those!” Molly whispered back, moved to the point of tears: another adult around.
“Fish duty,” Erika said, waving off her thanks and shoving the unwieldy balloons through the doorway. “But anyhow I had to rush to pick these up so I didn’t have time to get in costume, it’s in my car, so should I—”
“The basement,” Molly said. “Those cellar doors in the backyard. They kind of stick, you’ll have to tug hard. There’s a bathroom down there too if you—”
“The square key, right?”
“Mommy!” Viv cried out in the background.
Erika winked and zipped her fingers across her mouth, my-lips-are-sealed, before closing the front door.
Viv gasped as she came around the corner. “Where’s those from?”
“From a seagull,” Molly said.
“A seagull!” Viv was in rapture. She seized the knotted ribbons of the balloons and pulled them, with some effort, down the hallway, toward the living room. “Look, we don’t need flowers.”
Molly was distracted, navigating the balloons along from behind.
“Because we have silver and red and yellow,” Viv declared.
Molly and Viv and the balloons burst forth from the hallway into the living room, which was dotted with fifteen or so yellow bowls of red strawberries, placed here and there on every surface, including the floor.
“What if people step on them?” Molly said.
Though they looked, actually, very beautiful.
14
When the doorbell rang, Viv ran on tiptoe, the skin of her feet barely making contact with the floorboards. She was just now tall enough to unlock the door and turn the knob and pull it open.
The fish’s scales were resplendent, iridescent. Its mask culminated in a fan-shaped headdress that descended from the crown of its head all the way down its spine. The tail took the form of blue spandex bell-bottomed pants. The fish wore silver sneakers, as planned, and blue satin gloves.
When Erika spread her hands wide to greet Viv, blue gauze fins became apparent, hanging from her arms like undermounted wings.