“I’ll give it to you to use as a vase when you leave.”
“Oh, well, I doubt we’ll finish an entire bottle.”
Again, if feeling ornery, she would have said, You bet your ass we will.
Instead: “I’ll give you some of the hydrangeas. I know how much you like them.”
She brought out a variety of small plates—olives and pita and hummus and some soft cheeses, a dish of ceviche, all bought in little plastic tubs from Whole Foods but served now with garnishes to make it look like she’d prepared them herself.
“I don’t think I realized how hungry I am,” Marilyn said. “This looks wonderful.”
A little smug, maybe, as she set down the last plate, one containing tiny slices of bruschetta, like Look at me, Mom, look how normal I am.
Vestiges of her teenage habits appeared only fleetingly for her now—she still, on occasion, flirted with the idea of purging, and once in a while she’d try a diet that she read about in Us Weekly. But she became comfortable with her body in adulthood—after her husband, after her abbreviated pregnancy—in a way that surprised her. She grew out of the part of herself that worried obsessively about things like that with so little holdover that it made her suspicious.
She regarded those days primarily with embarrassment. Common wisdom would say her dalliances with cocaine and extreme dieting were the manifestation of some larger psychological shortcoming, but Wendy disagreed. She’d disliked her family. She’d wanted better things. This, as she saw it, was a marker not of psychological distress but of upward mobility. She was ambitious, like her father. He’d gone to medical school and she, conversely, had made herself appealing to men who were also planning on going to medical school (or law school, or parentally funded gap years in Amsterdam). Except, of course, people like her father were respected. She recalled one evening, in the basement of an enormous house by Thatcher Woods, during which coke-peddling Spencer Stallings said, in front of three other boys, in front of one girl named Autumn, who was also very rich and flawlessly honey-haired, with an air of entitlement specific to blond boys reared in sprawling Colonial Revivals: “Suck my dick, Sorenson.”
And Wendy had done it. That was the worst part. She got down on her knees and did it right there, with other people watching, because you had to have something to remain on the inside with these people, and she had mousy hair and a motley Catholic family and a swan-like body that was maintained only because she was exceptionally good at making herself puke, and none of those things were enough. Her position in that basement was tenuous, so she’d unzipped his pants. Spencer had spoken to her with such authority both because he was an insufferable prick and because he knew she would do it; because Wendy, when receiving direction from anyone other than her parents, did what she was told.
She’d since been able to reconcile those degrading adolescent days with the life she led now, a life with a temperature-controlled wine rack and a two-story unit in a high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan, a life in which she could boss people around and meet a twenty-something at a bar and take him home and then kick him out in the middle of the night if she was so inclined. She’d endured years of being treated badly in order to fashion a version of adulthood in which she could do the same to others. There were worse things. This was survival.
“So,” she said, going to work on the wine. “How is everyone?”
Marilyn sighed. “Oh, everyone. They’re fine. We’re fine. Your sisters are—you know, status quo, I think. Lize seems a little worn out, but I suppose that’s— Well, you know how it is.” Her mother stopped, realized what she’d said and glanced up at her with apology. “Jonah’s doing quite well. Getting acclimated. He’s really a lovely boy; his resilience is—astounding, honestly, don’t you think?”
She sipped her wine, declining to answer.
“Honey, are you and Violet—is everything okay between you two?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, reminding herself a bit of Jonah.
“Because I can’t— I imagine these past few months have been—overwhelming. For both of you. And I can’t help but notice that— Well, I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I get.”
“I’m fine. I don’t know about Violet.”
“You and I haven’t discussed it, actually,” her mom said carefully. “What—happened. That year. The year Violet was living with you.”
“We came, we saw, we conquered,” she said idly, though the intensity of her mother’s attention was making her nervous. “Jesus, Mom, what more do you want to know? Violet was pregnant. Violet had a baby. The baby went home with other people. Violet returned to her same robotic self at an alarming speed. Violet went to law school. The end.” But of course that wasn’t true. Of course that had been just the beginning, as far as she and Violet were concerned.
“I just wonder why you wouldn’t have called me. I just don’t get why either of you thought you’d be even remotely equipped to handle such an enormous life decision.”
“You were as old as we were then when you had me and Violet,” she pointed out.
“Well, yes, but I— Times were different back then, Wendy, and I had your father and we’d always planned to have children. Just because you came a little earlier…”
“Gosh, Mom, did you get pregnant with me before you planned to?” She rolled her eyes. “I’m totally shocked; you’ve never mentioned it.”
“Oh, lord, Wendy, I didn’t mean—”
“We’re sisters, Mom. I can’t explain it any better than that. You wouldn’t understand.”
Her mother laughed. “How on earth do you argue that someone who’s given birth to four daughters still doesn’t understand sisterhood?”
Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know. You just don’t.”
