A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “What are you doing?”

  “Headache.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost ten.”

  “You’re kidding.” When was the last time I’d slept this late? We’d had dinner the night before with my office mate Janene and her husband, Bill, at the Garland Chophouse, $160 per couple with a bottle of domestic champagne thrown in, and I remembered, in the panicky delirium of the last day of the year, deciding to splurge on three bottles of 2003 Dominus to wash down our T-bones.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Downstairs ashtanga. The incense is going.”

  “I see.”

  I found my robe and tiptoed down the stairs, for some reason delighted to find my wife on the rug, in her green Hampshire sweatsuit, in full downward dog.

  “Trying to start off the New Year with some good karma, huh?”

  She looked up at me and sighed. “Don’t make fun.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and I wasn’t. “Want me to make coffee? Or would herbal tea better suit the occasion? Maybe we have some chai?”

  She lowered herself into plank position and then into cobra (I’d taken a few ashtanga classes myself when the JCC offered them), and then she collapsed on the floor. “Coffee would be terrific,” she said. “We really drank way too much last night, didn’t we?”

  “We certainly did,” I agreed, heading into the kitchen. “What time does Joe want us over?”

  “Twelve, twelve thirty,” she said. “There’s a babka in the fridge. It’s for them—don’t touch it.”

  “Babka, huh?”

  “I got it at the Rockland Bakery yesterday. I mean it, Pete, don’t touch.”

  Slowly we drank our coffee, showered, and dressed: I wore my jeans-and-tweed-blazer usual, and Elaine spent some time on her makeup and hair. Twenty-five years of marriage, and perhaps more than our share of connubial ups and downs, and yet, at least that morning, neither one of us looked much the worse for wear. She dressed in a pretty turquoise blouse and black pants and I helped her adjust the heavy straps of the compression bra she still liked to wear so that they didn’t peek out from her shirt.

  “You look great, Lainie,” I said, kissing her neck.

  She patted her hips. “This year, I swear, I’m losing twenty pounds.”

  “You don’t need to do a thing.” She actually looked rather fetching to me—I had a soft spot for zaftig—so I patted her ass, but she slapped me away.

  “Get real,” she said. “I’m not even eating any of the babka. No eggnog either.” Elaine loved eggnog. “I mean it, Pete. Twenty pounds by December thirty-first.”

  As we fussed with our coats by the back door, Alec looked up at us from his perch at the kitchen counter, where he was devouring a New Year’s breakfast of cherry vanilla Häagen-Dazs and picking idly at the crossword. “Where are you two going all dressed up like debutants?”

  “It’s the Sterns’ brunch,” Elaine said, touching up her lipstick in the mirror by the door.

  “You weren’t going to invite me?”

  I thought he was kidding.

  “Dude, what the hell? Just let me get dressed. I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

  “You want to come?”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to come?”

  “Why would you?”

  He gave us a confused look, stuck the ice cream back in the freezer, and jogged up the stairs. “The Sterns throw a great party,” he called, which was, I guess, the best and only reason to go to any party at all.

  Since he’d been home from college, Alec had been either recalcitrant or put-upon, and only since we’d finished renovating the studio above the garage had he shown any interest at all in civilized behavior. I was never entirely sure what our exact crime was, or why he was so bent on returning to live with us, its perpetrators, but Alec had a list of accusations a yard long that he often rattled off, unprompted. It seemed one big problem was that by insisting he attend a four-year college, we were forcing him to live according to the bourgeois mandates (I kid you not) of our choosing, not his. Also it proved that we didn’t really believe in him as an artist, because if we did believe in him, we’d have used the money we were otherwise spending on tuition on a grand tour of European galleries and museums. According to Alec, four years of gazing at the fabled canvases in the Louvre, the Tate, the Reina Sofia, and the Uffizi would be a far better use of his time and our money than “bullshit figure drawing” at Hampshire. And for all I knew, he was right, but that didn’t make him any less of a shit to be around, nor did it mean that Elaine and I were about to let him screw around Europe for four years on our dime.

