Was she fixed now? Was that what Dr. Baer was trying to tell her? It couldn’t be. No one in her life would ever consider her “cured.” At least once a day someone told her to lighten up. Every time she talked to her sister, Claire said, “Calm down. Stop worrying.”
But she couldn’t. That was the thing. Martha would have loved to stop worrying, but she didn’t know how. Maybe Claire thought it was crazy, the way Martha always thought there was a murderer around every corner, or that she had stomach cancer, or that she was going to die in a car crash. But the thing was, those things happened. They happened every day to lots of people. And so she couldn’t understand how other people just walked through life, unconcerned, not even considering the possibility that tragedy could strike at any moment.
How did these people just assume that they were going to live a full and safe life, when all evidence pointed the other way? When there were so many ways for people to die, so many different ways that people could get hurt—just walking down the street, or even sitting at their desks at work—wasn’t it a miracle that anyone made it through the day at all?
As the session was ending, Martha had stood up and looked straight at Dr. Baer, to make one more attempt to try to get her to understand. And now, the last thing she’d said was playing over and over again in her head: “I can’t fold another pair of pants with whales on them,” she’d said. “I’ll die if I do.”
CHAPTER 3
In the Coffey house, there was always a list taped to the refrigerator. At the top, it was titled: THINGS WE NEED. When the list got too full, or most of the items had been crossed off, someone would tear it down and start a new list with the same heading. The title was always capped and underlined, as if to stress that yes, this is important, these aren’t just things we want, these are things we need.
Weezy couldn’t even remember when the list had started. She supposed it was when she and Will first moved into the house, over thirty years ago. They were so young then, barely out of college, and at that time they needed everything. But times were different, and they didn’t ask their parents for help or just charge everything, like kids would today. Neither of them even had a credit card yet, and they had a whole house to fill. So they made a list to prioritize what they were going to buy first. Weezy remembered their deciding to buy a bed and a couch, but waiting almost two years to buy a dining room table. Most of the house sat empty for those first few years, but the list always made them feel like it was only temporary.
It was on that list that Weezy told Will she was first pregnant. She’d gotten home from the doctor, so excited, and she’d added A Crib to the list. So clever, she thought. She stood back and looked at it and laughed and even jumped up and down a little bit. She was giddy the whole day, waiting for Will to come home and find out that they were going to start their family. It was almost perfect, the way she asked him to check the list to see if she’d added milk, and how he scanned it quickly, taking a moment to let it sink in, to believe what he’d read. He turned around to face her with a look of disbelief on his face. Neither of them could believe it, really, that they were capable of something so amazing, so fantastic. They were so proud of themselves, as if no one before them had ever accomplished such a thing.
Of course, when Martha was two months old, and Weezy found out that she was pregnant again, there was no such moment. Instead, she’d sat on the kitchen floor and cried up a storm. She never told Claire this story. They were delighted when the baby came, of course, but on that day, newly pregnant with a fussy infant, she had cried. Holy moly, had she cried.
Once the list had been up there for so long, it just seemed necessary. Each family member wrote down whatever it was they needed, and it was all in one place. Today, the list contained the following items: Grape-Nuts, lightbulbs, car inspection (Volvo), AA batteries.
When Max was home, the list was filled with food: Cheetos, Oreos, turkey, Honey Nut Cheerios. Max still ate like a teenager, ravenous, shoveling food in his mouth like he hadn’t eaten in days. He was twenty-one now, going to be a senior in college, but he seemed younger to Weezy. His limbs still looked too long for his body, his smile a little sheepish, like he knew that he had grown up to be handsome, but he had no idea how or when it had happened.
Once, when Claire was in high school and in a particularly foul adolescent mood, she added A Life to the list. It was after they’d forbidden her to go on a weekend trip with a group of friends to someone’s unsupervised shore house. Claire had screamed in the way that only a fifteen-year-old girl can. She’d narrowed her eyes and accused them of abuse, and denying her the right to any fun at all. “Just because you have no lives,” she’d said, “and just because you are socially void, doesn’t mean that I have to be.”
Will had found the list in the morning while making coffee, and he’d brought it upstairs to Weezy, who was still in bed, and the two of them had laughed and laughed. “What a little shit,” Weezy had said, and Will snorted. They saved the list, thinking that someday they’d show it to Claire, maybe when she had a teenager of her own. “To show her what a horror she was,” Will said.
Martha had once added Peace to the list, during the first Iraq War, and Weezy was touched that she had such a sensitive daughter. (She was also a little concerned about Martha’s obsession with war, natural disasters, and just horrible news in general, but she tried to focus on the sensitive part.) Claire had ripped down that list, saying that she didn’t want any of her friends to see it, because it was “beyond embarrassing.”
“Why do we even have this list?” Claire had asked that day. “Things we need? It makes us seem so desperate. God, we aren’t poor.”
Weezy loved lists. They made her feel powerful. Today she sat down with her coffee to make a list for the day. Shore, she put at the top. Then underneath that she wrote, grocery store. She put her pen down and took a sip of coffee. She’d been trying to get commitments from all of her children to go to the shore house for a week in August. She and Will would stay on for another week after, but she wanted all of her children there together. Was that too much to ask?
