by Rachel Hulin
It’s pretty amazing what science can tell us about our ancestry now. I’m so curious to imagine what our forebears were up to—maybe it’s the writer in me, but I find it totally fascinating. It’s so odd that most people don’t know anything about even two generations back.
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Hey Harry,
That just shows you how quickly our own grandchildren will cease to give two shits about us. Maybe that’s why Grandma is so intense.
Will this test tell you if you (but mostly I) will die early of cancer? I maintain a lingering and not-insignificant fear that I will die early of Mother’s breast cancer, or will it be Grandpa’s Alzheimer’s? If I start thinking too much about it I can’t breathe right.
You know—I don’t even know my blood type, which is a tragedy because I can’t do the blood-type diet. Although periodically I read the rules of each diet and decide which one sounds like me and then I fantasize about the diet I should be on to give me lots of energy and lifepurpose™. I think I should be B-type blood, because those are the folks who can eat cheese, lots of it.
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Hey Matilda,
My blood type is A. I seriously doubt yours is B, unless you secretly hail from India. And yes, the genetics test tells you the likelihood of getting all types of diseases, and also tells you how much of which ethnicity you have in your ancestry. I will share the results with you—ours would probably be very similar, except different traits show up on the male/female chromosomes.
I’m not so interested in the diseases part. Carpe diem, right? Try not to stop breathing. Mom’s was a tiny lump.
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Harry,
Genetics are a bitch. I see this often when I’m shooting weddings, during the family portrait (aka hell) portion of the event. Five beautiful, vivacious daughters and two troll-like, blustery sons. In any case, I hope you get some exciting news about the future.
It’s amazing, Harry, that you can find this genetic stuff out from spitting in a tube and sending it to a website. I knew things were going to get good after they invented the Walkman.
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Harry,
It’s kind of a gray day today, so I’ve been image-searching Suprematist paintings and redrawing them to make me feel better. The whole movement was based on “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,” so I think if I re-create them, then I also can have a pure artistic feeling.
(I always thought that temp job archiving slides of Russian art from the early 1900s was just going to be a minimum-wage throwaway!)
Here is a handmade Rodchenko that’s about me and you. A Fakechenko. Do you love it?
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Matilda,
Who is big and who is little?
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Harry,
I am big.
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Matilda,
Seems about right—you up on the pedestal, me grounding you.
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Harry,
You taking credit, me slightly off-kilter. Speaking of—I don’t like this new feeling I’m having lately, the feeling of oldness. I know someday soon I’ll wake up and realize I’m absolutely irrelevant and it will be terrifying. Or maybe I’m there already, Harry.
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Hey Matilda,
Don’t worry, we’re not old. It’s all just beginning to crystallize. Whenever I start to feel old, I think of a painful moment in my early twenties, and I feel so relieved to be past that. I also look at my students, who are so clueless, and realize I know more than I think I do. Today I had to explain to most of my English Lit I section who Virginia Woolf was. Help me out, high school English teachers! The kids they’re sending me are so half formed.
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Hey Harry,
It takes a long time for humans to understand things, give them a break. For example: I remember when I thought Mondale-Ferraro was one person. And I just wanted Mom to stop talking about him.
By the way, what was the most painful moment of your twenties?
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Hey Mat,
Hmm. Probably when I confessed to Dad that I was doing too many drugs at college and he asked me for the number of my dealer. So that he could “take that cocaine finally.” That was disappointing. You?
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Hey Harry,
Well, let me tell you the story about Martha’s Vineyard, Harry. As I recall you were in Nepal on a yak and missed the whole thing.
It started when I answered an ad in the campus newspaper. It said:
Come to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer. Stay in our family’s mansion for free. Drink our chocolate liqueur while we’re not there, and drive our Jeep around the island with abandon. Collect $300 a week and schtup the pool boy. In return, fold some towels and help us make tuna sandwiches. (Celery, no crusts.)
Well OK! I said. That is a king’s ransom. Sign me right up. I was nursing a mild heartbreak anyway—Max, remember him from freshman year? “I want to see other people,” he had said. “I feel too young to be officially entangled,” he said (after pursuing me relentlessly all fall semester).
This was a big house, the biggest in Edgartown. A white Greek Revival situation with a huge sloping mahogany staircase that led you to bedrooms you referred to by color. “And you will be staying in the blue room this week, Mrs. Fancie.” The family entertained a lot of guests when they were in town, which was sporadically.
