When no one responded, he went on, “Think about it. It’s genius. Nobody barbecues in the rain. And with solar you’d avoid that gross charcoal taste, which is, of course, the taste of cancer.”
“Eww,” said Charlie, the groom. He looked down at his plate.
The burgers were slightly burnt. Elisabeth hoped no one thought that was what had inspired Andrew’s comment.
His friends Joel and Ethan nodded.
“That’s fucking brilliant,” Joel said.
Ethan narrowed his eyes, deep in thought. “I like it.”
“We should do it,” Andrew said.
The others agreed. Elisabeth wondered if their enthusiasm was genuine. People did barbecue on rainy days, didn’t they? And wasn’t that charcoal taste the whole point of grilling?
She decided it didn’t matter. They were all bombed by that point.
The next morning, lying in the hotel bed, heavy curtains pulled closed, Andrew whispered, “I was up all night thinking about the grill.”
It took her a moment to figure out what he meant.
“Do you not think it’s a good idea?” he said.
“It’s interesting,” she said.
“I mean, Joel said it’s brilliant.”
Joel is a personal injury attorney, she wanted to say, but did not.
Elisabeth was trying to assess whether her hangover was moderate or severe. She needed coffee.
Andrew’s intensity for the grill lasted as long as the weekend away. He didn’t mention it again for months, until a dinner party at Nomi’s, when a colleague of hers claimed his father invented superglue but had never secured a patent, and so got screwed out of millions. Everyone told the story of something they’d thought of. Nomi’s husband, Brian, swore he invented TiVo back when he was in middle school.
“He brings it up every time I want to record something,” Nomi said.
Andrew explained the grill, going so far as to sketch it out on a napkin—it would resemble a papasan chair, covered in reflective panels that used the heat of the sun to cook food. The food would be placed in a pan that sat on a tripod in the middle of the contraption.
Elisabeth tried to picture a suburban family in a backyard, standing around the thing, drinking beers, waiting for their burgers to be done.
“I need to find an engineer to help me figure out the best curvature for the panels,” Andrew said. “That’s the key.”
“Damn, Andrew,” Nomi teased. “You’re not messing around.”
Elisabeth didn’t know until then that he’d thought it through. She was certain she registered disappointment on Andrew’s face when no one jumped to declare his idea the best one of all.
That napkin sketch ended up on their refrigerator in Brooklyn. Every time it caught her eye, Elisabeth wondered if Andrew pictured it hanging in a frame behind his desk one day, after he’d made it big.
The grill came up again here and there over the years, half joke, half something else. A stack of books appeared on his side of the bed: The Solar Electricity Handbook. And Off the Grid: Solar at Home. And Photovoltaic Design and Installation for Dummies, which seemed like an oxymoron. Elisabeth never saw Andrew read any of them. At some point, she noticed they were gone.
Five years ago, Andrew left a job at a big consulting firm and took a slight pay cut to go work at a midlevel firm that focused on restaurants. Elisabeth hoped it would make him happier, having a hand in that world. But in a way, it was worse than before. He was close to the people who were doing what he wanted to do, but he wasn’t one of them.
He kept the job for three years. They were trying for a baby. That had become their focus. Hers, at least.
Then one night in bed, Andrew said he couldn’t breathe.
It scared her. It wasn’t like him.
“What’s going on?” she said.
Andrew said he was worried he was going to be stuck in a job he loathed for the rest of his life.
“I feel like I’m dying every morning on the way to work,” he said. “I wish I was brave enough to take a risk.”
“Maybe you should,” she said. “Life’s too short to have a job you hate.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I should do it.”
“Do what?”
“The grill. I mentioned the idea in this meeting last week with the owners of a restaurant group, a potential new client. One of the guys got it, you know? I could tell. I think I could get him on board as an early investor, maybe. He said he’d love to see a prototype once I have it.”
Elisabeth realized then that she hadn’t meant what she said. Having a job you hated was at least half of what it was to be an adult. Andrew was usually practical and reliable and steady. She loved that about him, depended on it.
“This is my dream,” he said. “I’d be an inventor in the food space. I’m sure I could come up with more ideas if I had the time. Do you know about the guy who invented the Clog-B-Gone? It’s just a piece of plastic that pulls out all the hair that’s stuck in a drain. He made twenty-five million in the first year. Imagine if the grill did half that. We’d be set. My parents would be set.”
He looked at her with the most hopeful eyes.
“But what would we do about money in the meantime?” she said.
“I have it figured out. I’ll stay on at work on a contract basis for the next six months. I’ll use that time to get started on developing the grill and to apply for grants and financing for the following year. And not that I’m anticipating it, but we have that money in savings if we ever really need it, right?”
She paused. “Right.”
They hadn’t merged their finances when they married, only came up with a loose arrangement—he would pay for the day-to-day, and, with her advances, the royalties, and the sale of movie rights from her first book, she would build their savings. For their future child, for college and retirement.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he said. “I know it sounds crazy. But I have a feeling now’s the time.”
