Little Children by Tom Perrotta.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Little Children.
Author: Tom Perrotta.
Genre: Fiction, romance, parenthood, infidelity.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2004.
Summary: The book's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "the Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband Richard, who is more and more involved with an Internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at 9PM. They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined.

My rating: 7.5/10


♥ There was no higher praise at the playground than cute. It meant harmless. Easily absorbed. Posing no threat to smug suburbanites.

♥ Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have blamed it all on a moment of weakness. At least that was how she described it to herself, though the explanation always seemed a bit threadbare. After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.

♥ On the other hand, lots of things didn't suck. Long summer days with nothing to do but hang out. Afternoons at the pool, surrounded by young mothers in their bathing suits. And the way his body felt right now, the blood pumping into the muscles, the excellent soreness in his triceps. And when Aaron called out for him just then, right on time, there was something beautiful about that, too, the way a little kid needed you for everything and wasn't afraid to say so.

♥ If they'd staged a hundred train wrecks, he would have shouted Spdang! a hundred times and cracked up with undiminished glee at Gordon's hundredth declaration of injury. (Todd was always Gordon, and Gordon was always the injured party.) That was one of the sweet, but slightly insane things about being three: Nothing ever got old. If it was good, it stayed good, at least until you turned four.

♥ As touching as it was, there was also something alienating about the explosion of mother/son passion that lit up the apartment every night. It was as if Todd became a nobody once Kathy got home, just some stranger inexplicably taking up space in the house, rather than a loving parent who'd devoted his whole day-his whole life-to ensuring his son's safety and happiness.

The thing that always killed him was the jester's cap. All day long Aaron treated it like his prize possession-he ate, played, and napped in the cap, and would burst into tears if you so much as suggested he take it off to go in the pool-but the moment Kathy stepped into the house it came flying off like some worthless piece of trash. Todd was pretty sure it was Aaron's way of announcing that the entire day up to that point-the Daddy part-had been nothing more than a stupid joke. Now that Mommy was back, the real day could begin, the precious few hours before bedtime when he didn't feel the need to say a toddler's version of Fuck You to the world by walking around in a jingling pink-and-purple hat.

♥ They had a walled-off, wholly self-contained attitude toward the world, as if nothing of importance existed outside of their own severely limited circle of activity. They kept their eyes low and communicated in grunts and monosyllables, barely looking up when one of their number nailed a difficult landing or took a particularly nasty spill, or even when some cute girls their own age stopped to watch them for a while, whispering and giggling among themselves.

I must have been like this, Todd sometimes thought. I must have been one of them.

♥ All through high school and college, Todd did exactly what his dead mother and quickly remarried father wanted from him, excelling in the classroom and on the playing field, impersonating a successful, well-adjusted kid who had somehow absorbed a terrible blow without missing a beat-starting quarterback, dean's list, social chair, lots of girlfriends, accepted into three of the five law schools he'd applied to.

It was only later, after he was married and the father of a newborn son, that he began to suspect that there was something not quite right, something unresolved or defective at the core of his being. And it must have been this something-this flaw or lack or whatever the hell it was-that kept his arm glued to the mailbox while he watched the skateboarders every night, desperately hoping that they'd notice him for once and say something nice, maybe even invite him to step out from the shadows and take his rightful place among them.

♥ It wasn't her opinions per se that were so irritating, it was the smugness with which she expressed them. Underlying Mary Ann's every utterance was an obnoxious sense of certainty, of personal completeness, as if she'd gotten everything she'd ever wanted in the best of all possible worlds. This? Sarah always wanted to ask. This is what you wanted? This playground? That SUV? Your stupid spandex shorts? Your weekly roll in the hay? Those well-behaved children who cower at the sound of your voice?

♥ Most of the men who showed up at the playground during the workday were marginal types-middle-aged trolls with beards and potbellies, studiously whimsical academics who insisted on going down the slide with their kids, pinch-hitting grandfathers providing emergency day care, sheepish blue-collar guys who wouldn't meet anyone's eyes, the occasional cooler-than-thou hipster-with-a-flexible-schedule. But there was no one even remotely like the Prom King, who looked like he'd wandered off the set off a day-time soap to bring a little bit of glamour into the lives of bored young mothers.

♥ "They're not used to running into good-looking men at the playground."

..Todd nodded thoughtfully at her analysis, neither blushing nor trying to deflect the compliment. When you were as handsome as he was, Sarah supposed, there wasn't much point in pretending to be surprised when other people noticed.

♥ She pulled her head away from him and looked up.

"You know what would be really funny?"

In retrospect, she was never quite sure if he answered her question. Maybe he nodded or made some vague murmur of assent. In any case, he did exactly what she's meant him to, as if she'd outlined the action in precise detail.

