by Meg Wolitzer
“Well, they’re coming to dinner tomorrow,” Dory said. “Be sure you’re home on time.”
“Dinner? Tomorrow?” Willa said in a voice of sudden emergency. “With this family we don’t know? With this boy? Are you serious?”
3.
The night the Hellers came to dinner, Dory Lang wasn’t thinking about sex, nor was she aware of its fairly imminent and startling end. It was still fall then, and most days held on to their summer warmth. The new school year had hardly begun, and everything appeared possible, even probable. The economy was in the process of being intermittently slapped back to life. The two wars continued, and though almost everyone in Stellar Plains had initially been against them, and still made disgusted noises about them, over time the wars had become indistinct and blurred. Dory was in family mode at dinner, hovering over the deep wooden salad bowl at the dining room table, mixing the greens with a giant spoon and fork.
“Willa made the vinaigrette,” she said to the room, pointlessly, and her daughter looked at her with cold horror. It was as if Dory had said, “Now, Eli, here’s an interesting fact: Willa got her first period the day she turned thirteen.” Her remark was apparently inappropriate; she was inappropriate.
Robby had had Eli in his second-period English class earlier that day, and even after a brief meeting with the students, he’d said that Eli had made an impression on him. He seemed very smart, Robby had told Dory. Eli was nearly grown-looking, but not entirely, his dark, clean hair worn down to his shoulders. Almost no boys had long hair anymore, Dory realized as she looked at Eli across the table, but whenever you saw one who did, you were immediately at least a little interested, because it brought up your own adolescence, when many boys had hair as long as girls’.
At the dining room table, Eli was awkward and appealing in a stretched-out maroon sweater, pulling his sleeves into the palms of his hands. He had a bright face, with a scattered interruption of mild acne and facial hair along his jaw. His whole head seemed to assert itself into the dining room like the head of a moose mounted on a piece of wood. As they ate together, Dory could feel how humiliated Willa was by the presence of parents. By the fact that these parents ate; that they had teeth and gums; that they existed. It was hard, Dory knew, when your parents were teachers at the school you attended, for of course there they were every day, lurking in hallways and at the panini-maker in the cafeteria, and sometimes actually even interacting with your friends, making boring and chummy remarks like “Well, hello there, Marissa. And hello to you too, Lucy. Are you girls enjoying your classes this year?” and generally being far too visible, and far too watchful.
But Dory hadn’t seen the full burden of this for Willa until the evening the Hellers came to dinner. Willa was unresponsive and nearly catatonic during the meal, and Eli wasn’t much more receptive toward her. The two of them were almost rude in their disregard of each other. Eli, while ignoring Willa, paid attention to Robby, asking him about the syllabus for his class.
“I’ve never had a student who wanted to chat about the syllabus,” Robby said. “I’m going to guess you’re a big reader.” Eli said yes, he pretty much was, and he named a few writers he liked, all of whom Robby liked too. Delighted now, Robby said to Fran, “Bottle this kid. He’s rare.”
This was true; reading as a passion was fading away, and everyone knew it. Sometimes, when Dory took the train into the city for the day, she would see novels for sale on street corners, as if their owners were surrendering them in an act of radical housecleaning for the new century. The changes in reading were all bound up not only with technology, but love and sex too, though it was hard to tease it all apart.
You weren’t supposed to think life was worse now; it was “different,” everyone said. But Dory privately thought that mostly it was worse. The intimacy of reading had been traded in for the rapid absorption of information. And the intimacy of love, well, that had often been traded in for something far more public and open. What had happened to sexual shyness? she wondered, picturing herself in her parents’ house in Brooklyn, knowing nothing, having never seen a naked man, and being shocked nearly to the point of aneurysm when a boy put her hand on his lap at a party. Sexual shyness and lack of information—they were gone. But was that so terrible? The world was different, not worse, her colleagues said to one another. Different, not worse. They told themselves this like a silent mantra as they walked down the hallways of the school, or navigated the wild and lush, brightly lit planet.
After dinner with the Hellers, Dory said that they’d have coffee in the living room, and that maybe Eli and Willa wanted to be free of them—which didn’t mean that the kids wanted to be with each other, but they weren’t given a choice. Eli trudged off upstairs along with an embarrassed Willa; soon came the frank thump of her favorite band, The Lungs, and then a crunching, heavy step as Eli probably walked around her calamine-pink carpet in his heavy work boots, examining the snow globes and friendship bracelets and seed packets and plastic containers of zero-calorie sweets that dotted the surfaces of her room.
He wouldn’t be interested in talking to her, Dory thought; she was too recessive and conventional. And she would find him strange. “He’s an odd one, Mom,” Dory imagined her saying later. “All my friends would think so.” Eli and Willa were likely sitting on the bed and the chair listening to The Lungs in oppressive silence.
“You have a great kid, and what’s particularly great, as Robby said, is that he’s a boy who reads,” Dory said to Fran as she poured coffee. Robby brought in the flat-looking apple cake he’d hastily made after school. He had two standard dishes, and this was one of them; the other was a cheese bake, which always crusted and flowed over the lip of a square pan that they would take turns partially cleaning, then invariably leave to soak in the sink for days.
