by Emma Straub
“Shit,” Porter said.
“Damn,” Nicky said.
“Yeah, and so I’m sorry if I’m a little bit paralyzed, you know, when it comes to making decisions, or to having the career that I want, but it’s kind of hard when you know even your parents think you’re a total idiot.”
Astrid shook her head, her mouth hanging open. “No, oh no, honey!” she said. “I said that?” She reached over Cecelia and Nicky and put her hand on Elliot’s wrist. “Oh, god. And poor Barbara. I was so ashamed—not of you, but of how I reacted—that I avoided her for so long that I forgot why! Until she got hit by the bus, I hadn’t actually thought about why I didn’t like her in years! I love you,” she said. She wished she could have a printout of all the mistakes she’d made as a parent, the big ones and the small ones, just to see how many of them she could guess (her temper was always shortest at bathtime) and how many she couldn’t. She wondered how much her secrets had led to Porter’s secrets, what pain she could have saved along the way.
“Also,” Elliot said, raising a finger between them like a pause button, “the reason that I’m telling you is that I just want to do the right thing. For you, for Dad, for Clapham. I don’t want to be the asshole that turns the town into something else, you know? I want you to be wrong.” Wendy clutched his arm. She loved him—Astrid hated that she’d ever thought of her as anything other than perfect, if Wendy looked at her son that way. That was all anyone could ever need, really.
“I was wrong,” Astrid said. She didn’t remember the day he mentioned, but they’d had a hundred conversations like that, about their children. About each of them. That’s what happened in marriages, and with children—you talked about the good things and the bad things and one was usually up and another was down. That’s how it was with her and Russell—she was the bad cop and he was the good one. But it was all just a way of sorting out all the things that made up life. It was too much, otherwise, too enormous a feat to wrap your head around. Sometimes Astrid thought that they’d had a third baby because the first two seemed a bit cracked, and they wanted a fresh start. A fresh start at parenting. But the children should never know. They should always have perfect confidence in themselves and their adults. The words came easily now. “You’ve never disappointed me,” Astrid said. “And it’s not up to me, Elliot. Your life? Your choices? They don’t belong to me. Neither does this town—not any more than it belongs to any of you.” She looked into her son’s eyes and thought about the moment he was born, about how he came out of her body and Russell had cried and that they had both looked at this brand-new baby, who was as beautiful a thing as they’d ever seen, and how the nurse had passed Elliot—still bloody, still screaming—to Russell, who handed him to Astrid. She hadn’t ever really been naked before that moment, Astrid thought—that was the very bottom layer of her person, giving birth to a child and then holding that child against her body; inside, then outside. What kind of parents had they been? The poor children expected love without context, but context always existed—Astrid had not liked breastfeeding, Elliot had been fussy, he was born in winter and so they were all trapped indoors, unlike Porter and Nicky, who were lucky and had birthdays in April and June. Who ever did something right the first try? Astrid knew that she had failed, maybe not in the ways that she thought she had, but in so many ways she had never even noticed. This was the job of a parent: to fuck up, over and over again. This was the job of a child: to grow up anyway.
Elliot stood in front of her, holding his elbows.
“Your father was so proud of you,” Astrid said. “He would be so proud of you. Do you know that he couldn’t sleep after you were born, and so he took the night shifts? He would sit in the rocking chair in your bedroom and watch you sleep. Sometimes I would come in in the morning and he’d be asleep in the chair and you’d be awake, and babbling, like you were the one who’d been watching over him.” She reached out and held on to his wrist. “Without you, we wouldn’t have been parents. We would have just been two people, spinning in their own orbits. You were what made us a family. I love you.”
Elliot didn’t want to cry and so he didn’t. “Whatever. Okay. I love you too.” That was as good a reaction as she could expect. There they were, both standing on the same ever-shifting ground.
Birdie had made her way closer and was now standing just over Elliot’s shoulder. “Hi,” she said, peeking over, as if his body were a hedge. “Hi,” Astrid said back.
