Young Jane Young

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Oh God, Rach, that’s nothing. She’s young. It’s the special privilege of youth to make mistakes.”

  I lowered my eyes. “It wasn’t just the affair. It was who it was with.”

  “Who was it, Rachel?” she said. “You don’t have to say.”

  I whispered the name in her ear.

  “Good for Aviva!”

  “Roz!” I said. “You’re wicked. He’s married, and he’s our age, and he was her boss!”

  “Well, he’s not hard to look at,” Roz said. “And we did used to joke about him being our ‘spring fling.’ Do you remember?”

  As if I could have forgotten.

  “Do you think Aviva could have heard us?” Roz said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “That wife of his.” Roz was pleasantly soused. “I change my mind, good for him. Aviva’s a catch. They would have had be-yoo-tee-full babies, those two.”

  “Well, it’s over now,” I said. “No babies, thank God.”

  TEN

  I want to begin by saying, the accident was neither Aviva’s nor the congressman’s fault.

  An eightysomething woman, driving with a suspended license and in the beginning stages of dementia, wasn’t looking when she took a left turn, and she slammed into the side of the congressman’s Lexus sedan. The old woman was killed, which meant there was an investigation. The investigation found that the old woman was at fault, and also that my daughter, who was in the passenger seat at the time, was having an affair with the congressman. This was the beginning of South Florida’s Aviva Grossman obsession. Avivagate.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Before Avivagate, before the story had a name, there was a period of time when we waited for the story. We waited to see if the story would even become a story, or more precisely, if Aviva would be a character in the story. For a brief but shining moment, she was the “unknown female intern” who was traveling in the car with the congressman. We didn’t know if her name would be released, and I believe the congressman tried to keep Aviva out of it. He may be an immoral man, but he is not a cruel one. Unfortunately, interest in the story grew beyond the congressman’s power to protect my daughter. The public would not be sated until it knew who had been in the car with the congressman that night.

  Aviva couldn’t bear to tell her father. She waited until the day before the police’s release of her name and the congressman’s press conference addressing that release. I offered to tell Mike for Aviva, but to her credit, she said she wanted to tell him herself.

  We took Mike to the sleepy restaurant at what used to be the Bridge Hotel but is now a Hilton. Roz and I like to joke that everything in the world eventually becomes a Hilton. The restaurant was a favorite of our family’s, mainly for the view of the Intercoastal and the boats passing by, but the food was nothing special. Pool food. Club sandwiches. Steak fries.

  Aviva ordered a Cobb salad, which she did not touch. And then, to prolong the meal, she ordered a coffee, which she did not drink. We talked about things: my job, Aviva’s classes, Mike’s job. We did not talk about Congressman Levin, though the story—sans Aviva’s name—was already in the air. That kind of gossip didn’t interest Mike, though. So we talked about nothing, and time flew. I knew Mike was planning to go back to the office. I considered prompting Aviva, but I decided against it. It was not my secret to tell.

  As Mike was going over the bill, he told a story about a woman whose heart he’d operated on a few years back. “Sixty-one years old. Quadruple bypass,” he said. “No complications, but the recovery was long. Anyway, about a year after the surgery, she was playing with her granddaughter, and out of the clear blue sky, she made a perfect replica of the family’s dachshund out of Play-Doh.”

  “Play-Doh!” Aviva said too enthusiastically.

  “Yes! Can you imagine? And the granddaughter says, ‘Make another, Dodie.’ So Dodie does one of the granddaughter and the house and Dodie’s childhood home in Yonkers, which she hasn’t seen for years, and by this point, the whole family is gathered around to witness this miracle. And Dodie’s son says, ‘Maybe we should get you to a sculpture studio, Mom.’ Before the heart attack, she’d never been in the least artistic. She had no sense of perspective, could barely draw stick figures. And now she’s making these photorealistic three-dimensional busts out of marble, clay, whatever medium she can get her hands on. She did the whole family, all of her friends, a few celebrities. She’s so good, the story gets picked up by the local news. They’re calling her the Grandma Moses of sculpture. And now Dodie’s taking commissions, and she’s getting paid thousands of dollars to do sculptures for towns, for public spaces, for celebrations.”

