“I just—” An incorrigible tear had fallen from her eye right onto a freshly inked correction on the paper before her; green ink bled into a tiny Rorschach. She’d spoken without any thought at all of her child, a kid who already lacked both a stable father and a mother who had any idea what the hell she was doing, a kid who at least deserved a competent and compassionate doctor. “Gillian, I— Dr. Levin, I didn’t mean— I’m sorry for saying that; it just— Of course it’s not my business.”
“No,” Gillian said. “It’s certainly not.”
You’re healthy, at least, she thought, a hand on her belly, and when she apologized again, “I’m really, really sorry, really,” she wasn’t sure if it was to Gillian or the baby.
* * *
—
Forty years: he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. He’d sent his wife an ostentatious bouquet to the store that morning, hydrangeas and tiger lilies and some kind of inedible kale. She’d called him to thank him but she’d sounded distracted and it made him feel like some sad teenage kid sending carnations to the prom queen. She was now, having brought the flowers home, rearranging the blooms in their vase, and she looked up at him and smiled. “These really are lovely,” she said. “I feel bad I didn’t send anything to you.”
She hadn’t necessarily forgotten, but she’d left before he awakened and only wished him a happy anniversary when she called to thank him from work, so he couldn’t tell if she would have remembered on her own. They’d never been much for holidays like that—holidays that didn’t involve the kids—but they tried to do something on the various milestones that accumulated, flowers from him or little notes from her, expensive dinners out, drives along the lakefront. And sex: they always had sex on their anniversary. It was, however crass, one of the few unfaltering pillars holding up their union. But perhaps they’d outgrown that. Perhaps they’d gotten complacent, regarding their decades-long marriage as a point of fact instead of the miracle that it was. Standing at the kitchen counter, they’d eaten swordfish left over from the grill and a salad she’d thrown together; he updated her on the ginkgo tree and she told him about her employee Drew’s insistence that they set up a Facebook page for the store.
Now she was making the coffee for the morning, setting the timer. “Any chance you wouldn’t mind taking the dog out? I thought I’d jump in the shower before bed.”
“Sure,” he said, turning to jingle his keys in the direction of Loomis.
“Thank you,” she called after him.
He loved Marilyn more, he was pretty certain, than anyone had ever loved another person. It almost suffocated him sometimes. And it was inevitable that one could grow used to that kind of luck, the way you’d grow used to anything, your body adapting around a presence or an absence. But of course it was a miracle, of course it was blindly, baldly phenomenal that he and Marilyn had not only found each other—out of all the other people on the earth, in the Chicagoland area, in the Behavioral Sciences Building that day so many years ago—but also that they were still here, together, that they hadn’t divorced or murdered each other or, worse, fallen into stagnant suburban silence, dead-eyed dinners and separate beds and hostile jokes about the toilet seat. That they still made each other laugh. That they made love, in their sixties, more often than they had in their thirties. That the sight of her at the end of the day still brought him so much joy.
He loved his daughters infinitely, of course. He would die for them, any one of them, for any reason, and he’d known this from the moment Marilyn had guided his hand—his twenty-five-year-old hand—shyly across her belly, swelled with Wendy, and he felt the faint flicker of a kick. He knew from that second that he would love their children with an inexpressible ferocity. And it only became easier, surprisingly, when they emerged from the womb and started to grow into little people. But he loved Marilyn more. He’d accepted this early on. Each one of his children was a singular, baffling miracle, a joy, an utter delight. But they came from Marilyn; he watched each one of them grow within and emerge from her body, he saw her in the subtle nuance of each of their faces, their posture, their frenetic hand gestures. Marilyn held his heart and she treated it with such meticulous care, filled in all of the little holes with her attention and affection and benevolence. Four whole decades she’d been doing this.
