Peter Chang was pedaling his bike hands-free, waving his arms as he yelled “Suzie, hey, Suzie Q, see you later!” The others bobbed and weaved behind the car, sliding first to the left, then right. Sam imagined Mr. Epstein cursing them as Johnny Ross, always the fastest among them, slapped a hand against the trunk of the Mercedes.
From deep inside the house Sam heard his mother calling his name. All morning she had been up and down the attic stairs, bringing down luggage for a trip he hadn’t known she was taking until this very moment. As Suzie Epstein moved farther away, shaking the last of the photos from the shoebox, the neighborhood mothers fluttered in the breeze, suspended for one long, graceful moment in the air, until they fell to the pavement like the paper in a ticker tape parade.
TWO
How to Walk on Ice
Suzie—1998
Suzie was tired of the boys who talked and said nothing. When she had first arrived at the new high school in Brookline, the boys surrounded her while the girls ignored her. The boys spoke over one another, telling jokes to impress her, yet laughed prematurely, obliterating the punch lines. They boasted with tales of athletic accomplishments in sports while moving clumsily, knocking into Suzie and one another, as if their bodies were not their own. They were a force of nature, these boys, and so she put her head down and pushed forward until finally they stopped trying to get her attention.
She was lonely. And she ached for Bella as if an essential part of her anatomy had gone missing. The ache came up on her suddenly, it was like she’d forgotten how to breathe, especially when her thoughts inevitably drifted to Sam. She had never told Bella about Sam. So she couldn’t ask about him, or even ask what happened after she left. At first she was certain that Sam must hate her for what she did to him, and then, as time went on, she felt stupid for thinking that any of her old friends still thought about her. They had called and sent letters that Suzie left unanswered. The reputation her parents had created, the very public arguments, the photographs, the making up, had forever tainted Suzie in some way. So if this had been her parents’ clean start—why not let it be hers as well?
At her mother’s urging, Suzie got her license as soon as she was able. Instead of the road trips she and Bella used to dream about taking one day, she drove her brothers to soccer practices, dentist appointments, and Hebrew school. She picked up takeout food and library books. She used up tanks of gas circling the roads that led to their suburb until her eyes hurt and her fingers grew numb and cramped on the steering wheel. She would have been in touch with Bella if she’d had something good to say about this new life. But what could she possibly tell her?
Her father’s position as head of an investment firm in Boston made weeknights as a family impossible. There existed the too-easy excuse of foreign markets and clients in locations where time was reversed, requiring her father to go without sleep in order to keep the world economy running smoothly.
In the beginning, her mother would go into the city to meet him several nights a week. She would take a late-afternoon bath and shave her legs, a small tumbler of vodka perched on the lip of the tub. She always left the door open just enough that Suzie could see her hand as it reached for the glass. The humid, lily-scented air would drift into the bedroom, and Suzie could feel her hair frizzing as she burrowed in her parents’ bed, the sound of her brothers arguing filtering fuzzily through the closed bedroom door. Suzie would switch channels with the TV on mute while her mother volleyed questions about her day. There was nothing to tell so Suzie made things up: a new friend to have lunch with, a club she might join, tryouts for the tennis team, a possible run for student council. She enjoyed these little white lies where anything was possible. Her mother never asked any follow-up questions, too absorbed in applying makeup to the contours of her face and perfume to the hollows at her throat, as if she had never had children, as if Suzie were her girlfriend.
Those nights there was always money on the counter for takeout. Suzie spent it all on food until she figured out that her brothers were just as easy to please with a bucket of fried chicken and cylinders of spongy, fluorescent macaroni and cheese. Six months in, she had amassed a couple hundred dollars that she kept stuffed inside a tennis sock in her top drawer.
