A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Get your canvas, Al,” Elaine whispered, as if human voices still had the power to scare suburban deer away.

  “If Joe were here, he’d shoot them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He told me today,” I said, “he’s had a notion to take Neal and Adam up to Maine and go deer hunting. Stop at L.L. Bean first.”

  “You’re kidding,” Alec said, shaking his head. “Laura would just love that.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

  “Joe wants to go shoot deer?”

  Suddenly I was embarrassed for my friend. Round Hill obstetricians, especially of the Jewish persuasion, did not frequently admit to red-state bloodlust. I shrugged and watched the deer watch us, their huge black eyes hopeful and slightly dazed in the last light of the day. From the Kriegers’ side of the lawn, maybe ten feet in front of the deer, Kylie Krieger emerged in mustard-splattered overalls with half a hot dog in her hand. Kylie was probably five or six, a freckle-faced urchin who waved maniacally at me when I passed her in the street.

  “I want to feed them!” she squealed. Then she looked at us guiltily.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Elaine called.

  “I want to feed them!” she said again, and she thrust the hot dog in her palm out toward the deer, who looked at her curiously.

  “Well, why don’t you, then?” Elaine said.

  “Kylie! Kylie!” Mark Krieger, who back then I had no idea could throw a coffee mug as hard as I now know he can, came running into our yard after his daughter. “Kylie, what did I tell you about coming onto the other people’s lawns—”

  “It’s okay,” Elaine called. “We’re happy to have her.”

  Mark looked up at us gratefully. “We’re trying to get her to stand still for, I don’t know, more than five seconds at a time.”

  “But Daddy, I want to feed the deer!” And then she threw the hot dog with all the might in her five-year-old body, and the deer backed into the lilac bush and hustled away, immune to the charms of our tiny neighbor.

  “Nooo!” she shrieked as the deer scuttled into the darkness of the tree line.

  “Oh, Kylie. You scared them.”

  “Where’d they go, Daddy? Where did they go?”

  “Honey, deer don’t like hot dogs. That’s what I was telling you—”

  But it was too late. She flung herself into her father’s arms and began to weep uncontrollably, hitting her palms against her father’s chest again and again. I want to feed the deer. I want to feed the deer. Mark shot us an apologetic look and we shook our heads in sympathy. Maybe later I’d knock on their door, see if they wanted to come over for a glass of cognac. He looked like a man who could use a drink. He retreated back to their side of the lawn, and I could hear his wife start to panic. “Jesus, Mark, what happened to her? She’s hysterical!”

  “God, you couldn’t take me back there for all the world,” Elaine said. “Temper tantrums and crying jags? No way.”

  “But I thought you said you wanted to be thirty-four again.”

  “I guess I forgot.”

  “Come on.” Alec laughed. “I wasn’t really like that, was I?”

  “You?” Elaine grinned. “Oh, no, you were a perfect angel all the time. You have frosting on your nose.”

  He wiped his nose with his thumb, then licked the frosting off his thumb. “I was an angel, wasn’t I?”

  “From the day you were born,” Elaine said, and then we were all quiet again for a while, the throb of Kylie’s hysterics still thumping in our ears.

  “I have to tell you guys something,” Alec said.

  This should have served as a warning for us to jump to our guards immediately, but the night was so languorous, our sense of peace so palpable, that our guards were impossible to find.

  “Laura and I are moving to Paris.”

  It didn’t even register. Not as a joke, not as a threat, not as a sentence. I reached out and cut myself another tiny sliver of cake.

  “I’m sorry, Alec,” Elaine said. She waved away my offer of half the slice. “You want to what?”

  “I don’t want to anything,” he said. “I’m doing it. Laura and I are moving to Paris in two weeks. She knows some people there, some guys from Tunisia, actually, who she harvested grapes with last spring. They’re opening up an art gallery-slash-clothing store, and they need someone to manage it, and they’ll pay her off the books.”

  “That’s great for Laura,” Elaine said, “but what on earth does that have to do with you?”

  “I’m going with her,” he said.

  “But you’re not,” I said. Only slowly were any of the words he was saying even making sense in my brain. “You’re starting school next week.”

  “No,” Alec said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m not going to school. I’m moving to Paris. With Laura.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I said. “You already registered. You picked your classes.”

  “I’m going to withdraw,” he said. “I’m moving to Paris.”

  “Alec—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’re starting school. Next week. You picked your classes. We put down the deposit. You’re starting school.”

  “Actually, I’m going to withdraw,” he repeated. “Look, I’m sorry, I know you’re disappointed, but I still feel that my education would be better served if I went to Europe and—”

  “Alec, I don’t think you’re hearing me. You are starting school. Next week.” I couldn’t even pronounce the word “Paris.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I know you like Laura a lot. I know she seems like a very mature, interesting older woman. I know it seems like she’s had a lot of life experience—”

  “Dad, this isn’t about—”

  “Let him finish, Alec.”

  “Laura Stern is not going to take you anywhere. You are not withdrawing from school. You are not moving to Paris. You understand me?”

  “Dad, unfortunately you can’t really tell me what to do anymore,” he said. “I turned twenty-one in July. I’m an adult.”

