by Meg Wolitzer
Once, they had all liked being a family. For a long, long time they had been a fairly good one, taking vacations together, sitting down to meals, and, no, the parents hadn’t been terrible; even after Pleasuring was published, they came to school plays and teacher conferences between interviews and lectures. They tried. But they were an embarrassment to their older daughter, and adolescence was just too hard, being a person was just too hard, and then the divorce happened. One day that same year, Roz Mellow pulled the Volvo into the driveway and found that Holly was not there. She was off, first with Hojo and then with Joanne Mikulski, who had one canine tooth the color of a corn niblet. Then, a while later, she was off with Danny Jett and those girls she’d met in the city, and then she was off in the city itself, up in Spanish Harlem where a bartender she met in a dance club inexplicably insisted on calling her “Rosalita.” Over the years, Holly Mellow, beautiful Holly Mellow, the most gorgeous one in the family and the haughtiest, too, simply gave up her status as daughter, deciding it didn’t “work” for her anymore. She gave it up, and she left them. They relinquished their claim on her, had long agreed to return her to the world, where she told them she belonged.
Except the thing was, at age forty-three, she didn’t belong to the world anymore. She had retreated from it, but it was too late to go back to her original family; they were completely different now, and she would have been the worst kind of hypocrite, and anyway, she had her own family. The house on Swarthmore was gone, the marriage was gone, even the children were unrecognizable in their fully grown selves—Dashiell a fucking Republican, Michael so tightly wound and corporate and unhappy, and Claudia just a vague, and vaguely artistic, loser.
But it wasn’t as though Holly should talk. Until recently, she’d had nothing much to show for herself at this age except, improbably, the beauty that she’d carried with her throughout her life like a little treasure you kept in your shoe, guarding it as you traveled. And then, in a late-life burst of fertility, she’d been fortunate enough to have a baby, and he had changed everything in one bloody instant of birth, turning what had previously been a dissolute life, then an obedient life spent beside Marcus Leeming, into something indescribable. She now had purpose.
The baby, whose name was Ross (a dull name but Marcus had insisted, after his dead father) but whom everyone called Buddy, was now nineteen months old. For the past year and a half, Holly had been as immersed in him as anyone could be in another person, and for nearly a year before that, she’d been entirely immersed in the pregnancy itself, reading those books that offered advice about nausea and folic acid and genetic testing and labor itself, that sickening stew of pain, Pitocin, ice chips, and continual begging for reprieve.
Marcus was a doctor, though not the kind that could be of any use during pregnancy. He was an orthopedic surgeon, and his clients included pro-football players and old women with hip fractures. His practice was full, and he was a thin, gangly man with long hair that he still wore in a little ponytail, if only to remind himself that once, before medical school and the internship and the residency, he’d been a renegade. Long ago, when he was a teenager in Oregon, he’d been in a rock band that had played frequently in the Portland area. They were good, not great, he told Holly, which also described his own academic career—the reason he was rejected by every American medical school he applied to. Getting his medical education “offshore” had been at first humiliating and then wonderful, he said, for by the time he came back to the States to begin an internship in a hospital, he was far calmer than his stateside counterparts, psychologically much more able to cope with the daily assault of hospital life. She wasn’t sure that what he exuded was calm; it seemed mixed with a kind of tense wariness that was notable to her from the start.
They had met in 1995 at a party in Malibu that had lasted all night, and she, who at that point in time was living in the hills in Silverlake, selling pot out of the garage apartment she rented in a red-roofed mission-style house, had drifted to the party in a caravan of friends, one of whom actually knew the party’s host. When she first saw him, Holly was sitting out on the bleached deck looking at the ocean and thinking about committing suicide. The thoughts of suicide came unbidden, as they had done occasionally throughout her life. Usually they occurred when she was at her most aimless, in a car with people she didn’t really know, lying stoned beside someone unfamiliar, or at a big party of strangers, like this one in Malibu. Out on the deck of this house on stilts, she imagined the entire house being washed away in a storm; she pictured herself as just a tiny head bobbing in the water, and then she thought of the relief she would feel as she swallowed a mouthful of it and went under for the last time. Her hair would swirl around her head; a tiny starfish might be found lodged in her throat. No one would know who she was.
