A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  But then Lil also liked (loved) being the center of attention, while Beth hated it. Her bat mitzvah had been, incontrovertibly, the most painful day of her life. But all that aside, when she got right down to it, she’d simply never imagined one of those little boxes in her future. Nor had she envisioned a ring, engraved invitations, a big dress. But now here she was, racing toward Saks, a “rock” (as Emily put it) sending shards of light through the car’s interior, to buy a white dress for her wedding, her real, big, catered wedding, to a man she’d known less than a year, a man who had—there was no getting around it—started their relationship very strangely and then, even when it achieved a level of normalcy, kept her at arm’s length. It was, she thought, the way things were done in some hazy, nebulous past—the 1950s?—or in the books she’d read growing up: a girl ventured out into public places with a man—movies, dinner, plays—and eventually he proposed.

  She glanced at her mother, who was humming softly, and, adopting a cheerful tone, asked, “So, who was arrested?” She forced a laugh, which quickly mutated into a cough, for she knew the answer to this question—Dave, of course, always Dave—and dreaded hearing her mother’s commentary on the person in question. Her mother had never liked Dave, though she’d tried her best to hide it.

  Mrs. Bernstein smiled. “You’re sure you don’t want to guess?” Beth nodded. “Okay, then I’ll tell you.” She paused for drama, as she did in class when reading aloud from Poe or Lovecraft. “Tuck. Lil’s husband.”

  Beth exhaled deeply. “What? You’re kidding. What was Tuck arrested for? He’s, like, a writer. What for?”

  Mrs. Bernstein laughed. “Protesting. He was part of some big demonstration against Crown, you know, that big hotel company. Apparently, they also run prisons, and exploit the prisoners. Horrible stuff! It was very clever. The demonstrators dressed up like prisoners, sort of. Lil really didn’t mention it?”

  “No, she didn’t,” said Beth, frowning. “I haven’t spoken to her in a few days, though.”

  The mall loomed ahead of them and Mrs. Bernstein’s mind clouded, again, with font sizes, response cards (postcard or matching envelope?), thread count (or should they not bother to register for sheets? Nobody ever bought them anyway; it felt somehow too intimate), and shades of white (would Beth look best in pure white or a cream? Probably the former). In one practiced motion, she swung the Subaru into a spot—far from the entrance, but you couldn’t hope for better on a Sunday—grabbed her purse, and hopped out of the car. Slowly, Beth followed. Mrs. Bernstein squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and kissed her loudly on the cheek. “Oooooh, we’re going to have fun,” she said. Beth smiled. “Yes,” she said. “You’re feeling okay?” Beth nodded. “I’m fine, really, maybe a little tired.” Mrs. Bernstein studied her daughter’s face. She did look tired, puffy under the eyes. She was teaching summer session at NYU—“It’s a big deal,” she’d squealed, “they hardly ever use adjuncts at Tisch!”—and maybe it was all too much for her, all that prep time, plus her dissertation (which Mrs. Bernstein feared was getting a bit lost), and the wedding to plan, all these decisions to make. “Okay, we won’t tire you out too much today.” She pulled open the heavy glass door that led into the men’s department and gestured grandly for Beth to step inside.

  The familiar aisles of Saks had a calming effect on her and she felt, suddenly, that she might ask the question that had been plaguing her. “Sweetie, have you thought about bridesmaids?” Without warning, Beth heaved a great, gulping sob and burst into tears, just as they arrived in the cosmetics department, with its hot, white lights. Mrs. Bernstein, shocked, reached up automatically and put her arms around Beth, who stood frozen in the middle of the aisle. A gray-haired Clinique salesperson approached them tentatively, tissues in hand. “She can come over here and sit down if she likes,” she said. “Thanks,” said Mrs. Bernstein. “I think we’ll go to the women’s room.” The saleswoman nodded and pursed her lips. “Second floor,” she whispered. “Through lingerie.” Mrs. Bernstein gave her a conspiratorial smile. “Okay, Bethie, let’s take a little walk.” Beth nodded and clung to her mother. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I feel so stupid.”

  “Shhhhhhhh. It’s okay,” Mrs. Bernstein murmured, guiding her toward the escalator.

