“It’s been a while, huh?”
“Wow. What, like, four years or something?” But, really, I knew: it had been almost four years to the day since we’d broken up at Thanksgiving, freshman year of college. We hadn’t seen each other since.
“You look great.”
“So do you.” He did. Energized, happy. Rob at his best. “I was just about to get another drink. Do you want to…?”
After we got our drinks, he pointed at an empty booth. “You want to catch up for a minute?” he said.
In the booth, our knees touched for a brief moment. “Wow. It’s so strange. You look the same,” I said.
He laughed. “In a good way, I hope.”
“Where are you living?”
“Here, in Cambridge. I’m applying to med school. Working in one of my professor’s labs for the year.”
“Med school! Right. I’d forgotten about that.”
“You thought I’d changed my mind?” He smiled.
Later, a waitress came by and brought us another round. Rob could still make me laugh. He was still that boy he’d been in high school, the one who made the younger girls blush when he talked to them in the cafeteria. Whose confidence and affability extended to everyone. He would make a great doctor. For the first time in four years, I found myself thinking about him as a real person. Not as a footnote to my history, a static piece of the past. As a living possibility, right in front of me.
“Are you still with that guy?” he asked. “What was his name again?”
“Evan,” I said. I could feel the effects of my two and a half drinks. A looseness in my limbs, a narrowing of my mind. “Evan Peck. Yeah. I mean, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Things aren’t great. I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to last.”
“Really.” His leg brushed against mine. “That’s too bad.”
“What about you? Girlfriend?”
“There was this girl, but we broke up at graduation. It wasn’t going anywhere. Honestly, of all the girls in college, I’m not sure any of them really came close to you.”
He moved nearer, resting his hand on my knee. I was almost overwhelmed by nostalgia, by the rush of memories: fall afternoons on the sidelines of the soccer field, cheering for Rob after he scored a goal. Study hall, kissing in the dusty back corner of the library. The way he would sometimes catch my eye in the middle of class, backlit by the morning sun, and wink as our teacher droned on about mitochondria. Life opening up before us. That moment bursting with possibility—a feeling that now seemed light-years away. I never thought things could get so complicated. I didn’t think I was capable of feeling so uncertain, so confused. Rob leaned closer, and so did I.
“Julia!” Camilla was yelling from the bar. “Get your ass over here!”
The spell broke. We took a group picture. The band, back together again. Camilla ordered a round of tequila shots, but I demurred. I had to drive home. On my way out, I waved good-bye to Rob. He mouthed, I’ll call you.
The next morning, I went downstairs and found my mother in the kitchen, hands on her hips, staring at a casserole dish. The turkey was already in the oven. The pies were lined up neatly on the counter. Jasmine, our housekeeper, had made everything days in advance.
“Well, there you are. Happy Thanksgiving, sweetheart.” She kissed me on the cheek, then resumed staring at the casserole. She poked it and frowned. “I can’t for the life of me understand what Jasmine did to these potatoes.”
“The same thing she does every year?”
“She’s trying something new. That’s what she said. It smells”—she leaned forward, sniffing—“I don’t know. It smells off.”
“I think that’s just garlic.”
“Garlic.” She sighed. “Why does everything need to have garlic in it?”
She came and sat next to me at the kitchen table. She was wearing what she called her “work clothes”—faded jeans, an old cardigan—what a normal person might wear to the grocery store but what my mother only wore within the confines of the house. She wouldn’t be caught dead looking like this in front of her friends. She was sipping her coffee and watching me while I peeled a banana.
“Mom. What?”
“Your hair is getting so long.”
“I haven’t found a place in New York yet.”
“Why don’t you just get it done while you’re here? I can call. I’m supposed to go in tomorrow.”
“How was the party last night?”
“Oh, it was nice. The Fletchers are doing some landscaping, so their yard is a complete mess. Your father is actually on the phone with Henry right now.”
“Is something going on?”
