He asked Kate out at the reservoir, where she went skinny-dipping in the summer. Early in the morning, before the kids arrived, or sometimes late at night, when the water was almost black. She was towelling her hair when he appeared, and she wasn’t wearing any pants. Her pubic hair was unkempt.
“Does this count?” Kate said. She waved at the plastic nightstand painted like wood, the warping watercolor above the headboard—a flimsy French lake. She chopped the hot dogs and wrapped them in dough from a cannister, the kind that twisted and popped, jolting her each time. She piled them in pyramids and put platters everywhere. She overdid it. On all the countertops, above the fireplace they’d never used, on the bedside table, for people waiting to use the bathroom. She took bowls of chips from one person to the next, raw faces whose tears seemed to have nothing to do with her.
Each year, Kate separated a new group of children. Some of the mothers envied her stomach and her throaty neck, her bare face a reproach to theirs, which were painted gold and pink with time they didn’t have. There were occasions, Kate suspected, when they despised her. When their clothes were no longer clung to, when they entered the classroom and no one looked up.
Then one afternoon, while the classroom emptied, she held out the knapsack for the man’s son. She was weaving his arms through the straps when she heard a woman’s voice calling his name, high and kind and careless. Kate followed the boy outside and stood in the parking lot, waving at her reflection in his mother’s car window.
She was on a date with a management consultant—two windows—when she met her second husband. They were both waiting for change, their drinks sweating in their hands. Kate saw him in the mirror behind the bar, where his face hovered above two bottles of gin. In the other corner of the mirror, beside the liqueurs, she saw the back of her date’s head.“What?” She picked up the bills from the counter.
When Leah turned fifteen, she began starving herself. This was the sort of thing, Kate knew, that teen-age girls did, but she had imagined it differently. She’d imagined vain girls or boring girls, girls with boyfriends and shiny makeup. Or maybe sad girls, girls with bad parents, secret abortions—things that swallowed them up. Leah’s life was smooth and unblemished.
csestanovich csestanovich this excerpt just made me say '¡Pero por dios! ¿qué es esto? (My god, what's this!) out loud. Then I read it. It was beautiful.