A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  What was odd was that even as we sat there, I could feel everything changing and knew I was powerless to stop it and powerless to predict what would happen next. If I could go back in time, I would — but no, I’ve got to stop thinking that way. There’s nothing else I would have done, anyway.

  “Dad?”

  “Alec?”

  “You’re spacing out.”

  “I’m not. We’re talking about Laura Stern. This morning you were making fun of her goat cheese aspirations.”

  “I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “I see.”

  In the living room, Elaine got off her treadmill, snapped off the television, and headed for the kitchen. I could hear her plodding footsteps. “Alec!” she called. “Alec, did you spill these potato chips all over the floor?” Every so often she could let out a high maternal squawk.

  Alec leaned in, dropped his voice to a half whisper. “Like, you know, Dad—like, did you ever just see someone and that moment think to yourself” — he took a breath—“I could marry a girl like that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Alec, get in here and clean this crap up!”

  He was starting to blush. “Forget it —”

  I looked at my intoxicated son for a long minute. There were a million things I could have said. I went with, “I suppose I know what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  I paused for a minute. “Sure.”

  Alec smiled gauzily. As far as he knew, his parents’ marriage was a long stroll on a beach at sunset.

  “So what happened?”

  “Alec! Get your butt in here now!”

  It was the fiction that I stuck to. “I married her.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AFTER NOT HAVING laid an eye on Laura Stern for more than a decade, I saw her again three days later. Alec, who in general only came near the big house for food or sleep or a soak in the upstairs Jacuzzi, was sitting on the porch, drinking from a steaming cup of Starbucks; Laura Stern was puffing away on a Marlboro at his side. I guess he’d neglected to tell her that ours was a nonsmoking house.

  It was one of those anomalous January evenings — more and more frequent, I guess, since America finally won its war on the ozone layer. Fifty-eight degrees, starless, breezy. Confused crocuses had already started to push through the earth, and the town geese had never even bothered to migrate. I’d come home early, having finished up rounds that afternoon, and thought about maybe shooting some baskets in the driveway under the motion-detecting lights.

  “How was your day, Dad?” How was my day? I was disgusted to see them there. Alec looked as happy as a fistful of balloons.

  “It was fine. How was yours, kids?” I said, immediately feeling stupid. Laura Stern was no kid. “You two just, um, hanging out?”

  “Alec wanted to show me his paintings,” Laura said. “He’s really so talented. I’ve never seen anything like that deer series he’s painting. The representation of life just squashed away, the trail of the car or whatever it was. God, there was so much color on that canvas, I couldn’t believe how intense it was.” She paused to smile at him, and he hid his face behind the Starbucks cup. “He’s really going to make a name for himself in the arts, don’t you think, Dr. Pete?”

  “You can just call him Pete,” Alec mumbled.

  “I like saying Dr. Pete,” Laura said. “It makes me feel like a little girl again.”

  “He is very talented.” For some reason I was stuck on the walkway in front of the porch; I didn’t want to walk past them, nor did I want to skirt them entirely and head in through the side door.

  “So what are you and Elaine up to this fine evening?” Laura asked. “It’s a nice night for a walk, isn’t it? Practically spring.” Was she trying to get rid of us?

  “I haven’t really thought about it yet.”

  “The Red Menace is making dinner tonight. I was hoping she’d do something sort of authentically Chinese, but it turns out all she eats is steamed carrots and eggplant.”

  “Isn’t that authentically Chinese?”

  She laughed. “Only if you eat a fortune cookie afterward.”

  Alec laughed, too, which was a sound I didn’t hear all too often. Laura was wearing a puffy green jacket, a fuzzy yellow hat, and absurdly tight jeans. Why such tight jeans? Why couldn’t I move? “Anyway, I really can’t think of a nicer January than this. For New Jersey, I mean.”

  “In California,” Alec ventured, “it was probably like this all year round, right?”

