by Jonathan Dee
“How original,” Cynthia said. She sat on the windowsill, feeling the metal safety guards against the small of her back.
“But it goes beyond that. She has-there have been-well, she ended up in the hospital, more or less against her will, there were some sort of pills involved, she says it was an accident but apparently some doctor there refuses to see it that way.”
“Some doctor where?”
“In Bellevue,” Ruth said.
“In Bellevue?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. The way it was explained to me, it’s just a formality. Warren says it’s a liability issue for them. They need to release her to someone, a family member, and so I need you to go down there and get her. The admitting doctor’s name is-”
“Whoa,” Cynthia said. “Whoa. I am not a part of this. Bellevue? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“She’s your sister!” Ruth wailed.
“She is not my sister. Jesus. We are leaving for Costa Rica in less than a week. Why the hell don’t you and Warren come get her?”
“ Warren is in San Francisco. He’ll come get her if he has to, but it would mean another night in that place for her. Who knows what goes on? Even the doctor said she obviously didn’t really belong in there. He seemed so nice.” The thought of institutional niceness in such circumstances undid Ruth, and she started crying. “Please, Cynthia. Please. It’s his only child. Maybe you don’t care about her but surely you won’t just let someone you know keep suffering if you can stop it. You’re not that kind of person.”
Her head was pounding. She really needed to eat something soon. An egg sandwich, maybe. “God damn it,” she said. “God damn it. All right. Where the fuck is Bellevue exactly, anyway?”
Ruth gave her the address. “Just a night or two with you,” she said, “and she’ll be better, maybe well enough to go back to her own place, though they told us she shouldn’t try-”
“No way is that happening. She’s your problem. And don’t hand me that family shit. This is not some sanitarium. I have children here.” In the cab down to 27th Street she called Delta and booked Deborah on a flight to Pittsburgh that night. Some two hours later, after she’d filled out every form and then waited in the lobby, which was lit like an autopsy room, for somebody to find somebody else who would sign off on the discharge, the steel door to the ward clicked open and her stepsister walked through. They hadn’t seen each other in eight years, but Cynthia, remembering the old hostility in Deborah’s eyes, was surprised to see it gone, and nothing else in its place. Probably just the drugs, Cynthia thought. They’ve got to have some designer shit up in here.
She was thin and pale, and looked very much like someone who had just spent a lot of time throwing up. Like a much more intense version of the hangover Cynthia herself was still fighting down. Her hair was in knots. The great unlikeliness of this moment was actually kind of compelling, but Cynthia tried not to let it show. “So you’re on a 7:32 flight to Pittsburgh,” she said, but Deborah didn’t even break stride, she was in such a hurry to get out of there. Cynthia fell into step alongside her. “They probably won’t even let you on the plane looking like this, though. You can come back to our apartment and clean up and borrow something to wear. Do you have to go back to your place for any reason?”
Deborah licked her lips and said hoarsely, “No.”
“Good. I don’t think there’s time, anyway.”
She sat in the kitchen while Deborah took a shower that lasted a good thirty minutes. Cynthia was torn between irritation-the kids had to be picked up at school at three-fifteen-and nervousness about whatever might be going on in there. Finally Deborah exited in a huge cloud of steam, looking flushed and a little more like herself, though still woefully skinny. Cynthia’s jeans barely stayed on her hips; she had a smaller pair but there was no way she was giving those up. “I can’t believe you live like this,” Deborah said. “That is the nicest shower I’ve ever been in. You should see my place.”
Cynthia looked her over, not listening to what she said. She didn’t trust her. In her state she might do anything, and if it happened here, it would become Cynthia’s problem. “Come on,” she said. “We have to go pick up my kids.”