They’d all been responding in a casual way, “Sure, Mom, probably.” And now here it was, August 1, and she still didn’t have a real answer from any of them. Not even Martha, who was living with them. It was like none of them knew that things took planning, like they all expected her to just wait for them to make up their minds, and then rush around to get ready for it.
Weezy called Claire for the third time that week. As soon as she said, “Hello,” she could hear Claire sigh. “Mom, I told you I’d try. I’m not sure if I can take the time from work.”
“It’s less than a month away,” Weezy pointed out. She tried to stay calm. “Have you even talked to them about it? Have you asked? I’m trying to finalize everything.”
“I’ll ask today, Mom. I promise. But they might say no.”
“Well, see what you can do. Your sister would love to spend some time with you. And Max, too. He’s bringing Cleo. And your Aunt Maureen will be there for sure, although it’s looking like Ruth and Cathy can’t make it. Neither can Drew, which is too bad.”
“Max is bringing Cleo?” Claire asked.
“Yes. He asked if he could, and I said it was okay, of course.”
Claire stayed quiet for a few moments and Weezy wondered what she was thinking. They’d all met Cleo last year, when Max had brought her for a visit. Right after they’d all been introduced, Weezy and Claire went to the kitchen to get drinks for everyone, and Weezy whispered, “She’s a bombshell.” It was the only word she could think of to describe Cleo.
“Mom.” Claire laughed. She’d started to say something, but then stopped and nodded. “She really is, isn’t she?” And the two of them had bent their heads together and giggled like girlfriends at the pretty little bombshell that Max had brought home.
Weezy had warned her sister before she came over for Thanksgiving. “Just so you know, Max’s girlfriend is quite a showstopper.” Ma
ureen had laughed and said something about Weezy’s being a protective mother. “No, it’s not that,” Weezy said. “She’s just … she seems older. She seems, well, very sexual.”
Maureen had laughed again, but when she got to the house and met Cleo, she was visibly taken aback. She recovered, walked over to Cleo to introduce herself, and tripped just as she got near her. Maureen put her hands straight out, ended up pushing Cleo down on the couch to break her fall, and the two of them landed tangled together. They pulled themselves up and off of each other, and then sat side by side on the edge of the couch.
“I’m Max’s clumsy aunt,” Maureen had said. Claire, Martha, Cathy, and Ruth had watched the whole thing with their mouths hanging open. Cleo brushed off her arms and insisted she was okay, that there was no problem. She’d even laughed.
Later in the kitchen, as Weezy poured Maureen a glass of wine, she said, “I told you.”
“You weren’t kidding,” Maureen said. “Good lord.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t expect Max to bring home a lovely, pretty girl. She did. But Cleo was something else altogether. She seemed out of place in their house, like a runway model that had been dropped out of the sky and into their Thanksgiving. She was nearly as tall as Max, and she wore strange, funky outfits that looked amazing on her, like the fake fur vest that kept shedding, so that little tufts flew behind her when she walked, making Will sneeze.
Weezy was immediately worried that she was too much for Max. She wanted Max to date someone just a little less stunning, someone who didn’t seem like she would break his heart so easily. And so, although Cleo seemed perfectly polite and nice, Weezy prayed every day that they would break up.
Claire had defended Cleo. “Just because she’s so pretty doesn’t mean she’s not a good person,” she’d said. Claire was always protective of Max, and she’d gone out of her way to be nice to Cleo.
But Weezy could hear something in Claire’s voice now, like she didn’t want Cleo to go to the shore for some reason. Maybe Claire finally sensed that Cleo wasn’t the right match for Max? Weezy started to ask Claire about it, but Claire interrupted her.
“Okay, Mom. I’ll ask at work and let you know, okay? I’ll call you later.”
Weezy hung up and started to cross the item off her list, but then realized she couldn’t because it wasn’t taken care of yet. She did add Empty dishwasher to the list, and then crossed it off, because she’d already done that and it made her feel like she had accomplished something.
She sipped her coffee, which was starting to get cold, and tried to plan out her day. There was so much to do, and already she was exhausted. How was it that even as her children got older, it seemed harder to get things done? It was supposed to be the other way around, she was pretty sure of that. But it seemed like the more she tried to get things in order, the more she tried to corral them, the more they squeezed out of her grasp like a group of little greased pigs, determined to do the opposite of whatever she wanted.
WEEZY COFFEY HAD ONCE BEEN Louise Keller. No one called her Weezy until she met Will, when they were freshmen at Lehigh University and were seated next to each other in World Civ class. She’d introduced herself as Louise, but the next day Will called out to her from across the quad, “Hey, Weezy!” It made her laugh, made her heart beat faster to hear him call her that. (Of course, if she’d known it was going to stick, she would have put a stop to it right away.)
They were in college, and everyone was new to everyone else, and this crazy nickname took the place of her real name. Half of her friends from college never even knew her as Louise. With time, even her parents and sisters adopted the name, and eventually she just stopped fighting it. She almost forgot that she’d ever been Louise in the first place.