She was smoking a cigarette when the tall, bony man with the ponytail came out onto the deck. There was no one else outside because the night was chilly for Malibu at this time of year, and everyone else seemed to want to stay in where the fire was burning in the room-size fireplace. A former rock musician was singing an acoustic version of his one hit, “Try Me,” and everyone was joining in on the chorus. “Try me . . .” the guests sang, “and if you don’t like me then return me . . .”
“They sound like shit,” Ponytail said, standing beside her at the wooden rail, and she nodded. “You shouldn’t smoke,” he added.
“Who says?”
“The surgeon general.”
“Well, tell him to tell me personally,” Holly said, thinking: You asshole. Back then she thought most people were assholes; it was satisfying to be able to categorize someone quickly.
“Look,” he said, “I’m a physician. We’re trained to think this way. It’s a knee-jerk thing by now. But we’re all hypocrites. My partners and I—we’ve got an orthopedic practice—and among us there’s not a sin we haven’t committed.”
Holly looked at him with interest now; the idea of suicide was put away in that instant, just like an unfinished book you close before sleep. She was tired and lonely and had been up in her apartment since dawn stuffing sensimillia buds into those miniature Ziploc bags, all the while being kept company by a neurotic ex-prostitute named Rita, who resembled a blaxploitation star who’d died not too long before. Rita had recently decided to enter the marijuana trade, but she liked to tell stories about the halcyon days in “the life”; she spoke of johns and cash flow and STDs, including a particularly woeful tale of chlamydia that ended up in botched laparoscopic surgery in a free clinic in Venice Beach.
In Malibu, with the ocean blurry and loud just beyond this deck and a houseful of rich people and their friends singing around someone’s unplugged Fender Stratocaster, Holly took comfort from the tall orthopedic surgeon beside her. She realized that she didn’t know anyone who was a doctor; her life was populated by people like herself who hadn’t gone to college but who had a natural smarts about them.
A doctor. She gave Ponytail a weak but genuine smile.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and when she told him, he said the inevitable: “Mellow? Maybe it’s a common name, but any relation to the sex book Mellows?”
And she had to confess; she hated this moment whenever it happened. “Yeah,” she said, “my mother and father wrote Fucking: One Couple’s Story of How to Do It and Why.”
There was a brief pause, and then Ponytail smiled slowly. “That’s funny,” he said. “You’re funny.”
She listened to him reminisce about what the book had meant to him, how he had used it, what he had learned from it, and on and on. Throughout his monologue she looked away, trying to convey her discomfort and boredom all at once, but people almost never picked up on it. Usually they were so taken by their own little leaf-storm of memory about the book that they became lost in the telling, and Marcus Leeming was no exception.
Later on, when the party was over and the guests were wobbling to their cars, she wobbled to his. Her friends didn’t question this; they barely reme
mbered that she’d come with them. Instead, they were stuffing someone new into the backseat, and soon they would be barreling along the Pacific Coast, heading for home, or at least someone’s home.
In Marcus’s rented house he tried to show her what he had learned from her parents’ book. Though very thin, he was quite strong, with a sheeting of pale, blondish hair. At first she didn’t feel much with him except a kind of slightly annoying and lulling friction, but finally he seemed to understand that in her opinion the sex—like most sex she’d had in recent years—was inert, static, would never happen again unless he did something about it. So he brought out a tiny bottle of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and they quickly snuffled it up, and everything was temporarily fixed. The friction became simply rhythm, and she heard her own breath coming faster and louder, as though she were being chased by a young woman, herself, down a long road. When, weeks later, she saw him in his blue-green scrubs about to go into the OR, she would think that the opacity of the outfit was about right. For who knew who he was underneath? His own past was still only partly filled in; she didn’t really want to know it all.