  By the time they reached the lounge, Beth’s sobs had subsided into hiccups. Mrs. Bernstein deposited her on a beige couch, walked over to the cooler, and siphoned off a little paper cone of water, then sat down beside her daughter and placed it in her hands. Beth drank it, meekly, glancing at her mother over the rim of the cup. “Honey, what’s going on?” This set off a new avalanche of tears. “I . . . don’t . . . know,” Beth choked out. Mrs. Bernstein was beginning to grow frightened. Beth’s problems had always been easily resolved by a trip to the doctor or a week of rest. Her tears were frequent, yes, but generally passed quickly. She was sensitive, Mrs. Bernstein thought, but not particularly complicated. “Okay, okay,” Mrs. Bernstein said, pushing Beth’s damp bangs off her forehead. “You don’t have to tell your old mother. We can just go home. Is that what you want?” Again, the tears. Mrs. Bernstein wondered, disloyally, if this was a passive-aggressive attempt to wiggle out of planning the wedding. Perhaps she should tell Beth that it needn’t be some big affair? A pang of disappointment shot through her. No. Everyone wanted a real wedding. It was already decided. It would be a grand, old-fashioned thing, at the Vinalhaven house, with a lobster dinner, and fresh oysters and champagne. So much fun.

  “No,” Beth sobbed, to Mrs. Bernstein’s relief. “No. We can stay. It was just—” Her voice broke. She took a deep breath and buried her face into her freckled hands. “It was just that. I thought you meant—” Her voice became a whisper. “Dave.” Mrs. Bernstein was baffled. “Sweetheart, what do you mean? What about Dave? Dave your old boyfriend?” Beth sat up and shook her head from side to side, like a dog. She snuffled into the tissue. “When you asked me to guess who’d been arrested,” she said slowly. Mrs. Bernstein nodded encouragingly. “Well, at first, I thought, none of my friends would ever be arrested. And then I realized, Dave. He’s the only one who would do something like that. I mean, not get arrested for protesting. I was thinking it was something like getting into a fight. Or breaking into some illegal place. Dave is always doing things like that. Sneaking into places. And he has an awful temper. Remember the barbecue?”

  Mrs. Bernstein laughed. The summer after Beth’s graduation Dave had taken the train out—somewhat grudgingly—for the Bernsteins’ July Fourth barbecue. After sulking away most of the afternoon, he ended up deep in conversation with an older male cousin of Dr. Bernstein’s, a psychiatrist who had recently adopted Buddhism (after stints with Hinduism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Scientology, and various strains of Socialism). Mrs. Bernstein tended to describe this cousin as a “condescending jerk” and on this particular day he was loudly yammering on about Buddhism. Somehow (it wasn’t hard to imagine how), he and Dave got into an argument, which began with the cousin suggesting that Dave didn’t really understand the “underlying principles” of Eastern religions and ended with Dave clutching a lawn chair in one hand, a steak knife in the other, saying, absurdly, “There’s an easy way to solve this. You want to go around the corner? Stand up, you pussy.” The cousin—a fattish sort, with a fey beard—cowered behind a potted ficus and told Beth that her boyfriend appeared to have sociopathic tendencies. Had he harmed animals as a child? Dave stormed out without saying good-bye, and presumably (he and Beth had never spoken of the incident) walked to the train station and skulked home to Brooklyn. Mrs. Bernstein had thought it all pretty funny. That cousin was just awful. He told everyone that they didn’t understand the “underlying principles” of this or that. But Beth was distraught afterward, feeling that she had failed Dave in some way. Now, however, she joined Mrs. Bernstein in a chortle.

  “So you were afraid Dave had been arrested?” Mrs. Bernstein asked softly. “You were afraid for him?” Beth’s face went slack. “No, no. I wasn’t afr
aid. It was just . . . I try not to think about him. I can’t stand to think about him. He makes me so mad.” Mrs. Bernstein nodded sympathetically. “I know, I know. And you thought I was going to make you have some silly little chat about him. That I was acting like he was just another of your friends, like Lil or Sadie.” Beth furrowed her brow. “Something like that.” Mrs. Bernstein bobbed her blonde head. “But sweetie, what’s the trouble with him? Is he upset about your wedding? I mean, that you’re getting married? Is he making things difficult for you?” Beth shook her head. “No, no, he . . . he hasn’t said anything about it.” Before she could think about it, a little laugh escaped Mrs. Bernstein. “And I suppose that’s the problem.” Beth looked at her miserably and said nothing. “Do you see him? In the city?” Beth shrugged. “I see him sometimes. At parties.” “Your friends invite you two to the same parties?” Beth let out a guffaw. “Mom! He’s their friend, too. He’s known all of them as long as I have. What are they supposed to do? It’s not like they’re your friends, having little sit-down dinner parties. These are party-parties, with, like, a hundred people or something. It would be weird if they only invited one of us.” Mrs. Bernstein nodded. “I guess, it’s just now that you’re engaged, I thought—” “Mom, it’s not, like, 1950. The world hasn’t changed because I’m engaged.”

