Back home, Susan unpacked the cold stuff and then took a half hour to line her drawers and cupboards with wax paper before unpacking the pantry items. She turned on the radio, found WNYC, and spent the rest of the Leonard Lopate Show slicing open boxes marked KITCHEN, rinsing off dishes they had stupidly packed in newsprint, and finding counter space for the KitchenAid, Cuisinart, and hand mixer. Settling down with her laptop at the kitchen table, Susan filled out a numbing series of address-change forms and then composed a mass e-mail with her new address, appending the de rigueur postscript about how “my cell phone number and e-mail will of course remain the same … ”
Susan’s brisk march through her task list was slowed by a headline on her Yahoo! homepage: Anna Mara Phelps, the young mother accused of killing her daughters, had been arraigned and pled not guilty by reason of insanity, as expected. Susan noted, before forcing herself to get back to work, that Phelps was a former actress, had moved to New York from Minneapolis in 2002, and was thirty-four years old, same as Susan.
Upstairs, Susan swept out the closet in the second bedroom and opened a box marked CLOTHES: EMMA. She was smoothing out the miniature party dresses on their pink plastic Cinderella hangers and arranging them carefully when she heard the excited clamor from downstairs, as Marni and Emma stomped inside. Downstairs she heard all about the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which apparently featured a working greenhouse, a delightfully scary collection of snakes, and a fully functional pretend pizza restaurant.
“And how was the bus ride back, sweets?” Susan asked, crouching to wipe a smudge of yogurt from Emma’s cheek.
“Oh, actually? She was super worn out,” said Marni. “So we took a car home. I hope that’s OK.”
Susan went to find her purse, and forked over another nine bucks.
When Emma was up from her nap, Susan got her dressed and they went out together, with no fewer than three shopping lists: one for the hardware store, one for the drug store, and one marked “misc.” On the front stoop, holding Emma in her arms and balancing the stroller on her back, Susan nearly tripped over Andrea, who was seated on the top step with her legs folded beneath her and the Times spread out on her lap.
“Whoa. God, sorry, Andrea.”
“No, look at me, I couldn’t be more in the way!”
Andrea was wearing oversized old-lady sunglasses, studded along the stems with rhinestones. Susan was always seeing glasses like them in secondhand shops and wishing she had the kitschy nerve to sport a pair. “So? Are we Brooklynites now? Are we finding everything OK?”
“I think so. Wait, no. Butcher?”
“Oh, yes. The place to go is called Staubitz. It’s down Court Street, just past Kane, I think. Or just before. Anyway, it’s down there somewhere. Should I draw you a map?”
“No, no.”
Emma squirmed in her arms. “We’re going, love. We’re going.”
“Some people like Los Paisanos, on Smith, but if you ask me those people are idiots. Staubitz is the place, and tell John I sent you.”
“I will. Are you OK?”
She had noticed that Andrea was holding her hip, shifting her position laboriously from one buttock to the other.
“Oh, you know. This and that, dear. The equipment is old. Still works, but it’s old.” She gave Emma her big comedienne’s wink, which Emma returned enthusiastically.
Susan smiled. “So, Staubitz?”
“Staubitz.”
She gave Andrea a little mock salute and continued down the steps. Halfway down Cranberry Street, she remembered the person she’d seen, or maybe imagined seeing, lurking in the backyard on Sunday night, staring up at the house.
She stopped and turned back. “Oh, hey, Andrea?”
But the door was just closing; Andrea had slipped back inside.
Tuesday began on an unexpectedly delightful note: Emma woke up early, and Susan, feeling unusually well rested and at ease, decided they should whip up a batch of cookies. Emma, naturally, thought this was pretty much the best idea she’d ever heard. They spent a happy and loud half hour, clanging around the kitchen in matching polka-dot aprons, mixing, pouring, and giggling, until Alex came down for his coffee at 7:45 to find both wife and daughter flour-caked and giddy.
“Oo! They’re ready! They’re ready!” announced Emma, dancing in front of the oven while Alex yawned and scratched his butt.
Susan slipped on an oven mitt, pulled out the tray, and handed Emma a sample, which she ate in one bite before throwing her arms around her mother’s waist. Susan sipped her own coffee, shot Alex a grin. “What can I say? The kid loves me.”
Four hours later, Susan was bustling about in the master bedroom, hanging a few small framed photographs and waiting for the cable guy, when she was struck by a strong pang of guilt and self-recrimination. It was all well and good to take on these endless logistical rounds — shopping, unpacking, hanging pictures, hanging clothes — but when was she going to set up her easel and do some painting?
That’s right, mess around forever, whispered the accusatory inner voice she knew too well, arch and recriminatory, and then you never have to put your money where your mouth is … right? Never have to try. Susan was frozen in place, holding her favorite red cardigan sweater up by the arms like a dance partner; she had just dumped out an entire box of packed clothes that needed to be folded and put away.
Never try, never fail.
Susan knew what she should do: put down the sweater, march downstairs, and start painting. No time like the present, right? There was nothing she was doing that couldn’t wait. Instead, she lay down the sweater on the bed and brought its arms down and across, one by one, then folded it deliberately upward from hem to collar, smoothed the crease, and stowed it in the dresser.
Very nice, Frida Kahlo, said the voice of self-recrimination, soft and insistent. Very nice.
The man from Time Warner rang the bell at 11:58, two minutes before the expiration of the four-hour window in which the dispatcher had prophesied his appearance. His name was Tony, and he made small talk in a thick Brooklyn accent as he installed the cable box. Susan offered coffee—“No, tanks,” said Tony — and then hovered in the living room, scanning the Arts section and waiting for him to finish.
“Hey,” Tony said all of a sudden, and looked up from his squat before the entertainment center. “Wassat?”
“What’s what?” Susan asked.
“Dat. Ping. Ping. Hear dat?”
She narrowed her eyes and listened. It was very low, barely audible, but the cable guy was right: there was a light ping, every ten or fifteen seconds, coming from … somewhere. She walked a slow circle around the room, then up and down the hallway, but couldn’t figure it out. “Weird,” she said.
“Yeah,” said the cable man. “Anyway, dat’s it. Finished. Lemme show ya the remotes.”
When Tony from TimeWarner was gone, Susan grabbed the dustpan and handbroom from under the kitchen sink and swept a tidy circle around the entertainment center, gathering up the little bits of clipped wire he’d left in his wake. Before she went back upstairs, she cast a quick, worried glance at the door to the bonus room.
“Tomorrow,” she said firmly. “I’ll do some painting tomorrow.”
As was perhaps inevitable, given the speed with which Alex and Susan had decided to take the apartment on Cranberry Street, they started to discover small problems they had overlooked during their one brief tour. The face plate on an electric outlet in the kitchen was slightly askew, so Susan had to angle the prongs awkwardly to plug in the toaster. A long ugly crack marred the wall above the sink in the downstairs bathroom, and the faucet in the kitchen sink had to be tightened with unusual force, or it dripped.