It was too late to take on anyone else’s past; she had her own, and that was too much. She had never thought that you could marry someone you didn’t really know, and who didn’t really know you, but now she not only knew you could do that, she was going to do that. Marriage would imply movement in her life and would give everyone the idea that she, Holly Mellow, was passing through the same channels that most people passed through. Marriage would break up time and provide constancy. There would be one house, one other person. She knew that sex was not what her parents’ book had insisted it was. Surely her parents no longer thought it was. Marriage came with irony attached to it, but this in itself had a sharp and pungent appeal to Holly.
It was as though she carried within her formerly druggie, pissed-off self a 1950s notion of marriage: If you were a woman who did nothing, who had nothing meaningful, then you could marry a doctor. His name would become your own, and thank God for that, because then you could lose that telltale Mellow tag once and for all. Even his medical degree (though from St. Martinus University on Curaçao) would be your own. You could erase yourself, letting the edges that were you, for better or worse, become blunted and blurred and eventually lost to you, like the names of people you had known during your drug years and could now no longer retrieve.
It wasn’t that Marcus Leeming cleaned up Holly Mellow’s act, but simply that in his presence she had the desire to clean up her own act, for she understood that otherwise, this wouldn’t work at all. As it was, he barely tolerated her slacker, finish-nothing attitude, her lack of ambition, her slovenliness. In those first weeks, she confessed all her wrongdoings to him—the laundry list was extensive and tried his patience and what he thought he could stand. He sat back against his couch in his living room, listening with a falsely friendly smile.
She told her future husband about 1991, the year she spent staying on in Minnesota after leaving Recovery House. Like recent college graduates whose best years occur in the embrace of the campus, Holly Mellow and a few others had taken an apartment only two miles away from the facility they’d lived in together, and they proceeded to find jobs for themselves at local ice-cream parlors and bookstores. Holly worked the counter at I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, lifting levers and feeling the pressure and hearing the hum as she let soft-serve snake out into little Styrofoam cups. Her hands and clothes smelled continually of yogurt midspoil, and whenever she or one of the other employees would complain to one another about this or anything else, the other one would say, archly, “I can’t believe it!” Sarcasm ran high in that small, bright store. Because she was older than thirty at the time, she was the oldest employee there. The manager, who was only twenty-three, was incredulous that she didn’t want to climb the employment ladder, rising at least to the rung of assistant manager, but she assured him she did not. The work was just too boring. And besides, she had the money from her trust fund, which had allowed her this long, serpentine, dissolute life, and she supposed she ought to be grateful, but she was not.
During all those years, when she barely spoke to her parents, she still took their money, removing it silently, so silently from her bank account via ATMs all over America, signing checks and paying for food and dope and vodka and rent and gas and record albums and later on CDs, not really thinking about her mother and father, who had made it possible for her to acquire these things. Her mother and father, who had made it possible for her to live.
Even now, at age forty-three, with her drug days over, she seethed like a teenager over the wrongs that had been done to her, and, sometimes, the wrongs she had done to others. She pictured her mother crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night. She pictured her father wandering the house and stroking his beard, perplexed and mournful. She saw her parents going at it like monkeys, telling the universe that sex was a pleasure, a thrill unlike any other, a view that she’d shared for about a minute when she was a teenager, and which became harder to support as she aged, and as men aged too, everyone seeming to flatten against the beds they lay in, exhausted and angry in addition to being aroused. She saw her brothers and her little sister, all of them as wide-eyed and innocent as children in a painting on black velvet, though in this case their eyes were wide not from wonder but from what they’d seen.
