A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Aah!”

  She laughed her snaggletoothed Lithuanian laugh. “There’s a sale on at the Gilded Lily downtown,” she said. “They close at seven. Hurry up.” Mina. My shining light.

  I found a parking spot right in front of the store and left fifteen minutes later with a healthy-sized hole in my wallet and a nice, sparkling evening bag, a silk scarf, and a pair of earrings made from Venetian glass, which looked like psychedelic bottle caps but which the saleslady promised me my wife would love. She could tell I was running late and was just going to take her word for it. I handed over my AmEx without even checking the price tag. When I signed the receipt, I gasped.

  But my generosity was rewarded by some joint miracle of stoplights and traffic, and I beat Elaine home with time to spare. I rolled up my sleeves, arranged the presents on the kitchen table, got to work mixing a marinade for the tuna steaks in the fridge. We’d have tuna, grilled vegetables, and mashed potatoes swirled with the wasabi I’d found at Fairway (a neat little trick I picked up from the Food Channel), and Alec was supposed to pick up a cake for dessert. I called his cell.

  “You’re checking to see if I forgot the cake.”

  “Did you forget the cake?”

  “I’m at the bakery right now.”

  “Good,” I said. It was good to hear him. “Use my charge card.”

  “I wouldn’t do it any other way.”

  So that by the time Elaine was home, the tuna was resting in the marinade, the potatoes were bubbling, the vegetables had been sliced and washed, I’d set out a little tray of olives and cheese, pulled two brunellos from the basement and a nice pink champagne, and even managed to change out of my shirt and jacket into a clean white T-shirt with LIPITOR scrawled across the back.

  “Happy birthday, Lainie,” I said when she came in, hauling an overstuffed briefcase and a fifty-four-year-old smile. Elaine was seven months older than I was. Back when that was more of a laughing matter, I used to tease her.

  “What are these? Presents!” My wife loved presents; she dropped her briefcase and grabbed the first little package, the one with the earrings.

  “Did you go to the Gilded Lily? Oh, you shouldn’t have!” And she tore into her packages and gushed over each of them and treated me to a long, grateful smooch right there in the kitchen. Then she stuck the earrings in her ears — they still looked like bottle caps to me—and tossed her hair this way and that. “What do you think?”

  “You look beautiful.”

  “But do I look old?”

  “Not a day over thirty.”

  “You lie, you lie, you lie,” she said, and she wrapped me up in another big smooch. It was amazing what earrings and a handbag and a scarf could do. “I’m just going to run these upstairs. Pour me something to drink, will you?”

  I turned on the stereo, opened the doors to the patio, dragged out a bucket of ice, and wiped the dust and cicada shells off the outdoor furniture. Just as I was about to pop the pink champagne, Iris and Joe appeared in the backyard, carrying a much better bottle, some frosty Krug.

  “Where’s the birthday girl?”

  “Krug?” I asked as Joe handed me the bottle. “Why are you two such show-offs?”

  Joe shrugged and Iris pecked me on the cheek and then we went inside to pour five glasses and wait for the rest of my family to join us.

  “What’d you get her, Pete?”

  “A handbag, a scarf. Some earrings. I don’t know. I’m so bad at that stuff.”

  “Iris? Is that you?” Elaine called from upstairs. “Come up and see my presents! Bring me some champagne!” It was her birthday and she was treating herself to a little girls-only.

  “Sounds like you made her happy,” Joe said.

  “Ladies love me,” I acknowledged. I took the plate of sliced vegetables outdoors to the grill and got started.

  It was a nice August evening; the whole summer, in fact, had been reassuringly temperate after a few short-lived June heat waves. The hundred-year-old maples that shaded our backyard shook with squirrels climbing up, up, up and chipmunks scattering along their trunks. We used to keep a bird feeder out here for the robins and jays, the occasional oriole, but the raccoons kept figuring out how to swipe the feed and we didn’t like having them so close to the house. We still got raccoons back here sometimes, though. Raccoons, rabbits, skunks, all those deer.

