Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  “He remembers.”

  Jetpack, I needed my jetpack. “Allie, please,” I said. “Honor my wish.”

  “Karen—”

  “My dying wish.”

  “Karen—” she said. Tomorrow both of us would pretend this conversation never happened, that I never got as manipulative as this.

  “I’m asking you one thing, Allie,” I said. “And if you can’t do that, I don’t know if I can let Jake stay here.”

  “Karen!” she said. She sounded slapped.

  We used to fight a lot, Allie and me, when we were kids. Our bedroom was so crowded with Allie’s stuff, her clothing and her makeup and her field hockey sticks and her bullshit, that just creating a little space of my own in there was next to impossible. When I finally escaped to college I couldn’t get over how free it felt to have that spartan bedroom, that empty closet. And now here I was, living in her house, depending on her to keep me alive.

  I didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything either, for a minute, but then one of us changed the subject, a little bit creaky but we managed it. Soon enough we were talking about maybe going to the house in Friday Harbor next weekend or maybe going shopping, and of course we should visit dad soon, and what did we think of Ross’s tattoo? Secretly, I mean we’d never say anything, but didn’t it look a little bit cool? And a girlfriend in India! We’d both always been a little curious about India, maybe one day we’d go. Even me, I could probably still get there if I tried.

  But just because we changed the subject didn’t mean that I trusted her entirely, until she said, “I miss Mom,” which was exactly what I’d been thinking; I missed our mother. And because we were thinking the same exact thing and remembering the same exact person, I was reassured that we were sisters on the same exact page.

  (Jake, there will always be days in your life, even if you can’t remember me, that you will miss me. That you’ll need me. A person never stops needing his mother.)

  Allie and I turned our attention from the computer, from the lake. We looked at each other; we each had her eyes, and in them we found solace.

  4

  The next morning you were playing Angry Birds on my iPhone when it rang; you picked up, even though you weren’t supposed to. “Oh, hi,” you said, speaking too loudly—for all your pleasure in picking up, you didn’t really have any idea how to talk on the phone. “Yes, I know who you are . . . Yes. Seattle. Yes.” Then you dropped the phone on the bed and lay down next to it.

  “Jake—” Holy shit—was it your father? I lurched, my heart hammering. “Is someone on the phone?”

  “It’s Ace.”

  “Jesus, Jake.” I picked up the phone, a weird tingling in my fingers, either anxiety or nerve damage. “Ace, sorry, my kid likes phones.”

  “He’s spunky, that’s good,” Ace said. “Listen, you know anything about France? That’s where we’re going. I want to make it to Normandy, see the D-day beaches, but Jillie wants to go to some castles. Do you know if they got castles in Normandy?”

  “I’m your campaign manager, not your travel agent.”

  “I know, honey,” he chuckled. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, here it is.”

  “Everything okay by you? You feeling all right?”

  I told him I was. I don’t know, Ace was a decent-enough guy. He cared about me, in his way. He even loved his wife, despite his inane and pedestrian betrayals.

  “Listen, Karen, the real reason I’m calling, my daughter found some Hernandez family videos on YouTube. She thought you should watch them. Hernandez isn’t the most polished gal, but she does have a certain, I don’t know, authenticity. She’s got one of those inspirational my-father-was-a-shepherd stories. You know how people like that.”

  “Really? Her father was a shepherd?”

  “I’m speaking broadly,” Ace said. “I’m wondering if we should send out a little biographical mailing, tell everyone who I was too. You know, she’s not the only one who came from a farm.”

  “Wasn’t your father a teamster?” I asked. “Listen, it doesn’t matter—this isn’t about biography. It’s about results, right? Who can bring city dollars to the district. Who can represent the people. You’ve been doing that for four years. You’ll keep doing it.”

  “Yeah, but I got 2017 to think about.”

  “2017 is four years from now,” I said. “The mayor’s race is tomorrow’s problem. Let’s do one thing at a time.”

  “This is my last chance to make a name for myself before the mayoral primaries.”

  “Ace, we’ve got this,” I said, but I knew he wasn’t satisfied. “I’ll look for those videos.”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  “Go to France and have fun.”

  Despite the pins and needles that were now traversing my palms I found my laptop and opened up YouTube. Beverly Hernandez, Beverly Hernandez—I had to click past several videos of a Colombian teenager singing pop songs before I got to a shot of our particular Beverly Hernandez sitting on a couch under a hideous oil painting with a girl who looked to be about eight. I pressed Play.

  “Hi,” said the girl. “My name is Monica O’Neil, and today I am interviewing my grandmother Beverly Hernandez about her life journey for my project about American immigration.”

  The girl drew a breath. Dark curls framed her face; she was wearing a pink sweatshirt and hoops in her ears. “My grandmother Beverly Hernandez grew up on a sugarcane plantation in the Dominican Republic before the evil dictator Trujillo removed the farmers from the property.”

  Although she seemed to be reading from cue cards, she pronounced Trujillo in flawless Dominican. “Her mother decided to escape with her children and go to the Bronx, in New York. I am now going to ask my grandmother what she remembers about being an American immigrant.”

