Chap turned on the faucet, filled a coffee mug with water, and glugged it down. He turned the mug upside down and put it in the dish drainer. It was what he did at home — just upended a glass or mug as if he hadn’t drunk from it. Fran bit her tongue and turned back toward the refrigerator. There was a picture of an elderly lady she did not recognize. Everything was held in place with magnets shaped like clouds. Droplets of rain fell from the cloud holding the postcard of Matthew to the refrigerator. Four differently shaped clouds not in use were lined up vertically next to the door handle. Fran moved them until they were separated by wider spaces, pushing one higher and another lower, the way clouds would really look in the sky.
“It’s certainly not their house in Cambridge, is it?” Chap said.
Outside, moths fluttered against the glass, seeking the light. She saw on the counter a spray can of Yard Guard and another can of Deep Woods Off. A mosquito buzzed her ear. Reflexively, she flinched and ducked. Chap ran toward her, clapping his hands. He was as quick as a snake’s tongue. A bug hardly ever escaped him. At home, if a cricket or a lightning bug got in, she would have to holler out quickly so he wouldn’t kill it. She always got a glass and the notepad they kept by the kitchen phone so she could capture nice insects and release them outdoors. He chided her. “You let in more than you free,” he said. Still, something made her patiently stalk them, and she felt victorious when she pulled her hand back inside after shaking out the glass and finding it empty. That had happened the night before they left for Vermont. “What does your crystal ball say?” Chap had asked, passing by in his pajamas as she was closing the door with her foot and gazing into the bottom of an empty glass. And she had thrown it at him. Not hard — she had more or less tossed it, but it had caught him by surprise; he hadn’t ducked, and it had hit him in the shoulder. He winced, more perplexed than angry. Several expressions crossed his face before he pulled his chin in tight to his throat as if to say: What’s this?
“It looks like one of those antique shops that’s set up to look like somebody’s house when actually everything’s for sale,” she said.
“The decoys must be his,” Chap said.
“Jesus,” she said. “We don’t collect anything. I wonder when they started doing this?”
He leaned against the counter, the moths behind his head like large, durable snowflakes. She thought of Anthony’s letter — the one he had sent about Christmastime, telling her about the new lights the college in town had installed so people could cross-country ski at night. Everything the Brunettis wrote made the town sound idyllic. Cows — whether or not they were presiding over heaven — were not dear to Fran’s heart, but what she had heard about the horses made her curious to see them, and from the photographs on the refrigerator, she could tell she was going to love the garden. She and Chap had enough sunny land behind their house to garden. She wondered why they never had. She began to fantasize that there would be endless herbs. As a child, she had stood in her grandmother’s dill patch, tickling her nose with a stalk of the delightful, feathery stuff, hoping a wind would blow other big stalks her way to touch her legs. She looked again at the picture of the elderly lady on the refrigerator. The woman was eating something from a plate on her lap. It looked like white-frosted cake. Strawberry shortcake? Or a mound of vanilla ice cream? She suddenly wondered if there would be a farmers’ market in town; if there might be special dinners at the firehouse, or even some celebratory day. In the town her grandmother had lived in, they had had an annual celebration to commemorate the day the library opened. She had gotten her first kiss in a rowboat on the lake in that town on the seventeenth anniversary of the opening of the library. Her grandmother’s next-door neighbor had taught her how to spot the constellations.
“You collect cookbooks,” Chap said suddenly. “Isn’t that what you always look for in airport bookshops?”
They were on the Brunettis’ screened porch. It seemed quite large, but she could not put her finger on the light switch. As her eyes focused a little better in the dark, she went toward a cord dangling from a ceiling light. She pulled it and a breeze started up; it was a fan, not a light. Then Chap found the light switch and two sconces flickered bright on the far side of the porch, at each corner. In a few seconds Chap had also pulled the chain on a table lamp, so the porch was almost as bright as the kitchen.
“The place goes on and on,” Chap said.
