Want, стр. 31

I get a news alert on my phone, an hour into painting: a ballistic missile alarm went off in Hawaii, the alert says, but officials say it was a false alarm.

I’m quiet a minute, looking at my phone, then back and forth between paint-covered children.

Can I paint your eyes? the four-year-old says, coming at me with a fine brush covered in purple. I throw the phone up onto the couch, smiling at our daughters. I lie back on the floor with my eyes closed, my hand resting on the baby’s calves as she moves around me.

I say: Only the lids.

At 2:00 am on Tuesday, the baby starts to cry and I go into her room and her forehead and her cheeks are hot and sweating. When I come back from the bathroom where we keep the baby Motrin, she’s thrown up on her sheets. I pick her up and take her clothes off and run a warm bath but she vomits three more times, so I rub her down with a warm cloth, standing her up naked in the bathtub, as she keeps vomiting. She vomits on my clothes too and I take them off and rinse myself and both of us sit in the hallway of the apartment, her hot skin splayed across my legs, in T-shirts but no pants. She’s crying off and on and there’s nothing left for her to vomit but her fever hasn’t broken and I don’t want to leave her and she curls up on my lap and falls asleep. At 5:00 am, my husband throws up in the bathroom sink. At 6:00, I email work and tell them that I’m going to be late. I take the four-year-old to school and my husband’s emptied out enough, so he stays with the baby so I don’t have to miss the day. At 1:00, the school calls to say the four-year-old has gotten sick, and when I pick her up she’s crying and I carry her the mile home because she’s too sick to walk and she’s vomiting too often to get in a car or ride the train. At home, the baby and my husband are asleep and I wash the four-year-old with another warm cloth and sit with her with an empty plastic mixing bowl until she’s also emptied out. I give her tiny sips of water and when my husband and the baby wake up both of their fevers have broken and they go outside for a short walk. I stay with the four-year-old and we watch five hours of Paw Patrol and Dora and Friends and she falls in and out of sleep. That night, I put everyone to bed and order myself a five-dollar pad thai and sit alone and read.

The next day, I have a fever, but no puking, so I take three Advil, stashing the bottle in my backpack, and I go into work because I only have three remaining sick days and I have to teach my night class anyway. I split my high school students into groups and ask them to close read different parts of the text I assigned the night before and present them, but at my night class, there is no group work, so I lead a three-hour conversation on Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator, a suddenly wealthy man without a memory, doubting the solidity of his status as a person, seeks to construct a perfectly controlled representation of what he thinks might be authentic in order to feel real.

During the break, one of my students sees me splashing water on my face and swallowing more Advil and when she asks if I’m okay I hold on hard to the cold sink and nod and smile at her, fever spiking, my head cloudy, and don’t say anything.

That weekend, we go to some too-big, close-to-the-water Long Island house in which my husband built two months’ rent’s worth of walk-in closets.

We get invited to these things after he builds someone a custom closet or redoes their cabinets. The men who own these houses like to open a beer and sit with him as he works on weekends or in the evenings after they come home. They open beers and offer him one; often, he says yes and sticks around.

He went to the same type of college they did, studied the same types of grown-up good-job things. He hated going to the same place every day, had always, secretly, wanted to work with his hands. He’d go after work to a shop he rented and build for hours, just to calm his nerves, to make things, after hours of vagaries. He’d gone to college when no one before him in his family had gone to college and he felt at first that he had to prove something. Once the markets crashed, he had a reason, but also, he had an excuse. He could leave and not just not feel guilty but feel good.

Those greedy fucks, he’d mutter, listening to NPR, as the markets kept tumbling and then the banks were bailed out. He stood close to me—we’d just moved in together—rubbing his thumb along the fresh wear forming on his hands, his suits all dropped at Housing Works, so obviously relieved.

It’s a shorter ride on the Long Island Rail Road than my commute to work and we bring the children. My husband’s hoping to find his next job. We make small talk, sip too-sweet wine, and he flirts, is charming. I spend long stretches of time sitting fully clothed on the lids of toilets, or searching for or playing with the children, desperate for when he says we can go home.

He’s fitter than these other men, a little younger. He’s cooler; I never understood the purpose of words like “cool” until I met him. He makes their wives reach up too often