  “You should get a percentage,” I said. “She owes it all to you.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but she is making a bust of me right now,” Mike said. “Gratis.”

  “You can put it in the lobby of your office,” I said. “The Head of a Great Man.”

  “What do you think caused it?” Aviva asked.

  “You unblock the heart, and the increased blood flow will improve brain function. And maybe the improved brain function creates new neural pathways, resulting in the discovery of heretofore undiscovered talents. Who knows?” Mike said.

  “The heart is mysterious,” I said.

  “That’s garbage, Rachel,” Mike said. “The heart is fully explicable. The brain is mysterious, I’ll give you that.”

  “The heart is explicable to you,” I said. “The rest of us are in the dark.”

  Mike signed the receipt.

  “Daddy,” Aviva said.

  “Yes?” Mike looked up.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” Mike said.

  “I’m so sorry.” Aviva began to cry.

  “Aviva, what is it?” Mike sat back down at the table. “What can it be?”

  “I screwed up,” she said.

  “Whatever it is, we’ll fix it,” he said.

  “This can’t be fixed,” she said.

  “Everything can be fixed,” he said.

  AVIVA DROVE BACK to Miami, and Mike, who had canceled the rest of his day, and I drove back to our house to argue pointlessly.

  “I suppose you knew about this,” he said.

  I sighed. “I had suspicions,” I said. “I did suspect.”

  “If you suspected,” Mike said, “why in God’s name didn’t you do something?”

  “I tried,” I said.

  “You didn’t try hard enough!”

  “She’s a grown woman, Mike. I can’t lock her in her room.”

  “I thought the one thing I could say for you was that you were a good mother,” Mike said.

  He had always been lousy in an argument, and this is one of the many reasons I do not miss being married to him.

  “How could you let her do something so immoral?” Mike said.

  “It’s not as if you set a great example,” I said quietly.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said, there’s no point in us trading insults. We have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “What can we do?” Mike said. “Other than get her a lawyer and wait for this to pass?”

  “We have to support our daughter,” I said.

  “Obviously,” Mike said. He put his head in his hands. “How could she do this to us?”

  “I don’t think she was thinking of us,” I said.

  “Would you have done something like this at that age?”

  “No,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have done something like what the congressman did at his age either. I wouldn’t have slept with an employee, young enough to be my daughter. Would you?”

  He didn’t reply. He was flipping through his address book. “I’ve operated on about a million lawyers. There’s got to be a good one in here somewhere.”

  AVIVA AND THE congressman both claimed that the affair had been over for some time. I know what she to
ld me, but I cannot say if this is true or not. It may have been, as he said, that he had been giving the intern a ride home. (I will tell you that they were not going in the direction of her apartment in Coconut Grove or our house in Forestgreen at the time of the crash.) It was certainly bad timing that she was in the car when that old woman turned left.

  Occasionally, a news story captures the imagination of a region, and so it was with the congressman and my daughter. I could tell you the details of how the story played out, but even if you didn’t live in South Florida, there is nothing you haven’t heard or can’t imagine. It played out exactly as these stories always play out.

  The congressman and Embeth went on a news show. They claimed that the affair had occurred during a time of trouble in their marriage. The time of trouble had passed, they said. They held hands. He had manly tears in his eyes, but he did not cry. She said she had forgiven him. She said that they had a real marriage, not a storybook one. Something like that. I remember she wore an ill-fitting purple tweed jacket. What must she have been thinking?

  Because it was an election year, the congressman’s staff took great pains to distance itself from Aviva. They characterized her as the Lolita intern, a Lewinsky wannabe, and a variety of other synonyms for “slutty.”

