Wyatt watched him expectantly.
“How old are you?” he asked. “Five?”
“I’ll be six in the summer.”
He’d been seven when he learned the truth about Santa, from an atheist manic-depressive kid in one of the foster homes. Before that, though, he’d always been skeptical of Santa, conceptually speaking, and a little creeped out, too, by the idea that there was an adult man in a fur suit who broke into your house at night and watched you sleep.
“Santa’s not not real,” he said. “Not exactly. I mean, technically, no, he’s—”
“Where do the presents come from?” Wyatt sounded less traumatized than he did curious, wide-eyed and tenacious under his covers, hungry for intel; his face reminded Jonah, again, of Violet, the mother he shared with this kid. He wondered if any of his own expressions resembled hers. He wondered if he’d inherited from Violet this stupid tendency to say precisely the thing he wasn’t supposed to say, like he’d done when he accidentally told Ryan about Liza and the Subaru guy. It took him a few seconds to realize that the creepy feeling at the back of his neck was because someone was watching him. He sat up halfway and saw Violet in the doorway, her face white with anger.
“Jonah’s teasing you, my tyrannosaurus,” she said, entering the room. “Say goodnight.”
The kid must have been tired, because he just waved listlessly from his pillow, eyes already drooping closed. Maybe he wouldn’t even remember their conversation in the morning. Violet wouldn’t look at him, even as she sat down on the bed beside him. He stood up to go.
“Of course Santa’s real, sweetheart,” she whispered to Wyatt. “And he’ll come down the big chimney at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Seattle.”
He wasn’t sure what to do so he just stood in the hall watching them, the way Violet rubbed circles on Wyatt’s chest, how her voice had dropped in both octave and volume so it became the perfect bedtime voice. She leaned in to kiss him and Jonah looked away.
“I love you, my pumpkin,” she crooned. “Sweet dreams, sweet thing.” Then she rose and clicked off the lamp and tiptoed out of the room. He moved out of her way and she pulled the door shut. Then she turned to him. “What the fuck was that about?”
He froze. He’d always suspected Violet was capable of meanness, but so far he’d only seen her be subtly bitchy. “He asked. I wasn’t sure what to— I didn’t want to, like, lie to him.”
“Ninety percent of talking to children is lying.”
“Violet, hey.” Matt appeared, closing Eli’s door behind him. “Keep it down.”
“He just told Wyatt that Santa isn’t real.”
“Let’s talk about this downstairs,” Matt said.
“I mean, he asked me,” Jonah said, ignoring Matt. “He said Jax already told him. He was confirming.”
“He’s five years old. He would’ve believed you over another kid,” she snapped. “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry if you were forced to grow up more quickly than you should’ve, but you’re almost a fucking adult. There’s no reason for you to try to ruin it for my kids.”
“I didn’t—” My kids.
“I think you should—probably go. Matt, can you take him?”
“Honey, hang on a second; let’s—” Matt went over to Violet, dipped his head toward hers, whispered something, Calm down, Viol.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll go ruin things for David and Marilyn. Set fire to the house or something. Old Christmas tradition from the mean streets.”
“Do me a favor and don’t raid our wine rack again,” Violet said acidly.
Matt glanced up at her, not with anger but suddenly wary, alert, and Jonah could tell that he was worried about her, legitimate crazy-person-level worried, like she was about to catch fire.
“Matt, if you could just—” Violet said, turning away from her husband’s grasp and disappearing through the bedroom door behind her.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” Matt said, not unkindly. How fucking weird these people were. How you could burn your bridges with one half of a couple and not the other. It was exhausting to be with them, with their stuffiness and their secrets. He still didn’t understand how Violet had come from David and Marilyn, how it was possible for someone to be such a total fucking android when her parents gave off so much warmth it was unseemly; how when he worked on the trees or the plumbing with his grandfather, the silence between them contained more kindness than he’d ever experienced from Violet for a single second.
“Whatever.” He pulled out his phone to text his grandparents a warning that he was coming home early, just in case they were having old-people sex in his absence.
1998
In the span of a single weekend, Wendy had, unbeknownst to them, found a studio apartment near the Briar Street Theatre and a job waiting tables at a steak house in the Loop. The only favor she’d asked from her parents was use of the station wagon to transport her possessions. Marilyn’s first reaction to this had been to firmly object to Wendy’s moving out, but the more she thought about it, the more she couldn’t help but feel proud. Her daughter was taking initiative, making a bold move that would force her life forward. She’d hugged her daughter goodbye in the foyer, feeling almost sadder than she had when they’d dropped Violet off at Wesleyan that fall, though Wendy was moving only twenty minutes away. Wendy had never quite fit in in the world in the way that Violet had. Wendy forging her own path was a far more terrifying prospect, she thought, at the time, than anything Violet would ever undertake.
Standing at the window, the Volvo’s taillights having long since left her field of vision, she both missed her daughter and didn’t. She was both proud of her and hopelessly worried about her.
“Mom? Lurk much?”
