“True. But I met Amelia four years ago,” A.J. argues. “I just didn’t bother to notice her until a couple of months ago.”
“Still bad timing. Your wife had died. And then you had Maya.”
“It’s not much consolation,” A.J. says.
“But hey, it’s good to know your heart still works, right? Want me to set you up with someone?”
A.J. shakes his head.
“Come on,” Lambiase insists. “I know everyone in town.”
“Unfortunately, it’s a very small town.”
As a warm-up, Lambiase sets up A.J. with his cousin. The cousin has blond hair with black roots, overly plucked eyebrows, a heart-shaped face, and a high-pitched voice like Michael Jackson. She wears a low-cut top and a push-up bra, which creates a small, sad shelf for her name necklace to rest. Her name is Maria. In the middle of mozzarella sticks, they run out of conversation.
“What’s your favorite book?” A.J. attempts to draw her out.
She chews on her mozzarella stick and clutches her Maria necklace like it’s a rosary. “This is some kind of a test, right?”
“No, there’s no wrong answer,” A.J. says. “I’m curious.”
She drinks her wine.
“Or you could say the book that had the greatest influence on your life. I’m trying to get to know you a little.”
She takes another sip.
“Or how about the last thing you read?”
“The last thing I read . . . ” She furrows her brow. “The last thing I read was this menu.”
“And the last thing I read was your necklace,” he says. “Maria.”
The meal is perfectly cordial after that. He never will find out what Maria reads.
Next, Margene from the store sets him up with her neighbor, a lively female firefighter named Rosie. Rosie has black hair with a blue streak, exceptional arm muscles, a great big laugh, and short nails she paints red with little orange flames. Rosie is a former college hurdles champion, and she likes to read sports history and particularly athletes’ memoirs.
On their third date, she’s in the middle of describing a dramatic section from Jose Canseco’s Juiced when A.J. interrupts her, “You know they’re all ghostwritten?”
Rosie says she knows and she doesn’t care. “These high-performance individuals have been busy training and practicing. When did they have time to learn to write books?”
“But these books . . . My point is, they’re essentially lies.”
Rosie cocks her head toward A.J. and taps her flame nails on the table. “You’re a snob, you know that? Makes you miss out on a lot.”
“I’ve been told that before.”
“All of life’s in a sports memoir,” she says. “You practice hard and you succeed, but eventually your body gives out and it’s over.”
“Sounds like a latter-period Philip Roth novel,” he says.
Rosie crosses her arm. “That’s one of those things you say to sound smart, right?” she says. “But, really, you’re trying to make someone else feel stupid.”
That night in bed, after sex that feels more like wrestling, Rosie rolls away from him and says, “I’m not sure I want to see you again.”
“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings before,” he says as he puts his pants back on. “The memoirs thing.”
She waves her hand. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t help the way you are.”
He suspects she is right. He is a snob, not suited for relationships. He will raise his daughter, run his store, read his books, and that, he decides, will be more than enough.
AT ISMAY’S INSISTENCE, it is determined that Maya should take dance. “You don’t want her to be deprived, do you?” Ismay says.
“Of course not,” A.J. says.
“Well,” Ismay says, “dance is important, not just physically but socially, too. You don’t want her to end up stunted.”
“I don’t know. The idea of enrolling a little girl in dance. Isn’t that kind of an old-fashioned and sexist notion?”
A.J. is unsure whether Maya will be suited to dance. Even at six, she is cerebral—always with a book and content at home or at the store. “She’s not stunted,” he says. “She reads chapter books now.”
“Not intellectually, obviously,” Ismay insists. “But she seems to prefer your company to anyone else’s, certainly anyone her own age, and that probably isn’t healthy.”
“Why isn’t it healthy?” Now A.J.’s spine is tingling unpleasantly.
“She’s going to end up just like you,” Ismay says.
“And what would be wrong with that?”
