Chapter 16 #2
“M and M together again,” Eleanor said, which for a moment felt pointed to me, but then she kissed each of us on the cheek, Margaret and then me, her face against mine so briefly, her Alone Time necklace dangling from her neck.
It occurred to me that in all the days since giving me the picture of herself, El couldn’t have known whether or not I’d seen it and therefore hadn’t had to act as though she’d sent it.
Unlike me, at the pool, looking at her phone in her hand and knowing that she’d read all my messages and answered none of them.
All I had to do was the same: Be regular.
In my favor, Eleanor was distracted. She loved the fair.
It was full of games and animals and dirt. She wanted to see the animals first.
“I’m not here to visit livestock,” Margaret countered.
I pointed out that if we didn’t see them first, we’d have to see them later.
The tents smelled of hay and animal bodies, warm, alive, and somehow private.
The one thing El wasn’t allowed was a pet in the house, and her face softened to see the alpacas with their fuzzy Q-tip heads and the baby cows blinking their long, cartoon lashes.
Margaret, once she got there, volunteered to feed a horse some hay and giggled when she felt the mare’s hot breath on her palm.
“Mina is reading informational placards because obviously,” Eleanor said when she saw me standing next to a sign that explained the fair’s numerous competitions.
She knew I loved an explanation. Prizes had already been awarded to the roosters for their crowing, the chickens for their flying, the goats for their dairy, and the piglets for their ability to run around a track.
Eleanor’s awareness of me made my chest rise.
I reminded myself again that she didn’t know I’d seen the picture and she didn’t know either for how long I’d looked.
Then again, when had I ever been able to hide anything? My heart beat in my throat.
“In case you were wondering, this one is a champion,” I said, and pointed to a piglet who was then taking a nap next to its mother, milk around its mouth.
El walked over to stand beside me in front of the wooden enclosure. I leaned my arms against the top of the wall, and she leaned as well. The length of her hair now touched her shoulders. Its strands slid across my arm when she moved.
“That’s the right way to behave as a champion,” she said.
“Take a nap.” She pulled her phone in its sparkling case from her pocket to take a picture of the piglet.
Then she flipped to the front-facing camera.
In the screen, we both saw Margaret behind us and then turned around to look.
She had positioned herself near the exit.
She was acting busy on her phone while occasionally scanning passersby on the off chance any of them wanted to fall in love with her.
She had rearranged her shirt to be shorter.
Eleanor rolled her eyes briefly, just the slightest rise of her dark pupils into her mascaraed eyelashes, which made me shiver—the pleasure of being included, the pleasure of observing her mood.
“Come be in this,” she called to Margaret, and then handed her phone to me because I had the longer arms. Eleanor and I tilted our heads toward each other.
Margaret posed behind us, one arm in the air and a hip out.
Eleanor and I separated to make room for her in the space between our faces.
Our tour of fauna concluded in the rabbit pavilion, a cavernous space with a ceiling supported by enormous wooden beams. Great long rows of folding tables ran up and down the room, each row holding something like fifty cages, each one with its own upside-down water-bottle dispenser suspended over a bed of shaved wood.
The heady smell of alfalfa permeated the enclosure.
Eleanor walked slowly from cage to cage, making long eye contact with each rabbit who was willing.
I saw her mouth moving. She spoke to them softly, possibly on the topic of their ears, which looked soft enough to create a pained sensation in my chest, or perhaps that was Eleanor and the unguarded tenderness that swept like rare weather across her face.
Margaret finished inspecting rabbits in a few minutes. I saw her idling by the door, scanning the crowd of pedestrians.
“It’s too hot out there,” I said by way of persuasion. The shady pavilion was a relief from the afternoon’s dusty heat.
Then Eleanor stepped into the long line of people waiting to hold the designated patting rabbit.
Margaret watched, waiting for Eleanor to glance toward us in consultation or make some gesture of acknowledgment, but El only looked at the bunny, who was then being caressed by a seven-year-old.
Everyone else in line was either a parent or a child.
Margaret, I knew, disapproved of aligning ourselves with ages we’d too recently been.