The first kiss was tentative, only half-serious, as if they were acting in a play, but the second one was for real-gentle, then forceful, and then completely electrifying, the kind of kiss that would have made perfect sense outside a dorm room at two in the morning. On a playground at noon, between near-total strangers, though, it was as kind of insanity. Luckily, one of them finally had the good senses to pull away from the other, though Sarah could not for the life of her remember which of them it was.

♥ That was one of her sweetest quirks (or at least it used to be): As long as you could convince her that the practice in question fell within the boundaries of "normal behaviour," she was up for just about anything.

♥ A smooth landing was preferable to a painful tumble, of course, but was that it? Even when done properly, the maneuver seemed unassuming to a fault, barely worth the trouble. And yet, rider after rider kept gliding past him like figures in a dream, crouching and hopping, standing or falling, performing their pointless task with the stoic patience of early adolescence. I don't know why I'm doing this, each boy seemed to say, but I'll keep doing it until I'm old enough to do something else.

♥ It was like suddenly being a teenager again, returning to a time when sex wasn't a routine or predictable part of your life, but something mysterious and transforming that couple pop up out of nowhere, sometimes when you weren't even looking, though usually you were. Walk into a party and Bang! There it was. The mall, McDonald's, even church! Some girl smiles at you, and it's a whole different day.

Losing that sense of omnipresent possibility was one of the trade-offs of married life that Todd struggled with on a daily basis. Sure, he got to sleep with a great woman every night. He could kiss her whenever he wanted (well, almost). But sometimes it was nicer to kiss someone else for a change, for the hell of it, just to prove it could still be done. It didn't seem to matter that Sarah wasn't his type, wasn't even that pretty, at least not compared to Kathy, who had long legs and lustrous hair, and knew how to make herself as glamorous as a model when you gave her a reason to. Sarah was short and boyish, slightly pop-eyed, and a little angry-looking when you got right down to it. She had coarse unruly hair and eyebrows that were thicker than Todd thought necessary. But so what? She'd read his mind and walked into his arms, as if she'd memorized a script he hadn't even remembered writing until he found himself standing in the middle of it, breathing hard and barely able to let go.

♥ It was Bertha who finally broke the ice. She followed May out to the parking lot one breezy spring afternoon and began chatting as naturally as if they were old friends, making a series of statements to which May could only say Amen, about how mortifying it was to see your own child under lock and key, and how he was still your little boy, no matter what he'd done, and how you had no choice but to keep loving him, no matter what he'd done, and how impossible it was for other people who hadn't had this experience to understand the strength of the bond between a mother and her child, no matter what he'd done.

♥ And the truth was, May appreciated the company. Not because she liked Bertha, exactly-Bertha was hard to like in any simple way-but because a person needed company. Something went sour inside if you didn't have someone to talk to every day. ..So that was May's choice: not between Bertha and family, or between Bertha and someone nicer, but between Bertha and no one.

It wasn't that hard to choose.

♥ "He knows where the body is," Bertha insisted. "You can tell by the way he blinks those shifty little eyes."

May didn't even like thinking about Gary Condit, let alone talking about him. The missing girl, the grieving parents, the murderer walking around unpunished-it was just too horrible. Bertha, on the other hand, couldn't get enough.

"He might as well have had the word guilty stamped across his forehand. And sweet little wifey standing by his side."

What else can she do? May wanted to ask. What else can she do if she loves him?>

♥ She wanted to think about the day she moved into this house. It was a long time ago-over thirty-five years. She was pregnant with Carol; Ronnie had just started school. It was the first house she'd ever owned.

It wasn't like she had any illusions about her life even then. She already knew that she'd married the wrong man-at the beginning he'd at least been a charming drunk, but by then the charm was all used up-and that her son wasn't going to have an easy time of it in school. There was something about him that people didn't like.

But in spite of everything, she'd felt hope. They were moving into a place of their own in a nice neighborhood near a good school. Maybe things would be different there; maybe they would be happy. She stood on the front lawn in the early evening and whispered a prayer that her family would thrive on Blueberry Court, that her marriage would improve, that her children would grow up into healthy, successful adults.

And this is what her prayer had come to: the word EVIL spray-painted in gigantic Day-Glo orange letters at the foot of her driveway, along with an arrow pointing straight to her house.

"God help us," she said, reaching for Bertha's arm so she could steady herself for whatever was coming next.

♥ What was left, now that he'd taken what only a short time ago had seemed like an unimaginable step, was a calm sense of detachment, as if he were watching himself from a great distance, wondering if there was any chance he could stop before he did something he might regret.

But he always knew that it was beyond his power to stop, now that he'd come this far. Besides, if there was one thing life had taught him, it was that it was ridiculous to be at war with your own desires. You always lost in the end, so the interlude of struggle never amounted to anything but so much wasted time. It was much more efficient to give in right away, make your mistakes, and get on with the rest of your life.

