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JULIA ENTERED THE KITCHEN to find Nathan and an apparently reinstated Valentina sitting at the table, playing cards. This weekend there had been no trace of her, an unprecedented period of serenity in the household. Under normal circumstances, if she wasn’t at their dinner table, she was interrupting it with calls and text messages, and it had been a relief to be free of her pouting and huffing, her air of bored pretension. She batted sooty lashes at James, addressed Julia as if condescending to a member of household staff, and rarely deigned to speak to Gwen at all. Julia had felt cautiously hopeful that without her Nathan might be a nicer boy, and so it had proved. He had been more relaxed, able to act his age and to drop his air of world-wearied, supercilious cynicism. It could not be a coincidence that Gwen and Nathan had been getting on so much better. On Friday night the children had volunteered to go shopping together for supper, and later Nathan had sat with them watching at least ten minutes of one of Gwen’s favored reality shows without once suggesting that the devoted followers of such programs must be lobotomized morons. James had heard from Pamela (who had heard from Saskia) that Nathan and Valentina had broken up. If true, this would have been radical, and auspicious. But now it was Sunday evening and here she was, barefoot and back in their kitchen.
It was Valentina’s pointed look toward the refrigerator, accompanied by a stifled, fey little giggle, that first attracted Julia’s attention to the blackboard on the back of the fridge door. When the fancy took her Gwen would write notes on this board, or practice her various calligraphies, or paint rainbows or self-portraits with chalk-dusted fingertips. Frequently she drew elaborate illustrations of the shopping list. “Grapes,” Julia would write, and the next day a vine would climb and twine around the letters, heavy with misty bunches. If Julia reminded herself to pick up some cottage cheese, she might find a drawing of a thatched and rose-wrapped little chalet perched upon a wheel of generously perforated Emmenthal. Julia had always treasured these artworks, begun, like so much else, in the months after Daniel’s death, another form of silent communication, and another small way in which they worked to make one another smile. Family traditions could go some way toward making two people feel like a family. Gwen’s rendering of a winsome, smiling anchovy had remained in one corner for months.
Today, a new, tertiary commentary had appeared. In Julia’s handwriting it said, “Olive oil, mushrooms, cheddar.” James had written “Spuds,” which Gwen had then rubbed out and replaced with a drawing of a potato. She had made her own additions to the list but several of these, “MAYONAISE” and “TOMATOS”—had since been amended in thick red chalk to their correct spelling by a third, unknown hand. A drawing of an anthropomorphized fish finger that had been there for days had been wiped away and in its place, in ornately serifed uppercase, the words, “5/7. TRY HARDER NEXT TIME.”
Julia frowned at Nathan but from his face it seemed he, too, had only just noticed. Beside him she saw Valentina widen her eyes, and pout. She snapped a card down on the table and looked back at her hand with an expression of rather camp, exaggerated innocence, then raked her fingers through her long hair and pulled it forward over her shoulders, and stretched. “Hello, Julia,” she said, sweetly.
James came in, unzipping his coat, and betraying no surprise at seeing Valentina in the kitchen, for which Julia admired him. She moved to get a damp cloth to wipe the blackboard, but at that moment Gwen appeared. She stopped short in the doorway, looking startled.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Valentina cooed, with an exaggerated expression of regret.
Gwen appeared to struggle with a series of conflicting emotions but then said, rather stiffly, “I haven’t lost anything.”
“She means Mole,” Nathan explained, looking embarrassed.
Gwen appeared not to hear him. “I haven’t lost anything I actually wanted.”
While this indecipherable exchange was taking place, Julia edged forward and tried to conceal the horrible, unsolicited little spelling test by standing in front of it. This drew everyone’s attention.
Only Julia had a vantage place from which to see Gwen’s expression of bewilderment collapse into raw new shame. Gwen opened the fridge, extracted an apple, then left, slamming the door only marginally harder than necessary. Her footfalls up the stairs receded. To follow would compound the humiliation, Julia felt, though she longed with a magnetic pull to go to her daughter. James glanced at her and then turned and ambled out again. “I’m going to do a little work,” he said, as he left, “I’ll see you guys.”
Julia noticed, unmoved, that Nathan was glaring at Valentina. “It’s late,” she said, finally. “I’m going to start dinner. Do you two mind shifting to the living room?”
“Val’s not staying for supper,” said Nathan, smearing his hand over the scattered playing cards and pulling them toward him on the table with the satisfaction of a Vegas dealer. “Anyway, she’s given up eating till next year. Nil by mouth till she’s the size of the square root of minus one. Imaginary.” He sounded blithe but looked guilty, Julia noted. In truth, she thought, it wasn’t on to let him make fun of Valentina, either, and James would have pulled him up on it, but Julia did not feel inclined to defend her daughter’s assailant. Policing all these delinquent and unrelated teenagers was tedious. She took two eggplants from the newly denuded refrigerator and began to chop them. Behind her she heard Valentina saying, “Forgive me for thinking we had major things to talk about,” and then in a lower voice, “What? She won’t actually care. They don’t believe in stuff like spelling at her school, anyway, do they? It’s too rigorous and constraining. Who needs to be able to spell when you can draw such a jolly, friendly little fish finger?”
Julia pulled open a lower drawer and clanged several saucepans on her hunt for the colander. If Nathan replied, she couldn’t make it out, and the next she heard was Valentina adding, petulantly, “E ho già detto che, don’t call me Val.”
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SO THAT, GWEN THOUGHT, was that. Shame twisted within her. Valentina might be odious but she, Gwen, was something far worse, for she was stupid. Whatever peculiar Bostonian wormhole had yawned open and deluded Nathan into finding her attractive had resealed, and the natural order of the universe had been restored.