When the family was there the sheets were turned down each night, a chocolate mint placed on the pillow. The toilet paper was folded to a point and rolled over, not under.
There were five of us crowded into the maid area of four rooms clustered in a dormer over the kitchen. No AC, just fans in every room that whirred loudly all day and all night and put the warm-air smell of expensive dinner into our clothes.
We answered the phone not with our names, but with a number: “5510, can I help you?” We had on khaki shorts and white knit polo shirts from Lands’ End that had been bought for us to wear, and we looked like squares, the shape. The blond-haired, ruddy, formerly handsome chef drank twelve Bud Lights in cans every afternoon in quick succession, and you could tell from the color of his eyes that Bud Light in bulk is not good for you. He was not fond of me at all.
The two girls we were working with had deep tans they slathered on from a pink bottle and really long fake fingernails. They snuck boys into the dormer and rarely included me in their conversations. But if they had liked me I would have liked them.
My favorite family member was the youngest daughter, who was glamorous and untouchable when I picked her up from the airport.
She would come back to the serving area in between courses and we’d smoke menthols and drink malt liquor together. Her name was Martina and she had dramatic yelling fights with her father that echoed through the house at night. She made “dad” into five syllables. “D-a-a-a-d!” High-pitched. She always had a fresh manicure, with black glossy polish ten or so years before black was all the edgy rage. I opened her diet sodas by the pool and handed them to her. She didn’t want to pop the cans herself.
Max came to visit on the Fourth of July weekend. His eyes looked especially blue and he was talking about other girls. Older girls, girls with accents. I think he thought I was over him. He was of course unindoctrinated in the ways of being the help so he kept making the mistake of wandering into the main house and nearly fraternizing with the family.
“Do you think I have a chance with Martina?” he kept asking me.
And then he’d finish the champagne that had been left out and gone flat.
I went to sleep early one night after my run, tired and keyed up from the asthma medication I’d been popping to look less rhomboid in my maid outfit. When I stepped into the blinding morning sun the next day to skim the leaves from the surface of the water I saw two bathing suits mingling together, Max’s and Martina’s, four feet down on the dappled, watery pool bottom, and I sat down and cried.
At the end of the summer the girls with the fake tans had a blowout fight because it tu
rned out they were secret bisexual lovers and were having a jealousy thing.
Which proved I didn’t know anything about anything. That was the worst moment of my twenties. I got it right out of the way at the beginning of the decade.
I missed you, Harry. You should have come to see me.
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Hey Matilda,
I remember you after that summer. Skinny and cold in eighty degrees. Hair standing up on your arm like a mole-type creature.
I never liked that Max. Didn’t he turn out to be gay?
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Harry,
No. He married a mayonnaise heiress. So now, presumably, he has all the champagne he needs. And more tuna salad sandwiches than he can ever eat. Isn’t it odd how marriage can still completely change your fortunes and make your friends envyhate you forever?
I should call them up.
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Matilda,
Top three ironic tattoos in my classroom today:
1. Anchor
2. MOM & DAD
3. Finger mustache
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Harry,
Do you know anything about this Zelda game? Is Zelda a boy or a girl?
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Matilda,
Does your boyfriend make you watch him play video games? I give you two five more months, max.
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Harry,
It’s not so bad. I sit on the couch with the cat and stare at the canary-yellow projection of POLLO that comes through the window onto the wall from the twenty-four-hour bodega next door. I pretend it’s a personal Barbara Kruger installation telling me to have organic free-range chicken fingers for dinner. And then I make some, and I dip them in BBQ sauce and they are delicious.
Nate has a good friend named Amit who is always over. I used to resent it, but now I find the dynamic of three people actually sort of useful. It keeps things a bit varied, and you can’t be quite so passive-aggressive when your boyfriend refuses to paint your apartment walls yellow to coordinate with the bodega sign.
Amit works for an insurance company, on the bad-guy side, and makes loads of dough, so he buys us beer for penance. He is amusing, Harry. He wraps himself in the gauzy curtains when the lights are off, so that the yellow from the bodega filters through them in a canary-gold color, and he pretends he’s onstage and sings. Usually he’s Freddie Mercury.
Left alone with big fat Fanny, she was such a naughty nanny
My god, that Freddie got away with murder!
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Hey Matilda,
I think maybe you should kick your boyfriend standards up just a touch.