♥ He could easily imagine what people would say if they could see him now: exactly the same thing they'd say if someone had told them that Ray from work was a transvestite or that Ted from next door had anonymous gay sex at highway rest stops. They'd shake their heads with the standard combination of amusement, pity, and smug superiority, and say, Ha-ha-ha, poor Ray. Ho-ho-ho, poor Ted. At least I'm not like that. But we want what we want, Richard thought, and there's not much we can do about it.

♥ His daughters were sophomores in high school when this bombshell struck; Richard and Peggy agreed to stay together until they graduated. Oddly, those last two years were their happiest as a couple, though they rarely slept in the same bed and kept their social calendars as separate as possible. Something about the expiration date on the marriage made each of them more generous than they'd been in the past-your spouse's annoying habit becomes a lot less oppressive if you don't have to imagine putting up with it until the day one of you dies. By the time they split, he'd developed a real affection for her, and still called once or twice a week to see how she was doing.

♥ He still hadn't gotten over how completely he'd misread his own needs. He'd assumed he was evolving and improving as a person, but all he'd really done was repeat his own failure, this time with his eyes wide-open and no one to blame but himself.

♥ "I think we need to talk," she said, but to his immense relief she backed out of the room without another word, pressing the door shut with the gentlest of clicks, not unlike the sound your tongue makes against the roof of your mouth when you think something's a shame.

♥ As badly as Sarah sometimes wanted to just grab Todd by the face and kiss him, to crawl onto his towel and blast away the pretense that they were just a couple of pals killing time together, she wanted just as badly to hold on to the innocent public life they'd made for themselves out in the sunshine with the other parents and children. If they had an affair, all this would have to head underground, into a sadder and darker and more complicated place. So she accepted the trade: the melancholy handshake at four o'clock in exchange for this little patch of grass, some sunscreen and conversation, one more happy day at the pool.

♥ "It's a little like being dead," he added, after a moment's thought. "..it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You'll know it's true, but you won't really believe it.

"That's actually sort of comforting," Sarah pointed out. I always figured when you're dead, you wouldn't be able to think of anything. There wouldn't be any you to do the thinking."

"That's a depressing thought."

"Only if you're alive," she said. "If you're dead, it doesn't matter."

♥ Startled, because at any other time in his life, he wouldn't have even looked twice at her, wouldn't have had the imagination to see past her sharp-featured, not-quite-pretty face, her less-than-stunning body. Why would he? He'd always been the kind of guy who could get the obvious girls, the pretty ones with haughty expressions and legs-up-to-here, the short sexy ones with the big brown eyes and the improbably large breasts, the would-be models, the willowy Asians, the hotties who caused a stir walking down the beach or past a row of lockers, the ones who'd never been without a boyfriend since the day they turned eleven, the girls most other guys knew better than to even make a play for. He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers, never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him every day: that beauty was only part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body. He was proud of himself for wanting her so badly. It made him feel like he'd grown up a little, expanded his vision, like he'd traveled to a faraway place or learned to appreciate an exotic food.

♥ This whole time he'd been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at her bare breasts and sympathetic face. It was a nice way to look at a woman.

♥ A knuckle in the nose here. A knee in the spine there. Was that my elbow in your gut? The more shots he took, the looser he started to feel, until he got to the point where he was throwing his body around without reservation, as if hurting the other guy were more important than not hurting himself, which was, of course, the secret to playing good football.

♥ What made it even more self-defeating was the fact that she hadn't even told her mother the truth. She'd made it sound like it was the football that was bothering her, the sheer physical recklessness of the game, the possibility that Todd might be seriously injured on the playing field, throwing their already complicated domestic arrangements into complete disarray.

But that wasn't the issue. Kathy wasn't one of those timid people who believed that a life worth living could-or even should-be risk-free, purged of any chance of a bad outcome. She understood that sometimes you needed to do something crazy, even potentially self-destructive-ride a motorcycle, jump out of an airplane, play tackle football without a helmet-to remind yourself that you were alive and not just cowering in the basement, waiting for the storm to blow over. She had compiled a substantial list of foolhardy things she was planning to do the moment her last child went off to college-traveling to a war zone was right at the top of it-and she wasn't about to condemn the thrill-seeking urge in anyone else, especially the man she loved.

No, the thing that really annoyed her about Todd joining the football team was how transparently happy it made him. The past couple of weeks he'd been a different person, as if he'd finally served eviction papers to the grim stranger who'd been living in his skin all spring, trudging dutifully off to the library every night, trudging dutifully back home. Ever since he'd hooked up with the Guardians, he'd been smiling more, listening when she talked, asking about her work. She could even see it in the way he moved-he was energized, lighter on his feet, as if he'd been magically reunited with his younger self, the carefree boy she'd fallen in love with in college. It should have pleased her to witness this transformation, but instead it filled her with shame and sadness, made her realize how much pressure he must have been feeling to live up to a vision of himself that had never really been his own.