  Mrs. Bernstein struggled to stay calm. Beth rarely spoke to her this way, as though she were some sort of fossilized relic, incapable of understanding a young person’s mores or woes. But since she’d returned last fall, she’d been increasingly impatient and irritated with her parents, as though she was going through a delayed adolescence. Mrs. Bernstein had no idea why, unless, well, the Bernsteins had been in California when Beth arrived—visiting Jason at Stanford, over his fall break—and maybe Beth resented their not having been home to greet her and help her settle in to her new place. Perhaps she’d felt alone—abandoned—and fallen in with Will too quickly? But she’d insisted she would be fine. And she was twenty-seven years old, after all. At twenty-seven, Mrs. Bernstein had Beth, and a job, and a house, and Jason on the way.

  No doubt, Lil’s wedding in and of itself had come as a bit of a blow. It’s always hard, Mrs. Bernstein thought, when the first of your friends marries. One of her friends had got married right out of school, to some man she’d met in the Village, and moved to a vegetarian commune in Maine. The rest of them thought it kind of a lark, as they were all going off on their single-girl adventures: Mrs. Bernstein to Morocco with the Peace Corps; her other friends to canvass for labor unions or environmental groups or to teach at public high schools in the Bronx or Brooklyn (where one, Marcy Goodman, had a gun pulled on her, long before they’d all started to worry about such things), or to internships at magazines or publishers. Now that friend—the first to marry—taught poetry at Colby and was married for the second time, to a doctor. The first husband moved back to New York and was never heard from again.

  Why had she thought of that—Judy Horowitz and her communard? Yes, because of the difficulty when one’s first girlfriend marries. One feels betrayed. Was that why Beth had rushed into this engagement—and set the date for the wedding so soon? Because she felt abandoned by Lil? Until this point, Mrs. Bernstein had thought the exact opposite: that Lil’s happy marriage had made Beth see that Beth herself was also worthy of happiness in love. That Beth, too, might date a handsome, successful man—and even marry him—rather than the dissolute, self-important slackers (to use the kids’ lingo, which was quite apt in this case) she’d preferred since high school. Mrs. Bernstein also suspected that Lil and Tuck had made her see that marriage was not some archaic institution (as Beth had, no doubt, been taught at Oberlin, just as Mrs. Bernstein had before her), but a real and eventual part of life. Some of Mrs. Bernstein’s friends called it a “necessary evil,” but Mrs. Bernstein didn’t feel this way. She believed that some people were made for marriage. Beth, for example, had a nurturing personality and blossomed when she had someone to take care of; and yet, by the same token, she was also a fragile girl and needed someone to look out for her, to remind her to rest and take her vitamins. In May, when she and Will had come home to tell the Bernsteins about their engagement, she’d already seemed worlds happier and healthier, with a bloom in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eye. Remembering this, Mrs. Bernstein brightened. Until today, Beth had seemed over the moon about her wedding. She couldn’t really be thinking of Dave. She sighed again.

  Beth, in some ways, resembled her father, a quiet, bookish man, prone to grand gestures (elaborate pieces of jewelry left on the toaster for Mrs. Bernstein to discover upon waking) and fits of melancholy (entire weeks spent in silence, reading and rereading Sophie’s Choice). During Beth’s long illness in high school, Dr. Bernstein had spent every free minute sitting on the couch with the girl, watching old tearjerkers—Now, Voyager; An Affair to Remember—and eating pumpkin seeds, his X-ray-filled briefcase open on his lap. It was during this same period, Mrs. Bernstein remembered, that Beth had read Sense and Sensibility—or, actually, all of Austen’s novels, in a two-volume set, brought home from the library—and favored the foolish and romantic Marianne over the wise and practical Elinor. At the time, Mrs. Bernstein had ascribed this bizarre proclivity—everyone preferred Elinor, that was the whole point of the novel, wasn’t it?—to illness: Marianne, like Beth, was prone to sickness. But had that early sympathy led to this exact moment? Perhaps. For Marianne was hung up on what were then called “first attachments,” believing a girl could never truly devote herself to anyone but her first love. Was this what was plaguing Beth? This girlish idea? That character learned, the hard way, that first loves didn’t work out so well, generally. Did Beth not remember the ending of the novel?

