Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  I took a seat on a midcentury sofa before anyone invited me to.

  “Karen,” Megan said, sitting down opposite me. “I’m so glad you were able to come. I know it’s been a tough time, but I really wanted to meet you and Jacob.”

  Close up, I saw that Megan wasn’t quite the beauty that she seemed to be in her (obviously well curated) Facebook photos, but she was still attractive and slim, with a wide, if thin-lipped, smile. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt and black leggings, an outfit both studiously casual and carelessly chic. I was wearing a long linen skirt and a white top, which made me feel eight million years old and frumpy, but the linen was cool and my legs had turned veiny and bad. I needed to keep them comfortable. And Allie had lied to me and told me I looked like I was a character in a Graham Greene novel.

  “It was kind of you to have us.”

  “Of course!” Megan said. “I mean Dave is so excited to get to know Jake, and he sounds like such an incredible little boy—”

  “He is,” I said. “He’s incredible.”

  “That’s what I hear,” Megan said, and for a moment something uncomfortable passed across her face, the briefest look, which was good. It made me feel better.

  “Mom, you want to meet Friendly?”

  I wanted to not talk to Megan and thus to meet Friendly; I followed you into the second bedroom. That whole room had been totally redone as well—redone in a way that exactly suited you and your interests. On the left-hand shelves were Lego models of Yankee Stadium and the AT-AT cruiser; on the right-hand shelves were sets of elaborate Playmobils. There was a laminate desk just the right size for a six-year-old and a double bed outfitted with Star Wars sheets and blankets. A bookshelf stocked with kid’s books. The iguana lived in an oversized cage on the matching laminate bureau (a bureau that looked brand-new, that seemed certain not to have any clothes in it, since Dave had brought all your clothes back).

  “Dave, how long have you had Friendly?” I asked as you reached into the cage to bring him out.

  “We got him the night I was here!”

  “You did?”

  Why hadn’t you told me? Or had you told me and I’d forgotten? An iguana? Would I have forgotten? Dave shrugged. “I’d been thinking about a pet. I thought it would be fun to let Jake help me pick one out.”

  He’d gotten Friendly for you.

  “Dave, this is a really nice room,” I said. I meant it to come out as an accusation, but of course it just sounded like a compliment.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I wanted to make it comfortable for Jake to stay.”

  So he was going to try to take you. He was! Here it was: the fucker admitting it! He was going to try to take you! Well, he couldn’t. I’d sue the life out of him. I’d sue him with every penny I’d saved up for you. I’d defame him so hard his own mirror wouldn’t be able to look at him. I remembered how.

  I tried to exchange glances with Allie, but she was just gazing approvingly at the Playmobils, and at the view of the George Washington Bridge from the bedroom’s window.

  And then I realized: they had planned it together. There had been some sort of grand conspiracy. Allie didn’t want you, she wasn’t going to take you. She’d told Yuki to call your father and your father was going to take you from me with everybody’s consent. Because your father didn’t even need to sue me—all this time, I’d been thinking he would try to take you, but why? Why would he?

  He could just wait for me to go.

  He could spend the next two years finding a path through some bankrupting legal house of horrors or he could just—wait. And then I’d be gone. And then he could take you. I held on to the desk.

  “Karen?”

  You’d be his.

  “Are you okay? Do you need to sit?” Your fucking duplicitous father. “Do you need to lie down? Our room is right down the—”

  Lie down in your father’s bed! I shrieked at the thought of it, but fortunately I could pretend I was shrieking because you’d placed an iguana in my arms. “Isn’t he cute?” you said.

  I took a breath. I would not—I just would not let myself fall apart. The scaly horror I was holding.

  “Mom? Isn’t he?”

  Deep breath. It’s fine. You’re alive every day that you’re alive. “He’s not as cute as Kelly,” I said, even though I hated Kelly.

  “I wasn’t so sure about him myself,” said Megan, taking him from my arms and putting him back in his cage.

