Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts

by Claire Lazebnik

  The coffeemaker is hissing gently but it has a while to go, so I head back to my father’s office.

  He’s typing at the computer again.

  “Hi.” I return to my perch on the sofa arm. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Never,” he says. “And always.” He smiles, and I see for a second a ghost of the handsome younger man he once was, the one who my mother claims every female grad student had a crush on. He swivels his chair around so he’s facing me and pats me awkwardly on the knee. “Tell me what’s up with you these days.” But before I can speak, he says, “Did your mother tell you she’s selling the house? You were born in that house, you know. All three of you grew up in that house.”

  “But it kind of makes sense for her to sell it now, don’t you think?”

  “How unusual,” he says. “Someone’s actually asking me what I think about all this.” He leans back in his desk chair. There’s a small tear in the shoulder seam of his blue dress shirt. “I have to admit that I feel a bit blindsided. My plan was to be carried out of that house in a coffin. Preferably dead, of course.”

  “Of course.” We’re politely jovial with each other—it’s what we do best.

  “But the decision has been made and here I am.” He glances around. “Where’s Jacob? I don’t hear the pitter-patter of little feet anywhere.”

  “I sent him out for dessert.”

  “You sent him out?” he repeats, one crazy eyebrow soaring. “Does he work for you now?”

  “Well,” I say, “he works for you and you’re my father, so by the transitive property, he works for me, right?”

  “That is a fallacy.”

  “Says you.”

  He looks mildly taken aback. “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I was just joking. Did you know that Hopkins may come home soon to pack up her stuff? We should try to have a family dinner if she does.”

  “Such a complicated term, family,” he says with a grim chuckle, and it suddenly occurs to me—really occurs to me for the first time—that my dad’s heart might actually be broken. I don’t know what to say to that. We’re both silent for a moment, and then he says, “Do you know how long it had been since I’d last lived in an apartment? Over thirty-five years. I keep hearing people moving around me. Up above, down below, on all sides. I’m surrounded by strangers.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it,” he says sulkily.

  “Have you tried a white noise machine?”

  “No. Maybe I should.”

  “I can pick one up for you if you like. I’m always running errands for work anyway.”

  “Ah, still being challenged on the job, I see. I’m so glad you graduated magna cum laude from one of the Seven Sisters for this.” His foggy hazel eyes peer at me from under those craggy eyebrows, like they’re trying to pin down something that refuses to come into focus. “You’re too smart for this, Keats. If you want to spend time in academia—lord knows why, but it does seem to draw us in—go back to school, a real school, and get a PhD.”

  “That’s the last thing I want to do.” My cell buzzes in my pocket. I fish it out and peer at the text from Tom.

  U on ur way yet? Dinner’s at 6:30.

  I text him back. Soon. I lean back so I can slip the phone back in my jeans.

  “Please don’t let me distract you from your important communiqué,” my father says icily. He hates texting, goes ballistic when he catches students glancing at their phones during class.

  “I’m good.”

  “At what?”

  Fortunately I can hear the apartment door open at that moment. I call out to Jacob, who materializes a second later, bag in hand. “Who’s up for a doughnut?” he asks cheerfully.

  “I’ll have mine with my coffee.” I stand up. “Dad?”

  “Go ahead. I’ll join you in a second.”

  But he doesn’t ever emerge, so Jacob and I have our doughnuts in the kitchen without him, and then I stop by the office to say good-bye before Jacob drives me home like I knew he would.

  * * *

  When I get there, Tom is watching the Red Sox play the Royals on our living room flat screen. “It’s going to be a long season,” he says, looking up with a sigh when I let myself in. “We’re already stinking up the place. Glad you’re finally home. We’re going to meet Lou and Iz at their place and then decide where to eat.”

  “I need to shower. I smell like my house.”

  “Okay, but make it fast. How was your dad?”

  “Old.” I don’t mean it as a joke but Tom laughs.

  “That’s what happens when you have kids in your fifties.” Tom’s father is twenty years younger than mine and looks like an older, slightly beefier version of his son: his hair’s still dark and thick, and the cragginess in his face is pretty handsome. If Tom ages the way his father did, he’ll continue to be the best-looking guy in the room for the next forty years.

  They’re good pals, Tom and his father. They have season tickets to Fenway Park, and even though they see each other every day at work, they’re still eager to go to games together or play golf on the weekends. It’s sweet.

  Dick, his dad, started his linens laundering business thirty years ago and gradually built it up from a small family venture to a huge industry that services most of the hospitals and hotels in the greater Boston area. Tom worked there every summer during high school and then joined full-time when he graduated from BU. He’s a vice president now, but everyone there knows he’s being groomed to take over the whole company. His sister Anna doesn’t want anything to do with the business—​although she’s happy to live off its profits in New York City—​but Tom says he’ll welcome her into the company if she ever changes her mind.

  He also says he hopes our kids will want to join him there one day. I don’t say anything when he talks about that. I’ve always daydreamed about having a kid who becomes a famous novelist or screenwriter or something like that. But if running a laundry-washing business is good enough for the guy I plan to have kids with, it should be good enough for those kids. Right?