  “Bethie, do you think you’re still in love with Dave?” Mrs. Bernstein heard herself asking, though she truly didn’t want to hear the answer. Already, her mind was starting to turn to the practical: how they might cancel the wedding, if it came to that. Thank God they hadn’t ordered the invitations yet (or sent them out!). Beth dropped her head to her mother’s shoulder. “I don’t know,” she cried, lapsing, yet again, into sobs. Mrs. Bernstein released the breath she had been holding. “Okay, okay,” she said, though she was growing weary of all this drama and mystery. She steeled herself and took a firmer tone. “Sweetie, let’s try and talk about this. Tell your old mother what’s going on.” Gently, she pulled Beth’s head up. Tears still leaked from the girl’s eyes. A pair of middle-aged women walked in the door, murmuring quietly to each other and shooting Mrs. Bernstein quick, sympathetic glances. Beth pulled a clean tissue from the miniature box and pressed it to her face. “I’m sorry, Mom. This is so embarrassing.” She smiled a small smile and looked around her at the lounge’s pale walls. “Crying at the Clinique counter at Saks.” Mrs. Bernstein smiled broadly. “Well, kiddo, we all have to cry somewhere. It could have been worse, right? It could have been at the Prescriptives counter. Those Prescriptives women are mean.” Beth smiled. Mrs. Bernstein decided to press her luck. “And I’m sure plenty of women cry in the dressing rooms.” She raised her pale eyebrows knowingly. “That’s true,” said Beth.

  “So,” Mrs. Bernstein began. “So,” Beth sighed. Mrs. Bernstein smiled encouragingly. “Nothing has happened,” Beth began. “Except in my head. It’s just, well, you know.” She fumbled for the words. “Last fall, when I saw Dave at Lil’s wedding, I felt kind of affected by him, but I thought it was just because I was nervous. Because, you know, things were never resolved between us.” Mrs. Bernstein noted Beth’s use of the passive voice. What the girl meant was: Dave left things unresolved. She narrowed her blue eyes. Beth continued. “A few days later, I suddenly realized that I was mad at him, really mad at him. And that was why it was hard to see him. Because I thought I was over it—what had happened after college—but I wasn’t. I was still mad.” She laughed and shook her head. “I told Lil about it and she said, ‘Duh, Beth. We all knew that. Everyone except Dave.’ And then she told me that Dave fe
lt like I dumped him. Can you believe that?” Mrs. Bernstein scrunched up her face. “Well, I don’t know. You never told me, exactly, what happened between you two.” Beth rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Honey, don’t. You’ll give yourself wrinkles,” said Mrs. Bernstein, drawing Beth’s hands down to her lap.

  Chastised, Beth pulled her shoulders back and gathered strength to tell the story. “Well, he said he wanted to see other people,” she said shakily, “when we went to grad school. But all summer, before we left, it seemed like things were the same. Then we went away and he was always just, like, weird and tense. And I was always the one who would call. He never called me, not really. One day I just decided to stop calling—” Mrs. Bernstein could restrain herself no longer. “Beth, that was the right thing to do!” she cried, grabbing her daughter’s hands. “He was treating you badly! Of course you stopped calling. And now he’s sulking, saying you ‘dumped’ him. Come on!” She leveled her eyes with Beth’s. “Sweetheart, you know what’s going on here, right? He thought that you would go off to Milwaukee and”—she rolled her round eyes—“pine for him. And he would cat around for a few years. Then you’d come back and still be in love with him. But instead, you started seeing Will and now you’re marrying him.” Beth shook her head. “I don’t know if that’s it, Mom.” “Beth, why do you think he told Lil that he felt rejected by you? Because he knew she’d tell you.” Beth nodded. “He’s playing games with you. Just like he did in college.” “No, Mom, he’s not that calculating. He’s not manipulating me.” Mrs. Bernstein considered. “There are different ways of manipulating people,” she said carefully. “Sweetie, Dave is a wonderful guy, in many ways. He’s smart and funny—” Where was she going with this? She willed herself not to say too much and upset Beth. “But he has very serious problems. He’s immature. He was your first real, serious boyfriend, I know that, but I don’t know if marrying him would make you happy.” She restrained herself from adding that age-old mother’s lament, Does he even have a job? Of course, she knew the answer: yes, he had a job. Waiting tables.