greywash

Title: "High in the sunlit silence"
Fandom: The Magicians
Relationships: Quentin's mom-centric (Quentin's mom/Ted Coldwater, Quentin's mom/Molly)
Rating: Mature
Length: ~2,200 words  

Content notes: Warning for disturbing content. I keep my warning policy in my AO3 profile and am always willing to answer private DW messages or emails asking for elaboration or clarification on my warnings for a particular story.

Author notes: For both the "Wings" challenge and the "Lost and Found" square on my bingo card, as well as for this week's prompt from themagiciansreccenter, "Family." Title is from "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., which is also quoted several places in the text; also contains several references to/quotations from "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers. This story is technically part of The Marriage Plot, but I think it pretty inarguably stands alone and could probably be read as not even really being a Magicians story. [ETA 2019.03.21: this story is now also posted to AO3.]

Summary:

In September, Claudia starts Wednesday night Drawing for Beginners at the adult school.

High in the sunlit silence

In September, she starts Wednesday night Drawing for Beginners at the adult school.

The teacher is a big, heavyset woman named Barb McConnelly with a two-pack-a-day voice and a rough, low laugh; she corrects her when she holds her pencil too tight, a broad, strong hand resting on the back of Claudia's shoulder. Claudia's not any good. She quits after the fourth session, and Barb comes to see her at home: hunching, a little, when Claudia holds the door, like she's worried she's too broad or too tall, which she isn't.

"Claudia, I really want to encourage you to come back," Barb says, over a cup of coffee at the table in the kitchen, while some dumb fucking bird trills and warbles outside the window. Claudia gets up and closes it. Barb hasn't said anything about the house, which is a huge and shameful relief; but her eyes linger, a little, on the the little heap of wood and glue at the far end of the table. "I know it's hard," Barb says, "but the practice is important. No one starts out perfect."

Claudia swallows. "I'm not really sure I have the time," she says. Her throat feels tighter than she wants it to. "I always have to, you know." She waves a hand: the dishes—the baby monitor—the baskets of unfolded laundry—Claudia's Norton fucking Reader, untouched for months; and Barb shifts, as the chair creaks.

"My youngest is a senior at Bloomfield College," she says, finally. "Always on the lookout for some extra spending money, if you need a reliable sitter."

"Oh, no," Claudia says, and then laughs, a little. "My husband stays home with the baby, when I'm." Breathing in. "Out," she says, awkwardly; and then rubs at her face; as Barb watches her with an intent, too-sharp gaze, and then starts digging around in her handbag.

"Listen," Barb says. "I have three kids, all grown up. Doing well. A good husband, with a good job, and a nice house with the mortgage paid off: I don't need the money." She comes up with a little spiral notepad and a pen. "I draw because I need it. I teach because I love it. You get me?"

She scrawls something on the pad and then tears off the sheet, handing it over: a name, and a number.

"Yeah," Claudia says, throat tight, "I get you," and folds the paper in half, just as the baby starts to cry.

It takes her a week and a half to call, and the thing that pushes her over the edge is—

—nothing. It's nothing.

"Listen," Claudia says. "I—my name's Claudia, I'm a student of your mom's, she said you might be interested in, uh. Some part-time work, maybe?"

There's a long silence, and then a girl's voice saying, "Yeah": low and musical; like Barb's voice, minus about thirty years of heavy smoking. "She said someone might call. Babysitting?"

Claudia takes a breath.

"Yeah," she says. "Um—I know this is short notice, but do you have class this afternoon? I have, uh. A dentist appointment, I completely forgot."

Another pause, and then, "Where are you?"

"Montclair," Claudia says. "213 Walnut Street."

"What time?"

"Oh, whenever," Claudia says; and then—remembers, pressing her forehead to the wall. "My appointment's at three," she corrects, "but I could use some time, either side, to run some errands, if you can stay for a few hours."

"Sure," Molly says. "I can be there by one?"