The spring of Suzie’s sophomore year, just barely into this new life, her mother’s trips into Boston began to trickle to every other week, until, by the summer, they ever so quietly ceased to exist at all. Her father showed up in Brookline to shower and change, to remove pressed shirts from cardboard boxes, and to refill the dry cleaning bag. By the time they had lived in Brookline for an entire cycle of seasons the routine was set: he paid someone to mow the lawn in the summer, rake the leaves in the fall, and shovel the snow in the winter. He congratulated himself and anyone who would listen for not buying a house with a pool and therefore not needing to pay someone to maintain that, at least.
Instead Suzie’s mother joined the JCC, where Suzie’s brothers took swimming lessons in an Olympic-sized pool before they were shipped off to New Hampshire for summer camp, and a temple, where she baked challah bread with the rabbi’s wife on Fridays. In their previous life they would have been hard-pressed to find the menorah in their house, but here it became apparent, at least to the outside, that the Epsteins were observant.
Without Suzie’s brothers to supervise, her mother spent summer weekends entirely behind her closed bedroom door. On Monday mornings she emerged, showered, a little pale in the face. Her first stop those mornings was the grocery store, from which she would return with a brown bag containing a fresh bottle of vodka that she carefully placed in the freezer, a carton of milk, a box of Cheerios, and a bunch of bananas.
The pretense that there were groceries in the house seemed to convince Suzie they were doing just fine as they bumped up against a year in this new place. Even her father’s rare appearances made it look like he was a willing participant in the charade. At the beginning of summer Suzie had been startled to find him at the kitchen counter in the middle of the night, a silver spoon with a slim quarter moon of milk nestled in its bowl as he lifted it to his mouth, a bowl of Cheerios and a soft brown banana in front of him on the counter. “Suzie Q,” he said as he slurped the cereal, blotting the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. He had a sunglasses tan, with lavender smudges beneath his eyes and hair that curled over the collar of his shirt, too long to be fashionable.
Suzie exhaled. It was hard sometimes to reconcile the father who had once punched a hole in the screen door with the man wolfing down Cheerios at the kitchen counter. She wanted to ask him why he wanted this second-chance family so badly when he was never here, but she supposed she already knew that he didn’t like to lose.
“What do you want to do with your summer?” he asked.
Suzie moved across the room and filled a glass with water. “Well, I guess what I’ve been doing.”
One half of her father’s mouth went up in a reflexive attempt at a smile. “And what is that?”
“I go to the pool, I swim laps, I read.” She hesitated and added a lie. “I play doubles with a girl from school.”
“Oh yeah? Are you fierce on the court? I should come watch.”
“Sure,” Suzie lied again, shrugging. “I’m fierce.”
“You should be playing singles, then; always have an exit strategy, Suzie Q.”
“Really?” She took a shallow breath. “Maybe I’ll make varsity this year, since I’m a junior.”
He nodded as if it was a given. “Do you need a new racket?”
Suzie shook her head but her father’s hand was already rummaging around his back pocket for his wallet. He opened it and fingered through the bills, then extricated one and dropped it on the counter. “Ask the guy at the shop for the best racket. If it costs more than that let me know. Don’t buy second best, Suzie. You will regret it.”
Suzie didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until she reached for the bill. She picked it up and felt light-headed: one hundred
dollars. Closing her hand around the money, she tucked her fist into her armpit. “Is Mom sleeping?”
Her father raised his chin slightly and wiggled his jaw from side to side before he answered. “That’s what we’re calling it?” There was a click followed by a low hum as the air conditioner cycled on. “Then, yes, she is sleeping.”
Suzie finished her water in one long swallow and placed her glass in the sink. When she turned around her father had pushed his cereal bowl toward the edge of the counter. She reached for the bowl and put it in the sink alongside her glass and then turned the faucet on to get rid of the milk at the bottom of the bowl. When she looked back over her shoulder her father was gone.
