“It’s called Wonder Garden, and it has water rides and a very big pool, and a motorcycle show called Danger Game.” Nayana giggles. “I and my sisters want to go very much. But my mother does not like for us to talk about it. It is too much money, she says, and not necessary.”
“We’ll pay for it!” Jonah shouts. “We can pay for your whole family to go!”
“Oh.” Nayana’s smile fades. “No, no.”
“Well,” Rosalie says gently, “we can talk about that later.”
As she eats, Rosalie becomes aware of a woman with a sullen little girl at a nearby table. The woman keeps looking at them, and in particular at Michael. Rosalie wipes her chin with her napkin. Michael, she notices, is chewing with a strange twist on his lips. He laughs loudly at something Jonah has said. Rosalie glances at the woman again—an attractive blonde in a cowl-neck sweater—and catches her eye. There is something in the woman’s gaze, something flinty and unpleasant, that makes Rosalie look away.
Out of her costume, later, she is caught for a moment by her own image in the bathroom mirror. At a glance, she sees that the black eyeliner has miraculously succeeded in conjuring its illusion. It makes Rosalie look like a different woman, younger and more dangerous. This kind of thing rarely matters to Rosalie. She is not like other women whose appearances are paramount to their sense of worth. To her, the face she has at forty-eight is not so much aged as broken in. It is stretched and wrinkled in the right places, like a pair of soft jeans, a reflection of her character. Still, she is reluctant to wash her face tonight. She gazes for a prolonged moment at this new permutation of herself, lifting her chin to different angles, until the tiny fissures in the drying makeup begin to predominate and the effect shifts from sex appeal to mild derangement.
Michael is already in his pajamas when she comes out of the bathroom. She stands for a moment, watching him get into bed. He does not look at her in the bathroom doorway.
“Who was that woman in the restaurant?” she asks, careful to keep her voice light, curious.
“What woman?” Michael says, too quickly.
“The one who was looking at you.”
“Who’s that? I didn’t notice anyone looking at me.” He now looks toward Rosalie, in her pale blue nightgown with satin smocking. “Do you mean the waitress?”
There is something scripted in his delivery. Rosalie has never heard him speak in quite this way.
“There was a woman,” she says more plainly, “looking at you like she knew you. Who was that?”
Rosalie’s heart beats quickly, uncertainly, unsure of how to pilot such an exchange, of which there is no precedent in their twenty-two years of marriage.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Michael continues in his theatric tone. “I really don’t know who you mean. Maybe she was looking at our costumes.”
Rosalie does not speak. She stands in front of her jewelry box and, with a snag of regret, takes the gold hoops out of her earlobes. Delicately, she places them in their blue velveteen slots and, as she executes this motion, seems to tap into a deep, primal stream that delivers the truth to all women. She holds on to the edge of the dresser for a moment and closes her eyes. Then she turns around and smiles flatly at her husband.
“You’re probably right,” she says.
When she wakes in the morning, Halloween has rotted away. There is a string of bright, hard days ahead of her leading up to the school board meeting. While the kids are out, she burrows into the budget numbers, taps them into her calculator. Michael returns home after dark each night and seems to avoid looking directly at her. Perhaps this is not strange, she thinks. Perhaps he never did.
For the board meeting, Rosalie chooses a charcoal pantsuit. She puts on a string of pearls and paints her nails with opaline polish. The message, she hopes, is elegant austerity. She is the newest member and the only woman on the board. Her fellow members are businessmen, financiers, lawyers, and accountants, or think they are. They wear the set jowls of stoic beleaguerment. They are accustomed to daily, unsentimental spinning of numbers and whiteboard presentations. John Duffy is in his habitual undertaker’s suit. As the attendees convene in the high school library, Rosalie sits calmly behind her microphone, sipping at her water cup. All at once, she feels that she understands the plight of the politician, burdened with the expectations of an untutored public.