A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Come on over this afternoon,” Iris had said. She was on a Saturday jog through the neighborhood and had stopped in for a cup of coffee. “Turns out the kid wangled his way into MIT. Joe bought a cake.”

  “Iris, that’s fantastic,” Elaine said, stirring hazelnut Coffee-Mate into her mug. “You must be so proud.”

  “Not half as proud as Neal is.” But she was smiling. Of course she was proud. Who wouldn’t be? If it were me, I’d frame that first MIT bill and hang it on the wall. I’d turn out a replica of the acceptance letter in bronze.

  “Well, I can’t wait to say congrats. MIT,” Elaine said, “is really something.” However, my wife had continued to show an irritating lack of exasperation with her own son’s laconic garbage vis-à-vis college. As far as she was concerned, he could enroll at Bergen State in the fall if he wanted, and he could just keep living at home and she could drive to work with him a few times a week and have a little company. I wasn’t allowed to say that Bergen State was not exactly what I’d envisioned for our son without getting into nasty spats about elitism and my wife’s workplace, so instead I grumbled and kept my mouth shut and begged Alec to please, please, please, just write his fucking essay. And then Iris left and I disappeared into my den with my laptop.

  “Pete, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing, just some reading. Leave me be.”

  “You want to head over to Joe and Iris’s?”

  “I need some time, Elaine. I’ve got some stuff to finish up.”

  “What are you working on?” What was her problem?

  Part C: Describe the person I most admire.

  It took three hours and a certain amount of self-admonition, but in the end I think I did a fairly reasonable job of explaining in the first person why my own father, Alec’s grandpa Hesh, was a wonderful and admirable human being who had greatly impacted Alec’s life and left him with a respect for hard work, family obligations, and dedication to his community. A few phone messages with the answering service at Round Hill Country Day, and Alec had his recommendation letters secured. All we needed now was a transcript, some short answers to questions re: awards, sports, and after-school activities, and a couple of lines about what Alec might major in and why. It hadn’t been my intention to fill these out, too, but the truth was it was easier to hide in my study and fiddle with Alec’s application than it was to go out and nag him. And it actually didn’t take all that long. By four that afternoon, I was celebrating Neal’s MIT acceptance in the Stern kitchen, helping demolish a chocolate cake. Iris had fired up the Crock-Pot full of cocoa.

  “Neal,” I said, shaking the kid’s triumphant hand. “Job well done.”

  “Yes, it was,” he said, chocolate on his lips, MIT on his sweatshirt. “Yes, indeed.” And I caught Joe’s eye, but he looked away, went to the cupboard to pull out some more mugs. I sat down then in the breakfast nook next to Pauline, who was fourteen, pimply, with a mouth full of braces, but still infinitely more graceful than her older brother. She handed me a plastic fork for my cake.

  “My dad’s so sad that Laura’s not here,” she sighed.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s why he has that face on,” she said. “Like, Laura’s his favorite. The precious. He’s so bummed that she’s not here to celebrate.” She sliced off a neat square of cake. Her red hair fell lank down her back. “The precious,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like in Lord of the Rings?” I shrugged to show that I had no idea what she was talking about; she shrugged back. “His precious one,” she said. “No matter what the rest of us do, you know, we won’t live up to Laura.”

  “I doubt that’s true, Pauline.”

  “Believe what you want,” she said. “It’s true, though.” We regarded each other for a moment, me thinking that of all these wonderful kids, how unfair that Joe favored the criminal, and Pauline almost certainly thinking exactly the same thing. “I’m getting more cake,” she said. “You want some?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” And I looked over again at Joe, who, sure enough, was gazing thoughtfully, a bit sadly, at his son’s chocolate-stained grin.

  ANYWAY, THREE MONTHS later, Alec was accepted to Hampshire. Because I could not help myself, I brought home, for celebration, a large chocolate cake. We were so thrilled to have a bit of good news after the night in jail and the brooches and etcetera that nobody bothered to ask Alec many details about his application, and he himself seemed not to want to press it but rather just to accept our congratulations graciously, as if this bit of good fortune had always been his due.

