No, not the heaps of dirt, not the coffin of butterflies, not the single stream television, not most of all the bloody cocoon, the cheap Louise Bourgeois womb: Oh, please! This hadn’t been news since 1975. Come on, Lace. Say something. What the fuck was wrong with our generation? We were all so scared and nice, nice and scared. Even subversion came with a typed white handout. Even tricky art was called “tricky” and dropped in a box. Everyone wanted to be liked. Everyone wanted a write-up in the Times. Everyone wanted—
On the street I spotted them. Lacie was still incandescent, Ian shaking his head no. So busy was she screaming she didn’t see me skulk across the street. He did. He sent me a glance as raw as opened skin, pink and shocked and tender, a universe from the smug satisfaction he had showed me at the bar when he had oh-so-reasonably, oh-so-respectfully suggested we stop, and satisfaction was not the word, then, for what I felt. No, power is the word.
Grand Central at any time is a dream, with the pale gold and pearly green-blue of its celestial signs, but at half-past ten, when there are only cops and panhandlers and drunk suburbanites around, there’s a stillness close to church. Slamming through the hall that night, I was aware of destroying something sacrosanct. Furiously I cut a harsh diagonal, my backpack heavy with sweaters and jeans, underwear and socks, running shoes. Basic stuff. I was going home.
The spur from Southeast takes only twenty minutes to reach Harlem Valley–Wingdale, but then it’s nearly forty minutes to North Banbury. On the drive back from the station my mom and I didn’t talk much. She didn’t ask if I was okay, or why I had come home. Over her nightie she’d thrown a North Face fleece, and in the light of the passing headlights her skin was papery and worn.
When we pulled into the driveway Marlo began to bark, and by the time my mom was unlocking the front door he was hysterical. Out he tumbled, all brown wriggly body, his grief over the midnight intrusion magically alchemized to pure canine glee. Reflexively he pushed his long torso against my legs, shaking and snapping his jaw, while I cooed, “Oh, Marlo, Marlo, yes I came home, I’m here, I know, it’s so exciting,” and then I slapped his side and he trotted off to find me a toy, and my mom kissed me near the lips and said she was happy I was home.
Was it home? When I had brushed my teeth with the extra tube of toothpaste kept in the guest bathroom, and slid between the crisp white sheets of the guest bedroom, wallpapered in cerulean blue, Lacie and Ian and Milk and Honey, at least, seemed a million miles away. Two minutes later I was dreaming.
* * *
—
When the city people had discovered North Banbury, the town had stripped away its hardware stores and food marts, its gas stations and drugstores, to make room for “shoppes” selling penny candy and Shaker furniture. Then the money abruptly veered east, to the hamlet of White Hart, leaving North Banbury with a Main Street of shuttered ceramic stores and out-of-business cafés. It was a funny summer town, mostly deserted, with a strangely prominent post office, and a hot-dog vendor selling his wares exclusively on Wednesdays from eleven to one.
Not that any of this bothered my parents. After I graduated from high school, they had bought a narrow three-story Victorian with rattly windows, wide soft floorboards, and peeling lead paint. To my surprise they’d decorated impeccably: in the airy top room, with its banked four-pointed ceiling, they’d placed giant clay pots filled with sprays of red Japanese maple, a comfortably saggy mauve couch, and a mounted sculptural twist of weathered gray driftwood. It turned out my parents had taste. They were only waiting for me to leave to display it.
I awoke the next morning to crunching gravel. From the window I watched my dad walk down the driveway with his gym bag over his shoulder. Downstairs, a burner clicked and caught.
While I was washing my face my phone trilled.
“Rose? It’s Griffin,” Griffin shouted when I picked up, and with my finger I plugged the ear that was not pressed to the phone, as if I were having trouble hearing, though my parents’ house was silent. “I just got off the phone with Erv. Ervin West? He’s very upset.”