I did that to him, she thought. I sucked the life right out of him.

She was the one who'd encouraged him to go to law school, despite his grave and frequently expressed doubts about his fitness for the profession, and she was the one who'd insisted that he give the bar exam one final shot, make one last good faith effort to pass the test before giving up on a career into which he'd put so much time and effort. At any point in the past six months she could have set him free with a single word, released him from his private hell of failure, but she hadn't done it.

She hadn't said a word.

It was because she was a coward, Kathy understood that, a selfish person who wanted to have it both ways-wanted to live the interesting life of an artist without accepting the unpleasant financial sacrifices that usually came along with the package. She had friends from film school, people in their thirties, who were still living in run-down apartments in Brooklyn and Somerville-with roommates!-deferring marriage and children, scraping by without health insurance or dependable cars, still trying to nurse their youthful dreams of making honest, noncommercial, socially conscious movies, dreams that were becoming more and more unlikely with each passing year.

Kathy, by contrast, had chosen the path of compromise and accommodation, working her way up the public television food chain, from lowly PA to sound technician to editor to assistant director, putting in impossibly long hours on remarkably dull projects ("Part Four of A-Pickin' and A-Grinnin', Our Comprehensive Five-Part History of the Banjo"), finally arriving at a point where she was able to direct a project of her own. Wounded Survivor: Forgotten Heroes of the Pacific War wasn't a particularly original piece of documentary filmmaking, or even a subject in which she had a great deal of interest-she had consciously, if not cynically, designed her grant proposal to piggyback on the wave of World War II nostalgia that was sweeping the nation the late nineties-but she knew it was an important landmark in her own career, a stepping-stone to bigger and better things.

All along, her ace in the hole, the one thought that saved her from the tedium and petty politicking of public television and the bourgeois economic despair that was always gnawing at her-How will we ever be able to buy a house, take a nice vacation, send our kids to a decent college, etc., etc.?-was the prospect of Todd becoming a successful lawyer, making enough money to support the family in the style she believed they deserved to live, while at the same time freeing her to have more children (and more child care), and to work only when she wanted, and only on projects she believed in. All that was standing in their way was one stupid test.

Her plan-it was so humble, so eminently doable-made so much sense that she couldn't quite bring herself to let go of it even now, when she had no choice but to admit to herself how miserable it had made her husband. Maybe the football would help. Maybe it would wake Todd up from his funk, give him the energy and confidence to rise to the occasion and pass the test on his third try. If it happened that way, it would all be okay: They'd be able to look back on the past two years as a blip on the screen of their happy life together, a necessary interlude of struggle, rather than a grim period of anxiety and stagnation, the time when it all went to hell.

He can do it, she told herself, rolling onto her back and gazing up at the gray blankness of the ceiling. He can do it id he wants to.

♥ What he really wanted was to talk about Sarah, and the beautiful strangeness of their affair, the way it seemed to fit so perfectly with the contours of his life-the morning and night belong to my family, the afternoon belongs to her-but something told him that Larry wasn't the right audience for his confession.

♥ "Okay, then," continued the professor. "That's a pretty substantial number of women who expect to follow a traditionally male career path. I ask this next question simply out of curiosity. How many of you men would be willing to stay home and raise the kids while your wives go off to work? Change the diapers, take care of the cooking and the laundry?"

The guys glanced around-many of them were football players, a tribute to the professor's well-deserved reputation for generous grading and a shockingly light reading load-trading Yeah, right smirks, leading the women to shake their heads and roll their eyes in mock exasperation.

"Any takers?" the professor asked.

By that point, though, the whole class was already in the process of turning to face Todd, who was sitting in the back row, between two other football players, all three of them dwarfing their little wooden chair-desks. Unlike his teammates, however, Todd's hand was raised high over his head, his long arm stretching toward the ceiling.

Kathy thought at first that he must be joking, pulling a little prank for the amusement of his buddies. Her indifference to Todd had remained constant over the past couple of years, as he fulfilled his early promise to the letter, developing into an old-fashioned B.M.O.C., the object of much swooning speculation and feverish pursuit from the sorority girls and sports groupies who made up the least imaginative sector of the undergraduate female population.

Oh, grow up, would you? she thought.

As if responding to this request, Todd looked right at her and smiled. Not the smug, mocking smile she expected, but something sweeter and more complicated, as if he were apologizing for not being the person she thought he was, for failing to embody her low expectations.

I'm not kidding, his face replied.

Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occurred. This was certainly the case with the silent communion that passed between Todd and Kathy in sociology class on that dreary March afternoon. The whole episode couldn't have lasted more than a couple of seconds, during which Kathy was aware of nothing more than a pleasant sense of possibility, the beginning of an unexpected flirtation. Ten years later, however, as she lay in bed beside her sleeping son, it seemed to her that everything that had happened afterward-the whole course of their lives-had been contained in that single charged moment, Todd's hand in the air, his eyes on Kathy, almost as if he were volunteering to be her husband.

"There he is, ladies," the professor had announced, in a tone of mild but genuine surprise. "There's the man you're looking for."

♥ "She's a knockout," he confessed, slipping one finger inside of her, then another, making her gasp out loud. "But beauty's overrated."

At the time, Sarah barely registered the comment, giving herself up to the strong sensations flooding her body. Later that night, though, it came back to her: Beauty's overrated. He'd meant it to be comforting, but at three in the morning it had precisely the opposite effect. He had a beautiful wife, a knockout, and she was sleeping beside him right now, their legs intertwined beneath the covers. And where was Sarah? Wide-awake in the dark, listening to the wheezy, tedious breathing of the man she no longer considered her husband. Beauty's overrated. Only someone who took his own beauty for granted could have been able to say something so outrageously stupid with a straight face.

♥ Sarah shouldn't have been surprised to find Todd living in a duplex with a beat-up Toyota on his side of the driveway-she knew that his wife supported the family with some kind of low-paying work as a documentary filmmaker for public TV-but the house just didn't fit into her idea of his stature in the grand scheme of things. He carried himself like a natural aristocrat, a person for whom nice things came as easily as good looks. In some fundamental way, it didn't make sense that someone as unremarkable as she was should be living in a bigger house and a better neighborhood than Todd.

It wasn't an awful house, not by a long stretch. It had sky-lights and scalloped woodwork over the front doors and windows, the sort of small touches that marked it as a "quality home," modest though it was. Maybe it felt right for them to be living there at that particular point in their lives. Maybe it was even romantic in a way, to be a young family together, sharing burdens, moving up in the world. Years from now, Todd and Kathy would be able to drive Aaron down Angelina Way and say, There's the old condo, can you believe we ever lived like that?Sarah had skipped that particular phase of life, moving straight from a shared apartment with annoying roommates into a mini-Victorian full of furniture from Pottery Barn, and she couldn't help resenting Kathy for the fact that she got to suffer with Todd through their lean years, creating a history they could look back on with pride and maybe even a touch of nostalgia.

Unless he leaves her, she thought, her chest swelling with a strange feeling of lightness, as if hope were helium. Unless he leaves her to be with me.

♥ "When I read this book back in college, Madame Bovary just seemed like a fool. She marries the wrong man, makes one stupid mistake after another, and pretty much gets what she deserves. But when I read it this time, I just fell in love with her."

Mary Ann scoffed, but the ladies seemed intrigued. Jean smiled proudly, as if to remind everyone who was responsible for Sarah's presence at the meeting.

"My professors would kill me," she continued, "but I'm tempted to go as far as to say that, in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist."

"Really?" Bridget sounded skeptical, but open to persuasion.

"She's trapped. She can either accept a life of misery or struggle against it. She chooses to struggle."

"Some struggle," said Mary Ann. "Jump in bed with every guy who says hello."

"She fails at the end," Sarah conceded. "But there's something beautiful and heroic in her rebellion."

"How convenient," observed Mary Ann. "So now cheating on your husband makes you a feminist."

"It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness."

"I guess I just didn't understand the book," Mary Ann said, adopting a tone of mock humility. "I just thought she just looked so pathetic, degrading herself for nothing. I mean, did she really think a man like that was going to run away with her?"

Sarah couldn't help smiling. Just yesterday, for the first time, she and Todd had discussed the possibility of divorcing their respective spouses. Sarah had floated the subject cautiously, after he'd told her about his miserable Saturday at the beach, how he and Kathy had argued the whole time, how fragile and unhappy their marriage had become. She's losing patient with me, he confessed. I'm going to leave Richard, she replied. And then they had made love tenderly, almost fearfully, as if trying to adsorb the meaning of what they'd just told each other.

"Madame Bovary's problem wasn't that she committed adultery," Sarah declared, in a voice full of calm certainty. "It was that she committed adultery with losers. She never found a partner worthy of her heroic passion."

Mary Ann shook her head sadly, as if she pitied Sarah, but the other ladies were beaming, nodding in fervent agreement with this unexpected and thought-provoking assessment of the novel.

♥ Ronnie's personal ad had worked like a charm, drawing twenty-seven responses the first week alone. ..Ronnie had read the letters out loud, and almost all of them referred directly to the line, I'm not perfect and don't expect you to be, either. There must have been a lot of men out there demanding perfection, judging from the relief the women felt at the absence of this requirement.

