A Good Family

by A. H. Kim

  “No,” Claire insisted, “I want Cinderella Sparkle. I love Cinderella Sparkle.”

  As a girl, I loved Cinderella, too. Her blond hair done up in an elegant bun; her vacant sky blue eyes; her porcelain complexion and perfect, upturned nose. It was my secret wish as a girl to grow up to look like Cinderella. I was devastated when I realized it could never happen.

  Gazing at the glittery pink spectacle, I wonder what’s going on in my young niece’s mind. Does she also hope to look like Cinderella someday? How does it feel to have a mother who looks like a real-life Cinderella, only with Jennifer Aniston’s hair and Michelle Obama’s wardrobe?

  Claire blows her party horn, eliciting laughter from her fair-haired guests. I quickly light the candles on the cake—six candles for six years plus an extra one for good luck—and motion for Sam to stop staring at his phone. As Sam carries the cake out to the table, I run to my purse and grab my own phone, imagining Beth’s delight when she gets the photos in my next weekly letter.

  “Happy birthday to you,” I begin singing. The party guests soon join in. Ensconced in her bejeweled birthday throne and softly illuminated by the candles, Claire is the picture of childlike joy. The singing ends and everyone waits.

  “Hurry, Claire,” I say urgently. “Close your eyes and make a wish.”

  * * *

  Back at home, the girls have just finished taking their evening bubble bath. Claire and Ally stand on the pink bath mat, dripping wet and smelling of lavender and vanilla soap. Looking at their naked little bodies, I notice Claire’s Mongolian spot is starting to fade but Ally’s is still prominent. Sam never tires of teasing me about my panicked reaction years ago when I changed Claire’s diaper for the first time and saw the pale blue blotches on my niece’s rear.

  “Call 911!” I yelled. I held Claire tight in my arms and ran to Sam and Beth in the living room. Beth had to spend nearly fifteen minutes, including online consultations with WebMD and MayoClinic.com, to convince me that the bruise-like coloration on Claire’s bottom was a normal developmental condition among babies of Asian ancestry and not an omen of imminent death.

  “Girls, come downstairs, it’s Mommy!” Sam bellows from downstairs. The words barely have time to register in my ears, but Claire reacts instantly. Before I can stop her, Claire runs naked down the rear stairs. I wrap Ally burrito-style in a towel and carry her downstairs like a wiggly sack of potatoes.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Claire asks Sam breathlessly. Her eyes scan the living room. Sam holds out his cell phone, and I understand what Claire doesn’t.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Claire asks again. She continues to look around the room for her mother. I wrap Claire in the extra towel, take the phone from Sam and say gently but clearly, “Claire, it’s your mommy on the phone.” Claire’s face has a blank expression as she accepts the phone from me.

  “Mommy?” she asks tentatively.

  “Claire, it’s Mommy. Can you hear me, sweetie?”

  “I can hear you!” Claire shouts. “Where are you, Mommy?”

  Ally starts jumping up and down, and the bath towel tumbles into a pile at her feet. I try to rewrap my little burrito, but she runs out of reach.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” Ally babbles. She tries to grab the phone from Claire.

  “Shut up!” Claire yells, “Shut up, Ally! I can’t hear Mommy!”

  I reach over to extract the phone from Claire and am struck by the strength of the little girl’s resistance. A beeping sound and recorded message come over the line, but I can’t hear it for the commotion.

  “Claire, let me put the phone on speaker so we can all hear your mommy.” I look her in the eye so she understands I’m not taking her mommy away from her. I press the speaker button and place the phone on the ottoman so both girls can hear.

  Beth’s voice comes over the speakerphone. “Girls? Can you hear me, girls?”

  “We can hear you, Mommy,” Claire says. “Where are you?”

  “Yeah, where are you?” Ally parrots.

  “Remember, girls, I told you I was going to camp,” Beth replies. The word camp reverberates in my head, reminding me of my once-clever play on words. Now it just seems cruel.

  “When are you coming home?” Claire asks.

  “I don’t know,” Beth answers.