Loomis pulled him over to a thatch of milkweed and he allowed himself to be guided, turning back to look at their house, seeing the light come on in their bedroom, letting himself get a little histrionic, thinking of her. He was governed primarily by the part of himself that contained the love for his wife, his love for her endless capacity for love, for her optimism, for the world that she saw in which no one was ugly or evil, just hurting. That part had always been the largest. She was his, and he was hers, and he had never gotten over the mystifying luck of his draw. Some mornings he woke before her and watched her, watched her twitching eyelids, watched her choosing, willfully, to spend her life with him, to crawl into bed beside him each night and to kiss him, always, even if they were fighting; to make their bed every morning; to give birth to his children and raise them and regale him drowsily with stories of their troubles and achievements. She promised to love him, and part of his infatuation was sheer confusion. How, why? Why still? How dare they take these years for granted; how dare they pretend it was a night like any other night, dish soap and running shoes, when in fact the universe had allowed him to be with his best friend, his partner in all things, for over forty years? Fatigue be damned, he would wake Marilyn, take her hands, impart this revelation to her. He tugged the dog toward home.
The phone rang as he was retrieving Loomis’s after-walk snack, and he smacked his head on the hard edge of the low shelf in the pantry, and so his voice, when he answered—a smarting string of expletives running through his mind, a hand rubbing his head, Loomis sniffing worriedly at his knees—was not quite friendly.
“Yes?” he said, and there was a pause before the caller replied, “Hi—David?”
And she flooded back with ease, Gillian Levin, the woman who had once meant so many things to him and to his family. He’d discovered at some point that it was just easier not to think about her at all. She’d left the office not long after they stopped having their dinners, went to start her own obstetric practice on the Far North Side, and after a while life took over, filled in the spaces that used to be occupied by their friendship. His daughters continued to mature; his wife fell in love with him again; their circumstances were complicated anew by college tuition, by sons-in-law, by grandkids.
Until now, apparently. Loomis shoved his snout between David’s knees, still concerned for his well-being. He reached down to rub behind the dog’s ears.
“It’s okay,” he said to Loomis, before realizing the strangeness of it. “I mean—yes, hi, this is David. Hi.”
“It’s Gillian Levin.” The ludicrousness of her feeling the need to introduce herself. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Not at all.” It’s my fortieth wedding anniversary.
“Well, I won’t keep you long. I just have— I spoke to Liza this afternoon, David.”
And his blood immediately ran cold, thinking that maybe his daughter’s dark dreams were coming true, that in fact there was something wrong with her baby.
“I’m sorry, that was—poorly phrased. She’s fine. Prenatally. But she mentioned something quite upsetting on the phone.”
Had he missed something? Should he have been more concerned about Liza’s mental state, not just passed it off as the routine jitters of a first-time mother? He thought of Marilyn, asleep among the paint fumes in their kitchen on Davenport Street.
“She asked if you and I had slept together,” Gillian said.
The gods were not on his side during this conversation. He steadied himself against the kitchen sink. “She what?”
“I told her no, of course. But I— It seemed like
a gross invasion of privacy, and I just— I’m not suggesting that you…”
“No, that— I can’t imagine where she—got that.” His heart was pounding. It seemed unfair that the past was just allowed to pop up through the phone mounted on your kitchen wall.
“I’ve tried very hard to close the door on that part of my life,” Gillian said. “I mean, not— Your friendship meant a great deal to me, David.”
He swallowed. “Yours too.”
“But I never—I’d never— I have a reputation to uphold.”
“Of course,” he said, dumbly. It was so unexpected, all of this. Was Liza experiencing some kind of psychosis? But no, certainly—she had to have heard something, way back when. Sensed something. Their forgotten middle child, easy and unassuming. Could she really have been carrying this suspicion around for nearly twenty years? “I’m not sure what to do,” he said.
“I just thought you should know,” Gillian said.
“Sure. I’m sorry. I’m not sure— This is perplexing to me. But I’m sorry it happened.”
“Nothing for you to apologize for,” she said.
“Well.” There was a stillness, a long quiet moment in which it would have been normal for one of two friendly old colleagues to propose a future get-together.
“Sweet?” His wife’s voice, overhead.
“Marilyn’s calling me,” he said reflexively. Her name was a grenade.
“Of course.” Gillian paused. “Take care of yourself, David.”
“I’m sorry, again,” he was saying, but by the time he’d finished, she was gone.