  It did not help Aviva’s cause that she had kept a blog, detailing her months working for the congressman. The year was 2000, and I did not even know what a blog was when I found out that Aviva had been keeping one. “Blog?” I said to Aviva. The word felt foreign on my tongue. “What’s that?”

  “It’s short for weblog, Mom,” Aviva said.

  “Weblog,” I repeated. “What’s a weblog?”

  “It’s like a diary,” Aviva said. “It’s a diary that you keep on the Internet.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” I asked. “Why would you do that?”

  “It was anonymous. I never used names. Until everything happened, I had about three readers. I was trying to make sense of my experiences by writing about them,” she said.

  “Then buy a diary, Aviva!”

  “I like typing,” she said. “And I hate my handwriting.”

  “Then make a folder on your laptop and save a Word file called Avivasdiary.doc in it.”

  “I know, Mom. I know.”

  Aviva’s blog was called “Just Another Congressional Intern’s Blog.” As she said, she didn’t use his name or her own, but people still figured out it was her. Decoding Aviva’s blog became an unofficial South Florida pastime for a while. She tried to have it taken down, but it wouldn’t be taken down. This blog was like a zombie. It would not be killed. She’d have it removed and it would show up somewhere else. You can probably still find it somewhere on the Internet if you look hard enough. I will tell you that I read it—most of it; some of it with one eye closed—but it was really quite boring except for the sexy parts. And the sexy parts gave me no pleasure. I felt the same way when Roz’s and my book club read the Story of O.

  Aviva was forced to take a leave from U of Miami because the press were disturbing the other students in her classes.

  She moved back home, and she waited out the storm as best she could.

  One other thing I could say about this period is God bless the Forestgreen gates. The press could not wait on our lawn but instead had to wait outside those gates for us to leave. Roz brought us food. Her offerings included matzo ball soup, sweet and savory kugels, tongue sandwiches on rye, loaves of challah, bagels, lox, herring, and hamantaschen, as if we had a sick friend or a death in the family.

  A quick story about hamantaschen, while I’m thinking about it. A week before the end of the school year, Rabbi Barney summoned me to his office. He held out a fig hamantaschen. “Rachel, have a hamantaschen,” he said.

  “No thank you,” I said. In general, I do not care for hamantaschen as I find them low on fruit filling and often dry in the cookie part.

  “Please, Rachel, take the hamantaschen. My mother bakes them twice a year. It’s a big production for her. She has a special recipe. Also, she has lung cancer. This might be the final batch of Harriet Greenbaum’s famous hamantaschen.”

  I thanked him for the generous offer, but I told him it would be wasted on me. I told him my feelings about hamantaschen. But he kept insisting so I took it, and I bit into it, and honestly, it was delicious. High fruit to cookie ratio, and not dry in the least. She must have used a stick of butter. It was so delicious and sweet, I almost wanted to moan.

  “Rachel,” he said, “we’d like you to resign.”

  I was in the middle of chewing the hamantaschen. I needed a beverage but none had been offered. It took me almost twenty seconds to swallow the hamantaschen. “Why?” I asked. Of course I knew why, but by God, he was going to say it.

  “The scandal with Aviva. It’s no good for us.”

  “But, Rabbi,” I said, “I am not the one in a scandal. It’s my daughter, and she is an adult, a human being separate from myself. I cannot control what she does.”

  “I’m sorry, Rachel. I agree with you. It’s not Aviva’s affair, it’s the fund-raiser that’s the problem. The board felt that you compromised yourself by advocating for the fund-raiser with the congressman last year. It has the appearance of impropriety.”

  “I didn’t know about the affair!” I said. “And I had nothing to do with the fund-raiser. You must remember. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  “I do remember and I believe you, Rachel. I believe you. It’s how it looks.”

  “I’ve given twelve years of my life to this school,” I said.