That was the moment to voice her reservations, to tell him the truth. But Elisabeth couldn’t do it. He had never discouraged her as long as she’d known him.
When George’s business imploded, Andrew said he never would have left his job had he known his parents were about to be so strapped. He said he wanted more than anything to help them. Elisabeth assumed he was thinking about the savings account, that he wanted her to offer it up.
“Maybe I’m being overly simplistic,” he said when she didn’t. “They’d probably resent that. They might never be able to pay us back.”
She wanted to say that of course they should offer Faye and George the money. But she couldn’t. The money was gone.
Andrew’s fellowship had been the deciding factor in them leaving Brooklyn. He wanted to be closer to his parents so he could at least help them around the house, spend time with them, take George fishing. He applied, and Elisabeth agreed that if he got the fellowship, they could go. She never thought it would happen.
Despite her doubts, she was proud of him for making it this far. Amazed, actually. But then again, anyone with a truly great idea would have taken it to Stanford, or Harvard, or someplace. She could only imagine what the competition had been at the hippie college, where they called the engineering department Greengineering.
The department had a modest fund devoted to innovation, given each year to a promising amateur inventor working on some aspect of eco-friendly technology. The winner got a team of student workers and an adviser. Andrew had a year to make a prototype and get someone to license it. He had no plan for what would happen after that.
As with all her other shortcomings, Elisabeth blamed her inability to believe in him on her mother. She had had no model of what a devoted wife was supposed to look like.
Down through history there were stories
of women who stood by men with ventures. These women were ultimately rewarded for their faith, for their willingness to live without vacations or home renovations or date nights, all in the service of the Great Idea. The wife who believed ended up rich beyond her dreams, with hobby pursuits like running an eponymous charity or buying the local bookstore in her favorite resort town.
The great man’s battle cry: “None of it would have been possible without her.”
Elisabeth wondered about the failed men, the ones no one talked about. Did their failures have to do with a lack of belief on their wives’ parts, or were success stories written after the fact? Did Steve Jobs’s wife secretly get furious at all that tinkering in the garage and wish he’d go sell insurance with her brother until, poof, he struck gold, and then she could say she knew it, she knew it, she had always known.
“Are you making much progress, sweetheart?” Faye asked Andrew now.
Elisabeth looked at her husband.
“It’s coming together,” he said.
He took a bite of the stroganoff to discourage further questions.
In the early days after they moved, Andrew never stopped talking about his work. One night he came home and announced that a student on his team had calculated that the solar-powered grill had the potential to cook meat three times faster than a charcoal grill. Another night, he had a child’s Christmas-morning grin on his face because he had learned there would be focus groups.
But lately, Andrew had no updates. Maybe he went to work and stared at the Internet all day, which Elisabeth figured was what most people did, and which would be fine with her if he had any sort of job security.
“How about you, Lizzy?” George said. “Has a new book idea come to you yet?”
“Not quite,” she said.
She regretted telling him that she couldn’t figure out what to write about next. George now saw it as yet another way into talking about his favorite subject.
Elisabeth knew what would follow.
“The Hollow Tree,” George said. “I’m telling you. It’s bestseller material. You’d win a Pulitzer Prize.”
“Dad, stop,” Andrew said. “I beg of you.”
In most respects, he had endless tolerance for his parents. At present, the Hollow Tree was the one exception. It wasn’t that anything George said was untrue, but they all recoiled from it because, Elisabeth thought, of the intensity of his delivery. It seemed unhealthy. Not something to be encouraged. Faye said he’d take any excuse to talk about it, no matter whose company he was in. She preferred for Elisabeth and Andrew to change the subject whenever it came up, which it did, every time they saw him.
Last weekend, George had rambled on for half an hour about the importance of subscribing to the local newspaper. He said they needed to get the Gazette if they cared about supporting journalism.
“Elisabeth is a journalist,” Andrew said.
“Yes,” George said. “And?”
“We’ll subscribe to the Gazette eventually,” Andrew said. “It’s not exactly top of mind, Dad. We pay for the Times online and I can barely manage to read that every day.”
Actually, they didn’t pay for the Times. Of course, they saw themselves as the kind of people who would and should and did, but in reality they still used the free login she’d always used at work, out of laziness more than anything.
Elisabeth felt guilty enough without the reminders from George. When they still lived in the city, they got food delivered almost every night for dinner, even after she read an article about how the website they ordered from was killing restaurants. She always meant to tip in cash, because the article said it was the only way to be sure the delivery guy got the money. But many nights, she didn’t have any small bills, so she just added the tip online and hoped for the best, giving the man who arrived at her door an extra-wide smile as she took the warm paper bag from his hands.
Lately, she bought Gil’s clothes and toys online, because there were no good stores nearby, and the few places selling organic baby items downtown were too expensive. Elisabeth justified this by reminding herself that she rarely got food delivered anymore, since the only delivery options here were pizza and Chinese.