  “Will it be before Christmas?” Claire asks.

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Then who’ll get us presents?”

  “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll make sure Santa gets you presents.”

  “Will you be back by Easter?” Claire presses. “That’s really far away.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “You’ll be back before my next birthday, right? That’s a whole year away!”

  “No, sorry, baby, I won’t,” Beth says.

  “How about the birthday after that?”

  There’s a pause.

  “No, Claire,” Beth replies, “but you can come visit me.”

  I look over at Sam, desperate to nip this conversation in the bud. As if reading my mind, Claire grabs the phone from the ottoman, out of my reach, and retreats to the corner of the room. She holds the phone close to her face.

  “Mommy,” she whispers, “will I still be a girl when you come back?”

  Beth clears her throat, but her voice sounds hoarse anyway. “Yes, you’ll still be a girl,” she manages to respond. Claire’s face has a far-off expression.

  “Happy birthday, baby,” Beth says.

  And then the line goes dead.

  beth

  eight

  I’m roughly one month into my prison sentence, and Juanita and I are standing in Pill Line to get our daily dose of drugs. Estrogen and Zoloft for her; Lexapro and birth control for me. We’ve been waiting for over an hour, and there’s still a dozen women ahead of us.

  I’ve got my face buried in the latest Town & Country, which Hannah sent me with her most recent weekly letter. There’s a six-page photo spread on the International Debutante Ball, and I recognize a classmate from Brearley. When did I become old enough to have friends with debutante daughters?

  The daughter looks just awful, poor thing. All the designer tulle in the world can’t hide those tragically chubby arms. They stick out like pale Vienna sausages.

  I hear a commotion ahead but ignore it. There’s always some ruckus or another going on at Alderson. Juanita looks up from her book—And Then There Were None—and says, “Watch out, here comes Meatloaf.”

  Meatloaf Mary was a ninety-five-pound heroin addict when she arrived in prison eighteen months ago. She got her nickname the first week after she got out of detox, when she ate an entire meatloaf in one sitting. Now she’s over two hundred pounds and a key player in Alderson’s shadowy drug trade.

  “Whatcha gettin’ today, Blondie?” Meatloaf asks me.

  “Same old, same old,” I reply.

  “Fuck that Lexapro,” she says. “Ya want an antidepressant, ya gotta get the doc to put ya on the good stuff. Like Wellbutrin. Or even better, Seroquel. Oh yeah, Suzy Q’s the way to go. Grind that baby up, and it’s just as good as heroin. I can get ya top dollar for that.”

  “Thanks but no thanks,” I say, not looking up from my magazine.

  Meatloaf Mary won’t leave.

  “Whatcha need birth control for anyway?” she asks. “Ya doin’ a CO on the side?”

  I can’t imagine ever getting desperate enough to hook up with a corrections officer. All the ones I’ve met are either dumb as a box of rocks or have man-boobs the size of Big Macs.

  “Bad periods,” I say.

  “Ya know, if it gets bad enough, ya can always ask the doc for Vicodin. Or else Percocet. Too bad they stopped givin’ out Tylenol with codeine—that was the shit.”

  “Good to know.”

  Juanita and I are almost at the front of Pill L
ine now.

  “Hey, Meat, get the hell away from here,” the CO guarding the nurse yells.

  “My name’s Mary,” she says, giving him the finger before slinking away.

  It’s Juanita’s turn to take her meds from the nurse. With her dark hair and serious face, Juanita looks like a nun receiving Holy Communion. The nurse waits for Juanita to sip water from a pleated white paper cup, swallow and open her mouth in proof.

  I’m next.

  “Here you go, Lindstrom,” the nurse says.

  “Are you sure you don’t have any of the brand-name stuff?” I ask.

  “The generic’s just as good, and you know it.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I say. “I’m having trouble sleeping.”

  The nurse motions to the long Pill Line as if to say, “Shut your trap and hurry up.”

  I take the two pills at once, swallow them down with water and open my mouth wide. The nurse cocks her head sideways for me to move along. The tablets leave a bitter, gritty taste in my mouth. I miss the minty glow of my Lexapro oral suspension.

