The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  “I just mean that nobody would blame you,” Liza said.

  Wendy registered the statement in all its humorlessness, then looked up at her sister, who was staring at her like some kind of Vision-Questing interventionist. “Jesus Christ, Liza, are you fucking joking?”

  “No, no—I mean—of course we would all—I just mean you’ve been through a lot, and it would be an entirely natural reaction to that level of—you know, trauma, to just shut down. To lose the will to…”

  “Are you saying you’d understand if I lost the will to live?”

  “No, I just mean that it wouldn’t be— God, you’re boxing me into a corner here, Wendy.”

  “You don’t counsel people, do you? Like, at your job?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good,” Wendy said. “I’m not being serious. Jesus. And we’re talking about you. Whose life, for once, seems to be more fucked up than mine.”

  And her sister broke down then, another single pregnant woman self-immolating on her sofa. “I can’t do this myself,” she said. “I thought I wanted Ryan out of the picture because he’s been—well, a mess, really, lately; he’s been really struggling, Wendy, for a while, like totally catatonic, and it’s felt kind of like I already have a kid, so I’ve been worried about him being able to be a father to his own kid, but now that he’s actually gone I don’t know what I was thinking. And God, the timing couldn’t be worse with work; it looks like I got pregnant to take advantage of my benefits as permanent faculty; you should see how my department chair looks at me now, like I’m fucking radioactive.”

  “You’re going to be okay,” Wendy said.

  “There’s a person inside of me that I’m supposed to keep alive.”

  She watched Liza’s brain catch up with her mouth, and her sister reached first to touch a hand to her belly, as though in apology to her baby, and then for Wendy’s wrist, squeezing it like their mother sometimes did when she felt emphatic about something.

  “Oh, my God, Wendy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I just meant that—”

  “You’re fucking terrified,” Wendy said. “Of course you are. But you are going to be okay. And you’re not going to be by yourself. Mom and Dad are super-stoked and they’re going to be all over you to babysit. And Violet will seize any opportunity to inundate you with smug parental wisdom and remind you she’s smarter than you. And I’m also not, like, a total miscreant. I can spoil it rotten. I keep walking by these fucking ludicrous newborn culottes in the window of the Dior boutique. I might be just a ridiculous enough person to buy them for you.” Shortly after she’d gotten pregnant, Miles had come home with a Cubs onesie he’d bought from a street vendor by Wrigley Field, and everything had felt real, then, for the first time, her baby and its devoted, doting father. She swallowed. “There will be tons of people to love your kid, Liza. You know that, right?”

  “I just had this—image. Like we grew up so—like how you want your kids to grow up.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion, I think,” Wendy said. “And things usually don’t turn out exactly how we imagine they will.”

  Liza paused. “I didn’t mean that nobody would blame you.”

  “If I offed myself? Thanks, Lize.”

  “You know what I meant?”

  “I took it to mean that you think I’ve been pretty violently fucked. But that plays to my point. Shit happens, people leave, and you can still end up being rich enough to live in the same building as Oprah.”

  “I thought she left Chicago.”

  “I mean, she allegedly did.”

  “Oprah does not live in your building, Wendy.”

  “You can forget about me buying a Burberry trench for your baby if you keep up that attitude.”

  Liza smiled. “I came here because I was hoping you would temporarily lure me into the illusion that everything’s going to be okay.”

  “And?”

  Liza reached for her hand again, but this time she held it, didn’t let go. “Thank you, Wendy.”

  * * *

  —

  An upswing: Grace had a crush on a boy and she made just enough money to pay her rent and buy a quarterly avocado and/or nongeneric tampons, if she was feeling decadent. These were the important details, and the ones on which she chose to focus. She’d started going to Orion with regularity, stopping after work on days when Ben was there. She’d quickly grown familiar with his schedule, which seemed like either a step in the right direction of a romantic relationship or unequivocal stalker behavior. And she’d sit across from him at the counter, legs swinging from the high stool, and they’d talk about anything—the underratedness of Pete & Pete, her weird oboist boss, interpersonal dramas within Ben’s pickup soccer league—and that wonderful thing would happen where hours would pass by in seconds; she’d look at her watch and see it was suddenly 10:00 p.m., a phenomenon anathema to her lately, because every other area of her life seemed to be creeping along, slouching toward nothing at all.

  She was most acutely reminded of how royally screwed she was during contact with her family. When they weren’t on the phone, she was able to ignore many of the details of her circumstances, let everything blur at the edges a little like when she watched Netflix without her contacts. She’d begun to limit her communication with her parents and her sisters—the latter was much easier than the former, because all of her sisters seemed to be at peak stations of selfishness; but her parents called her at least once a week, usually more.

  “Gosling,” her mom said when she answered. “I’ve missed the sound of that little voice.”

  It was a Saturday evening and she had just done a hair mask with her two remaining eggs that were a week past their sell-by date. She sat against the wall next to her refrigerator, where her service was the strongest. “It’s not little; it’s just a regular voice.” She paused. “Sorry.”

  “Is now a bad time, sweetheart?” her mom said, laughing uncertainly.

