Free Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman Page B

was selling his house in Larchmont. He had moved way beyond that pleasant neighborhood, and well into the land of gated estates.
    The aroma of baking pizza interrupted my Internet reverie. I followed my nose out to the kitchen and found my husband and son swathed in identical white aprons. Their hair and faces were dusted with flour, and they had rigged up a catapult system out of wooden spoons and elastic bands.
    “What’s up, guys?” I asked, from what I thought was the relative safety of the doorway.
    “Extra dough,” Peter said. Isaac leaned back and fired off a grayish clump. The T-shirt I was wearing had ridden up over my round belly, revealing a strip of midriff. The dough caught me right there.
    “Ick,” I said, peeling off the cold clot. “Gross.”
    “Yeah!” Isaac squealed. “Really gross. Like brains!”
    I winced. “Ick,” I said again. “Where’s Ruby?”
    “She didn’t feel like helping. She’s down on cooking for some reason. She’s in her room, playing computer games.”
    I left my men to their battlefield, hoping vainly that one or the other of them would become inspired to clean up. I found Ruby hunched over the iMac she had inherited when her father upgraded his system.
    “What’cha doing, kiddo?” I asked, sitting down on her bed and picking a bit of pizza dough off my stomach.
    “Barbie dress up.”
    Ruby’s favorite computer game was a particularly vacuous one in which she spent her time crafting outfits for Barbie to wear. Her current project looked like a bra and panties in a lime green, with fringes.
    “Cool outfit,” I said, wondering if I shouldn’t hire her out to Felix. She seemed to have his style down pat.
    She leaned back in her chair and gazed at her handiwork appraisingly. “It’s okay. Mom?”
    “What?”
    “I need a belly button pierce.”
    I lifted my eyes from my stomach and stared at my six-year-old, dumbfounded. “You need
what?
”
    “I need a belly button pierce. Like Barbie.” She pointed at her design. It was only then that I noticed that she’d decorated the doll with a thick gold hoop where her belly button would be. The thing is, though, Barbie is not particularly anatomically correct, and Ruby’s ring sat on an empty expanse of virtual belly.
    “You don’t need your navel pierced, kid.”
    “Yes I do!” she said. “Barbie has one!” She poked the screen with one indignant finger.
    “First of all, Barbie isn’t real. She’s a doll. And that’s just a picture of a doll that
you
made. And anyway, if she
were
real, Barbie would be a lot older than you, Ruby.”
    “But I’d look really good with a belly button pierce.” She lifted up her shirt and showed off her delicious roundedstomach. I scooped her up in my arms and kissed her exactly where she’d hoped to impale a bit of metal.
    “Mom!” she objected.
    “Sweetie, we’re not having this argument. You’re not getting your pupik pierced, and that’s that.”
    “Pupik is not an English word, mama.”
    “I know sweetie. It’s Yiddish. It’s what your Bubbe and Zayde call a belly button.”
    She sat up in my lap and gazed at me, her expression carefully devoid of expression. “Okay, well. How about earrings?”
    I stared back at her. Had this all been a ploy to get me to agree to pierce her
ears?
Was my little girl capable of that kind of craftily sophisticated manipulation?
    “When you’re twelve, Ruby. You know that.”
    She groaned in frustration and heaved herself off my lap. “When I’m
twelve?
I can’t wait that long! I might already be ugly when I’m twelve! I might be . . .” she paused for dramatic effect. “I might
be fat!”
She whispered the word, as though it were too horrible even to say out loud. I could have been imagining it, but I swear she shot a horrified glance at the stomach peeping out from underneath my too-small shirt.
    I was saved from launching into a defense of my prenatal weight gain by the chirping of the telephone. Peter had