“Everything’s fine.” She set her coffee down and rubbed at an invisible scuff on the table. “Did I tell you? I’ve been asked to join the board of that new women’s clinic. You remember, the one Mrs. Baldwin is involved in?”
“Is that why we had to invite the Baldwins to Thanksgiving this year?”
She pursed her lips. “We invited them because they’re our friends. You’ve known them a long time. Don’t you remember how much you loved it when Diana used to babysit for you? Anyway, it’s a wonderful organization.”
Charities and nonprofits sought out my mother for many reasons. My father’s firm was a generous and reliable donor; she was a lawyer herself and could perform certain legal functions; she was smart and asked the right questions. Her days had long ago become full with assorted obligations, as full as they would have been with a normal job. When I was younger, around eleven years old, she’d considered going back to work. She mused about it out loud, asking me and Elizabeth whether it would be okay by us. Until, abruptly, those musings stopped. Then she’d been brittle with us in the weeks that followed, losing her patience and snapping at us more than usual. It didn’t seem fair; it wasn’t our fault. I knew the reason—I’d overheard the argument—but something drove me to ask the question. Maybe I wanted her to finally lose it, to admit her anger. I felt an anticipation of shame, and a sick curiosity, as I said it: “Mom, why didn’t you go back to work?”
Her cheeks reddened. But that was all I would get. She had too much control.
“Because, sweetheart. I want to spend time with you and your sister. That’s my job. That’s the most important thing to me in the whole world.” She smiled, her face returning to a normal hue.
But I knew the truth. A few weeks before that, the night of the incident, I’d been setting the table for dinner when my dad got home. My mother poured a glass of wine and slid it across the kitchen counter toward him.
“I have good news,” she said.
“Oh?” My dad took a sip of wine. “This is excellent. Is this the Bordeaux?”
“James. I got the job.”
He took another sip, slowly, then set his glass down. “You did.”
I’d rarely seen her smile like that. Goofy, giddy. “They met all my terms.”
“Julia,” my dad said, “why don’t you go see where your sister is?”
I held up the forks and knives, bunched in my hand. “But I’m setting the table.”
“It can wait. Go ahead.”
As I walked out, I tried to catch my mother’s eye. But she was staring at my father, and her smile had disappeared. I ran up the stairs, then along the second-floor hallway to the top of the back staircase, which led down to the kitchen. I climbed down the back staircase as quietly as possible, stopping just before the kitchen came into view. I held my breath and listened.
“But you knew this wouldn’t work, Nina. I told you that weeks ago.”
“No. No. You said you had some concerns, and we agreed that we’d discuss them when the time came. Okay, so now’s the time. James, I had to work my ass off to get this job. This is an incredible opportunity. It’s the best class-action group in the country.”
“This is a terrible idea. The girls need you at home. And we don’t need the money.”
“I don’t care about
the money. It’s important work. A third of my cases are going to be pro bono. Do you know how hard I had to push to get them to agree to that? Do you know how unheard of that is?”
“It’s a massive conflict of interest. That firm has multiple cases pending against my clients.”
“So I recuse myself from those cases. We put up a Chinese wall. Plenty of people have done this before. You think we’re the first pair of lawyers to ever run into this?”
“You cannot do this. You will not. You’d be working for a bunch of glorified ambulance chasers. You’d be embarrassing me in front of everyone we know. You’d be embarrassing yourself.”
I flinched at the sound of glass smashing against the wall.
“Nina, stop it.”
“It’s my turn, James.” She was shouting, her voice high and hoarse.
“You’re not thinking straight. You don’t want this.”
“Fuck you. Don’t tell me what I want.”
Shortly after that, my father came upstairs and told us that we were going to McDonald’s for dinner. Elizabeth was gleeful—we never ate fast food—but the whole time I felt a sad lump forming in my throat. Those french fries were bribery. My mother’s car was missing from the driveway when we left, and it was still missing when we got back from dinner. Lying in bed that night, I tried to make myself cry, but I couldn’t.