  “No. No, it’s fine. Sorry, Mom. It’s good to hear your voice too.”

  “Dad and I just spent much of our dinner discussing how much we miss you. Are you bogged down with school work? I saw it’s been raining there for almost a week.”

  “I’m—pretty bogged, yeah. How did you know it’s raining here?”

  “Dad and I added you to the weather trackers on our phones.”

  It was the nicest thing she’d heard in some time, the fact that people existed on the earth who gave a shit whether or not she was enduring excessive precipitation. She combed her fingers through her hair, trying to decide if it felt softer, wondering if Ben would notice its shine, wondering what it would feel like to have Ben run his fingers through her hair, down her back. They’d go have a beer sometimes, after his shift, and last night he’d flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve of her shirt. She’d panicked, at the time, so unprepared for intimate contact, and Ben, laughing, had apologized for startling her, but now she felt the ghost of his touch on her arm while her mom yammered on about the hardware store and Jonah’s martial arts.

  She swallowed. She’d become preoccupied with sex for the first time in her life, surreptitiously borrowing D. H. Lawrence and Catullus and Lolita from the library. She had once gone so far as to type out the single, shameful word—porn—before slamming her laptop closed in terror. She’d become obsessed, from afar, with the construction of Ben’s body, with the way his shoulders looked straining against the back of his T-shirt, with the dark hair she’d seen once on his lower belly as he reached to get a bag of coffee beans from a high shelf, with the smell of his sweat when he got close enough. She’d read that some boys could tell when they were having sex with virgins, which of course made her terribly nervous.

  “Before I forget,” her mom said, jolting her back to attention. “I wanted to give you the new cr
edit card number so you could get your flight home for Christmas.”

  She’d forgotten the inconvenient fact of holidays. She’d managed to evade Thanksgiving by citing a crushing midterm exam schedule, but she felt somehow blindsided by the existence of Christmas. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see them. In fact, she was wildly homesick, would’ve loved nothing more than to spend a week or two kicking around at the house on Fair Oaks, snuggling with the dog, sleeping until noon and eating her mom’s grilled cheese. She wanted to hear from Liza, no holds barred, what it felt like to be pregnant; she wanted to drink fancy wine on Wendy’s couch while her sister tipsily bought her expensive handbags online. She would’ve liked to go grocery shopping with her dad and to play Candy Land with her nephews and to finally meet Jonah, her sister’s mysterious progeny, who’d already seemed to have been absorbed wholeheartedly into the fibers of the family, who was spoken of so highly that it made her kind of jealous. One of the few perks of being the youngest kid was the fact that you didn’t have little siblings to be jealous of, but Jonah was a game changer, and it seemed ludicrous that she was the only one in the family who hadn’t met him, a fact that only made everyone feel farther away.

  But as she pictured how these things would unfold—eating the grilled cheese would mean sitting with her mother at the table, having to lie to her face; everything she would say about herself to her newfound nephew would be at least slightly false; her sisters had an uncanny ability to extract the truth from her—the risk of it all started to feel enormous. She couldn’t keep this up forever, of course—things would inevitably implode, she knew, and probably soon; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t told them yet; she couldn’t believe that she didn’t have a plan for the coming year, a real plan involving some kind of forward motion, another go at the LSATs or a lower-bar round of law school applications or a ballsy move to San Francisco to live with her rich friend Caitlin and get an entry-level marketing job. But she hadn’t done any of those things, and every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.

  “Mama,” she said without meaning to, her voice now truly pathetically small.

  “What is it, Goose?” Her mom sounded concerned, but then interrupted herself: “I’m on the phone with Gracie, sweetheart; could you ask David?”

  She had to be talking to Jonah. Her replacement, filling the place she’d once inhabited and of an appropriate age to actually need parenting.

  “Love? You okay?”

  She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. I— Actually, I feel so terrible about this, but I…”

  “Of course you’re coming home,” her mother said, the statement part question.

  “It’s just that I—got an offer I kind of can’t refuse.” She conjured up an image of some pedigreed friends, hearty souls who vacationed in wood-paneled chalets. “I’m going skiing. With a few friends from school.”

  “Which friends?”

  She tried to ignore the way her mom’s voice had wilted. “Um. Emily.” Emily she’d mentioned before, a made-up bisexual Wisconsinite from her fictitious study group. “And Sharon.” She froze. Where had that come from? Who, other than those born before 1960, was named Sharon? But she just had to go with it. This was one of the drawbacks of living a lie, the constant need to be ten steps ahead of where you thought you’d need to be. “Her parents have a house in the Alps,” she said.

  “The Alps? In Switzerland?”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. “I meant Aspen,” she said. “Sorry, I’m super-tired.”

  “Wow, sweetheart.” Her mom’s voice was undeniably wounded, despite the fact that she was obviously trying to be enthusiastic. “That sounds like a wonderful vacation. But of course we’ll— Gosh, I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever, honey. I miss you.”