Dory sliced into the apple cake, which barely gave under the blade. “Yes, Eli definitely reads,” Fran said, “but still he’s always on that thing all the time, too. Robby, I can’t believe you baked this. Or I guess I can believe it; my husband, Lowell, is the cook in our family. During the school year, poor Eli has to eat whatever I decide to put together. Last year I fell in love with extra-firm tofu; that became the theme of our meals. Choosing tofu is like choosing a mattress.”
“What thing?” Dory asked. “What thing is Eli on?”
“Farrest,” she said.
“Oh, Farrest. Yes.” The three of them sat in silent contemplation of that green and—to their thinking—uninteresting virtual world. “I’m not against it,” Dory said after a moment, “but I just don’t understand why they love it so much. If they wanted a forest, a real forest spelled the normal way, we’d be happy to drive them to one. The nature preserve is only twenty minutes away, and they could bring a picnic lunch or something, and spend the entire day.” She knew she sounded asinine even as she said this, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I’m just not sure why they need it,” Dory added. “I’m not a Luddite; I practically live on the Internet too. I love a lot of that stuff; it astonishes me to see what’s out there. And I hear that little ping whenever an e-mail’s just come in, and my heart speeds up. I actually get all excited, you know? What is that?”
“Endorphins,” said Robby.
“But what do we think the e-mail’s going to be?” Dory asked. This was a conversation they had had before, and it usually went the same way. “We act like it’s going to change our lives,” she said, “but it’s rarely very interesting.” In Dory’s inbox at that very moment—she’d checked right before the Hellers arrived—was a message from a friend, signed “xoxox,” like many e-mails between women. Even the most casual female acquaintances tossed around x’s and o’s in a promiscuous display of intimacy. “And half the time,” said Dory, “if it isn’t just a generic note, it’s something to help you improve your penis size.”
“Except they spell it ‘penus,’ ” said Fran. “To slip through the spam filter.”
“Yes, my penus size,” Dory said, and they all la
ughed a little. “I sit there staring at my laptop every single day,” she said. “Totally enmeshed. It’s my constant companion, and I can’t get enough of it.”
“Well, it’s the end of civilization, I guess,” said Fran Heller. “And we all need to band together.”
They quickly agreed that yes, they would certainly band together, but then they all added that of course they knew that civilization wasn’t really ending; that in fact it was only beginning, it was in many ways thrilling, it was all cracking open, and in their lifetimes, which was so terrific. How wonderful to be there for the show. The problem, though, was that they themselves were getting outdated. They just couldn’t remain as fluid as they needed to be in order to thrive and embrace the hulking, steaming heap of technology before them. Dory’s laptop never seemed up-to-date; it was always too slow. Always, the little colored wheel spun and spun, and she actually felt herself tighten with tension in the thighs and crotch when this happened, as if she was doing those horrible Kegel exercises women were supposed to do after giving birth. She hated to wait excessively for a burst of information, but she often had to wait and wait.
Over recent years, the world had run roughshod over them, but it hadn’t entirely left them behind. They were excited when new, seductive electronic inventions appeared; they updated their own computers and bought their own gadgets, which they carried everywhere, enjoying the reassuring feel of an object in a pocket, and the texture of its skin-tight protective case that made it seem like it was in a condom, pulsing and fully loaded and waiting. But some websites felt to them like the biggest waste of time in the world. “What about whatdotheylooklikenow.com?” Robby had recently said. The site where people posted photos of child stars from shitty old shows who were now bald and chinned and unemployable. The whole point was to see the ravages of time, even as you imagined time wasn’t passing while you sat there wasting it yourself. And what about sexting? Fran wanted to know now. Did every new electronic activity need a clever name? Did a new word or phrase need to be coined for every single transitory preoccupation ? Yes, was the answer; yes it did.
Not only that, but the Internet could be dangerous, deadly; about this, the three parents were all in agreement. “As you know,” Dory sometimes said to Willa, “some of the social-networking sites you love are basically the equivalent of a public square, and so you’re totally vulnerable to anyone who comes along.” All parents made grand, threatening statements to their kids; they all used the term “public square.”
The Langs and Fran Heller told one another what their kids’ avatars were on Farrest: Willa was a ninja, and Eli was a centaur. Then they laughed at the absurdity of this, the grandiosity and yet the sweetness, and they each tried to figure out what their own avatars would possibly be, if they were forced to choose.
“Dory,” said Robby, “would be a bird. Some big bird.”
“Not flightless, I hope,” Dory said. “I hope you don’t think I’m that sedentary,” she added in a jokey voice.
“No, no, you’d fly,” he said. “But low to the ground.” He wasn’t trying to insult her; he just meant that she wasn’t a risk-taker, that she was interested in life, but that she was also cautious and gentle. This was all true.
“And you,” Dory said, “would never leave the ground. You’d be a dog. A long, sweet, loping dog.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” her husband said. They were in agreement about each other.