  Joe sipped his Krug appreciatively. “Say what you will about the suburbs,” he said, as the grill flamed beneath us.

  “I was thinking the same exact thing.”

  Alec came walking up the path from the driveway, an enormous cake box balanced precariously in his arms.

  “There’s some champagne for you in the kitchen.” I wanted all of us to be festive.

  “Great,” he said as he backed his way into the house. “The cake cost seventy dollars.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Doesn’t it feel like money actually doesn’t mean a thing anymore?” Joe asked. “Like money has been separated from all sense of value?”

  I looked at my old friend, whose wife cleared a million dollars a year. “Sometimes.”

  “It does to me all the time,” he said, and Alec came back out with his glass of champagne.

  “So how’s it going, kid?” Joe asked. “Getting ready to start school?”

  Alec shrugged, glugged his Krug like it was soda pop.

  “Slow down,” I said. “That’s no way to enjoy a good champagne.”

  He rolled his eyes and took a prissy, delicate sip. “I’ve been trying to finish up these small oils before I go,” he said. “But I’ve been working overtime at the store.”

  “Well, you’ll be able to keep working on them at school, won’t you? Taking some studio classes?”

  Alec shrugged, then glugged the rest of his champagne. “I guess.”

  “What will you be taking?”

  “Just, I don’t know, some painting, an English class.”

  “Anthropology,” I said. “Studio pottery.”

  “The potatoes are boiling over, Dad.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Here, you watch the vegetables. I’ll go—”

  “No, it’s okay, you guys hang out,” he said. “I’ll make the potatoes.”

  “No, but there’s a secret—”

  “You want me to do that wasabi thing, right?” he said. “I’m on it.”

  “You know how to do the wasabi thing?”

  “You stir wasabi into mashed potatoes,” he said. “It’s no big deal.” Why did he have to deflate my wasabi thing? It was a big deal, completely wonderful, an unexpected, hard-to-place spicy kick in a bowl of fatty off-white potatoes. Jerk.

  “He looks good, Alec,” Joe said, a bit generously, after Alec disappeared.

  “Yeah, well.” I spiked some zucchini on my fork to flip them over.

  “No, really,” Joe said. “He looks happy. He’s gonna have a great time at school.”

  “To be honest, I think he looks so damn happy because he’s spending too much time with your daughter.”

  The thing with Laura and Alec had been going on for months now, but Joe and I almost never talked about it. We were each embarrassed, I guess, of our own disapproval. I didn’t want Joe to think I didn’t like Laura (although I probably didn’t), only that I didn’t like her for my son, but this was a finer point than I felt comfortable making. I expected Joe felt similarly about Alec.

  “So what do you think of that?”

  “The truth?” I said, poking the eggplant. We were two middle-aged men standing over a grill; we could have been talking about anything, sports, the weather, our wives.

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “The age difference, everything. And Alec’s at such a vulnerable point right now. I wish he’d just concentrate on his schoolwork and not be involved romantically. Especially with a much older person.”

  “I don’t like it either,” Joe said. “I’m not sure it’s the best thing for her to be dati
ng a kid.”

  “When she moved to the East Village, I thought—”

  “So did I,” Joe said. “In fact, that’s part of the reason I thought she was going so abruptly. So she could sort of cool it with Alec without having to have a difficult conversation. But evidently he spends a couple nights a week there—”

  “He does,” I said.

  “It’s funny, if he’d wanted to date Pauline, I would have been thrilled. I used to think about that, actually, how nice it would be if those two somehow—”

  “But it’s Laura.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think it’s like—” and I wanted to be delicate, but at the same time I really wanted to know what Joe thought. “Is it like arrested development on her part? Or something? I mean, Alec, God bless him, is not necessarily the most mature kid, and you’d think Laura would get a little bored.”

  “Could be,” he said. “I’m not sure how much she’s really dated in her life. She might feel comfortable with a younger person. It could be a power thing.”