  The niggling sense again of how easy it would be to collapse right now, confess, take a red-eye home and let her parents take care of her. But then her phone buzzed with a text message, and she pulled it away from her ear to look at it: You around? Up for a drink? Comeback, 8ish? Every time her screen glowed with his name she felt a tiny door opening up inside of her, one through which she could enjoy little pockets of her life.

  She returned to her call. “I miss you too,” she said. If she paused too long to consider anything, she felt a sickly vertigo. “And I’m really sorry to miss Christmas, but I—like, I feel like it’s important to be making friends, trying to find my footing here again since almost everyone from Reed left, and I…”

  “Of course,” her mom said. “Of course that’s important. We’ll be a skeleton crew anyway; Violet and Matt will be in Seattle. You live your life, Goose. Dad and I will be here whenever.”

  There was a downside, guilt-wise, of having the most wonderful parents known to man. She swallowed the lump in her throat. I’m sorry I am such a garbage person-slash-daughter, she did not say. “I’ve got to go, Mom. I’m meeting a friend for a drink.”

  “Sure. Have fun, sweetheart. I love you.”

  “Love you too,” she said, and she hung up the phone, texted Ben back Be there in 20, and flew out the door and into the chilly evening mist before she could fully digest what a monstrous asshole she’d become.

  1996

  It was rooted in chivalry, his offer to drop Gillian off at her car, because the windchill was twelve below, but David felt something else taking hold with her beside him in the passenger seat, something that quickened his pulse and left an acidic sickness at the back of his throat. They’d been stealing away to dinner after work for weeks, meandering meals with tacked-on rounds of drinks.

  “Of all the places to live in the world,” Gillian said, blowing big dramatic puffs of air into her cupped hands, “we’ve chosen the Midwest.” The we struck him as odd, as though he and Gillian had, together, planted a flag in the soil of Illinois.

  “Insanity,” he said absently, angling out of his parking space. Her presence contracted and expanded next to him, filling the car like monoxide, scent of cold air and kinetic energy, static and spearmint. He’d learned a great deal about her, their meals together allowing an impressive coverage of ground: she’d spent a year abroad in Italy when she was in college and had retained bits of the language and an affinity for the country’s dry red wines; she’d voted for Perot because she had a soft spot for crazy underdogs; she’d broken her right clavicle while cycling and the bone had been improperly set, resulting in a visible notch beneath her skin. He tried to allow himself to experience their conversations without any real-time introspection. On his way home after their dinners, he ticked off reasons why they weren’t doing anything wrong.

  “I’m parked right up here,” she said.

  He pushed the gearshift back into park beside her little gray Honda. She didn’t move.

  “If you could live anywhere else,” she asked, “where would you choose?”

  “Huh.” He fiddled with his heating vent.

  “I have a list,” she said.

  “I guess I’ve never thought about it.”

  “You’ve never thought about living somewhere else?” The note of surprise in her voice shamed him. Was it so unheard of, that he’d never envisioned an alternative? His family was here. The rest was white noise, as far as he’d always been concerned.

  But now, in the car, he considered it. He’d always liked the winter—the ground had been white on the days both Wendy and Violet were born; one evening in Iowa City, before the children, the furnace had broken, and he’d come home to find Marilyn waiting for him, naked in a nest of blankets on the living room floor. The best thing about the cold was the comfort that came from escaping it. The warmth pulsed from the vents while the air outside the car crackled with the bone-numbing negatives of early February. He wondered if it ever got this cold in Italy.

  “Siberia might be nice,” he said, but Gillian didn’t laugh. “Have I given you my hearty endorsement of snow tires yet? W
e’ve got at least a couple more months of precipitation.”

  “David.”

  “They really make a difference.” Nothing had happened between them. He reminded himself of this at intervals each time they went to dinner. But he knew how to order a glass of wine for her, and he knew she’d always felt estranged from her parents, and he knew she’d gone on a series of unsuccessful dates in the fall with a high school math teacher who was an amateur parasailor. He’d grown accustomed to her conversational rhythms, to the weight of her silences, to her wit, which was often so dry as to be overlooked.

  Gillian shifted incrementally closer. “I’m not—imagining this, am I?”

  “Imagining what?”

  “Come on, Mr. Observant Feminist. Help me out here.” She leaned in—his heart stopped; she smelled—he could finally experience it himself, from a point of remove, the scent his wife loved—like the grainy silt of latex gloves. She put her hand over his.

  He exhaled, and it wasn’t until he did that he realized he’d been holding his breath. “I can’t,” he said. It almost felt more intimate than kissing, the breath of his words so close to her face, the chapped skin as her fingers laced between his own. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not looking to interfere with anything,” she said. “I just thought…”

  “I didn’t mean to—mislead.” He still hadn’t moved his hand.

  An inch of charged particles between their faces. Warm boozy breath, and he couldn’t tell if it was his or hers. The dull shock of her hand moving up to his forearm.

  “You’re not imagining it,” he said after a minute.

  The smile that bloomed on her face was sudden and girlish.

  “But I’m not—that man.”

  “What man?” She put her hand on his thigh, and he was so used to the gesture, one his wife made often when they drove together—her little proprietary hand just patting his leg hello, an idle expression of affection—that it took him a few beats to realize what was happening.