She startled and turned to Liza, who’d appeared at her elbow. She smiled faintly. “Apparently so.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just contemplating my half-empty nest. Just missing your sister a little.”
“Mom, she’s an adult. She’s twenty,” Liza said, as though that were the oldest age imaginable. Marilyn had gotten married at twenty-one; by the time she was twenty-four she had a husband and two kids and free rein over her own household. And yet saying goodbye to Wendy had felt a bit like dropping her off at preschool for the first time.
“I’m allowed to miss twenty-year-olds,” she said. She put an arm around Liza’s shoulders. “Or fourteen-year-olds.”
“She’ll be fine, Mom,” Liza said gently. At some point your children crossed a threshold from being children to being real people and it never seemed to announce itself dramatically but rather in quiet moments like this one. Marilyn said goodnight and went upstairs, forwent putting on pajamas and instead stripped down to her underwear and climbed between her sheets in the dark. Her own children slipping from her in increments, she pressed the cool knob of her wrist against her forehead, willing away either the dregs or the beginnings of a headache. When the door creaked open she rolled instinctively toward the light from the hall.
“You awake?” David whispered. He shut it behind him and the bright blade disappeared.
“How’d it go? Was she okay?” She and David could talk about Wendy to only a certain degree of honesty; their firstborn was emblematic of too much for them both—too much heartbreak, too much tension, too much earth-shattering love.
“Fine,” he said. She knew him well enough to know that it was not gruffness in his voice but gloom. He crawled in next to her, his knee grazing her thigh and his hand getting tangled in her hair before they settled together, an old, tired pair of spoons. Forks, David called them, because he was tall and she was slight and their limbs sometimes seemed to get stuck together like interlacing tines.
* * *
—
At some point, Marilyn had let go of the notion of going back to school. And while she never quite stoppe
d resenting that fact, she held the anger back, stored it in the space behind her molars, biting down, every so often, and allowing herself to revel in the injustice. But mostly she just kept going. Kept dropping off the girls at school, kept going to their water polo games and piano recitals, kept signing their permission slips and hemming their skirts and fixing their dinners. It was all-consuming, as it had always been.
She was headed to the hardware store on Chicago Avenue in pursuit of new pruning shears one morning, but when she arrived, she found the front door locked and a small sign taped to the window announcing that the business was for sale.
She was less haunted than one might think, raising her family in the place where she herself had been so distressingly reared. Most of the time she focused on the creation of new memories—choosing the guest suite instead of her parents’ room for her and David’s bedroom; covering the nauseating yellow floral wallpaper in one of the bedrooms with an infant-appropriate animal print when she was pregnant with Gracie; urging the girls, when they repaved the driveway, to imprint the concrete liberally with their initials and handprints. The house on Fair Oaks had been a saving grace for them, of course, but that didn’t mean Marilyn wouldn’t approach it like she had their house in Iowa, with the blue paint in the kitchen: with a penchant for change and renewal.
There were parts of life in her hometown that tugged at her pleasantly, though—the familiarity of the trees, the muscle memory that kicked in when she walked down the street, and the way she could enter any of the old shops and be transported back decades by the sick-sweet milk of the ice cream parlor or the chlorinated sawdust of the hardware store. She had a distinct memory of herself—one of few not marred by her parents’ emotional detritus—riding on her father’s shoulders, him dipping down in order to enter Mallory’s Hardware without bashing her head against the frame, the jangle of wind chimes, the fishbowl full of Dum Dums.
“Marilyn Connolly? Where are all those babies of yours?”
Now, on the sidewalk outside Mallory’s, she turned to see an old friend of her mother’s from Sundays at St. Catherine–St. Lucy (her father called the cumbersomely named parish St. Mouthfuls Aquinas). She couldn’t for the life of her remember the woman’s name.
“Not babies anymore, I’m afraid,” she said and was surprised to feel real emotion in her throat after she said it.
“They can’t all be in school?”
“Every single one,” she said, forcing a smile.
“What are you doing with yourself, then? Luxuriating?”
She hadn’t stopped to consider her own forward momentum. Gracie was only in kindergarten; she still wore Pull-Ups to bed. Liza required constant chauffeuring and surveillance. But her days were notably quieter, and she hadn’t given much thought to what was next for her.
As an adult, she visited Mallory’s Hardware with no real regularity, but it was where they went when they needed potting soil or birdseed, tools for David’s one-off home improvement projects. It wasn’t that she had any deep-seated attachment to the place, but it held pleasant associations, and sometimes she believed in signs, and there was a bit of money left over from her inheritance from her father, and while there was no such thing as leftover money when you had four children, it seemed only fair that she should be able to spend some of it on herself. She and David would never be able to leave for their children what her parents had left for her, fiscally speaking, but she hoped they would provide a legacy of happiness, or at least the earnest pursuit thereof.
She stopped by David’s office on the way home, shamefully aware of Gillian’s absence—she had recently left the practice to start her own in Andersonville.
“Hey, sweet,” he said, and she remembered what Gillian had said about how his voice changed when he was talking to her. She closed the door behind her and went to sit in his lap behind his desk, cognizant of the ridiculousness of the gesture but wanting to be near him. She wrapped her arms around his neck.
