by Dani Lamia
I like my house to be empty of people when I arrive, but I also like the lights to be on and some soft music playing: old indie rock, ideally. Arcade Fire or the Strokes or the Killers or Franz Ferdinand or Tom Waits or something.
Tonight, I come home and head straight for my study on the top floor, which is in a gabled attic full of natural light. I pour myself a bourbon, filling to the brim the glass kept chilled in a little freezer up here. I sip it slowly at first, then more greedily until the warmth and sweetness spreads into my brain and my belly and I start to feel more solid, more sensible, freer.
I drink Fresca because LBJ drank Fresca. He remains my favorite executive and a model as a power player with respect to winning games by any means necessary. But Fresca doesn’t go very well with bourbon, so I have a supply of specially ordered “White Coke” up here in my study. I have several cases that I purchased illegally from North Korea, where the product is still manufactured. What else are you supposed to do with money? I don’t do normal snortable coke anymore. This is as close as I get.
During World War II, General Eisenhower once gave Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union a Coca-Cola. The two famous generals were keen admirers of each other, but even so, General Zhukov was flummoxed and frustrated with how much he enjoyed the rust-colored imperialist beverage. He asked for more. Much more. He drank as much as he could in secret while fighting the Nazis and guzzled it by the chilled bucketload afterward at the Potsdam conference. Yet he still couldn’t get enough.
After the war was over, Zhukov had to go back to Stalin’s Russia. It was a major drag for him. As a gift to Zhukov, when Eisenhower became president, he ordered the Coca-Cola corporation to find a way to remove the coloring from Coke and put the clear liquid in white bottles with straight sides, like vodka. The corporation even added a red star. Eisenhower then ordered Coca-Cola to begin shipping this White Coke directly to Zhukov via its Marshall Plan–era factories and distribution centers in Eastern Europe.
Zhukov returned the favor on his end, helping Coca-Cola move its products more easily through jointly controlled Austria. And Zhukov was able to enjoy drinking Coca-Cola directly in front of Stalin and his own troops, who assumed it was just vodka. Rust-colored Coke became White Coke, which eventually became a staple for the high command of many communist countries after the formula for Coke was outright stolen during the Brezhnev era. North Korea, my current supplier, was one of the first countries to begin manufacturing it in bulk.
I consider my supply a delicate luxury, and I hope it lasts me the rest of my life. It tastes the same as regular Coke, though one time there was a giant beetle in one of the bottles, which somehow only added to the authenticity and mystique.
I finish my first straight glass of Four Roses and then crack open a bottle of White Coke. I pour a little into the glass and mix it with more bourbon, then I stare out my attic window at the neighborhood below me. Young people are starting to come out to mingle at the bars across the street. I consider going out. But to do what? To meet someone new?
No. I finish my bourbon and White Coke, and by this time I’m a little hungry and a little sleepy. I make myself a full pan of tater tots, but I only end up eating a few. I eat a cup of blueberry yogurt and snuggle into my giant bed in my room, which is exactly the same as my giant bed at work. I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep that seems to yawn on forever, like a warm throat swallowing me for infinity. I only wake up once in the middle of the night, which is unusual for me. I typically wake up four or five times when I’m sleeping at home all alone. I get up to use the bathroom and while I’m sitting there on the toilet, staring through the open door at my empty bed, I suddenly realize that my children are older than I was when my mother killed herself.
“That means that I am a better mother than she was, by default,” I say out loud. I throw myself back into bed, and the next thing I know, I’ve been awoken by the doorbell, which someone is basically leaning on, ringing it over and over again.
I hit the buzzer that opens the door and then fumble around until I find a clean sweatshirt, which I slip on over the Arcade Fire T-shirt that doubles as my pajama top. Somehow I managed to fall back asleep with my pajama bottoms still attached to one of my ankles, like a snakeskin I couldn’t quite shed, and now I pull them all the way up and hop into the elevator and take it down to the bottom floor.
