“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Jen said. “I mean that in the least sinister way.”
Wendy decided immediately that she liked her, and this made her, just as immediately, resentful: of Jen, for landing Aaron Bhargava when she herself could not; of Aaron Bhargava, for finding someone with a good aura and a functional womb.
“Eisenberg, huh?” Aaron said. He reminded her of a Labrador, pure myopic goodness. He made up for being so vanilla, she recalled, in bed. She looked again at Jen’s belly.
“Of the West Egg Eisenbergs,” she said absently. The Bhargavas regarded her with smiling bemusement. “And who have we here?” She gestured to the girl, whose big blue eyes were still following the trajectory of the cigarette.
Aaron laid a hand on the small head. “This is Evie,” he said. “Can you say hi, honey?”
“Why do you have that?” Evie asked instead.
“Because it’s been a long day.”
“Sweetie, don’t be rude,” Jen said.
“It’s a valid question,” Wendy said. “One I should be asking myself more often.”
“We’re in a very inquisitive phase,” Aaron said. “Do you have children?”
It was a simple enough question, but it still sometimes tripped her up. “I should head back inside,” she said. “God, sorry, I spaced. I’ve been out here way longer than I meant to be.”
“Everything okay?” Aaron asked.
“Uh-huh.” She now turned to stub out her cigarette, pressing it into the little tower of sand. “Just my—” Her throat filled before it could emit the word dad. “My husband sprained his wrist. Golfing. Stupid.” She apologized to Miles in her head; thanked him for saving her. She’d not told anyone yet that Jonah had texted her shortly after they arrived at the hospital: ill give the car back. pls dont call cops. sorry for fucking everything up. She was arguably the least emotionally stable person in her family; why did the universe insist on plaguing her anyway?
“It’s so wild to see you,” Aaron said, and this time it was he who reached to hug her, and, sans cigarette, she reciprocated, feeling the familiar way his muscles stretched taut across his back and his arms around her felt pleasantly like being in a straitjacket. “How’re your sisters, by the way? How’s Violet?”
She squeezed back for a couple of beats longer than was socially appropriate. “Superior to me in all ways,” she said.
* * *
—
The fact that her father hadn’t died made the need to go home feel even more pressing, but nobody had offered to pay for her ticket—her mother certainly would have, if asked, but Grace couldn’t bear to seem so pathetic, couldn’t bear to add one more thing to a to-do list whose contents she couldn’t bring herself to think about.
She resented her sisters for being in Chicago, for also not thinking to bring her home. Then again, she couldn’t believe how selfish she’d been, not coming home for Second Thanksgiving or Christmas, giving up what was possibly—God, please, not—her final opportunity to see her father. Violet had predictably insisted that she not let the accident get in the way of her schooling. Liza had been nice enough, but she’d sounded edgy and preoccupied, and Grace had felt the need to reverse their roles, act as though Liza was the one who needed taking care of; her baby was due in less than a month. And Wendy only expounded on her hatred of hospitals. So she was stuck, confined to her apartment. She’d started to text Ben a dozen times, but had ultimately decided against it.
She began to understand how some people could abdicate any commitment to normal human life. Layering one bad thing on top of another had the effect of making a person capable of nothing beyond drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, sitting on the balcony into the wee hours like some kind of pervy sitcom neighbor and coming in to watch documentaries about murderers.
When the doorbell rang, she had not showered since Sunday and was eating stale pita chips she’d found in her pantry. She panicked, thinking first of her geriatric landlord, then of Ben Barnes, then of an elaborate deliveryman murder ruse (Call Me Craig, a documentary about the Craigslist Killer, was streaming from her laptop on the coffee table). She flattened herself against the couch, rolled onto the floor and crawled down the hall toward her bedroom, so the visitor couldn’t see her. She considered that this might be what it looked like to hit rock bottom.
When she was safely in her bedroom, her phone dinged, like something out of a horror movie. How had this become her life, this abject fear of everything normal—a person ringing your doorbell; a well-adjusted boy expressing his love for you? She held her breath as she looked at the message: hey its jonah ur nephew, i can see ur computer, can u let me in.
She exhaled. She was weirdly not surprised, weirdly relieved about this unexpected visitor. She wouldn’t be alone, at least. She rose from the floor. She would have to teach Jonah the art of the semicolon.
2002
Grace did not have a middle name, though her sisters got Evelyn, Rose and Ann.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” her mother said. “I guess we ran out of ideas.”
She had been hoping for something more mystical. Perhaps the confession of a weighty decision her parents had made: “You just didn’t need a middle name like your sisters, Gracie. You were special enough without one.” She knew, of course, that her mother had nearly died when she was born, but it didn’t seem that hard to come up with a name.
“You could have just named me after you,” she suggested. She was making a genogram for social studies and sat before an impressive spread of glitter glue and Sharpies, staring at her mother disdainfully over her poster board.
Her mom, dubiously examining a batch of tomatoes she had just brought in from her garden, stopped to consider it. “It doesn’t sound right,” she said finally, and Grace had to agree that Grace Marilyn didn’t have quite the singsongy cadence of Violet Rose.
