But his wife—his wife who’d come with him to Iowa and given him this beautiful, chaotic life, made a father and a doctor out of him, loved him amid the tumult—hated it here. And so it was. They were bursting at the seams, and thank God they were still able to laugh about it, but he wasn’t sure how much longer that would be the case. He owed her. She would be there, wherever they lived. The rest, he supposed, didn’t really matter.
She was watching him with apprehension, and he smiled at her, and the relief that crossed her face made everything worth it; for the simple fact of her hand squeezing his, he would have moved a dozen times over.
* * *
—
The third step from the bottom still creaked as it always had. Marilyn came down from putting the girls to bed and found David on the couch, looking small and uncertain in their underfurnished living room. He saw her and smiled; she came and sat beside him.
“I don’t think I ever really realized how huge this place is,” he said. “I mean—growing up—I think my entire house was maybe the size of this room.”
“My Little Match Boy.”
“I’m serious. I think—I would have slept where the fireplace is, and my dad’s room would have been the…foyer, I guess. Do I have to call it that?”
“You can call it whatever you want,” she said, rubbing his thigh.
“You’re just going to have to bear with me while I get used to this.”
“Yeah, well, likewise,” she said, and he looked at her pointedly. “I’ll be patient.”
Marriage, she had learned, was a strangely pleasurable power game, a careful balance of competing egos, conflicting moods. She could turn hers off in order to allow his to shine. Conservation. Reciprocity. She was allowed to feel confident and excited only when he was feeling anxious and pessimistic. If he worried about everything, she was allowed to worry about nothing. He had given her a gift by agreeing to move here. She curled into him and surveyed the disaster of the living room. They had unpacked the girls’ things, some of them at least—her children had roughly seventy times more possessions than she did—and a few absolute necessities; but everything else was still in ruins, haphazardly stacked boxes and furniture left wherever they had decided to set it and rolled-up rugs like fallen bodies and all of the things her father had left behind—the built-in room dividers with the gilt-edged encyclopedias, the antique end tables that her mother had refinished.
“What should we do first?” he asked, sounding drained. He would start work the day after tomorrow, and had just finished at the hospital in Cedar Rapids yesterday, had come home at midnight and meticulously packed up what remained of their kitchen and modest living room; he had gone to bed at three and awakened at six to pick up their U-Haul and play an elaborate game of Tetris with the complete contents of their domestic life, fitting it all into the truck without a centimeter to spare. (She had discovered, after the fact, one box that she had forgotten in the bedroom closet, and when she presented it to him he had looked so dejected that she had decided she could do without the extra set of linens—though they had been her mother’s, beautiful Pratesi sheets dotted with lavender fleur-de-lis—and set it on the curb.)
“We should drink a beer together on our porch,” she said.
“It’s only eight. Tomorrow’s our only full day to get settled in before I’m back at work.”
“So what?” she said, rising from the couch. “Outside.” He looked first at her and then at the carnage in their new living room. “Forget about it for tonight. We’ve got the next fifty years together to finish unpacking.”
At this he smiled, shook his head and rose to go with her onto the porch. They’d yet to unpack the patio furniture and sat instead on old pool rafts they found in the garage.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Come keep me company,” Wendy demanded, calling in from the patio to where Jonah was watching South Park reruns in the living room. It was nice to be able to ameliorate your own loneliness, to beckon a person and have him comply. He looked up, one leg thrown over the back of the couch and his neck at a ninety-degree angle over the armrest. He rose without protest, clicked off the television and came to join her outside.
“You want me to bring the bottle of wine?” he said when he reached the screen door.
She stiffened. “What? No.”
He paused. “Okay. Just checking.”
“How was martial arts?”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “I’m still working on the three sixty defense.”
It surprised her how easily they’d fallen into a rapport, how much he’d relaxed around her over the course of a few months. He joked with her, told her about dumb shit he’d watched on the Internet. He inured her to teenisms, dope and lit and meme; and he told her when it would be normal for her to use those words and when it would just seem try-hard.
“If at first you don’t succeed…” she said idly, lighting a cigarette. Every once in a while he’d bum one from her, but his habit didn’t seem serious.
Bring the bottle? As though she were some kind of wino. True: if her recycling bin was any indicator, she probably drank more than she should (though at least she recycled). And the guy at the bodega where she bought her cigarettes knew her by name, but she also went there for orange juice and Clif bars, which didn’t necessarily mean she smoked too much—though scientific consensus pegged all smokers as smoking too much. As for the weed, the evidence in her favor was staggering: reduction in anxiety, possible increase in lung capacity and metabolism. Cancer prevention too; people ignored the research on that. She just happened to live in a state where it had not yet been made legal.