In the morning, my mother was back, smiling tightly as she waved us off to the school bus. There was a ghost of a red wine stain on the kitchen wall, scrubbed but not quite erased. The next week, she announced that we were renovating the kitchen, a project she claimed she’d been thinking about for a long time. The contractors sealed off the doorways with thick plastic. They let her do the honors. She picked up the heavy crowbar and swung it against the old walls and cabinets, smashing them into dust.
* * *
The Baldwins were friends of my parents from the neighborhood: the husband a surgeon at Mass Gen, the wife on many of the same committees as my mother. I was seated next to Mrs. Baldwin, whose earlobes were soft and stretched from her heavy pearl earrings. She took tiny, precise bites of her food and dabbed her lips with her napkin between every bite. “So, Julia. How is life in New York? What an exciting time this must be.”
“It’s good. A lot of friends from college moved down, too, so it’s been fun.” I took a big swallow of my wine. “But tell me about Diana. What’s she doing in Paris?”
Mrs. Baldwin beamed. She loved nothing more than talking about her perfect children. “Oh, Diana is just wonderful. She adores Paris. I’m not sure she’ll ever come back!” She laughed in high, tinkling tones. “She’s fluent in French—did you know that? She’s working at the American Library. She has a little apartment in the Seventh. One of her best friends is the niece of the ambassador to France, so she’s become friends with everyone at the embassy through her. Isn’t that marvelous?”
“It sounds great,” I said, reaching for the wine.
“You studied in Paris, didn’t you, Julia?”
“Yes. Spring of junior year.”
“I remember that. Your mother told me how much you loved it.”
Well, of course she did. My mother had studied in Paris during her Wellesley days, too, and she laid out the reasons why I ought to go; she was the one who pushed me from hesitation to action. At first it felt like I was just doing the sensible thing, following in her footsteps, making her happy. But I had loved it—that was true. Not instantly. It was a love that came gradually, and it felt sweeter for it.
I went in armed with a plan. My first week in the homestay, before classes began for the semester, I’d get up early and make an itinerary for the day: museums, scenic routes, famous patisseries. My hostess encountered me on one of those mornings as I was scrutinizing a guidebook over breakfast. She looked baffled when I explained: I had a long list of sights in Paris that I wanted to see. I’d use this time, before school started, to knock out as many as possible. She stubbed out her clove cigarette and sat next to me at the kitchen table.
“Julia,” she said in a thick accent, preferring her bad English to my even worse French. “This is not what you do. You come to Paris to live. Alors.” She closed the guidebook firmly. “You do not use this. You walk the city and you see it. You understand, yes?”
I took her advice, and I walked through the city for the first time with no plan and no guidebook. It was a cold, miserable, wet January day. I’d worn the wrong shoes, and my feet were soaked and freezing within five minutes. I went into a café for lunch and ordered an omelet, and the waitress smirked at my pronunciation. The food sat strangely in my stomach, and jet lag trailed me through the afternoon. When I was waiting at the crosswalk on the Rue de Rivoli, a bus roared past and soaked me with puddle spray, and that’s when I lost it. I was homesick and lonely and I missed Evan so much, and I was crying, and all I wanted was to go curl up on my narrow bed in the homestay. But going back felt like admitting defeat. So I kept walking. I crossed the Pont Royal and wound up at the Musée d’Orsay. My feet were still soaked, and my clothes were, too. My eyes felt gritty and puffy, and I was so tired I thought I might pass out. This was distinctly not how I’d imagined it—my first week in Paris, my first visit to the famous Orsay.
