by Emily Gould
Not a lot of people knew he was her dad, of course. They didn’t have the same last name, and even Marie had not known that the person her mom referred to as “your bio father” (whereas Matt was always, had always been “Matt”) had been a tragic figure, famous to fans of her mom’s friend Callie’s band and to music nerds like Tom. Her mom had waited until she could reasonably be expected to understand not only the concept of death but also the more difficult concept of “semi-famous tragic figure” before springing that one on her.
Laura told Marie about Dylan a few months after her first depressive episode, after things had stabilized. She made up a sanitized, simplified version: “Your dad was a sad guy, but he was also very talented. At least, a lot of people thought so. I certainly thought so. I didn’t know him very long. He was only twenty-five when he died. He had a stupid accident.”
“Did I ever meet him?” Marie had asked. It had seemed like a reasonable question; she knew that a lot had happened in her life before she could remember things.
“No, baby, he never knew I was pregnant with you. He died before I even knew.”
Then Laura had put an unfamiliar CD on the little kitchen boom box that they mostly used when they wanted to listen to sprightly, upbeat cooking music. They sat there without talking and listened to one of his songs together. It was hard for Marie to pick out any of the words through the fuzz and filters, but it had a nice tune. She didn’t immediately want to hear it again or anything, though. She got the feeling, though she couldn’t say why she felt this way, that her mom didn’t really love the song, either. Maybe that was why she’d never played it before. Listening to it seemed to awaken something in her mother, though. She got distracted and seemed far away.
“Do you think this is a good song?” Marie had hazarded after a few minutes.
Laura shrugged. “Objectively, yes. It’s not really my cup of tea, though.”
The song had ended, and the next one had come on, but Marie reached over and hit stop on the boom box. “Can we listen to the White Album?”
“Sure, whatever you want. Do you want to talk about your bio father more? Ask me any questions?”
Marie had shrugged. “Not really. Maybe later. I don’t think I have any questions right now.”
Laura had looked into her face for a minute, and Marie had felt, as she now often did, that the price of her mom’s love, the blood-warm ocean she swam in constantly, was this kind of heightened surveillance of her feelings. Maybe with two parents it would have been spread out a little more. Lately Laura was always checking to make sure she wasn’t sad. Sad like her dad.
Marie was ashamed of being on medication for depression, but at least it was something about her that was special. No one had ever said this out loud to her face, but Marie knew that unless she could prove herself to be exceptional in some way within the next year or so, she was going to be pretty much fucked as far as college was concerned. Unlike Kayla, who had racked up prizes and awards basically since kindergarten, and who would surely get some kind of scholarship to study whatever boring STEM-related thing she wanted, Marie mostly coasted in school. She could sing and play guitar, of course, because her mom had taught her the same way she’d taught lessons to hundreds of other kids—but in a city full of kids who’d learned to play violin at age three, she didn’t stand out as a prodigy. And while her mom wasn’t discouraging, she also wasn’t exactly pushing her onto the stage.
“I’m just glad you’re doing something that makes you happy,” she’d said once, when Marie had told her that she was probably going to place at least third in the freshman talent show. At the show, Marie had played cover songs on her guitar, but she hadn’t picked very popular songs, and had come in fourth.
Marie tuned back into what Tom was talking about as he said, “So these rare recordings, plus a whole treasure trove of Dylan juvenilia, are owned by your grandmother, but she issued a statement after he died that she has no plans to release them.”
“My grandmother?” Marie pictured her grandmother’s messy house in Columbus, filled with the cousins she saw once a year on Christmas, who exchanged a ton of tacky plastic as-seen-on-TV gadgets and talked about Jesus in a way that made her mom and Matt visibly uncomfortable. Then she realized that wasn’t the grandmother Tom was talking about.
“Oh, my bio dad’s mother. I don’t even know who that is. I guess that’s weird.”
“That is weird! Does she know you exist?”
“I think so. But my mom and I have talked about this stuff for, like, a cumulative forty-five minutes over the course of my entire life, you know? You definitely know more about my dad’s family than I do.”
“So you’ve never met her?”
“No, I’ve never met anyone in his family. It doesn’t seem important. Look, can we talk about something else? Or, like, do something else?” She tried to look at him the way she had seen people do in movies and TV shows—flirtatiously, suggestively. She half closed her eyes and inclined her head in a direction that would have made it easy for him to lean down and start kissing her again. He ignored it.
“So this is kind of crazy, but what if you went to visit her and you asked if you could have the tapes? Like, as a kind of inheritance?”
Marie opened her eyes fully. “That’s not kind of crazy, that’s completely crazy. Where does she even live?”
“The internet thinks she lives in Massachusetts. We could drive there in, like, five hours.”
“Let’s just go right now, right? Road trip!”
Tom didn’t catch her sarcasm, or refused to. “Well, no, but you could probably figure out how to call or email her. And then we could go visit. We could plan it together. It would be an adventure for us.”
“Where would we sleep?” There was no way she would actually do this, but she liked thinking about it. She imagined a room in some kind of gross roadside motel, peeling back the rough comforter and climbing into a bed with Tom, and felt terrified and thrilled. It was like remembering a scene from a movie, not like imagining a possible thing that might happen in her life.