  “Yeah, almost always sixty, seventy degrees. And at night the goats would horn around in their sheds—you could hear them—and Enid had a couple of sheep that would bleat in their pens, and there were dogs and some cows. It was really nice.”

  “Were you sorry to leave?” Alec asked.

  “No,” she said. “It was time.”

  “You know,” I said, eager to end this jaunt through memory lane and thinking maybe it’d get them off the porch, “I was thinking about shooting some hoops. Taking advantage of the weather.”

  “Dad, we’re kind of hanging out.”

  “You shoot hoops right here? On the driveway?” Laura said. “That’s so great! Could I join in?”

  “You want to shoot?” I asked. “I, um …” Alec looked panic-stricken; I imagine I did, too. “That would be — do you know how to play basketball?”

  “I have no idea.” She laughed and ground the cigarette end onto the bottom of her shoe. “But I bet you can show me.”

  “Actually, maybe I’ll just go inside and start on dinner.”

  “Oh, come on, Dr. Pete,” she said. “Let me just try. I promise I won’t get hurt. And if I do, I won’t sue.”

  Alec still looked panic-stricken. But what did he want me to do? “Okay,” I said. “Let me go upstairs and change.”

  The kitchen smelled like Crock-Pot stew, and Elaine was in the bathtub with a book when I got upstairs.

  “You’re home early,” she said. She had a towel wrapped around her head swami-style, and a glass of wine perched on the soap ledge.

  “What is this, a Calgon commercial?”

  “One of the few privileges of the middle-aged housewife,” she said, “is the early evening soak. Don’t worry, dinner’s on downstairs. You’ll get fed.”

  “It smells good.”

  “So then what’s that frown for?” She put her book to the side of the bathtub and stepped out of the tub. Her body was rosy from the steam, and her nipples — one pink, the other, a tattooed construction, Nubian brown—were pert and hard. Well, the fake nipple was always hard, but nevertheless the effect of my wife rising out of the steam ordinarily might have given me an inclination or two — but not with Laura Stern downstairs, manhandling our son.

  “Pass me your wineglass?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” She wrapped herself in a towel and drained the tub, then handed me her glass of half-spoiled something. She kept all our unfinished bottles on the counter for cooking and had zero appreciation for when one of them turned bad.

  “Jesus, you should toss this.”

  She shrugged. “The rest of it’s in your stew.”

  I collapsed backward on the bed, loosened my tie, kicked off my cruddy loafers. “Laura Stern wants to shoot hoops with me.”

  “Say that again?”

  “Laura Stern wants me to go downstairs and shoot some hoops.”

  “Hmmm …” She tugged on her underwear, her thick white bra.

  “She’s downstairs with Alec, sitting on the porch. She’s smoking.” Elaine detested smoking.

  “And?”

  “And I thought I’d get rid of them if I told them I was planning on shooting around outside for a little while, but instead Laura Stern announces that she’d like to play with me. She’s never played basketball, but if she gets hurt she won’t sue.”

  “Is that a joke? That she won’t sue?”

  “I assume.”

  “So then go play with her.”
/>   I pulled a pillow over my eyes. “Elaine, what is Laura Stern doing on our porch?”

  “It sounds like she’s smoking and waiting for you to go play some basketball with her.”

  “Please tell me you think it’s a little odd that a grown woman wants to spend her free time hanging out with a twenty-year-old boy.”

  “No,” she said, pulling on a faded black turtleneck. “But I do think it’s a little odd that you’re so upset about it. Go downstairs and shoot around for fifteen minutes. I’m going to make a salad.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What else do you want?”

  “You really don’t think this is weird?”

  “Pete, relax, okay? Go shoot some hoops or you’re going to make yourself crazy and me along with you.”

  I spend all day telling other people what to eat, what to drink, what to do if they see blood in their stool; sometimes it’s a relief to just follow orders. I traded my khakis for shorts, laced up my sneakers, and took a breath. Laura Stern was home for the first time in years, clearly distanced from her family, looking for someone to treat her kindly. She found our son. She wanted to shoot some hoops. Innocent as a lamb.

