Astonish Me

“Joan,” says Tim, “I’ll buy you an ice cream. Let’s go crazy. You too, Sandy. My treat.”

“It’s early for ice cream,” Chloe pipes up, parroting Joan. “I don’t want any.”

“Party pooper,” Sandy says.

Joan drops a curtsy for Tim, her feet in an impossible position. “Valiant knight, I accept your ice cream.”

“Now do you want some?” Sandy asks Chloe, but Chloe shakes her head. For a child, she is strangely indifferent to pleasant temptation.

They walk past the shiny elephants in circus hats flying on steel arms around a colorful mechanical globe, past the line of people waiting to board Peter Pan’s pirate ships, past the many brick chimneys of Toad Hall. Near the Pinocchio boats, a grey-haired black man in a white paper hat is selling ice-cream from a canopied cart. The air smells like sugar and chlorine and sun-warmed concrete, and from a distance comes the sound of a brass band and the clatter of toboggan cars descending the Matterhorn. As Tim hands Joan an ice-cream sandwich with great ceremony, Sandy regrets ever suggesting that he spend the day with them. With a sudden ferocity, she hates what she’s wearing. The blameless shorts and sleeveless white blouse feel constrictive, malicious. If she were alone with Joan, she would be irked by her spoilsport habits—the way she won’t drink fun cocktails, the way she gets Harry to settle down at night by letting him cling to her neck like an orangutan while she hums and sways and murmurs, the way she gets up at the crack of dawn without an alarm clock and stretches and exercises in the room, holding on to the back of a chair the way she had when Sandy first saw her, her twiggy arms and legs going up and out, forward and back, and so on into an infinity of the dullest kind—but Tim had to come along and prove how much more desirable Joan is than Sandy, even though Sandy is the one who knows how to have a good time. Not that Sandy would cheat on Gary, but to flirt, to play pretend in this world of smooth, perfect, colorful moving surfaces, is to breathe deeply, to relax back into the shape of the person she once was.

She has asked herself if Joan’s body and Gary’s admiration of it—everyone’s admiration of it—is the only reason she is losing patience with their friendship. But there’s more: she doesn’t trust Joan. She suspects if she could see herself through Joan’s eyes, she would not like what she saw. The roots of her suspicion are obscure: Joan has never been anything but nice, never allowed judgment to show through. But maybe that’s part of the problem. Joan’s controlled exterior makes her seem like she’s hiding something. It didn’t help that Harry was identified as gifted and Chloe wasn’t. Gary sees a conspiracy. Surely the son of the young, self-styled star psychologist in charge of the whole charade would never be declared average. Surely someone had his thumb on the scales. Surely Chloe could not be allowed to take her place among the chosen children. Gary might like Joan okay, but he loathes Jacob. Sandy stops short of imagining some nefarious plot to keep Chloe down, but, looking at her child and Joan’s as they sit with ice-cream-smeared Amber between them and avidly monitor the approach of a person in a fuzzy yellow Pluto suit, she can’t see how one is smarter than the other. Harry is so quiet, such a mama’s boy, while Chloe is opinionated and confident.

Pluto stops, waves a big-mitted hand, and crouches down, inviting a hug. The children rise and move toward him, opening their arms, drawn into the embrace by the irresistible gravity these suited characters hold for them. Chloe buries her face in the dog’s shoulder while Harry presses his palm against its smooth red tongue and Amber reaches to stroke its muzzle. Chloe has been shy around the princesses and the other characters who are recognizably human, but she hugs the animals fearlessly, emotionally. All three children engage with their whole bodies, allow their backs to be rubbed and patted by the big stuffed paws. Often, dazed and pleased, they have to be gently peeled off by the characters themselves.

“What I want to know,” Tim says quietly, “is who these people are who want to go around hugging kids all day.”

Sandy is disappointed he wants to ruin the moment with a joke, but she plays along. “I’ve heard,” she says, “that the people inside don’t even get to wear their own underwear. Apparently there have been issues with crabs.”

“No shit!” Tim says and then covers his mouth, looking to see if the children heard. But Amber, Chloe, and Harry are lost in the afterglow, arms slack, staring after Pluto’s skinny tail.

“Dad,” says Amber, squinting, “I want a Pluto doll.”

