The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  Grace slid despondently down the orange slide, weeping; it would have been funny if Marilyn had been in the mood.

  “Honey, come here,” she said, but her daughter ran instead to her father. David stooped to pick her up and Grace buried herself in his threadbare polo shirt.

  “Thanks for this,” David said sarcastically, looking at her over Grace’s head.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I’m leaving. I don’t know how late I’ll be. She needs a bath after dinner tonight.”

  “No I don’t,” Grace wailed into David’s chest, kicking her legs.

  She felt suddenly jealous of her daughter for her position in David’s arms. When she touched Grace’s back, her daughter stiffened, crowed anew. She flicked her eyes up to David.

  “Bye,” he said, and she thought it might have hurt her too much to reply, so she didn’t.

  A home health nurse cared for David’s dad three times a week, but Marilyn had been spending her Sundays puttering around his house and making him dinner. In Richard’s living room, she thought of how much she seemed to annoy David lately, of how he had moved fluidly from guilt and attempts at redemption to this kind of perpetual disdain for her. He hadn’t looked at her like that since they lived in Iowa City, when they had the first three girls and were both constantly exhausted and embittered and within arm’s length of both a baby and two small children. At least then it made sense; at least then they commiserated, once the kids were in bed. At the house in Albany Park, she was hot and irritable. She held her ponytail away from her neck. She’d just helped Richard with his washing-up and he’d requested a recess before they dove into their requisite marathon of Scrabble. He was in his armchair with his eyes closed and she decided, feeling her own fatigue settle over her like a fog, to rest as well. She hadn’t been sleeping much lately. And David was working more. She knew his evenings with Gillian had ceased but in their stead he had picked up extra clinic hours in earnest, as if to karmically atone.

  “Rich?” she asked, lifting the material of her shirt and dropping it, creating a breeze. She was going to ask him for something about David as a little kid, some story that might awaken some tenderness within her. She paused. “Never mind.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Sure. Fine.” She felt tears in her eyes but blinked them away.

  “You have so many wonderful qualities, Marilyn, but you’re a worthless liar.”

  She laughed, felt one of the tears snake its way down her cheek.

  “My son’s treating you well, isn’t he?”

  “Of course.” She hadn’t told anyone about her distance from him, about Gillian. David’s father would hardly be the appropriate audience, but she indulged the thought: Your son’s found himself a girlfriend. Your son’s a philistine. She pictured Richard cuffing David on the side of his head, telling him to pull it together. “Rough patch,” she allowed herself to say.

  “How’s Wendy doing?” Richard asked.

  “Oh. She’s—” She studied him and tugged a few times at her ponytail. If David were here she would say something blithe and noncommittal about her passable grades or her renewed interest in literature. David was decidedly not here, though; David was at home bonding with their three-year-old, who she hoped would have already forgotten that she hated her mother just like Wendy did. “Her weight’s up. Her spirits are—not quite as up. She’s pretty miserable at school, I think, but possibly less so than she is at home. We’re keeping her to a curfew because I think if she didn’t go out we’d all lose our minds, and I have no idea what she’s doing when she’s out but at least she comes home. She’s just—existentially unhappy, I think is the problem, and I’m not sure what to do with that, so I’m just trying to make sure that I don’t make her more unhappy, which is hard because she hates me, but overall she—she’s doing better than she was.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”

  Unable to look at him, she said, “I would place your bets elsewhere, Rich.”

  “God, if those girls had any idea how lucky they are to have you as a mom.”

  “That’s kind of you to say.”

  He shifted stiffly and cleared his throat. “I should tell you she’s been coming here.”

  She glanced up, uncomprehending. “Pardon?”

  “She comes here sometimes.”

  “She comes here? Like, here here?”

  “She showed up once after she got out of the hospital. And she’s just kept coming. We talk. We play Scrabble. She’s almost as good as you.”

  She studied him.

  “Okay, not almost as good. But not terrible. She’s a formidable opponent.”

  “I’m sorry, Rich, I— Wendy, we’re talking about?”

  “I think she’s needed a place that wasn’t home. Don’t we all need that sometimes?”

  She was going to counter with something about how she herself had never been afforded such a respite, but she supposed that her own visits to Richard’s were not entirely altruistic. It was a place where she could go without her children; it was a place where she could go to help her father-in-law that had the convenient side perk of giving her the upper hand with her husband. It was a place where she could be alone and adult.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “How does she get here?”

  “Takes the train,” Richard said. “Green to Brown.”

  “What does she— What do you talk about?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Anything. Little things. Her classes. The dog. You.”

  “Me?”

  “You and David. Historical stuff. She calls it her ‘origin story,’ I’m assuming because of that new-agey socialist school you’re sending her to.”

  She smiled at that. “It’s a public high school, Rich.”

  “I was telling her the other day about the first time I met you. How shocked I was that my son had happened upon such a knockout.”

  “Well, obviously,” she said, blushing.

  “How you saved him. You can’t know how relieved I was when he found you.”

