Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  In reality, it felt strange to live in a place that revolved around a college campus when you yourself had nothing to do with it. Everyone in town referred to it as the college, just as in their world, New York was the city and Gilbert was the baby—you knew there were others, but they didn’t matter.

  So far, Elisabeth had gone to exactly one reading, given by a poet she liked. She expected the room to be full of older women in long cashmere cardigans, but everyone in attendance was a student. They swiveled their heads as one when she entered, taking her in as you might a space alien.

  There were three colleges within fifteen miles of their house. The women’s college around the block; a state university that was so large she had mistaken it for a city the first time she saw it; and the hippie college where Andrew spent his days, a place where they didn’t believe in grades or even desks. During class, students sat on mats on the floor.

  After spending so many years in Brooklyn, they had believed themselves to be as progressive as was humanly possible. But they were learning now that they’d been mistaken.

  “This kid in my lab told me today that he’s pansexual,” Andrew said over dinner one night.

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “It means he’s attracted to all genders.”

  “So he’s bi.”

  “No.”

  “How is he not bi?”

  “He doesn’t see gender. Or maybe he sees it, but it’s not part of what attracts him to a person.”

  “Okay. But he’s attracted to both genders, so basically—bi. Right?”

  “No, because gender is a spectrum, not a binary. He said the only reason babies are assigned one gender or the other at birth is because the American medical establishment is stuck in a heteropatriarchal view of said binary. So really, we shouldn’t force Gil to subscribe to these norms. We should let him make up his own mind.”

  “Huh,” she said, considering this.

  It felt to her like humanity was on the cusp of something. Maybe the world was becoming a more tolerant place, and their child would grow up with entirely different boundaries than the ones they’d known. Gender-neutral toys were all the rage. Her friends would sooner give their daughters hard drugs than Barbies. She wanted to know how this would shape them as they grew, how Gil’s generation would come to think about their own bodies, and one another’s.

  For a moment, Elisabeth glimpsed her former self—the curiosity, the thrill, that came from asking questions of people whose lives were nothing like her own. It had always amazed her how willing strangers were to open up to a journalist, even on the worst days of their lives. Maybe especially then.

  “I’m so jealous of you,” she told Andrew. “My most interesting conversation of the last week was with the FedEx guy. I told him our address was 32 Laurel Street. He insisted it was 23.”

  Locals like her in-laws complained about the colleges. They caused too much traffic; they were full of self-important academics who looked down on regular people. But whatever money those students and their parents pumped into restaurants and hotels and gas stations and grocery stores was the only thing keeping this corner of the world afloat. Each campus was abutted by a few blocks of pretty houses and a downtown full of quirky shops and music venues and vegan cafés. Then, abruptly, things dropped off.

  Years ago, George had told her, the area boomed with mills that produced lumber and paper. There was a soda-bottling plant, a toothbrush factory. But when these places closed, nothing came along to replace them. Now half the towns around here were all but abandoned. Stores and bars and restaurants were few and far between, only their signs left behind to remind you of what had once been and was no more.

  Immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico and a large Puerto Rican population had settled in certain towns, out where there were still working dairy farms and fruit orchards. In Weaverville, you might go to the old five-and-dime and hear nothing but Spanish spoken. The place sold Mexican spices and sodas and candies.

  Elisabeth liked this—the classic architecture, populated with people and things one wouldn’t expect. But the town was otherwise depressing. Empty storefronts, houses no one wanted to buy. Not even a school anymore. The kids got bused elsewhere.

  Faye, who was raised there, shook her head whenever Weaverville came up in conversation and said, “That town used to be something.”

  * * *

  —

  The baby was asleep in the back seat when they arrived.

  “Maybe I should stay out here with him,” Elisabeth said. “You can bring me a plate.”

  “Ha,” Andrew said. “Nice try.”

  Gil was alert and craning his neck to take in the new surroundings by the time they reached the back door.

  The door opened straight into the kitchen, which hadn’t been renovated since the seventies. A yellow linoleum floor, wood-paneled cabinets, and, above them, a border of purple tulips, hand-stenciled by Faye.

  She raced over from the stove and took Gil from Andrew’s arms.

  “Hello, baby,” Faye said, raising him to the light.

  The dog came in, howling.

  “Duke, don’t be jealous,” Faye said. “You know I love you too.”

  She looked at Andrew and Elisabeth as if just noticing them.

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Beef stroganoff.”

  “Yum,” Andrew said, even though he hated beef stroganoff.

  He had wanted to be a chef when he was young, but he was afraid he’d never make any money. Instead, Andrew made cooking a hobby. Elisabeth had often wondered how he got so good at it, growing up with a mother whose recipes all seemed to include Hamburger Helper.

  Faye handed the baby back to Andrew, sated by her thirty seconds of quality time. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “We got another notice from our friends at Citibank. We have ninety days to make the payment, or we’re out. Your father refuses to care. Like he’s going to call the bank’s bluff. I try to make him talk to me about a plan, and he says he’s busy.”