  “Does it … does it bother you to think about—”

  “I don’t,” Joe said.

  “Me neither,” I said. Which was a lie. Sometimes, just as I was falling asleep, I heard those bumping, murmuring sounds in my head and wanted to die.

  “Ah.” Joe shuddered (he thought of it, too) and changed the subject. “Anything interesting in the office lately?”

  “Let’s talk about anything else, huh?”

  “Don’t you think?” He looked down into his flute.

  “Let’s see … the office. The office. A girl I like came in today, Roseanne Craig—you know her? Arnie Craig’s kid? I’ve been seeing her periodically, complaining of malaise, some weight fluctuation, amenorrhea, food cravings—”

  “She pregnant?”

  “Swears to God she isn’t, although I probably should have made her take a test.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “She said it would have to be a virgin birth, and I imagine she knows the last time she had sex.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Okay, well, let’s just say for a second she isn’t, for the purposes of this conversation. We bought a car from her six weeks ago, Elaine’s Jeep. She didn’t seem pregnant then, at least.”

  “She’s a car dealer?”

  “Works for her father,” I said. “Comes in about a year ago, complaining of depression, some weight loss — clearly she doesn’t really know why she’s there except her dad wanted her to come.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then she tells me this story. Seems her boyfriend left her and she’s stuck back in New Jersey when she thought she’d spend her life in California running a bookstore.”

  “Tough break.”

  “I tell her she needs a shrink, she says she’s seeing a reflexologist.” We shook our heads at each other. “Then we buy the Jeep from her and she looks great. But then she comes in today again and is absolutely depressed. I like this kid, too. There’s something winning about her.”

  “Will she see someone?”

  “I told her to go to April Frank at Round Hill.”

  “Could it be something else?” he asked. “Not depression? Maybe autoimmune? Endocrinologic?”

  “What, like a thyroid thing?”

  “I don’t know,” he mused. “You see Hashimoto’s every so often, it can present like that. And I had a woman with Addison’s a few years ago. Mood swings, weird food cravings, nausea.”

  “Joe, I’ve seen maybe two cases of Addison’s since I started practicing. Nobody has Addison’s. And she hasn’t mentioned any dizziness, no joint swelling.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt to check.” Joe, God bless him, was a terrific doctor, but one of those docs who ordered every test for every possibility, even if its statistical likelihood was negligible; he’d consider tropical wasting diseases for women who’d never left Bergen County. It was one of the reasons I only rarely talked shop with him: I preferred a different type of induction and chose to use reason and observation instead of expensive and unnecessary testing.

  “I told her I’d try and get her an appointment with April on Monday,” I said. “I’ll see what April thinks, if she thinks it’s depression or something else.”

  “Fair enough,” Joe said. “But still, maybe you should call her, bring her in for some blood work. Or maybe send her to an endocrinologist.” Then he went into the kitchen to get the bottle of champagne. I wondered what his patients thought when he automatically went to the worst-case scenario (pregnant, thyroid, Addison’s). Joe was a high-risk OB, a fraught subspecialty that required infinite diligence; for some reason he’d always found delivering babies who might die more rewarding than delivering babies who were sure to live. He got off on brutal cases: the worse the chances, the more invested he became.

  We resumed our position by the grill and stared down at the vegetables, letting the flame warm our faces. The vegetables were turning nice and glossy, their edges just starting to char.

  “You ever want to hunt, Pete?”

  “Huh?”

  “Like go hunting for a deer or something, then skin it and age it and cook it.”

  I thought of Roseanne gutting a fish on Saranac Lake. “Never once in my entire life, Joe.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that lately,” he said. “With all the deer on the side of the highway, a person gets ideas. What he needs to do to survive. Or what he’s capable of. I’m full of soft skills, Pete, but I’ve been thinking I need to sharpen up a few of my hard ones.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Totally serious,” he said. “I’ve been daydreaming of packing up Neal and Adam and driving up to Maine or somewhere, stopping at L.L. Bean, bagging us a deer.”