  “We found each other,” she said. She felt dangerously close to crying. She looked away, but his gaze was so persistent that she finally met his eyes.

  “David’s a good man,” Richard said. “But he’s as flawed as the rest of us. He has good intentions but he doesn’t always do the right thing. None of us do. If you’re unhappy with him, Marilyn, you should talk to him.”

  “That doesn’t work if he’s not talking back.” It was the closest she would ever come to betraying him.

  “I was telling Wendy about those two kids sitting at my kitchen table that first time you came over. You were both so young. He didn’t take his eyes off you the entire night.”

  Her throat throbbed. “Rich, really, this is sweet of you to mention but—”

  “He’s lucky to have you, and he knows it more than he knows anything in the world, and sometimes you just have to remind him. I think you owe it to yourself. If you’re even one-tenth as miserable as you look, sweetheart, you’ve got some real problems.”

  “I’m not—” she started to say, but she stopped, because she was.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of May, Wendy had lost all of her acquaintances and all of the acquaintances had acquired coveted slots in incoming freshman classes. She had refused to participate in the collegiate rat race, and her parents had stayed quiet about it until one afternoon when she came home and her mother was sitting on the front steps. She hoisted her backpack higher on her shoulder and turned up her headphones, preparing to walk straight past her.

  Her mother held up a hand to stop her. “Hi,” she said. “Have a minute?”

  “Homework.”

  “You’re a second-semester senior,” said her mom. “High school is behind you. Your homework is pointle
ss. Aren’t you the one supposed to be making these arguments?”

  Just when she’d decided to hate her mother forever, she made a joke like this.

  “I know you despise me,” her mom said lightly, and the easiness of her tone pierced Wendy through the ribs. “But please just sit for a couple of minutes. I want to talk to you.”

  Wendy, compromising, leaned back against the built-in flower box on the porch.

  “I could never despise you, Mom,” her mother said, playacting now, embarrassing herself. Pretending they were a normal mother and daughter, that jokes like this could be thrown around casually between them. She seemed to realize that Wendy wasn’t going to smile and she dropped the act. “We need to talk about the college thing, Wendy.”

  “What’s to talk about? I’m not going.”

  “Yet. You’re not going yet.”

  “I’m not going ever. It’s stupid. I’m not going to go spend another four years with a bunch of maladjusted brats just so I can get a crazy-expensive piece of paper and become, like, that narcoleptic lady who does the filing in Dad’s office.”

  She couldn’t be sure, but she thought her mom might have almost smiled at that last bit.

  “You can become whatever you want, sweetheart.” Her mother almost never called her “sweetheart” and they both seemed to realize this at the same time; Marilyn blushed and Wendy scowled. “We’ll do some research. You can apply for next year. Maybe take a community college class. Take some time to get your bearings and figure out what you’d like to do.”

  “I don’t want to do anything.”

  “I know that’s not true,” her mother replied. “Look, honey—” Again they both bristled at the honey; her mother was off her game. “I had no idea what I wanted to do when I started school. And then I discovered how much I loved to read. And once you find that thing—it can be the tiniest thing, Wendy—possibilities start opening up. You start thinking about your life in a different way. For me it was— There was teaching, or editorial work, even writing, I thought about. There were options. Things that I never would have seen had I not gone to college.”

  “Quoth the woman who dropped out of college to follow a man,” Wendy said, and she watched her mother’s face fall, a familiar expression that suggested she’d just been cracked over the head with a baseball bat. “I’m just saying, like, you’re not exactly a paradigm for why college is the answer. Fine—you found some stuff you thought was interesting. But then you left it all behind and married Dad and you—whatever, you have us.” It occurred to her that if anyone ever presented a similar situation to her—forgo typical young adult dalliances and look: you could be living a boring-as-fuck middle-class life with the world’s biggest asshole as your teenage daughter!—she would slit her wrists.

  “There’s more to it than this,” her mom said, raising her hands to indicate the spread surrounding her, the brick and the geraniums and Grace’s finger paintings taped to the front door. “Of course I don’t regret any of my decisions. But I’m grateful I got those few years as a student. They did me a world of good.”

  Wendy saw, before her mother, that Grace was at the front door, trying to bust her way out, fumbling with the knob.

  “Mom,” she said, just as her sister tumbled outside, ponytail askew, awash in that three-year-old energy that Wendy found at once adorable and exhausting.

  “Mama,” Grace said, throwing her arms around their mother’s neck. She was surprised to see her mother’s face fall again. She’d never really seen her get annoyed with Grace.

  “Hey, my pumpkin.” She touched Grace’s arm. “We’re right in the middle of talking.”

  More surprising still: her mom apparently considered this conversation more important than whatever Grace was bringing outside.

  “Mama, I can’t find Scotty and Liza said he’s in the laundry but he’s not.” Grace buried her face in their mother’s shoulder, and Wendy wondered if she herself had ever been so offhandedly affectionate as a child.