Even her own children sometimes referred to her as Weezy when talking to each other or to their friends. And a couple of times in high school, when Claire was annoyed, she’d say, “Chill, Weeze,” which made her sound like a frozen treat.
Weezy had graduated from Lehigh with a degree in education, even though she had never really wanted to be a teacher. Her mother had pushed her toward it, telling her that it was a doable profession for women. Weezy took a job in a sixth-grade classroom for one year, and then she’d gotten pregnant with Martha and then Claire, and she never went back.
She hadn’t missed it. After her first week of teaching, she knew she wasn’t going to like it, but she had committed to it, so she gave it a try. The kids she taught were right on the brink of adolescence, that time when they don’t quite fit in their bodies, when they can turn nasty in a second and gang up on each other, on teachers, on anyone, really.
It didn’t make sense for Weezy to work those first few years, not with two babies at home. When both of the girls were in school, she’d started looking into other jobs. “But not teaching,” she told Will. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go back to work, but she felt like she should. Not for money reasons—they’d actually been quite fortunate, inheriting enough from Will’s father to buy the house, and it wasn’t like they lived an extravagant life. No, it was more that Weezy had always talked about how women had the right to work, how they were equal, and now she felt that she should act on it.
She’d worked on and off for years—at the front desk of a medical office, as the office manager of a small law firm, and most recently at an accounting firm running the day-to-day operations of the office. She’d been there for almost six years, and she couldn’t say she was sorry when they started suggesting they were going to eliminate the position.
The secret she never told anyone—not Will, not Maureen, and certainly not her mother—was that she much preferred the times when she was at home, when she wasn’t working. During those years she was able to make her life more orderly, was able to spend more time with the kids and Will. And even though it had felt chaotic a lot of the time with three kids and a dog, she still loved it.
Her favorite times were Sunday nights, when the house was clean and picked up, the laundry was done, the lunches for school were made and sitting in brown bags in the refrigerator, homework was done, and everyone was asleep. It was those nights when Weezy felt she’d accomplished the most, when the quiet of the house buzzed through her, made her feel like she’d won a prize.
Maybe it would have been different if she’d majored in something besides education, something that she was interested in. But then again, maybe not. Her parents had always told her she was the smart one, right in front of Maureen, like Maureen wasn’t even there. In their eyes, Maureen was the pretty one. “Maureen will marry well,” her mom said once, but that wasn’t true. Maureen had married an awful man, and they’d stayed together long enough to have two kids and then he’d left, moved clear across the country and barely saw his children.
No, it had been Weezy that had married well, married a kind man who was a caring father and a good provider. It had been Maureen who had found a career she loved and raised Cathy and Drew practically on her own. Sometimes Weezy wondered if they’d almost done it on purpose, fulfilled the part of their lives that their parents doubted they would, just to show them they could.
Weezy found herself overcompensating when she talked about women in the workplace, as if her children were going to pick up on her desire to stay at home and get some sort of subliminal message that told them women couldn’t make it. No, she didn’t want that. She couldn’t raise two daughters and let them think there was anything they couldn’t do.
Her rants became almost background noise to her children. They were so used to hearing her go off on the way the world viewed women, in a commercial, or a TV show, or a billboard. She wanted to make sure that they knew it wasn’t right, but sometimes she wasn’t even sure if they were listening.
She remembered once overhearing a friend of Claire’s say that she “wasn’t a feminist or anything,” and Weezy had scolded her. “Do you know what a feminist is?” she’d asked. “Do you even know what you’re saying by denying that? Do
you think you’re worth less simply because you’re a woman?”
The girls had all giggled at being called women. They were twelve and uncomfortable at the thought. Claire had sat there, her face red and hot, trying to get Weezy to stop talking, rolling her eyes to the top of their sockets, saying, “God, Mom, come on, stop!” But Weezy didn’t care. So her child was humiliated by her—so what? Wasn’t that the job of a parent? And when Claire was embarrassed enough to answer back, embarrassed enough to react, well, then at least Weezy knew that she’d been heard.
WEEZY COULD HEAR WILL WALKING around in his office upstairs on the third floor. Sometimes it sounded like he paced back and forth across the room all day long. Will was the head of the sociology department at Arcadia University, a small liberal arts school near their house. He’d started working there in the eighties, when it was still called Beaver College. It had existed as Beaver College for over a hundred years, but as the Internet grew, parents who went searching for “Beaver College” didn’t find the school’s homepage—instead they found themselves on some pretty disturbing pornography sites. And so the school decided to reinvent itself.
Will was a popular professor at the school, teaching classes in sociology and in cultural anthropology. His most popular class was Society and the Cyberworld, which looked at the way culture changed because of technology. He used the name change of the college as his first example, pretending to be a prospective student as he searched the Internet, then faking his surprise at what he found. He always made the kids laugh, as he covered his eyes and shook his head at the results. His students loved him, found him entertaining and engaging. They begged to get into his classes, even after they were already full. He was almost a campus celebrity.
Will had written a book in the late eighties called Video Kids, which had become something of a phenomenon. It was a look at the effect that television and video games had on children. He hit something in the culture at that moment, and his book had become a best seller. He’d appeared on talk shows, and was still invited to sit on panels and give speeches.
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