  I took another deep breath, but I still felt faint. All this and an iguana.

  “Come on, Karen, let me get you something to drink.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but Megan had taken me gently by the arm—how fucking sick I must have looked, that she was touching me, thought she had the right to touch me—and we all trooped back into the living room, which, the more I looked at it, seemed like a clear and unimaginative rip-off of a million HGTV renovation shows, and I wondered who this Megan was in her leggings and her granite countertops—who could she really be? Who lived like this? Who got Dave Kersey to live like this? Who was okay renovating a room for the long-absent child of your husband’s son by another woman? Who was okay waiting out that woman’s life so you could bring that child into your home?

  “That’s a nice room,” I said. “Did Dave just put it together?”

  “Well, obviously we added a few things for Jakey,” Megan said.

  “Jake,” I said. “Just—he’s just Jake. I’m the only one who calls him Jakey.”

  “Right, of course,” Megan said, smoothly. “Jake.” She removed a bottle of champagne from the ice bucket, withdrew the cork smoothly. “Mimosa or straight up?” she asked.

  “He’s not going to move here,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Megan said. “We know that. This is just for when he visits.”

  “But even after—even after I die. He’s going to live with my sister,” I said. “With her.”

  “Oh, Karen.” She handed me a glass of champagne. “Nothing is imminent, right? You’re here now, aren’t you?”

  What did she mean? “I just need you to know—”

  “Megan, I just love this print,” Allie said, pointing to something on the wall, and I thought about how I was starting to sound unhinged and how I had to pull it together for the rest of the afternoon. I could call the lawyer as soon as we got home; I could start making provisions in my will. Even after I was gone, he wouldn’t get you without a fight.

  You and Dave had bopped off somewhere else—the den, I surmised, because in a few seconds I heard the beep and clang of a video game. You knew you were supposed to ask permission before you played video games!

  Allie and Megan returned to the couch, smiling, holding mimosas. “She has a Francis Bacon lithograph!”

  “It’s tiny,” Megan said. “It’s the first thing I bought when I started making money. Some people buy cars or go on vacations. I bought art.”

  What did she want, a fucking prize?

  “It’s so beautiful,” said Allie, the traitor.

  “So what was that room like before? The room Jake stayed in?” I asked. “I mean, the last time I was in this apartment”—That’s right, Megan, I was here long before Dave had even heard your name—“it was mostly just storage.”

  “Well, we’ve had it as a guest room for a while,” Megan said. “My parents sometimes come stay, other guests come by.”

  “Where are your parents from?” Allie asked.

  “Tacoma, Washington,” Megan said. “I grew up there.”

  “You’re kidding!” Allie said. “I live in Seattle.”

  “I know,” Megan said. “Dave told me you live on Mercer Island. He said it’s a gorgeous house.”

  Allie blushed. I thought, Jesus Christ, they’ll follow you to Seattle, they’ll follow you everywhere. Words were crowding in my brain: LegoStarWarsFrancisBacon.

  “We really love the location,” Allie said.

  “Are your parents still alive?”

  Megan blinked at
me. “They are.”

  Allie, giving me a quick look, deftly moved the conversation to the Pacific Northwest—skiing, hiking, Friday Harbor, all that shit—while I thought about my breathing exercises, which I tried to do subtly, so as not to look like I was having problems. I replayed the mantra: None of us know what the future holds. None of us can control the future. I get to live every day I’m alive. I will not melt down and humiliate myself.

  I thought of the codeine in my purse. I still kept codeine in my purse. It would help me get through this. If only I could stand.

  “And then when I was a kid, we’d spend summers in Yachats, on the coast in Oregon,” Megan said, still musing on her childhood. My purse was in the corner of the room. I could have probably gotten there, and would have, but Allie kept flashing me warning looks: sit down, sit down, relax, it’s going to be okay.

