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Their daughter brightened and gave a shy half smile.
She thanked the woman, sharing a heavy look that made it clear what she was really thankful for. Noted how her little girl tracked the woman, how her eyes fastened longingly at the café door the server disappeared through. Filed that away.
Her husband’s face was sour.
“What?” she sighed.
“I just don’t get it. You’re polite to the waitress, but not the manager?”
Here we go again.
Since the estrangement from his father, her husband hadn’t revisited his accusation that she might have misread the situation on the day of his mother’s death; that she might have done something worthy of his father’s wrath. But this new habit—her husband examining her behavior, searching for signs she was socially blunted, inconsiderate—penetrated the otherwise placid surface of her marriage to remind her,That’s right, he wants to blame you. That’s right, he needs his father’s approval so badly he’s ready to sacrifice your reliability. And that’s right, it’s your fault for letting that black hole of a man into your life.
She knew she needed to sound calm. Dismissive. She needed to repress the lecture she felt rising in her throat about how she’d ignored her instincts about his father and look how that turned out, about how infuriating it was that now her husband wanted her to shuffle off her revulsion to this random stranger for no reason at all. A rant like that would show she was all the things she wasn’t allowed to be. Bitter. Angry. Filled with impotent regret.
So she shrugged, asked, “Why are you making this a big deal?”
“I just don’t understand why you’re so weird with people sometimes.”
“Look. I know you think I’m being rude or awkward or whatever. But I don’t have to pretend to enjoy having him hover over us. And that woman was…kind.”
“ ‘Princess,’ is just, like, not offensive.”
“I don’t like princesses,” the little girl piped up. “We live in a democracy.”
She gestured at their daughter as if to say, “Exactly, she gets it!”
“I like princesses!” said the little boy. “They’re good at singing.”
“Good point.” She intercepted the little boy’s hand in midair as he went to pick his nose again.
“What’s a heartbreaker?” their daughter asked.
Her husband turned, surprised by the non sequitur. She feigned engrossment in helping her son blow his nose, curious how her husband would answer.
“It’s when—it’s when you don’t love someone who loves you,” her husband said. “That’s called breaking their heart. A heartbreaker.”
“So a heartbreaker hurts someone’s feelings?”
“Sometimes. But…it’s a compliment. The man said it to be nice.”
She heard more than felt her teeth clench.
“He was using the word ‘heartbreaker’ to mean ‘beautiful,’ ” she told her daughter, “because people want things that are beautiful, and are sad if they can’t have them. But no one is required to love someone else. No one’s entitled to your love or attention.”
She looked at her beautiful daughter. So unique, so unusual, people said, wanting an explanation, uncomfortable over their longing, their need for difference to be defined. They stared, trying to reconcile what they saw as aberration with their interest, uneasy over their attraction to it, uneasy about not being able to classify. To silo her singular beauty.
The little girl glanced at the café door the woman had disappeared through.
“You understand?”
“Yeah.”
Does she? Do you?
Watching the children barter their pickles, her husband conceded, “I guess the guy was a little weird.”
Happily surprised at his about-face, she said, “Right? What was he, like, thirty? ‘Princess, sweetheart, heartbreaker.’ He’s not old enough for stuff like that to seem, I dunno, reasonable. And did you notice he didn’t go to any other tables? Doesn’t that seem—strange?”