  Beverly smiled at the camera and adjusted her necklace, a fat silver cross. She looked even better in motion than she did in her Facebook stills—her face was so soft and expressive—but the video must have been shot while she was still undergoing treatment, because she was clearly wearing a wig, and not a great one. The fibers looked like nylon.

  “Hello, third graders. I’m happy to speak to you about my journey.” She had a thick borough accent, a hint of Spanish in the vowels.

  “So as you heard, I was born in the Dominican Republic, which is a very small country on an island in the Caribbean Sea. I lived in a little village, and my house had no electricity, which might be hard for you to believe. We did have lots of family, though, and I remember that I loved to play outside with all my little cousins.

  “When I got to New York City, I was six years old. I was very scared. This place—it was nothing like my small village in the Dominican Republic. I had never seen so many people or such big buildings in my whole life. I remember being terrified of everything, the cars, the people, even the other children—I didn’t want to leave my mother’s side. And then that first day, when I started school, I couldn’t speak English, not a word. Not only did I have no friends, I didn’t even have a language to make friends!”

  “Wow,” said the girl, in a tone that said she’d heard this before.

  “That’s why, Monica, when people want to have the ESL classes, or teach classes in Spanish, I think this is a very bad idea. You don’t learn by being catered to that way. You learn by being thrown into the classroom! I learned English in six months. If they had separated me into an ESL class, I might never have learned. And then I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I’d probably be living on welfare or something, unable to get a job because I couldn’t speak the American language.”

  Okay, so she was an English-only welfare fascist—well, she was running as a Republican.

  “And you had to work while you were in school, right?” Monica asked.

  “Mami, I feel like I worked from the day I was born.” Beverly adjusted her necklace again. “Even when I was having my babies, I was working two jobs sometimes. People would
say, How could you work when you have those babies? But I loved working and I loved my girls. I needed to work and I needed my girls.” The shot pointed at the floor for a minute and then came back up, and it occurred to me that one of those daughters was probably holding the camera. “I loved them both. There was no way to choose.”

  “And you went to college?”

  “I went to college, yes, and then I went to graduate school, which is what you do when you want to be something in this country. That is what makes this country so special. Anyone who chooses to get educated, to work hard, anyone who takes responsibility for success, they can do that if they go to college. And now I am a senior administrator at Roosevelt Hospital, which is the biggest public hospital in New York City. I have come very far, very far, because I chose to be educated and I chose to work hard.”

  Bev smiled at the camera, big and toothy, and for a second I was a little concerned. She could take that smile all the way to Congress if she wanted.

  “So what I want for you, and for all your classmates, is to work very very hard and to know that if you don’t give up, if you keep studying, if you don’t let yourself off the hook, you can succeed just like I did. Don’t allow for making excuses. If you’re tired, so what? Everybody’s tired. If you’re broke, so what? I was broke too. Work hard and save your money. You won’t be broke any more, you know? And that is the very simple way to success in this country. People think it’s hard, like you need to figure out a special secret, but it’s really not so hard. Study hard. Work hard. Don’t make stupid choices.”

  Oy, usually I hated this Republican reductive bullshit, but the way Bev was looking at the camera, earnest, her granddaughter nodding along, I found myself, without meaning to—nodding. For just a second. Listen, if Bev could appeal to me, she’d appeal to voters. She seemed friendly and she’d survived cancer and her story really was that perfect mix of inspirational and relatable. Even I could relate to it. Did I ever tell you this, Jake? I took three weeks maternity leave and then it was right back to the office.

  “And if you do right by yourself, working hard, improving yourself,” Bev was saying, “chances are you’ll do right by your family too.”

  I didn’t even think twice about it: I’d just take you to the office, let you nap in your Pack ’n Play while I ran meetings. The first time I took you on the campaign trail, back in 2008, I’d hired a nanny to watch you in hotel rooms while I traversed various counties in congressional districts along the mid-Atlantic. My major candidate that year was Lacey in New York’s Eighteenth—a tight race, a first-time candidate. Whenever we needed a baby for a photo op, I’d race up to the hotel room, wrap you up in something fleecy, and haul you to the nearest stump speech or Walmart opening. You posed in a hundred propaganda shots that year and looked adorable in every one of them.

  My parents were still living in Rockville Centre then, and when the nanny needed a break, my mother would drive upstate to watch you while I coached Lacey through the day’s travails. I remember one night I’d caught some sort of bug and all I could do was lie in bed and moan and tap out emails. This would have been fine, except I had a speech to write for a fund-raising dinner, and I was so nauseated that I couldn’t even sit up, much less write something incredible.

  “Here,” my mother said, sitting at the flimsy hotel desk, “give me the computer.”

  “You already have the baby.”

  “I can handle two things at once.”

  You were such a gorgeous baby, Jacob, really—all rosy cheeks and soft blond hair. I remember looking at you in my mother’s arms and feeling jealous that she had the strength to hold you. “What are you going to do with my computer?”

  “I’m writing your speech.”

  “Mom, stop.”

  “What, you think I don’t know how to write?”

  “You don’t know how to write one of these things.”

  “I’ve heard every last speech any of your candidates has ever delivered,” she said. “I know how this works.”

