by Emma Straub
“No,” Barbara said. She was still young enough to make decisions. Barbara walked past Bob, nearly tripped over a sleeping cat—oh, she would miss those cats at night—and walked straight up the stairs into her bedroom and packed a small overnight bag. She’d figure out the details. For now, this was enough.
“Where are you going, Barb?” Bob asked, his eyes wide. He watched her walk back down the stairs, back through the door, and back toward her car.
“I’m going to my mother’s for a bit, Bob,” Barbara said. “I’ll be in touch. The juice you like is in the milk aisle, just so you know, at the store. On the right. Just past the milk.”
Bob opened his mouth but no words came out. Barbara put her bag in the back seat, shut the door with a thunk, and then drove toward Heron Meadows. It was temporary. Everything was temporary. It was an illusion to believe otherwise. But nevertheless, it did feel good.
Epilogue
Months later, when Birdie and Astrid were planning their honeymoon, Astrid looked up Alaskan cruises and finally found just the right one: This summer, come along as we explore America’s icy frontier! This six-day cruise is round-trip out of Seattle and then sails right up the Pacific Coast, stopping in Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway before its final stop in beautiful Vancouver, Canada! The days are long, and from our decks you’ll be able to see bald eagles, whales, bears, and sea lions. All this, plus glaciers and 1,200 lesbians! Now that’s what we call a cruise. Astrid booked it on the spot.
The baby—Porter’s baby—Eleanor Hope Strick, who Astrid had decided she was going to call Hopie—was six months old. She was tiny and well behaved, with a bald head and perfect circles for eyes, like a cartoon. Astrid had hemmed and hawed about going away, leaving them all alone, but Porter had insisted that she’d be fine—Nicky and Juliette had offered to come and stay to help—and so the newlyweds rolled their pulley suitcases to the airport and flew across the country to set sail.
The boat was enormous, much larger than Astrid had expected, though she’d seen photographs on the website. A hotel on water! And not the kind of hotel that Astrid was used to staying in, but a behemoth of a hotel, with a casino and a theater and three swimming pools and five different restaurants. She couldn’t tell if the idea was to enjoy the boat or enjoy the world outside the boat—maybe it depended on the person. They were in a sea of women waiting to board, everyone excited and anxious and hauling their luggage, some kissing, some bickering with their wives or girlfriends or friends, some jostling with strangers about their spot in line, just like any airport departure gate where men had been willed out of existence. There were more young women than Astrid had expected—women in their forties, with a few maybe even still clinging to their thirties. She’d imagined it would be all old ladies like her and Birdie, a sea of gray hairs, like the water aerobics class at the Rhinebeck YMCA.
“Here we go,” Astrid said. She was a reluctant traveler. They’d gone to Disney World once, when the kids were ten, seven, and five, and Astrid had briefly lost Nicky while Russell took the bigger kids on Space Mountain, and the horror of it had lingered for the rest of their trip. She snapped at the children whenever they wandered out of her line of sight; she shouted when Elliot accidentally sent a pat of cold butter flying across the hotel restaurant. After that the Stricks never went anywhere they couldn’t get to in their station wagon. And where would she have gone alone? Now it had been so long that she’d forgotten the point of travel in the first place. The boat looked too big, and for a moment, Astrid worried that it would sink immediately after they were all aboard, like a giant bath toy plunged to the seafloor.
* * *
—
Their room was on the Verandah Deck, the sixth floor out of ten. Uniformed staff lined the halls. “I feel like we’re on Downton Abbey,” Birdie said, bowing.
“Or the Titanic,” Astrid whispered as she opened the door to their room, which looked like any other hotel room, only with furniture that was all bolted to the floor, and none of the stupid knickknacks that always drove Astrid crazy—decorative ceramic sea stars, a bowl of inedible fruit. Maybe cruises were for practical people. All along the deck outside their room, there were heavy chairs and bins, everything cemented to the ground so that it didn’t fly off into the ocean and knock a dolphin unconscious (Astrid assumed). There were two life preservers in the closet, ready for the muster drill they’d been warned about—before the ship set sail, everyone had to practice getting to their rescue stations, where they would be counted and, theoretically, saved from a watery death. It seemed an ominous start to a voyage, but those were the rules.
