by Mandy Berman
The money from the language jar went to charity—a tradition so privileged, Fiona realized now, she would be embarrassed to tell anyone about it. Her family was not charity-minded in any other ways. It was just that they didn’t need that money.
“Well, how are your classes?” Amy asked.
“They’re fine,” Fiona said. Two boys with backpacks slung over their shoulders walked past her, en route to the library. One glanced in her direction. She caught his eye, and he started for a moment, recognizing her. He offered a slight wave, and turned away, continuing toward the library. Muttered to his friend, who chuckled. She had hooked up with him last Thursday night, when they went out after the reading. They went to a lacrosse party, and at the time he’d looked cute, in a sort of stocky, preppy way. And the fact that he was hosting the party allowed for an added sense of attraction, like being in charge of it gave him power, however small. The details were a bit hazy, but she remembered him making her drinks in the kitchen from his own liquor, instead of dipping her Solo cup into the vat of red jungle juice that everyone else was drinking, and this had felt valiant and romantic. She had given him a blow job, and it was messy, because he didn’t warn her when he was finishing. He didn’t reciprocate. She didn’t sleep there.
Now, in the middle of the day, she would have described him as husky, not stocky. His face was wide but his mouth small and puckered, and his chin was round and pink and jutted out a bit from his face.
“Just fine?” her mother said.
“Sorry,” Fiona said. “Um. The French lit class is hard. I need all of Liv’s help that I can get. I’m completely worthless.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“No, it is.” She kept talking. “The feminist lit seminar with Roiphe is great. Modernist lit is fun. Easy. Poetry is fine. It’s required.”
“You have a really heavy reading semester,” Amy said.
“It’s not so bad.”
“Roiphe is your advisor, right?”
“Yeah. We’re supposed to do this term paper at the end of the semester about an American woman whose narrative was destroyed by the patriarchy. I think I’m going to write about Monica Lewinsky.”
“Really? That’s an interesting choice.”
“What do you mean, interesting?”
“I mean, interesting. That’s all.”
“It sounded loaded.”
“Don’t do that, Fiona. Don’t edit me.”
“I’m not. I just don’t know what you meant by that.”
“I just mean that she’s certainly controversial.”
“Well, that’s the point.”
“I’m not going to take the bait on this, Fiona.”
“Huh? There’s no bait.”
Amy took a deep breath on the other end, preparing to change the subject and, consequently, be the bigger person. In always giving Fiona the last word, Amy was actually the winner. She ended up coming off as the more emotionally healthy one, the one who could let arguments go, while Fiona floundered, holding on to disagreements that would be insignificant to any reasonable person.
Fiona reported on Marley, who’d scored high on the MCAT and was now working on her med school applications, and Lula, planning to apply for museum jobs in New York.
“And Liv?”
Fiona examined the unpolished nails on one hand, holding them out in front of her.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I mean. I don’t know how to explain. She hasn’t exactly been around.”
“That new boyfriend of hers?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s he like?”
Fiona lowered her voice.
“Preppy. Rich. Republican, pre-law.”
“Sounds perfect for her.”
“I think that’s what she thinks she wants, but it’s not actually what she wants.”
“It’s hard to know what you want in a partner when you’re twenty-one years old.”
One year ago, Fiona would have said, “You did,” because Amy and Fiona’s father had married in their early twenties, but that was no longer relevant.
“Speaking of which,” Amy said, clearing her throat. “One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is actually to let you know something sort of, well. Sort of exciting. Exciting to me, anyway.”
“What?” Fiona said. “You met Richard Gere at ShopRite and he asked you to run away with him?”
“Close,” Amy said.
“You met Richard Gere at Target?”
“I met someone, Fiona.”
“What?”
“I met someone,” she said again. “A man. His name is Ed. He’s a biochemist. He’s very smart and very kind. He lives over in New Rochelle.” Again, that unnatural affectation. Like she’d practiced this. Perhaps with the therapist she saw twice a week.
“What? Ed?”
“Yes. That’s his name, Fiona.”
She let out a snort. “Liam is going to have a field day with this.”
“Liam knows, actually.”
“What?”
“He met us for dinner in the city, in fact.”
“What?”
“They got along famously.”
“What? Famously?”
“Could you please stop saying ‘What’?”
“Sorry,” Fiona said. She tried to put herself in her mother’s shoes, but found herself unable to cross the line into empathy. “I’m at a loss. I’m twenty-one years old and my mother has a boyfriend and I don’t.”
“That’s right,” Amy said, lowering her voice to a stern whisper, as if someone nearby was listening. “Your dad moved on a long time ago and I had to, too.”