She looked at him. “A little jealous of the Brunettis’ house?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. He shook his head no, walking toward her.
“Well, maybe in the daylight,” he said, hugging her.
Feeling his body against hers, and feeling his fingertips pressing into her, she said: “Honey, I don’t buy cookbooks for the recipes, you know. I buy them if they have funny old-time illustrations.”
In college, she had intended to become an illustrator. One of the things that had drawn her to Pia Brunetti had been Pia’s love of drawing. Of course she had been very fond of Anthony and might have become the Brunettis’ friend in any case, but one day she had run into Pia at a bookstore when Pia had been staring at a book of Ingres drawings. She did not usually — in fact, ever — run into people in the art section of bookshops. And when Pia began to speak about the drawing she was looking at, running her finger through the air as if lightly shaving a layer from something that could not be seen, she had been moved, and had asked her to join her for coffee after they finished browsing. That was when she found out that Pia was a seamstress, and that she was adept at altering patterns so her creations would be entirely unique. Fran’s own career as an illustrator had gotten derailed in college as she began to study biology in order to do biological drawings. Biology itself became so much more interesting. First biology, then medicine. Then the thought of so many years in medical school (she had already met, and was almost engaged to, Chap) gave her cold feet. Somehow — she herself was not quite sure how — she had decided to teach art to children, though when she went to graduate school she had not specialized in that, after all. She had written her thesis on the use of music in early childhood development, and taken exams, the summer she married, for her teacher’s certification. She had Anthony in class her second year of teaching. By then, the tests she and Chap had undergone had revealed that it was almost certain he and she could not conceive. A more intense feeling for children — children as a category — came over her. She indulged herself and became quite attached to certain children, even fantasizing that they might be hers, though the fantasizing did not extend beyond scenarios she would imagine as she was falling asleep at night. She had a strange reaction to those late-night imaginings. Or at least she thought it must be a strange reaction: both to wish that they extended into her dreams and to luxuriate in the letdown when her eyes opened in the morning. That was where she really might have had a crystal balclass="underline" she could tell quickly — so quickly that she thought of it as intuition — if, and in what way, a child was in distress. Anthony was easy to diagnose. Telling the parents in a way that would not offend or frighten them was the only problem. She had been so good at her job that several private schools had tried to hire her away from Bailey, but she had liked her colleagues, appreciated the fact that few administrative meetings were convened unless there was a real need to bring everyone together. But in the fall of her third year of teaching she had begun to have headaches, and in the morning her eyelids were swollen. Chap finally persuaded her to go to the doctor. She had blood tests, and was diagnosed as having mono. A young person’s kissing disease, and her usual outlet of affection, except for kissing Chap, had been hugging the children at school. In fact, although she and Chap made love two or three times a week, they rarely kissed — or only afterward: little kisses she planted on his shoulder; a fond kiss smack in the center of her forehead, before he rolled out of bed. It was his idea, after she spent almost two weeks at home and seemed to enjoy it in spite of her low energy, that she take time off from teaching and indulge her love of drawing. People were too programmed in this society, he said: his salary was quite adequate to support them both. Something persuaded her that he was right. Perhaps she wanted to be flattered and cajoled by the headmaster of Bailey. In the back of her mind she also thought about putting out feelers to other schools — seeing what response she would get if she instigated something, rather than receiving surprise offers. Instead, she walked around the empty house in the day, wearing Chap’s bathrobe, which she appropriated, thinking: This is what solitude is. This is what it’s like to be childless. She enjoyed the misery this provoked, the way she enjoyed, in part, the disturbing dreams. Word got out in the community that she and Chap had inherited money — that she had quit because they now had a great amount of money and because she wanted to follow other pursuits. It was never a surprise to her that adults fantasized as quickly as children, because the converse was true: speculative children inevitably grounded themselves, after a spell, in reality. It was just too frightening to fly by the seat of their pants for too long. They would begin to paint within the borders. Read from beginning to end.