  Downstairs the two were sitting and talking like old friends; Alec was moving his hands expansively, and Laura had her head tilted almost all the way to her shoulder. From her profile, I could see the purse of her lips as she concentrated on whatever he was saying, nodding along as he spoke. She had a wrist cocked, a cigarette burning between her fingertips, her chin wrinkled. And as I looked at her like this, she reminded me not so much of Iris but of old Mr. Stern, Joe’s dad, who died twenty years ago.

  I rolled my shoulders, flexed my knees. Jesus, what is it about being fifty-three that turns your head so easily to the past? Memories seemed to corner me more and more frequently that January: I’d be driving to work and see an old lady in a bright pink dress and almost have to pull over because suddenly Aunt Iz was calling to me over the banister in the building I grew up in in Yonkers, asking how I’d done on my chemistry test; I could hear her as if she were in the backseat right behind me, and feel the hair on my arms prick to attention. This sort of hallucination was due, I’m sure, to the very fact of being my age, to the knowledge that the better part of my life was behind me, that no matter what medical science came up with in the next few decades, I wouldn’t live to see as many new years as the old, dusty ones I’d already seen. You are who you are at fifty-three, and even if the person you are is lucky and happy, the crush of it — the kneecapping crush of it—is that anyway it’s too late. My fifty-three-year-old overweight diabetics would die of stroke in fifteen years; my fifty-three-year-old hypertensive, sedentary middle managers would die of kidney failure. They would not lose weight, they would not start to exercise, they might not even remember to take their meds. They were fifty-three; they were who they were. And as so many doctors before me have noted, it’s often easier to die than to change.

  Old Mr. Stern—he told me to call him Niels, but I never could — ran a dry-cleaning establishment for thirty years in Center City Philadelphia, near Rittenhouse Square. Sometimes he’d find turquoise necklaces, pearl earrings, in the pockets of his customer’s coats; he was so nervous about holding on to those semiprecious baubles that he’d drive them to their owners’ houses right after he closed up shop. Once, he found a small bag of cocaine in the pocket of a three-piece suit (he wasn’t certain what he’d found, but Joe’s sister Annie put a little on her gums and confirmed it). So distraught he could barely finish his sentences, and half-convinced, I’m sure, that some Colombian drug lords were about to bust into his little shop and rape his seamstress, Mr. Stern drove across the Ben Franklin Bridge to Camden and dumped the whole bag into the Delaware River along its grimier shores.

  Mr. Stern was sixty-five when he was diagnosed with colon cancer; it was a death sentence, and Joe asked if I’d like to go with him for a visit, since the old man had always liked me and I think he was nervous about facing his dying dad alone.

  “He wants to live to meet the baby,” Joe said, rolling down the windows a fraction so we could feel the exhaust rise off the turnpike as we drove down to Joe’s childhood home. Iris was six months pregnant with Neal, and they knew it was going to be a boy.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ve talked to his doctors,” Joe said. “It’s unlikely. It’s metastasized to his liver. He’s got tumors the size of lemons. They give him six weeks, maybe two months. He’s on some codeine now to manage the pain, since nobody sees much point in surgery.”

  For some reason, Joe’s dad had always thought I was an intellectual, and he treated me as if I was a man of reason and literature while his son was nothing but a science geek. This wasn’t fair, of course, nor was it true, but I relished the old man’s quiet approval. The first time we met I was midstream in a course on Melville that, if I remember correctly, fulfilled some crucial writing requirement. My hardcover Moby Dick spilled out of my backpack (we were at the student union, drinking coffee—the Sterns had stopped by on their way back from a weekend in Ohio) and Mr. Stern was entranced.

  “At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided,” he murmured in his fairy-tale German accent. “It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your book,” he said, picking the tome off the floor. I’d been carrying it around for weeks, hoping that somehow the novel’s pages would penetrate the fibers of my backpack and insert themselves into my nervous system without my having to do any of the miserable work of reading.

