saying to Colin, and then eliminated all but the most essential conversations: What do you want for dinner? Can you take Moira to ballet on Saturday?
From there, she imagined, it would be but a short leap until she found herself emotionally estranged from her husband. And then he would crave intimacy and find it elsewhere. Cheating now seemed inevitable, the end of the divergent paths she and Colin were taking.
It might have helped if Colin had put a stop to the estrangement that wasn’t really an estrangement, but he was worried about his job (they had extended the merger period another three months, and whatever investigation was ongoing was moving glacially, but it felt like a stay of execution, not a pardon). She could see him searching for words with which to engage her. Recently, she had ceased to cede him any emotion. No matter what he said she would reply vacantly as though humoring a pestering child. A couple of times he said things that would have pissed her off just a couple of months before, but she had barely acknowledged that he spoke, let alone risen to the bait.
Elm had seen this in her own parents. Fighting, they’d at least declared their commitment to hating each other. When they quieted, finally, toward the end of Elm’s adolescence, she knew the marriage was over. They remained together, inhabiting two separate sections of the same house. Elm saw the same vacant cohabitation looming in her own marriage. She vowed to herself that she would break this pattern, clenching her fists to seal the promise.
Moira looked adorable dressed as a Trojan for the kindergarten reenactment of the Aeneid.
“Typical posh New York school,” Colin had scoffed, “forcing kindergartners to perform a book I wasn’t even aware of until university.” Still, he was there in the front row with the other parents digitally recording the play. Oddly, the still cameras were the larger instruments, with lenses better suited to shooting football for Sports Illustrated rather than elementary school thespians in a small church basement. The video cameras, on the other hand, were so small as to be nearly invisible, nestled in the palms of hands.
Elm sat toward the back with her friend Patty, who had a daughter Moira’s age. Elm was overheated, as she so often was these days, fanning herself with the program. Patty had a second daughter, eighteen months old, who kept squirming on her lap, shrieking when Patty refused to let her down. “Be quiet,” Patty kept saying, waving a teething ring in front of her, like she was coaxing a seal to do a trick. Elm looked at them, irritated. She had forgotten that toddlers were so willful, unable to say what they wanted or to make logical decisions. Ronan had jumped off the sofa at twenty-one months and hit his head on the ottoman. When he stopped crying, Elm left him for a moment to go throw the ice pack in the sink and he was up on the sofa, leaping again.
The piano music started and the shower curtain parted to reveal a dozen five-year-olds dressed in togas. The teacher stood to the side, her back to the audience. Elm struggled to pick out Moira, but it was difficult even to tell genders apart. And then she saw a child on the end whose unruly hair must be her daughter’s. She waved, though Moira didn’t wave back. She was concentrating on following the teacher’s choreography. Hands went up, hands went down, hands went up, and the children began to sing, something high-pitched and unintelligible. Five children came forward to form a front line and they held hands, spreading out. Then Moira’s row came through from behind, ducking under the joined arms. Then the process reversed and Moira’s line went back through the hands. She bumped into someone on her way backward and got confused, spinning in circles until the teacher pointed where she should be.
Patty was laughing, bouncing her daughter on her lap.
“They’re really cute,” Elm said.
“Cleo has suddenly developed a mouth on her like a sailor,” Patty said. “I think she’s getting it from the nanny. It’s not bad words, really, just, like, a bad attitude.”
“Does it come with eye rolling? Sometimes I say something so stupid that Moira can barely deign to roll her eyes.”
“God, they’re such teenagers already.… Hey, are you expecting?”
Elm blushed. “Yes, how did you …?”
“You keep fanning yourself. The last time I was that hot I was pregnant.”
“Yeah. I’m eleven weeks.”
“Congratulations!” Patty