Her mom, after a moment, apparently decided to let it go. “How about you? Are you as hopelessly lost as everyone else?” It was possible that this was some kind of convoluted compliment. Wendy, with her two floors and her widowhood and her organic prepared foods, was now situated more comfortably into the fibers of the world than her sisters. Survival. Her mother leaned her head back in her chair and closed her eyes, not seeming particularly eager for a response. She was struck again by how lovely her mom was, by the way that all the wrinkles on her face seemed to be laugh lines, by how her hair—uncolored and neglectfully cut—still looked a bit like gold Christmas-tree tinsel.
“No, Mom. Status quo. I’m a marathon of disappointment as usual.”
“You’ve never disappointed me,” her mother said, eyes fluttering open. “If you’re unhappy with how things are, then I—I’m sorry for that, and I wish you felt differently, but you’ve never been disappointing. Not ever.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Wendy said.
“Is this some kind of—what, reckoning? Because I wish you would’ve warned me if—”
“This is what you always do. You start to be sincere and then the second I reciprocate you shut down.”
“You made a joke, Wendy. That’s not sincerity.”
“It’s my kind of sincerity.”
“That you get from your father.” She sighed. “Wendy, honey, I— You’ll have to forgive me if I’m caught off-guard when you just all of the sudden lash out at me with—”
“Oh my God, Mom, it’s not all of the sudden. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who says that. It’s all of a sudden. Didn’t you get, like, a significant portion of an English degree? Before I showed up and ruined your life?”
“Wendy, you didn’t ruin my life. Lord.”
“I’m just saying. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not in the least.” She blinked. “Well, I mean, of course I mind. But smoke away. Blow it right in my face. It’s criminal how much I love the smell.”
Wendy lit a cigarette and exhaled away from her mother.
“I was asking because I was genuinel
y curious about what’s going on with you, Wendy,” she said. “I am genuinely curious.”
“Well, forgive me if I didn’t recognize that because it’s literally the first time I’ve ever seen you be curious about me.”
“You fascinate me,” she said. “All you girls. You’re miraculous. There’s nothing in the world I care about more.”
“All I’m saying,” she said, filling their glasses, “is that you seem particularly fascinated by those of us who’ve achieved certain milestones. Liza has a PhD. Gracie’s—whatever, like an adult baby who we feel affection for by default. And Violet has kids.”
“I adore the boys,” she said. “But I hope none of you ever felt any pressure from me to— Nothing about that makes Violet any more legitimate in my eyes.”
“You act like she’s the fucking Blessed Virgin.”
“Violet’s fragile,” she said, and Wendy was surprised by the ease with which she spoke. “Violet needs to be treated like that.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re the strongest of my kids. I know I’m not supposed to say things like that.”
“And yet,” Wendy said, but she was intrigued.
“Maybe I didn’t coddle you enough at the outset,” she said, and Wendy snorted. “I definitely didn’t. Fine. But don’t you think there’s a chance that you’re better off because of it? Don’t you think it’s possible that I was teaching you how to be—resilient? Self-sufficient?”
“Not intentionally.”
“Nothing you do as a parent is intentional.”
“Which I’d know if I’d done what I was supposed to?”
“Which you’d know if things happened the way you deserved for them to happen.”
“What about God?” Wendy asked meanly. “Isn’t God supposed to give us what we deserve?”
“That’s not how it works,” she said flatly. “Life’s hard for all of us. Life’s terrible, a lot of the time. It’s not about deserving things but we— I think we’re entitled to feel angry when we’re deprived of things that other people take for granted.”
“Well, hey, thanks,” Wendy said. “Thanks for the permission.”
“Would you like me to leave? I can’t—I can’t ever seem to do anything right, by your standards. Would you just like me to leave you alone?”
Wendy sipped her wine and squinted at a spot past her mother’s shoulder. “No,” she said finally. “I’m not sure what I’d like.”
“Well, settle in,” Marilyn said. “Because it takes for-fucking-ever to figure that out.”
Wendy raised her eyebrows.
“Fine,” her mom said, taking a drink of her wine. “Let me bum a cigarette.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m unused to having this kind of fraught existential discussion over lunch,” she said.
Wendy handed over the pack of cigarettes.
She took one, lit it and inhaled deeply, coughing on her exhalation. “Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she said.
“Disgusting?” Wendy asked.
She shook her head. “The most wonderful thing I’ve experienced in months.” She took another drag. “I get why you did what you did. With Jonah. I get it. I’ve wanted to tell you that. Nobody’s ever ready to be a parent.”
“I wasn’t going to be his—”
“Nobody’s ever prepared to care for a child full-time, is what I mean. Nobody understands what that means until they do it for themselves. We’re all just holding our breath and hoping nothing catastrophic happens. And how deeply you get hurt doing that! It’s constant pain. It’s a parade of complete and utter agony, all the time, forever.”
“You’re selling it well,” Wendy said.
“It takes such a long time to realize that it’s worth it. I wonder why we’re engineered that way. We’re sleep-deprived to the point of madness those first couple of years and then one day you wake up and you see the little person you’ve created and she says a sentence to you and you realize that everything in your life has been an audition for the creation of that specific person. That you’re sending freestanding beings off into the world and it’s entirely on your shoulders.”
“So when you fuck it up…” Wendy said.