“Oh, no.” I squinted at the tiny analog clock on the dresser. Seven thirty in the morning. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“Do you remember what you said to Isabel last night?”
So I came to learn that after I left, Isabel cried so hard her mother thought she might need to be sedated. Said that she hated me. Said that she never wanted to see me again. Said that I didn’t believe in her, that I had told her she was a failure.
“So, needless to say, you won’t be working with Isabel anymore.” He sounded grimly satisfied.
“Did he tell you he asked me to write her college essay for her? Because he did. He asked me to do it.” Panic made my voice mean.
“Be that as it may.” Griffin did not sound surprised. “Be that as it may. The thing is, Rose. I know that you’re very smart. But at Ivy Prep, we don’t hire for book smarts. There are lots of geniuses in the world. That’s actually very common. What we need are people who can read people. Who are emotionally intelligent.”
Of course he had it exactly backward. Any modern female who’d gone through the whole please others indoctrination—who had been socialized, in other words—was emotionally intelligent. Emotional intelligence was as common as dirt.
“Look, Rose,” and now he sounded genuinely grieved. “If I were your friend, I’d tell you to get another job. Not that I’m not your friend,” he quickly added.
“You’re firing me?”
He chuckled. “I’d like to think that being your friend and being your boss, they’re not mutually incompatible. And I like you a lot. That’s why it’s difficult for me to have this conversation. But as your friend, I’d tell you to start looking for a different job.”
“So you’re firing me.”
“No, no, no. At Ivy Prep we don’t fire people. We just, well. It’s an algorithm.”
“An algorithm,” I repeated.
“The tutors at the top of our ranking system, they get the most referrals. Those at the bottom get the least.”
“And I’m at the bottom.”
“Well, actually you’re off our list.”
“But you’re not firing me.”
“I like you a lot,” he repeated helplessly.
I looked in the mirror. I’d slept in my sweats, and my hoodie had left a red crease across my cheek. “I like you too,” I told Griffin Chin, and then I hung up the phone.
* * *
—
They say that people who lose everything—in a fire, or a flood—often feel an odd exultation. I had never understood that until now. Lightness swam up in me. The shoddy apartment, and roaring subway; the endless coaxing of Isabel to more sentences, clearer sentences. Why did I need any of it? Over months I’d erected a life I had imagined was as solid as stone pillars, only to discover I’d built a paper tent. Down it came in a single yank.
If I told my parents I’d lost my job they’d want to have a sober conversation about how, and why, and what I felt, and because my mom knew how to listen, because she was a very, very good shrink, she’d pull the loose threads in my conversation until I was talking about Isabel’s adolescence and my adolescence and then, inevitably, Lacie’s adolescence, and then Lacie today, and my mom would see it all, my cloak would unravel and I would be psychically naked before her, which was how I always ended up in front of my mother: bare. Unable to keep anything from her.
No. Not today. I vowed not to blab my mistakes. I would not—under no circumstances—bring up Isabel. I definitely wouldn’t say the name Lacie. I would keep myself locked away.
* * *
—
Once I had decided to hide my distress from my parents, I joined my mom in the breakfast nook, where we sat drinking coffee with milk fresh from the local dairy. Chunks of fat floated in our cups, slowly dissolving into yellow greasy cir
cles. Steel-cut oats bubbled on the cast-iron stove.
“How’s Lacie?” my mom asked.
“Fine,” I said carefully. “She’s just sort of the same.”
When I’d moved in with her my parents had naturally been surprised, and rehashed many old memories of our sleepovers from years ago. But there was something probing in my mom’s voice now. “Is she still talking in that babyish voice?”
Actually, my dad had been the one who did most of the reminiscing about our old friendship. My mom had never liked Lacie. Or rather, she had liked her when she was a fearless ten-year-old girl, but when she had become giggly and coy, popular with the boys, my mom, unlike the rest of us, was not charmed. My mom was a practical woman.