  And then, after only three semesters in—well, there’s nothing more to say about that, except that one evening after Alec had returned to live in our house for a year and a half to dedicate himself to painting deer and mooning over Laura Stern, I came home from work to find brochures from the New School, NYU, and the School of Visual Arts on the kitchen table.

  “Elaine? Did you send away for these?”

  “I’m sorry?” She was stirring soup. “Huh. I didn’t even see those. I guess Alec must have gotten them.”

  I refused to acknowledge my heart’s optimistic leap and ate my soup and chicken without saying another word about the brochures. The boy was nowhere to be found—the studio lights were out, his Civic had disappeared — and until I confirmed the mail with him, I could not hope for the best. Frankly, ever since I’d seen those kisses with Laura, I’d had less and less of an idea what to say to Alec or how to say it, and our relations risked hitting that awful low of his senior year in high school, the only other time in his life when we didn’t say a word to each other for entire weeks. But of course this time I’d found myself avoiding him, not out of rage, but out of an odd sort of fear about what I might say if I opened my mouth. And he avoided me because it was easy.

  Alec came home around midnight, smelling like secondhand smoke, and found me sitting at the breakfast bar pretending to read. I’d left the brochures on the table.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hey, Al,” I said, flipping the pages of my Cleveland Clinic Journal as casually as I could. “Have fun tonight?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and he sidled his sneaky way to the refrigerator to glug soda straight from the two-liter.

  “What did you do?”

  “Hmmm?” He wiped his sticky mouth with his sleeve and put the bottle back in the fridge. “Nothing, really. Drove around with Laura.”

  “Really.” I swallowed. “So you two are—”

  “We’re nothing, Dad.” He laughed. “I mean, I don’t know what we are.”

  I had to assume. “But you still like her.”

  “Of course.” He sat down at the table with me. He’d long since removed the ring from his eyebrow, but he still wore those contemptible plugs in his earlobes and had kept the habit of fiddling with them when he had nothing else to do with his hands.

  “And what about these?” I said, gesturing to the brochures. I’d been hoping he’d bring them up himself, but I couldn’t wait all night. “They were just sitting here on the kitchen table when I came home.”

  “Oh, those came? I went online to check them out and they ended up asking me for my address so they could send me brochures. I don’t know why they bother, why they’ve got to waste trees, when everything I need to know’s right online.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “There are these pop-ups, they just demand your address before you can even think straight—”

  “And you visited these school’s sites to check out—”

  “Their transfer programs,” he said. He was still fiddling with his earlobe.

  “The transfer programs?” I put my journal down and looked straight at my son. “You’re really thinking of going back?” I did my best to keep my voice casual, but it probably betrayed me, because Alec smiled indulgently.

  “It was Laura’s idea, to be honest. She thinks I need some more instruction to really get my painting to where it shou
ld be. And also that I’d end up making important contacts if I stayed in school. In the art world it’s so much about who you know, and she thinks it’s easier to get the big galleries to pay attention if you come well recommended.”

  “Laura said that?”

  “See, Dad?” Alec said. “She’s not pure evil.”

  “Who said pure evil?”

  He laughed, stood up. “Anyway, the applications are due in a couple of weeks, so I don’t know. I can’t make any promises. But I’m thinking about it. These are probably the three best programs in New York. The ones I can get into, anyway.”

  “Look,” I said. “If you need anything, money for the applications, whatever, just let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “And if there are any other schools, anything else you want, maybe we could take a trip to Boston …” Why was I so intent on Boston?

  “No, no matter what, I think I’m gonna stay in New York. It’s where the art market is. And Laura’s moving to the East Village at the end of the month, anyway.”

  “She is?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She’s losing her mind at her parents’ crib.”

