The Shortest Way Home

by Miriam Parker

  It wasn’t the kind of relationship my parents had, and I’m not sure how I got that way. I remember when I was little, before the accident, my parents would never fight. They were brooders. If they were sad or angry, they would just go be by themselves until they figured it out. I swear there was an entire year where my parents barely spoke to each other, other than saying necessary things like “please pass the salt” and “the phone’s for you.” My dad was on the road a lot that year—sulking in his truck, most likely. I never knew quite what brought them back together, but then after that year, he was around more. And they were happier; they went out on dates, bought each other little gifts. He started bringing back pig figurines from each long haul that he went on, and pretty soon she had an entire windowsill of tiny pigs above the kitchen sink. “My mini farm,” she used to call it. I’m so glad they had that year, because it was their last good one. That mini farm is still on the windowsill in my mother’s kitchen. Lovingly dusted, but unchanged. That was how they showed affection in my family—with small gifts, a pat on the back, a smile. And anger and disappointment were never displayed with fighting.

  Even as a small girl, I had been kind of the black sheep of the family emotionally. If I was sad about something and was asked about it at the breakfast table, I would start to cry. If I was mad, I would throw a toy. I became an expert at slamming my bedroom door. I once even broke the lock on the front door of the house by slamming it on my way out. It upset my mother, father, and brother so much when I was angry that I got angry more often. They called me “our little teenager.” After my dad died, things did change; even I became a brooder. There wasn’t energy or time to be passionate anymore.

  Ethan’s family had been intense: Dinnertime was a kind of interrogation, where you had to detail what you had done that day, prove your worth. His father, who was a high-powered hedge fund executive, always took time when Ethan was little to have dinner with the family, even if he went back to work late into the night after, so that mealtime was sacred, valuable. The idea of quality over quantity was important in the Katz household. If the answers weren’t robust enough, Ethan’s father challenged, asked more questions. The conflicts were always out in the open. Ethan didn’t say he liked that approach to family bonding, but he also couldn’t help but sometimes fall into the twenty-questions version of an interaction.

  So, my attraction to Ethan was one of otherness, strangeness. He was from a world I wished I could be a part of, the family I never had. The only problem was, I didn’t always know what the line was between playing and fighting. For me, everything kind of felt like fighting, although I knew that for him mostly it felt like playing. Until it wasn’t playing at all.

  With William, the attraction was physical, a rumbly stomach, sweaty palms, a loss for words. Wanting just to touch each other. With Ethan, our relationship felt mature, grown-up, like we had been together forever. Dare I say boring? Or was physical attraction just a fleeting thing? I didn’t know. Everything felt confusing, up in the air, adrift, and I felt like a teenager with a major crush.

  * * *

  —

  William showed up at the cottage about forty-five minutes later carrying a laptop, a cable that would connect it to the TV, and a bottle of Port. I’d already taken a bottle of Pinot Noir out of the wine fridge, but he insisted that it was past that time of day. It was the time when you had to drink Port. “It’s the ultimate nightcap,” he said.

  “Baileys on ice is the ultimate nightcap,” I said. “Puts you right to sleep.”

  “That’s what the movie is for,” he said, his eyes twinkling. It was clear that despite his earlier protestations, he was proud of the film. “Also, Baileys is gross. It’s just chemicals. You should stop drinking that.”

  “I’m not sophisticated like you,” I said.

  “You used to work at Tiffany’s,” he said. “That sounds sophisticated to me.” His hand lingered next to mine, his leg just adjacent, but with only a hint of closeness.

  “But I’m from rural Iowa,” I said. “I grew up on Wonder Bread and Chef Boyardee. Highbrow and lowbrow.”

  “You’ll be one hundred percent highbrow by the time you leave here at the end of the summer,” he said. “You might not even like California wine by then. You might only drink Italian. Some French.”

  “That doesn’t seem possible,” I said.

  “Just wait,” he said. “My dad can make a wine snob of anyone.”

