graduate school and studied what they wanted instead of what they were told was necessary for the greater good.
Before I let Malcolm persuade me to switch to the more lucrative field of life science, I sampled everything college offered. Philosophy, literature, classics. There was a poster in my Latin class of an elephant who had just taken a dump with Stercus Accidit! at the bottom in bright yellow letters—the professor’s idea of a Latin joke. But now that I think of that poster, I realize the image was completely wrong. Shit doesn’t happen all at once; no invisible elephant unloads a pile right where you’re about to step. What happens is this: Some bunny rabbit lets a little pellet drop. Then another one. Then another. You don’t worry much because the bunny’s cute and the pellets are small, easily brushed away.
Stercus accidit. A little bit at a time. Usually while we’re not paying attention. Like my mother’s story about the frog in the boiling pot.
“Hi,” Freddie says as we approach the waiting car.
“Hi,” says Sabrina.
And now we wait again.
Behind us, Mrs. Delacroix’s curtains shift slightly to the left as she sets herself up to watch the morning’s events. In the houses on either side of hers, things are less subtle. Blinds roll up with an audible snap. Mrs. Morris pretends to be dusting a windowsill. Mrs. Callahan sprays Windex on the same pane five times, rubbing at squeaky-clean glass with a new paper towel after each squirt. Every one of them joined Sarah Green’s social engineering campaign some years back.
Enjoy the show, ladies. Fuckwits.
Freddie takes out her phone and starts tapping chickens across traffic-filled roads, her way of escaping into another reality. I let her play—anything to prevent one of her meltdowns. Sabrina continues staring at the sidewalk as if it were a work of art. The figure in the SUV’s driver’s seat steps out, lights a cigarette (it takes her three tries before she finally makes the flame meet the end of it), and looks at me hard.
“You’re that Fairchild asshole’s wife, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I don’t add, For the time being.
Sabrina’s mother draws heavily on her smoke, exhaling in my face. “That’s for him, bless his heart.”
You have to grow up in the south, or at least spend time there, to get the fact that “bless your heart” isn’t exactly a polite way of wishing someone well. Quite the opposite, actually. I wave a cloud of smoke away and stand next to Freddie as the yellow bus rumbles around the corner. More indistinguishable shapes of various sizes press against the windows.
“Get back in the car, Sabrina,” Mrs. Sabrina says. “We’re going home. And I don’t care what happens to your brothers’ Q scores. We’ll move. We’ll go somewhere sane.” She says this last bit with her eyes on me.
Sabrina only stands there, looking down. She shakes her head once, then twice. “I have to go, Mom.”
“No. You. Don’t.”
“You don’t understand. I do have to.”
“Enough. Come on, girl,” Mrs. Sabrina says, pushing her daughter inside and pulling her seat belt on before running around the front and getting in herself. The engine purrs to life.
There’s an elementary physics lesson; I know of it from proctoring years of tests. The idea is this: To effect change, you require force. And force is exactly what comes pouring out of the Lexus as Sabrina tumbles out of the car, shouting at her mother to go away as the yellow bus blasts its first sharp honk into the neighborhood.
What happens next happens fast. Sabrina running to where her suitcase sits on the sidewalk. Mrs. Sabrina stalling the Lexus’s engine as she tries to reverse. Sabrina scrambling toward the yawning door of the yellow bus, stumbling. Mrs. Sabrina leaving the car, careering blindly in the direction of her daughter, grasping for purchase on Sabrina’s jacket and coming away with fistfuls of air.
It’s as if the girl wants to go.
For a ridiculous moment, I’m thinking of that old movie with the Child Catcher, wondering why anyone would want to board his horrible little wagon with its iron bars while desperate mothers are screaming