Elliot walked around Astrid, toward the back of the salon, where he stood still for a few seconds before turning to his brother and putting his arm around his shoulder. The twins were at the sink in the back, spraying each other. There would be water to clean up later, but no one hurried to stop them. Astrid heard Nicky and Elliot begin to talk about the 1994 Knicks, and who’d been a more important part of the team, John Starks or Patrick Ewing, and Astrid put her hands on Birdie’s cheeks and kissed her on the lips and thought, I want to marry you, and then she opened her mouth and said, into Birdie’s ear, “I want to marry you.” If she hadn’t learned anything else, she had learned this—say it. Say it now, while you have the chance.
Chapter 42
Barbara Goes Wild
Barbara always bought orange juice with no pulp, because that’s what Bob preferred. He had narrowly spaced teeth, and if she bought the extra-pulpy kind, which she liked because it tasted the most like orange juice and the least like water, then it would get caught in his teeth like a lobster in a trap, unable to get loose without manual assistance. And so Barbara bought orange juice meant for picky children, and she didn’t complain. She had time during the day, to do what she liked, and so she could compromise when it came to things that weren’t important.
When Bob retired and was home all day, Barbara realized it wasn’t just the juice. He needed help, always. Help making lunch, help figuring out whether he wanted to go for a walk, help deciding on the route and whether to wear a jacket. Bob followed her to the bathroom and would keep talking to her through the door as she did her business. Some of her friends had warned her about this phenomenon, that husbands needed hobbies, but Bob didn’t want a hobby unless it was attached to Barbara, and so Barbara decided to get herself a hobby instead, somewhere Bob couldn’t follow.
“What do you mean, braces?” Bob asked. “For your teeth?”
“Yes, for my teeth,” Barbara said. “What other kinds of braces are there?”
There were other kinds, though, she knew, because she had done research. There were so many kinds that she’d never heard of! There were the metal kind, of course, but then there were plastic ones, and ceramic ones, and braces that ran along the inside of your teeth, and invisible ones, like condoms, that fit over your teeth! The brightly colored rubber bands were available for anyone who desired more self-expression. There were so many choices, and so many visits necessary. Barbara was excited.
A new orthodontia practice had opened across the river in Kingston, which would take Barbara twice as long to get to as Dr. Piesman, who affixed metal brackets to every adolescent’s teeth in Clapham. That was part of the point, the time it would take to drive there and back. Barbara had searched online and found a dentist with a nice photo, a young man with a white coat and a (of course) gleaming smile. Barbara wanted a smile like that—her teeth had started to drift decades ago, slow as glaciers, but now they had solidly collided with each other and overlapped at odd angles, everything the color of pale yellow corn on the cob. It was time.
River Valley Orthodontics was on the first floor of a newly renovated building in downtown Kingston. The waiting room was neat, as it had not yet been destroyed by teenagers putting their dirty sneakers on the seats of chairs. Barbara gave her name at the desk and then waited for her name to be called. When the dental hygienist led Barbara into the exam room and she put her purse on a chair in the corner, Barbara was happier than she would have been at a day spa, a place in which she always felt too old an
d too soft. But taking care of your teeth wasn’t vanity. Teeth were important.
The hygienist attached a paper bib around Barbara’s neck and adjusted the chair so that Barbara was lying parallel to the floor.
“Would you like to watch something?” the hygienist asked through her mask. She was arranging tools on a little steel tray, and they clinked as she set them all in a straight row.
“Watch something? Oh, no, thank you,” Barbara said. She wasn’t one of those people who needed to be stimulated all the time, with a smartphone and a TV screen and a podcast in her eardrum. She liked to be where she was.
“Are you sure? We have Netflix.” The hygienist swiveled a small rectangle until it hung directly over Barbara’s face. She clicked a button and the screen lit up.
“No, no, thank you,” Barbara said again, now self-conscious about her choice. The menu screen stayed illuminated, and so she stared at the colorful little boxes, each one promising a half hour of jolly entertainment. The hygienist patted her on the arm and told her that the dentist would be in shortly.