But she was functional, wasn’t she? She volunteered and went to core barre and showed up to fund-raisers biweekly at least, and she’d yet to make a spectacle of herself. And now she was taking care of a teenage kid, and he was still alive, wasn’t he? And she’d turned her sexual exploits into kind of a game, sneaking around, sparing Jonah from her visitors. There was a pleasant excitement in it, tiptoeing through the halls, muffling her cries in the pillows, silently seeing the men to the front door. And she was surprised by the erotic benefits of this: it felt like when she was a teenager and she’d had to sneak Aaron Bhargava in and out of her bedroom window. She wondered—not to be gross—if her parents had ever benefited similarly from hiding their own romantic exploits. It made her feel illicit and mature, responsible, shielding the kid down the hall from witnessing the primal scene.
He’d begun, lately, though, to look at her with a mix of caginess and concern, like nothing that came out of her mouth quite made sense, like anything she said was potentially a joke. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had started happening, but now it was all she could see, the way he acted like she was some doddering hag who couldn’t be trusted to use the stove.
“Do you think I’m a fuckup?” she asked him.
“What? No.”
“Why the fuck did you ask if I wanted a bottle of wine, then?”
He winked. “Because sometimes you ask me that.”
“Maybe if you’re passing by the kitchen I’ll ask you to bring me something, but it’s not like I’m constantly soliciting you to bring me bottles of wine.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Do you think I’m just a total boozehound?”
“God, no, Wendy. Chill out.”
“Honestly.” The nausea she felt was another thing that could be assuaged by marijuana, scientifically speaking. “What do you—take me for?”
Jonah frowned.
“What do you think of me, I mean.”
“I think it’s pretty sick, actually, your life,” he said, and she felt the blood drain from her face. “No,” he said, noticing. “Like, good sick.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s like lit,” he said. “Like good sick. S
eriously. Like you’re just this— I don’t know. You smoke and drink a bunch and just hang out and you still seem—I don’t know, like, okay with everything.”
“Just hang out?”
“Like you’re just a chill person, and it doesn’t seem like you’re that bothered by all of the bullshit that everyone else worries about. Which is cool, Wendy. It’s a good thing.” He squirmed. “Can I bum a smoke?”
“No,” she said, surprising herself with her anger. “Jesus fuck; you’re like a baby. It’s not cool to smoke; you’re fucking yourself over by starting so early.” Her father chastened her for it, which made her furious because he was such a fucking hypocrite, because her mother used to keep a pack of Camels wedged behind his workbench in the garage.
“Look, dude, I didn’t mean—”
“I’m not a dude. God, what the fuck do you— Christ. Forget it. You should go to bed.”
“It’s like eight-thirty.” He looked up at her with surprising clarity. “Wendy, I didn’t mean— I think you’re cool. I don’t need to bum a cigarette. You’re good. We’re good.”
Of course it was common sense, just textbook being-a-person, that you would never appear in someone else’s eyes precisely as you did in your own. There had been talk, when she was a teenager, of body dysmorphia, an adolescent mindfuck that added fifteen pounds to her frame every time she looked in the mirror, dishwatered her hair and tripled her chin. But now she worried she’d floated all the way to the other side of the spectrum, that she’d lost perspective on herself in possibly a more detrimental way, one that convinced her she was fine when in fact she was supremely fucked, shoplifting-Winona-Rider-level fucked, merely a mammoth bank account away from being drowned-rat-sewer-dwelling fucked.
“You’re too old to be this dumb,” she said.
“What?” He seemed like a child again now, fully.
“Stop trying to be cool. You’ve got enough stacked against you already. Play to your strengths.” She convolutedly wished he had brought out what remained of the bottle of wine.
He didn’t say anything, and it made her feel worse, and she prematurely stubbed out her cigarette and lit another one just for something to do.
“I’m not the cool degenerate aunt who you can just— I’m an adult, Jonah; I’ve been through more shit than— Christ.”
“Look, Wendy, I was trying to be nice. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He rose uncertainly. “You’re cool,” he said. “You’re lit.” She heard desperation in his voice, and she felt a combination of anger and compassion, for his apprehension, for his naïveté.
“Sleep well,” she said, and she leaned definitively away from him over the railing, staring wistfully down at the lake like some kind of persecuted maritime harlot, listening to the swish of the door as he went inside, feeling an allergic pressure in her sinuses, watching the waves hurl themselves mercilessly against the Harbor Lock.
