Nathan can’t sleep, or rather, he is unable to give himself the opportunity to sleep. He sits up with the television. Each episode of something needs to be watched; otherwise he visualizes the morning before. During the commercial breaks, he plays through how it could have gone another way, how he could have said nothing as she stared at him in that flannel nightgown. Instead he had to talk. Something in her eyes made him talk, because he wanted to help, which is not uncharitable. He wants his family to be whole, and yet Marion stares at him in her nightgown, feet bare, the flannel swelling around her stomach and her ass and her knees. She hasn’t brushed her teeth. I have a thing in Dumbo. He didn’t need to tell her, so why did he? Why did he say anything at all?
His eyes must close at some point, because they open again around five with an early-morning talk show. He fumbles upstairs to his bed but never bothers to set an alarm. Ginny wakes him when Jane’s school bus is about to arrive. He is still wearing his clothes from the night before. The first morning without Marion will be a rough one.
Both girls are still in their pajamas drinking orange juice when the bus driver honks her horn, and Nathan must go out to the street to explain to the bus driver that he will take Jane to school today. The bus driver is annoyed with him for not calling this in to the dispatcher. It’s time wasted on her route.
Nathan won’t take Jane to school, Ginny will, but he’ll walk his children to the F station, even though Ginny informs him that this is unnecessary. Humiliating, even. Nathan Palm doesn’t care and tells her so.
“I am your father. I am not humiliating.”
As he walks home, he thinks of his father and how humiliating he could be.
Central Park
Spending a night in an Apple Store is not a good idea. Marion is lucky she looks the way she looks: nonviolent. But after three hours the employees are suspicious. They begin to move her from one computer to another, asking questions about her RAM needs and explaining the millions of pixels available to her. As she tries every set of headphones displayed, one persistent employee asks her over and over again what it is she is hoping to accomplish. Marion acts sane until she figures sanity is not an asset. She barks that she is busy, busy, can’t he see, and the employee becomes meek and slinks away. After that, no more blue shirts bother her.
As she circles the store, she circles her options. There are not many. She researches the trains that leave New York City, but none of the arrival cities call out to her. The case is the same with the buses. She can’t picture herself on the streets of these places. She dislikes the architecture of most midwestern cities. Perfect sidewalks and parks without life. She considers Philadelphia for an hour: it seems affordable, and the red brick structures are attractively run-down, but at the end of the hour she finds a reason why it wouldn’t work. An hour after that, she can’t remember the reason but feels certain it was a good one. Vermont is briefly her new home around 4:30, but then she knows too many Brooklynites who often speak of moving to a farmhouse and tapping their own maple syrup. Who knows? One of them might actually do it.
She’s stumbling on the logistics. She would need to buy a car in order to survive in most of these places. She’s frightened of driving now, and also, how could she buy a car without a legal identity? Without a credit history and insurance? How could she work? Marion knows she should have considered these questions more completely when she packed the knapsack full of cash and drowned her phone but is glad she didn’t. If she had, she might not have been able to leave.
When the sun rises, Marion climbs the glass steps of the store and exits. She heads into Central Park, where there are benches and she can cry safely with her knapsack beside her. The air is sharp and cold, but regardless, she is glad to be out of the fake air of the computer store.
She hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Neurons fire, instructing her to wake her daughters up for school, to make them breakfast and pack their lunches. She feels like she’s left the stove on or a window open during a storm. A bathtub fills with hot water and now spills over the porcelain lip. She considers resting her head on her knapsack but blinks away the idea before it becomes too attractive. She would be nothing without the knapsack.
She closes her eyes and begs for inspiration. She opens her eyes and remembers laughing with Nathan about a melancholy English teacher who had an affair with the rumored gay but hetero-normatively married college counselor. They’d conducted the affair at a Days Inn off Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, chosen by the adulterers for its acceptance of cash and relative anonymity. It’s decided: Marion is heading back to Brooklyn.
Chapel
Ginny takes the F train to school and the B57 back home. On the first day of every month she’s given a new green MetroCard by the city. She loses it most days and must fly through her backpack and her coat pockets and her books to find it again. She usually does, but hides from her parents her absentmindedness. The MetroCard is symbolic of her new freedom or even a physical manifestation of her freedom, and she knows that her father wishes she did not have one. Given any opportunity, he could take it away from her and she would be back on the school bus with her sister, a foot taller than the other riders. It would be impossible.
Her mother has shrugged her shoulders at Nathan’s anxiety about the MetroCard in the past.
“When I was growing up, I had a bike. During the summer, we just took off. We had to be back by dinner. My mother didn’t know where I was.”
Even Ginny could see that Marion was baiting Nathan.
“How pastoral for you,” Nathan said. “The thing is—and I don’t want to take anything away from your street smarts—downtown Brooklyn is slightly more dangerous than Sheepshead Bay. And with that fucking thing, she doesn’t even have to stay in Brooklyn. She could go to the fucking Bronx and be back by dinner.”
“Don’t go to the Bronx, honey.”
Mother and daughter smiled conspiratorially over the dinner table.
Ginny’s backpack is heavy with textbooks, so she walks hunched, her arms swinging front and back. She juts her jaw and clenches her teeth. Her father’s twenties are tucked in the front pocket of her jeans, and she periodically checks to make sure they are still there. She ignores Jane, who babbles as they walk from the subway station to the school.