Rita looked at her with a small, tired smile. “She needs a fresh diaper,” Rita said, and before I could respond to that, Rita sobbed: just one small sob, and she strangled it off for the most part so that it might almost have been a hiccup, but I was very sure it was a sob. It seemed like overreacting to a dirty diaper.
I am not comfortable with emotions, partly because I do not have them and so I generally don’t understand where they come from and what they mean. But after years of careful study and a great deal of practice I had learned to cope when others displayed them, and I usually knew the correct response when a human being was in the grip of strong feelings.
In this case, however, I admit I was helpless. Going by the book, a woman’s tears generally called for comfort and reassurance, no matter how phony—but how could I apply either of those things if I didn’t know what was causing Rita’s crying fit? I looked at her carefully, searching her face for some clue, and found nothing; red-rimmed eyes and wet cheeks, yes, but unfortunately no one had scrawled a message on her face outlining a cause and a course of treatment. And so, sounding almost as awkward as I was beginning to feel, I stuttered out, “Uh, are you … I mean, is something wrong?”
Rita sniffled again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Once more she seemed about to say something truly momentous. Instead, she just shook her head and touched the baby’s face with a finger. “It’s Lily Anne,” she said. “We have to move. And then you.”
I heard those terrifying words, “It’s Lily Anne,” and for just a moment the world got very bright and spun around me as my brain was filled with an endless list of terrible maladies that might be attacking my little girl. I clutched my baby tightly and tried to breathe until things steadied down again. Lily Anne helped out by swatting at the side of my head and saying, “Abah-a-bah!” The clout to my ear brought me back to my senses and I looked back at Rita, who apparently had no idea that her words had sent me into a full-scale tizzy. “What’s wrong with Lily Anne?” I demanded.
“What?” Rita said. “What do you mean? There’s nothing— Oh, Dexter, you’re being so— I just meant, we have to move. Because of Lily Anne.”
I looked at the happy little face of the child bouncing on my lap. Rita was not making sense, at least not to me. How could this perfect little person force us to move? Of course, she was my child, which raised a few terrifying possibilities. Perhaps some vagrant strand of wicked DNA had surfaced in her and the outraged neighborhood was demanding her exile. It was a horrible thought, but it was at least possible. “What did she do?” I said.
“What did she— Dexter, she’s only a year old,” Rita said. “What could she possibly do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you said we have to move because of Lily Anne.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “You’re being completely …” She fluttered a hand in the air, and then she turned around again and took another gulp of wine, bending over the glass and shielding it from me, as if she didn’t want me to know what she was doing over there.
“Rita,” I said, and she slapped the glass down onto the bench and turned back toward me, swallowing convulsively. “If nothing is wrong with Lily Anne, and she didn’t do anything wrong, why do we have to move?”
She blinked, and then wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. “That’s just …” she said. “I mean, because look at her.” Rita gestured at the baby, and it seemed to me that her motor skills were not quite what they should have been, because her hand bumped clumsily against my arm. She jerked the hand back and waved at the house. “Such a little house,” she said. “And Lily Anne is getting so big.”
I looked at her and waited for more, but I waited in vain. Her words did not add up to anything I could understand, but they were apparently all I was going to get. Did Rita really think that Lily Anne was growing into some kind of gigantic creature, like in Alice in Wonderland, and soon the house would be too small to contain her? Or was there some hidden message here, possibly in Aramaic, that would take me years of study to decipher? I have heard and read many suggestions about what it takes to make a marriage work, but at the moment what mine seemed to need most was a translator. “Rita, you’re not making any sense,” I said, with all the gentle patience I could fake.
She shook her head, just a little bit sloppily, and scowled at me. “I’m not drunk,” she said.
One of the few eternal truths about humans is that if someone says they aren’t sleeping, they’re not rich, or they’re not drunk, they almost certainly are. But telling them so when they deny it is thankless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. So I just smiled understandingly at Rita. “Of course you’re not,” I said. “So why do we have to move because Lily Anne is getting so big?”
“Dexter,” Rita said. “Our little family is all getting so big. We need a bigger house.”
A small light flickered in my mighty brain and then came on. “You mean we need a house with more room? Because the kids are growing up?”
“Yes,” she said, slapping her hand on the picnic table for emphasis. “That’s exactly right.” She frowned. “What jid you think I meaned?”
“I had no idea what you meaned,” I said. “But you’re sitting out here—and you’re crying.”
“Oh,” she said, and she looked away, and once more she blotted clumsily at her face with her sleeve. “It doesn’t seem like right now.” She looked at me and quickly looked away again. “I mean, you know, I’m not soopit. Stooper.” She frowned, and then said very carefully,
“I’m. Not. Stupid.”
“I never thought you were,” I said, which was actually true: amazingly scatterbrained, yes, but not stupid. “Is that why you’re crying?”
She looked at me very hard, and I was just beginning to get uncomfortable when her eyes glazed over a little, and she looked away.
“It’s just hormones,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to see.”
I skipped over the image of anyone seeing her hormones and tried to focus on the heart of the matter. “So there’s nothing wrong with Lily Anne?” I said, still not quite sure that everything was exactly what it should be.
“No, no, of course not,” Rita said. “It’s the house too small. Cody and Astor can’t share a room forever, because you know,” she said. “Astor is getting to that age.”
Even without really knowing what specific age she meant, I thought I understood. Astor was growing up, and she couldn’t share a room with her brother forever. But even so, aside from the fact that I was used to this house and didn’t really want to move away from it, I had a few practical objections. “We can’t afford a new house,” I said. “Especially not a bigger one.”
Rita waggled a finger at me and squinted playfully through one eye. “You have not been paying attention,” she said, working very hard to make each word distinct.
“I guess not.”
“There are lots of wonderful opportoonies,” she said. “Toon-a-nitties. Damn.” She shook her head, and then closed her eyes tightly. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, lord.” She breathed heavily for a moment and swayed so that I wondered if she was going to fall off the bench. But then she took an extra-deep breath, rolled her head in a half circle, and opened her eyes. “Foreclosures,” she said carefully. “Not a new house. A foreclosing houses.” She smiled loopily, and then jerked around and hunched over the wineglass again; this time she drained it.