“What about your middle name?” she suggested.
Her mother snorted, placing the best of the tomatoes into a colander to wash. “It was the least I could do to not curse you with a clichéd Irish name. Trust me. Less is more.” She’d grown up Marilyn Margaret Frances Connolly. Grace conceded that, again, her mother had a point. She still felt robbed, though; she was consistently, across her genogram, inking in middle names with an icy blue Gelly Roll pen, and it seemed a great injustice that she didn’t get to use it for herself.
“Who was your doctor?” she asked.
“Pardon?” Her mother’s voice had sharpened.
“Thompson’s named after his mom’s doctor because he almost died when he was born.”
“How romantic,” her mom said, a meanness in her voice.
“Mom?”
Her mother was holding a tomato under a violent stream of water. “What?”
“What was your doctor’s name?”
She paused, turned off the water. “Gillian,” she said.
It was rhythmically unsatisfying, but the alliteration was pleasant. She left the space below her own name blank, and waited until school the next day to ink in the false middle name.
Her parents called her their afterthought. Sometimes her dad called her the Epilogue, which she preferred, because epilogues were deliberate and valuable. But epilogues also got the shaft, because they came after all of the important things had already happened. She had a faulty memory that seemed to consist primarily of events for which she had not been present. Sometimes, during family gatherings, she would muster up the courage to speak and say something like “Remember when that lady tried to fight Dad for his parking space at the zoo?” and inevitably—almost every time—one of her sisters would snort. All of her sisters snorted in disbelief with the same intonation, like a tribe of braying elephants.
If Wendy were the first to speak, she’d say something like “I do, Gracie, because I was there. You weren’t.” If it were Violet or Liza, the reb
uttal would be equally weary but slightly kinder: “You were two, Gracie,” or sometimes, embarrassingly, “You weren’t even born, dude.”
But she could see them, these memories, and this seemed a cruel cognitive trick. She could conjure with ease the memory of her father angling the station wagon into a tight spot in the parking lot of Brookfield Zoo, only to be assaulted when he emerged from the car by a woman in a Sound of Music sweatshirt who called him a swindler and demanded that he relinquish the space to her. Once she’d raised it, though, her sisters would fly free, sail along without her, cracking up at the dinner table over how David had offered, flustered, to move his car in order to let her have the spot and how Marilyn, already tired of being at the zoo though they had not yet entered its arched, lion-spotted gateways, got out of the passenger seat and said, “This day is harrowing enough as it is. Find another spot.” This happened constantly, her family gliding down the rails of memories for which she had not been present. It was disconcerting, especially because some of the memories were less whimsical. She had lots of scary memories whose origins and/or validity were difficult to articulate—scary only in the sense that they diverted from the otherwise cheery, pristine norm of her other childhood memories, her mother’s luminous smile and her father’s strong hugs and her sisters’ gentle laughter. She remembered Liza babysitting her once and showing her a big star that someone had drawn on the back of her neck. She remembered happening upon her mother, once, sitting on the back stairs smoking a cigarette, and she remembered asking, “Mama, who gave you that?” and her mother stubbing out the cigarette and saying, “A bad girl, sweet pea; come sit with me.”
“I didn’t mean we ran out of ideas,” her mom said in the kitchen, coming over and kissing her head. “We had plenty of ideas. Dad just liked the sound of your name on its own.”
She didn’t have a middle name, and she didn’t have her own memories, and this was the trouble with being an epilogue. You got shoved at the end of the book before anyone gave you a chance to read it.
* * *
—
Violet’s relationship with Matt was predicated on a series of never-ending conversations. Before she’d even kissed him for the first time, they’d spent six weeks of evenings together, racing to cover infinite ground: they both had families to inaccurately render and hard-nosed political positions to exaggerate and college roommates to slander; they had between them four decades of books to discuss and low-level secrets to divulge. She never wanted to stop talking to him. She was a 1L and he was a third-year. She approached her postgraduate education with a militancy attainable only by the crazy or friendless, but somehow Matt penetrated her formality; they met at a Studs Terkel lecture and spent several evenings on the patio at a dive on University Avenue, during which they drank a lot together and talked about their most beguiling idiosyncrasies. And then one night he kissed her by the Fountain of Time, and she couldn’t remember feeling this happy—feeling happy at all, in fact—since before she’d gotten pregnant.
His normalcy frightened her, honestly. Because though she had been cultivating a similar image since she was ten years old, to find a man who seemed so entirely without defect seemed statistically unlikely. She met Matt seventeen months after she’d given birth. He laughed at her jokes but he also asked her serious questions: Explain that; how do you feel about that?; convince me, Violet.
They were lolling around in his bed one evening, Matt reading an article in The Economist. He was a difficult man to distract; his face was twisted in concentration and he was twirling his Uni-ball in a convincing display of absorption.
“Matt,” she said, knitting and unknitting her fingers.
“Hmm.” Not taking his eyes from the magazine, he reached for her hand.
“I don’t want to—like, have a big buildup, but I want to talk to you about something.”