Dalton ’s lower-school building was a double-wide townhouse just a few blocks away; the early-arriving mothers went into the lobby, where there was a fireplace, to keep warm, but Cynthia and Deborah waited outside at the bottom of the steps for April and Jonas to emerge. Deborah seemed to have some awareness of herself as out of place; she stayed a step behind Cynthia’s shoulder and cringed a bit as if trying not to be seen, not just by the kids (whom she wouldn’t have recognized anyway) but by anyone. More than half the women out on the sidewalk were nannies, substantial and mostly dark-skinned and sober-looking, talking to one another with their eyes on the door and occasionally laughing without smiling. When April and Jonas appeared on the landing, wrapped tightly in their coats, and walked smiling down the steps toward their mother, Cynthia heard from behind her, softly but unmistakably, a gasp.
“Kids,” Cynthia said; and then, just because it was the shortest available explanation, “this is your aunt Deborah.”
Their mouths fell open, but they also remembered their manners and held out their hands for Deborah to shake. “I’ve seen pictures of you,” April said, and for a moment Cynthia was surprised. “At Mom and Dad’s wedding. You were one of the bridesmaids.”
“That would be correct,” Deborah said. Cynthia rolled her eyes. Some people had no talent for talking to children at all.
At home the kids watched TV and had a snack, as usual; and Deborah, after sitting silently under the kitchen clock with Cynthia for a few minutes, stood up from the table and went into the living room to join them. Cynthia phoned her mother with Deborah’s flight information. “Yes, Mom, she’s fine,” she said, watching warily through the kitchen doorway. “Perfectly normal. I mean, if a grown woman sitting on the floor eating Goldfish and watching the Disney Channel is normal. Just be there when her flight gets in so she doesn’t go AWOL or whatever.” When Adam walked through the door, Cynthia stood up, kissed him, and grabbed her keys. “They’ve eaten,” she said to him. “Let me just get my coat and we’re out of here.” He went into the TV room, and the kids jumped all over him. “Daddy,” they yelled, “have you met Aunt Deborah?”
Deborah stood up, brushing crumbs off her shirt. She and Adam nodded to each other awkwardly. Jonas, holding both his father’s hands, walked up his thighs and flipped himself over.
“How’s your brother doing?” Deborah said.
Adam’s eyebrows went up. “Good,” he said. “He’s in Los Angeles. I guess I’d forgotten you knew each other. You want me to tell him you said hi?”
“No,” she said, as Cynthia reappeared in the doorway behind him and beckoned with one finger.
They hit traffic getting on the FDR at that hour and again once they were over the Triborough. Cynthia started looking nervously at her watch. No way in hell they were missing this flight. Suddenly she felt a kind of shudder go through the seat beneath her, and when she turned she saw that Deborah was crying, and shaking with the effort not to make any noise while doing it.
“Oh please,” Cynthia said-not to Deborah, exactly, but that was how she took it.
“Please what?” Deborah said angrily, wiping her eyes on her borrowed shirt. “I’m sorry that unhappiness doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle. I know you don’t give a shit about me but I’d think I’d merit the sympathy a total stranger would, at least. Of course maybe the total stranger would get nothing from you either. I’d forgotten how easy everything’s always been for you. I just didn’t expect I’d ever feel so jealous of it.”
“As I understand it,” Cynthia said, “you banged some married professor and what do you know, it turns out he’s a liar. Wow, I’m sure you’re the first person that’s ever happened to. So you forget about it and you move forward. The rest of it is just drama, which should really be your middle name, b
y the way. You may not respect me but at least I’d respect myself enough not to wind up in the batshit ward.”
“What do you know about it? What do you know about anything? You have never suffered a day in your life. You’ve never not gotten anything you wanted. And now those kids of yours are growing up the same way. Like a little ruling class. It’s terrifying.”
“What did you say to them?” Cynthia said.
“Everything given to them. No idea how fortunate they are. Sweet and content and well bred. Everything as it should be and they have no idea how the other ninety-nine percent lives.”
