“And yet you used the word brother when we hadn’t discussed—”
“Jesus, Matt. There’s no instruction sheet for this. What else was I supposed to say? That Mama and Dada just casually befriended a random high school sophomore?”
“I just think it’s better to play it safe. You know how impressionable they are.”
“Our children?” she said. “With whom I spend every day? Yes, I’m familiar.”
“There’s no need to get—”
“Isn’t this night stressful enough without us fighting?”
“You’re the one who—”
“Mama!”
At the sound of Wyatt’s voice she leapt efficiently into panic mode. Was this what she got for opening her home to the boy: peril for her own children? She pushed past Matt, steeling herself for whatever was transpiring in the playroom, hoping that her latent mammalian strength would kick in, whatever it was that helped people save their kids from being crushed by cars.
But in the playroom, Jonah was upside-down in a handstand, a slight outward bend in his elbows, legs splayed in splits, and Wyatt was regarding him with bald admiration.
“Mama, look,” he said.
She paused to get her bearings. “Honey, you scared me. I thought something was…” She trailed off when she saw the look on Jonah’s face, shades of embarrassment and hurt feelings.
He lowered himself to the floor.
“I didn’t mean,” she said. “I just thought—maybe someone had gotten hurt.” I thought you’d managed to kill one of my children in the two minutes I left you alone with them.
“He can do a thing on one hand, too,” Wyatt said incredulously. Jonah had since risen and was now standing over by the window, stretching his arms self-consciously against his chest.
“It’s a—you know, an accident-prone age. I get nervous,” she said, in partial apology. Behind her, she could feel the weight of Matt’s silent assessment. “I didn’t know you were a gymnast,” she said.
Jonah snorted. “I’m not.”
“Just a skill you picked up?” she asked. She lifted Eli into her arms and reveled in his solidity. Her children were fine. Everything was fine.
“Yeah, actually.”
“No lessons?” She realized the stupidity of the question, dripping with her privilege, a woman for whom lessons—gymnastics, viola, whatever her heart desired—had always been a part of life.
“Just things I learned I could do,” he said mildly.
“Well, you definitely didn’t inherit your agility from me.” Again, it was an awkward and conspicuous thing to say, a faux pas of the highest order. Jonah blushed.
“Can you teach me?” Wyatt asked him, and Jonah looked at her quickly before he replied, “I don’t think so, dude. Too dangerous.”
The doorbell rang. Matt went to answer it.
“Pizza,” she said. “I hope that’s okay. The universal unifier.”
She watched him open his mouth and then decide to close it again.
“Don’t tell me you don’t like pizza,” she said.
“I love pizza,” Wyatt said gravely.
“I’m lactose intolerant,” Jonah said.
“Are you—really? How did I not know that? Wendy should have said—” But of course this wasn’t Wendy’s fault; it was another orb hanging densely between them, pulsing, winking: That’s just the tip of the iceberg of things you don’t know.
“It’s really no big deal. I’m not actually that hungry.”
“You’re fifteen,” she said. “Of course you’re hungry. Do you do gluten?”
“Do I— Sure.” Jonah seemed to suppress a smile. “Yeah. Gluten’s great.”
She was so ashamed of the PB & J she made for him that she pretended not to notice, doing the dishes as Matt drove him home, that three bottles of wine were missing from the rack.
* * *
—
Wendy became aware, as the redhead was about to find his target, of another presence in the room. She assumed at first that it was a trick of her mind, fuzzy with Grey Goose, but when she turned her head at the feel of the guy’s beard against her clit, she saw the shadow in the doorway.
“Fuck,” she said, and for a few seconds there was a kind of slapstick arrangement as she scrambled for the covers, the man’s head caught between her thighs, her elbow knocking painfully into the headboard. “Jesus fuck; what’re you doing in here?” Her pity dinner with Miles’s friend, of course, had been a lie; she’d taken advantage of her childlessness to have a night out. She’d heard Jonah come in after dinner at Violet’s, but she’d been preoccupied with the redhead. She’d assumed Jonah had gone to bed.
“What the hell?” the redhead said. He was on his feet, hands balled into fists, shoulders tensed like the fur on a dog’s back. “Who the fuck is this?”
“No, it’s okay,” she said, scrambling up, wrapping the sheet around her body. She grabbed his arm before he could approach Jonah. “It’s all right; he lives here.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” The man looked back and forth between her and Jonah. “Is this your kid?”
It hurt her heart that this was the first cognitive leap he made, and with such ease. She’d told him earlier that she was thirty-two. “He’s my nephew. Jonah. Jonah, this is—” She was blanking on his name. She waffled constantly between worries about early-onset Alzheimer’s and fears of alcohol-induced memory loss.
“Were you watching us?” the man asked, his muscles flexing beneath her fingers.
“No, I was just— I came to ask for some Tylenol and—sorry; I wasn’t—I just needed—”
“What do you need Tylenol for?” she asked, because—oddly—her first instinct was concern for his well-being.
“I pulled a muscle, I think. My shoulder. I was doing some tricks for Violet’s kids.”