When he came into their bedroom, Marilyn was sitting on the edge of the bed in his threadbare old St. Clement’s Basketball T-shirt, the one she’d managed to spare from the covetous hands of their girls. She’d let her hair down and she was smiling at him, a kind of smile he hadn’t seen for several months.
Life’s insistence on juxtaposing darkness and light would never cease to amaze him. That Marilyn was entirely oblivious to Gillian’s return seemed like a scientific impossibility. His anniversary gift, perhaps. He decided to seize it.
“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
A little pinprick of guilt. “Food for the Poor.”
“Way to bring down the mood, handsome man.”
“You’re so beautiful,” he said simply.
“Forty years is a pretty big deal,” she said. “You think I’d let you off that easy?”
He came over to her in a kind of leap, and it made her laugh aloud.
1984–1985
Marilyn had been preparing dinner when she learned that her father had died, Liza on her hip, the ends of her ponytail in Liza’s mouth, a bag of potatoes in her free hand, the receiver wedged between her chin and her shoulder.
“Why don’t you take a seat?” said the nurse on the other end, but she had already sat down heavily—startling the baby—in a kitchen chair. Liza, sensing her unease, began to fuss.
“Shh,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking to the baby or to the nurse.
“Your father’s had a heart attack, Mrs. Sorenson.”
“I know,” she murmured into the top of Liza’s head. Because she’d always kind of expected this, since she left Oak Park, hadn’t she? “I know, I know, I know.”
“We weren’t able to resuscitate him. I’m so sorry.”
It surprised her anew—as it had when she and David signed their lease, when she wrote the monthly check to the gas company, when the girls were born—how these instances of adult responsibility were just foisted upon you, without preamble or training. Suddenly she didn’t have parents, and there was nobody around to tell her what that meant, or how she was supposed to feel about it. In some ways, her father had done her a kindness by allowing her such a swift and clean exit from his life, by failing to express interest in her or his grandchildren. She tried to picture her own children growing up, progressing into adulthood, and she tried to imagine not being utterly riveted by their every step, as she was now.
“You’re wonderful, my lambs,” she’d whisper to the girls at night in the weeks after his death, memorizing the parts in their hair. “You’re Mama’s best things.”
Now Violet ambled into the room, having visibly wet her pants, having been too wrapped up in the game she’d been playing with Wendy where their dolls were sea explorers and the dustpan was a boat, which Marilyn had known would happen, because her eldest girls were so tightly wound sometimes that they had to be forcibly extracted from their imaginative world to deal with workaday inconveniences like urination. She knew them so well. So much better, already, than either of her parents had ever known her. Violet’s eyes were brimming with embarrassed tears, and Marilyn—her shoulder pressing the phone to her ear as the nurse began to review logistical details, Liza sucking again on the ends of her hair—opened her free arm to her daughter and pulled her close.
* * *
—
She was quieter in the weeks following her father’s death, he thought, but it was also hard to tell, because the way their life was structured didn’t really allow for a mourning period; he’d offered to take some time off work but she’d just smiled at him and insisted she was fine.
And then suddenly she was back.
“Darling, I hate it here,” she declared dramatically one night a few weeks later when he walked in the door, one hand elbow-deep in a rubber glove and the other holding a martini like some kind of missed-bus holdover from their parents’ generation; he was pretty sure she was even wearing makeup.
“Good evening to you too,” he said. He tripped over a tiny pair of rain boots as he went to set down his briefcase. He followed her into the kitchen, where she was wiping down the counters, Springsteen playing softly on the radio, which could indicate any number of her moods, from overwhelmed to furious to completely and insatiably aroused.
“There’s a dead mouse in the basement,” she said. “And the crack in the girls’ ceiling is getting bigger; I think it might be from ants. The librarian asked me if I’d gotten myself pregnant again. She said she’s been noticing that I’m gaining weight.”
“You’re not gaining weight.”
“I am, though. I am because there’s nowhere to go around here and so I’m just always sitting. I made you a drink if you want.”
“Thank you.”