“Hey, you’re right,” Cynthia said. “I really should try to ennoble them with some early suffering. I really should go back home and take some things away from them. Boy, it’s a mystery to me how someone as smart as you has never had a kid of her own.”
And when she said that, Deborah stiffened as if she’d been hit; she stopped talking and turned to look out the window; and just like that Cynthia had a pretty good idea what had really happened. They rode the rest of the way to LaGuardia in silence.
“Keep the meter running,” Cynthia said to the driver. Deborah, her hand on the door, turned to face her. “I know you only did this because you had to,” she said, “but thank you anyway.”
“I didn’t have to do it,” Cynthia said. “Why would I have to do it?”
“Because we’re quote-unquote family,” Deborah said.
But that’s what’s so fucked up about it, Cynthia thought when she was back in the city-bound traffic on the L.I.E. Everyone thought they could keep playing this family card with her to get her to do what they wanted; the irony was that they had no idea how deeply she bought into the idea they were so cynical about. She believed in it more than any of them. But you didn’t get to screw around with definitions, your own or anyone else’s. Just because Ruth found some rich guy to get old with, it didn’t follow that Cynthia was no longer an only child. And she hadn’t heard from her father in the last three years, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still her father, or that anybody else was. That was how you kept the whole idea meaningful, and powerful. You kept it small.
But the whole blowup stayed with her, particularly the indictment of her children, or at least of the way she was raising them. That was beyond the pale. Even if you’d spent the previous night in Bellevue, she thought, you should know better than to go there. It wasn’t the first time she’d reached the conclusion that, on the subject of children, most people were full of shit. What was supposed to be the point of denying them anything? Who decided that not having things that your parents hadn’t had either was character-building somehow? Narcissistic bullshit. Your children’s lives were supposed to be better than yours: that was the whole idea. And what was the point of getting hung up on how much things cost? You were expected to complain when things were, or seemed, more expensive than they should be: braces, for instance, which their dentist said both kids were eventually going to need. Fifteen grand, probably, before that was all over. But the fact was they could afford it. They spent sixty thousand dollars a year just to send their kids to school and they could afford that too. They knew or observed plenty of people-in their neighborhood, in their own building-richer than they were; still, they already had much more money than Cynthia had ever seen as a kid, even during the flush times. In fact the very notion of “flush times” was one that Cynthia did not care to revisit. And as far as the kids’ characters being shaped by money, it was clearly untrue because money itself was one area where you saw the fundamental differences between them. The two of them fought less and less as time went on; there was little ground for competition or envy because they just didn’t want the same things. April was a thoroughly social animal, obsessed with preteen perks and downright lawyerly when it came to the question of their early acquisition. She’d been given her own cell phone this year, because that was a safety issue; but just last week Cynthia had bought her a pair of Tory Burch shoes for Christmas-to be honest, it thrilled her somewhat, just on the level of pride in her daughter’s precociousness, that April had even asked for them-and before that there’d been a kind of mini-scandal at school when some kids she knew in the grade ahead of hers were caught trying to pay for lunch at Serendipity with a parent’s credit card. You could hold them off for a while, but any parent knew that it wasn’t about possessing all these things so much as it was about asking to be trusted, to be let into the world a little more, and in that light Cynthia couldn’t see the argument for saying no to very much. That the lines should stay open, that she should always be the first person April would come to about anything and everything-that was the important consideration, and she wasn’t going to risk losing her daughter’s confidence over something as stupid as other people’s bitchy judgments of her privileges. She knew April already had a bit of a mean-girl rep at school, but as far as Cynthia was concerned, wailing over that kind of natural social stratification was more about the mothers’ egos than the kids’. April could handle herself just fine. In truth Cynthia couldn’t help but be a little impressed by the fantastic amount of ingenuity April put into appearing two or three years older than she was. The great irony, of course, was that Jonas’s complete lack of interest in whatever his own peers were doing or buying or watching made him seem like he was about forty years old.