I'm overweight, the very first letter began, but I have a lot of love to give. I do hope you'll give me a chance. One correspondent spoke of her double mastectomy scars; another detailed her long struggle with unwanted facial hair. I tried electrolysis, but it hurt like anything! I am currently making an effort to accept myself for who I am, and your ad made me think you might treat me with the compassion and respect I deserve.

"Jesus Christ." Ronnie tore the letter into shreds with the thoroughness that characterized his actions. "Just what I need, a date with the bearded lady."

Jenny had SEVERE acne. Patricia's cellulite was so bad she'd rather die than wear a bathing suit. Diana was suffering from female pattern baldness. Chronic foot pain made it hard for Angela to get around. Sharon had headaches that felt like dull spikes being pounded into her skull. The world was riddled with imperfections.

♥ The bar exam was a two-day marathon, as much a test of physical endurance as legal knowledge. Day One was the MBE, two hundred nitpicking, densely worded multiple choice questions, a mental root canal that made the SAT seem like a routine cleaning by comparison. Once they had you thoroughly battered and demoralized, they made you trudge back on Day Two for the essay section, which for Todd, at least, was even worse: an eight-hour confrontation with the blankness of his own mind, the white noise of his inability to think made even louder by the furious scratching of his fellow test-taker's pens and pencils.

♥ "I have a good feeling," she said. "They say the third time's a charm."

They also say, "Three strikes and you're out," Todd thought, but he didn't say it out loud. There was no reason to make this any worse than it already was.

♥ He was touched by the offer, impractical as it was, but he knew he was finished with the bar exam. He was never going to be a lawyer. He'd told Sarah he didn't know what had gone wrong, but that wasn't precisely true. He knew, he'd just never been able to put it into words. Something had happened to him over the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.

"Mind if I suck your breast?" he asked.

♥ "Spring of junior year, this girl from the University of Connecticut came to one of our parties. Her friends left, but she stayed late, after everyone else had gone home. Pretty girl, a little bit chubby. Drunk as anything. ..I mean, you can imagine what happened. At a certain point in the festivities, she just sort of volunteered to give everyone a blowjob. The whole frat."

"She volunteered?"

"I swear, the whole thing was her idea."

"Right."

"I was there," he said. "You weren't."

"She was drunk."

"Everyone was drunk."

"So what happened?"

"Nothing. We talked her out of it. We told her it wasn't a good idea."

"Really?"

He gave her a look. Yeah, right.

"So did you-?"

"I didn't want to. But she made me feel guilty, like I was insulting her if I didn't."

"I can't believe you're telling me this."

"That's not even the weird part."

"What could be weirder than that?"

"She stayed the whole weekend."

"Oh, God."

"No, it wasn't like that. She ended up sleeping in this one guy's room, Bobby Gerard. Really nice guy. Total nerd. Never had a girlfriend before in his life.

"And?"

"They're married now. Three kids."

"Come on."

"I went to their wedding. So did a lot of our frat brothers."

"Guys who were there that night?"

"Yup."

"What was that like?"

Like the whole thing never happened. Nobody joked about it or even referred to it indirectly. When people asked the bride and groom where they met, they just said, 'At a frat party,' as if it were the most normal thing in the world."

"That's creepy."

"It was actually a nice wedding."

♥ On the night they met, a little more than ten years earlier, neither Larry nor his soon-to-be-ex-wife would have won any prizes for being an especially observant Catholic. Had they hewn more closely to the precepts of the Church in which they'd been raised, Joanie probably wouldn't have been competing in the Thursday Night Miss Nipples Contest at Kahlua's, and Larry-along with his fellow bouncer, a huge taciturn guy known only as "Duke"-probably wouldn't have been dousing the four finalists with buckets of extremely cold water.

..And yet, despite their enthusiastic embrace of contraception and premarital sex (that very night!)-not to mention their theoretical willingness to terminate an unwanted pregnancy should such an unfortunate situation arise-both Larry and Joanie considered themselves to be good Catholics in some rock-bottom, immutable way that had less to do with religious practice than cultural identity. They were Catholics like they were Americans-it was their birthright, a form of citizenship that their parents had passed on to them and that they would pass on to their children, regardless of whether they toed the Vatican line on morally fraught issues like abortion and wet T-shirt contests.

♥ The two tragedies that blasted through his life in such quick succession-in his memory it was like they'd happened on the same day, like he'd gone straight from the cemetery to the mall-only confirmed the dark suspicions he'd been harboring for a long time: i.e., that the world was a cruel and senseless place where horrific things happened to good and bad people alike with no regard whatsoever for their goodness or badness. They just happened. And if some kind of God was in control of it all in the service of some inscrutable divine purpose, as Joanie liked to insist, then God was an asshole or at best an incompetent, and in either case was of absolutely no use to Larry Moon or any other human being who simply wanted to live a decent life and protect his or her loved ones from misery, injury, or death.