With that he sharpened his gaze on her. “What?” Their relationship was still so new that this could have been an admission of a sex change or a tryst with one of his classmates, and she wondered where her confession was about to fall amid the ranks of betrayal or romantic wrongdoing. She shifted to face him. She loved Matt, already—she knew this—and it seemed pivotal that he know this about her, that he be aware of her most painful thing. She thought of her parents, who seemed to have been sharing everything with each other forever. Disclosure facilitated trust, did it not?
“So I’ve,” she began, and then faltered.
“You sleeping with Professor Milman?” he asked. She would not realize until later what a gift it was to be able to joke about something like this.
“I had a baby,” she said tonelessly, staring at a spot on his blue bedspread, and the statement hung unpleasantly in the air like the fumes of a passing garbage truck. “A year and a half ago. I broke up with my boyfriend and I found out I was pregnant right as I was graduating and I had the baby and I gave it up for adoption.”
Matt was quiet for a moment, still holding her hand. And that had proven to be the most wonderful thing about their relationship, bar none—just the presence of another person, hanging on to you, even if it wasn’t with any particular vigor or purpose.
“I’m not sure what to say,” he said finally, gently, and so she just started talking. She talked about Wesleyan and her straitlaced boyfriend Rob, who was getting a PhD in biochem and who wasn’t always very nice to her, about his cheating on her with a research assistant. She did not tell him about the night before Wendy’s wedding, just a month before graduation when she’d been utterly crushed by the upset of her life plans: the Volvo in the parking lot, the acrobatic blue-eyed boy who’d come inside her and whom she hadn’t seen since.
She talked about moving in with Wendy; she talked about selecting a discreet adoption agency; she talked about how she’d been too afraid to look when the baby emerged from her body and so she’d never actually seen her son; she talked about how empty she felt when she returned from the hospital to her room in Wendy’s house.
“Wow,” Matt said when she’d finished. “I can’t imagine.”
“No, you can’t.”
“But why didn’t you—” he stopped. “Never mind.” Matt had the nightstand of a fifty-year-old suburban father, glasses and Carmex and a well-worn paperback copy of The Adventures of Augie March, bottle of multivitamins and glass of water and earplugs to tune out his downstairs neighbors. Matt had had his life figured out since he was ten, Dartmouth and law school and recreational basketball on the weekends. She felt a chilly fear settle around her for the first time since she’d met him. Perhaps he wouldn’t understand. Why had she ever thought he would? Why had she thought she could possibly explain to him—Mr. Perfect, sailing down the path—what had motivated her to make the decisions she’d made?
“Why didn’t I what?” she asked.
“I just mean— It sounds crass to say about— I don’t mean it in a— Why didn’t you just have an abortion?”
She was quiet, considering it. It was, of course, the question she’d never fully answered in her own mind. The best she had was a number of fragments that were all loosely related but didn’t quite add up to a finished whole. When they were in high school, she and Wendy would lie on the eave outside of Wendy’s bedroom window and discuss their potential futures. As kids they’d spent hours playing MASH, sketching out elaborate hypotheticals, marriages to Dennis Quaid or Dennis Rodman, a mansion in Sacramento or an apartment in Queens, careers in food service or international relations. Wendy always made the riskier choices, populating her charts with wild cards, while Violet played it safe, everything in moderation. At the end of the game, Wendy would end up homeless and overburdened with children and married to Pee-wee Herman, but Violet would always have something more palatable, a decent salary and a safe but luxurious car, a stately suburban home inhabited by a manageable number of children who’d been fathered by Bono. It wasn’t always the most logical decision that
was the right decision. That would be a foreign concept to Matt, as it had been to her at the time. But she had wanted to be brave, an adjective no one had ever applied to her, especially when Wendy was around.
“Violet, I wasn’t trying to—”
“No, I know.” She picked up the Carmex, screwed and unscrewed its tiny lid. “It just—stopped being an option at a certain point. I can’t really—explain it better than that. It’s—Wendy. That’s the best answer I’ve got.”
“You haven’t talked much about her,” he said.
“It’s complicated.” She pulled her knees to her chest.
“She was the only person who knew about this?”
“Pretty much.”
“I can’t imagine ever doing something like that. I think it— That’d crush me, I think. I can’t believe you’re— It sounds horrible.”
“It was horrible.”
“Violet, I—”
How easy it would be for him to ruin everything right now, to say the wrong thing, to reveal that she was simply too flawed, that the choices she’d made when she was low and confused would follow her forever, ruining her prospects of happiness, of normalcy.
“I wish I could’ve been there for you,” Matt said, and she felt some of the weight lift, because if Matt had been there, things would have been different, better; there wasn’t a doubt in her mind about this.
“I’m telling you this because I think you deserve to know,” she said. She issued a silent apology to the baby, for calling him a this, a thing, for slamming the door in his face like she was, for the second time, for so firmly locking the deadbolt after she’d already refused to look at him. “But I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Matt, okay? It happened and it’s over.” If anyone could understand this, it was Matt, who thought he could will away nascent head colds simply by denying their existence, who’d trained himself to wake up at 5:45 each morning without an alarm clock. “If this—changes anything for you, I’ll understand.”
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 44