“Um, not really. She’s not really so girly anymore.” I hesitated, annoyed that my mom was caricaturing Lacie in this way, but also glad. Maybe I could allow myself to say this one thing about Lacie. Just one thing. “It’s more like, she pretends she’s this brilliant absentminded artist, but really she’s totally savvy and careerist and smart about things like that.”
My mom waited. I wanted to tell her more. I wanted to describe the red cocoon. I wanted to explain how I thought it was bad, but that I also secretly loved it, and how much it terrified me to love it, because I thought it must mean Lacie was more talented than me, in addition to more everything else, but I knew my mom, the therapist, would say something vaguely chiding about jealousy and remind me that brilliance was not a zero-sum game; she would straighten me out, and nudge me an inch closer to psychological health. So annoying.
“How are you guys doing?” I said instead, playfully poking her. “Tell me about you.”
Overnight my parents had donned the garb of old people. My dad had new stiffness in his joints, instructions to replace his daily run with a swim, plus pills to take each morning. If my mom sat for too long it took her forever to stand. She’d bend over and massage her knee, muttering, I’m fine, I’m fine. It worried me. Also I wanted to poke at her vulnerability, since she had so quickly sensed mine.
But all she said was, “Oh, honey, we’re good, we’re good. It’s a very sweet time of life, really.”
“Yeah?” I tried to make my face open.
“Yeah, it is. Your father and I are in a really good place, we’re financially secure, there’s not”—she looked at me hesitantly—“you know, when you’re young there’s all this rushing around and scrambling, you’re trying to get ahead in your career, you’re building a family…” She hesitated again, knowing my prickly spots, but unable to resist them, as I could never resist hers, “or you’re trying to meet someone, but when you’re older, that stuff is resolved, you can just enjoy life.” She looked at me squarely, and I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “There’s so much of life to be enjoyed.”
* * *
—
Up in North Banbury, life did seem to consist of simple pleasures. Every morning the sky was a deep saturated blue, and on my runs the sun warmed me. Writing in the kitchen, I listened to the humming creek, and on breaks watched the quicksilver water. Marlo dug holes. One night I let him up on the bed, where he curled nose to tail like a fox. The warmth of his body soothed me.
Evenings we had long meals. My mom cooked. Gradually I forgave my parents for wearing the masks of old people. I saw that beneath their tentative questions there was a real desire to know me. Somewhere in their cool, polite interest was love. It was just love that stayed in its lane.
And yet, it bothered me: no matter how often I checked my phone, there were no messages from Ian or Lacie. My background photo, of the beach where Ian had watched me swim in the waves, was never overlaid with a message. It got so just the sight of that curling Atlantic made my heart pound.
* * *
—
My plan had been to stay indefinitely, but the following Wednesday my mom announced that the Duffields were coming for the weekend. Not that this meant that I had to vacate the guest bedroom—no, not at all. She was just interested in knowing my plans; she just wanted to get a “sense” of what I was “thinking.”
When she brought this up, we were sitting at the kitchen table again looking at the gold-torched forest, so different from the dusty suburban woods of my childhood. Fog was burning off the hillside, and even through the shut window we could hear the creek.
“What’s your tutoring schedule like?” she asked, false enthusiasm in her voice. “Is it like a Monday to Thursday thing, do you take weekends off, how does it work?” Needlessly she added, “We’re so happy you’re here.”
I looked at her face, her gently exfoliated face, plumped and smoothed by expensive creams. “I don’t have a job.” I hurled the words. “I got fired.”
She recoiled. “Fired?”
“Fired.” God, what a word. Suggestive of the kiln.
“Oh, Rose. What on earth happened? How did you get fired?”
Haltingly, I told the story. She kept nodding, taking big gulps, and when I had finished, my dad, who had wandered in halfway through, and now stood at the stove eating his oatmeal, offered, “Well, she’s not wrong. You did go to Harvard. It is easy for you to say.”