Did her dad have a girlfriend, too? Was he with the woman he’d cheated on her mom with? Fiona didn’t ask, didn’t want to know. She didn’t really want to know any of this. She found it nearly impossible to imagine her parents as sentient people apart from each other, with desires and sex drives. It was only when the divorce was finalized a year ago, and she learned about her dad’s cheating, that the reality of that had sunk in. For so long she thought her parents’ separation was temporary, a by-product of grief, not also a result of infidelity. She’d never thought the separation would last forever. She knew this had been an immature response; it was the way children, not college students, thought of their parents being separated.
“My dad can go fuck himself, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, yeah.” Amy didn’t call out Fiona for swearing this time.
This was the one thing that Amy, Fiona, and Liam could all agree on now. It was almost nice, at that point in time, to have someone to blame. To have someone to be angry with. It became extremely easy to believe that most of this was his fault, that his cheating could have somehow, impossibly, caused Helen’s death, and for that, Fiona—and her mother and brother, she was sure—had been grateful.
“I’m happy, Fiona.”
If Fiona died, would Liam, a short two years later, have to endure this kind of conversation, hearing his mother say she was not “starting to feel like herself again” or “getting a little better every day,” but downright “happy”? It was one thing to experience happiness now and again, but the gall it took to admit it.
“I don’t know what to say.” A group of skinny freshman girls walked by, laughing and oblivious. Fiona suddenly felt uncomfortable sitting outside, in public. This conversation felt particularly private. “It’s a strange thing for you to spring on me.”
“Well, if you ever answered your phone or called me back, I could have told you sooner.”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
“Three months now.”
“Three months? And you’re just telling me now?”
“Like I said. If
you answered your phone—”
“I was in New York three months ago! That was the summer! And you kept it from me all that time?”
“I didn’t want to tell either of you until I knew it was serious.”
“But now it is.”
“Could you find it in your heart to maybe, somehow, not be totally miserable about this?”
Fiona understood that her experience of loss could never compare to her mother’s. She had not lost a child. And yet, how was it possible that Fiona felt so desperately alone in her own grief? She did not want to try to be happy. She felt entirely incapable of it. And the fact that her mother was moving on, and Liam was moving on with her, and Fiona was left behind—well, this made her feel not only lonely but incompetent, less than. How were they so healthy in their mourning? How did one even begin to try?
“Please,” Fiona said. “I’ve always been miserable.”
She knew that was an exaggeration. But the line worked in the moment, and was powerful enough to stun her mother, followed by Fiona ceremonially clicking the red hang-up button before Amy could respond. She knew it was childish, but she forever wanted to get the last word.
* * *
—
Seething, she stormed across the quad, past the library, crossing Phillips Avenue. Her car was parked a block before her house, and without much thought, she climbed into it. She threw her bag on the passenger seat and, with both hands on the steering wheel, let out a noise she could only make alone, deep and anguished.
When she thought of where she might be able to go that wasn’t home, she couldn’t come up with anything. This town was a wasteland, managing at the same time to feel both insular and unimportant.
So she drove forward, every now and then wiping her furious tears away with the back of her hand so she could see the road in front of her. It was six P.M.; the sun was just setting, and she lowered her sun visor to shield her eyes from the orange glare. She drove past the old cork factory and the new boutique hotel and made her way through downtown. She sat at a traffic light watching Amish women stream in and out of the large brick building where the market was held. She drove down the hill, past the nice restaurants and the Irish pubs, past the two-screen movie theater, past the loft where she had spent the night with Gabriel Benoit, and hit the traffic light that separated the “good” part of downtown from the “bad” part. On the other side of the light, the restaurants grew sparse and the houses grew shorter, pushed up next to each other like the houses on her block, only more ramshackle, paint chipping from the exteriors, flat fronts and plastic-shingled awnings, pickup trucks with their hoods open in the driveways, no one tending to them. After passing an empty lot, an abandoned church, and an overgrown field with a “Property for Sale” sign staked into it, she spotted a bar. It was called Rudy’s—she’d never heard of it. It was a shack with a neon sign out front. It was exactly as anonymous as she needed it to be.
She parked in the lot out back, checked her reflection, wiped away the mascara that had ringed around her eyes. She made her way to the front of the building. When she opened the door, the half-dozen men inside turned and looked at her as if they’d never seen a young woman before. Two burly middle-aged men sat at a table on the other side of the room, dirty from a day of construction work, still in their boots. There was a pool table in the back of the room, and two younger men in flannel shirts were playing each other. The pregame show for a baseball playoff game played on the old TV mounted in a far corner, and the old man sitting at the bar alone seemed to be watching it without paying attention.
Fiona sat on an empty stool at the end closest to the TV and rested her elbows on the surface of the bar. It was sticky.
The bartender wore a plaid shirt, his dirty white undershirt peeking up at the neck. The shirt, untucked, only barely covered his gut, which looked as firm and round as a basketball. He had broken capillaries on his nose and several days’ worth of gray scruff.