  “He’s in the dryer, sweet thing, but Wendy and I are talking right now and I need you to not interrupt.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Gracie,” her mom said, her voice suddenly stern. That was more like it, more like what Wendy had been reared on. “Honey, your sister and I are having a private conversation and you just interrupted. I need you to go back inside. I’ll be in soon and I’ll get Scotty out of the dryer.”

  Wendy and Marilyn both watched Grace with apprehension: she was unused to being scolded. Grace looked hurt at first, and her eyes widened in a way that might have been tearful, but then she righted herself, one tiny hand still resting on their mother’s shoulder.

  “Okay,” she said, stepping back.

  “Give me a hug, gosling,” Marilyn said, and she twisted to pull Grace into her. Wendy watched them, intertwined, and wondered again whether her mother had ever made the same request of her. Give me a hug, Wendy. It didn’t seem likely. “Good waiting, sweetheart. We’ll be in soon.” Grace tiptoed inside and Marilyn fixed her gaze on Wendy again. “Here’s my proposal,” she said. “Stay home one more year. Apply anywhere that interests you. Wait and see what happens. And I’ve thought about it and I’d like to pay you to babysit Gracie a few afternoons a week during the school year, if you’re interested.”

  She was never asked to babysit Grace. “Are you joking?”

  “I’m not,” said her mom. “You’ve had a long year, honey, and I think it could do us all some good to take a breather on this one.”

  It was a surprisingly gentle approach, but she couldn’t bring herself to express any kind of gratitude. Another year at home sounded like hell. She would still always be the fuckup who’d not bothered to apply to college the first time around. “Alternately, I could just leave,” she said.

  “Alternately with what money?”

  She shrugged, raised an eyebrow, tried hard to suggest to her mom that perhaps she had secret and untoward channels of income, that perhaps she had entrepreneurial inklings after all.

  “Try it through the summer.”

  And because she didn’t have a rebuttal, because she didn’t have any connections or anywhere else to go, because it seemed for the first time in a long time that her mother didn’t actually hate her, Wendy agreed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Liza was trying not to dwell on the complete egregiousness of the fact that she had been asked to stay at the house on Fair Oaks and keep an eye on Jonah while her parents had one of their clandestine sex weekends. She was trying not to get riled up over the fact that her parents had not asked either of her sisters—because though Violet, the boy’s mother, had maintained a sociopathically troubling lie about his existence for fifteen years, and Wendy, jobless and loaded, could barely be trusted to care for a cactus, both were technically more able to step in than Liza, who was eight months pregnant, six weeks single and deep in the throes of a hellish fall semester. And yet her older sisters had won again. She was curled in her parents’ bed, trying to focus her thoughts on something serene—the sunrise, the snuffling of Loomis’s exhalations from where he lay on the floor beside her—when her morning sickness reared its head again, a familiar, belated and unwelcome guest.

  She knelt before the toilet in her parents’ bathroom, waiting for the next eruption. The last time she’d been sick here had to have been in the nineties. Adolescent stomach bugs and her mother’s washcloths on her forehead, blessedly cool. Simpler times.

  “I—uh—sorry.” There had never been any doubt that Jonah had Sorenson genes; they appeared constantly in the form of his social inelegance.

  She turned to the door. “Oh, Christ, it’s Friday. It’s your Krav Maga day, isn’t it?” She was unused to having to consider the schedules of others. “Listen, I—I’ll take the train to work. You can take my car.” Distracted by the buzz in her esophagus and the bladder a
crobatics of the baby, she didn’t notice his second’s hesitation before he nodded. “Keys are on the table by the door.”

  She practically fanned him out, and when she heard the door click behind him, her stomach reacted compliantly, heaving, bringing her once again up onto her knees, the baby romping carelessly somewhere southward.

  * * *

  —

  Lake Michigan in late fall: too cold for swimming, of course; an oversight on Marilyn’s part (though she’d tried, valiantly, wading in to midcalf) but fabulously unpopulated, pitch-black by a quarter to six, quiet save for the rhythmic rolling of the waves against the beach. The house they’d rented was old and drafty, and as David made a fire their first night, she stopped what she was doing to watch him, kneeling before the hearth, poking at the pile of wood with a raccoonish curiosity. She was giddy with the freedom of being somewhere different, alone with him; she awakened him at sunrise to make love and then dragged him out to the pier, despite the cold, with a thermos of coffee and an armload of scratchy afghans from the bedroom. She built them a sort of nest on the atrophied boards and coaxed him down beside her, pink light beginning to bleed orange onto the horizon. She shivered, and he pulled her against him.

  “Someone’s in high spirits,” he said.

  “What, is your coffee not strong enough?”

  He laughed. “I just haven’t seen you like this in a while.”

  “Oh, God. Are you in a mood?”

  “No, I’m not in a mood,” he said, “I’m just not feeling as carefree as you are, I guess.”

  She moved away to look at him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, for God’s— Honey, I wasn’t— Forget it, okay?”

  “Do you realize this is the first time in my life when nobody needs anything from me? Aren’t we supposed to be enjoying these years? Haven’t we earned that? We’ve raised four kids into adulthood. Can’t we feel a little bit smug about that?”