Ismay gives him a look as if the answer should be obvious. “Look, A.J., you two are your own little world. You never date—”
“I do date.”
“You never travel—”
A.J. interrupts. “We aren’t talking about me.”
“Stop being so argumentative. You asked me to be godmother, and I’m telling you to enroll your daughter in dance. I’ll pay for it, so don’t you fight me anymore.”
There is one dance studio on Alice Island and one class for girls ages five and six. The owner/teacher is Madame Olenska. She is in her sixties and though she is not overweight, her skin hangs, suggesting that her bones have shrunken over the years. Her always bejeweled fingers seem to have one joint too many. The children are both fascinated and frightened by her. A.J. feels the same way. The first time he drops off Maya, Madame Olenska says, “Mr. Fikry, you are first man to set foot in this dance studio in twenty years. We must take advantage of you.”
In her Russian accent, this seems like a sexual invitation of some kind, but mainly what she requires is manual labor. For the holiday recital, he paints and constructs a large wooden crate to look like a child’s block, hot-glue guns googly eyes, bells, and flowers, and fashions sparkly pipe cleaners into whiskers and antennae. (He suspects he will never get the glitter out from under his nails.)
He spends much of his free time that winter with Madame Olenska, and he learns a lot about her. For instance, Madame Olenska’s star pupil is her daughter who dances in a Broadway show and whom Madame Olenska hasn’t spoken to in a decade. She wags her triple-jointed finger at him. “Don’t let that happen to you.” She looks dramatically out the window, then slowly turns back to A.J. “You will buy ad in program for bookstore, yes.” It is not a question. Island Books becomes the sole sponsor of The Nutcracker, Rudolph and Friends, and a holiday coupon for the store appears on the back page of the program. A.J. goes even further, providing a gift basket of dance-themed books to be raffled off with proceeds going to the Boston Ballet.
From the raffle table, A.J. watches the show, exhausted and slightly fluish. As the acts are arranged according to skill, Maya’s group is on first. She is an enthusiastic if not overly graceful mouse. She scurries with abandon. She wrinkles her nose in a recognizably mousy way. She wags her pipe-cleaner tail, which had been painstakingly coiled by him. He knows a career in dance is not in her future.
Ismay, who mans the table with him, hands him a Kleenex.
“Cold,” he says.
“Sure it is,” Ismay says.
At the end of the night, Madame Olenska says, “Thank you, Mr. Fikry. You are good man.”
“Maybe I’ve got a good kid.” He still needs to claim his mouse from the dressing room.
“Yes,” she says. “But this is not enough. You must find yourself good woman.”
“I like my life,” A.J. says.
“You think child is enough, but child grows old. You think work is enough, but work is not warm body.” He suspects Madame Olenska has already tossed back a few Stolis.
“Happy holidays, Madame Olenska.”
Walking home with Maya, he is contemplating the teacher’s words. He has been alone for nearly six years. Grief is hard to bear, but being alone he has never much minded. Besides, he doesn’t want any old warm body. He wants Amelia Loman with her big heart and bad clothes. Someone like her, at least.
Snow is beginning to fall, and the flakes catch in Maya’s whiskers. He wants to take a picture, but he doesn’t want to do the thing where you stop to take a picture. “Whiskers become you,” A.J. tells her.
The compliment to her whiskers sets off a stream of observations about the recital, but A.J. is distracted. “Maya,” he says, “do you know how old I am?”
“Yes,” she says. “Twenty-two.”
“I’m quite a bit older than that.”
“Eighty-nine?”
“I’m . . .” He holds up both his palms four times, and then three fingers.
“Forty-three?”
“Good job. I’m forty-three, and in these years I’ve learned that it’s better to have loved and lost and blah blah blah and that it’s better to be alone than be with someone you don’t really fancy. Do you agree?”
She nods solemnly, and her mouse ears almost fall off.
“Sometimes, though, I get tired of learning lessons.” He looks down at his daughter’s puzzled face. “Are your feet getting wet?”