  After he set up all the technology, we settled on the overstuffed couch with our glasses of Port and the film. It was indeed short, about fifteen minutes. It covered the history of the winery, some of which I had heard on my first visit. But it was romantic and elegiac. The violin music he had scored it with as he showed the rolling hills and the portraits of his ancestors really got to me. And he did this amazing time lapse of grapes growing on the vine. I wondered how he did that.

  “I loved your film,” I said when the credits rolled.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You don’t have to say that.”

  “I am so impressed that you did it all yourself. And it brought tears to my eyes. The violin music was so beautiful.”

  “I really appreciate you saying that,” he said. “It took a long time to get that fifteen minutes down.”

  He took my hand and I felt fluttery.

  “Do you really have to leave tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The program officially starts in September, but I was eager to get started, so I’m taking some summer classes and working as an assistant to one of the professors, who is cutting a short film.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.

  “If I’d known that you would be here, I’d probably have waited. But how could I have known? I am glad we met, though, and that you’ll be here with my parents.”

  “I like your parents a lot,” I said. “They like to explain things.”

  “Be careful,” he said. “They’re more complicated than they seem.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to make of that statement. My family was what you saw on the surface. My mother was lonely, living in the past. My brother was the good, strong one who took care of her, as well as his own family. And I was the one who ran away. When I took Ethan out to Iowa to visit on the Christmas trip we named “Meet the Greene,” my mother behaved as well as I could have possibly expected. She wore clothes that weren’t her hospital scrubs. She made my favorite food from childhood, macaroni and cheese with hot dogs in it, even though I had repeatedly told her that I didn’t like that anymore. She told her favorite childhood story about me: about how she couldn’t find me one morning for school; she checked everywhere in the house and called the neighbors and then called the school to tell them that I would be absent, and they told her that I had gotten to school at six thirty A.M. and was found waiting outside when the principal got to work at around seven. I had asked if I could go into the library because I had finished reading my book and needed a new one. Ethan asked what book I had finished, but I was pretty sure the story was apocryphal. After all, Mary Ellen kept me pretty well stocked. After dinner, we sat in the living room and silently watched a hockey game together. My father was a long-suffering Blackhawks fan and my mother, even though she never liked hockey, had taken it up after his death. She watched every Blackhawks game and, by now, even knew the players and the strategy. Even though she still claimed to hate the sport.

  I knew that Ethan thought hockey fans were philistines, a fact he had admitted to me before I told him that my mother loved the Blackhawks. “It’s different in the Midwest,” he had said. “It’s colder there.” I liked seeing him backpedal. But my mother seemed to like Ethan, although she managed to bring up my high school and college boyfriend, Eric. She reported to the table that she had seen Eric himself with his daughter at the A&P and Drew had seen Eric’s mother at the gas station.

  “She lives in the past,” I told hi
m that night as we tried to get comfortable on the foldout couch in the basement; it felt like we were sleeping directly on the bars that held it up. The next day, we’d had brunch with Drew, his wife, Elise, and their kids, Gillian and Duncan. Elise and I had mimosas and we all watched the Vikings on a giant projection television.

  “Welcome to the Midwest,” Drew had said.

  “It’s not so bad,” Ethan had said as he drank an Iowa microbrew. I could tell that at that moment, he meant it.

  * * *

  —

  It took longer for me to meet Ethan’s parents than it had taken for him to meet mine. After that first Christmas in Iowa, we had gone back to California together. He hadn’t seen his family that holiday, claiming, “We don’t celebrate Christmas. Why would I go visit my parents?”