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Harry,
I think maybe you should trust the universe enough to attempt a real relationship.
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Matilda,
I’m patient, you see.
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Harry,
In any case, I kind of like Nate’s boldness. The first night we went out, he bragged that he was broke, declared to the bartender “I’ll take your cheapest swill, sir!” and asked me to pay.
Ballsy, right? And at the time he was an intern, but NOW—associate editor.
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Matilda,
Truly impressive.
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Harry,
I’ve been thinking so much about the Large Hadron Collider today. It’s an enormous machine in Switzerland that is supposed to answer the mysteries of time and space and some other things, more or less.
And I read an article today saying that someone has been found near the collider, claiming to be from the future!! It’s about time, too. Because if no one has come from the future yet, then time travel must be impossible, if you think about it.
I 100% believe this time traveler. He makes me very happy.
In other news, I have a glamorously located pimple that makes me feel like Marilyn Monroe. Hopefully it will stick around for another few days.
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Matilda,
The date on the article you linked to is April 1. So…I think your time traveler may be a hoax.
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Harry,
Fuck.
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Matilda,
If it makes you feel any better—maybe no one has come from the future yet because time is not linear at all but more like a Möbius strip, so that we’re all really living at the same time, despite the perception that we die and are born in order throughout time. Just a thought.
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Harry,
Maybe that’s why Steve Jobs said “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow” when he died. That would make sense. Although I doubt there’s a big reveal right away. Unless time immediately stretches out upon death’s door.
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Hey Matilda,
Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
BTW, I’m going to start checking my email only twice a day, at 9 a.m. and again at 4 p.m. I’m starting to have feelings of panic when I’m out of range.
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Harry,
Technology has truly ruined all of our lives. All day we stare at computerized screens, caress them, feel beholden. I doubt you can pare down your email consumption that much, though. We’re Goodmans. We are addictive by nature.
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Matilda,
I am pretty good at fighting these addictive urges, however.
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Hey Harry,
Pro tip: It’s more fun to just give in.
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Hey Matilda,
It may be more fun for now, but it won’t be in the long run.
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Hey Harry,
That is where we differ. You’re the long-distance runner. I’m a sprinter. In my defense, it’s the city that’s my enabler.
The thing about living here—you’re always on the edge of being broke, or downsized, or apartment searching. You’re perpetually on a forty-five-minute train ride somewhere, from which you need to return in the dark.
Fall is too short, and is primarily spent worrying about winter. And once winter arrives, it’s better to stay in bed, with small breaks taken for the Laundromat, where you’ll need to protect your underwear from hipsters and vagrants.
One time Grandma came to visit me here at Mom’s insistence and asked me when I’m “going to live like a normal person.” She was appalled at my lack of a dishwasher, among many other things, notably a promising partner. And deep down, so am I.
SO am I, Harry.
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Matilda,
Perhaps you could consider another locale?
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Harry,
Don’t act crazy. It’s my destiny to live this way.
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Matilda,
Suit yourself.
Today I got to class and I did not have my phone in my pocket, or my glasses on my head. One step forward, two steps back, I guess.
(It’s odd, because I don’t leave the house without saying “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch” first. I always say it, I can’t help myself.)
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Harry,
I say, “Phoneries, ovaries, wallet, and keys.”
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Matilda,
You must misplace your glasses often, then.
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Hey Harry,
I got another bride today, for June. She showed me her invitations. Two little swallows in the corner of manila cardstock, holding trumpets and greenery in their tiny beaks, proclaiming the wedding date proudly to all the guests.
What is it with brides and birds, Harry? What’s so romantic about birds? Aren’t they harbingers of disease? Don’t they go to the bathroom on our heads?
Is it because they fly around?
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Hey Matilda,
I don’t know. I think swans are nice and emblematic for weddings because they come from ugly ducklings. Evolution of self, etc. etc.
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Hey Harry,
Unless the ugly duckling just turns into a goose
and then has its liver removed. But good point.
I think penguins would be a more apt wedding bird, because they mate for life. From now on, I’m going to call my brides “birds.” It feels nice to do that. You should come up with a name for your students, too.
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Matilda,
I think I will call them bats. Fumbling around in the dark, alighting on false inspirations.
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Harry,
I’ve realized something.
I have four main moods:
Depressive-Depressive: I am sad and things are pointless and I am going to nap.