“Sit down. I’ll get it.” She tossed her glove into the sink and spun toward him, stopping to kiss him as she passed; when she pulled away he could taste the waxy sheen of her lipstick. “I’m the one who needs more physical activity.”
“For God’s sake, honey; you get plenty of physical activity. You’re chasing three kids around all day.”
“Which brings me,” she said, thrusting out his martini, “to the girls’ room.”
“The ants. You said.”
“No. They’re going to kill each other in there, David.” She sat down next to him, laughing, her domestic façade proving itself to be just that, a theatrical little lilt to make her day more interesting. She still had a sense of humor about it all. She enjoyed their life, sometimes; of course she did. Sometimes he’d catch her humming when she was folding the laundry; her face lit up with pleasure every time Liza did her great hysterical baby-cackle; she’d just planted a row of tulips in the front yard. He reached for her free hand and clinked his glass against hers with the other.
“Oh yeah?” he said. He sipped his martini. “Lord of the Flies situation?”
“Really.”
“The librarian wasn’t right, was she? You’re not pregnant again?”
“Christ, no. But I’m losing it here, David.”
He often felt guilty when he came home to her, not because his day had been fun but because she so often appeared completely drained. He would come over to her on some of those evenings and lean to kiss her and feel afraid w
hen her eyes met his because they were so unfamiliar to him. She’d get this vacant, glassy look, usually accompanied by a weak shell of a smile, and she’d sometimes kiss back and sometimes just let him kiss her, and then inevitably one of the kids would make a noise or the pot she was filling in the sink would overflow and just as quickly she’d snap out of it, wrenched from her rumination by the chaotic onslaught of their household.
He felt bad that he’d never given her the opportunity to get to know herself better. At twenty-nine, she’d become so staunchly, irrevocably Mom to three girls that there was no room for anyone else, and even if there had been room, there wasn’t anyone else, because she hadn’t had the chance to discover any of her other selves prior to the births of their children. She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he had been so fixated on having her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had. This was how he saw it: getting her, winning. It wasn’t fair. She deserved more.
He observed the room around him: every inch of real estate on the fridge was covered with waterlogged paintings of princesses with pink hair and rainbow-striped dinosaurs. There was barely room at the table for Liza’s high chair, and the sink was lined with drying sippy cups and Strawberry Shortcake plates. And his wife, losing her mind in the middle of all of it, in the kitchen she’d impulsively painted blue before either of them had any idea what it meant to be overwhelmed.
“I got a call from my father’s lawyer today,” she said.
“Oh?”
“We’re homeowners.” Her voice was tentative. “If we want to be.”
The house on Fair Oaks: her father’s house, her childhood home, with the lilac bushes and the ginkgo tree beneath which she’d taken his virginity.
He hated Oak Park, and not only because he’d grown up in the city and rued the moneyed profusion of the suburbs—yards that could fit nine of his father’s house, fussy cobblestone streets. He hated it because of those things, but he also suspected they wouldn’t quite fit there, not like they did in Iowa City. They weren’t rich enough and they had too many kids. Oak Park: not north where the Jews lived or south where the Catholic Catholics lived, but just west of the city, a land populated by regular, lazy Catholics and agnostics, those who were skeptical or jaded or just liked to sleep late on Sundays. Oak Park: the land of wide lawns and narrow minds, the birthplace of Hemingway and Ray Kroc and home, then, to a bunch of walking contradictions afflicted with what his equally conflicted social liberal/fiscal conservative father-in-law had referred to as “a mean case of NIMBY syndrome.” Oak Park, the topography of which David could barely stand to comprehend, such a far cry from the pragmatic gray land upon which he had been reared, not very far away at all but aesthetically unrecognizable, apples and oranges, Frank Lloyd Wright versus the Tom, Dick or Harry who’d mapped out the bland vinyl-sided walk-up in which he’d come of age. Houses with bowling alleys in the basements and indoor swimming pools, houses that had once been inhabited and embellished by Depression-era mobsters but were now owned by white-bread investment bankers and neurosurgeons, people whose kids drove BMWs and had spots on reserve for ineffectual social science degrees from Marquette and Cornell. He hated the thought of living somewhere so precious and affluent.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 19