♥ May didn't answer. She had found some of Ronnie's pictures a few years ago, after he'd gone to jail. He had a whole library of them packed inside an old suitcase in his closet. She'd burned them in the bathtub, crying the whole time, admitting to herself for the first time that her son really was sick, that he might actually be some kind of monster.

♥ But then the priest started talking about Jesus, how He loved absolutely everyone, even the lowest of the low, the lepers and prostitutes and convicted criminals, the reviled and despised, the forsaken and friendless. The way Father Mugabe talked, you would have thought Ronnie McGorvey was a character from the Bible, a pal of Barabbas and a neighbor of Mary Magdalene.

What about Holly Colapinto? he wanted to shout. Jesus sure had a funny way of showing His love for her.

He tried to distract himself by examining the stained-glass windows, but his eyes strayed to one of the stations of the cross, Jesus bent double under the weight of His terrible burden, being jeered by the soldiers. That's the problem with these people, he thought. They worship suffering. They want the worst to happen.?

♥ But for some reason, all he could think about was his father's funeral.

The sun had been blinding that morning, just like it was now. Larry remembered how lost he'd felt, stepping into the cruel brightness after the funeral mass, seeing the hearse at the curb, the driver in his dark suit standing so casually by the open back door. The desolation of that moment had imprinted itself on his skin and gotten absorbed into his blood. It was permanent now, as much a part of him as his hair or his teeth.

♥ Kathy had never been one of those women with a thing for older men. She'd always been a little grossed out when one of her girlfriends confessed to a crush on a gray-haired professor, or an affair with a "senior colleague." It seemed perverse to her, depriving yourself of the best years of your lover's life, fast-forwarding to the inevitable period of decay and decline, the saggy pecs and expanding waistline, the cholesterol and blood pressure medicines, the god-awful snoring they all did, the ear wax and nose hair, the need to be compassionate and understanding if the plumbing didn't work the way it used to.

The thing that really gave her the willies, though, was the idea of the guy having a massive heart attack in the middle of sex. Nelson Rockefeller-style, dying while he was still inside you. Everybody thought about it from the man's perspective, like it was some kind of triumphant exit (What a way to go, they'd sigh. At least he died happy.) Did anybody consider the poor woman? Could there be anything more horrible? It would probably take a few minutes for you to even realize what had happened-you might just think he'd had an especially intense orgasm or something-and the whole time you'd be lying there, hugging an old man's corpse, talking dirty into its waxy ear. Just the thought of it was enough to make you start sleeping with teenagers again.

♥ ..it had occurred to her that it might be fun to do some kind of comic documentary something lighthearted but socially engaged, a little hipper and edgier than her current project. The creation of a nationwide chain of Chinese restaurants by a bunch of clueless white guys seemed like just the sort of vehicle she was looking for, a way to shine an amusing light on what was actually a troubling phenomenon: the voracious march of American business, its insatiable need to devour everything in its path-other people's traditions-and then spit it back out as blank commodities for sale to middle America.

♥ It felt like a joke at first, a parody of the high school coaches they all remembered with varying degrees of fondness and resentment, but after a while-the evolution was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible-it turned serious. Todd has seen this phenomenon in every sport he'd ever played, ever since he was old enough for Little League. The mood of a team was a delicate, volatile thing-it only took one person to change the whole chemistry.

♥ If the Auditors were the thugs of the Midnight Touch Football League, the Controllers were the pretty boys, spandex-clad twentysomethings from the financial industries who arrived at the field in caravan of BMWs, Lexuses, and Cadillac SUVs, bringing along a platoon of hot women who apparently didn't mind staying up late to cheer the boys on, a sure sign they were girlfriends instead of wives.

Larry's feverish optimism spread among his teammates like a virus.

♥ He spun on his heels and jogged backward across the goal line, the ball raised triumphantly overhead, a gesture that looked arrogant when the pros did it on TV but felt right just then, allowing him to watch his teammates as they came charging joyfully down the field to join him. Todd spiked the ball and waited for them, his arms stretched wide, his chest heaving as if he were trying to suck the whole night into his lungs. All he wished was that Sarah had been there to see it, to know him as he'd known himself streaking down the wide-open field, not as some jock hero scoring the winning touchdown, but as a grown man experiencing an improbable moment of grace.

And ten he saw her.

He wasn't sure what made him glance up just then at what he thought were the empty bleachers-a reflex of habit or hope, some kind of magnetic charge she was emitting-but there she was, a wish made flesh, sitting by herself in the top row, in the shadow of the announcer's booth. She was waving to him, her face shining like a beacon, her mouth forming words he found he could understand quite clearly, as if there were no distance between them at all, words he would have said right back to her if he hadn't been buried just then beneath a stampeded of ecstatic teammates, a swarming pile of jubilation.

