“Really? I was hoping we’d be here all night,” he said. “Seriously, though, let’s try to have a good time, okay?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Stephanie popped into the hallway, in a bright red, skintight dress.
“Get in here, you two,” she said.
She glanced at Elisabeth’s shoes, but didn’t say anything.
They were whisked into separate conversations—Elisabeth into the crowd of women in the kitchen; Andrew into a throng of men seated around the dining room table, talking about sports. There was nothing sadder than men talking about sports. Why did they accept it as their only form of communication with one another?
A bar had been set up on the kitchen island. There were paper napkins printed with Christmas trees, plastic cups, and several open bottles of wine and liquor.
Elisabeth fixed herself a gin and tonic. She said hello to the Laurels, and half a dozen other women who looked like them, whom she hadn’t met before.
“What about you? Do you have the Elf on the Shelf?” said a woman wearing jingle-bell earrings.
Elisabeth searched her memory for what that was.
“Her son is too young,” Debbie said. “He’s just a baby.”
“Well, trust me,” the woman continued. “That elf will be your best friend in a few years. My kids act like angels when they think he’s watching and taking notes for Santa.”
Elisabeth remembered now. Her friend Pearl at her old job had told her about this.
The Elf on the Shelf is the perfect introduction to life in a surveillance state was how she’d put it.
“You girls make motherhood so difficult for yourselves,” said the one older woman in the group. She wore a black dress, too tight for her sagging midsection. “We never would have dreamed of setting up a doll in a different pose every night to amuse our children. Or as a way to get them to behave. We just threatened to spank them and that was that.”
Elisabeth stared at her.
Then Stephanie grabbed her and pulled her over.
“Elisabeth!” she said, drawing out each syllable. She was already drunk. “I’d like you to meet my bestie. My ride or die. My mom.”
The older woman smiled and rolled her eyes in faux embarrassment. “Hi there. I’m Linda.”
Like Stephanie, she seemed extremely proud of herself for no apparent reason.
Elisabeth took a deep breath. She was being judgmental, harsh. She pinched herself. Banana banana banana.
“Elisabeth has a brand-new baby,” Stephanie said.
“That itty-bitty waist, and you’ve got a brand-new baby,” Linda said, admiringly. “Very impressive.”
“He’s not brand-new,” Elisabeth said. “He’s seven months old.”
“How are you finding the baby stage? It was my least favorite part of motherhood, if I’m honest,” Linda said.
“I love it,” Elisabeth said.
“When do you think you’ll have another? It’s the most fun, having two,” Linda said. “Watching that sibling bond happen right in front of your eyes. Though it’s true what they say—after the first, your mind is gone for a year. After the second, it’s gone for good.”
Stephanie and Linda laughed. Elisabeth wondered what their minds had been like to begin with. She wondered why so many people felt it was their job to insist that women have more children, while simultaneously pointing out how terrible it would be when they did. She poured herself more gin.
The doorbell rang.
Stephanie flitted off to greet another guest. Linda launched into a story about a fight that was brewing at her church over whose grandchild would portray Baby Jesus in the Nativity play.
“My friend Judy and I have a quiet campaign going to get her grandson, Dylan, in there. He’s an angel. Those blond curls you just want to eat.”
Elisabeth missed Gil. “My son has those curls,” she said.
“You should see this kid they’re planning on using,” Linda said. “He has a strawberry birthmark and eczema.”
She said eczema as if it were the plague.
As soon as an opportune moment arose, Elisabeth excused herself.
She walked into the living room alone.
Stephanie had two Christmas trees as tall as the ceiling, covered with blinking lights. Why two? An attempt to be as showy as possible?
The Laurels coordinated their outdoor holiday decorations. They all hung big rainbow-colored bulbs on their bushes, and enormous prewired wreaths over their garage doors. But no one told Elisabeth and Andrew, who had purchased tiny white lights online, and a puny wreath from the Boy Scouts when they came door-to-door. Their house looked shabby, half done, compared with the sea of bright colors and lit-up snowmen and the actual sleigh pulled by eight plastic reindeer on Debbie’s lawn.
A week ago, the Laurels had invited Elisabeth to a Christmas cookie exchange, which entailed baking ten dozen of one kind of cookie, then meeting at Pam’s with nine other women who’d done the same, and mixing and matching until everyone had ten dozen assorted cookies to give as gifts.
It’s like a chain letter, but with cookies, she had explained in a text to Nomi. Given that I have never baked one dozen cookies, let alone ten, I think I’ll pass…
When she repeated this to Andrew later, he said, “I know the people around here are a bit much. But you have to admit, they’re great neighbors.”
It was true that Stephanie’s husband had snowblown their driveway when the first winter storm hit without warning. And when Gil spiked a fever and Elisabeth got home from the store with the Tylenol, a total wreck, Karen happened to be walking by and got her sister, a pediatric nurse, on the phone.
After the cookie exchange, Pam showed up at her house with a pretty tin, and Elisabeth actually gasped upon opening the lid to find twelve perfect cookies—beautifully iced snowmen and presents; chunky rounds bursting with cranberries and white chocolate and nuts. She was glad then that she had not attempted to bring ten dozen slice-and-bakes and pass them off as her grandmother’s recipe.
