The next day, she worked from home. Propped against the end of the den sofa, she arranged her cashmere napping blanket over her legs, balanced her laptop on a cushion, and slipped her phone into the pocket of her terry-cloth robe. She logged into her Gallard account and sighed deeply as a flood of emails washed over her. She started by flagging memos and reports to read later, then went over the Global Influencer deck that had just come in from one of their consultants. She copy-pasted some of the findings into her positioning platform presentation, mapping the share trends by physician specialty and reordering the competitive analysis bullet points.
It was the kind of work that would normally lull her into a comfortable trance, but she was too distracted by her headache to lose herself completely. Her eyes kept wandering to the built-in bookshelves, which, she couldn’t help noticing, were a little too neatly arranged, sections of books alternating with meaningless knickknacks. They were nothing like Peter’s shelves, which had been piled with well-thumbed books that he actually seemed to have read and interesting objects from what appeared to be extensive travels to third-world countries.
In the center of her den shelves hung a family portrait: Mary Ellen, Matt, and the girls on the beach in matching white linen shirts, their faces glowing healthily in the rosy sunset light. It was the same sort of photo all of her friends had in their dens. Until now, she’d never thought twice about it, but today she found it irritating. What family ever walked around in matching outfits, except when taking one of these stupid pictures? Who were they creating this illusion for—their friends, who had all done the same thing? Was it for themselves—a comforting fiction that this perfect moment had actually happened?
Mary Ellen realized that instead of feelings of affection or nostalgia, the picture had only ever inspired a sense of accomplishment: at having booked the best photographer in Avalon; at having found four white linen shirts in the right sizes the day before the shoot; at having sprung for the larger mat and UV glass for the frame. It was a job well done.
She turned back to her laptop and tried to focus on her work, but that was also irritating. The ad agency had sent over images for the upcoming focus groups: a woman putting on a bike helmet. A doctor counseling a smiling patient. The people in the focus groups—people who relished their job as professional opinion-havers—would not, she knew, experience any actual feelings of “safety” or “trust” upon seeing these photographs. But they would point to the bike helmet and say the word, and the moderator would record this event in a lengthy and expensive report, and everyone would fly home to present the findings to their teams and move on to “next steps.” A job well done.
It was happening again, the swell of dissatisfaction that had been tormenting her for the past year, like a case of bursitis. The fact that it seemed to have been brought on by the death of her father continued to nag at her. Guilt made everything so much worse.
A howl came from the kitchen. Matt had been directing loud complaints at the television all morning; apparently, people in some other time zone were playing soccer. Mary Ellen clutched her forehead and called his name, but he didn’t answer. She set her laptop aside, wormed her feet into her slippers, and went down the hall.
“What are you doing today?”
He was sitting at the counter, cereal untouched, staring red-faced at the TV. “I can’t believe Iniesta blew that shot. I could’ve made that shot.”
“Matt.”
“What?”
“I was thinking. Let’s go to ICA today.”
“To what?”
“The Institute of Contemporary Art. There’s a show I want to see.”
He grimaced and laughed at the same time.
“Come on. You need to get out of the house. I do too.”
“I don’t need—”
“We can have lunch. There’s that sushi place.”
“I thought you had to work.”
“I only have a conference call at two. I can play hooky the rest of the day.”
Matt wiped a hand down his face. “Can’t you go this weekend? Take the girls. They’ll be more—”
“When’s the last time we did something, just the two of us?”
Matt stared at the TV.
“It’ll be fun,” she said brightly. “I just need to take a shower first. I’ll be right back.”
She knew Matt was going to hate everything about ICA—the blurry video installations, the rigorously sparse galleries, the pious hush. It made her uncomfortable too, but it was a good discomfort, an interesting discomfort, and she thought she might be able to get him to see it that way. Matt had been trundling along in a well-worn rut just as long as she had. Maybe he would enjoy being pulled out of it for an afternoon.