  * * *

  We see Izzy and Lou almost every weekend, probably because we like both of them, which is unusual for us. In general, I tolerate Tom’s friends more than I actively like them—a lot of them acted weirdly condescending toward me when Tom and I first started dating and I was only fifteen, which maybe I shouldn’t blame them for, but it didn’t exactly endear them to me. I don’t have all that many friends of my own, because for the last ten years Tom’s taken up all of my free time. While the other girls at Smith were spending their weekends carpooling to parties on nearby coed campuses, I was riding the bus back to Boston to be with Tom, so I just didn’t forge the same kind of bonds the other girls did. And the few I did get close to, like my roommates, settled in other parts of the country. But Tom and I are together pretty much every night anyway, so I don’t particularly feel like I’m missing out on companionship.

  And like I said, we spend a lot of time with Lou and Izzy.

  Lou goes all the way back to high school with Tom, and he’s a good guy, dependable and honest and basically pretty easygoing, but the one I really like is Izzy, who’s halfway between my age and the guys’. She’s cute and blond and sweet and kind and would pretty much do anything to keep everyone around her happy. After she graduated from high school, she continued to live at home, taking classes at a local community college, so she could help her parents care for her older brother who was born with some kind of serious brain damage and can’t talk or feed himself or go to the bathroom on his own. She lived at home until she married Lou, and even now, a few years later, she still spends one day each weekend back there, driving the hour it takes for her to get to and from Salem, just to give her mother a few hours’ relief from the constant drudgery of caring for Stanny.

  Her desire to please occasionally tips over into mild insanity, since she hates to disagree with anyone about anything. For instance, once w
e were all discussing a movie we had just seen, and Lou said he hated it because it was boring, and she said, “I know! I almost fell asleep!” and then I said, “Really? I thought it was incredibly tense,” and she said, “I know! I still have goose bumps!” and no one but me seemed to notice that in her rush to be agreeable she had contradicted herself in fewer than ten seconds.

  You forgive Izzy for stuff like that, because it comes from such a good place, from such a genuine desire to make everyone around her feel understood. She’s unlike the people I grew up with, unlike my very self-centered and argumentative family: she’s proof that not everyone thinks being right is more important than being nice.

  It takes us about fifteen minutes to get from our apartment in Waltham to their tiny house in Needham, and as we pull up I see that Izzy’s strung small white lights along the latticed roof of the front porch. They twinkle cheerfully in the dusk, and I point them out to Tom, who says, “She knows it’s not Christmas, right?”

  “They’re pretty.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he says, and we knock and less than a minute later Tom’s on the sofa with Lou watching the game.

  Izzy makes a face at me and says, “I’m starving but the game’s tied.”

  “We’ll never get them out of here now,” I say.

  “At least there’s wine in the fridge—we can have our own party until they get hungry enough to get up off their butts.” Izzy has a very slight southern accent. She’s originally from Georgia, but her parents moved to Salem when she was in high school. She still dresses like a southerner, always dressier than the occasion demands. Tonight, even though it’s just us and we’re not going anywhere special, she’s got on tight, new jeans, spike-heeled black leather strappy sandals, a silk tank top, and a small fitted jacket. I’m wearing comfy jeans and a cozy, oversized boyfriend cardigan, and I feel shabby next to her.

  It’s not a fair contest, though: I grew up in a household where my mother and older sister never used a blow-dryer or read a fashion magazine. What little I know about primping I’ve had to teach myself.

  She pours the wine and asks me about my day, so I tell her my family news.

  “That’s how your mother told you she was divorcing your father? Just in the middle of a conversation about something else?” She shakes her mane of long blond hair in disbelief.

  We’re sitting at their small square table, glasses of wine and an open bag of chips in front of us.

  I nodded. “Then when I was just a little surprised, she acted like I was overreacting.”

  “God, I’d be sobbing all over the place if my parents got divorced.”

  “I’m not actually all that sad. That marriage was over a long time ago.” I realize I’m quoting Jacob, but since Izzy doesn’t know him I don’t bother telling her that.

  “Still, they’re your parents.” Her big blue eyes—fanned by thickly mascaraed eyelashes—are tender with sympathy. “My parents fight all the time—​I’m talking huge screaming matches—​​but I can’t imagine they’d ever actually leave each other. They can’t, because of Stanny.”

  “What’s funny is I can’t remember my parents ever fighting. They were actually always pretty polite to each other.”

  “Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they needed to scream more.”

  “Maybe.” But I can’t picture it. Ours has never been a house of raised voices. Cold, contemptuous, sarcastic, sharp voices, yes. Raised, no.

  I tell Izzy I really like the lights out in front, and she says that Lou poked fun at her because they looked like Christmas lights.

  “Tom said the same thing,” I admit.

  “Those two,” she says, more fondly than irritably. “They’re like peas in a pod, as my mama would say.”

  “Well, I love the lights.”