I sat on a bench up on the fifth floor and let the crowds slide past, obscuring then revealing the artwork on the walls. It felt good to stay in one place, to sit and get warm. The light grew dimmer from the afternoon sunset—January in northern France. I’d been sitting on the same bench for at least two hours. Eventually the crowds thinned, and I had my first uninterrupted view of the art in front of me. There was a Monet that I recognized. The Parliament building in London, silhouetted against a reddening sky, the sun reflected in the water. A painting I’d studied before, in class. That day in Paris, I stared at it for so long that it changed into something else. No longer a specific building in a specific place but a mixture of color and movement that the eye could interpret any way it wanted. It was like when you say a word over and over and it becomes strange and new, a collection of sounds you’d never thought to question before. When you learn that there is something to be gained by examining what’s right in front of you.
I lingered until a security guard told me to leave. I bought a postcard of that painting in the gift shop, and when I got back to my homestay, I tacked it up on the wall next to the photograph of my mother, the one I’d found a few weeks before. My mother as a younger woman, before her life had solidified onto its current course. Every morning during that semester in Paris, those images were the first things I saw when I opened my eyes. I began to think of them as a pair, as a symmetry. The past, the present. They reminded me of the gift I’d been given: time. Time to do nothing, or time to do whatever I wanted. I didn’t need to have it all figured out. The uncomfortable feeling that had plagued me through sophomore year, that had made me feel strange and restless—it had taken a while, but it had finally evaporated. I was okay, right where I was.
Mrs. Baldwin was regarding me with a quizzical expression.
“I’m sorry?” I said, emerging from the undertow of memory.
“I said, you’re living with your boyfriend in New York, isn’t that right?”
“Right. Right, yes. We went to college together. He works in finance.”
Those data points rendered him acceptable. Mrs. Baldwin didn’t need to know any more. She started telling me about her son’s wedding over the summer—it was just the loveliest wedding, they were married at the Cloisters, the bride’s parents were famous-ish, and the mayor came. I refilled my wineglass again, then again. The memories of Paris had made me melancholy, had reignited a longing for some vanished chapter of my life. It was a feeling too big to hold on to.
“You okay?” Elizabeth said between dinner and dessert, after we had gotten up from the table to load the plates into the dishwasher.
“I had too much wine.”
She snorted. “Sitting next to Mrs. Baldwin? Next time I’d go for something
stronger. Heroin, maybe.”
“How was your end of the table?”
“He kept touching my hand. Like, to make a point in conversation. But he was leaving it there a little too long.”
“Dr. Baldwin? Ugh. Creepy.”
My parents waved good-bye to the Baldwins as their car backed out of the driveway. When the front door closed, I noticed a slump in both of them. The mask dropped, the smile loosened. They didn’t particularly enjoy the company of the Baldwins any more than Elizabeth or I did. But they did see the utility of their company. The Baldwins were the right kind of people with the right kind of connections.
“Just leave it,” my mother said when Elizabeth and I started clearing the dessert dishes from the table. “Let Jasmine get it in the morning. I’m going to bed.”
She trudged up the stairs. My father retreated to his study off of the kitchen; always more work to be done. Elizabeth shrugged and went up to her room, too. Pepper had been in his crate all through dinner, and no one made a move to let him out. So I unlatched the door and fed him a scrap of piecrust from Mrs. Baldwin’s plate, then took him for a long walk through the dark and sleepy neighborhood.
Chapter 11
Evan
Roger caught me earlier that day. “Trouble in paradise?” he said, clapping me on the shoulder.
I jumped in my seat and exited the browser where I’d been looking at apartment listings, but I felt the heat rise in my face. Roger sat down across from me, grinning with glee at his discovery. “The wife mad that you’ve been spending so much time in the office? She kicking you out?”
“Shut up, Roger.”
“Oh, wow. Did I hit a nerve?”
Several hours later, Roger was gone. Everyone was gone, except for me. The streets were quiet when I finally left the office around midnight. The scattering to home had begun that afternoon. The only signs of life in our neighborhood were the divey Irish bars jam-packed with city kids who were home for the holidays from college, drinking with friends.
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