But the kitchen was large and bright, and it was there that the household gathered for its disorganized breakfasts and late-night snacks. At first it was Dolores whom Margot most noticed. Dolores was twenty-eight, which Margot thought was fascinatingly old and ruined. She was tall, with narrow hips and shoulders but a lot of fat on her rear. She had a pained, sardonic countenance, and her skin was prematurely lined. She had just been released from a mental hospital, where she had been sent after she had pulled most of the hair from her head. She took lithium and wore a head scarf to hide her scalp. She had an air of ridiculous tragedy that reeked of affectation, but Margot admired it anyway. At breakfast she ate an orange, coffee, and toast soaked with expensive European butter, which she would sprinkle with salt. As she leisurely ate, she would glue false fingernails to her fingers and then paint them with red polish. Her gestures were very elaborate and fine.
Donald, the math major, watched her with bemusement and, Margot thought, perverse, furtive attraction enlivened by a little hot streak of disgust. Patrick did not watch her, but Margot felt his attention sometimes touch his sister, quickly, like a traveling drop of light, as if he were checking to be sure she was still there. He sat at the table in a torpid slouch, but his hazel eyes were live and expectant. He held his limbs, especially his hands, in peculiar twists that made Margot imagine his inner muscles in secret shapes of furious discord, but his posture was light, lax, and happy. She knew that his mother sometimes sent him bottles of Valium or Xanax, because she had once been present when one of his would-be girlfriends intercepted a care package and dumped the contents in the toilet. But she didn’t think his languor was drug induced. It seemed more the product of an unusual distribution of self, as if, by some crafty manipulation of internal circuitry, he’d concentrated himself in certain key psychic posts and abandoned the vast regions he didn’t want to be in. These empty spaces had an almost electrical allure, more highly charged than his distinct presence in the areas he occupied. Men didn’t like him very much, but whenever the phone rang, it was almost always a girl for Patrick.
Margot’s apartment was cold when she arrived. She turned on the heat and then went through all the rooms, turning on the lights. She put her pink flannel robe over her clothes and made herself a dinner of sliced carrots, a ham sandwich, and a Styrofoam cup of take-out vegetable soup. She put the sandwich and the carrots on a turquoise plate and the soup in a burgundy bowl. She put out a folded napkin and a spoon and vitamin capsules. She poured herself half a glass of red wine. She sat down, and suppressed pain oscillated through her in a slow, hard wave. When she had told Patrick that Roberta had left her, she had seen a faint look of satisfaction move in his eyes—satisfaction not at her loss but at seeing the Margot who was familiar to him, stalwart in a state of loss. His look almost made her bitter. But at the same time, she felt that something in her voice had invited it.
She poured lots of salt on her ham sandwich and allowed her little dinner to comfort her. It was one of the things she and Roberta were good at: small, comforting dinners. Roberta had been gone for six months, and it was still difficult for Margot to sit down to eat by herself. Still, she was determined to do it, and her determination felt good to her. It made her feel like a tenacious animal, burrowing a home in hard, dry soil. And that, of course, had been what Patrick had heard in her voice.
She remembered very well the moment when she and Patrick had become friends. She had been sitting in her room on a rainy afternoon, and he had knocked on the door to ask if she wanted to go to the Brown Jug to have coffee with him. She remembered thinking that coffee with Patrick might be an event and then being irritated at herself for the thought.
They had to walk some blocks to get to the Brown Jug. The rain had just stopped, and the air was cold, silken, and insinuating. Patrick hadn’t worn a scarf, and to protect his throat he held his coat close around his neck with one hand in a gesture of artificial privation that seemed a calculated counterpoint to the abundance of his lips and eyes. He drew her into conversation with a gentle solicitousness that was both seductive and condescending. The condescension made her unsettled and gruff, but then a little tendril of seduction would creep out and wrap itself about her wrist, and to her embarrassment, she would find herself talking brightly, her words done up in fancy shapes to impress him. He listened to her with a tense receptivity that made her embarrassment strangely thrilling. The conversation was static and vibrant at once, like a suspension bridge humming with hidden electrical energy.
The rain had surfeited the grass, and each bright blade was alert and full of tender resolve. She commented on the beauty of it. Patrick said that when he was in the third grade, he would walk to school in the winter and imagine that the grass was crying out to him for help from under the snow. Sometimes he would reach down and dig out a blade or two and put them in his warm pocket with an odd, almost erotic burst of feeling at the random, humanitarian rescue. He would imagine what the rescued grass must feel like, huddling in his pocket, gratified, yet bewildered and fearful in the stifling lint-ridden warmth. Once he actually brought one home and laid it to convalesce in a tiny matchbox stuffed with cotton.
“You must’ve been very disappointed when it died,” said Margot.
“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t really think it was alive.”
His tone was light and delighted; it seemed as if it could turn in an infinite number of directions at once, all of them easy. Margot was quite taken with him; he was not what she had expected.
When they got to the diner, they ordered coffee and sweet, gelatinous pies. The tone of their conversation changed. Seated and eating, Margot no longer felt the solicitousness or the light changeability she had sensed during the walk. Patrick just looked at her and talked about nothing. Her mind wandered, taking in the shabby, genial diner with pleasure. On the walls there were cheap paintings of landscapes and animals that nevertheless looked as if the artists had cared about them. There were plastic flowers on each table. The sugar containers had big lumps of stale sugar in them. Their waitress was a small woman in her thirties with beautiful, fierce eyes. One of her legs was withered, but her carriage was determined and erect. Patrick said, “It’s just that I feel so invisible. I just feel so invisible.”
Margot blinked and stared at him. His bright-orange shirt was open to his exquisite collarbones. His long, subtle hands looked hypersensitive against his cheap coffee cup. He was outrageously fine and fair. “What do you mean?” she said. “What on earth do you mean?”
She didn’t remember his answer, or even if he had one.
She got up at six in the morning so that she would have time to eat a nourishing breakfast and prepare a sack of wholesome lunch food. She made herself a porridge of four kinds of whole grain mixed together in the blender. She thought of a former client, a fragile widower named Thomas, whom she had persuaded to make at least one daily meal for himself. On his second breakfast he had dropped his bowl of oatmeal, and she had been unable to make him try to cook again. As Margot remembered him, she felt an intense rush of loyalty and protectiveness bordering on love.
She turned on the radio. People were talking about whether or not the nation’s children were being doped up with Ritalin on account of an attention deficit disorder vogue. “It’s a brave new world!” yelled a caller. “And you people . . . you . . .”
Margot put a lot of butter, honey, and milk in her cereal. She was the only person she knew who still used whole milk, and she was inexplicably proud of that tiny fact. She sat down and dug in. At least she hadn’t spilled her cereal.