Fran Heller said that she would be a spider on Farrest. “The kind that bites,” she said with a rapid laugh. “I know I tend to be a confrontational and impatient person. Eli and Lowell always tell me I’ve got to learn to ease up a little. ‘Chill, Mom,’ Eli says. But I just can’t stand it when other people do things that seem to me shortsighted or self-destructive. I think I’d be a spider, because my instinct is to want to creep in and sort of scuttle around, figuring everything out and making it go the way I want it to.”
Of course Fran had stood up to the other confrontational teacher, Abby Means, she of the swirling fifties skirts and Diet Splurges. Fran seemed to be one of those people who were born without the gene for fear, and who would say anything to anyone. Perhaps she had other kinds of brazenness too, Dory thought—sexual brazenness in particular. Unbidden, an image came to her of Fran with her generic husband Lowell, clicking handcuffs onto his hairy wrists and attaching them to the posts of a Southwesternlooking bed. Dory wondered again what Fran would pick for the play. Probably it would be something dark and provocative that no one could understand. The whole audience would sit in the auditorium feeling cheated, for all they had wanted was to laugh, to loosen up a little during the brief slice of time in which they had been forcibly released from their laptops and their cell phones, and now instead they had to listen to this.
Dory realized that she felt tired all of a sudden. The new drama teacher had worn her out; Fran Heller was a spider, spinning, and Dory understood, with disappointment, that she didn’t really like her all that much.
When it was time for the Hellers to leave, Eli and Willa came downstairs together blank-faced, which Dory didn’t recognize to be a studied state. Had she been looking carefully, she would have seen the way the pink mottling of her daughter’s skin had rearranged itself again; the clouds had moved.
“What did you and Eli talk about up there?” Dory asked her later in the kitchen, the two of them loading the dishwasher while Robby pushed a sponge across the counter.
“Nothing.”
“Nobody talks about nothing.”
“People talk about nothing all day,” said Robby.
“We listened to The Lungs,” Willa finally said. “We compared schedules.”
“Is he nice?” Dory asked.
“I don’t know,” Willa said, shrugging, peevish. She gooped a slug of green gel into the detergent maw of the dishwasher, then closed the door, letting the handle slap shut, which triggered the slow revving-up from inside. Two plates seemed to knock against each other in there, and would continue to do so for the next hour.
“He seems like an interesting kid,” Robby said, and he happily picked at the edges of the half-eaten apple cake.
“Actually, I still have work to do,” said Willa, wanting to leave this conversation immediately and forever—probably also wanting to leave the static comfort of the kitchen, in which a dishwasher churned and moaned, as if expressing all the effort it took to sustain family life. She would be leaving home in a couple of years. It was possible that her strongest desire to do so occurred in the kitchen that night.
4.
Over the following weeks, Willa and Eli seemed nearly bored around each other, barely looking up when the other spoke. In the evenings sometimes, Eli wandered down Tam o’ Shanter, appearing on the Langs’ doorstep, hoping to have a conversation with Robby about a novel he had just read, asking Robby questions about theme, character, motivation.
Willa, named for a writer, wasn’t a big reader; her parents had long known this about her. She had loved The Thunder of Hoofbeats during her middle school unicorn phase, and then she’d loved Jane Austen, or more accurately Mr. Darcy, like many girls who imagined clinging to his mutton-chop sideburns the same way that they would have clung to the unicorn’s mane. But then Darcy was replaced by the effeminate zombie love interest in a series of frankly stupid novels that Willa and her friends Marissa Clayborn and Carrie Petito and the two Lucys had read compulsively in seventh grade. The zombie had “glazed, oaken eyes and a mouth that was forever slightly open in want,” and Dory remembered practically shouting at this prose when she read it. “Oaken!” she and Robby had cried, though much later Dory would recall the line and think that, to some extent, it was an accurate description of teenaged desire.
Robby and Dory didn’t know then that this would be the height of Willa’s pleasure reading. Had they known, they would have kept her supplied with books about alluring, oaken-eyed zombies. Instead they harangued her, and little by little she stopped reading altogether, exc
ept for what she’d been assigned at school. When Eli Heller came over to discuss novels with Robby, the two of them sat in the den for long stretches. Then finally Eli would stand and walk out into the front hallway, where Willa might be, and they would hardly acknowledge each other, and he would go home.
Eli could be seen in the school cafeteria most weekdays eating the high school’s crude version of panini, his fingertips practically polished with oil. He was just one of many students Dory would smile at, say hello to, ask a bland question of about his classes. She almost never thought about him, and she had no idea she would ever need to. During a fire drill in the middle of November, all was revealed. Dory had been standing at the SMART Board talking about Stephen Crane, and her students were desperate in their boredom. She made a note to herself that she should lobby to remove Crane from the curriculum for next year; the kids could no longer read The Red Badge of Courage. It was an easy book—it used to be taught to seventh-graders, and she herself had read it when she was eleven—but as far as she could see, the students’ brains had changed. Whether they’d evolved or devolved wasn’t clear to her, for they also possessed that astonishing capacity for technology. They were distracted, their neurons pulled apart, and now their brains somehow magnetically repelled Stephen Crane. Though maybe this wasn’t the worst thing in the world (after all, if she had to read Stephen Crane now, for the first time, would she actually find it exciting? She had a feeling she knew the answer), their distractedness still bothered her.