During the week her mother worked side by side with the gardener, kneeling in the freshly tilled earth, planting and then rearranging row after row of perennials, filling the wheelbarrow with mulch and gravel, creating gardens within gardens until sweat saturated her T-shirt and shorts and the yard resembled a patchwork puzzle that always appeared to be a few pieces short. Suzie’s mother was the only mother in the neighborhood who worked outside, as far as Suzie could tell, unless tanning and tennis were considered work. In their old neighborhood most of the mothers did some sort of gardening, but here it was always a bunch of guys in a pickup truck who decamped with so much machinery that it looked like a mini military operation was about to take place. In the first muddy, bright days of spring it took all of Suzie’s limited high school Spanish to explain to the panicked gardener that her mother was not firing him but wanted to help.
When the milk turned sour in the fridge and the bananas blackened, Suzie would toss them out on her way to the JCC pool. There she worked her way through Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams while camped out on a lounge chair. She did fifty laps two times a day and existed on lemon ice. Her body was brown, toned, and leaner than it had ever been in her life. She took notice of the hourly rotation of lifeguards, and when she tired of Freud, she appraised their flattened stomachs with the gradation of muscles, and the sharp jut of their hipbones from where their trunks hung in effortless suspension. At least once a week one of them would casually toss her an invite to a party, but she never took any of them up on it.
Though she didn’t mean to, she thought of Sam. She wondered why she had always stopped short of going all the way with him. She knew his feelings had been genuine from the beginning, when hers had not. She remembered how his hands shook the first time he touched her breast through her bra, how his entire face had softened, how he had kept his eyes on Suzie as if what they were doing was special, as if Suzie was special. His eyes would widen as his hands grew bolder, although he stopped short of asking permission. There was a real tenderness to Sam that nearly made Suzie forget she didn’t care about him. She could tell she confused him, and how scared he was to ask her what they were doing for fear it might stop. She knew he wanted more, whatever more was. He wanted to be a real boyfriend, not just the guy she hooked up with in her basement. The times he attempted to talk about the future she unzipped his fly or took off her bra. Anything to stop him from saying what he felt out loud. She had started out by telling herself she was using him. By the time she realized that things had changed, it was too late. But maybe the real reason was that it had always made her just a little bit angry that Sam was so pliable and that he cared about her feelings, when she had no idea what they were. In the end she hated how she had treated Sam. She hated the person she had become in Sam’s eyes and there was no way to take any of it back.
In the late afternoon on her way home from the pool Suzie would stop at the grocery store and make two large salads from the takeout bar. She tried to mix up the ingredients depending upon what they had that day so that dinner held an element of surprise. She and her mother shared the two salads at the iron table on the back patio, the legs uneven on top of a swath of slate, irregular and iridescent, with stones that shimmered like scales in the waning light.
One evening, Suzie picked at her salad, waiting for the moment to tell her mother about the letter from school. Her mother’s mood was light, which was surprising. Suzie’s brothers were done with camp at the end of the week and school was starting a week after that. Suzie’s father had originally said he would pick the boys up, but now he was going to Asia instead. So her mother was driving alone to New Hampshire. Suzie felt pressure to go with her, but she couldn’t make herself offer.
“Mom,” Suzie started. “I got this thing from school.”
Sarah looked up from chasing a chickpea around the container. “A thing?”
“Did you know that I could double up on classes and graduate early?”
Sarah’s tongue darted out the corner of her mouth and disappeared again. “How early?”
“A year.”
“What?” Sarah’s eyebrows shot up, accentuating the dirt trapped at her hairline. “And you would want to do this?” She shook her head. “How does it work?”
“I have a four-point-five GPA and I’ve taken AP everything since we got here. I’m bored out of my mind. I would just have to double up on my core classes, which would be nothing.”
“And then what?”
“Then I go to college a year early.” Suzie was relieved to say it out loud. “My guidance counselor thinks I could go anywhere, so why waste a year?”
“Wow,” Sarah said slowly as she reached for her glass of iced tea. “You would be gone?” Her voice was low.
Suzie sighed. “I probably won’t go that far, Mom. I would still be able to help you out.”
Sarah frowned. “I’m sorry.”
