“Let’s go seek a fish fry,” said Sarah, and happily took Edward’s arm.
“Let’s do,” said Edward, sounding to my ear like a southern gent in a corny old film.
We piled into the Ford Escort, no longer by the black car and with only one small silver scratch, and drove around a little haphazardly, passing the stadium, whereupon Sarah said, “So here’s where all the Catholics gather and pray for the Packers to win.” We wound up at a supper club called Lombardino’s, which over the bar had a sign that read BETTER TO OUTLIVE AN ELF THAN OUTDRINK A DWARF. There were drawings of Vince Lombardi on the napkins and placemats and even the teacups; to my surprise, I had to tell Sarah and Edward what a supper club even was.
“We’re from the East,” said Edward. “They don’t have them out there.”
“They don’t?” This seemed unimaginable to me.
“I mean, there are steak houses, but they’re not the same. We love supper clubs but without really knowing what constitutes one. We kind of get it, but we always like to hear the exact definition from someone who grew up out here,” said Sarah.
Always. Out here. So this was a thing they did, a tourist’s game. “Well, a supper club is just, well, it’s got these carrots and radishes in a glass of ice like this,” I began lamely, with no words coming, just a sense of the obvious. It was like describing my arms. “And there’s always steak, and fish on Fridays, and fried potatoes of some sort. There’s whiskey sours and Bloody Marys and Chubby Marys, and supper, but there’s no real club. I mean, there aren’t members or anything.”
“What’s a Chubby Mary?” This was Edward and Sarah practically simultaneously.
“It’s a Bloody Mary with a chub sticking out of it.”
“A chub?”
“A fish. It’s dead. It’s small. At first you see its head just poking up through the ice cubes, but believe me, the whole thing is there.”
Edward and Sarah were sitting across the table from me, grinning as if I were the most adorable child. My face heated up in response to what I felt was mockery. For a second I wanted to stab myself.
“They’re probably in the back, giving everything a quick parboil then tanning it with a torch,” said Sarah.
“Sarah thinks nothing is really cooked anymore, just toned with a butane lighter.”
“Sometimes that’s true.” Sarah shrugged.
“We often blowtorched the weeds at home by hand,” I said. “But that’s organic weed control — not cooking.”
“No, it’s not. Cooking.” Sarah smiled briefly again as if I were still just the cutest thing but no longer what she was looking for in this job.
Edward took his wineglass and toasted Sarah. “Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“It’s your birthday?” I asked.
“Yes, well, in all the rush of events, who can even care!”
I was tempted to ask how old she was, but then I remembered I already knew. Instead I said, “So, you’re a Capricorn!”
“Yeah,” she said tiredly.
“Like Jesus!” I said. Having a Jewish mother, I was still inclined to think of Jesus not as the messiah but as, like, a celebrity.
“And like Richard Nixon,” she sighed, but then smiled. “Capricorns are a little boring. But they’re steady. And they work very hard, aiming for the highest thing.” She drank from her birthday wine. “They toil purposefully and loyally and then people just turn on them and destroy them.”
“And tomorrow’s our anniversary,” said Edward.
“That’s right. But we never celebrate it.”
“Well, it’s a little on the heels of your birthday, but we celebrate it.”
“We do?”
“Sure,” said Edward, smiling. “Don’t you remember? Every year on that day you put on a black armband and then I go looking for you and find you on top of some bell tower with a bag of chips and some Diet Coke and a rifle.”
Sarah turned to me. They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me. “There’s a lot of pressure having a birthday and an anniversary so close together. It’s a stressor.” She raised her glass in a toast. “What does that elf and dwarf sign mean?” she asked. I was now the official translator.
“I have no idea.” Perhaps they would suddenly, brutally, fire me.
When the bill came, Edward reached for his wallet but couldn’t find it. “I must have left my wallet in the car,” he said.
Sarah was already pulling out a credit card. “You should get one of those waist-belt change purses,” she said to him.
“Too much like a colostomy bag,” said Edward. They both looked amused, and for a freak minute I believed they were perfect for each other, a feeling I would never have again.
“Should I pay for mine?” I asked awkwardly.
“Absolutely not,” said Sarah, signing for the bill, not looking up.
The next morning I awoke in my own suite — the Presidential Suite, it was named — to Sarah’s phone call.
“We’re off to see the baby,” she said. “Would you like to go with, as you real midwesterners say?”
Was this perfunctory politeness — or perfunctory rudeness? Was I supposed to decline and let them have their appropriately private meeting? Or would declining get me fired, as it might suggest that the baby was of no real interest to me? I had come this far with them — it seemed I had to say yes. It was a decision made in the dry terror of cluelessness. Why was I never quick to understand? At the end of a transaction, for instance, when a store clerk handed me my purchase and said, “Have a good one,” I always caught myself wondering, A good WHAT?
“Yes,” I said now. The thick drapes at the windows were outlined in sun. I pulled them open with the plastic rod and the morning burned in — clear and ablaze above a snowy parking lot. The ceiling I could see now bore a maize maze of water stains, and the walls of the room had bullet holes in them. The Presidential Suite! Well, I supposed, even presidents got shot. The wallpaper peeled in triangles at the seams, like the shoulder of a dress dropped to show a whore’s plaster skin. There was a fake thermostat, one of those thermostats to nowhere.
“Can you meet us in the lobby in thirty minutes?” Sarah asked doubtfully.
“Of course.” I looked over at the in-room coffeemaker and wondered how it worked.
As soon as I saw them in the lobby, I realized my mistake. They were looking at their watches, holding hands, then looking at their watches again. Their glance up at me was quick, perfunctory, and when I got into the car and sat in the back like their sullen teenage daughter I could see that this was not an outing I should be on. Edward started to light up a cigarette, and Sarah swatted it away.
“Afraid of secondhand smoke? There’s conflicting science on that,” he said.
Sarah gave him a look but said nothing. From my awkward place in the backseat I remembered a headline from the student paper. “You know what they say about secondhand smoke,” I said. I was a girl still finding her jokey party voice and borrowing from others’.
“What?” said Sarah.
“Leads to secondhand coolness.”
Edward turned in his seat to look at me. I had pleased him with this stupidity, and he was getting a better look at me to see who I was today.
“Did you have a good breakfast?” he asked.
“I did,” I lied.
“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” he said, turning back around, and I studied his hair-cape some more, its weird, warm flip.
The foster home we pulled up to was in a working-class subdivision. The foster family’s name was McKowen, and on their garage was a big letter M in bright green plastic.