  Well, that was true—she was so proud of me that she’d become a sort of groupie, tagging along to any rally or fund-raiser where she knew a politician would read a speech I’d written. Weakly, I pointed out where I kept my different templates. You’ve got to thank all those people in that list, I said. And you’ve got to include personal details.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. Then I fell asleep.

  The Eighteenth was so ridiculously tight that year—Republicans were scrambling to stop their hemorrhage in the House, and they thought they could flip the district, tap into working class resentment of the new money “elites” buying lakefront property in the lower Hudson Valley. The Democratic National Committee was panicking, throwing lots of resources our way. I knew that if I blew Lacey, it would look really bad. But what could I do? I shivered then burned, shook with fever, slept in some sort of sweaty delirium. My mother escorted you to the fund-raiser, where she handed Lacey the speech she’d written and then spooned you mashed sweet potatoes in one of the private rooms. Back at the Holiday Inn, I’d gain clarity for a moment, realize I’d abdicated my professional responsibility to my mother, then lapse once more into hallucinatory sleep.

  That was October 20, 2008. October 21, it was like the whole thing had never happened—my head was clear, my stomach settled—and our finance guy reported that my mother’s speech helped earn an additional $175,000 that night. A month later, Lacey won the district by six points, and the Democrats took over the House by an additional twenty-one seats.

  A pretty great story, right, Jake?

  Bev’s story was pretty great too, though. Ace was onto something. If she managed to put together a decent campaign, she could have a fighting chance at this thing. Ace and I would have to work harder than I thought we would for our legacy. As you know, Ace wanted to be mayor one day. And this would probably be the last campaign I’d ever run.

  LET’S RETURN, FOR a moment, to my mother, who recognized what was happening to my father long before the rest of us caught on. In 2010, she packed up the house on Long Island, sold it for a song as the housing market crashed, and moved to the house my sister built for her on Mercer Island. I remember, while she was packing, going through my father’s clothes, his beautiful suits, his hats. I remember being aghast that she was planning to give so much of it away. You were three years old then. You know that picture of you as a toddler with the fedora on? That’s from that time, when we were packing. And the ring—that’s when she gave me the platinum ring my father had worn around his wedding finger every day for decades.

  “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “Daddy almost let it fall down the drain the other day,” my mother said. “He’d be heartsick if he lost it.”

  “Why not give it to Allie?” I asked, although already I had fitted it around my thumb.

  “I thought you’d love it more,” she said. (I think she was right. I haven’t taken it off since, except for surgeries, and the day I had you.)

  For seven months they lived together in Seattle in this very guesthouse, sleeping in twin beds in the bedroom where you sleep now. My mother did a lot of nannying for Allie’s kids during those seven months, even though Allie already had a nanny, a fat Slavic lady my mother didn’t like. Allie kept telling my mom to relax, take it easy, but my mom didn’t know how. When she wasn’t ferrying the kids to school or baseball or dance or soccer, she was cooking dinner or folding laundry. The only thing she didn’t do was take dad to his doctor’s appointments; she said it was because she didn’t like to drive on the highways, so Allie did it, and let the issue rest.

  And then one afternoon, in the guesthouse kitchen, she dropped dead of an aneurysm. She’d been making my father lunch. He was asleep in his wheelchair when she fell to the floor; Camilla found her several hours later. And now we were living in the house where my mother died. We ate there; we slept there. I did all my writing in the room where she did her crosswords. You’d think I would have found it upsettin
g or at least a little creepy. But what a comfort it was—to know she’d lived in these rooms, and to still feel her there unexpectedly, when I turned my head or caught the sight of something hazy from the corner of my eye.

  THE LAST THURSDAY in June, you and Dustin started summer camp on the Bush School grounds. Your hours at camp felt like a little too much time apart, since I’d just as soon have had you home, chatting with me as I tried to figure out how to bury Beverly Hernandez. But I knew camp was good for you, the running around. The normalcy.

  I’d just taken some vitamins and was attending to paperwork, planning a few speaking engagements for Ace, when an email came in from your father. “July 4” was the subject line.

  Christ. July 4 was seven days away.

  “Karen, please let me know if this is too soon, but I can’t stop thinking about Jacob, and if it’s possible, I’d really like to come to Seattle over the holiday weekend. We do not have to spend that much time together—I’d settle for even an hour. Please let me know at your earliest convenience.”

  My earliest convenience? Was he demanding my earliest convenience? From there my line of thinking dissolved into a simple no no no no no. Not now, why right now? And not on his terms, whatever those terms might have been.

  On the other hand, it probably had to happen sooner or later. For you, I mean.

  “Sure,” I typed back, not letting myself outthink myself. “That would be fine.”

  We were supposed to go to the house in Friday Harbor, but Allie and the kids could go without us. Or we could meet them there the next day. No reason to let your father ruin the whole weekend.

  He was still online, wrote back immediately: “Really? You mean it? Oh, you’ve made me so happy, you have no idea. I already booked a room at the Westin. Thank you, Karen, thank you.”

  And at this I clicked off without a response because no matter how much resignation I felt about seeing your father I really didn’t like making him so happy.