Tom shrugged. “I hadn’t thought it through that far—in the car, I guess? Or at your grandmother’s house, if she’s nice.”
Marie shook her head. During one of their many recent hushed, tense conversations about money, Matt had mentioned something about inheritance, and Laura had said that no amount of money was worth having to deal with “that awful woman.” Marie was just now realizing that they had to have been talking about her grandmother.
“I don’t know. Basically the only thing I know about her is that my mom doesn’t like her.” Marie pulled her hand away from Tom’s grasp. “This whole idea is just too scary and weird, Tom.”
He grabbed her hand back and started to rub the inside of her wrist with his pointer finger, lightly.
“A road trip is romantic, right?” He leaned in for a kiss.
They kissed for a long time. A goat bleated in the distance, but Marie barely heard it. When they stopped kissing, she was ready to agree to almost anything.
* * *
Laura woke up and knew, without checking, that Marie was home, safe in her bed. She must have barely breached the surface of consciousness at whatever point in the night that Marie had crept in the door, then dived back down into a deeper sleep. It must have been very late, but at least she had come home. Anyway, it wasn’t worth picking another fight about, and she always wanted to keep Marie from feeling bad if at all possible.
She got out of bed and looked in the mirror over her dresser to see whether the damage from the thrown phone was still visible. Luckily it wasn’t, though if you were looking for it you could see that the undereye circle on that side was slightly darker. Laura still looked incongruously young compared to most of her kids’ friends’ parents, but compared to all the versions of herself that had existed previously, she looked old. Not old old, but not young anymore. It wasn’t about gray hair or wrinkles or anything that obvious, but more in the set of her jaw
and the reflexive downward tilt of her mouth. Her default mode was skepticism and worry. When she’d been younger her default mode had been openness and inquisitiveness, and the light in her eyes had flashed at everyone indiscriminately. Now she wished she had saved some of that light, banked it somehow. Maybe there was a way to get it back? Some kind of soul rejuvenation that only the very, very rich knew about?
She left Matt to catch another few minutes of sleep, since he’d gotten home so late, and went to start getting ready for the day.
Laura usually walked the girls to the subway on her way to the school where she taught music. Though Marie sometimes complained about it, they all still enjoyed the ritual. Kayla and Marie walked slightly ahead of Laura, murmuring to each other occasionally with their phones in their hands, ready if they had to stop for any length of time at an intersection.
Though their building itself wasn’t beautiful, their neighborhood was objectively perfect, with its brownstones and tall old trees, everything dark and staid and calm. The air itself seemed filled with the soothing, softening presence of money. Gentrification wasn’t a messy work in progress here, as it was in all the other Brooklyn neighborhoods where Laura had lived prior to moving to Park Slope. The especially impressive brownstones had window boxes and tiny front gardens planted with marigolds and tufts of spiky grasses. Laura had thought she was inured to envy, after having felt it so often for so long. Today, though, she wished that she had the time and space to plant flowers. She thought of the planning and the annoying little tasks and micro-decisions required and soon she was exhausted by just the idea of the window boxes. Fourteen years ago, a version of Laura might have enjoyed the flowers’ beauty. Now all she could see was the work it had taken to grow them and plant them and keep them alive. Nothing took care of itself.
She said goodbye to the girls at the entrance of the F train. Kayla gave her a desultory hug, but Marie stood off to the side, refusing to make eye contact, pretending to be entranced in her screen. After watching them descend the stairs, Laura walked the remaining block to the school where she worked. Today she was leaving right after her last group of students to have a drink with Callie in Manhattan, and the thought of this would sustain her through the day of mild irritations underscored by a baseline thrum of worry about Marie.
The job was fine. Or maybe it was pretty bad. It was a job. In a way, Laura missed teaching the baby music classes, even though the pay had been chancy and the owners of toy stores were often awful and there was a frankly evil pecking order among the established musicians, who tended to get territorial as they competed to lock in new students. At least then she’d been performing. That had made up for a lot of time spent cleaning drool off of shaker eggs after each class was over.
In search of something more stable, she had first found a job at a music summer camp, and through that gig she’d landed a full-time job at a public elementary school. The rise of standardized testing eliminated the budget for her position at first one and then another public school, and she’d found herself faced with the choice of working at either a charter or a private school. She’d decided to split the difference and do both part-time. The charter school’s students were so disciplined they were almost animatronic, except when they could sense that they were in the presence of a teacher who would not enforce the ironclad rules, and then they were so unruly that Laura usually felt it was a victory if no instruments got broken and no one cried during class, herself included. At the private school, the students were nicer, though they were occasionally condescending. She sometimes couldn’t shake the feeling that they thought of her as kind of a servant. It was still better than being cursed at by seven-year-olds, though. In 2013 she’d taken a full-time position at the Briar Academy, teaching music appreciation to first through fourth grades.
