Very Nice

by Marcy Dermansky

  My mother put Princess on a leash and walked me to the train station. She walked to the ticket machine and paid for my tickets. I did not tell her that I had an app on my phone. I let her pay. She sat on a bench with me while we waited for the train and we both petted the dog.

  Maybe we didn’t have to return Princess. I could get him in so much trouble. My professor wasn’t supposed to sleep with me. I was his student. Maybe, in exchange for not turning him in, we could keep this dog. Maybe this would be my gift to my mother, because it was wrong, I realized, to have brought this dog into her life.

  I might have forgotten about my mother and dogs, how attached she gets. And Princess, she could also be a reminder for me. That I had had sex with my writing professor; it had not been some schoolgirl fantasy. It had happened. It was not like I could really be in love with him. It had been one night. It hadn’t even been a night. It had been a few hours in the late afternoon.

  I was sad when the train pulled in. I wanted to stay home with my mother and my professor’s dog. I felt strangely left out. The train stopped and I got on it. I turned to wave at her, but my mother had already started walking home.

  * * *

  —

  Mandy Jones was a vegan.

  She wore a black tank top, skinny jeans. She had strong, muscular arms. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders. She had straight bangs. It was the kind of haircut I’d had in the third grade.

  She was probably two decades younger than my mother. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to like her, but I sort of did anyway. Or, I didn’t dislike her. She was a pilot and that was cool. Amanda, I thought, would be a better name, like the name in my story, and I asked her if that was possibly her real name.

  “Truthfully?” she said, and I said, “Sure.”

  I felt nervous and my father looked nervous. What truth would this pilot reveal to me?

  “I was named after a Barry Manilow song. I was ashamed of this fact for a long time, but no one really remembers him anymore, so it’s okay. It was my mother’s favorite song.”

  The funny thing was that I actually knew who Barry Manilow was because my mother also loved him. I grew up listening to her sing me “Copacabana,” except sometimes my mother would change the words. Instead of “Lola,” she would sing:

  Her name was Rachel

  She was a schoolgirl

  She didn’t want to get out of bed to go to school.

  It went on like that, my mother making up words to the Barry Manilow song while I groaned, secretly loving it. This probably didn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know that song, and my father’s girlfriend, Mandy, was right: Almost no one remembered Barry Manilow at this point. Which made me ponder the nature of fame. My professor was famous, but I would guess my father’s pilot had never heard of him. Or my father either, who genuinely believed fiction was for women. I thought about my professor constantly, his hands on my skin. Sitting at a restaurant, across from Mandy and my father, I started to flush.

  “My mother loves Barry Manilow,” I told Mandy, and then I felt disloyal somehow, because it meant that my mother was old. In league with Mandy’s mother. “I do, too,” I said, trying to make it all right.

  “Weird,” Mandy said and she laughed.

  She wisely tried to change the subject. Mandy wanted to know if I was heartbroken about Hillary Clinton. Because she was heartbroken about Hillary Clinton. This was eight months after the election; I figured she must be desperate to make appropriate conversation.

  “Girl power, you know?” she said. “First female president. I was so sure it would happen.”

  How my mother would have sneered at her. Girl power. It was a line on a T-shirt, nothing more. I told Mandy I had been for Bernie Sanders. This wasn’t even entirely true. I was being contrarian. I actually liked them both, which was not a popular viewpoint at my liberal arts college. I was supposed to feel passionately about a candidate, even if it was the crazy Green Party lady. It didn’t even matter to me anymore, Hillary or Bernie, now that there was this god-awful new president.

  “Well, we can still get along,” Mandy said.

  I shrugged. I didn’t agree or disagree.

  “I am heartbroken for the world, really,” I said.

  “Your daughter has depth, Jonathan,” Mandy said, which was completely condescending. Which made me think that maybe I did not like her after all. Which made me feel glad. I would tell my mother that I did not like the pilot. My father was nervous. He drank two gin and tonics in half an hour.

  My father had been for Hillary, too. He worked for one of those investment banks that had invested tons of money in her campaign. Paid for her to make speeches. And it was her association with bankers that helped bring her down. My father had said after she lost that it had been a bad investment. Sometimes, I wondered if his leaving my mother was related to Hillary losing.

  But he didn’t appear to have lost his mind.

  He had just moved on.

  That made me sad.

  It was not until I had gone into New York and met my father’s perfectly acceptable girlfriend that I realized that I was upset. There was something wrong with this woman, wanting an old guy like my father. He was handsome in that way that older men could be. Fit. He played tennis. But he was balding. He went to bed at ten. He read the Wall Street Journal. Clearly Mandy could have anybody. Clearly she had some daddy issues. I wondered how long they would live together in her small apartment. If she had any idea how big our house in Connecticut was. How long would he last in Tribeca? Clearly, it was not his scene.

  My professor was older, but he was not that much older. He was not a father figure. It made me feel better realizing that Mandy Jones was not as perfect as she appeared. It didn’t matter that she had destroyed my family. Because I was in college. I didn’t need my family anymore.

