A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne

Author:Suzanne Berne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2001-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

1

“THEY SAY WE’RE IN for some rain,” said Mirella, coming into the living room. “As if we haven’t had enough already.”

It was the first time she had spoken directly to Howard in nearly two days.

Howard was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, bare feet crossed, reading the Sunday Times. Jacob sat beside him on the carpet with his wooden tracks and train, which he had set up so that the train could climb a pile of blocks, then go hurtling down the tracks to break up by the coffee table. “Click clack,” he whispered, each time this happened.

Mirella could hear Pearl on the second-floor landing, playing with her collection of tiny china dogs, who kept barking and baying and having to be sent to their rooms. Last night she had been up three times with nightmares, coming sobbing to the door-way—“I want Mama”—settling down only to wake up again, until finally Mirella climbed into Pearl’s bed to calm her and to get back to sleep herself. But she had not gone back to sleep; hour after hour she lay with Pearl in her arms, stroking Pearl’s hair, breathing in her uncomplicated smell of scalp and skin and the strawberry yogurt she’d had before bed.

Now Pearl’s voice was tender and strict, periodically comprehensible, transmitting down from upstairs like bulletins from a radio broadcast. “No more whining,” she was saying, “or you will be thrown into the garbage can.”

Randi, Mirella knew, had gone out to take a morning walk around the village to see if she could buy some live yeast. She was planning, she’d said, to bake bread today.

At the sound of Mirella’s voice, Howard had looked up and lowered the paper. Now he said: “Rain, rain.”

She sat down in the gray velvet armchair that matched the sofa opposite. “Jacob,” she said evenly. “I want you to go upstairs and play with Pearl. Mommy needs to talk to Daddy.”

Howard folded the paper in half and put it beside him on the floor. He gave a questioning look at Jacob, but Jacob had become absorbed in stacking blocks into a shaky tower. For a minute they both watched him build his tower, then regard it tensely. He tilted his head first one way then another. Then slowly he took hold of the bottom block and pulled it out. When the tower fell, blocks cascading onto the carpet, he looked grateful.

“Jacob, Mommy asked you to go upstairs.”

“Now, Jacob,” Mirella said sharply, watching herself make a strict chopping motion with one hand; she could have been dicing an onion.

Jacob looked up and stared at her with polite disbelief, which grew into bewilderment. On his forehead the little red thumb-print seemed to darken. Slowly he stood up and wandered out of the room, pulling at his little khaki shorts.

Mirella watched him go, digging her fingernails into her palms.

“That was a little harsh,” said Howard when Jacob was gone.

“We have to talk.”

“I’ve been waiting to talk. You’re the one who didn’t want to talk.

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