“Please, my dear,” her mom said. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”
The secret of her mother: she wished she’d been willing to learn it earlier. Give her an ounce of yourself and she’d give herself to you in totality, metric tons of love and amusement and conviction. Wendy pulled her knees to her chest, fifteen again, and shoved a triangle of pita into her mouth.
* * *
—
“In my desk,” Wendy called. “In the middle drawer on the left.”
In her daughter’s bedroom in search of Advil—their conversation had given her a headache; the cigarette had made it worse—all Marilyn heard was left and she pulled open the top left-hand drawer and was confronted with a number of files. Medical—2009; Dental—2012; Tax Exemptions—07–08. And then, the fourth folder in: Ivy.
The sight of the name still made her so sad, and she stared at it now, the smallness of it, three letters, Wendy’s familiar looping tail on the y. How much it must have hurt her daughter to do something as pedestrian as labeling a folder, to have Ivy relegated to the shallow depths of a file cabinet. She slipped her hand inside the file to open it and peered in the crack. A few ultrasound photos, a hospital bracelet, and a pale blue slip of paper. She removed it, holding her breath. ILLINOIS BUREAU OF VITAL STATISTICS. DATE OF DEATH: 09/10/2005.
“Did you find it?” Wendy called.
She forced the air out of her lungs, slid the paper back into the file, and opened the middle drawer. There, among paper clips and Post-it notes: the Advil. She shook the bottle for validation. “Found it,” she called.
She had so many regrets about Wendy. She regretted that she’d had her so young, during a time in her life when she was so lonesome. She regretted that she’d never really given Wendy her full attention, overcome first by delirious exhaustion and then by preparations for the unexpected arrival of Violet, the born-too-soon second child who kicked everything into such chaotic overdrive. She regretted—not Grace, certainly, but the impulsive moment during which she and David had decided to try again, when she perhaps should have been noticing the increasing moodiness of her eldest, the troubling relationship Wendy was developing with food. She regretted whatever she had done to make her daughter loathe herself so. She wondered what she’d done to make Wendy so entranced by a life loftier than the one she was living.
She was disturbed by the way their lunch had unfolded, by Wendy’s accusations, by the swift dexterity—indicative of bad habit—with which her daughter had opened the bottle of wine. And it occurred to her for the first time that she was maybe the only person in their family who knew uniquely the kind of loss Wendy had endured, that she hadn’t lost a husband and a baby but she’d lost her mother before she’d had a chance to figure out who she was as a person. That there was no way to measure suffering, of course, but that she—whose entire childhood had been an exercise in settling—knew better than anyone else what Wendy was going through.
She could see herself in all of her children, most often things about herself that she disliked. Violet knew how to put on a brave face, even if to her own detriment. Liza regarded her parents with undue reverence in the same way that Marilyn once had, watching her own parents—likely both extremely intoxicated—waltzing around the living room together one Christmas Eve, blind to the things both of them had to swallow in order to continue their relationship. Grace was malleable and conflict-avoidant. But Wendy had the strongest hold on her. Her daughter was impulsive, compulsive, turbulent. She spoke her mind as Marilyn had before she had children. She was self-conscious and self-critical and self-destructive.
She’d never say it—for fear of r
uining a good thing in a way that only a well-intentioned mother can—but Wendy’s marriage to Miles reminded her the most of her own, the way that her daughter seemed to come into herself only after she’d met her husband, a man who was older than she and more serious—as David had been in 1975. And this made everything harder. Wendy was harder to approach, harder to soothe, harder to pity. She thought of all the times she’d tried to comfort her as a teenager, all the times her daughter’s sticklike limbs had remained flaccid beneath her touch, all the times Wendy had sneered at her mother’s efforts to connect.
Wendy: that first baby, that first person who demanded that she love the world around her in addition to and on behalf of the tiny person in her arms, who woke up a part of her heart whose existence she had not previously known and who made her realize its potential, those infinite and ever-shifting thresholds. Wendy: strong-willed and infuriating. Wendy, the first person on the earth in whom she had seen her husband’s exact same eyes.
She could never explain this to her daughter. You made me recognize that my heart is in fact a bottomless hole of simultaneous pleasure and despair. She could never say, You gave my life meaning and ruined it at the same time. She spent six months with her firstborn, conjoined, buried in blankets against the long winter, noticing You got my mom’s nose and Other people may not think your eye contact means anything but I know that it does. But then Violet came, along with the excuse to say, I am now the mother of two infants and any mistakes I make can be chalked up to exhaustion.
And then Ivy had died. She’d been in agony for her daughter, for the grandchild she’d never get to meet. In the office, she steadied herself against Wendy’s desk. All these years she’d thought her granddaughter had lacked a middle name in the same way that Grace did—she’d never faulted David for the oversight, picturing him making a knee-jerk decision, holding their newborn, certain his wife was dead.
There was a fullness in her chest. Perhaps Wendy didn’t hate her as much as she’d always assumed. IVY MARILYN EISENBERG, on the certificate she’d just tucked back into its resting place in Wendy’s desk, just above the date.
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