she got home, she had walked out to the development. She knew Debbie would be there. She had gone to the Malone house the day before because Mrs. Malone had invited her. Charles Malone had been in a bassinet in the kitchen, sucking loudly on the neckband of his T-shirt, little beads of prickly-heat ranged like a necklace around the crease in his fat neck. “That baby is more like a potato than a human being,” Mrs. Malone had said, not at all regretfully, as she chopped onions at the kitchen counter. “He just lies there all day sucking on whatever he can get into his mouth. He’ll want a beer by the time he’s three.”
“Aren’t most babies like that?” said Maggie, who was sitting at the table while Debbie was upstairs getting dressed. Her long wet hair was dripping onto the seat of her shorts, and even though Mrs. Malone was all the way across the room, Maggie’s eyes were tearing from the onions.
“Lord, no,” Mrs. Malone said, dabbing at her face with a paper towel. “That Aggie didn’t settle down until she was two. Crying all the time unless you carried her around the room on your shoulder. Lifting those little legs and passing gas so loud you could hear her all through the house. It was all I could do not to pitch her out the window.” She lifted a corner of her apron and wiped her eyes. “Damn,” she said. The baby lost his piece of T-shirt, let out a momentary yell, and had found his middle fingers by the time Maggie got to the bassinet. He had a funny egg-shaped head, like a cartoon character.
The entire house was in a tizzy because Helen was coming home for dinner. It was difficult to imagine what a difference six weeks could make. Helen had become a visiting dignitary from another world, Monica had become engaged and Maggie’s mother had become a wraith who evaporated and reappeared without warning in her own home. Mrs. Malone, whose idea of a balanced meal was tuna on toast with a slice of tomato, had planned scalloped potatoes and Salisbury steak for the occasion, bending over cookbooks that had been shower gifts many years ago, their bindings still cracking when they were opened because they had so rarely been used.
Debbie found it all incredibly annoying: her mother dressed in fresh Bermudas and a pressed shirt, her father home early, a cloth on the dining-room table, which was usually reserved for family holidays, and Maggie invited without her permission and against her will. She had wanted to have Bridget Hearn there, too, but Mrs. Malone had said no. “She’s not family,” she had said in front of Maggie, who had flushed when Debbie said, with an abrupt gesture, “Neither is she.” Debbie had gone upstairs to change without asking Maggie to go along, but Maggie had followed anyhow, listening as Debbie railed to herself as she dressed. “Does she think my sister is going to think she turned into a good cook in one month? Does she think my sister will all of a sudden think we eat in the dining room every night?” Maggie suspected that Debbie kept referring to Helen as her sister in an attempt to cut her down to size, but it was all in vain.
Aggie and Debbie had gone downtown with a friend of Helen’s from Sacred Heart to see Helen in the revue. While Debbie had said it was “okay,” Aggie had been more specific. “She had on this thing like a leotard, you know?” she said, leaning forward, her eyes bright in the beam of a flashlight they had turned on on the floor of the development house. “It was white and it had her heart painted on it like it was bleeding, with drops running down her stomach. And she sang this great song called ‘Loving One Another.’ And this guy behind us with a beard? He said to this other guy who was with him, ‘That’s the one I told you about.’ And the other guy said, ‘You weren’t kidding.’” She looked really beautiful. It was really quiet when she sang.”
“You could see through her costume,” Debbie said.
“You could, a little bit,” Aggie said. “Like you can see through my white suit right after I go in the pool? But I think people thought it was just shadows.”
“Sure,” said Debbie, snorting.
Debbie snorted now as she stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “An apron?”