“I’d like to do something kind of radical,” she said.
His hands cupped her waist. “Overthrow the government?”
“I’m serious,” she said.
He furrowed his brow, trying to hide amusement. “Noted.”
“Do you support me?” she asked.
“I don’t know what it is that you’re—”
“Generally, historically speaking. You trust me?”
“More than anyone on the planet, kid.”
She kissed him. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome?”
“I’m not crazy.”
“I never said you were.”
“A new chapter, I think, maybe.”
“You going to enlighten me, sweetheart?”
She stood up, held out her hand. “Let’s take a walk.”
* * *
—
For as long as Wendy could remember, she’d wanted a house with a quiet garage. When she was growing up, the telltale crunch of the garage door had signaled impending doom: her parents’ arrival home from a PTA meeting or dinner or work, which would mean a Chore List or a lecture on how she had ditched school. She wanted a quiet door that swooshed open, a quiet door through which some quiet, humming European car would glide, driven by a man who was just slightly alternative, who smoked and drank but not too much, who had read Crime and Punishment and burned incense.
It was a fairly simple request. Quiet garage, interesting life. With Miles she got everything she wanted, though not exactly in the way she imagined. He was, for starters, fifteen years her senior. And this was fine, despite the reactions of her family. She was twenty and he was thirty-five. And—okay, her teacher: that was another detail that her parents weren’t crazy about, but that was barely true, an inconvenient fact of no more than an hour’s duration. She met him in a Foundations of Economics class that she was taking in the Continuing Education program at Harold Washington (she saw an ad on the Halsted bus; she shelled out her saved tips and found herself taking two night classes). She’d had to leave home eventually. Violet was immersed in her Connectican liberal-arts situation with the vigor of someone far more purebred. Grace was adorable but maddening, always sneaking into the room when Wendy was watching The Kids in the Hall. Liza was a weird, temperamental quasi adult who misused words like quasi and didn’t get why that was funny. Wendy had been sick of it all, so she’d left.
She watched Miles come into that first class and quickly turned to the people seated around her, expecting her female classmates to be abuzz. Instead she saw indifference. She glanced up to the front of the room again. There he was, pulling a few books from his bag, running a hand through floppy, graying hair (prematurely, surely), and—ah—shoving a pack of American Spirits deep into one pocket. Why wasn’t anyone else noticing?
She pulled out a legal pad and pushed her hair from her face. It was then that he met her eyes, and Wendy knew, immediately, that he was going to be hers. She couldn’t help but smile, and it horrified her. She was smiling like those terrible people who just couldn’t wait to get to the punch lines of their bad jokes. Grinning. Repulsive. But she couldn’t stop. She watched him clear his throat and chew the inside of his bottom lip (a nervous habit, she later learned).
“Hey,” he called, rapping on his desktop with his knuckles. Slowly, the room quieted. He sat on the edge of his sad linoleum desk and shoved his hands in his pockets. She noticed a watch, at once delicate and imposing, on his right wrist. Cartier. She had, after years of entertaining the suburban elite, an eye for luxury. “I’m Miles Eisenberg. I’ll be your instructor for this term.” He suggested that they start out with an icebreaker and his eyes fell, again, on Wendy. “How about you? Would you mind starting us off?”
Wendy was born for such situations and sat up straighter in her chair. “Me? Sure.”
“Great. If you could pick a partner, get us started pairing off. We’re
going to interview one of our classmates. Just to make sure we’re all acquainted. Would you choose someone?”
She swallowed, crossed her ankles, and looked up at him. “Can I pick you?”
There were a few titters from neighboring chairs. Miles Eisenberg flushed a deep red.
“I—well, sure. Sure you can. Why doesn’t everyone else partner up and we’ll talk for…” He glanced at the clock. “Five minutes.” It was an uncomfortably long time but she was ecstatic. She went to join her future husband at his desk.
She went home with him that night and they made it to his foyer—he had a foyer, a whole brownstone, in fact, in the desirable part of Hyde Park—before things started to get weird. She sat back on her haunches, straddling him.
“If you say one more thing about how young I am, I’m going to leave right now and go find a willing fifteen-year-old boy.” She made him laugh; he reached to brush her hair from her face.
“Wendy, you’re my student.”
This had already occurred to her. First, in class, perched on the edge of his desk telling him about her job at McCormick & Schmick’s. And it had occurred to her again a half hour ago when they were making out in his car—an Audi; such kismet that she’d settled for a community college instructor only to find out he was secretly loaded.
“Why the fuck are you teaching Misfits 101 if you can afford a car that’s worth like a billion times more than all your students’ sold plasma combined?” she’d asked him in the front seat, when they’d risen for air.
“I find it fulfilling,” he said.
There was something unendingly satisfying about this answer: a person doing something because he could, because it brought him joy. In the foyer, pressing herself teasingly against his groin, she thought of him in the front of the classroom, the awkward grace of his presence.
“I’ll drop your class,” she said. “There. I’m not your student anymore.”
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 37