Women and Children First by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page A

troublesome; it’s been going on a long time and she doesn’t expect it to change. If anything did change, it would probably disappear. She doesn’t want to live with Raymond, and now, as always when he hugs her hello, their bones grate; it’s not particularly sexual.
    She just likes him, that’s all. When it’s Raymond coming to dinner, she cooks and dresses with a little more care than she otherwise might, and spends the day remembering things to tell him which she promptly forgets. Of course, she’s excited when Dottie, or anyone, is coming over. The difference is, with Dottie, Claire enjoys her food. With Raymond, she often forgets to eat.
    Barbecued chicken, tomatoes with basil and mozzarella, pasta with chanterelles Joey’s found in the woods—it all goes right by her. Luckily, everyone else is eating, the girls trekking back and forth from the table to the TV. The television noise makes it hard to talk. It’s like family dinner, they can just eat. Anyway, conversation’s been strained since Dottie started at the Academy. Claire fears that Joey might make some semi-sarcastic remark which will hurt Raymond more than Dottie. Raymond’s protective of her; they seem mated for life. It’s occurred to them all that Dottie is the original dancing vegetable.
    What does get said is that the meteor shower isn’t supposed to pick up till around midnight. But they’ll set up the telescope earlier so the girls can have a look before they’re too tired to see.
    Joey and Raymond and the girls go outside while Dottie and Claire put the dishes in the sink. Claire asks if Poppy was any trouble that afternoon and Dottie says, “Oh, no. They played in the bathroom so quiet, I had to keep yelling up to make sure they were breathing. Later they told me they’d been making vanishing cream from that liquidy soap at the bottom of the soap dish. I said, you’re eight years old, what do you need with vanishing cream? They said, to vanish. I told them they’d better not use it till they had something to bring them back from wherever they vanished to, and they said, yeah, they’d already thought of that.”
    “Where did they hear about vanishing cream?” says Claire. She feels she ought to tell Dottie—feels disloyal for not telling her—to watch for suspicious-looking shampoo bottles on the upper shelves. But she doesn’t. It’s almost as if she’s saving it for something.
    “Speaking of vanishing,” says Dottie. She hands Claire the book she’d forgotten that afternoon. It’s Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees . Claire’s read it before, and it seems like the right moment to ask, so she says, “Does this mean that you’re going to get up from the table one night and climb up in the trees and never come down again?”
    Dottie just looks at her. “Me in the trees?” she says. “With my allergies?”
    They’re amazed by how dark it is when they go outside. “I told you,” says Dottie. “It’s August.”
    The grass is damp and cool against their ankles as they walk across the lawn to where Miranda and Poppy are taking turns at the telescope. “Daddy,” Claire hears Poppy say, “what’s that?”
    Joey crouches down and looks over her shoulder. Claire wonders what they see. Scorpio? Andromeda? Orion? Joey’s told her a thousand times, but she can never remember what’s in the sky when.
    Before Joey can answer, Raymond pulls Poppy away from the telescope and kneels and puts one arm around her and the other around Miranda. “That one?” he says, pointing. “That one’s the Bad Baby. And it’s lying in the Big Bassinet.”
    “Where?” cry the girls, and then they say, “Yes, I see!”
    “And that one there’s the Celestial Dog Dish. And that”—he traces his finger in a wavy circle—“is the Silver Dollar Pancake.”
    “What’s that one?” says Miranda.
    “Remember Superman II ?” Raymond’s the one who takes the girls to movies no one else wants to see. “That’s what’s left of the