  “I know,” said the rabbi. “It’s a rotten business. We want to make it as copacetic an exit as possible. You could say you’re resigning to spend more time with family. Everyone would understand that, the year you’ve had.”

  “I won’t say that!” I said. “I will not lie!” I had half a hamantaschen left, and I was considering throwing it at the rabbi. Last year, that Fischer idiot threw a black-and-white cookie at me, and I started to wonder if every principal exited this school with a ceremonial baked good fling.

  “Is something funny?” the rabbi asked.

  “Everything’s funny,” I said.

  “Well, sleep on it.”

  “I don’t need to sleep on it.”

  “Sleep on it, Rachel. No one wants to fire you. No one wants another scandal. If you resign, you can still find work somewhere else.”

  I SLEPT ON it. I resigned.

  AFTER I PACKED up my desk, I drove across town to a dumpy pink apartment building on Camino Real. I rang the bell for M. Choi. The woman’s voice asked who it was, and I said it was a delivery, and the woman said she wasn’t expecting a delivery, and I said it’s flowers, and the woman said who are the flowers from? And I said they’re from Dr. Grossman. The woman buzzed me in.

  I climbed the stairs, and M. Choi had the door open. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform, not a sexy costume one—blue scrubs with a neon geometric pattern.

  My husband’s mistress said, “Hello, Rachel. I guess Mike didn’t send me flowers.”

  I said, “Mike’s not a flower guy.”

  “No,” she said.

  I said, “I got fired today.”

  She said, “I’m sorry.”

  I said, “It’s been a rotten year.”

  She said, “I’m sorry for everything. For Aviva. And for everything.”

  “I don’t want an apology,” I said. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m making one for myself. The water’s already on. It won’t be a moment. Have a seat,” she said. She went into the kitchen, and I poked around her living room. She had pictures of her family, pictures of a cat and then a different cat. She had one picture of Mike, but it was a group photo with her and the other people who worked in Mike’s practice. Mike wasn’t even standing next to her. I was still looking at the photo when she returned with
the tea. I set the frame back on the mantel, though I know she saw me looking at it.

  “Do you take sugar?” she asked. “Milk?”

  “No,” I said. “Plain.”

  “I like a touch of sweetness,” she said.

  “I like my sugar in dessert,” I said, “but I try to avoid it everywhere else.”

  “You’re so trim,” she said.

  “I work for it,” I said. “Inside me, there is an angry fat woman.”

  “How do you fit her in there?” the mistress asked me.

  “You’re funny,” I said. “I hadn’t expected you to be funny.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because I’m funny,” I said. “If he wanted funny, he could have stayed home.”

  “I don’t think I was always funny,” she said. “I was too in awe of him to be funny.”

  “In awe of Mike? That is funny,” I said.

  “When it started, I was only twenty-five, and he seemed so powerful and accomplished. I was amazed that he could take an interest in me.”

  “How old are you now?” I said.

  “Forty in March,” she said. “Take out the bag. The tea gets bitter if it oversteeps.”

  I did as I was told. “Fifteen years,” I said.

  “A tea bag left to steep for fifteen years will definitely make bitter tea,” she said.

  “I meant, that’s how long you’ve been with Mike.”

  “I knew what you meant. I feel terrible half the time and the other half of the time, I wonder where my life has gone,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But you’re still young.”

  “I am,” she said. “Relatively. Or at least I’m in the middle.” She took a long look at me. “You are, too.”

  “Don’t be condescending,” I said.

  “I’m not meaning to be. My point is, it may not seem like it but Aviva is lucky this came out now and not fifteen years from now. She still has choices.”

  I sneezed.

  “Bless you,” she said. “Are you getting a cold?”

  “I’m never sick,” I said. “Never.”

  I sneezed again.

  “But I’m so tired,” I said.

  She said she had some chicken matzo ball soup in the fridge. “I made it myself,” she said. “Lie down on my couch.”