“Eleanor is literally an infant,” she said with an edge in her voice.
I shook my head. “She just likes people less than you do.”
“She likes rabbits more than she likes us.”
“No, she likes rabbits more than she likes people other than us.”
Margaret rolled her eyes—a petting zoo would not advance the plot, in her opinion—and told me she had to go to the bathroom.
Before walking away, she said, “Stay here and make sure Eleanor doesn’t wander off after a lamb.
” This possibility was as likely as Margaret wandering off on her way to or from the bathroom because she ran into a girl she met at some camp three years ago or a boy in the middle of a growth spurt.
I joined Eleanor in the line, which ran down the middle of the pavilion, some ten or twelve kids ahead of us, rows of rabbits alongside.
She fanned herself with her folded map, face shining with perspiration.
“We could have gone with her if she’d waited five minutes,” Eleanor said, irritated.
We were alone. Because I knew something she didn’t, I felt it was my turn to move us forward.
I had to proceed cautiously. As soon as Eleanor sensed that someone thought they had a right to a certain kind of behavior from her, she rescinded all generosity.
She gave freely or not at all. Uncertain, I said nothing.
Bunnies rustled in their cages around us, chewing alfalfa, grooming their friends.
I felt too tall. I felt an unfortunate desire to lay my cheek on top of Eleanor’s head.
My body told me this was a thing I could do.
My body told me I could wrap my arms around her shoulders and rest my cheek atop the part in her hair. I told my body to please shut up.
When we got to the front of the line, Eleanor confidently lifted the large rabbit from the arms of the fair attendant.
His coat was a wonderful cinnamon color.
His impossibly fat neck formed a plush ring of fur into which he could rest his face, like an airplane pillow.
El stroked him contentedly and without hurry, in spite of the shifting line of children behind us.
Not all of them would get to hold the bunny before the attendant retired him from duty.
Rabbits could only withstand a fixed quantity of attention before demanding retreat. Eleanor felt a kinship.
I marveled at her frictionless surface, the way the world slid across her skin without sticking.
The tense energy of the line behind us grated on me.
I resisted the impulse to tell her to hurry up and scratched the soft space above the bunny’s brow, between his ears, felt him watching me with wary pleasure and felt El watching me too, the rabbit in her arms.
“I’d let you poop all over my house,” she said to him, even though I knew she wouldn’t have.
She returned the bunny to the attendant reluctantly when her time was up.
Then she tried to get in line again, but Margaret returned from the bathroom and led us away from the pavilion into the aisles of the fair.
Margaret strutted a few feet in front of me and Eleanor like a marching-band conductor.
Her hair bounced on her back. She wanted to maximize our surface area.
The fair represented an opportunity to engage with people who we could usually only observe online.
Normal rules of communication didn’t apply.
If you saw someone at the fair, it was considered reasonable to send them a message even if you hadn’t talked to them, which meant there was additional value in being seen.
Margaret wanted to open as many avenues of interaction as possible.
I was fine to follow, but El kept stopping to examine carnival game prizes, goldfish in knotted plastic bags, cans of Silly String, cups of slime, and multitiered tiaras.
Her mother’s good taste forbade the presence of junk, so Eleanor couldn’t help yearning after the colorful flotsam that oozed from every tent and stand.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to have an enormous bear?” she said to me, which I found very endearing, but Margaret showed no signs of slowing down. I caught up and touched her shoulder.
“Let El play games,” I said. “It’s too early for all this running around. Everybody here is still a five-year-old. We’ll see people later.”
“Sure,” Margaret said. “A game couldn’t hurt.”
We all heard the singular. Eleanor gave Margaret a look that meant, Other people also have favorite parts of going to the fair.
Margaret merely walked toward the nearest tent.
We followed, and Eleanor lost five dollars throwing a ball at a bunch of bottles designed to never fall over.
She wanted to try again. She’d looked up strategies for beating carnival games ahead of time and was determined to triumph.
Margaret sighed, removed her miniature backpack, and began to adjust its straps.
She gave me a look that meant, Eleanor is being very Eleanor.