  “People keep waiting for the great American novel. They don’t seem to realize it was written one hundred years ago by a customs inspector from New York.” The dry cleaner tilted his head at that thoughtful angle. “Few other novels have the majesty, the bravery, of Moby Dick. Melville does things on that boat, switches perspectives, spends wonderful moments in a church, a boardinghouse, the belly of the ship …” He trailed off. “What would you say is the great American novel if not this one?”

  “I, uh … I really don’t …”

  “Niels, leave him alone,” said Mrs. Stern, but smiling.

  “It’s a good, um, story,” I said falteringly.

  “I should say so.”

  My own father had neither the time nor the inclination—when would he read a novel? On the grimy train to Midtown, standing up, jostled by a hundred other gray-suited commuters? On the exhausted ride back home, still standing room only? After dinner? Most nights he’d fall asleep with the Forward on his lap, a glass of ginger ale in his left hand. Weekends were for working, or for taking the occasional drive to the beach at City Island. Sometimes, if the mood was right, he’d take us to a Sunday movie at the Yonkers Triplex, then dinner at Peking Palace. If he had advice for us, it was not about which books to read, but rather about why General Motors was a fail-safe stock, or how to find the nearest shelter in case the Russians started meaning business. Two Fridays a month he stopped at the grocery on Central Avenue to add to our stockpile of canned beans.

  “So now what?” I asked Joe as we dodged the awkward southbound merge of 80 and 46 and 95. Joe, a Philly-style driver, glared at the oncoming cars but couldn’t bring himself to give them the finger.

  “I think—,” he said, “I think the idea is to put him in hospice, see what we can do about his pain, help him get his affairs in order. He can still eat a little, sleep. He’s on codeine. And of course he won’t complain.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s just such a bitch, though, especially for my mother.” Joe tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, then rubbed them anxiously on his bald spot. He wanted to be anywhere else. “They’re too young for this.”

  “How’s she holding up?”

  “Alternates between denial and rage,” he said. “Either s
he acts like it’s all going to be perfectly fine or she starts railing against doctors, as though it’s our fault somehow that my father got cancer.”

  “You know how people are when they’re starting to grieve.”

  “I told him for years to get a colonoscopy. He wouldn’t. We’d fight, you know? Just getting him to stop smoking a half pack a day …”

  “He was a stubborn guy.”

  Joe shrugged, checked his rearview mirror. “They’re all stubborn, that’s the thing,” he said. “That’s how they were raised. That’s how they raised us, how they got through the daily business of their lives. They worked like animals. My dad at the store, your dad with the insurance. They wore out their shoes, you know? All that shuffling every day. Worked harder than I ever will in my entire life. But never buckled his seatbelt, never put out the cigarette, never got a goddamn colonoscopy.”

  “They invented seatbelts too late.”

  “No excuse,” Joe said.

  Both our dads had spent the bulk of their best years doing things they didn’t feel like doing: Joe’s dad at the shop, my dad pounding Ninth Avenue, soft leather briefcase in hand. People never stopped needing insurance, he reminded us, and he never stopped trying to sell it to them.

  But then again, every so often my dad would take off an entire weekend, and we’d drive deep into Westchester, me in the front seat and Phil in the back. We’d go scout properties in White Plains or even up in Chappaqua, Yorktown. “What do you think, guys?” my dad would ask, slowing down in front of a FOR SALE sign, a shiny new ranch with a one-car garage and dogwoods dripping on the front yard. “Good schools, safe neighborhoods, low taxes.” A caress in his voice.

  Sometimes my dad would stop across the street—keeping the motor running—and we’d all imagine it, the bicycles in the driveway, the fort in the backyard, our very own bedrooms. We’d seen television; we knew how it was supposed to be. We’d roll down our windows and stare. Board games stacked neatly on the shelves above my desk, Davy Crockett wallpaper, pennants from the local high school team. And then, blinking awake, we’d understand the impossibility of leaving Yonkers for greener pastures. My dad would pull a K-turn. We’d be home in time for supper.