  “You are hardly an adult, and I absolutely can tell you what to do. We’ve indulged your bullshit long enough, and you are going to start classes next week like we agreed on.”

  “Pete, lower your voice.” I hadn’t even realized I was yelling.

  “Dad, look, I’ll refund you the money—”

  “Do you honestly think this is about money?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course it’s about money.”

  “You are out of your mind, you know that? This isn’t about money. This is about you. You and your life. We have been, in my opinion, way too indulgent with you as you’ve dicked around for the past couple of years, but no more. You are going to school, you are graduating from school, and after that, if you want to move to Paris with some slut with a criminal record—”

  He stood. “What did you call her?”

  “Alec, sit down.”

  “No, I won’t. What did you call her?”

  “Alec, sit.”

  “A slut with a criminal record? Is that what you think of her? She’s only your best friend’s daughter, Dad. She’s only someone you’ve known all her life.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I’ve known her all her life. And if you think for one second you are getting on a plane to go to Paris with her, you are so out of your mind you should be committed like she was.”

  “Fuck you, Dad.”

  “Alec, you will not talk to me that way.”

  “Fuck you—”

  We only stopped when we heard the soft bubble of Elaine crying. “Please,” she whispered. “Please. It’s my birthday. Please can we not fight today?”

  Alec sat back down, but his arms were crossed over his chest and he was glaring at me. I would have switched places with Mark Krieger in an instant, if only I could pick the kid up in my arms and tell him he’d been a bad boy and lock him up in hi
s room for the rest of the week.

  “Could we not talk about this right now?” Elaine said. “Please?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  I just continued to glare at him.

  “Next week,” Elaine said. “For me, okay? Do me a favor, just cool it for one week. You can talk about this again, but in the meantime, don’t withdraw yet, okay, Alec? Okay? And we’ll talk about this more on Friday.”

  “But—”

  “Please,” Elaine said. She wiped her nose with her wrist. “Friday night, you two can get together and talk about all of this. But not until then. Give it a week. Please.”

  “Fine,” Alec said. He was chastened.

  I stood, stormed into the kitchen, slammed the door, slammed some dishes in the sink. I wiped the champagne flutes off the counter in one furious gesture and let them smash on the floor.

  Elaine had had fifty-three happy birthdays before this one. God knows you can’t win them all.

  I WENT TO work Monday morning determined not to let Alec’s temporary insanity disrupt my entire week. Between appointments, on the exam room phone, I called the New School registrar to make sure the kid hadn’t withdrawn; he hadn’t. I asked them, if he called, not to let him, but they said that wasn’t really in their power. I begged. They said no. I hung up.

  I had a packed day at the office, which was terrific as far as keeping me distracted went; if I was lucky, there’d be some huge crisis right around seven o’clock, which would keep me in the hospital until I was too exhausted to think straight. Elaine and I hadn’t talked about Alec the whole weekend. We went about our separate lives and were cordial with each other even as we chose to dine separately — our heads, such as they were, buried in work. As for Alec, he was doing triple shifts at Utrecht and, of course, crashing in the city. I’d had a passing idea to call Joe and talk to him about this, but as I picked up the phone my hand froze and suddenly I couldn’t talk to him, knowing what I might say. It occurred to me that part of me—most of me—blamed him for this. Which was unreasonable, of course. But if children are the sum of their parents, what the hell did Laura say about him?

  So Monday I showed up at the office with no small relief and was soon crushed with patients. An arthritic hairdresser I’d been watching for years, two new diabetics, a few squeezed-in semiemergencies, a hypochondriacal magazine editor with chest pains who thought she was having a heart attack but had actually just strained a muscle in Pilates. A teacher with pretty bad bronchitis. And then a round of college students in for their physicals, armed with somber-looking sheets I had to sign off on.

  During lunch, I asked Mina to put in a call to April Frank’s office to see if she could squeeze Roseanne in. That evening, luckily for me, but of course not for them, two of my patients were admitted to the ER with various middling-to-serious complaints, so I stuck around to hold their hands as specialists came by and did the voodoo that they did so well. I made rounds. I grabbed a dinner at the hospital cafeteria: chicken piccata, raspberry Jell-O. I thought about going to the JCC, but when I looked at my watch I saw it was almost ten. I drove home, making up a long route, onto the Palisades for no particular reason, and by the time I got home, the lights were out as I’d suspected they’d be.

  The week progressed in this same busy fashion: Janene came back from Nantucket midweek with a box of homemade caramels for the office—this is what she did when she went on vacation, sat around with her kids and went swimming and made candy. It was a distinctly female thing, I thought, to bring presents for the office; never once when I’d gone away had it occurred to me to bring anything back for anyone other than myself, and when Vince Dirks traveled — usually to some godforsaken place to shoot long-range photographs of squalor—all he brought back was some kind of stomach bug or strange rash or both. Elaine started classes. I got Roseanne an appointment in two weeks’ time to see April, who was apologetic but overwhelmed by the number of patients she had clamoring at her door.