It’s morning. How did it get to be morning?
My girls are in the kitchen, looking annoyed, wearing their bright pink backpacks. They seem slightly happy to see me at first, but then catch themselves and revert to haughty preteen aloofness. Though they are twins and look exactly alike (except for the fact that Olivia currently has blue hair), they really aren’t very much alike as far as their personalities go, though they do share a history and a certain measure of divorce-inflected trauma. Olivia is the creative, outgoing one, and her grades suffer for it, but she is far better company, albeit rather lazy. She is so charming, though, that it doesn’t matter. Not to me. I expect that she will bring me an incredible amount of trouble in years to come, but I am hoping that most of it falls on her father. I’ll probably have to worry more about Jane, who is the cerebral one, the one who most takes after me. She even wears her hair like I do, blond and straight and cut at her shoulder, which must make her father uncomfortable. Not that he would ever say anything about it.
“You guys ready to party?” I say to them.
“Mom, not yet,” says Jane. “Maxim’s party isn’t until this afternoon.”
“Your father just dropped you off here and left you? All alone?”
“Well, he’s coming back, now,” says Olivia, sheepishly. “We called him, since you weren’t answering the door.”
A united front. It was most likely Jane who called him, but Olivia is backing her, which is a bad sign. Usually, my only way to deal with them in an effective manner is to divide them up.
“It’s my weekend,” I say fiercely. “I don’t want to see him. He isn’t allowed to come here. Text him and tell him that you’re fine now—that I let you in, that everything is okay.”
“We called him, though,” she says. “So now he’s worried. He just wants to make sure.”
There is a knock at the door and then Ben just opens it right up, which is fucking ridiculous.
“Oh, go ahead and just come in, then!” I yell. My ex-husband is definitely not the first human adult I want to see this morning, or really any morning.
“Girls?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, we’re all fine,” I say. “You can go ahead and leave now.”
Ben Fotopolous divorced me, so I’m not sure why he’s always trying to edge his way back into my life. He’s a beautiful man in a way that I have always found annoying, except when I am fucking him or trying to make other people jealous. He is kind and solicitous. He is my same height, and he is strong, and slender, and pale. He has one Greek grandfather, one Chilean grandmother, and the rest of him is Anglo, but certainly not WASP. Flawless skin with dark hair. Warm eyes. Nice dick. He’s funny and a good listener, and he has always been an attentive father, which is one of the reasons I picked him out to fill me up with kids. He’s a high school history teacher with a Bolshevik streak. Even after marrying me, he never stopped teaching in the Brooklyn public school where he first interned with AmeriCorps and then later took a job.
His job is the one that Jane and Olivia respect right now, since they are still in the world of school, where teachers are the ultimate authority and where grades are the ultimate currency. Teaching “big kids” is super-impressive to them, and my outright bribes aren’t. Plus, Ben has custody, so he’s the one who makes sure they get fed and get to school, and he deals with all of their tawdry little emotional problems.
Like how he used to deal with all of my tawdry little emotional problems. Only they are grateful in a way that I never was. And they can still grow and change and learn, wher
eas I am done growing up and definitely done changing, and I guess he finally figured that out.
“Big birthday party today, right?” he asks me, smiling.
“Yeah, the whole family is coming. Even Henley, for some reason. He’s flying in from China. I guess he needs money.”
“What’s he doing in China?”
“Embarrassing himself. Probably embarrassing the country. I think he likes the attention. I think he hopes that someday he’ll be kidnapped as one of the heirs to the Nylo fortune and held for leverage. That’s when he’ll finally truly find out how much he’s worth to us. Boy, will he be surprised.”
“How are you doing, Caitlyn? Are you feeling okay?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? Look, the girls are fine. You are fine. I am fine. You can go now. You are the good parent and I am the shitty one. Are you girls ready to have fun?”
Olivia and Jane ignore my whining. They finally set down their backpacks.