“Ibuprofen works better,” she said. “Downstairs bathroom. Third shelf on the right.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Take two, not three,” she said.
“Okay. Sorry. Thanks.” He skittered away and the redhead pulled his arm from her grasp.
“Well, that was fucking weird,” he said.
“It was.” She sank onto the edge of the bed.
“He lives with you? You should’ve told me. Jesus Christ.”
“Why?” she asked, suddenly defensive. “Why is that your business?”
“Because I’m—we were about to— Don’t you think I deserve to know if there’s some weird-ass kid who might be watching us from the doorway?”
“He wasn’t watching us.” Though she was preoccupied by the fact that Jonah’s initial reaction when he saw them in bed together wasn’t to run away in horror.
“I’m really— Shit, I’m sorry, Wendy, but I’m—really weirded out by this.”
“We can lock the door,” she said listlessly. The little thrill of him was gone, leaving only a light residual slickness between her legs. Steve. His name came to her epiphanically.
“I should go,” he said. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’ll call you.”
Because she’d perfected the line herself, she knew it wasn’t true.
* * *
—
Sitting on the porch with her mother, Liza asked, “Mom, have you— Was there ever a moment when you thought you might not be with Dad?”
The thing Liza admired about her parents’ generation was that they didn’t seem to think very much. They just did things because those things looked a certain way and looking a certain way was half the battle. You reached a certain age and you found a semiattractive, living, breathing man, and you went through the motions even if he was boring or mean or a sociopath, and you stuck it out to the bitter end. And this was not the most romantic notion but she liked the stubbornness of it, the simplicity, the
security.
Her parents were anomalous, though. They appeared, to this day, ferociously in love. And this stemmed from a mutual feverish adoration, judging by the old photos adorning her father’s desk, the kitchen window, the insides of the bathroom cabinets: Marilyn, a twenty-year-old knockout at Foster Beach, wrapped from behind in David’s arms; David in a pumpkin patch beside an appraising Marilyn, his arm slung around her waist, her middle swollen with Wendy; Marilyn and David on their wedding day, just after the ceremony, standing to the side of the altar, dissolved with laughter.
“Lord, no,” her mother said, and Liza’s heart swelled and sank at once, because she liked that those simpler times had existed but knew resoundingly that they did no longer. “I mean,” Marilyn continued. She was two glasses of wine deep and Liza stone sober; they both adjusted their posture accordingly. Pregnancy was the cruelest evolutionary fuck-you, filling you with more anxiety than you’d ever experienced in your life while prohibiting you from imbibing anything that might calm your nerves. “Have I ever wanted to punch him in the face? Yes. Has he ever said something that made me question the very construction of the universe?” Wine made her mother poetic. “Of course. But have I ever not wanted him around?” Another sip. “No. In another room? God yes. Silenced somewhere far away? Absolutely.”
“But never anything major,” Liza said. She and Ryan had met in college. On paper, it was the perfect equation for a simple, stubborn union. Meet someone when you’re both too young to realize how stupid you are. Learn all of their oddities and secrets before they have a chance to create more of them beyond your control.
“Never separation,” Marilyn said. A light flipped on within the house—David in his office—and they both turned to look, scandalized by the reminder that the subject of their gossip was mobile and mere feet away. “Never anything like that.”
“But why not?” Liza asked.
Her mother took another sip of wine and tilted her head, seemingly reflexively, toward the light in her husband’s study. “Why would I? God, look at him. Who’s better than that man?”
They looked together through the window. Neither had a satisfactory answer.
“Why are you asking me that, sweetie?” Her mother’s expression had changed from wistful to concerned.
Liza shook her head, suddenly feeling like she might cry. “No reason.” She wanted to ask her mom if this undercurrent of despair was something gestationally ubiquitous that they’d just neglected to mention in the BabyCenter forums.
“How are things at home?”
“Fine. Great.”
“You’re an endearingly bad liar, Liza-lee.” Her mother rose and came to sit next to her on the glider. “I shouldn’t have been so glib. We all have doubts.” She touched Liza’s knee. “Of course we all have doubts. But I think the key is being able to look past them. If you can do that and still feel good, still feel at peace, that’s what’s important.”
“Settle, then,” she said.
“No,” her mother said emphatically. “Not settle. Not at all. I mean take a hard, honest look at the things you’re doubting and see if they really matter.”
“But how can you tell? How can you decide whether or not—you know, what’s a deal breaker, or whatever?”
“That varies with every couple, sweetheart. Not everything has a formula.” Her mom put a hand over her thigh. “What’s going on with you, Lize? Talk to me.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again. What was going on with her? To articulate it seemed damning somehow; to vocalize it was to give permanence to what she hoped wouldn’t last. “I’m just wondering whether or not you ever had any doubts about Dad.” Her mother must have felt this guttural terror at some point, must have experienced moments of revulsion when watching her husband eat asparagus, dreaded the future in which he talked about how it made his pee smell. Of course everyone had those problems, even her parents, who had been married for a hundred thousand years and still winked at each other across the dinner table.