Suzie shook her head. “What are you apologizing for?”
Sarah sighed. “For making you feel like you have to help me out.”
“Mom, I just want to be done with high school, really, I just want to be done.” Suzie took a deep breath and tried to keep her voice sincere. “It’s nothing about you or, you know, anything. Really.”
Her mother looked at her like she was going to say something more, but didn’t. Instead she reached across the table for Suzie’s takeout container and piled it on top of her own. She pushed back her chair, the iron legs dragging on the stone, and stood.
Suzie stayed seated. She was anxious, but trying not to show it. “Will you sign the papers?”
In the dim light of the porch her mother’s eyes looked watery, but Suzie couldn’t be sure. She didn’t want to make her mother cry. Really. She meant what she said. She just wanted to be done with high school. She wanted to be out of this house. She wanted to be free.
On the afternoon before her brothers came home Suzie added more than the takeout salads to the grocery cart. Sarah had still not said whether she would sign the papers, and Suzie was trying her best to figure out how to ask again. Getting groceries couldn’t hurt. It would be one less thing for her mother to do before she left for New Hampshire.
She was standing before the boxes of macaroni and cheese thinking about all of this when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and turned around. One of the lifeguards from the pool was grinning and trying to reach around her. Their bodies were so close she smelled the suntan lotion wafting off his skin and the heat through his T-shirt. He had been the boldest of the lifeguards throughout the summer: offering lotion, commenting on her reading material, reminding her to hydrate, keeping count of her laps. She looked forward to his quips, although she tried hard not to show it.
She pushed the cart with her hip and moved aside. He laughed and picked two boxes off the shelf and held them out to her. “How many?”
“Oh.” Suzie bit her lip, embarrassed all of a sudden for the two of them to be out of context. She liked that he saw her at the pool, not buying mac and cheese at the grocery store. “Uh, four?”
“You’re pretty hungry, huh?”
“My brothers,” Suzie explained as he dropped the boxes in her cart.
He grabbed two more off the shelf and shook them at her. “Well. These are all for me. I’m starving and broke, so mac and ch
eese it is.”
Suzie smiled and started to roll away, but he put out a hand to stop her. “Hey, where you going?”
“I have to get home.”
He nodded slowly and gave her a funny little frown. “You never came to any of the parties we invited you to. Tonight’s your last chance. We all go back to college this weekend.”
“What about the pool?”
He laughed. “Not my problem, but I think they got it covered. Or kids drown.”
Suzie laughed. “Well, the JCC pool is pretty crowded, so they could stand to lose a few . . .” He laughed with her and Suzie felt a little thrill in her gut.
“Smart and funny.” He grinned again and leaned on the cart. “How many books did you read this summer anyway?”
Suzie felt her cheeks get hot.
“Come on, you have to come out tonight.” He paused and smiled. “You know where 2424 Merrywood Lane is?”
Suzie nodded. The address was in a development a few streets over from her own. She knew from driving her brothers around that the houses were large and similar to hers in newness, but closer together on smaller, less wooded lots.
After he got a maybe out of her, he moved aside so Suzie could continue shopping. She pushed past him, randomly taking things off the shelves, acting as if she knew all along what it was she was looking for.
It was true that Suzie felt a little less sorry for her mother the second time around. It was hard to muster sympathy for someone who knew exactly what it was she was willingly getting back into. If Sarah Epstein couldn’t remember what it felt like to be called names, to have her screen door punched in, to have the police called, she should have asked Suzie. All Suzie knew was that if she ever trusted another human being enough to become his wife, she would never choose someone like her father, and certainly not twice.
As she pulled into the driveway she vowed to try hard not to get in an argument with her mother tonight. She thought about how they were more than this one moment, this one lousy dinner of takeout salads on the patio at dusk on a summer night in a place that was as random as any on the map. She hated how this place now had become more than geography, how it held the weight of starting over, and the stink of disappointment.
The Grown Ups Page 3