It was fair to break from your parents in the beginning or the middle of your life; she had enough reason. They had mortified her, they had ignored her, they had humiliated her. And life had been waiting, like a convenient getaway car. She was seething still, as she sat here in the white rocking chair with the baby. Holly Leeming’s husband had swept into her life, getting extra credit from her because of his ponytail and his medical degree, the combination of which was impressive and relieving all at once. Someone to watch over me, she had thought. Someone who had a little power and could give her a life that might feel permanent in a way that nothing had felt since she’d sat with her brothers and sister in a little tribe on the pink carpet of her bedroom. She’d spun the slow, clicking spinner of the game of Life and it had landed on mortgage, marriage, a family. Holly Leeming, amazingly, had all of that. The past was fucking old hat. The present, while it didn’t really possess the unmistakable taste of reality, was in fact real, and upon her.
She was a wealthy wife in a large house in Topanga Canyon, still pretty though vaguely battered-looking, the skin around her eyes and mouth bearing the telltale parched pull of a former smoker. Her hair remained blonde and luxurious, and her body was freckly and tanned and lithe as always. Holly had become a mother after age forty; the nurse in her OB’s office had given her a pamphlet that featured various gray-haired women holding newborns on the cover. Her own baby was against her now, flesh against flesh, and the light was starting to tint the nursery window. Buddy Leeming was coming fully awake, lifting his head up from her left breast and looking at her quizzically, like someone coming out of a drug stupor to ask: Who am I? Where am I?
“Mom?” he said.
“Hi, Buddy boy,” she said. “Hi, sweet bean.”
Now Buddy was reaching out to the arm of the rocking chair, running his fat hand along the curve of white wood. “Go,” he said. “Go down. Go down, Mom. Now.”
But all she wanted to do was sit here with him, stealing a little more mother-baby time before the light came fully into the room and Marcus woke up in a surgeon’s sour mood, and she had to fall back into this suburban L.A. married life as though it was where she really ought to be. Holly thought of Dashiell and his illness, and she thought of her parents, first entwined and then separated forever. She thought of her brother Michael, who’d always looked at her with such longing, which she’d known about forever but had consistently ignored, because what could she do about it? What could she do for him? They’d been breathlessly close, those two, a duo, and now they were nothing. His life was almost unknown to her: the time at Princeton, the corporate world he inhabited,
the woman he loved, the money he spent. She’d let him go, along with all the others. Holly thought of the entire Mellow family first as one big object, then as a collection of separate, broken-off pieces. God, life was wild and sad. It sometimes seemed to be like some whirling laser show you went to see at midnight. There you were, all fucked up as you sat in your theater seat, your head back, your mouth slightly open in awe.
“Go down,” Buddy said now, more insistent this time.
But she couldn’t let him go down, she wasn’t ready and she wasn’t sure when she ever would be. Holly Leeming took her baby’s head and moved it back to her breast, planting it there. His eyes looked up at her, as if to say: What the fuck?
But she was resolute, unapologetic, and she slipped her nipple back into his mouth and waited a long moment for him to latch on again, which she knew he would, for he was good-natured and didn’t want to make trouble, and it was just as easy to be here, in the small, warm room with her, as it was to be out there in the world.
Chapter Ten
JUST BEYOND the semicircle of hospital rooms, a corresponding semicircle of nurses manned a large, curved dashboard of controls, and in the middle of a sequence of hallucinations Dashiell Mellow imagined that he was on a spaceship, lifting off from Earth. “Going somewhere better,” he said in a dry voice.
“What’s that?” asked the night nurse, a gentle blob in a yellow gown and mask, who was just passing through to check on his meds and make some notes on his chart.
“Going somewhere better,” he repeated, though even now he was losing the conviction of those words. What did he mean? He struggled to remember why he’d said that, but found that he couldn’t.
“Oh no, you’ll be fine,” said the nurse. “The medical care is excellent here, believe me. My brother-in-law had a triple bypass six weeks ago, and he’s already back at work.” Then she patted his blanket with one Latex hand and swished out on silent shoes.