  She offers to show me some of the other little improvements she’s been working on, and as we walk around the house, she points out a faux-marble finish on a cabinet, a decoupage kind of thing on a mirror frame in the powder room, and a headboard she’s made for their bed by stapling fabric over layers of wood and cotton batting. It’s the kind of artsy decorative work that no one in my house could even think of doing: I can’t remember my mother ever even getting our windows washed or our walls painted, and she definitely wasn’t standing around with a sponge full of paint faux-marbling anything.

  I murmur admiringly as Izzy points it all out, feigning more enthusiasm than I’m actually feeling. It’s pretty enough, but all these crafts are a little—

  I stop myself before I can finish that negative thought. It’s the snob in me coming out, making me want to criticize something that’s perfectly lovely, just because it’s the kind of thing other people do, not my cerebral, crazy family.

  I tell Izzy she’s amazing and the house looks fantastic, and she smiles, pleased.

  We end the tour back in the living room. The guys actually notice our arrival, but only because it’s between innings and there’s a commercial on.

  “Where have you been?” Lou says to Izzy, accusingly. “We’re starving.”

  Izzy cuffs him on the shoulder and turns to me, laughing. “Can you believe these guys?”

  “No.” I reach out my hand and haul Tom to his feet. “I really can’t.”

  We go to a restaurant where the baseball game is playing on a TV over the bar. The boys sit on the side of the table facing the TV. Izzy and I sit on the other side and share a huge salad.

  4.

  At work on Monday, I get an IM from Milton telling me to call Mom, which is exactly the kind of twisted, backwards way messages get delivered in my family. I call the house, and Mom answers and immediately says, “I had a great idea.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “You know how I’ve got to figure out what to do with all the extra furniture before we move? Well, I’ve decided I’m going to let you kids pick out whatever you want—tables, books, artwork, whatever—so when it’s time to move, I’ll know who gets what. And then I can get rid of anything I don’t want with a clear conscience. I want to do it as soon as possible, so I can start taking stuff to Goodwill next week.”

  “Is Hopkins coming?”

  “It’s not sounding too likely. Not in the near future anyway. She’s just got too much going on at work. But I’ll ask her what she thinks she might want and pick out a few more things for her. Anyway, I thought maybe you could come over for dinner tonight and look around. Do you have plans?”

  “Not that I know of, but I should check with Tom.”

  “By all means,” she says, way too politely.

  * * *

  Tom groans into the phone. “We just saw them two days ago.”

  “Says the man who sees his father every day.”

  “He pays me to do that.”

  “I’d happily skip it, Tom, but I’m worried that if I don’t tell Mom what I want right away, she’ll give everything to Hopkins and Milton.”

  “Do your parents even own anything valuable?”

  “They’re not paupers, Tom.”

  “I know, but—” He doesn’t bother to finish the thought. His parents’ home is filled with bright new furniture and bright new paintings and bright new knickknacks—they both came from pretty rough backgrounds, so when their company started doing well, his mother was determined to make her house look like something she’d only seen on TV until then. She’s left her past firmly in the past, and Martha Stewart has nothing on her, whereas my parents haven’t bought a new piece of furniture or—let’s be honest—thoroughly cleaned the whole house in decades.

  Tom says, “I really don’t want to go, Keats. We just saw your family. Enough’s enough.”

  “Is it okay if I go without you?”

  He doesn’t like that idea, either. “I thought we were going to have a nice quiet dinner alone tonight.” Of course, he did. When don’t we have a nice quiet dinner alone together on a Monday? Or a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday for that matter?

  “You’ll survive,” I sa
y.

  “I’m sorry I actually enjoy having dinner with my girlfriend. I must really be some kind of pig, wanting to spend time with you.”

  “A very codependent pig, yes.”

  The truth is, I never know whether it’s better to have Tom with me when I see my family or not. When he’s with me, I feel cushioned from their craziness, safely cocooned in my happy, normal life with him, but his presence adds some tension because they don’t appreciate him.

  It’s pretty much a wash.

  We come to an agreement: I’ll go to dinner by myself and leave as early as I can.

  * * *

  When I pull up in front of the house, I see a couple of other cars already parked in front. One I don’t recognize, but the other is Jacob’s.

  I let myself in and head toward the kitchen where I hear voices.

  Jacob’s sitting in the breakfast booth, talking to some man with a big back. The big back stands up and turns around when Jacob greets me.

  The guy is probably over six feet tall with broad shoulders and hammy legs in jeans that are belted under a substantial stomach. I’d put his age at sixty, give or take a few years: his hair’s gray and pulling away from the temples, but he’s still got a decent head of it and the tanned and healthy looks of a guy who plays golf or goes sailing every weekend.

  Maybe it’s the boat shoes on his sockless feet that make me think that.

  He’s greeting me heartily, a little too heartily given the fact I have no idea who he is. “You must be Keats! ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and all that. You’re probably sick of hearing that.”

  “Not really.” I shake the hand he’s extending toward me. It’s huge, his hand—fleshy and twice the size of mine. “Not all that many people go around quoting Keats.”

  Jacob, who’s also risen, smothers a smile at that.

  “He was my favorite,” Mom puts in. “Well, after Hopkins, of course. And you can’t ignore Milton. The poet, I mean.”

  Yeah, you can’t ignore the poet. Just the real kid who has his name.