“No, I suppose I didn’t. But, Liza, that doesn’t mean— It’s okay to have doubts, honey. It’s perfectly fine to feel anxious or uncertain about another person. It’s a huge thing you’re undertaking with Ryan, sweetheart. It’s natural to be scared. But it’s better if you find a way to be scared together.”
Did you ever lie awake worrying what you might be passing on to us through Dad’s genes? Did you ever for a second think that he wasn’t good enough? Did you ever wonder if it would be your fault if he wasn’t? She’d spent a handful of afternoons at Marcus’s apartment in the past month, hazy, easy days between his plaid jersey-knit sheets; avoiding Ryan, avoiding reality. She squirmed, feeling a trilling anxiety at the back of her neck.
“It’s funny,” her mom continued. “I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but it’s much easier said than done, don’t you think?”
If her mother—her ever-perceptive love guru of a mother—seemed genuinely unworried about Ryan, maybe that was enough of an endorsement. The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number of times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.
What she’d been doing with Marcus was cruel, simply put. It was the most textbook kind of cruelty there was: letting him fuck her from behind, letting him make her laugh, letting him drop her off at her parents’ house and kiss her in his car while Ryan was at home with his Netflix and his pretzels and his pervasive despondency. It was cruel to Marcus and Ryan both. When her mother went inside to make them some tea, she pulled out her phone and began to type, verging on something novelistic, This has been really fun but I recently found out that I’m pregnant—it happened before we got together so please don’t worry—and I feel as though it’s what’s best for my health and the health of my relationship and also my libido has really been slowing down in the last couple of weeks but I really do wish you the best and I hope that Walter’s hip replacement goes well and that—
“Everything okay out here?” her mother asked, and she deleted the text before sending it. She looked up—her mom was blithe and optimistic, blind to her daughter’s terrible behavior—and resisted asking if Marilyn would be willing to break things off with Marcus for her.
She fired off a quick message—We need to end things. Personal stuff going on. I’m really sorry. Xx—and shut off her phone before smiling up at her mother.
1983–1984
Marilyn was beginning to think—more than think: theorize—that her elder daughter was a sociopath. She arguably had too much time to think about it; she was, as one of the many parenting books that now lined the built-in shelves purported, too close to the problem to have perspective. But who could judge if not she? She spent every day with the children, was awakened by them each morning and read to them until they fell asleep each night. And she loved those versions of her girls—the warm, sleepy, pajama-clad bodies that tucked themselves next to her at sunrise, breathing their sweet stale breath into her neck, querying about breakfast and telling her about their dreams; the drowsy, heavy heads, trying to stay awake until the end, that lolled against her as she whispered lines of Dr. Seuss.
She liked her children best, then, when they were sleeping. Which perhaps was part of the problem, but she was fairly certain that a larger part of the problem was Wendy, whom she sometimes imagined sending to a boarding school that accommodated distressed preschoolers.
Earlier that day, she had denied Wendy’s request for chocolate milk, and then watched as Wendy sank into a ball in the middle of the kitchen floor. Her daughter hugged her knees and started making a strange, fiercely focused face. Her cheeks turn
ed, after several seconds, bright red, and Marilyn realized that she was holding her breath.
“Wendy, stop it,” she said. Motherhood had rendered her more fatalistic than ever, and she was picturing blood vessels bursting in Wendy’s eyes, in her brain. Her heart started pounding. Violet was propped up on several phone books in a chair at the table, coloring, regarding her sister with curiosity. “Wendy, I mean it. Stop that right now.” But Wendy didn’t stop; she hugged herself tighter and her eyes bulged a little bit and her face got redder and redder until finally Marilyn dropped to her knees and shoved her fingers into her daughter’s mouth, the only thing she could think to do. And Wendy bit her, hard, and she hissed, “Fuck” and Wendy, breathing laboriously, glared up at her and said, “Mama said a bad word.”
She sent Wendy to her room, fighting back tears herself, and she sank into a kitchen chair across from Violet and wept when she heard the bedroom door slam. Violet looked scared, scrambled down from her seat and climbed into her lap.
“It’s okay, Mama,” she said. “It’s okay.”
She looked down at her petrified daughter and in an instant realized that this was precisely the kind of scene she had vowed to avoid making as a parent herself, the kind of scene that was completely commonplace to her when she was a child. Her own mother—maybe drinking; probably drinking—would get wild-eyed or melancholy, dissolve before her eyes into a puddle of despair or fury.
“Don’t cry,” she would say, bringing her tissues, stroking her mother’s hair. She remembered these memories as some of her first, from when she was five or six. Or possibly even four, like Violet was now, her own tiny daughter staring up into her face, reaching little starfish hands to her cheeks to dry her tears.
“I’m okay, pumpkin. Mama’s okay. I’m sorry I scared you, little bear.”
David was not usually home during Wendy’s meltdowns and so when she tried to describe them to him in bed at night they came out sounding embellished—though they weren’t. Her husband would pull her against him and rub her back.
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