The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian

exaggerated motion, moving her chin like a mechanical stamp press. She noted that the younger girl’s mouth was covered with caramel from the candy apple she had eaten when they had first arrived at the orchard—one their father
had
paid for—and the front of her white sweatshirt was dotted with spots from the rotting apples in which she had just rolled. She looked like a kid from a TV commercial for a laundry detergent.
    “I should tell,” the younger girl added.
    “You should do a lot of things,” Marissa said after she had swallowed—again with an obvious dramatic flourish. She had been acting with grown-ups, most bankers and teachers and hairdressers by day, in community theaters for three years now. She hoped that someday she would get to do even more: She fantasized about Broadway. “Maybe you should start by not rolling around on the ground like one of those pathetic messy kids from the preschool,” she continued. “Or maybe you should think about washing your face every couple of months.”
    The younger child—a plump girl named Cindy—seemed not especially stung by the rebuke. She shrugged. Then she used her sleeve to try to wipe the caramel off her face, but already it had coagulated like blood. It was going to take a lot more than a dry sweatshirt sleeve to clean up that mess.
    When their father had suggested they go to the orchard this afternoon, Marissa had expected that his new—newer, anyway—girlfriend would be coming along, too. The one named Laurel who their mother dismissed for being so young. But Marissa liked Laurel, and so she was disappointed when their father had said it was just going to be the three of them and they would not be picking Laurel up at her apartment on the hill by the college. “You still have caramel on your face,” she said after a moment.
    Once more Cindy tried wiping it off, this time licking her fingers and rubbing the mess that framed her lips like clown makeup.
    “Is it gone?” Cindy asked.
    “Much better,” Marissa lied. No point in driving home to her sister the reality that she was a complete slob. Still, Marissa wasn’t sure why she felt so cranky this afternoon. She and her sister and their dad had had a reasonably nice weekend so far. After going to the lawn sale yesterday at one of their mom’s neighbors, they had seen a surprisingly unbabyish movie that they’d all liked a lot and then gone out for pizza for dinner, (a slice of which, predictably, Cindy had managed to spread on the cuffs of her sweater, resulting in the sort of stain that would cause Mom to roll her eyes in frustration and say something snarky about Dad when she noticed it). Their father had made waffles for breakfast this morning. She hadn’t done her homework yet and that was vexing her slightly from the very back of her mind. But she could always dive into her math when they got back to Dad’s, and do her reading in the bath after dinner.
    She wondered if her bad attitude at the moment had something to do with Mom’s plan to marry Eric Tourneau in November. She had overheard her parents squabbling about the logistics on the phone this morning, arguing over where she and her sister were supposed to be in the days before and after the ceremony. (Unfortunately, she knew precisely where she was expected to be on the big day itself.)
    “Are you gonna eat all that?” asked Cindy.
    In the distance, easily seventy-five yards away, their father was standing on his toes as he stretched for a cluster of apples on a particularly spindly tree. When he had dropped another pair in the wicker basket at his feet, he glanced over at them again. Marissa really wasn’t sure how and when she had wandered off here. She knew she had been working on a different tree from her dad and then had passed over a series of ones that didn’t have apples low enough for her to reach. She had no idea how this chasm had appeared between her father and her.
    “Okay, you tell me,” she asked Cindy. “Which