The show was called Transubstantiation; Justine had called it a feminist comment on constructivism. Mary Ellen had relayed this information to Matt in the car on the way to the show, but she wasn’t sure he’d been listening. Now he was leaned forward, scrutinizing the label next to a dress hanging inside a dry cleaning bag on a gallery wall. “Constructivism started in Russia,” she explained. “It began during the Bolshevik revolution—”
“This one is called ‘Number 7,485,’” Matt said, straightening up. “Do you think she really made seven thousand of these?”
“Maybe it’s a comment on the commodification of art.”
“Would you wear it?”
Mary Ellen snorted. “That’s not the point, Matt.” She looked at the dress, which had a photograph of a factory building printed on it. “Or I don’t know, maybe it is. It’s a photograph, hanging on the wall in a gallery, but it’s also a piece of clothing. I read about this. I think it’s called…” She snapped her fingers. “Productivism!” She beamed at him.
Matt sighed and put his hands in his pockets. “Does that mean it’s good?”
“Well, it’s interesting.”
“How much do you think it is? You could buy it and hang it in your closet with all that other stuff you never wear.” He gave his baseball cap a waggish tug, then retreated to a bench while Mary Ellen finished her round of the gallery. She felt pleased at having remembered productivism; she was definitely going to have to slip that into a conversation with Justine. She inspected the rest of the pieces, ticking through the movements in her head: relational aesthetics…postexpressionism…appropriation… It was all there, a trail of bread crumbs for the initiated.
“So what do you think?” she asked Matt, sitting beside him on the bench.
“Me?” He rocked his head side to side. “I don’t know. Not really my thing.”
“But doesn’t it make you curious? To know what this is all about, what it’s trying to say?”
“I’ll be honest, Mary. I think most of it is hideous. I wouldn’t want it hanging over my couch.”
“Okay, but that’s the thing. You’re not supposed to like it.” Mary Ellen put a hand on his arm. This was the most important thing Justine had taught her, the most seductively counterintuitive bit of wisdom that was now lighting her path through this new world. “Beauty, pleasure, gut reaction—that’s all irrelevant.” She pressed her lips together and canted her head back, filled with the power of this proclamation. “It’s about criticality.”
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s about locating ideas within a cultural framework—”
Matt pulled out his phone and checked the time. “Oh look, it’s sushi o’clock.”
Mary Ellen sighed. “Don’t you ever feel like learning something new? I mean, besides how to replace the InSinkErator.”
“I read biographies.”
“I mean learning something that changes you. That changes the way you see things.”
“No.”
“Matt.”
“Seriously, Mary, no. I like the way I see things. And I don’t understand all of…this.” He lifted his chi
n toward the wall. “I don’t get why you worship that teacher of yours, why you’ve started speaking in some kind of…code. I don’t get it.” He turned off his phone and shoved it back into his pocket. “It’s like you’re trying on a costume. Which is fine; it’s fine to try stuff out, but you don’t have to take it so seriously.”
Mary Ellen drew herself up. “I take it seriously because it’s serious. Art is serious, or at least it should be. And I don’t worship Justine. I admire her.”
“Okay. Sorry. Can we go eat?”
Mary Ellen felt her headache begin to swell again. She searched her bag for her bottle of Numbitol. “There’s another room we haven’t seen. But if you want to leave, I can meet you at the restaurant.”
Matt stayed with her, though, or at least near her. As she perused the next room, he sat on a bench and scrolled through his phone. Mary Ellen tried to focus on the art, but her enthusiasm had drained away and she found herself standing too long in front of an abstract black-and-white photo, staring blankly at the grainy pattern.