“Yay,” says Olivia pathetically.
“Have a good time, girls,” Ben says, and turns to leave.
“Bye, Ben,” I say.
5
I let my children walk all over me, as usual. They are civilized about it. We order food from wherever they want, like every time. For lunch, that means we get Chinese dumplings delivered from Ginger House in Flushing, Queens. The dumplings are only about eight dollars an order. Getting them delivered to my Townhouse costs fifty dollars. I am not one of those world-disdaining elites who doesn’t know how much things cost. I am one of those tight-fisted penny pinchers who loves the steady jangling increase of coins in my coffers.
We also get lemon chess pie from Two Little Red Hens, which I am more excited about. I eat a few dumplings with the girls in solidarity. We talk about games, about school, about boys, about movies. Olivia is going through some kind of crisis with one of their friends, who is evidently “fake.” Jane seems to think this crisis will blow over, and perhaps it is only me who catches Jane’s insinuation that it is Olivia who is truly not being the genuine one.
“Do we really have to go to Maxim’s party?” Jane asks.
“I mean, no,” I say. “We can tell the family to go piss up a rope. But your Uncle Henley has flown in from China. You haven’t seen him in forever. Also, Grandpa will be there. Also, your cousins.”
“Maxim is creepy,” says Olivia.
“I don’t like leaving the city,” says Jane.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. “Why live in New York if everybody isn’t going to just come here, where all the stuff already is? But Bernard likes to show off his big dumb house, and there is nature and whatever. Remember trees? I promise we won’t stay long.”
We have a couple hours to kill, so we watch some horror movie that Olivia chooses, which Jane avoids by focusing instead on her phone. The movie is something about the ghost of a murdered child returning to haunt a family, and the whole thing is done through security cameras that pan and shake. The movie is in black and white and there are often subtitles when the people are whispering to each other. Did the ghosts add the subtitles in later? The metaphysics of the film are very silly, barely even internally consistent.
Promptly at 3 p.m., a car arrives with a driver that I often use who knows to never even try to talk to us, and he drives us out to Bernard’s compound on Long Island. Bernard lives in the terrible part where all the people are rich and boring and for some reason can’t handle living in a proper city and instead need lots of space for things like horses and extra cars and drones and dumb shit that represent the suburban trappings of wealth, and not real wealth. Real wealth is having all the city shit that matters, like the ability to pay people to do exactly what you to tell them to do, who then live in total quaking fear that you might someday stop paying them. Who wants freedom when you can have power?
At Bernard’s, there are no balloons or streamers or other evidence outside to suggest it’s a child’s birthday party, and aside from us Nylos, the guests are all Bernard’s friends and their kids. The catering is nearly invisible, which gives the event a cul-de-sac vibe that I find nauseating, since I know where this aesthetic comes from: some unspoken craving on Bernard’s part for the remnants of our idyllic childhood. Sorry, little brother, Mom kind of ruined that when she offed herself in our living room. It is so transparent and sad.
When we arrive, Bernard says hello and then disappears. His wife, Phoebe, grins and grabs us and gives us big hugs as if we’re all one big, happy family. She is wearing about thirty different bracelets and has limpid blue shark eyes that don’t seem to dilate. They have two children together: Maxim, who has just turned ten, and Julian, who is eight. We are all fairly certain that Maxim is a budding serial killer who will one day bankrupt his father in legal bills, but for now he satisfies himself just being surly and spoiled. Julian, on the other hand, is adorable.
“Helloooooo,” says Phoebe. “Thank you for coming all this way!”
“It’s good to see you, Aunt Phoebe,” says Jane, ever the proper diplomat. Olivia doesn’t even bother, not willing to pretend that we have any kind of relationship with “Aunt Phoebe.”
“Looking fit, Feebs,” I say, cruelly. She and I both know that my brother will never, ever, ever be faithful to her, no matter how nice or in shape she is. Her smile falters, but not actually that much, which is impressive.