  I fucking hate generics.

  Generics are the bane of the pharmaceutical business. It can take years, decades even, and hundreds of millions in R&D dollars to bring a new drug to market. Even though the government usually provides twenty years of patent protection, with the long lead times needed for clinical trials and FDA approval, it’s often a race against the clock to sell as much brand-name medication as possible before cheaper generics enter the market.

  That’s why so many drug reps are hustling for business like there’s no tomorrow.

  About two years after our God Hälsa new-employee orientation, Charlotte was away at a psychiatry conference in San Francisco with a bunch of other fun-loving drug reps while I was spending another Friday night alone in our too-small apartment.

  I try to entertain myself by sitting in front of the TV eating a movie-theater-size bag of Sour Patch Kids and watching Sex and the City. There’s something about the chewy candy that I find comforting and addictive.

  I reach into the bag and realize I’ve mindlessly eaten the entire contents before Carrie even types that episode’s “I can’t help but wonder” question on her computer. That’s when I have my eureka moment.

  The following Monday, I make a beeline to Dr. Stanley, God Hälsa’s director of Product Development, who I happened to befriend in the company cafeteria one day and who I’m quite sure is in love with me.

  “How hard would it be to reformulate Metamin into a chewable compound?” I ask. I rip open a bag of gummy colas and offer it to him for inspiration. Dr. Stanley reaches into the bag and takes a handful. He chews as he listens to my pitch.

  “One of the things that always comes up during my sales visits,” I continue, “is just how much parents hate making their boys swallow the pills. And to make matters worse, they have to do it two or three times a day. These parents say they would do anything, pay anything, to avoid the daily battle. So, my question to you is this—what if we made it so that boys actually want to take their Metamin?”

  Dr. Stanley swallows hard. I see his prominent Adam’s apple bob up and down. A new drug formulation triggers a new period of exclusivity. It basically resets the clock for making money and gives the drug company another slug of time without competition from generics.

  We look at one another and feel the electricity between us. It’s better than sex.

  We’ve just invented gummy Ritalin.

  It takes a couple years to develop and bring to market, but the new formulation quickly becomes a top seller. We turn pharmaceutical straw into honest-to-God twenty-four-karat gold. Marketed globally as Metamin-G and offered in such mouthwatering flavors as blue raspberry, root beer and wild cherry, the groundbreaking drug is the darling of the pharma industry and the savior of parents everywhere.

  Overactive boys who used to hate taking their ADHD medicine are now begging for it. Even better, what was initially troubling for God Hälsa’s executives—namely, that in order to accommodate the gelatin, cornstarch, sweetener and artificial flavoring and coloring for the gummy compound, the new formulation contains less active ingredient per unit—unexpectedly turns into an added benefit. A bottle of Metamin-G remains competitively priced with a bottle of Ritalin or Adderall, but the actual profitability is higher because patients have to take twice as many Metamin-G units per day as its competitor brands.

  I’m soon promoted to vice president of Marketing. I get a spacious window office in God Hälsa’s gleaming corporate tower, my own trusty executive assistant, a shiny black town car with a dull white driver and a bottomless expense account.

  The first year or two after Metamin-G’s debut is a complete whirlwind of activity. My Outlook calendar is filled with back-to-back requests for press interviews, photo shoots and keynote addresses at medical and pharmaceutical conventions around the world.

  My pointillist portrait is featured prominently on the front page of the Wall Street Journal under the bold-faced headline “God Hälsa’s Marketing Goddess.” Fortune includes me in their annual issue profiling 40 Under 40. (I’m number seven.)

  Esquire wants to do a Women We Love feature about me, but God Hälsa’s corporate overlords get cold feet after they see the photo that the magazine’s brilliant art director wants to accompany the article: a full-page spread of me in the nude, lying in a sea of brightly colored Metamin-G gummies with the clever caption “American Booty.” I’m pissed when the uptight SVP of Public Relations nixes the photo on “poor taste” grounds, but I ask Esquire’s art director for a full-size copy. I figure I’ll look at it when I’m old and gray and need to remind myself of what a complete babe I once was.