He pushed a coaster over to Fiona. “You waitin’ for someone.”
“No,” she said, noticing her smeary reflection in the dirty mirrored wall behind the bottles of liquor. “Double well whiskey.” She pushed a ten across the table.
“You twenty-one.”
“Yeah.”
He grunted, poured.
The old man at the other end of the bar seemed to be talking to himself. “Nothing wrong with that,” he kept saying, shaking his head and peeling the label off his bottle of beer. “Nothing wrong with that.”
Wordlessly, the bartender replaced the man’s bottle.
“Thanks, Danny,” the man said, and he immediately began to peel the label off that bottle, too.
The knocking of the cue against the billiard balls on the pool table, and the balls against each other, was comforting. It sounded like the rituals of youth, or something like that.
Her drink was going fast. She hadn’t always been like this. Once she had been a lightweight, had hated the feeling of being too drunk. Her friends used to make fun of her for it; her friend Rachel, from camp, who drank early and efficiently and capably, used to say, “Fee, the goal is to drink the beer before it gets warm.” They emailed every now and then. Rachel was thriving now, on track to graduate magna cum laude from Michigan, in a serious relationship with a fellow psych major. Was taking the LSATs and planning to apply to law school. An example of how you can turn your life around, Amy would say, because after Rachel was sexually assaulted and her dad died, all during the course of that one unforgettable summer, she did, indeed, turn her life around. Sometimes it felt like Amy wouldn’t have minded having Rachel for her daughter instead of Fiona.
She signaled the bartender, pushed her glass toward him, and put a finger up. He nodded, refilled.
The door opened again and from inside the bar Fiona now found herself squinting at the person walking through it. The sky outside had darkened; the tall, broad figure, whom she was sure she wouldn’t recognize, stepped into the blue neon of the bar. In fact, she did recognize him.
He sat down, two stools away from Fiona.
“Hey, Danny,” Oliver Ash said, his strange accent out of place in the blue-collar American bar.
Danny nodded, and poured Oliver Ash three fingers of Stoli into a glass filled with ice.
“Thanks.”
Oliver Ash squinted up at the TV, and in turning his head in that direction, noticed Fiona.
“Hey,” he said to her, a friendly affectation to his voice. “Have we met?”
“We have.”
“You go to the college?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded, still trying to place her.
“We met at the department party last month,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “You were there with that girl. Liv?”
“Yeah.”
Of course he remembered Liv’s name and not hers. She had that effect on people. In fact, Fiona always seemed to surround herself with girls like that—girls who were prettier than she was, whom men liked more, as if she could somehow catch their allure. When she thought of it, all of her roommates and Rachel, too, were this way; they seemed to charm their romantic interests with little effort. Fiona, on the other hand, felt as if she had to bend over backward to make someone desire her.
Professor Ash looked at the empty stool between them. He gestured to it, and cocked his head to the side.
She nodded, and he moved over. Put his hand out. “I’m Oliver,” he said. He was dressed down from how she’d seen him previously, in a chambray shirt with sleeves rolled up, tucked into dark jeans held up by a braided leather belt. No males her age tucked in their shirts.
She took his hand and shook it, even though they’d done this before. “Fiona.”
“Right,” he said.
He looked up at the TV behind her. He had such a peculiar sense of weariness
to his face, as if he’d seen the future and it wasn’t pretty.
“Playoffs,” he said. “You like baseball?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Why do you come here to watch it, then?”
“Americana, I guess.”
“You’re from Berlin, right?” she asked him.
“I live there,” he said. “But I’m from Philly originally.”
“So what’s with the accent?”
“I’ve lived in Europe for over ten years. I’m one of those people that picks up accents through osmosis.”
“I haven’t been to Europe since I was a kid,” she said.
“Your parents took you to Europe when you were a kid?”
“My mom took me to Paris when I was fourteen.”
“La-di-da.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
“No, it’s great,” he said. “That you had that opportunity. Why haven’t you gone back?”
She was always going to go to France for her semester abroad, fall of junior year. She had always planned on that. But taking the semester off after Helen died put her a semester behind, meaning she wouldn’t be able go abroad at the same time as her friends, meaning she wouldn’t see them for an entire academic year. So she skipped it, and stayed at Buchanan with Marley during the fall of junior year, waiting for Liv and Lula to regale them with their European adventures when they returned.
“Reasons,” she said.
He nodded, not pressing any further, and drained his Stoli, signaling to Danny for another.
“So you must live with the other girl. The girl that…at the reading…”
“Marley. How did you know?”
“Oh, Liv mentioned it in her email to me.”
“Oh?”
“Oh,” he said, taking the refreshed vodka from Danny. “I’m already getting myself in trouble.”
So Liv was working on him. The fact that Fiona was now privy to this information, without Liv knowing it, gave her a perverse sense of satisfaction.