♥ "I can't do this anymore," he said. "I can't go another week without kissing you."

A subtle change came over Sarah's expression as she gazed down at him, and Todd felt his mind grow suddenly alert, as if a cool breeze had blown all the confusion away. It was as if the whole summer-his whole life-had been imperceptibly narrowing down to this very moment, the slight widening of her eyes, the little catch in his breath, the sudden realization that they'd crossed a line so big and bright it was hard to believe he hadn't seen it coming.

♥ He looked around the kitchen in a god of dread and disbelief, his mother's unmistakable presence radiating from the avocado teakettle and toaster; the peeling wallpaper with illustrations of various herbs and spices, their names written helpfully below; the brown medicine containers lined up like good little soldiers on the windowsill, the prescription labels all facing out. It didn't seem possible that she wouldn't be coming home. Just the thought of it made him feel dizzy and imperiled, as if he were standing on a high balcony with no railing, looking straight down at an empty parking lot.

"Please," he said, turning his gaze to the ceiling, in the direction of a God he considered his mother a fool for believing in. "Don't you fucking let her die."

♥ You'd think a moment like that would be unbearable, but it wasn't as hard as he expected. You just do that thing, that thing where you kind of shut off your mind for a little while. You see what's in front of you-your sister and her husband, the priest in black, the doctor in his white coat, Bertha, the nice Jamaican nurse, every last one of them ringing your dead mother's bed, shaking their heads in unison, as if you've asked a question, when really you're just standing there taking it all in with a blank expression, not feeling a thing.

♥ Bertha reached into her purse and handed him a folded sheet of paper that had been ripped from a spiral notebook.

"Your mother wrote it this morning. She wanted me to give it to you."

"What do you mean, she wrote it?"

"She wrote it," Bertha insisted. "I held the pen between her fingers and the nurse held the clipboard. But she did all the letters. She fell asleep right afterward. And then she had the hemorrhage."

..Inside the house, Ronnie unfolded the note. The letters were big and sloppy but he could tell the handwriting from a single glance. His eyes filled with tears as he read the brief message, a mother's final plea to her wayward son.

Please, she begged him. Please be a good boy.

♥ Todd nodded. It was painful to admit it, but the main thing he felt right now was an overwhelming sense of relief to be here in the street with DeWayne, instead of in the car with Sarah, rushing down the highway into the next big mistake of his adult life. Sure, he felt guilty for disappointing her, for making her wait around for nothing, for promising something he couldn't deliver. But what he suddenly understood-it seemed so obvious now, as if the truth had been jarred loose when his body hit the pavement-was that he'd never actually wanted to start a new life with her in the first place. What he loved most about Sarah was how beautifully she fit into his old one, distracting him from his imperfect marriage and the tedious obligations of child care, supercharging the dull summer days with a sweet illicit thrill. Outside of that context, he couldn't imagine them ever being as happy with each other as they'd been this summer.

♥ ..Sarah turned away from him to check on her daughter, who was still dozing peacefully in the swing, her head slumped to one side, her lips parted as if she were about to speak.

Poor girl, Sarah thought, reaching out to brush a strand of hair away from Lucy's clammy cheek. I'm all you have.

She knew she'd been a bad mother, that she'd signed on for a job that demanded more of her than she knew how to give. If she'd been alone, she might have gotten down on her knees to beg her daughter's forgiveness.

I'll do better, she promised the sleeping child. I have to.

Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy's breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy's skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they'd lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, competing for attention, relying on each other for companionship and emotional support, forming the intense, convoluted, and probably unhealthy bond that for better and worse would become the center of both of their identities, fodder for years of therapy, if they could ever figure out a way to pay for it. It wasn't going to be an easy future, Sarah understood that, but it felt real to her-so palpable and closer at hand, so in keeping with what she knew of her own life-that it almost seemed inevitable, the place they'd been heading all along. It was enough to make her wonder how she'd ever managed to believe in the alternate version, the one where the Prom King came and made everything better.

♥ "Can I ask you something?" he said. "I mean, I wouldn't want you to take this wrong, but it's not such a great idea to be out here with your kid after dark.

"Yeah," said Moon. "I was kinda wondering about that myself."

"You want to know what I'm doing here?" Sarah said, as if she hadn't understood the question.

Moon and McGorvey nodded, while Mary Ann looked on with an oddly sympathetic expression. Sarah started to speak, but instead of words, only a small, embarrassed giggle escaped from her mouth. How could she explain? She was here because she'd kissed a man in this very spot, and tasted happiness for the first time in her adult life. She was here because he said he'd run away with her, and she believed him-believed, for a few brief, intensely sweet moments, that she was something special, one of the lucky ones, a character in a love story with a happy ending.