  It took until the spring when I was interviewing for my summer job at Goldman Sachs for us to fly together to New York. We stayed in the hotel Goldman had booked for me, so there was no weirdness about staying in the Katzes’ apartment. But we also barely spent time with them. We met Franklin and Bunny (as she was called) Katz for dinner at the Four Seasons. Ethan’s father didn’t even let us see the menus, just ordered a round of martinis and steaks and lamented that the place would be closing soon. “It’s an institution,” he declared. “It’s a travesty to mismanage a landmark.” Then he delivered an extensive lecture on derivatives and their impact on the economy. Ethan’s mother had told a remarkably boring story about a fund-raiser she was organizing to support artists in the public schools, not that she had ever set foot in a public school. Ethan had warned me about her boring stories and I had thought he was exaggerating, but she could make even a gossipy story about an artist having a nervous breakdown before her art was to be delivered to the auction sound truly tedious. Ethan kept squeezing my hand under the table as if to assure me that it would be over soon. After their monologues, they had asked me about my family and I had skirted the question a bit, which they hadn’t really noticed, saying just that my mom lived in Iowa and was a nurse. “What a noble profession,” Bunny said. She never asked a follow-up about my father, and it seemed too much to tell them. I didn’t know if Ethan had briefed them on my father’s death before the dinner or if they just didn’t care enough to ask anything else.

  They asked me about my plans after business school. They appreciated my answer about the summer job at Goldman and after that pretended that I wasn’t there, discussing their plans for Passover in the Hamptons and Memorial Day in Scottsdale, although wouldn’t it be oppressively hot there by then? Bunny gave me a kiss on each cheek at the end of dinner.

  She patted Ethan on the head and said, “Don’t mess this one up.” I assumed that meant that she liked me. That night, he said, “I think they liked you because they just acted like they always act, like self-involved narcissists.” I decided not to comment on that. It seemed like the type of thing you were allowed to say about your own parents but probably didn’t want feedback from other people on. While I was at my day of interviews, Ethan went to see his friends and start-up cofounders, Graham and Jesse, in Brooklyn. Somehow I didn’t get to meet them on that trip, which was disappointing. I had heard way more about them in our eight months of dating than about his parents. To me, it seemed like they were more like family, and he’d known them for almost as long. I tried not to be offended that I never got to meet them. He chalked it up to them working on their business plan, but it made me wonder if he was embarrassed by me. I never had the guts to ask.

  I had never thought my family was strange—the prolonged silences, the lack of conflict, the disappearing act that my father did when he was unhappy, or the days he spent in dark rooms. Nor did I really have the space to evaluate all of the extra work I had to do taking care of my mom after my dad died. Even though I knew in theory it was unusual for an eleven-year-old to be responsible for making a grocery list, making sure dinner was available for anyone who wanted it, and cleaning the bathroom, it was my normal. It was a bit of an awakening when I started spending time with my high school boyfriend Eric’s family. Eric had three sisters and about twenty first cousins, and their house was always filled with home-cooked food, lots of clutter, and laughter. There was always music playing on the radio or music being played on a piano or songs being sung. There was dancing. They played whiffle ball in the yard. I always wanted to be part of a family that was fun like Eric’s, and I wondered sometimes if it had been a mistake to leave him behind. At the very least, he understood where I was from. What my roots were. And he would always be proud of me. He just wanted me to be happy. That was why he let me go; he knew I would be happier.

  Ethan’s family was intense. They had high standards for themselves and their son. Ethan did brag about me once during the meal to his father, saying I was one of only a few members of our class to get this far in the interview process, that everyone was jealous of me. That was the one time his father perked up and looked at me kindly. Like I was more in his image than his own son. They didn’t seem supportive of the tech start-up that Ethan was starting, which they found confusing and risky. “Why not just come join the old family business?” Franklin had asked. But Ethan had said, “Let me just try this, Dad.” At least with my family, the expectations were so low that I never had to worry about disappointing anyone.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re different,” I said to William.

  “From who?” he asked.

  “From other people I’ve met,” I said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said.

  “You take things in stride. And you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished. But you want more. I find that inspiring.”

  “That’s very sweet,” he said.

  “What do you mean about your parents being complicated?” I asked.