  “That’s rather rugged of you, Joe.” I started forking up the finished vegetables and dropping them on the plate.

  “I’m not explaining it well,” he said. “It’s just, I want to actually do something physical, self-reliant. Depend on myself for an entire meal, for more than that. Prove that if it were just me and the woods, I could survive.”

  “You and the woods and L.L. Bean.”

  “I probably won’t do it,” he said.

  “No, no, it sounds … well, it sounds like a midlife something or other, to tell you the truth.”

  “I know.” He chuckled. “Most guys just buy a Corvette, right? Or sleep with a twenty-five-year-old?”

  “Now that’s the spirit.”

  Iris came out onto the patio.

  “Joe, come on, we’ve got to get to the airport.” Pauline was arriving home from a six-week idyll in Tuscany, learning Italian and writing poetry before beginning her career at MIT.

  “I guess it’s that time,” Joe said, turning to shake my hand. “Don’t mention I said anything about the twenty-five-year-old.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” I said. I waved at Iris and watched the two of them descend step-by-step down the lawn to their car, holding hands the way they did at the most casual moments.

  If I had known that it would be the last—no, no, I won’t do that. There’s nothing to gain by doing that. I’ll leave it there: I watched the two of them descend step-by-step down the lawn to their car, holding hands they way they did at the most casual moments, and then turned to bring the vegetables in, to bring out the tuna, to serve my wife her birthday meal. We gathered around the table together. It was a beautiful evening.

  ALEC HAD DONE a pretty good job with the wasabi potatoes, which were maybe a bit kickier than I would have done them but were nevertheless a strong showing. He’d painted Elaine a tiny miniature of the George Washington Bridge at sunrise and had it mounted in a quirky copper frame. She squealed over it even more than she’d squealed over the earrings I’d brought her, which was fine. We put down the two brunellos with impressive ease and sat out in the backyard, the cake plates still cluttering the table, the three of us just enjoying the hum of the night, the buzz of the mosquito zapper,
the faint swoon of Lionel Hampton from inside the house.

  “I was thinking of heading to the Bergen bookstore next Friday,” Elaine said. “If there’s any way to see what books you need, we could probably get them through the school, use my employee discount.”

  Alec shrugged. The idea was that he’d spend the first semester at home, where after all he had a fine studio, since the New School didn’t guarantee housing for transfers. After the first semester, if all was going well, we’d look into something for him in the city. He hadn’t mentioned moving in with Laura in the East Village, which was good because then we didn’t have to fight about it.

  “Fifty-four,” Elaine mused. “Can you believe your wife is fifty-four? I’m an old lady, Pete.”

  “You’re nothing of the sort.”

  “I think I saw in one of your magazines, Mom, that fifty is the new thirty. Which means actually you just turned thirty-four.”

  “Trust me when I tell you fifty-four is not the new thirty-four,” she said. “But don’t I wish it were.”

  We were quiet then. I wondered about Elaine’s wish to return to thirty-four. Those were nice times, I know. We were new parents, just moved to Round Hill; I was building up my reputation at the hospital and Elaine was making friends in the neighborhood. But it was before she’d gone back to teaching, which gave her so much satisfaction, before I’d really established myself, before we’d gotten to know Alec as a person. In many ways, I was a happier man now than I was at thirty-four. In many ways, that particular evening, I was as happy as I’d ever been.

  “What are you thinking about, Pete?”

  “Musing,” I said. “A bit drunkenly.”

  “What about you, Al?”

  “The same.” He reached out with his fingers and stole a chunk of cake, just like his mother did when she wasn’t worried about her figure. Then he licked it off his fingers one by one. Just like her.

  In the back of the yard, on the southwestern corner of the property line we shared with the Kriegers, two small deer pushed their tentative way out of a clump of lilac bushes. They were adolescent, probably female, since they were undersized and still spotted. Usually deer like that presented in much bigger groups. I wondered if their mother had been hit by a car.