“Maybe later, okay?”

“Dad.”

“Later, baby.” The ice cream and the hug have appeased her, and she does not persist.

Joan is playing reflective. “I thought the kids might be scared of the characters, but they act like they’ve always known these people—or mice or dogs or whatever.”

Tim looks at her like she’s a genius. “I never thought of it that way.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Sandy says. “They’re really having fun. It’s great.” But nobody says anything, except Chloe, who says she has to pee. Sandy says okay, she’ll take her, and then they should all be brave and go on the Matterhorn.

Amber has no intention of riding any roller coasters, but she wants Tim to go so he can tell her about it, and it is decided, mostly by Sandy, that Joan will take Amber on the teacups and then on Alice in Wonderland while Harry and Chloe and Tim and Sandy ride the roller coaster.

“It’ll be a good chance for you to …” Sandy mimes a cigarette at Joan.

Joan ignores the gesture. “Does that sound okay, Harry?” she asks. “Do you want to go on the Matterhorn?”

“Okay,” the child says.

Sandy suspects Harry is afraid but doesn’t want to be shown up by Chloe. She wishes everyone would go away for a while, let her and Tim be alone in little cars in dark places, get rattled around and pushed into each other.

Yodeling music is piped through speakers along the line for the Matterhorn, which is very long, wrapping partway around the mountain before a series of switchbacks inside an open structure meant to suggest a Swiss train station or chalet or something, not that Sandy’s ever been to Europe. Gary promised to take her, but now he says it’s too expensive. Hearing Joan casually mention her time in Paris and all the other places she went on tour with the company doesn’t help. Sandy once confessed her dream of seeing Big Ben and the Tower of London, and Joan only said the food was bad in England. Sandy asked her how she would know, since she never eats, and Joan had not laughed. She wishes she could be nicer to Joan; she wishes she liked her more.

The Matterhorn is a craggy cement sculpture of a miniature mountain with a white-painted overhanging peak. Speeding toboggans flash through the caves that perforate its sides. A waterfall cascades behind an arched stone bridge. Passengers shout and scream; every minute or so the abominable snowman who lives inside gives a loud roar. Tim offers Sandy a sip of his soda, and she drinks coquettishly from the straw. Harry clutches his stomach and complains of butterflies. “After this,” Sandy tells him, “when you’re a roller coaster pro, we can go on the space ride. You go really fast past stars and planets. There’s a chocolate chip cookie in the sky, but only for a second. You have to watch for it.”

“My mom might want me to wait with her,” says Harry.

“You’ve been on it?” Chloe asks Sandy.

“Yes,” Sandy says.

“Daddy was probably with you. That’s probably why you weren’t afraid.”

“No,” Sandy says, “I wasn’t afraid because I wasn’t afraid. It was fun.”

“Your mother is very brave,” Tim tells Chloe. “Fearless.”

“How do you know?”

He winks at Sandy. “I can just tell. She’s that kind of lady.”

“You have no idea,” Sandy says, feeling cheerful again. Tim starts to yodel along with the music. The children fall all over themselves laughing. She wonders if he’d been making her jealous on purpose, as a tactic, or if Joan is simply out of sight and out of mind. She sidles closer to him, leaning against the railing, and while the children reach through a low fence to pluck white and purple petals from the flowers planted around the mountain’s base, he puts his arm behind her, around her, his fingers brushing her side. When the children look up, he swings away as though stretching.

“How’s the single life?” she asks in a low, confidential voice.

“Fine most of the time, but I get lonely. I don’t do so great with being lonely.”

“Fat chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“I bet you’re never lonely. I bet you’re a ladykiller.”

“Me?” He twinkles. “Nope, crying into my can of soup every night.”

“Right.”

Chloe lolls against the railing, watching them, her fists full of petals. “Sweetie,” says Sandy, “don’t stare. What is it?”

“Why are you talking to him?”

“He’s my friend. My new friend Tim.”

Glowering, Chloe goes back to the flowers. Tim leans close to Sandy’s ear and says, “I do like those ladies, though.”

“Big surprise.”

He undoes his ponytail and combs his hair with his fingers, making a new one. There are damp spots in the armpits of his red T-shirt. “How’s married life?” he asks.

“Could be worse.”

“Sorry.”

“You know how it is.”