  The studio above the garage appeased him somewhat, and he got a job working nights at Utrecht art supply in the city and made friends with a few of his co-workers and taught after-school painting at the Red Barn Cultural Center. He’d started to become an almost-benign presence in the house, and we liked having someone to talk to besides each other. He conceded to the occasional Nets game with me, and over beers and veggie burgers after the games (he had the exact feelings you’d expect about eating meat) we talked, man to man, about nothing in particular.

  “Is Neal home from Boston for the break?” he asked as we drove over to Freeman Court.

  Neal Stern was almost the same age as Alec, but to my and Joe’s disappointment they’d never really gotten along, not even as kids. Totally different spirits; Neal studious and snarky, Alec earnestly bohemian, petulant, but sometimes, despite himself, charming.

  Elaine turned to the backseat. “I suppose he is.”

  “That kid’s probably made a million bucks already, huh?” Alec said. “Biomedical engineering?”

  “You’ve been keeping up with Neal Stern?”

  “Come on.” Alec laughed. “Like you guys haven’t mentioned him enough? I have his whole biography memorized.”

  “We’ve mentioned him?” I honestly had no idea that we brought up Neal Stern, and I immediately felt defensive both for myself and for my son.

  “I don’t remember having said his name more than twice in the past six months.”

  “Hah!” Alec barked, and then, just to make sure we got the point, he did it again. “Hah.”

  “Really?”

  “Neal Stern is graduating Phi Beta Kappa from MIT. Neal Stern has co-published eleven papers in leading biomedical journals. Neal Stern won a summer NIS fellowship to study protons in Germany.” But Alec sounded more amused than bitter.

  “Protons, that’s right,” Elaine said. “That was last summer, wasn’t it?”

  “Hah,” Alec muttered again.

  “You know, if it matters at all, not only do I not remember mentioning Neal Stern in such admiring tones, but if I did, it wasn’t because I wanted you to act more Nealish,” I said. We were already almost at the Sterns’ house. The day was sunny; we could have walked. “I’m just as surprised at that kind of ridiculous achievement as you are. I was mentioning it only as a sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Not as an object lesson.”

  “Yeah, well, for your information, Neal Stern has always been a total asshole.”

  “Hmmm …,” Elaine murmured. “Is that true? An asshole? But don’t outrageously smart people often have rather poor social skills?”

  “That’s a stereotype,” Alec said.

  “Or maybe he’s just a little inept?”

  “Mom, he’s an asshole. Not to break your heart or anything.”

  “Pete, is that true?” Elaine was incapable of thinking the worst of people, especially kids. She looked over at me, and I shrugged.

  I knew that Joe, too, often thought his oldest son was something of an asshole, although he rarely let on. But throughout the kid’s childhood, I’d seen Joe offer him some fatherly trifle — a game of catch, a bowl of salami and eggs, a trip to Great Adventure with me and Alec and a few other neighbors — only to watch him get rebuffed without so much as an apology. “Dad, I don’t have time for that” — redheaded Neal typing vigorously on h
is expensive laptop, and Joe retreating in wonder and sadness.

  “You know who’s going to be there, actually,” said Elaine as we found a parking spot a block away from the Sterns’ already-crowded street. “Laura. She’s home from California. She moved back into the house last week. Iris set her up in the basement. I think she’s planning on staying for a while.”

  “You’re kidding.” I hadn’t seen Laura Stern in at least a decade, if not longer. Joe and Iris kept us apprised of her peregrinations, but rarely in great detail. “I thought she was raising high-end goats or something.”

  “She was,” Elaine said. “But then she decided enough was enough and she wanted to come home.”

  “High-end goats?” said the incredulous boy who wanted to spend four years backpacking from Belgrade to Barcelona. “Who are these people?”

  “Iris’s sister has some kind of farm in Sonoma,” Elaine said. “She was making goat cheese for restaurants. You can buy the stuff at Zabar’s.”

  “Goat cheese,” Alec said dismissively as we walked up the Stern’s cobbled path. “Kills a baby and goes off to Sonoma to make goat cheese.”

  “Alec.”