But there was no getting out of certain forms of sibling togetherness; she had to take them to see that dentist again before they left for Costa Rica, for instance, and even though April was furious about having to miss ballet, Cynthia had made this appointment six months ago and if they missed it this huckster was booked until summer. She picked them up at school, and even though they were running late they had to take the subway instead of a cab, because for the past three weeks Jonas’s homeroom teacher had been doing a unit about conservation and air pollution and if Cynthia had to hear another word about the fucking ozone layer she was going to scream. They crossed 87th and at the storefront gap that led to the subway entrance they found themselves converging with a guy pushing a baby in a stroller-actually not a baby at all, Cynthia saw, more like three years old, a kid who, by virtue of still being strollered around at that age, was clearly running the show. Beautiful boy, though. The father was a good-looking guy too, very expensively tousled. All four of them did that little no-you-go-first dance at the top step, and even though it only took a second, Cynthia was suddenly conscious of impatient people mustering behind them.
“Sorry,” she said to the dad, “you go ahead,” and she smiled before she realized that he was not even looking at her but instead, uncertainly, down the steps themselves. She had a vestigial memory of pissing off rude strangers while pushing April around in one of those strollers, and also a mother’s instinctive assumption that men are overmatched by small children. “Guys, go on downstairs,” she said to April and Jonas. “Not through the turnstile.” She turned back to the father with her most prim smile as other commuters swirled into the open lane created by the kids’ departure and said, “Can I give you a hand carrying the pasha here?” Suddenly his eyes seemed to focus on her, and he gave her a very winning smile, though without nodding or shrugging or otherwise acknowledging that she’d spoken. He did not even seem to notice the swarm of hostile strangers struggling to get past him, which was an admirable quality, Cynthia thought. Or maybe there was something wrong with him.
“Yes, thanks,” he said at last. “That’s really nice of you.”
He didn’t move and so she went around to the front of the stroller and picked up the strap between the front wheels, even though that meant she would be the one backing down the stairs. He lifted his end by the handles and they started down slowly.
“So you’ve obviously been in my position before,” he said. “Beautiful kids.”
She smiled, looking down at her feet for the next step. In front of her, the little boy’s eyes opened slightly.
“Easy to see where they get it from,” the father said.
“T
hanks. Well, you too. He’s a knockout.”
“So, I guess this is like the meet-cute,” he said, and she laughed, even if she didn’t quite know what he meant. People flowed all around them. She tried to find April and Jonas but couldn’t turn her head far enough to see them. “My name’s Eric, by the way,” he said.
“Cynthia.”
“Hey Cynthia?” he said. He bent from the waist, and so she knew she was almost at the bottom step. She had to lean forward suddenly just to hear him. “This was so nice of you. Look, this is going to sound bizarre, but do you live in this neighborhood? I would hate to think that I’ll never see you again. You are a really beautiful woman.”
“I’m sorry?” Cynthia said.
“I can’t believe I said that,” Eric said, and it seemed exactly like he was telling the truth. He was probably an unemployed actor. His wife was probably some corporate lawyer who felt guilty for not spending more time with her son, while her husband spent his afternoons in the playground collecting phone numbers from au pairs.
They were now both standing on the cement floor inside the station, still holding the stroller between them, a couple of feet off the ground. People hustling down the stairs brushed past them as if they weren’t even there. She knew that the longer she just stood there, the more emboldened he would become. She could feel herself turning red.
“Do you do this a lot, Eric?” she said.
He knew how to stare into a woman’s eyes, that was for sure. “I know I’m being insanely forward,” he said, “but I’m not sorry, because two more seconds and I was never going to see you again. I know you’re married. I’m married too. It doesn’t have to be about that.”
What? she kept saying to herself, as if she were deaf to whatever she was thinking. What? His son’s eyes were half open and on her, as expressionless as if he had just sentenced her to death. It made Eric himself seem like some sort of superman to know that on some level he’d forgotten that the boy was even there.