The fourth graders were definitely the worst, and she taught them last, ending her day on a low note. It was amazing how one “funny” boy student could tip an otherwise okay group into chaos just by making a fart noise with his kazoo. She sometimes tried to remember why she’d initially thought she would be good around large groups of kids; it had been early in Marie’s life, when her love for her child had seemed to spill over into a love for kids in general. There were still kids she liked—students who had the same kind of enthusiasm for playing and singing that she’d had as a child, or even just interesting, quiet kids who she could tell liked listening to music on their own. But the brassy, bossy alpha types always turned the class’s attention toward them, and then Laura had to fight to wrest it back. She was tired of these future CEOs and lawyers. She wished there was a way to oust them so that she could focus on the students like the gentle second grader who’d come to her last week complaining that her hands were too sore to play guitar anymore. She’d told the girl that her fingers would toughen up soon and to keep playing, the same advice she’d been given the first time this happened to her. Maybe her life would have been different if she’d given up. It might have been better, she’d caught herself thinking.
The class ended at last, and Laura had an itch to run out of the classroom as quickly as her students did. Instead, though, she spent a decorous moment gathering her things, putting the instruments back in their cubbies on the shelves, smoothing her hair and reapplying lipstick using her reflection in her phone’s reversed camera as a mirror. She still always wanted to look good for Callie.
Laura took a seat at the bar they’d chosen as a mutually convenient meeting spot, ordered a glass of white wine and drank the first two sips like it was water. Though her back was to the door, she could tell when Callie walked in.
Even in their city full of professional-quality beauties, it was still rare to see anyone as beautiful as Callie. Everyone who saw her adjusted themselves in subtle ways; the bartender smoothed his hair back, and the college-aged women at the table nearest the door straightened their spines and pushed their collarbones forward as though showing off invisible necklaces. Callie rushed up to Laura, who stood up next to her barstool so that her friend could envelop her in a cool, perfumed hug. She was wearing a white shirtdress under a cropped black leather jacket, and there were little gold caps on the toes of her ankle boots. Laura wished she’d worn something other than her usual barely passable adultwear outfit of black jeans, Converse sneakers, and button-down shirt, but it didn’t matter. Whoever was with Callie was rendered at least temporarily beautiful or cool by association, and the bartender came around immediately to affirm this by putting misty glasses of ice water in front of each of them, topping off Laura’s glass and leaving Callie with the wine menu, all without uttering a word.
“That looks good. One for me, too, please,” Callie said, and was taking her first sip of wine within seconds. Laura had sat at the bar for five minutes before anyone had even given her a menu.
There was energy buzzing around Callie, mixing with her perfume and somehow promising fun, excitement, and money. Even after all these years of having the promise not quite deliver, Laura was still enthralled and enticed by it. They sat for a minute just sipping and smiling at each other, and then Callie reached out and touched the tender bruise under Laura’s eye that no one else, even Matt, had noticed. “Did you take up kickboxing?”
“I probably should. Marie is kind of out of control.”
“She punched you? What a little bitch!”
It stung Laura when anyone insulted Marie, though she of course thought of her daughter as a bitch all the time.
“Well, not quite. She threw her phone, not on purpose. But also not by accident, you know?”
“Did you punish her?”
“Should I have?”
“What would your mother have done?”
“Jesus, I don’t even want to think about it. Called the cops, probably. I see my mother once a year for Christmas and talk to her on the phone once a month about the weather. If that’s my relationship with Marie in twenty years I’ll, like … kill myself?”
Callie smiled. “Fair enough! And
of course I am the last person in the world who should be giving you parenting advice. I just hate seeing you get hurt. Emotionally or otherwise.”
Laura shrugged and finished her glass of wine, which was seamlessly refilled.
“There’s no way to avoid it. The whole endeavor is just one variety of heartbreak after the next.”
Callie looked down at her own pretty shoes. “It seems like a distraction might be just what you need right now!”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I have a gig guest-curating a playlist for Google Play, like, a mixtape of sorts, and I want to put one of your songs on it. A new song, not one of the old ones.”
Laura gave herself time to think by signaling to the bartender to top up her glass again, which this time she managed easily. Her gut reaction to any addition to her workload, mental or emotional or physical, was a resounding no. But Callie wasn’t going to keep offering her third and fourth and fifth chances forever, and she had recently touched her guitar for the first time in years.
“You really don’t have to do that. It is so nice of you to want to do a favor for me,” she hedged.
Callie sighed. “I’m not doing this as a favor for you. I don’t do favors, really, you know that. I got this assignment, I’m supposed to come up with stuff no one else could get, and I think you’d fit in perfectly with the other things I’m putting on there. I’m going for a sort of low-fi vibe, a little bit retro. It’s due next week. I just thought I’d mention it.”
“I have so much stuff I have to do between now and next week. Maybe if I had more time?”
It was rare for Callie to betray exasperation, but her patience seemed thinner than usual. There were bags under her eyes, too, Laura noticed, though she had taken pains to conceal them.
“You’ll never have more time, Laura. You keep saying things will be different in the future, but it’s never happening.”
“Well, I still have hope!” Laura tried to say brightly, but there was an edge of desperation in her voice.