The woman snorted as the little girl stumbled. “That one’s not mine, thank God. Or not the way you mean. She’s my sister.”
I peeked over at the mother and saw that she had pimples on her chin and plucked eyebrows. She had spit-up on her letter jacket and a Pixy Stix straw in the corner of her mouth like some cartoon hick with his piece of hay. She could have been any one of the Karens in my class a few years down the line, and when I realized this I wanted to laugh but not because it was funny. The girls who stuck around Loose River after high school were always having babies and getting married at eighteen, then moving into their parents’ basements or backyard campers. That’s what happened if you were pretty enough to be a cheerleader, but not smart enough to go to college. And if you weren’t pretty enough, you got a job at the casino or a nursing home in Whitewood.
“How old’s your baby?” I asked her then, to be friendly.
“Fifteen weeks,” she said. “I’m halfway there. At thirty, I’m not doing this nursing thing anymore, you know? My boyfriend’s afraid of my tits! They gross him out he says.”
I took another sidelong look at her, curious. I thought it was nice that her boyfriend had stuck around, anyhow. It surprised me in fact. The story didn’t usually go like that—usually pretty girls got married to boys who left town for the army, for Junior Hockey League—so maybe this Karen had some secret vein of talent. From the corner of my eye, I saw her breast poking out of her shirt. It looked surprisingly long, with a pimply seeming nipple. “Why don’t you just stop now?” I ventured.
“I’m not a bad mother! Studies say mom’s milk is the shit for babies. Plus”—she raised a stubbled eyebrow—”my boyfriend’s happy to stay down there for now. He calls it the better half.”
I wondered what that meant. What that felt like.
“Marco!” the seniors yelled from their trucks.
“Polo!” another car returned.
“What’s he doing to her?” the Karen wondered.
I followed her gaze back to the playground. The little girl was lying flat on her back in the gravel, Paul’s empty black glove at her side. Had she fallen? Had the swing knocked her down? As we watched, Paul crawled on top of her, his knees spread over her stomach, palms in the rocks. He seemed to be talking to her very quietly, and though there was no obvious reason to think he was doing anything wrong, I sensed there was something predatory in his kneeling stance, something aggressive. The little girl was still, her face turned away from us. Paul looked like he might have been about to kiss her on the mouth.
But he was just talking. They seemed to be playing a sort of game. “There is … matter … All is … mind,” he said. For a second it sounded like words from a book, from a fairy tale, the words running together so they were hard to hear. Then his singsong words became clear: “There is no spot where God is not.”
“What’s he saying?” the Karen asked me. “What’s going on?”
I wasn’t sure. We stood up together. But for some reason we were hesitant to approach. There seemed something very private about what we were watching, something secretive and excessive that excluded us entirely. The little girl started whimpering slightly, and Paul stayed crouched over her, blond hair hanging in his eyes. “There is no spot where God is not!”
“What the fuck?” The Karen shot me a disgusted look. “What the fuck is this?” She started forward. “I sit down in a park, and Jesus weirdos just show up out of nowhere.”
“No!” I said, startled.
“Freaks just flock to this town, like fucking geese.”
“Wait—” I followed her.
I felt a rush of defensiveness, and then—like a leaf flipping in the wind—a rush of relief arrived right behind it. I put my hands on my hips. I felt as though I’d been hiding something from her all this time, and that she’d finally called me out on a lie I’d been surprised I could maintain so long. I had no idea what Paul was up to and, for the moment, I didn’t really care. So we were weirdos. So Paul and I weren’t headed for a long afternoon of Sesame Street in a basement somewhere or an eventual brain injury from a puck to the head, so we weren’t headed for whatever crushing mediocrity this Karen and her boyfriend and her bald baby had planned. So what.
The Karen stalked over to the girl, her baby tucked under one arm. Then she grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her out from under Paul. For a second, the girl seemed stunned, as if she couldn’t quite breathe, but then she let out the piercing wail of a much younger child, snot bubbling from her nose. She looked at Paul with a face broken open, with a look of utter love and desolation, as if she’d given him everything in the ten minutes she’d known him, and he’d taken it, oh, he’d taken it anyhow, knowing just how much it cost.