  Could I still believe anything she said? The bedroom, the iguana, the toys: clearly your father planned to keep you in his life in a serious way. I thought about the codeine and how I could create a provision in my will limiting the amount of time he’d get to see you. I was pretty sure I could do something like that. Like a sort of permanent restraining order. I could figure out how to do that, or someone could.

  “Have you ever been to the Shakespeare festival in Ashland?” Allie asked.

  From the den, I heard a series of loud beeps and then an alarming crash.

  “Are they okay in there?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s just NHL hockey,” Megan laughed. “Dave wanted to get him Spec Ops and I was like, are you kidding? He’s six years old! But you know boys.”

  “Spec Ops?” I slumped. “Dave thought that was—appropriate?” Spider-Man 3. I had lost, I had completely lost.

  “Oh, you know, he’s just so excited,” Megan said. “He’s been learning everything he can about six-year-old boys, but sometimes I think he forgets himself. He doesn’t remember how violent these games can be.”

  “How has he been learning about six-year-old boys?”

  “My kids weren’t allowed to play Spec Ops till they turned ten,” Allie said. She took a sip of her mimosa.

  Megan had already downed hers. “He’s doing his best,” she said, and looked at her hands.

  “I have to say I just love this view,” Allie said.

  “Thanks.” Megan perked up. “It’s pretty great, isn’t it? It’s the reason we’ve stayed here. And the commute isn’t bad. How long did it take you guys from the Upper West Side? Twenty minutes?” She stood, went to the fridge, messed around with something in there, came back to the table empty-handed. So she was nervous too? But what did she have to be nervous about? She had won and I had lost.

  “Karen, Dave told me you’re a political consultant. That must be fascinating.”

  Oh shit, we were going to do this now. “Sometimes,” I said.

  “What are some of the campaigns you’ve worked on?”

  I took a breath, then I told her about Griffith, and I told her about some of the other big ones—the congresspeople she’d pretended to have heard of, the various statewide elections. I found that the more I talked the easier it was to breathe, and the easier it was not to panic. I had to stop panicking if I was going to get through this. It would be okay. I’d talk to the lawyer tomorrow. I had codeine in my purse.

  Allie mentioned that I had single-handedly saved Ace Reynolds’s career four years ago and that I was working for him again, and of course Megan remembered Ace—who didn’t?—and asked if it was hard saving candidates from the brink of their own self-destruction.

  “Not for Karen,” Allie said. “It’s what she’s best at. She makes sure her candidates look superhuman. Infallible. By the time she was done with the Griffith campaign, people wanted to vote for him to be God.”

  That wasn’t really true, but Megan nodded anyway. “I can imagine. You seem like you’d be great at that.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do I seem like that?”

  “And you’re a banker?” Allie said.

  “Sort of,” Megan said. “I’m more like a researcher. I travel to South American markets to find out more about industries Citi might want to invest in.”

  “What sorts of industries?” Allie poured herself more mimosa and topped my glass full of orange juice, and I took that opportunity to get up, pop one of my codeines, wait for the soft flood of nothingness to take over. I felt bad that I’d resorted to it but knew I’d feel better soon and would also forget that I’d felt bad. Which was one of the nice things about codeine, as opposed to Xanax. And I took only thirty milligrams.

  While Megan babbled about steel and industry and Brazil and manufacturing, you and Dave came to the table, and Dave poured you some orange juice, and then you grabbed a bagel from the bowl and Dave cut it for you, and I just watched. The codeine wasn’t even really kicking in yet, but just knowing it was inside me gave me a feeling of calm, a feeling of floating away from myself, like I could just watch this and see what it looked like when you and Dave hung out. What did it look like for him to cut a bagel for you? Did he know you preferred butter to cream cheese? He did not, but you corrected him. Did he know you liked a slice of tomato on your buttered salt bagel, the only time you would ever let a fresh tomato cross your little lips? He did not. You draped the tomato on your bagel, sat down, across from me.

  “Hey, Mom,” you said.

  “Hey, Jakey,” I said. “You having fun?”