  Meanwhile, Charlotte’s star goes into free fall. God Hälsa’s bean counters in Accounting discover she’s been putting her wardrobe on her expense account, and HR puts her on six months probation. She’s stripped of the profitable Lycka account and assigned to an extra strength stool softener called Flöde.

  “What were you thinking?” I ask when she tells me the news. Charlotte’s a smart cookie; I’m surprised she could fuck up so badly.

  “What do you mean, what was I thinking?” Charlotte asks. “I looked it up on IRS.gov. Clothing costs are legitimate business expenses if they meet two criteria—you have to wear the clothes as a condition of employment, and the clothes can’t be suitable for everyday activities. Everything I expensed qualified.”

  “That makes sense to me,” I say. “What did HR say?”

  “They said there’s a difference between what I can take as a deduction on my personal taxes and what I can submit for reimbursement under company policy. So then I said to them, ‘Show me where in the employee handbook it says that clothing isn’t a reimbursable business expense,’ and they couldn’t do it. But that didn’t stop the fuckers from putting me on probation. Like a common criminal or something.”

  “You couldn’t be common if you tried,” I say. “Criminal or otherwise.”

  “Trust me,” Charlotte says, “I did everything by the book. I uploaded the invoices from my stylist for reimbursement, and my manager approved them. All the receipts were right there in the accounting system, plain as day.”

  Charlotte takes a small scoop of Crème de la Mer and massages it gently on my face and down my neck. She kisses the hollow where my throat meets my collarbone and then chuckles darkly.

  “It’s not my fault no one bothered to actually read them.”

  Suffice it to say my meteoric success and Charlotte’s nearly simultaneous downfall affect our relationship in a major way. While I’m flying first-class to meet with investors in Zurich, London and Amsterdam, Charlotte’s sitting home alone with Messrs. Ben & Jerry. While I’m taking meetings with senior executives in Stockholm to discuss my brilliant marketing ideas, Charlotte’s taking shit from entry-level accountants in Uppsala to find her missing cab rec
eipts.

  These superficial changes are nothing compared to the one-eighty-degree change in expectations regarding my personal life. As a mere drug rep, I was permitted—even encouraged—to share an apartment with my female colleague. As VP of Marketing, I’m expected to have my own home, preferably pre-furnished with a handsome husband and 2.3 cherubic children.

  As a drug rep, I was rewarded for exploiting my womanly wiles. As a corporate officer, I’m required to take annual sexual harassment and diversity sensitivity training to ensure that any semblance of personality and humor are stripped from my interactions.

  It’s Charlotte who convinces me to move into my own place, a tasteful three-bedroom midcentury modern on the edge of town, far from the prying eyes of our colleagues and bosses. To keep up appearances, Charlotte keeps the one-bedroom in downtown Princeton, although we use it more like a very large walk-in closet than an actual residence. It’s also convenient for the occasional midday tryst. The risk of getting caught just adds to the thrill.

  Like any couple, we have our good days and our bad ones. We break up a few times—I’m a Sagittarius, Charlotte’s an Aquarius, so we’re destined to have some personal drama—but we manage to remain together, to maintain both our privacy and our passion, to extinguish the rumors while fanning the flames.

  Is it easy? Of course not.

  Is it worth it? Absolutely.

  Everything seems to be going fine until that fateful day, when I come back from the doctor’s office, walk into our bedroom and announce:

  “Charlotte, I’m pregnant.”

  hannah

  nine

  When Sam told me Beth was pregnant, I have to admit to being surprised. Sam and Beth had been together for years, but something about their relationship felt strange—even false. Beth was a high-powered executive and Sam was just a golf instructor. I didn’t get what Beth saw in him. It feels terrible to say that, but it’s the truth. Sure, Sam was attractive and charming, but that didn’t seem like enough for someone as ambitious and accomplished as Beth. I didn’t think the two of them would last. I guess they proved me wrong.