“What’s up, Nylo bitches!” shouts someone from the upper deck of the foyer balcony. My little sister, Gabriella, is wearing a sparkly silver caftan and almost hanging from the skylight, her curly brown locks flying every which way. I can tell she arrived much too early and now is extremely bored and no doubt ecstatic that I am finally here.
Olivia and Jane run up the stairs to greet their Aunt Gabriella. They are excited to see a familiar, friendly face among all of these dull Long Island ghouls who smile with pained expressions and move out of the way deferentially in the presence of us honest-to-god Nylos. They all know who I am, so I don’t bother saying hello to any of them. Why am I even here? I wonder. Just so Henley can borrow money from me? In fact, where is Henley?
“Where’s Henley?” I ask Phoebe. “And where did Bernard go?”
“Oh, Henley is here… somewhere,” she says. “And Bernard went to go check on… something?”
“Well, it’s been nice catching up, Feebs,” I say. “There are so many people here! How do you guys know so many people?”
“Sands Point is a very tightly knit community,” she says. “Bernard and I are very active in the local church and in the PTA. Bernard and the other moms—”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I say. “Bernard and the other moms all day.”
Now she turns away, red-faced, but I can tell she is suitably afraid of me again and will leave me alone for the rest of the party. I feel slightly bad, but not bad enough to apologize or worry about it longer than it takes for Gabriella and my girls to work their way through the crowd back down to me.
“What’s up, boss?” says Gabriella.
“What are you wearing?” I ask. “I am totally willing to give you money for real clothes. You don’t have to make dresses out of the curtains.”
“It breathes!” says Gabriella. “I like to feel the cool wind on my budding nethers.”
“Are you here by yourself? You usually shove some rock star in my face first thing.”
“I broke up with the black metal guy I was dating and now I am between artists,” she says. “Dane Wizard was very good at making brutal shapes of solid metal with his fuzzed-out bass, but he was less good at being vulnerable enough to accept my love.”
“You prefer drug addicts. You like it when they need you.”
“At least I’m not married,” Gabriella says, shooting a sidelong glance to Phoebe, who is arbitrating some pointless conflict between preteens.
“You look good,” I say. “Good tan. You don’t look too brok
en up about the sudden ending of your very important love affair with Dane Wizard.”
I vaguely remember the man: skeletal to the point of looking unwell. Black eyes that were like shiny bugs about to fly away.
“I went to Thailand for a while and I reconnected with the real Gabriella,” she says.
“Which Gabriella is that?” I say with raised eyebrows.
“You mock me because you just have the one self,” she says. “I’ve got hundreds. Masks and personas. It’s hard to say who I would even be if it weren’t for the centering power of dance. Maybe you get the same thing out of your job?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Have you seen Henley? He is supposed to be here somewhere, right?”
“He came in last night,” says Gabriella. “I think he got into some kind of trouble in China. He’s very on edge. He was hitting on Phoebe as much as possible, which I think she enjoyed, but which was making Bernard rather irritated at him.”
“You and Henley have always been close,” I tell her. “Which is good because I can barely stand him anymore. I feel like he’s always about to confide in me, which would be tragic, because I don’t care.”
“You just have to breathe, and center yourself, and find the deep well of patience inside,” she says.
“To breathe, like your caftan,” I say.
“Yes!” she replies, pleased.
“Are you still making your soaps?” I ask.
“Helping people cleanse themselves—body and soul—is still my life’s work, yes.”
Gabriella has tried to start many businesses, but she has had the most success as an Instagram entrepreneur, selling soaps with earthy smells that she invents herself, sending the recipes to a facility for production in New Jersey. Pine and peat, cedar and rose, lime and grass. She has some marketing savvy, but she lacks what you might call a killer instinct. I check up on her more than she knows. Actually, this soap business is almost breaking even. I’m proud of her, but I know that I need to be a little withholding if I want her to keep striving for my respect.