Was this what it was going to be like when the girls went away to school? Would she and Matt drift about, doing their respective “things,” intersecting only over occasional meals? Mary Ellen turned and looked at her husband, who was flicking at his phone with his thumb, his lower jaw thrust forward, exploring the inside of his upper lip with his tongue the way he always did. He was dressed in his usual outfit of sweatshirt and shorts (even though it was the first day of December, with snow in the forecast), nothing to distinguish him from the unemployed college graduate she’d fallen in love with twenty years ago, other than a gentle softening around his waist and jaw and two strokes of worry between the brows. Mary Ellen sighed and turned back to the photo.
They still had another year with the girls, but the Breckenridge trip was right around the corner. The twins would be spending half of January in Colorado with the Penn Charter ski team, giving Matt and Mary Ellen a two-week-long preview of life in the empty nest. Mary Ellen already had misgivings about the trip; the ski coach was known to turn a blind eye to after-hours partying. But more than that, she realized she was dreading coming home every day in the dark of January to find Matt, stripped of his entire raison d’être, still in his pajamas, watching ESPN, his head burnishing the sofa arm to an ever-brighter sheen. As if January weren’t depressing enough already.
“Come on, Mary. Let’s go to lunch. You need to be home in time for your conference call.”
“Matt, you’ll be home the whole time the girls are in Breckenridge, right?”
“Where else would I be?”
Mary Ellen sat next to him on the bench. “I think I’m going to take Justine up on her offer. I’m going to spend a week in her mountain house right after Christmas, while the girls are gone.” As she said this, Mary Ellen felt a nervous quiver in her stomach that may or may not have been hangover related.
“What? Why then?”
“Justine wanted me to go during the winter, and—”
“No, I mean, why go when the girls are gone? What am I supposed to do, all alone in the house?”
“It’s only a week, Matt. Maybe it’ll be good for you. The change.”
“I still don’t understand why—”
“They’re leaving in a year. I don’t want to miss any time with them. But since they’ll be away anyway…” As she was saying it, this reason struck Mary Ellen as perfectly valid.
“What about work?”
Mary Ellen leaned her head against his shoulder. There was something German shepherd–like about the way Matt worked to keep everyone together in their proper places, nobody straying from the herd. Which was understandable. He’d been so comfortable. “I’m quitting my job.”
Matt jerked back, causing Mary Ellen’s head to bounce, setting off sparks of pain behind her eyes.
“I’m kidding, Matt. Geez.”
“Don’t do that to me.”
“Relax.” Mary Ellen squinted at him. “But what if I did? You’d be all right, wouldn’t you? You could go back to freelancing.”
“I could never make what you make, Mary. You know that. Anyway, I thought you loved your job.”
“Of course,” she said, pressing her thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose. “Don’t worry. I’m only going away for a week. Nothing’s going to change.”
“Promise?”
Mary Ellen gazed around the room at the mysterious jumble of objects reverently pinned to the dove-gray wall. She knew what her father would have said about them, what a laugh he and Matt would’ve had together. But would she even have come here if her father were still alive? Would she have accepted Justine’s invitation, or would she have politely turned it down, explaining that her brand’s positioning platform was far too important to leave to her underlings?
“Nothing will change,” she said again, even though she was starting to realize, deep down, that something already had.
7
The pain in Ivy’s head bloomed like a cabbage rose, a hot fist of petals unfolding against the walls of her skull. The pain jerked and pulsed and pressed, bloodred, against her eyes, and spread its tendrils into her ears and down her throat. Coughing pushed the pain into farther, darker corners, but she couldn’t stop; she coughed and coughed like her lungs were trying to claw their way out of her chest; she coughed so hard she retched everything in her stomach onto the bed.
Such a waste, she thought, bundling up the bedding, trying to remember if there was any bread left in the kitchen, too tired to go up the stairs to check. How long had it been since she’d gotten the bag of groceries from the man with the cloudy eye? Time had been stretching and shrinking in unpredictable ways since she got sick, but she had a feeling it had been more than one week, less than three, but who could really say. Long enough to eat most of a loaf of bread and a pound of egg salad.