  “Smashes in the skull of a—”

  “That’s enough,” Elaine said sharply. Alec sighed heavily but kept his mouth shut.

  The party was already in full swing and the Sterns’ house was crowded with the spicy holiday odors of perfume, eggnog, French toast, and a wood fire. Someone’s children chased someone else’s children up and down the staircase. I heard Vince Dirks, my office mate, chortling in the living room. Bill Rothman found me as we tossed our coats in the guest bedroom. He placed a heavy hand across my shoulder.

  “I’m a wreck.”

  “You drank too much last night, Bill. I tried to stop you.”

  “Three bottles of Dominus. Three bottles! You can’t waste that. What could I do?”

  “You have a point.”

  “Janene’s still passed out at home. The kids think it’s hysterical. They’ve never seen their mother with a hangover before.”

  “She’ll be okay?”

  “I left some aspirin and Pepto by her bed.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “The least I could do.”

  “Happy New Year, Bill.”

  “Happy New Year, Pete.” And then he hugged me, because he was a pediatrician and that kind of guy.

  Downstairs, I wove my way through the New Year’s revelers and traded auld lang synes with my familiars. You live in a suburban town for twenty-three years, you can’t help knowing every local. Through the French doors to the kitchen I saw an elderly man I didn’t know talking to Christina Sherman, recently engaged to a Manhattan lawyer, Shelly told me, and as gorgeous and lithe as ever. She would always be recovering from Louis’s death, but she was too wise to let herself rot in grief. She’d taken a teaching job at Round Hill Country Day, and I often saw her early at the JCC, her in her spandex running clothes, me sweating, embarrassed, in baggy shorts. The old guy was standing very close to her, practically breathing down her neck, but Christina was too polite to back away. I thought about going to say hello to her. I hoped she wouldn’t leave our little town for the big city.

  “Pete!”

  “MaryJo.” I turned. Bert had died eight years ago, but MaryJo still made the rounds. So did her kids, and her grandkids, now old enough to bring their own tubs of rigatoni to a neighborhood potluck. I kissed all the Birches on the cheek and helped myself to a steaming ladleful of pasta and ricotta before anyone else could get a spoon in.

  Out on the deck, Joe was wearing a beat-up parka and a Santa Claus hat, whipping up his special New Year’s peppermint martinis (schnapps, vodka, a candy cane for a stirrer) for all comers. “Dr. D.!” he said when he saw me. “Happy New Year!”

  “Happy New Year yourself, old man,” I said, slurping down my rigatoni, wishing for some reason I had a Santa hat of my own. “You got any grown-up drinks back there?”

  “Bloody Mary?”

  “I said grown up.” I was a firm believer in the hair of the dog.

  “Attaboy.” Joe grinned and poured me a scotch. There was a hearty minyan milling on the deck, all men except for a fierce, feline-looking Asian girl in enormous pants, a camouflage jacket, and steel-tipped combat boots. Soon Neal Stern emerged from the kitchen with a mug of hot chocolate in his hand and put a possessive arm around the girl, whose frown softened into a gentle sneer. Neal was balding, just like his dad at his age, but he’d had the questionable inclination to shave his head, making him look both dorky and felonious. He was freckled, skinny, with a bulbous Adam’s apple and dark eyes set a bit too close together; I had no idea what he’d done to win the girl, but I imagined it had something to do with the very profitable future he seemed assured of.

  “Dr. Pete,” Neal said—Dr. Pete was what all the Stern kids called me — and removed his arm from around his girlfriend to shake my hand. “This is Amy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Amy. Happy New Year.”

  Amy blinked at me. “Well, yes,” she said like a sphinx. Then she turned her wintry gaze to Neal. “I’m totally frozen out here. I’m going inside.”

  “Broads,” Neal said to me after she’d removed herself from our company. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, right?” He chortled in a mirthless way, and I knew that if Alec were outside with us he quite possibly would have socked Neal right in the freckles. But I was an adult, so I made conversation.

  “I hear your sister’s back in town, huh?”