  “I see,” I said. Well, New York was a big city.

  “Anyway, good night.” He headed upstairs.

  “Good night,” I said to his retreating back. And then I stayed awake another whole hour, reading the flimsy brochures, and reconciling myself to the fact that Laura’s influence on my son was not only not as bad as I’d assumed it would be, but perhaps even better than my own.

  NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and the New School. I had a patient who was on the board at the New School. I’d call him first thing Monday.

  “THE SAAB,” ELAINE said several mornings later before I’d completely opened my eyes. “It finally died.”

  There are dozens of conversations you don’t want to have while you’re still in your pajamas, dreaming cheerfully about a drive across Sonoma with the cute, slightly cross-eyed blond who serves you your daily coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. This was only one of them. “What do you mean, died?”

  She was nudging me with her toes. “I mean I was driving to the gym and I barely made it down Pearl Street before the car shuddered like an epileptic and died. AAA towed it to Round Hill Collision, but I don’t care what they do to it, I don’t want to drive that thing anymore.”

  I rubbed my eyes. All I remembered was the happy dream in the vineyards of Sonoma. If I fell back asleep right this second, I’d still be there.

  “Pete?”

  “You want a new car?”

  “We could probably trade the Saab in.”

  “How could we trade in a dead car?”

  “It’s still under warranty, isn’t it? Or something?” My eyes finally focused; Elaine was in her yoga clothes, sitting cross-legged on the pillow next to my head.

  “I suppose.”

  “But let’s say I’m driving in Newark, Pete, and the whole thing dies again. It takes forever for a tow to come to Newark. I don’t need that kind of stress.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go car shopping.”

  She clapped her hands once like an excited child. “And no more five-speeds. I was really done with that stick shift, to tell you the truth.”

  While Elaine was in the shower, I knocked on Alec’s door to see if he wanted to come along—when he was a kid, he used to love to visit car lots, and my feelings toward him had been so warm in the weeks since I’d found those brochures that really I wanted his company all the time. But Alec wasn’t in his room, and when I looked out the window I saw his Civic was gone, and I wondered where he could be at eight thirty on a Saturday and then realized he’d probably never come home last night in the first place. Had Laura moved to the East Village yet? Was it already the end of the month?

  “You ready?” Elaine crept up behind me. She was wearing a navy suit, as though we were off to a business meeting and not a bunch of outdoor car lots on Route 17. “I think I want a Jeep this time.”

  “A Jeep?”

  “Something powerful,” she said. “Something kind of fierce.”

  “A Jeep is fierce?”

  “Come on, Pete. I want a more powerful car than that dinky little Saab, you know what I mean.”

  “You mean you want to spend a lot of my money on a new car.”

  “Exactly,” Elaine said. “Let’s go.”

  The woman who greeted us at Craig Motors’ front door was dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a lovely figure and a professional smile; I had expected a wiry, balding man in a collared sweater, or maybe hefty Arnie Craig himself. Instead, this lovely young thing, who was wearing a black suit more sharply cut than Elaine’s navy one, hair pulled into a neat bun. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and pale pink lipstick and looked so much better than she had the last time I’d seen her that she recognized me first.

  “Dr. Dizinoff! It’s nice to see you.”

  “Roseanne, look at you,” I said. “You look wonderful.”

  “Oh.” She waved her hand in front of her face.

  “How long have you been working here?” We shook hands, and I was glad to note that her color was good, her eyes were clear, her voice strong. She’d lost a bit more weight since I’d last seen her, but she still looked healthy — trim but not emaciated. I was glad to see she was working, and thought that in her professional getup, nobody would ever know half her torso was emblazoned with tattoos.

  “I just started six weeks ago,” she said. “But would you believe I actually like it? My whole life I wanted to run away from the car business, I wanted nothing to do with sales, but it turns out that I’m actually sort of good at it.” She smiled bashfully. “We’ve got a new lineup of Jeeps that are just flying out the door, and as you probably know, American sales countrywide aren’t what you’d hope for. But they’re doing really well over here.”