  Elisabeth pretended to be looking for something in the diaper bag. Whenever Faye mentioned their finances, she wanted to bury the uncomfortable conversation, to squelch it, to make it disappear.

  In the last year, she had realized that George and Faye were homeowners only in the loosest sense. They had refinanced and borrowed against this house so many times that they now owed more on it than they’d paid in the first place.

  A thump came from George’s office, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

  Faye straightened, and said, “Anyhow. What’s new with you?”

  “Elisabeth found us a great babysitter today,” Andrew said. “Now she can finally get back to work.”

  A strange pause as she pondered whether to be offended. He made it sound like she’d been floating on a pool raft drinking piña coladas for four months.

  “She’s a student at the college,” Elisabeth said.

  “That’s young to be in charge of an infant, isn’t it?” Faye asked.

  “I thought so too at first. But her references were great. Gil seemed to adore her. And she has tons of experience with babies. Much more than I do.”

  Faye frowned. “Be careful. I saw on the news this terrible thing. A babysitter killed three children. Drowned them in the bathtub.”

  She only mouthed the words killed and drowned, didn’t say them out loud, to shield Gil from the horror.

  “She did it with her bare hands,” Faye continued.

  “This happened around here?” Andrew said.

  “No, it was in Ohio or someplace.”

  Faye glowed as she said it. She thrived on the mere suggestion of tragedy. She had once diagnosed Gil as autistic because he stared at a light bulb. “That’s one of the signs,” she said. “I think that’s one of the signs.”

 
For each life stage, there existed cautionary tales meant to keep women in their place. Every female in New York was haunted by a story. Not some urban myth, but whatever was on the cover of the Post the day she arrived. A girl who stayed late at a bar and ended up raped, her body rolled in a carpet, tossed in a dumpster. A girl who was pushed in front of an oncoming train by some lunatic for no reason. A girl whose roommate came home drunk one night, stabbed her to death, and didn’t remember any of it in the morning.

  So it was with new mothers. The air was full of threats. On the news: the exhausted, overwhelmed woman who left her baby to suffocate in a hot car. Online: the day-care worker who dosed the kids with Benadryl to make them sleep, accidentally killing them all. Overheard in the produce aisle at the grocery store: the one about the parents who kept putting off that first-aid class, and then watched helplessly as their child choked to death on a grape.

  Elisabeth heard George’s heavy footsteps coming toward them now. A happy-making sound that drove away all thoughts of small lifeless bodies floating in a tub.

  “Lizzy!” he said when he saw her.

  He was the only person who had ever called her that, the only one who could get away with it.

  George still wore the same uniform he had worn to work for the past thirty-five years: a black suit, the jacket hanging on a hook in the mudroom now, to be slipped into again tomorrow. He had taken off his patent leather shoes. On his feet were black socks with a bright burst of gold at the toe.

  Before he shut down the car service, it was George’s habit to be out the door by seven at the latest each morning, sometimes four or five if he had to make an early trip to the airport. He started every day by polishing his Town Car’s black exterior, vacuuming the floor mats, placing new bottles of water in the cup holders built into the back-seat console, filling a bowl with peppermints. He still went through the motions, even though, as an Uber driver, he could work in sweatpants and drive a beat-up Mazda and no one would care. Something about this pulled at Elisabeth’s heart.

  George hugged her. He was a wall of a man. When he hugged you, it felt like being a child again. Safe and small. Elisabeth wanted to stay awhile. But George moved away from her, clapped Andrew on the back, then went to the stove and made a big show of inhaling.

  He whistled. “That smells delicious.”

  Elisabeth wondered if he too was lying. To her, the room smelled like an elementary school cafeteria at lunchtime.

  George and Faye had a solid marriage. She appreciated this. Her own parents had been miserable together, and perverse in their misery. All she ever wanted was for them to be normal, to wake up one day and realize they loved each other after all.

  Elisabeth spent her childhood playing referee. She could walk into a room and assess in an instant whether her parents were fighting, and what about. When her father was cheating, her mother confided in her like she was a friend. She spared Elisabeth none of the details.

  She was obsessed with being thin and beautiful and, most important, young. She had her daughters using antiaging cream when they were in middle school. She went on fad diets and made them join her. She fasted and encouraged them to do the same. She praised them for being skinny and chastised them when they didn’t look their best. She made a game out of the three of them looking in a mirror, taking turns pointing out their imperfections.

  “No one is going to tell you when you look like shit,” their mother said. “A woman has to be her own worst critic.”

  Any talk of bodies now made Elisabeth uncomfortable. But in this respect, she thought the damage done to her had been minimal, considering. She had been lucky enough to have teachers who told her she was smart, who encouraged her intellect. Her godfather was a journalist. He saw in her the hallmarks of a writer.