Maybe Andrew was right. Maybe the Laurels weren’t as bad as she had originally thought. But despite their small kindnesses, Elisabeth was standing alone in Stephanie’s living room right now, hoping none of them would join her. She didn’t think she would ever fit in here. She felt melancholy in the midst of everyone else’s apparent ease and merriment.
She checked the time. She was wondering whether they could leave yet when she heard voices. She turned to see Gwen with a handsome guy. He had shaggy hair that made him look more boyish than he was, even though it was gray.
Elisabeth was so excited to see her. “Gwen!” she shouted, with a tad too much enthusiasm. “Elisabeth,” she reminded her, in case. “We met here. At book club.”
“I remember,” Gwen said. “The unlikable Mary McCarthy.”
“When did you get back from Hong Kong?” Elisabeth asked, even though Debbie had already told her.
“Last week.” Gwen put a hand on the man’s sleeve. “This is my husband, Christopher. Chris, this is Elisabeth. She and her family moved here from Brooklyn not too long ago.”
“I recognize you,” Elisabeth said. “Where do I know you from?”
He shrugged. “It’s a small town.”
She thought he sounded defensive, as if she had accused him of something.
Andrew came in then, looking for her. Elisabeth made introductions.
They moved on to other topics—the trip to China, how quiet this town felt when the students were gone. Elisabeth kept working the thought over, like a piece of spinach stuck between her teeth. Christopher was so familiar.
“What do you do at the college?” she asked him.
“I’m an adjunct right now. I teach in the art department.”
“Do you know Sam O’Connell?”
“Su
re,” Christopher said. “She was one of my best students a couple years back.”
Elisabeth felt proud to a degree she was sure wasn’t earned.
“She’s our babysitter,” she said. “Isn’t she great?”
“She’s a senior now?” he said, without answering her question.
“Yes. Ugh, don’t remind me. I’ll be lost without her next year. She’s like a member of the family at this point. She might move to England to be with her boyfriend after graduation. Go live in the country, that’s their plan. But deep down, I think she really wants to work in a gallery.”
He didn’t reply. It made Elisabeth uneasy. His eyes wandered down to her breasts and then up again, as if someone was pulling a string attached to the top of his head.
She kept talking.
“We can’t let her, right? She’s too talented. I don’t even know why she wants to work in a gallery. She should just paint.”
“You’ve seen one painting,” Andrew said.
“No, it’s true,” Christopher said. “She has natural talent.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that. She doesn’t think anyone at the college thinks she’s good,” Elisabeth said.
“Sam’s one of the best in the department at the moment, technically speaking,” he said. “Unfortunately, she doesn’t take risks. She doesn’t have anything new to say.”
Annoying. What did he know?
“We saw her final project for the semester,” Elisabeth said. “The portrait of her grandmother.”
She paused to discern whether he knew what she was referring to, but he gave no indication one way or the other.
“Were you at that art show last Sunday?” she asked.
Maybe that was where she’d seen him.
Christopher let out a sound somewhere between a scoff and a cough. “I wasn’t. I try to avoid those things.”
Then it clicked.
“I know where I recognize you from,” she said. “I was on campus at the start of the school year to hang a flyer, and you were talking to some poor girl whose grandmother had died.”
His expression was blank.
“At College Hall. She wanted an extension on a paper,” she said.
“You wouldn’t believe how many grandmothers die the day a paper is due,” he said. “That, and midterms, appear to be the leading causes of death among grandparents, as far as I can tell.”
He didn’t smile. Gwen laughed, to make it clear that he was trying to be funny.
The look on Andrew’s face matched the way Elisabeth felt. It made her want to kiss him. Maybe the definition of a happy marriage was simply not wishing you were married to anyone’s husband but your own.
“We should get going before the baby wakes up and my mom decides to give him a cupcake instead of the bottle we left in the fridge,” Andrew said.
“Oh no,” Gwen said.
“Do you guys have kids?”
It surprised Elisabeth that Andrew would ask that question, the question they themselves hated being asked for so long.
“We don’t,” Gwen said.
“Smart people,” Andrew said. “You probably get to sleep past five a.m. on a Saturday.”
She gave him a look. Had he forgotten already?
“Five would constitute sleeping in for me,” Christopher said.
“He’s a big cyclist,” Gwen said. “He sometimes does sixty miles in a day.”
“That’s—impressive,” Elisabeth said.
She wondered if all that cycling might contribute to low sperm count.
They wouldn’t be couple friends, that much was clear. But still, she liked Gwen.
“We should get together now that you’re back,” Elisabeth said.
“I’d love that.”
The voices in the kitchen had grown louder. Stephanie’s laugh rose to a cackle.
“I suppose I should thank her and say goodbye,” Elisabeth said. “But I don’t want to go back in there.”
“I’ll tell her you had to get home to your sitter,” Gwen said.
“Bless you.”
Gwen followed them to the door and wrote her contact information on a leftover name tag. Elisabeth did the same.