Barbara hadn’t had braces as a child—her teeth had been straight enough, and it wasn’t so common then, not like it was when she was a crossing guard and half the middle schoolers had mouths full of metal. When she was twelve, in 1962, her only worry had been how to make her hair curl like Shirley Jones in The Music Man. It never did, and eventually she stopped trying. Her sister, Carol, had the curls in the family, and the attention from the boys, and the worry from their parents. Her sister was the pretty one, and Barbara, two years younger, was the family dog, dutiful and always hungry for scraps.
After high school, Barbara had taken courses at Norwalk Community College, some business administration classes, with thoughts of becoming a secretary. Carol wanted to be an actress and had moved to Los Angeles, where she was living with a man whom she wasn’t married to, a source of great pain for their parents. Barbara met Bob in the small cafeteria—he was studying engineering—and they had an easy time together. Barbara couldn’t remember a single conversation they’d had in that period, just that Bob looked at her like she were the movie star, like she was important, and desirable, and before long they were engaged and then married. Her parents were thrilled, and the wedding—in the backyard in high summer, with two dozen guests, mostly friends of her mother’s—was short and sweet. Barbara had worn pearls, and Carol had scowled throughout, irritated at their parents for not inviting her boyfriend, just because he was (as it turned out) married to someone else. It was 1972, and free love still hadn’t reached Connecticut.
Of course she and Bob planned to have children. That was what you did. The only woman Barbara knew who had chosen not to have children was her maiden aunt Dora, a nurse who lived happily with a roommate in Rhode Island, and who brought her roommate home for holidays with several pies and cakes that they’d baked and no one thought anything of it except that it was rather sad that two very nice women had never found men to marry them. Barbara wanted to have enough children to spread the responsibility and pressure evenly, the way a baseball team all felt it was their duty to get a hit, not just whoever was swinging the bat at any given moment.
And they had tried. Barbara remembered tossing her diaphragm in the garbage dramatically after the wedding, though she went back later that night to rescue it. She and Bob made love over and over that week, almost every night, so excited to finally live together. They had had sex before the wedding, but not often—it had been too hard to find the space and time to be alone. But now, in their own apartment, they could have sex whenever they liked, and so they did. Barbara drew the curtains, as if anyone could peek into their second-floor windows, and when they got home from work, after a perfunctory dinner, they would leap into bed and play with each other’s bodies like the shiniest toys on their birthdays.
When a year passed and Barbara still hadn’t gotten pregnant, she went to her doctor, who asked lots of questions about her menstrual cycle and took what felt like pints of blood from the crook of her arm. The next year, there was a miscarriage, and the year after that, two more. Barbara’s doctor told her that she could expect more of the same, and that she should look into adoption, if parenthood was what she was after. She and Bob talked about it for years, until Barbara was thirty, and finally Bob said, “You know, Barb, I just don’t think I want someone else’s baby,” and then that was that. It was a good thing to know about yourself, Barbara thought. Better to know that and not do it than to feel conflicted and go ahead with it. Better for the long term, anyway. She didn’t feel that way—she could have loved any baby put in her arms, she knew it like she knew her own name—but it wasn’t only up to her, was it.
The door creaked and Barbara turned. The young dentist whose picture she’d seen on the website walked in and sat down on the stool next to her.
“Hi there,” he said. “I’m Dr. Dan. You can call me Dr. Weiss, if you like, but most of my patients call me Dr. Dan.” He shook Barbara’s hand, which was a little bit clammy from resting on her forearm as it had been. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“Hello,” Barbara said. She smiled. He was even more handsome in person, not yet thirty, she guessed, with hair that looked freshly trimmed and only the slightest hint of razor burn on his cheeks where he had no doubt shaved that morning.
“Can I take a look?” he said, and pointed toward her mouth.
Barbara rolled her eyes with embarrassment. “Of course,” she said, and opened wide.