  * * *

  —

  Earlier that night, my mother had walked me to the train. Going home, my father walked me to the subway. This was my dad, the most boring dad in the universe, living in Tribeca. Otherwise, he did not seem any different.

  “This meant a lot to me,” he said.

  I shrugged. I wondered what I would tell my mother. I could not figure out how upset she was. She had told me more than once that she missed Posey more than my father. It seemed cruel of him to have left so soon after the dog died. He should have been there to comfort her.

  “There is a new associate in the firm,” he said, apropos of nothing. “Black girl, new to the city, smart, sharp as a tack. Good instincts. Works hard. We’re going to promote her soon. She makes me think of you.”

  “A black girl makes you think of me?”

  That was wrong. It was incredibly sexist that he called his female employee a girl. Also, I wasn’t as sharp as a tack. I was sort of slow and dreamy, something that bothered me about myself.

  “No,” my father said. “That didn’t come out right. I’ll start again. Her name is Khloe. For one thing, she doesn’t really look black.”

  “Is she black? What are you saying?”

  “She’s half black, light-skinned. The new black.”

  My father laughed.

  I didn’t. I did not have that much patience for him.

  “Don’t you watch that show? Orange Is the New Black? Mandy loves it.”

  “You can’t say hip things, Dad. It doesn’t work for you. You aren’t hip.”

  “Point taken. Anyway. It helped her get hired, her skin color. Diversity. She’s also pleasing to the eye. I had some drinks tonight, sweetheart. I shouldn’t say these things. It’s not PC. I am so sick of PC. Look, anyway, that is not the point, Rachel. I brought Khloe up because this is her first big job out of grad school and she is kicking ass. It pleases me, watching her run circles around her co-workers. It makes me wonder what you will be like in a couple of years.”
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  “You want me to go into finance?” I said. “I don’t see it.”

  “Don’t rule anything out, honey.”

  Though he had explained it to me, so many times, I still did not understand what, exactly, my father did. It was like when I was a kid, watching the U.S. Open on TV and I never knew what any of those ads were about, the investment firms and the life insurance. I’d recently had a revelation, an unpleasant one, straight from Bernie Sanders himself, that I might be the daughter of a genuine scumbag. The one percent. That I was guilty by association. By the simple fact of my birth. My privilege. The swimming pool. Even if my father seemed nice and gave money to liberal causes. And he was nice to me. He gave money to me, too. I was not so sure about the company he worked for. I knew that I could Google it. That all of the answers were on my phone. I did not want to know. I knew I was not going to like whatever I found out.

  “Maybe I will be a pilot,” I told my dad.

  “You could do that,” he said. “I’m sure Amanda could give you some tips.”

  Obviously, I was full of shit. I would not become a pilot. It was understood about me; I did not have focus. I did not know what I was interested in. I had floundered all through high school. I was not Ivy League material. I was still floundering in college, but I had made it through my sophomore year, had even done well in every class except creative writing. Which was, of course, ironic. I had always been a good babysitter. Kids loved me.

  “Or I could teach pre-K,” I said.

  This conversation we were having was my least favorite and I was not sure how we had gotten there. Every conversation with my father ended this way.

  My father sighed. “Whatever you do, honey, don’t be a teacher.”

  My mother, of course, was a teacher. He had never respected her job, had made jokes about how little money she made. It hadn’t mattered for her, because she had married well, but this was not the way things worked anymore. She also had a kid come into her classroom with a gun. She had talked the boy down, she had been a national hero even, appeared on the Today show. Schools, my father had said, are not safe.

  My mother had scoffed at this.

  “Let’s keep all the children home then,” she had said. “How about that?”

  It had been a stupid fight; it had occurred when they came to my college to tell me about their separation, but it reminded me how much my parents had been fighting. Or not talking at all.

  “Seriously, honey.”

  My father wanted me to promise him then and there that I would not teach. But maybe I would; maybe I would teach little kids. I liked my kids at day camp. I always had. This made me think about my professor, too, his tweets about money, about how broke he was, how he had spent most of his salary on train fare. My professor was a writer, really, not a teacher. He wasn’t even a good teacher. He had been so critical of everything I turned in. My mother, at least, liked my short story. She did not pick at it at a sentence level; she said it was wonderful.

  I realized how pathetic that was, this inner dialogue I was having. I probably didn’t want to teach pre-K anyway. I just wanted to upset my father. We had reached the subway, a small thing for which I was grateful.

  “Do you need money?” he asked me.

  I did not need money, not in any real sense of the word, but I also saw that this was the way it was going to go.

  “Sure,” I said.

  My father pressed a wad of cash into my hand.

  On the train home, in my own row, on my way back to Connecticut, I counted the bills. Ten bills. Two hundred dollars. It used to be my dad would just give me a couple of twenties. This was too much. The money made me feel dirty somehow. Was it supposed to buy my love? Somehow, my father didn’t know that I loved him no matter what. He was my father. Parents could be so stupid. It was staggering.