  You nodded, stuffed your mouth full of bagel. Dr. Susan said that one of the best things I could do at any time but especially when I was feeling panicky—Jake I’m dying—was to just concentrate on the actual sensations around me. What was around me? The air, the feeling of the linen of my skirt. The wooden seat I was sitting on. The smell of apple air freshener and mimosa and the salty briny smell of smoked salmon. Capers. My sister’s perfume. The sight of your half-chapped lips, the exact slope of your nose. The thick black lushness, the absurd lushness, of your eyelashes. The sandy wavy brown of your hair. The way your ears curved like shells. The yellow around your irises. Your smooth white neck, and the point of your left clavicle under the skewed collar of your New York Yankees T-shirt.

  The chomping noise you made as you ate your bagel.

  I felt the codeine splash up against my insides like water. It took away the panic but not the pain.

  I DON’T REMEMBER much about the rest of that afternoon except that we stayed for what seemed to be way too long, and at the end I needed to plead exhaustion so that we could get out of there. Allie and Megan seemed to be on very good terms; every time there was a pause in the conversation, one of them would reel it back to the Pacific Northwest and all the wonderful things to do there, to eat there, all that fucking salmon.

  At one point, Dave asked you when school started, and you said the Tuesday after Labor Day, wasn’t that right, Mom? It was right, and it sent me into a spin because the Tuesday after Labor Day was really only nine days away, and we still had so much to do: doctors’ forms and new sneakers and lunch boxes and the rest of it. We would get your supply list any day now, and the dates for back-to-school night. I wondered if this would be your last year at PS 199. Maybe next year at this time we’d have already moved to Seattle. I had the strangest sensation of wanting to see my father.

  On the way out, Megan pressed a bag of salt bagels in my hand and said she looked forward to seeing us all soon. Then Dave said he wondered if they allowed iguanas on the subway and you started to laugh, and there was some noise about bringing Friendly in for a visit, and I tried to crack a joke about Friendly the iguana eating Kelly the hamster and you said, Mom, everyone knows iguanas are vegetarian! And I said how silly I was to forget.

  Then everyone hugged everyone. I tried not to feel anything when I hugged Dave, and think I pretty much succeeded, but I couldn’t help but feel Megan’s soft skin, or smell her pretty hair. The last hug administered was between Megan and you, and she folded you into her arms like she really was very fond of you and y
ou were fond of her. I didn’t know why that should have been the case, really. You two barely even knew each other.

  And then the car came around and I promptly fell asleep in the front seat, except that wasn’t what it was, I didn’t fall asleep, I passed out because I had taken another codeine in the bathroom around the same time you and Dave and Megan started talking about all the fun there was to be had in Labor Day in Quogue. Can we go? you asked. We cannot, I said, and for once Dave didn’t push it. “Next time, bud,” Dave said to you, and I ignored him.

  At home, Allie started packing up. I was in the living room and she was in your bedroom, trying to break the laws of physics by cramming everything she’d bought over the past three weeks into her Samsonite. I went to the doorway and watched her for a while. Tomorrow Julisa would return; tomorrow I had to go to the clinic; tomorrow I would not be able to take her to the airport.

  “Are you going to let Dave have him?” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “When I die,” I said. “Will you let him take Jacob?”

  “Karen,” she said. The light in the bedroom was dim and my sister looked older.

  “Please don’t let him take my son.”

  “Karen, I won’t,” she said.

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise,” she said. She returned to her packing.

  “Really promise?”

  “Karen, you have to stop.”

  “Please?”

  “I really promise,” she said, but she was jamming underwear into the corner of her bag and therefore not looking at me and I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t entirely believe her, nor could I ask her to keep making promises to me about how she’d act after I died when I couldn’t force her to accept that I was going to.

  She put her head in her hands for a moment, then continued her packing.

  “I wish you weren’t leaving,” I said.

  “I can be back in days,” she said.

  “No, you can’t,” I said, because it was true—she had a life in Seattle to attend to. She had her family. A daughter with a septum ring!