“Right.” I held my face in my hands. “It’s just, maybe I’m not cut out for this kind of work. I kind of hate the kids.”
“Well, you hate the way they’ve been raised. Such a culture of materialism in that city…” My mom shook her head sadly. “And now of course there’s the internet…”
“No.” For some reason I had to make this clear. It wasn’t the internet. “Not the way they’ve been raised. Not the culture. The kids. I hate the kids.” God, it felt good to say. Even as I recognized how deeply untrue it was—even as I was thinking that I had some real affection for Isabel—I relished claiming harsh land. Always, with my parents, I ended up saying things I didn’t mean, just to shock them, just because I was tired of how infinitely reasonable and adult they were. But what really shocked them was when I began to weep.
“Oh, honey.” My mom covered my hand with hers. “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?”
Mutely I nodded, squashing flat with my thumb the tears on my face.
“Are you worried about money?”
Mind you, this question didn’t portend an offer of money. Unlike every other middle-class Baby Boomer parent, mine thought it was character building to figure it out. “You’re educated,” they would say, as if a liberal-arts degree were the equivalent of a fishing rod and the world a stocked pond. “Debt-free,” they’d remind me, and I agreed, I agreed, but it was hard, when you lived in New York, when you sat with teenagers “just back” from Japan or starting their unpaid internship at a small prestigious literary magazine, not to echo with not enough, not enough. That was the disease of the city, the beat it drummed into you, the crazy rhythm throbbing inside every single person you passed on the street.
At my silence, my dad pushed. “Are you worried about rent?” And oh boy, that’s what really did it. Waterworks. I wanted to say I was weeping for all the pain I had caused but really I was weeping for myself, me and my infinite capacity to fuck things up. In between sobs I huffed out, “I don’t want to live with Lacie. It’s too hard. There’s too much hist-hist-history.”
“You don’t want to go back?” my mom asked. She spoke gently, but I could hear her satisfaction, like a ripple of peanut-butter fudge. Finally she had figured out what my last-minute arrival was all about.
“I can’t,” I said, biting back my tears and using the same flat tone in which I had announced my firing. Then like a good daughter I closed my eyes, so my parents could confer with worried glances about my fate.
“What about Julia?” said my dad. “If you don’t want to live with Lacie, maybe you could crash with her again?”
Julia was his brother’s daughter, the surgical resident who had shot daggers at me every time she had found me lounging o
n her couch. Mutely I shook my head. Impossible.
Over my head my parents exchanged more glances. “Alyssa and Marcus are…” my mom started to say.
“Were you going to…?” my dad asked.
My mom made a moue of Maybe? and my dad indicated What about the? and my mom made a face that meant It doesn’t matter, and my dad with a one-handed shrug said Then it’s okay with me, and while I thought dear God let me one day marry someone with whom I can carry out full conversations without even opening my mouth, my mom said, “Our good friends just left for Oaxaca for a few weeks. Do you want me to see if they would let you stay in their place? It’s Washington Heights, but…”
* * *
—
Before I left I did all my laundry. My mom gave me a sandwich. My dad said, “Take care, sweetie,” and kissed me on the cheek.
On the train, I told myself it was good I was going back. I had to get my stuff. I’d go midday, when Lacie would be at work. It’d be easy and quick, and then my New York chapter would be done.
Self-satisfied, I took out my paperback and began to read. Almost immediately, my phone buzzed. I had squirreled it deep in my bag, hoping to resist its siren call, but at the chirp I fished it out.
Ian.
I stared a long time. Not even opening the message, just reading the alert, savoring the shape of his name on my screen. He was still in there as Ian The Barn. I hadn’t changed it; I liked the reminder that we had met in a beach town and lived together in that rambly old converted stable. I studied the pretty shape of the capital letters. Ian The Barn. Then hit the message: Can we talk? he wanted to know. He had made me wait for a week and a day, but I couldn’t resist. Within minutes I replied: How about this afternoon? Prospect Park?
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 22