On her first honeymoon, Astrid and Russell had taken the train to Montreal. It was April, and colder by far than they’d expected, and they went home with their suitcases stuffed full of extra layers, purchased in Canadian department stores as needed. What else did she remember? They’d played gin rummy in the hotel lobby, betting each other peanuts, though the bartender kept refilling both their bowls, so it didn’t matter much one way or the other. They’d made love every day. Astrid thought about mayflies, who lived for only a day, and tortoises, who lived for a hundred years—neither creature had remotely the range of experience a person could have. How funny, how ridiculous, for Astrid still to be the same person that she’d been in that hotel lobby, sitting across from Russell Strick.
* * *
—
The wedding had been small: the children, the grandchildren, a few friends. Nicky was already ordained from the internet (he’d married half a dozen pairs of his friends), and he performed the service, swearing to both of them that it was in all ways legal and legitimate. Porter cried, Cecelia cried, Wendy cried. They stood in a circle in the gazebo at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Nicky read a Mary Oliver poem and Birdie slid a ring onto Astrid’s finger and Astrid slid a ring onto Birdie’s finger and then there they were, in the middle of town, brides. Afterward, they all went to Spiro’s for pancakes.
* * *
—
The ship had warned that internet service was spotty when they were at sea, and so Astrid made sure to find the business center. She wanted to check in at home before they were too far, just in case. She and Birdie sat in heavy chairs and dialed into a FaceTime with Porter. Astrid clapped her hands over her mouth when the screen went from showing their own faces to showing Eleanor Hope, her gummy mouth snacking on her mother’s index finger.
“How is it?” Porter asked, only the lower half of her face in the frame.
“Great!” Birdie said.
“Great!” Astrid said. She squeezed Birdie’s thigh. “She’s gotten bigger since yesterday, don’t you think?”
“Mom, have fun, please. Birdie, please make her have fun. Eleanor has not done anything exciting, I promise.” Onscreen, the baby sucked and sucked, drenching Porter’s finger.
“Well, no,” said another voice in the background. The screen swiveled and Nicky’s face swooped down to fill the frame. He was grinning, his open mouth so large on the computer screen that Astrid could see his fillings. “Eleanor rolled over, and then she rolled back! It was epic.”
Astrid moaned. “Oh, no, I knew we were going to miss something.”
Elliot appeared over his brother’s shoulder. “It really was epic.”
Porter took the phone back. “Shut up, guys. Mom, it’s fine. Birdie, you guys have fun. Go adopt a seal, save a glacier, please, something.” She pointed the camera back toward the baby, whose enormous brown eyes blinked at them.
Astrid rubbed Birdie’s back. “Yes. Yes, we will.”
Birdie blew a kiss. “Love you, Eleanor!”
There was so much that Astrid hadn’t considered: getting married again, having someone to coparent, copilot, cograndparent! What a thing to do, to skip having children and go straight to being a grandparent. Birdie was magnificent at it: Of all the adults, she was the best at dancing Eleanor to sleep. Maybe it was her a
rms, strong from decades of steady scissor-holding, maybe it was that Astrid had used up her powers on her own children, maybe it was just that Eleanor and Birdie were fast friends. Astrid hadn’t thought of herself as one of those people who just wanted to be married, but now that she was, she was so delighted, all over again. The word wife, which had once felt oppressive, diminutive, belittling—she thought of all the times she’d been introduced simply as Russell’s wife, with no additional qualifying details, nothing so brash as a name—now the word wife meant something else. It wasn’t Russell’s fault, it was the world’s! Now that it was a double—your wife, my wife—the word felt twice its original size. This was how it was supposed to feel. It wasn’t just that she belonged to someone else, it was that she belonged.
“Mom, it’s fine,” Porter said. “We are all fine. Honestly. We are all adults here. Except for Eleanor. She’s just a baby. But we’ll be fine. We love you. Have fun.”