Molly is maybe, maybe twenty-one and doesn't look a thing like Barb: a tiny wisp of a girl with a face like an upside-down egg, her eyes big and limpid behind her glasses. She's a sociology student: "social work," she explains, dropping her bookbag on the kitchen table next to the baby monitor. "I thought at first—foster care, maybe, but. Kids are the hardest, I think."

She shrugs and then smiles at her: and Claudia feels it like an electric shock. Somewhere deep down inside her.

She has the most peculiar sensation, in that moment, of listening to herself speak. Of standing in an empty room, all hard floors hard walls hard ceiling, a little too low to be comfortable, with no doors or windows. Funny, she is saying, to that room's odd, hollow echo: That's funny. I thought I had pushed that out of me.

Later Claudia's not even one hundred percent sure where she went. She just—drove, for a while: through Montclair and Clifton and Nutley and Bloomfield, then at some point she knows she wound up pulled over right up against the fence next to the reservoir with all the windows down and the radio on, that stupid fucking song from Benny and Joon, while she sat on the roof and stared out over the water, remembering—remembering that morning. Sunlight pushing in through the windows while she was sitting at the kitchen table: feeding the baby, staring her unopened Norton Reader, remembering—remembering professional development credits, and beers after. There by the reservoir with sweat dripping down her back under her t-shirt, puddling just under the waistband of her jeans, she'd thought about—climbing, for a while. Standing up on the top of the fence with her arms spread and the air everywhere around her: slip the surly bonds of Earth, she'd thought; and then: No. It'd have to be higher.

Higher.

"Dinner's almost ready," Ted says, in their kitchen, "You want a hand?" With his hand resting low on her back.

"No," Claudia says, and straightens. Reaches for another onesie, from the basket. "I'm fine."

"I'd just hate to miss any more of the year than I'd need to," Claudia explains to Margaret, on the phone, on Thursday; and Margaret laughs.

"Claudia, it hasn't even been three months," she says, with a warmth that Claudia—can't stand. Can't stand: "take the time," Margaret says, "to get your feet underneath you. Spend some time with your baby."

Except—

—except: Claudia doesn't like spending time with her baby.

There. She can admit it: what the fuck does she care, about babies? When she and Ted'd been dating, she'd said something about the bourgeois obsession with procreating, and he'd thrown back his head and laughed. Heaven defend us, he'd murmured, looking at her with those bright bright bright bright eyes, from the bourgeoisie. She'd got over it, though, hadn't she? Everyone gets over communism: but now there is a tight, ashamed knot in the back of her throat, when she watches Ted rocking him, bouncing him: the baby's high gurgling coos and delighted smiles whenever he sees Ted. Not her. Mostly Claudia just gets long, suspicious looks: Me too, kid, she thinks, as she is wearily feeding him at three in the morning so Ted will be rested for class, me too. At three months her own mother had probably—told her not to break into the liquor cabinet or let the nanny smoke the last of Daddy's cigars, on her way out the door to another fucking Met benefit, or something; so it's not like Claudia doesn't come by it honestly, but somehow Claudia'd thought—

—well. Whatever. It was so much affectation, wasn't it: a girl who grew up on the Upper East Side and hadn't grown into herself, yet: only parts of it had mattered. Ted. The teaching. Poetry: and this is what she chose, isn't it: rather than to stay trapped inside her family's fucking—morally empty shoulder-padded Reaganite nonsense: to read, to teach, to do something that mattered; and so this is where she is, now, somehow, at twenty-seven: in a suburban tract home in Jersey, with a husband and a baby and all this fucking laundry, and she can feel it, can't she, she can feel it, she can feel it, pressing down on her. all over: Ted's quiet resentful judgement, when he comes home with stacks of tests to grade and she hasn't even managed to make spaghetti.

"It's okay, Claud," he says, stroking her hair back: "no, shh, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay:" but it isn't. Even she knows that: what kind of—what kind of a fucking—lunatic can't even—

"It's okay, sweetheart," Ted whispers, tucking Claudia's wet face against his shoulder. "Let's order pizza, hm?"