Ivy got a little confused looking for the laundry room. She was sure it was at the end of the hall, but now it was a bedroom, and she looked in all the cabinets but couldn’t find the washer so she just stuffed the sheets into a drawer and hoped for the best. At least this bed was made up with fresh sheets. She climbed in and rode the waves of pain all the way out to the open sea.
She dreamed and dreamed, her dreams whizzing in manic circles like a roulette wheel, never wanting to settle into one story line, always circling back. She dreamed that Gran was in the closet drinking beer, and Ivy brought her a sandwich, but when she opened the closet door a bird flew out, and then she was calling Asa, asking him to bring her the homework she’d missed. Asa brought it, and it was all geometry, and she couldn’t remember the Pythagorean theorem so she went to ask Mrs. Jacobson, the math teacher, who was in the closet drinking beer, and the bird flew out and hit the wall and slid to the floor, painting a bloody streak the whole way down.
When Ivy woke up, she was shivering violently and the sheets were damp. Outside the window, the world was coated in white flowers, and someone on the second floor was throwing fistfuls of petals into the air. Ivy decided to go see who was doing this, and also find something to eat because that would surely help her feel better. Getting out of bed was hard. The bed was fighting her, trying to pull her back. Her bones were all bruised, and it seemed like gravity was stronger than usual, like the earth had grown to the size of Jupiter. It occurred to Ivy that she was pretty sick, but any other thoughts about this kept flitting beyond reach and she couldn’t seem to gain on any of them.
It took a while to get up the stairs; she had to keep sitting down to catch her breath. Finally, she emerged into the living room, and all the open space made her feel dizzy, so she sat for a moment at the big table, resting her cheek on the cool surface. A frail whimper leaked out of her mouth. She thought she’d been lonely before, but this kind of loneliness put every other kind to shame. She just wanted someone to put their hand to her forehead, pour her a glass of Coke, put a box of
tissues by her bed. Gran had been the one to do it whenever Ivy was sick back home, although it usually took her a few days to be convinced Ivy wasn’t faking. Gran was a terrible nurse—she would forget to make Ivy lunch half the time, and she was stingy with sympathy—but she was a warm body in the house and could be counted on not to let Ivy die.
Why had she come up here? Food. Ivy pushed herself off the bench and went into the kitchen. She surveyed the counter, which was covered with dirty dishes and empty deli containers. The good stuff was long gone, but there was still a loaf of bread somewhere. She’d been eating it for the past couple of days, a couple of slices a day, but she couldn’t remember where she’d left the bag.
She pawed through the dishes and the trash, then opened the fridge and found it in there, a limp plastic bag with two slices of bread inside. Or rather, one slice of bread and one heel, just a shaving of crust. Ivy folded the heel in half and shoved it in her mouth, which was dry and full of sores. She poured a glass of water and did her best to work the bread down her throat. Then she picked up the last piece, which looked comparatively fluffy and sweet, like a slice of cake, and thought about what was next.
That slice of bread was the last of the food. This thought, at least, was coming through the fog like a pair of fast-moving headlights. It was the last of the food, and she was too sick to walk up the hill, and that white stuff wasn’t flower petals, it was snow. Even without the snow, even if it were sunny and seventy-five, she knew she’d never be able to make it up that endless driveway to the road. She could barely make it up a flight of stairs.
Ivy pinched one corner of the bread slice, feeling the fluffiness turn hard, then ripped it away and laid it on her tongue. It didn’t taste sweet; it tasted like everything else these days, like the side of a metal watering can. But it was pulling saliva into her mouth and waking up her brain. She took a big bite from the center of the slice, no crust, and it was like biting a cloud—one minute it was there; the next minute it was gone. She considered the remains of the slice. If she didn’t eat it now, she’d just eat it the next day, so why the hell should she wait? She was going to get better eventually—tomorrow, maybe, or the day after—and then she’d be able to walk to town.
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