“Okay,” Astrid said, and then Porter and Eleanor’s round cheeks vanished into thin air too quickly, and she and Birdie were left staring at their own reflections. Sometimes Astrid thought about everything in her life that could have been different—all the men and women she could have married, having her children or not having any children at all, moving to Paris, she and Russell dying in bed together at a hundred years old. She thought about how every decision of hers had rippled into her children’s lives, even this one, when she was still their mother every day but not actually in charge of their lives, not making decisions on their behalf. People said that everyone was born alone and everyone would die alone, but they were wrong. When someone was born, they brought so many people with them, generations of people zipped into the marrow of their tiny bones. She reached under the bolted-down desk and took Birdie’s hand and it felt just the way it had felt on their first date. Astrid had still been young then, though she hadn’t known it. Was it like that until you died, always realizing how young you’d been before, how foolish and full of possibility? Astrid hoped so. Outside, sunlight sparkled off the surface of the water, as if the ocean wanted to show the sky exactly how astonishing it was. Every day was a new day. She would call Cecelia later, and Wendy and the boys, her whole family. She’d call them until they were sick to death with love, just like she was. Astrid looked at their reflections on the blank screen, at herself and her wife, and felt so, so happy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My life changed enormously over the writing of this book, and so please forgive my lengthy acknowledgments. I was pregnant while writing my last two books (with two separate children—I am neither a speed machine nor an elephant), but while writing All Adults Here, I birthed a bookstore, with the help of my husband.
People sometimes have the misconception that working in a bookstore means sitting perched on a stool, reading in absolute silence for hours on end. Would that it were so! Books Are Magic is an elaborate beast full of boxes and orders and systems and eccentricities and, yes, thousands and thousands of books, as well as a staff of fifteen, and in the last two years, we’ve hosted more than six hundred events. The first person I need to thank is my husband, Michael Fusco-Straub, for caring for our bookstore, and for the people inside it, all day long, every single day, which made it possible for me to finish writing this book. The bookstore has made our lives both much richer and much harder, and I am grateful to my husband for keeping everything running beautifully in my absence. It is an astonishing amount of work, from changing lightbulbs to paying the bills and everything in between, and oh my stars, he is so good at it all.
Thank you also to the entire staff of Books Are Magic, without whom it would be a far less magical place. I value your brilliance, your energy, and your care. Thank you for bringing your whole selves to the bookstore, and for helping us to be a space where people want to spend time. Thank you to Eddie Joyce and Martine Beamon for believing in our potential so early on, and for being such wonderful partners.
Thank you to Alex Sagol and everyone at Cantine, where I spent many hours working on this book, and thank you to Audrey Gelman and the entire staff of the Wing Dumbo, where I spent many, many, many hours working on this book. The ability to sit somewhere comfortable that is not your own house, full as it is with laundry and toys to be put away, and to be fed and plied with endless pots of tea is an incredible gift, and I am grateful.
Thank you to my friends and family who were called upon for their various areas of expertise: Laura Royal, Tyler Ford, John Fireman, Meg Wolitzer, and Adam Koehler.
Thank you to Julian Foster, my mother, and my sons’ teachers for taking such good care of my children.
Thank you to Claudia Ballard, my agent and friend.
Thank you to Team Riverhead, and in particular to my thoughtful and emotionally astute editor, Sarah McGrath, who made this book better over and over again, and thank you to my hardworking sister-wives Claire McGinnis and Lydia Hirt, and to Geoff Kloske, Kate Stark, and Jynne Martin, for steering the ship in such a good direction. (It’s a big steering wheel.) Thank you to Jessica Leeke and Gaby Young, my sister-wives across the pond at Michael Joseph.
When I was finishing this book, there were two things I encountered that led me to understand what I needed to do: the apology episode of Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris’s always brilliant podcast Still Processing and Mary Oliver’s poetry, which crashed over me in a wave following her death. I recommend both things heartily.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of three other novels The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.
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