  I would give the money away. I would keep sixty, the amount I was due, to pay for my time, for my Friday night, and I would donate the rest. I didn’t know where. I would check Twitter. My writing professor was always tweeting about organizations that needed money. I took out my phone. Right away, I found an article about a man who had been deported, a Mexican who had been living in Texas for thirty-two years. He had been pulled over by the police because he had not come to a full stop at a stop sign and now he was being sent home. He had four kids. There was a link in the story to his GoFundMe campaign. I clicked on the link. I donated $140 to his family.

  Did that make me a better person? I didn’t think so. I was not a good person. I prayed that my professor would safely come back from Pakistan, and then I laughed at myself, praying. I was Jewish. Now, with the rise of anti-Semitism, that made me into the new minority. Even I could be discriminated against. I could be the victim of a hate crime. Did that make me a better person? I didn’t think so. I could start going to temple, then it would be real, but who was I fooling? I wouldn’t do that. I thought of my professor’s blue shirt. How soft it had been.

  “You,” he had said. “Are very nice.”

  I was such an idiot.

  This was nothing new.

  Becca

  I tried to think about the divorce in simple terms. I wanted the house. I loved my house and my flowers and the yard. I loved the pool, which was outdoors but still part of the house, accessible from a door in the living room, looking down onto the lawn, the swing set we put up for Rachel, which she had not used in so many years. I loved the front porch and I loved all of the art on the walls. I loved the amethysts and the gemstones on the bookshelves. I loved the books. I loved the green soaps in the downstairs bathroom, which matched the tiles on the floor. I loved my plates and my cups. The way the vase filled with flowers looked on the kitchen table. The house was me and it was mine.

  I wanted some cash from Jonathan, too, money that some people would say I did not need, because I had a job. Still, it was money I deserved. Jonathan thought of life as a series of bonuses, and I felt like I deserved a bonus for lasting twenty-five years. Twenty-five years.

  He owed me.

  Son of a bitch.

  That was what I thought, the phrase that went through my head when I didn’t think I was thinking about it. He owed me. Fucking hell. I did not want to be angry. I did not want to be hurt. Earlier this year, Theo Thornton, a former student, had come into my classroom and pulled out a gun, and that, I’d thought, was supposed to change everything. I was supposed to have a new perspective, light, clarity. I pretended not to care, but if I let myself feel anything, if only for a moment, I was furious with my cheating husband. He never even said good-bye to Posey.

  I had talked the student down.

  I had been lucky, of course. It could have gone either way.

  So I wasn’t going to worry about dust on the picture frames. I was going to accept life as it came at me, for better or worse. At some point, the money would bring me pleasure, and I wanted it. It helped, according to my lawyer, that I had been wronged. It helped that my husband was currently living in Tribeca with his pilot. Jonathan wanted out, fast, and so he could afford this divorce. Money would help ease the pain. There was that trip to Paris we didn’t take. I could take it now. I could go to art museums and not worry about being rushed.

  But some nights, awake at three in the morning, I would think: I am a failure. Jonathan was my husband, he was my family, and he no longer wanted to be my family. And then, then I would remember how bored I had been. Bored and bitter and how I had stopped doing his laundry on a regular basis, which seemed wrong even to me, cruel, petty, considering the hours he worked, not having clean socks for him in the morning. And then I realized that maybe, maybe I had stopped washing his clothes because they had a new smell to them. Had they smelled like sex? He was having sex with another person. How long had it been? And then, then I would reach for the dog on my bed and I would cry.

  It wasn’t my dog, this Princess,
she was such a beautiful poodle, I had to stop calling her Posey, but it made me feel better and so what harm was there in that.

  I felt happy now that Rachel was home. I had thought I might resent her presence, but I didn’t. I genuinely liked my almost-adult Rachel. She was interesting, she was moody, she would read the books I took out of the library before I could read them. She was good at her job and she was responsible, and I took credit for that. I was glad that she’d brought me the dog.

  I had been allowing myself to fall into a lazy kind of depression—left by my husband, dog dead—and then Rachel came home with her laundry and this constant need to be fed, the minute she walked in the door, and I got to mother her and I liked mothering. I always had.

  I had dedicated years and years to the mothering of Rachel and she might be in college, but I wasn’t done yet. I packed Rachel a lunch for camp every day, just as if she were still in elementary school: a turkey sandwich and a Tupperware container filled with watermelon balls. One day, searching for something sweet, I found only Baker’s chocolate and so I made brownies. I packed them for Rachel’s dessert. She ate them, I assumed, but she never mentioned them to me, as if she took it for granted that there would be homemade brownies in her lunch box. Of course, I ate them, too. I made good brownies.

  When Rachel was at camp, I took the dog on walks. My town was charming. I could get into the car and Posey and I would be at the Sound in less than five minutes. We would walk to the main square and go to my favorite café. The people who worked there would always bring me water for her. Everyone commented on my new dog.

  “She is a good dog,” I said, not confirming or denying her place in my life.

  Of course, if I were to get a new dog, I would get a puppy. There is nothing better than soft poodle puppy fur. The idea is to get a puppy, to bond with your poodle from a young age, but I’d felt a bond with this apricot poodle right away. It seemed as if she had been waiting for me.