  “Well, that’s probably because you’re the one selling them,” I said. I really was delighted with how well she looked. Some patients just stay with you; for whatever reason, Roseanne Craig and her depression had stayed with me, but now (through no intervention of my own, I had to admit) she seemed so much better.

  “I think we’re in the market for an SUV or a Jeep, isn’t that right? This is my wife, Elaine,” I said. “The car’s for her.”

  “Terrific,” Roseanne said, shaking my wife’s hand, too. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for specifically and I can show you what we’ve got.”

  Roseanne turned out to be the sort of saleswoman who would do any car-dealing father proud; she was efficient, knowledgeable, precise, and no-bullshit. I knew the Craigs would offer us a modest deal simply because I took care of them healthwise, but I also knew that we’d spend a bit more money on options we didn’t really need because Roseanne was closing the deal. She put us in a Jeep Commander and took us for a spin around the backstreets off Route 17, near the never-quite-finished Forrest Avenue overpass.

  “Now, the nice thing about this car is that it has a much smoother ride and faster acceleration than you see in some competing models. Plus all the space you’d want in an SUV, but the mileage of a sedan.”

  “Which is?”

  “Eighteen city, twenty highway,” she said. She was sitting behind us on the center bump, leaning forward to facilitate conversation. The model we were driving had a GPS system, and Elaine kept checking it out even though she knew perfectly well where we were.

  “You offer this thing in a hybrid?”

  “Not yet,” she said, “but GM is working on some terrific hybrid models for 2010. When it’s time to trade this in, you’ll have a variety of large hybrids and plug-ins to choose from.”

  “Come on,” Elaine said. “Nobody’s ever going to want to plug in a car.”

  “You’d be surprised, Mrs. Dizinoff,” Roseanne said. “For over one hundred miles a gallon, people will change their behavior.”

  “One hundred miles a gallon?”

  “That’s just the beginning,” Roseann
e said. Her voice was cheerful, but she was rotating her wrists in their sockets, and I thought I saw her wince. “Make a left up at the gas station — that’ll give us a shortcut to the office.”

  “You okay, Roseanne?”

  “Okay?” She blinked, stopped working her wrists. “I’m great!” I wondered at her grin, whether she was hiding anything. “Really,” she said. “I’m really great.”

  When we returned to the dealership, Arnie Craig emerged from some back room and gave us each an enormous, two-handed shake. “So what do you think of my little girl?” he asked. “Hell of a saleswoman, huh?” Craig was powerfully built, a few inches shorter than me but wide-shouldered and chunky-legged, and although he had a soft belly, there was something in his posture of the high school football player he’d certainly once been.

  “Hell of a saleswoman indeed.”

  “She really is,” Elaine concurred. Then she drifted off to take one more spin around the showroom and leave us to the details.

  “They’re interested in the Commander, Dad.”

  “Great choice.” He slung an arm around his daughter. “You trading something in? Interested in financing?”

  “My wife’s Saab was just towed to Round Hill Collision.”

  Arnie gave me a knowing look and Roseanne smiled. “Well, if you choose to finance, we’ll get you excellent terms,” she said. “Unless you’d rather determine the financing yourself. I know the doctors’ association sometimes helps with auto lending.”

  She dealt with enough doctors to do her homework, one more point for her.

  “I’m gonna go tend the floor,” Arnie said, giving his daughter’s shoulder a rub before letting it go. “You’re in good hands here.”

  She rolled her eyes at me, smiling the whole time, then led me to her desk, modestly appointed with a family photo and a brightly painted miniature of Saint Francis of Assisi and her Berkeley diploma hanging overhead. Roseanne was, I’m sure, the only salesperson in the room with a degree from Cal, but she seemed quite at home in this environment. She’d probably grown up in this very room.