She could think of plenty of other things they did right. They didn’t drive an SUV or eat red meat very often. They recycled. They tried their best to be good. If they didn’t have the time to attend protests with George, or sit around chronicling the ills of the world, well, that was normal. George, in his newfound zeal, was fond of saying, “People should be doing something and most of them aren’t.” It was impossible not to feel like he was referring, at least in part, to them.
Now George repeated himself. “How about it, Lizzy? The Hollow Tree: An Exposé of American Greed—it sounds big to me.”
“Maybe you’re right, George,” she said. “It could be a big book.”
“She’s humoring me, but I’ll take it,” George said.
“I think you should write it,” Elisabeth said. “It’s your idea.”
“I’m not a writer,” he said. “You are. Here’s a whole chapter for you. ‘Commerce: The End of the Mom-and-Pop Shop.’ You know the Dead Mall over in Dexter?”
Elisabeth shook her head.
“It’s this enormous shopping center, maybe what, fifteen minutes from here? Andrew and his buddies hung out there all the time in high school. It’s officially called the Shops at Evergreen Plaza. Years ago, that place was considered the height of sophistication. Now it’s mostly empty.”
No one replied, but George went on, undeterred.
“I got to thinking about that because, at my discussion group on Sunday, we had a presentation from Hal Donahue, who owns the shoe store downtown. They’re going out of business after sixty years. He told us that a while back, customers started coming in, having him get three or four pairs of shoes for them, or their kids, to try on. Then right in front of Hal, they’d go on their phones to see if they could find them cheaper online. You know what Hal said? He said, ‘Good luck to them. Is Amazon going to sponsor a Little League team and a parade float on the Fourth of July?’ Great question, I thought. People can’t live without all that.”
“We couldn’t live without Amazon,” Andrew said.
Elisabeth shot him a look. Why?
Andrew never would have admitted it to any of their friends back in Brooklyn. Everyone claimed to be done with Amazon; you had to. Though Elisabeth had seen the packages on doorsteps all over their old neighborhood every evening when she arrived home from work.
“What do you buy there?” George said now.
“Everything,” Andrew said. “Mostly stuff for the baby. We have a recurring order set up for diapers, wipes, formula. Free delivery. You should try it. It’s so much more convenient than driving to the store, only to find that half the time they don’t even have what you need.”
“You choose convenience at the expense of humanity,” George said.
Faye clucked her tongue at him.
Andrew shrugged. “I’ll worry about humanity once my kid starts sleeping through the night.”
A low blow, Elisabeth thought, especially considering Andrew never got up in the middle of the night. She gave George an encouraging smile.
“Tell Lizzy about the toaster,” he said to Faye.
“What about it?”
“This morning, our new toaster crapped out for no reason,” George said. “We bought it a month ago. The one we got rid of was a wedding gift. It still worked fine. But there’s no one we can complain to. The store says it’s the manufacturer’s problem. The manufacturer doesn’t answer the phone. You go around in circles until you give up.” He smacked his hand against the table for emphasis. “Boom. The Hollow Tree.”
“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” Andrew said.
“I know you’re making fun of me, but that statement
is one hundred percent correct. The world has gone to shit,” George said. “And yet most people are too comfortable to care. We used to think Big Brother would come along and steal everything from us against our will. But now we just hand it to him with a smile.”
“You sound like the college kids at my work,” Andrew said.
“Good,” George said. “I’m glad the young people get it. Gives me hope. They’re the ones who will suffer the most if things don’t change.”
“They’re self-identified socialists,” Andrew said.
George shrugged.
Looked at one way, he was practically a socialist himself these days. He wanted to dismantle the evils of capitalism. To halt progress in its tracks so that everyone might be equal. Looked at another way, he was almost conservative. George was the only person Elisabeth knew who wasn’t in the least bit excited about Obama.
“He keeps saying small business, that’s the answer,” George had said recently. “How’d that work out for me, huh? Or for you, Lizzy, with your unpaid maternity leave. It’s basically this administration’s way of saying, without saying it, that none of the real jobs are coming back—manufacturing in this country is dead—so you’d better invent your own industry. But you won’t have a job that gives you health insurance, or a pension, or any kind of protection.”
Tonight, when Elisabeth asked him which candidate she should vote for in the upcoming state senate election, George just sighed.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’re all crooked. They’re not coming to save us, Lizzy. We’ll have to save ourselves.”
* * *
—
When they got home, Andrew said, “My dad seemed even more off the rails than usual with the Hollow Tree stuff tonight.”
“He’s working out his frustrations,” she said. “Just go with it.”
Elisabeth had had another beer with dinner, and eaten only a few bites, sneaking the rest to the dog when Faye wasn’t looking. The alcohol mixed with her usual exhaustion made her eyelids feel heavy.
“My parents are getting old,” Andrew said. “It makes me sad. See, this is why Gil needs a brother.”
Friends and Strangers Page 5