  Charlotte, on the other hand, emerged from their mother’s care an almost entirely superficial creature. She was naturally thin and pretty, but on top of that she spent hours each morning doing her hair and applying makeup. It surprised no one when she gained a following on Instagram as a self-described “influencer,” which involved posting photos of herself in bathing suits on various Caribbean islands.

  Their parents divorced when Elisabeth was eight and Charlotte was five. Their mother ran off the day the papers were signed, leaving her daughters in the care of a nanny—and their father, though they rarely saw him. When their mother returned six months later, she and their father had somehow gotten back together. They never explained how or why. They got along almost too well for a while, before things returned to the way they’d always been.

  When Elisabeth was a junior in high school, they lived apart for a year. One day, toward the end of that period, she said something to her mother about the two of them having separated, and her mother said, “What gives you the idea that we’re separated?”

  “Dad living in the beach house was one indication,” Elisabeth said, angry, confused.

  “You’ll understand when you’re older,” her mother said, an oft-repeated statement that irked Elisabeth because she sensed it wasn’t true, yet by definition could not refute it.

  Her parents were together again by the time she graduated, holding hands as they watched her accept her diploma.

  Almost two decades passed, time enough for her to stop worrying whether their marriage would survive. They had not grown happier or less truculent with age, but they were old now. She figured they had gotten breaking up out of their systems. Then, two years ago, her parents split again. Her father found someone almost immediately on a business trip to Arizona, and moved to Tucson to be with her. He went to some lengths to expedite the divorce, making Elisabeth and Charlotte wonder if he planned to marry this new woman, whom neither of them had met.

  The news of her parents’ latest breakup still hadn’t sunk in. They told her, and Elisabeth put the information away in a box, determined not to let it derail her. She was trying to get pregnant at the time, which consumed so much emotional energy.

  Finally, it worked. Then came the bomb drop of a new baby.

  In Brooklyn, they lived in an old Italian neighborhood. Every year on the Fourth of July, men set off fireworks on their corner. The noise shook the building; rockets ricocheted off their bedroom windows and twice cracked them down the middle. They never wanted to be the annoying gentrifiers who complained about tradition, so for years, they said nothing.

  When Gil was around six weeks old, the fireworks began, and for the first time in his life he seemed scared. His face scrunched up. He sobbed into Elisabeth’s shirt. Her protector instincts kicked in. She called the police, even though the cops in their precinct were the brothers and cousins of the guys outside the window. When the officer asked for her name and number, she provided them without thinking.

  “You gave them your name?” Andrew said when she hung up.

  Two days later, late to the pediatrician, they hustled up the block to the car they had purchased hours before she went into labor.

  Andrew pressed the automatic-lock fob, but the doors didn’t open.

  He tried to unlock the driver’s side with the key, but it wouldn’t work either.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “They did that thing where they fill the locks so you can’t get in.”

  “That’s a thing?” she said.

  Andrew rattled the door handles.

  Elisabeth pulled out her phone.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Googling to see if that’s a thing.”

  “It’s a thing,” he said.

  “Retribution,” she said. “For calling the police on them.”

  “I told you you shouldn’t have given your name,” he said, shaking his head. Then, “Oh.”

  “Oh what?”

  Andrew blinked. “This isn’t our car.”

  As soon as they had established a hint of a routine, a bit of normalcy, they
moved here, a whole new kind of discord.

  “Who wants to try some homemade lager?” George said.

  It wasn’t a question. He was already pulling a brown growler from the fridge.

  He filled the glasses preset at the dinner table.

  “Those were for water,” Faye said, her voice tinged with irritation.

  “The Pilgrims never drank water,” George said. “Did you know that? Only beer. Even the kids.”

  “Yes, and most of them were dead by thirty-five.” Faye looked at Andrew. “Your father makes beer now. He got a kit in the mail, and he thinks he’s Sam Adams.”

  Elisabeth took a seat at the table, gave the beer a try. She couldn’t tell if it was good or disgusting. She took another sip. Faye started talking about coupons. Elisabeth drank until the glass was empty.

  “Delicious, right?” George said, refilling it.

  She nodded. Already, she felt that lovely blurring of edges, the slight disassociation of self from everyone else in the room. When she was young and got tipsy, all she wanted to do was kiss someone. Now she wanted to take a nap.

  “How’s the venture going, son?” George asked.

  The venture.

  That’s how he referred to it, every time.

  George was a devoted father. If he thought Andrew’s idea was a bad one, he didn’t let on. But he never called it what it was, which made her wonder.

  What it was, was a grill. A solar-powered grill.

  Elisabeth had been there when Andrew came up with the idea a decade ago. It was early in their relationship, their first weekend away. They’d gone to Florida for the wedding of his college friend. At the rehearsal dinner, a beach barbecue, everyone stood around admiring the sunset, eating steak and burgers, guzzling the bride’s signature cocktail, which tasted like fruit punch but was about eighty percent rum.

  That’s when Andrew said, “Why are there no solar-powered grills?”