Mr. Peanut Read Free Page B

can do this.”
    These conversations bolstered her. Her determination was renewed. Home from school, she went on long walks uptown, to Central Park, up to the reservoir and around the cinder track and back. This gave David precious time alone. He returned to his book, retrieving the box from underneath his desk and pulling out the new pages he’d written. He needed a change of scenery, so he moved to the kitchen table, set out his laptop, and sat down. He felt clear-minded. Focused. Everything was in order. It had seemed like years since he’d had enough peace to write.
    This is what it would be like, David thought, if Alice were gone.
    “Hello?” She came into the kitchen and kissed him. Her face was flushed, her cheeks cold and slightly wet. Winter seemed to trail behind her. “I’m going to do it this time. I really am. And it’s because of you.”
    She stood there, smiling. Saw the makeshift desk.
    “Were you working?”
    David twirled his pen in his fingers. “I was just finishing up.”
    She packed her own bag lunch in the evenings, creasing the foil of her sandwich as neatly as a present and taping it closed. She stapled the paper bag and wrote MY LUNCH in black felt pen on the front, then placed it lovingly in the fridge. The whole pantry was marked in this fashion: MY CRACKERS, MY PEACHES, MY TUNA. She set out her breakfast the night before as well, her spoon, knife, and napkin arranged and ready for use, the cereal bowl turned upside down and her banana curved below it like a wide smile. It was a lonely little scene, David thought, staring at the place setting in the refrigerator’s light and secretly drinking her vanilla soy milk ( MY SOY MILK she wrote on masking tape), her box of cereal ( MY CEREAL ) next to the measuring cup, its pictured athlete—receiver, hurdler, basketball player—frozen in leaps or bounds.
    “I’m ready for sleep,” Alice told him.
    She’d crawled under the covers and then she reached beneath her, strapped the sleep apnea mask to her face, and lay on her back staring blankly, eyes fixed on the image of her next meal. Look at how it comforts her, David thought, the calories counted like so many sheep.
    She dropped off the moment he turned out the light.
    While she slept, she exhaled musically, a cheerful, childlike hum. The machine whirred pleasantly. Not ready for the darkness or sleep, David lay there thinking about Escher X, his novel, and her accidental death. But then he listened to Alice breathe. And as he listened he experienced the most intense feeling of sympathy for her, a compassion that seemed to require her inertness, her unconsciousness. There was a whole world of torture she had to live through every day. He remembered a fat girl he’d gone to grade school with, how mercilessly he and all the other children had teased her—
Bobbie Jo’s a hippo, Bobbie Jo’s a cow, Bobbie Jo’s a bullfrog, Bobbie Jo’s a sow
. He still knew the song. Of course, Alice’s own students tormented her as well, David imagined. They were delinquents, criminals, loonies; they had no sense. He boiled with rage against them, though she’d never mentioned a single instance of abuse. He’d heard a young couple talking about Alice once in Central Park. “Look at her,” the man said to his girlfriend as David, having gone off to get Alice a Dove bar, came up behind them. “I mean, how do let yourself
get
like that?” The woman was wearing a spandex suit and Rollerblades. With her bright helmet, protective pads, and athletic body, she looked like a superhero. “I think you’d have to kill me,” she said. “Promise me you will?” He’d kill her, he promised, with his elephant gun. “You’re terrible,” the girl said, laughing and gliding off. You
are
terrible, David thought.
I’m
terrible—because he’d laughed too. He remembered the wakes of silence he and Alice trailed behind them as they walked across Sheep Meadow, conversations interrupted, looks both he and she