  “Still waters run deep, I guess,” he said.

  “I still don’t really know what that means,” I said. “Are they sad that you’re going to New York?”

  “They get it,” he said. “But really they want me to stay here and marry a girl named Stacey Rowley. Her family owns a winery in Oregon.”

  “The ultimate girl next state,” I said.

  “The girl next state who has a strain of Pinot Noir grapes that they want access to. And family money to prop up the business here.”

  “The most classic arranged-marriage story ever,” I said. “I wonder why they would do the same thing to you that happened to them. But you loved someone else? Someone from the wrong side of the tracks? Who didn’t have any wine strains at all?”

  “I had a girlfriend in college named Antoinette. She was from a family kind of like mine—a family business, but shoes, not wine. From Orange County. My mother hated her. Wouldn’t stop talking about Stacey around her. I’m actually surprised she didn’t mention Stacey tonight; that’s actually a good sign. Anyway, Antoinette was beautiful and fun, but she also had no empathy. She could walk right by a quivering dog or a crying child and not even notice. And she also didn’t have empathy for me. The worst was when I told her this story about when I was a kid and someone at a party that my parents were throwing gave me a little glass of sweet ice wine. It tasted amazing—supersweet, like liquid Popsicle, really. So I drank it and then I felt dizzy and went out to the garden with my dog, Sevvie, short for Reserve—we always named the dogs after wine things—and I felt horrible. I lay on the ground and rolled around and the sky was spinning and then I threw up. And Sevvie ate it. I was so embarrassed. I never told anyone that. Not my parents, not anyone. And her only response was, ‘It’s amazing you’re not an alcoholic.’”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, our hands still lingering. Fingers lightly intertwining. “It must have made the things that your parents made be scary. Like they could poison you. And your dog.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

  And then he very smoothly moved himse
lf toward me, put his arm around me. I leaned against him and looked up at his face. I wanted him to kiss me, but I couldn’t yet. But I won’t say that I didn’t nuzzle my face into his neck and inhale a delicious earthy smell, a combination of wine and vegetables and, yes, maybe just a hint of dirt. But it was a smell, not a taste. I knew what good dirt smelled like.

  CHAPTER 9

  The next morning, as the haze of the previous evening wore off, I realized that I had cheated on Ethan. Emotionally. I had talked about my family and my hopes and dreams with another man. A man who put his arm around me and tucked me into my couch to sleep. A man whose family I was spending the entire summer with.

  I would need to call him later—Ethan, not William; I could never talk to William again. The idea of a new crush was terrifying. I had been with Ethan for almost two years and I had kind of decided that this was it. That he would be the last person I would sleep with, the last person I would kiss. I had mentally closed up the dating shop. Maybe I was lazy, or just exhausted after going on first date after first date with men who either couldn’t stop talking about themselves or had nothing to say at all; going for months without hearing from someone, only to have them pop up with a witty text message at the most inopportune time.

  The other thing that was amazing about singledom was that everyone in relationships would say things like, “You’re so great, Hannah. I don’t understand why you don’t have a boyfriend. A guy would be lucky to have you.” And then when I would ask if they knew anyone single, they would think about it for a second and say, “Sorry, I don’t, actually! Let me think about it.”

  I’d thought regularly about going back to Eric, who was working his way to becoming the chef at the French restaurant I’d hostessed at in college. But no matter how bleak the life of a single woman in her twenties in New York could be, something kept me from giving in, from returning to Iowa, a sense that there was more for me if I just kept at it. I would get that perfect Nora Ephron life that I saw in When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail: a beautiful apartment (or at least a separate bedroom), a great career, and a wagon-wheel coffee table to fight over. Besides, I had mentally decided that Eric (and Iowa) would always be there for me if I needed them, but that I needed to charge forward, even if it made me sad and exhausted. Of course, if you wait long enough, your backup plan can betray you. It seemed that now Eric had a daughter and, presumably, a wife.