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“-on the sex offenders list.”
What? Eliza willed the other ambient noises to fall away and honed in on this one conversation.
“Really?”
“I signed up for telephone notification with the county. The guy lives five doors down from us.”
“Child sex offender or just regular sex offender?”
“Child, third degree. I looked him up on the state’s site.”
“What does that mean, third degree?”
“I don’t know. But any degree has to be bad news.”
“And he’s in Chevy Chase?”
Long pause. “Well, we do have a Chevy Chase mailing address.”
Eliza smiled to herself. She knew from her family’s own real estate search how people fudged certain addresses, that even within this very desirable county, one of the richest in the United States, there were hierarchies upon hierarchies. Which was worse: having a child sex offender on your block, or admitting you didn’t live in Chevy Chase proper? The Benedicts lived in Bethesda, and Peter had made sure there wasn’t a sex offender, child or adult, within a six-block radius, although one of their neighbors, a sixty-year-old civil service employee, had been picked up for soliciting in a bathroom at the Smithsonian.
The game done-Iso won it for her team on a penalty kick, a victory she carried lightly, gracefully-the Benedicts got back into the car and headed into the long, endless summer day. The heat was pronounced now; it would reach into the upper nineties for the third day in a row, and the lack of trees in this raw, new development made it feel even hotter. That was one thing Eliza loved unreservedly about their new house, the gree
Eliza stopped at Trader Joe’s, which the children considered a treat in the way the “real” grocery store was not. She let them pick out one snack each while she roamed the aisles, bemused by the store’s arbitrary offerings, the way things came and went without explanation. At summer’s begi
Yet the same Americans who believed that England was a land of material deprivation gave the UK too much credit for culture, assuming it was nothing but Shakespeare and the BBC. Eliza had found it even more celebrity-obsessed than the US. Germaine Greer had appeared on Big Brother during their time there, and it had depressed Eliza beyond reason. But then all television, the omnipresence of screens in modern life, depressed her. She hated the way her children, and even her husband, froze in their tracks, instantly hypnotized by a television or a computer.
“Some people,” Albie a
“You’d throw up,” Iso said. “You get motion sick reading.” Said as if the very act of reading was suspect.
“I don’t think I will here,” he said. “That was just in England.” For Albie, England was synonymous with being a little boy, and he had decided that whatever troubled him there had been left behind, that it was all past. No more nightmares, he had decreed, and just like that, they were over, or else he was doing a good job of white-knuckling his way to morning. A picky eater, he also had decided to reinvent himself as an adventurous one. Today, he had chosen chili-pepper cashews as his treat. Eliza had a hunch he wouldn’t like them much, but the rule was that the children could select whatever they wanted, no recriminations, even if the food went to waste. What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson? When Albie picked a snack that was, for him, inedible, Eliza sympathized and offered to substitute something from the nearby convenience store. Iso, meanwhile, stuck to the tried-and-true, almost babyish snacks like Pirate’s Booty and frogurt. Iso was a thirty-five-year-old divorcée in her head, a three-year-old in her stomach.
Yet-mirabile dictu-Albie liked the cashews. After lunch, he put them in a bowl and carried them out to the family room with his “cocktail,” a mix of Hawaiian Punch and seltzer. Peter had entertained a lot in his former job, and Eliza worried that London’s more liquid culture had made too vivid an impression on her son. But it was clearly the ceremony, the visuals, that excited him-the bright colors of the drinks, the tiny dishes of finger food. Eliza could stomach very little alcohol. It was one of those changes that had arrived during pregnancy and never went away. Pregnancy had also changed her body, but for the better. Bony and waistless into her twenties, she had developed a flattering lushness after Iso’s birth, at once curvy and compact.
The only person who disapproved of Eliza’s body was Iso, who modeled herself on, well, models. Specifically, the wa
“Stop breathing so loud,” Iso said.
“Loudly,” Eliza corrected.
The afternoon stretched before them, inert yet somehow demanding, like a guest who had shown up with a suitcase full of dirty laundry. Eliza felt they should do something constructive, but Iso refused the offer of shopping for school clothes, and Peter had asked that they hold off the a