  But still, my stomach rumbled with the thought of my oncoming conflagration with Alec on Friday night. Of course there was some kind of chance he would return to reason, decide to go to the New School as we’d agreed, and put thoughts of Paris and Laura out of his head. There was even some small chance that Laura herself had come to her senses and decided that Paris would be a lot more interesting without a twenty-one-year-old who didn’t speak a word of the language tugging at her sleeve the whole time. True, my hopes were dampened a little by a Wednesday afternoon call from my brother, who told me that Alec had asked his cousin Lindsey for some lastminute French lessons. “What the hell is with that kid this time?”

  I could feel the heat start to rise in my chest. “He’s thinking of studying abroad,” I said.

  “Don’t you need to actually be studying something to study abroad?” I could imagine Phil leaning forward on his ebony desk in his office on the forty-fifth floor. Calling me in between five-hundred-dollar billable hours just to bust my ass.

  “He’s starting the New School in the fall,” I said, heat rising faster now, up my neck, my cheeks. Phil was silent. “Did someone tell you otherwise?”

  “French isn’t such a useful language, Pete. Someone should mention to him, if he really wants to find himself a constructive pursuit, many of the gardeners and restaurant workers in the New York area rely on Spanish.”

  “Fuck off, Phil.”

  “Just trying to be helpful, Pete.”

  I don’t know which one of us hung up first.

  But it did occur to me that week, when I was at my most exhausted, that maybe the proper tactic to take here would just be to relent. Alec would go to Paris, run out of money or patience, yearn for home. Or he and Laura would start to grow apart, and then, alone and unable to find work in a town notoriously unfriendly to outsiders, he’d bide his time for a while before returning to our doorstep, cap in hand, as they say. Or he’d go, they’d have a big fight, and he’d come right home in time to get to school with only a week’s worth of missed classes and very little schoolwork to make up. No matter what, he’d be back at school eventually, which was the important thing.

  But it wasn’t lost on me that this was his senior year, or rather it was supposed to have been his senior year, and that next May there’d be a round of graduation parties for the likes of Neal Stern among others, and we would have to answer endless questions about what Alec was up to — or worse, our neighbors and associates would know better than to ask. Sure, it might sound grand to say, Oh, he’s living in Paris now. But I would know what was at the rotten heart of that: our son working at some Tunisian-owned clothing store and serving as the plaything of a woman half again his age. And I wouldn’t be able to look any of my neighbors or associates in the eye, because it would be likely I wouldn’t have spoken to my son in months or even a whole year.

  And this was what was on my mind when I bumped into Joe in the hospital cafeteria.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked casually. Joe tended not to eat in the hospital cafeteria unless he’d just gotten off a delivery and was starving; otherwise, his practice liked to order in.

  I shrugged and loaded up my tray with baked chicken, salad, and a Coke and watched as Joe assessed the steam-table options with a finicky glint in his eye. Oh, for Christ’s sake, take the chicken, it won’t kill you.

  “Just trying to figure out how to get my kid not to ruin his life.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Just trying to get Alec not to—” And then it occurred to me. “Joe, you know, right?”

  “Know what?”

  “That they’re moving?”

  “Who’s moving?” he asked. “Moving where?”

  Oh, Joe, my ignorant brother. We paid up and found an empty table in the corner of the room. “Joe, this will probably sound as insane to you as it did to me, but you should know that our children are planning to move to Paris together in a week and a half.”

  “Paris? Paris, France?”

  “I thought you knew.”


  “How would I know?”

  At least our own kid had the courtesy to give us some warning. “Evidently Laura knows some Tunisians with a clothing business in Paris,” I said. “Alec thinks he’ll get a better education in the arts if he just, I don’t know, hangs out with her and absorbs the fumes.”

  “She’s leaving?” He looked down at his plate, arranged his fork on his melamine tray. “Already?”

  “Joe, you didn’t talk to her about this? She hasn’t said anything?”

  “I thought she liked it in the East Village,” he said. “I mean, her roommate’s been a little difficult, but she was supposed to get a job, she was looking into it. There’s a yoga studio downstairs from her, Avenue A Yoga. She thought maybe she could get certified to teach.”

  “I guess there’s been a change of plans.”

  “I guess so.” He sighed. He rubbed his bald spot.

  “Any chance you could maybe, I don’t know, say something to her? Tell her this is—”

  “You know, I really enjoyed having her around,” Joe said, picking at his chicken. “It’s been so long since we got to spend time with each other, got to know each other a little,” he said. “It’s been so long.”

  So this was where we were. My son’s future was in the toilet and Joe was strumming his sad guitar. “Look, I don’t think—”

  “Remember that day we all went to the museum? Wasn’t that a great day?” Christ. “I thought to myself, at the end of that day, that this was the sort of thing I’d been missing, the company of my oldest daughter alongside the company of my oldest friend. We were driving home, and I was thinking about how many good times we’d missed over the years because Laura hadn’t been there.”

  “That’s what you were thinking about?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a little abashed. “I know, I know, but I’ve always had a soft spot for that girl, Pete.”

  “I’m not sure you have to write her requiem just yet.”

  “It’s just with Pauline leaving for college, I consoled myself that at least Laura was back in town. That even though my youngest was leaving, my oldest was back in my life.”