  Neal circled a finger around his ear to signify “crazy,” then took a fat sip of hot chocolate. “She showed up with her backpack last week, looks like she hasn’t showered in days. Almost ten o’clock at night. I’d just gotten home from school. Amy was in the guest bedroom, you know? ‘Cause Amy’s from Hong Kong and she wasn’t going to go all the way home for break. So she was just going to stay here, with me, but of course my parents are like, No way is she staying in your room.” Neal made the crazy gesture again, and I thought of old Mrs. Stern, keeping me and Elaine separate on our trips to Philadelphia.

  “So I ask her, What are you doing here? And she says, Is this my house or isn’t it? I’m here because I’m here. Let me in. And what could I say?” He laughed. “She hasn’t lived here for thirteen years, though, you know? So how could this be her house?”

  “I guess it’s been a while since you two spent much time together.”

  “Since I was a kid,” Neal said. “I mean, it’s not like I really know her—it’s more like I just know about her.”

  Joe, I could tell, was listening in, even though he was faking interest in a conversation with Stu Hurdy about the koi pond Stu was installing. Joe kept his eyes on Stu, nodded intermittently, but tilted his Santa’s hat in our direction and sucked on the vodka end of his peppermint stick. Joe almost never mentioned Laura anymore; he was too protective. I suddenly felt like a prick for bringing her up with a shmo like Neal.

  “What I mean is, Laura’s been gone ever since I was, I don’t know, seven years old, so it’s not like we’re great friends or anything. I’ve only seen her once a year, if that.”

  “Anyway,” I said, trying to divert the conversation.

  “And you know, the way she lives, it’s just laughable. Like she’s some sort of renegade. Remember how she was living on that island down near Puerto Rico, dreadlocks down to her ass, making jewelry for a ‘living’?” Neal put the quotes in with his hands. “Met us in Florida so she could ask my parents for ten grand. Which they gave her, of course, no problem. Because God forbid she should lose her mind and do something stupid and they have to pay for more lawyers.”

  Joe was still listening over Stu’s deadpan description of koi hibernation; he turned and glared at Neal. I remembered the Florida extortion, more than seven years ago — a family trip to Miami to celebrate some cousin’s bar mitzvah, Laura appearing out of nowhere, like a winsome rag doll in handmade clothes. She’d been living in
a trailer on Vieques with a girlfriend who spoke no English, working to rid the island of its U.S. military presence and, yes, making jewelry out of cowrie shells. She needed money for an operation for her roommate. She’d been out of the psych ward for eighteen months. Joe and Laura wrote her a check, on the condition that she get a haircut, buy a dress, and come to the bar mitzvah. She vanished from the Marriott lobby while they were at the reception desk, checking her in.

  “So now we’re supposed to welcome her back with open arms even though she’s treated us alternately like a bank and a group of strangers for ten years.”

  “Neal, stop it,” Joe said, cutting Stu right off. “You’ve said enough.” Joe’s voice was mild, but his expression was fierce in a way I rarely saw it.

  “Whatever, Dad. You might be in her little cult, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Neal,” Joe said, and that was all, but his tone now matched his expression, and Neal was smart enough to shut up. There was something about the subject of Laura that made all us parents prickly. Joe turned back to Stu. Neal looked at me and rolled his eyes.

  “So anyway …,” he said.

  “Anyway.”

  “I guess I’ll go inside and find Amy.” Marginally louder: “And don’t worry, Stalin, I’ll mind the censors.” Did Neal really just compare his father to Stalin? I watched as he loped back into the kitchen, an ironic tilt to his shaved head.

  “That kid,” Joe said, his expression softening but that fierceness still in his eyes. He forced a little laugh. “Never fails to say what’s on his mind, you know?”

  “A strong personality,” I said.

  Joe sighed heavily. “That’s one way to describe it.”

  “Anyway, Joe, the thing about it is you’ve got to watch for raccoons.” Stu Hurdy was unstoppable. “Raccoons can fish just like bears. You’ve seen those nature movies? They stick their paws into the pond and scoop them out like it’s nothing. It’s really quite remarkable to watch. But evidently there are certain plants that are naturally raccoon-repellent, you install them around the pond and it saves the fish from …”