* * *
—
Later, when everything had had time to sink in, David would marvel over the fact that Wendy had called him first. But when he saw her name flash across his phone on a Tuesday evening, when she responded to his hello not with a reciprocal greeting but with a guttural catch from her throat, his first thought was that something terrible had happened and he wished she’d called Marilyn instead. His wife was reading on the back porch and he had half a mind to bring the phone out to her, deposit it in her lap like Loomis did with sticks and squirrel skeletons.
“What is it?” he asked.
Her voice, when it finally found itself, was more assured than he was expecting. “So this isn’t working out,” she said. “This— Jonah.”
“What do you mean it’s not working out?” Of course they could have anticipated this. Of course Marilyn had anticipated this, but he’d held out some hope for Wendy, had seen how tender and thoughtful and resilient she could be. She couldn’t be getting rid of him already.
“There’s too much maneuvering. Plus my schedule. It’s all too— It’s just not meshing.”
As far as he knew, his daughter’s schedule consisted of various core-strengthening exercise classes and surface-level psychotherapy and a steady stream of cocktails—things to which he’d always considered her entitled, for now at least, given all she’d been through.
“Did something happen?”
“No, I— No, not like one specific thing; I just don’t think this is an ideal situation and frankly I’m not sure why we even considered it in the first place. You guys are blocks away from the high school. You have the room. You have the—”
“Adolescent strength training?” he asked. It had never been clear to him when Wendy would respond favorably to his jokes but tonight she laughed, after a long minute of quiet.
“It’s a lot,” she said finally.
No shit, he did not say.
“There’s just— I just don’t think this is necessarily the best time in my life to—you know, be sharing a life with another person. I don’t think I’m ready to— I’m definitely not ready to have a kid in my possession right now.”
He knew that if anyone waited to have kids until they felt ready to have them, the human race would have died off centuries ago. But again he held his tongue.
“It makes more sense for him to be living there anyway.” She paused. “I’m sure you think I’m a total fuckup. I know everyone thinks I’m a total fuckup but I— This really just isn’t— I just can’t right now, Dad. I’m sorry.”
“Nobody thinks that, sweetheart. Can you at least stick it out until the weekend?” This poor kid, being ferried around between their homes like a library book.
“Sure,” Wendy said. “I haven’t told him.”
“Don’t say anything yet,” he said. “In case it— You don’t want him to feel unwelcome.”
“He’s not unwelcome. I just—”
“I know. Hold tight. Let me talk to your mother.”
Marilyn was curled up on the wicker couch on the back porch with Loomis beside her, his head nestled into the crook of her knees. David paused in the doorway to watch her, the wave of hair that fell over the curve of her neck, the way one hand idly traced soothing lines down the dog’s back. He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders, making her startle.
“Just me,” he said.
“Hey, you. Who was on the phone?”
“Wendy, actually.” He sat down beside her, placing a hand on her knee. “So, guess what?”
She held a finger in her book and looked up at him expectantly. He remembered getting a call from her during his rounds at the hospital in Cedar Rapids, her voice wobbling, uttering the very same line: “Looks like we’re going to be having another baby.”
He should’ve known before he said it that it wouldn’t make her laugh.
* * *
—
“Mom called me,” Violet said, and Wendy, phone pressed to her ear, felt a surging of bile in her throat. “God, you really are fucked up, aren’t you?”
“I—”
“I should have fucking known,” Violet said. “Of course you don’t feel any kind of anything about this because you’re a goddamn sociopath.”
“It just wasn’t—”
“I asked you one thing,” Violet said. “I asked you for one thing and I— Christ, I didn’t even ask; you offered, and all you had to do was the bare minimum and you lasted the summer? You’re the one who started this, Wendy. You’re the one who started all of this and you’ve never given a single thought to the fact that these are people’s actual lives. Jesus. Do you not get that other people exist and have feelings and needs and— God, he’s fifteen. He’s a fifteen-year-old kid with a fucked-up life and you had the effortless opportunity to make things suck a little bit less for him and you couldn’t even pull it together for that? Do you realize how much instability he’s had in his life? Do you get tha
t I told him you’d be happy to have him for as long he wanted? Which you said to me, by the way. Verbatim. I wrote it down because I was so fucking shocked to hear you sounding like a psychologically reasonable person.”
Violet never spoke to her in this way, never dared to be so candidly cruel. She was so busy trying to compose herself, to speak past the thickness in her throat, to not feel life-endingly hurt, that she didn’t give any thought to what came out of her mouth in return: “You know, Violet, I seem to recall someone else in this family being the direct cause of his fucked-up life.”
“Fuck you,” Violet said.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 20