“I’m so happy to run into you again,” Gwen said. “This reminds me. My friend would love to have you speak to her class if you’re still willing.”
“Anytime,” Elisabeth said. “Have her email me.”
On the walk home, Andrew said she should be careful blabbing about Sam and her plans for next year.
“I got carried away,” she said. “The gin. But while we’re on the topic of subjects to avoid in casual conversation, don’t you remember how hard it was when we were trying and people just assumed we didn’t want kids?”
Andrew looked back toward Stephanie’s house. “Those two? You sure?”
“She didn’t say anything, but I have a feeling.”
“They don’t seem like the type.”
Elisabeth dropped the name tag Gwen had handed her into her purse. It sank to the bottom, drawn down into a stew of loose change and drugstore receipts and linty pacifiers, where it would remain for the next five months.
* * *
—
Charlotte had taken a week to get back to her about the holiday. Finally, she agreed to come if Elisabeth could help with her travel expenses. Elisabeth sent a check for four hundred dollars to help offset the cost of her flight, which Charlotte acknowledged with a text saying You’re the best! Followed by an emoji of a winky face blowing a kiss.
Let’s avoid any money talk in front of Andrew when you get here, okay? she replied. Things are kind of tense on that front.
Charlotte’s response was a sad face, which Elisabeth took to mean I’m sorry to hear that.
Her sister brought conch fritters packed in dry ice. She was so tan, the color of a Barbie. She drank too much on Christmas Eve when the three of them, plus the baby, went out for dinner. Charlotte carried on about how idyllic life on Turks was, while in the same breath mourning the loss of a trust-fund kid turned scuba instructor who went for a night swim and got eaten by wild dogs.
“He was a good friend of Davey’s,” she said. “It hit him hard.”
“Who’s Davey?” Elisabeth said.
“Davey,” Charlotte said, as if it were obvious, as if Davey were their brother. “I told you about him. He’s getting here tomorrow afternoon.”
“You didn’t tell me you were bringing anyone.”
“Will he be joining us for lunch?” Andrew said.
His tone was bright, but Elisabeth could tell he was calculating whether they had enough food.
“Yes,” Charlotte said. “He wouldn’t miss it. I told him what a great cook you are.”
Andrew tried to hide how proud the comment made him.
He blushed, which made Elisabeth smile.
Charlotte was exasperating, but still, they laughed a lot that night. Everyone was in good spirits. They told old stories that Andrew had never heard.
Elisabeth’s parents got in late. They had each booked a room at the Hotel Calvin, without consulting her or each other. Around ten, they both texted at the same time to say they’d had a run-in in the lobby while checking in, and wasn’t that just their luck?
Elisabeth showed the messages to Charlotte, who rolled her eyes.
“Those two deserve each other,” she said. “I don’t mean that as a compliment.”
“I’m really happy you’re here,” Elisabeth said.
“Me too,” Charlotte said with a smile. She put her arm around Elisabeth’s shoulder.
* * *
—
The next morning, Christmas Day, everyone arrived at once.
Elisabeth saw them through the window, getting out of their cars and coming up the walkway. He
r in-laws; her father and his girlfriend, who had, surprisingly, a retirement-age hippie vibe about her; Charlotte in black leather pants and a fuzzy white sweater, no coat; and, bringing up the rear, their mother, thinner than ever and impeccably dressed in a skirt-suit and heels, like a member of Congress attending the State of the Union. Elisabeth knew from Charlotte that she had recently gotten Botox, a chin lift, and something called CoolSculpting, which promised to freeze off her nonexistent fat deposits. She was carrying seven shopping bags from Saks.
Elisabeth took a deep breath. It was too much. She had imagined receiving them one at a time. She wanted to hide, but opened the door instead.
“Merry Christmas,” they all said, doing their best impersonation of a real family.
They crowded into the front hall. Andrew took everyone’s coats. Elisabeth’s mother regarded Gil in her arms and said, “Now there you are,” as if she’d been looking for him all these months. She reached out to hold him, which surprised Elisabeth.
Elisabeth passed the baby over and felt moved in some small way when Gil touched her mother’s face and the two of them smiled at each other.
“These are my grandfather’s curls,” her mother said. “He had blond ringlets in all his childhood photographs. Remember?”
“No,” Elisabeth said. She couldn’t recall ever seeing a photograph of her great-grandfather.
She wondered for the millionth time why her mother hadn’t come sooner. Why she was the rare woman for whom meeting her first grandchild was not a high priority. Now that she was here, she seemed to love him.
Elisabeth’s father intruded on the moment.
“Pleasure to meet you, young man,” he said, like Gil was the new guy at the office. She half expected him to shake the baby’s hand.
“Say hi to Gloria,” he said to Elisabeth.
“Sorry, yes, hi,” Elisabeth said. “Great to meet you.”
It was, in fact, one of the more awkward situations she’d ever been in. Her parents meeting her firstborn child, the two of them in the same small space, but not together anymore. And this woman, a stranger, whom Elisabeth was expected to treat with grace, because she was an adult and the host of this gathering.
Friends and Strangers Page 25