“Now bite down? And let me see you smile?” Dr. Dan bit and then smiled, for reference. The walls of the office were painted a pale orange, like a Californian sunset. Barbara knew certain colors were supposed to make people feel certain ways—that people fought more in red rooms, that sort of thing. Maybe orange was supposed to put you at ease? Dr. Dan probably knew. Barbara demonstrated the movement of her jaw. “I see,” Dr. Dan said. “May I?” He waited for Barbara’s nod, then gently reached his gloved hands into her mouth, one on each side of her teeth. It was so funny, going to the doctor, who was, in most cases, a stranger, and feeling totally free to let them touch whatever part of your body you’d agreed to by making the appointment. He slid his fingertips alongside Barbara’s teeth, slipping from one to the next, like a bicycle ride over gentle, rolling hills. She closed her eyes as he lowered his hands to her bottom teeth and bumped along those too. No one touched her anymore. At night, Bob snuggled close, hugging her torso like a koala bear, but five minutes later he’d roll away and start to snore. She couldn’t remember the last time he had reached underneath her clothes. And who else? Barbara tried to make a mental list of people who physically touched her and couldn’t think of a single one, except a woman for whom she’d held open the door at the bank, who had patted Barbara’s shoulder like you would a Labrador after it dropped a saliva-coated tennis ball at your feet. This was different. This was attentive. Barbara pushed everything else out of her head and concentrated on the feeling of Dr. Dan’s young, strong hands in her mouth.
“Okay,” he said. Dr. Dan slowly slid his hands out and then pulled off his gloves. “This is going to be no problem. Let’s get you fitted with a mold. I think six months with brackets would do just what you need. Maybe a year. And we could do natural, instead of silver, so that they’re tooth-colored, and less noticeable. A lot of adults like that.”
Barbara nodded. “Oh, that’d be great.” She wanted him to put his hands back in her mouth. There were those women in Japan, weren’t there, who were paid not to sleep with men, but just to sit and talk with them? That was what she wanted. Not sex, necessarily, or even the future promise of sex. She wanted a companion who didn’t need anything from her. She wanted someone to buy the juice she liked, without her asking, and kiss her on the cheek when he delivered it. Surely that sort of thing existed. It was America, wasn’t it, where everything was possible? But it wasn’t the sort of thing she could look up on her computer, because what if Bob saw? Coul
dn’t people see what you’d looked for? Not that Bob knew how.
“And how often would I need to come in?” Barbara hoped she didn’t sound too eager.
Dr. Dan shrugged. “Every six weeks would be great. Smile for me again?” Barbara smiled. “Oh yeah,” Dr. Dan said. “Every six weeks should do it. I think this will be great. And plus, we’ll get to spend so much time together!” He laughed. No one wanted to spend time with their dentist. No one but Barbara. She laughed at his joke and then laughed longer at her own. Dr. Dan looked pleased. “Okay then! Cassidy will take some x-rays and get everything set up so that we can get the impressions we need. Sound good? I’ll be back.”
Barbara swallowed. “Yes, thank you.” She watched Dr. Dan swivel his stool toward the door and then leap up gracefully, Gene Kelly in a lab coat. She snuggled back into the chair and stared up at the screen. Who would look at that when they could look at Dr. Dan? When the appointment was over, Barbara booked her follow-up in five weeks, fibbing and saying she was going to be traveling, and wanted to fit it in before she went away, though she wasn’t actually going anywhere at all.
* * *
—
Bob was waiting by the door when Barbara got home. “How was it?” he asked. The cats jogged down the front steps to greet her and rubbed their bodies against her bare legs. She supposed they had adopted, after all, and Bob hadn’t really noticed. If they’d had children, she might not have been so angry at him. She’d thought of the children she’d crossed back and forth across the street all those thousands of times as her children, but they weren’t, not really. They went home to their own mothers, who knew best. Barbara had just been an onlooker, a bystander. That wasn’t the same. If they’d had children, Bob would be inside, talking to one of them on the telephone, bothering them about their daily lives the way he bothered her. Bob would have been a great father; that stung. But now, so many decades later, he was the child and she was the parent and she only had the one life, didn’t she? “Did you stop on the way home and get orange juice?” Bob asked. “We only have the thick kind.”