So the next day she straps the baby into the car seat and goes to the grocery store, where she buys—pasta, broccoli, she doesn't even fucking know, what is this, a fucking pineapple? She puts the milk and the chicken in the fridge and then half an hour later she finds herself sitting on the floor of the kitchen staring up out the window: the long delirious burning blue, she remembers Ted murmuring, against her belly, as he pulled her panties down over her hips and just—went down. When they'd been dating they'd talked about—traveling, and art, and poetry, and maybe, Claudia'd thought, lifting her hips, maybe with this one—and the baby monitor is going off, as upstairs Quentin screams and screams, over nothing.

On Friday, Molly comes by again, and Claudia drives. Drives and drives and drives and drives while the radio blares when I go out (when I go out!) well I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you, and when I come home (when I come home!), yes I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who fucking comes back home with you: and when Claudia pulls back into their driveway she has a sudden, electric vision of just—flooring it. Or—backing up, first, better: Ted probably has an entire lecture, somewhere, on the physics of plowing your hand-me-down Volvo through a garage door and into your husband's priceless collection of useless crap, but—honestly, she's never given a shit about physics, until now. She wonders, a little, if she'd die right away or if she'd have to linger on, in excruciating pain, for hours or days or weeks; and then for some reason the whole thing doesn't really seem worth it anymore. Instead she parks the car and brings in the bag from the Walgreens and the other from the liquor store, finds Molly sitting at the kitchen counter, and thunks the bottle down in front of her: as Molly looks up from her textbook, blinking behind her glasses.

"Do you smoke?" Claudia asks, and Molly leans back in her chair.

"Do I—," she asks, and then hesitates, and then says, "Yes."

"Good," Claudia says, "cupboard over the toaster, grab a couple glasses," and tucks the bottle back under her arm, and then, after a second, she grits her teeth and grabs the baby monitor, too.

They sit out in the already-raggedy patio set that Ted and Claudia had bought in April from the Sears in the Phillipsburg Mall, Claudia thrilling at the entire ordinary, delicious procedure. She remembers perching—heavily pregnant, she'd thought, at the time—in the chair on the display floor, sighing as she sat back: Now, she had asked the salesman, very seriously, do you offer credit?: while Ted, behind him, shot her a little look that said, Behave. His mouth quirking at the corner. Claudia fills both tumblers up to the rim, nearly, and lights up before shoving the pack and the lighter over to Molly, who fumbles one out and doesn't look at her. Not, Claudia is thinking, an experienced smoker. Not an experienced much of anything, she'd guess: and then, as Claudia watches, Molly's tongue comes out and slips across her bottom lip, leaving it pink, and wet, and shiny. I have done a hundred things you haven't dreamed of, Claudia is thinking; but Molly is—looking at her, isn't she?; so—

So. Maybe.

Claudia leans back in her chair. "Tell me," she asks, "what do college women do for fun these days, on Fridays?"

On Wednesday, she goes back to the adult school. Do you mind? she'd asked Ted, as she'd drained the pasta from the water. Molly said she could stay, if you do.

No, no—go, go, he had said, as he slung an arm around her: his voice muffled against her forehead. Molly had been standing beside the kitchen table, head bent, packing up her textbooks. She'd stay for dinner. I'm glad you're going, Ted had said to Claudia. You seem happier, when you do.

"This week we're going to be starting in on landscape drawing," Barb says. "I want you to do your homework from real life, but we're going to do some practice studies from photographs and video."

Well, Claudia had told Ted, everyone needs a creative outlet; and he'd beamed at her. He'd been thinking about his planes, she knew. She was thinking of the way Molly's hair had looked, stuck to her face and sweaty shoulders: like wind, or clouds, or water.

Claudia sharpens her pencil, and opens her sketchpad to the next blank sheet.