Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead

Joan is being her usual boring self, never letting loose, smiling on delay, hesitating too long before saying yes to anything: a ride, a soda, a rest on a bench, a bathroom visit, a spin through a gift shop. Even the way she sneaks off to smoke so Harry won’t see seems self-righteous and prissy. “It was just pretend!” Tim says. “It’s just a game. Just for fun!”
    Abruptly, Amber stops wriggling. “I want an ice cream sandwich,” she says, “and I want to go on Dumbo.”
    Tim’s sunburned face creases with crestfallen exhaustion. Sandy feels for him. His divorce, from what he told her on the beach beside the pool, was an ugly one. “Okay, you bet,” he says.
    They turn as a group to look for the nearest ice cream cart, andJoan says, “It’s early for ice cream, isn’t it? We haven’t even had lunch yet.”
    “Having fun isn’t exactly Joan’s strong suit,” Sandy says to Tim. “I love her anyway.”
    “Joan,” says Tim, “I’ll buy you an ice cream. Let’s go crazy. You too, Sandy. My treat.”
    “It’s early for ice cream,” Chloe pipes up, parroting Joan. “I don’t want any.”
    “Party pooper,” Sandy says.
    Joan drops a curtsy for Tim, her feet in an impossible position. “Valiant knight, I accept your ice cream.”
    “Now do you want some?” Sandy asks Chloe, but Chloe shakes her head. For a child, she is strangely indifferent to pleasant temptation.
    They walk past the shiny elephants in circus hats flying on steel arms around a colorful mechanical globe, past the line of people waiting to board Peter Pan’s pirate ships, past the many brick chimneys of Toad Hall. Near the Pinocchio boats, a grey-haired black man in a white paper hat is selling ice cream from a canopied cart. The air smells like sugar and chlorine and sun-warmed concrete, and from a distance comes the sound of a brass band and the clatter of toboggan cars descending the Matterhorn. As Tim hands Joan an ice cream sandwich with great ceremony, Sandy regrets ever suggesting that he spend the day with them. With a sudden ferocity, she hates what she’s wearing. The blameless shorts and sleeveless white blouse feel constrictive, malicious. If she were alone with Joan, she would be irked by her spoilsport habits—the way she won’t drink fun cocktails, the way she gets Harry to settle down at night by letting him cling to her neck like an orangutan while she hums and sways and murmurs, the way she gets up at the crack of dawn without an alarm clock and stretches and exercises in the room, holding on to the back of a chair the way she had when Sandy first saw her, her twiggy arms and legs going up and out, forward and back, and so on into an infinity of the dullest kind—but Tim had to come along and prove how much more desirable Joan is than Sandy, even though Sandy isthe one who knows how to have a good time. Not that Sandy would cheat on Gary, but to flirt, to play pretend in this world of smooth, perfect, colorful moving surfaces, is to breathe deeply, to relax back into the shape of the person she once was.
    She has asked herself if Joan’s body and Gary’s admiration of it—everyone’s admiration of it—is the only reason she is losing patience with their friendship. But there’s more: she doesn’t trust Joan. She suspects if she could see herself through Joan’s eyes, she would not like what she saw. The roots of her suspicion are obscure: Joan has never been anything but nice, never allowed judgment to show through. But maybe that’s part of the problem. Joan’s controlled exterior makes her seem like she’s hiding something. It didn’t help that Harry was identified as gifted and Chloe wasn’t. Gary sees a conspiracy. Surely the son of the young, self-styled star psychologist in charge of the whole charade would never be declared average. Surely someone had his thumb on the scales. Surely Chloe could not be allowed to take her place among the chosen children. Gary might like Joan okay, but he