Her grandmother went to the pantry in search of cocoa. On the counter Lydia saw the big box.
“Oh no,” her grandmother said, clearly having heard the flaps open.
Lydia reached down and took out a new, pristine pink edition. “Look at this!”
If Hartwell had taught her anything, aside from reinforcing the notion that she was not, like her classmates, bound for the U.S. diplomatic corps or for NASA, it was that she knew exactly what it meant to have a grandmother who’d written such a spectacularly trashy book. Naturally, everything in the book that might have ever seemed scintillating had become, over time, passé. What was a mere allusion to a blow job when you could, if you wanted, take a few minutes during a dull lecture on differential equations and find countless examples on your phone? But there was something special about her grandmother’s trash that gave it such a long life. Maybe it was all the creative sex positions. Or the people fucking in the hot-air balloon. Or the diagrams, which she had heard about incessantly from the first week of school, and which were evidently ebulliently hirsute. Apparently a pen-and-ink rendition of a vagina was a better, more fulfilling vagina than any of the millions of photographs floating out there in the ether, available to download.
Occasionally someone at Lydia’s old school in Crestview would connect the dots between her and her grandmother. Boys would arrive at her desk with a printed article from Wikipedia, caught up in some dizzying, hormonal spell, and would stutter in caveman-speak, pointing at her, and then at a picture of her grandma. You? Her? Sex? Family? Usually she would feign ignorance: I have no idea who this Henrietta Olyphant is. I don’t know this book. What diagrams?
At Hartwell, where the students were better, and smarter, and richer, she could not lie herself out of it. Everyone had it figured out quickly enough. Because of it, most everyone assumed she had grown up in some deranged sexual den full of vibrators and leather chaps and whips. Or else that every family dinner ended with some in-depth discussion of Caligula’s exploits. Girls in the dorm came to her for advice or diagnostic help for possible infections. Or assumed that she held a liberal attitude toward the occasional three-way or four-way, or a deep affinity for porn.
This had happened with her roommate, Nisha Chakrabarti. A calculus whiz and a cellist of the first order, Nisha’s love for The Inseparables bordered on obsession. She’d let Lydia hold her copy, but for only a moment. It had belonged to Nisha’s own grandmother, a paperback edition from the eighties with a black cover. This, Nisha explained, was so that you could read it on the subway without feeling shame. Most of its pages were dog-eared, and some passages, such as the one in which Eugenia has her first orgasm (“a sharp swan dive out of the Gotham air into the steamy, salty, skin-tingling tropical ocean”), were underlined furiously in blue ink. Lydia had pretended not to be interested. She had consciously resisted reading it all this time. Surely there were other books, maybe books just as embarrassingly bad, written by other people who were not her grandma. Within the family, the book had become a talisman of anxiety and guilt and humiliation for her grandmother. Everyone knew this. Despite her mother’s occasional joking about its pink cover or its trashiness, you were not supposed to speak of it. You did not bring it up. If a man at the bank saw your last name and somehow made the connection and then proceeded to say something hideous, you did not then report it back to her. Her grandmother worried most about this: that her book, which had already caused her so much trouble, would cause trouble for them.
Lydia started to open a copy, and then her grandmother knocked it out of her hands with a wooden spoon. It was a well-known fact that she refused to touch the book with her bare hands.
“I’d rather you didn’t look at that,” she said.
“But why? It’s right here! And it’s so new and pretty!”
“It’s not a good book. That’s why. It’s awful.”
Lydia picked up another copy and read off the cover. “This much is certain: Henrietta Olyphant has written a wonderful book!”
“A dirty book is different than a good book.”
“Maybe I want to read a dirty book,” Lydia said.
“You’re young.”
“I’m fifteen,” she said.
“Fifteen is impossibly young. And besides, this is garbage and you shouldn’t put garbage in your head.”
“I’ve almost definitely seen worse online, you know.”
Instantly she saw her grandmother’s eyebrows rise.
The first weekend at Hartwell, she’d walked in on Nisha Chakrabarti midway through what was apparently an hour-long porn binge. This was typical behavior for the boys she knew, but not for the girls, not for the cadre of Danish catalog models and their friends, who were off interning at The Hague, and certainly not for someone like Nisha—gliding effortlessly through her quantum mechanics seminar and playing Bach in the Hartwell traveling orchestra. Perhaps owing to Nisha’s tastes, what Lydia saw horrified her. Men choking women, throwing them into vans, teaming up with other men, sometimes lots of other men, screwing them in the backseat of those same vans, in airplane bathrooms, in motel rooms, in a pool, by a pool, on a table near a pool. None of it looked in any way pleasurable despite Nisha’s entirely too-focused attention and the gaping hangdog grin that might have implied pleasure. And nothing Lydia saw on the dozens of videos she watched that night, or on the one other occasion they did this, made her want a boy to touch her, ever. The oily, hairless horror of porn filled her with anxiety. How could she ever be expected to do these things? Or act this way? And why was everyone so excited about it? Nisha had realized Lydia’s distaste at about the same moment that Lydia realized that she never ever wanted to see Nisha again. “What?” Nisha complained. “You don’t like this? You think it’s all like your grandma’s book, don’t you? All sweet and romantic. With candles every time a guy whips his dick out?”
Lydia found the dedication page, inscribed To My Darling Baby Oona. She wasn’t expecting to find something like this, something this sweet, in a book full of such ridiculous and explicit pictures.
“So what do I say,” Lydia asked, “when people come up to me and want to talk about it then? When people ask me stupid questions about the diagrams?”
Her grandmother flinched. “Do people do that? Really? Still? To you?”
“Weekly. Which is why I should have my own copy to read. To arm myself.”
“Just put it down,” her grandmother said.
“Don’t be so prudish about it,” said Lydia.
“I wrote the damn book, honey. And drew the fucking pictures. I think history has already come down with its opinion on my lack of prudence.”
“Well,” Lydia said. “I guess we have something in common.”
Her grandmother didn’t miss this. Lydia noticed another tiny rise of her eyebrow.
“So what vacation is this you’re on? It’s a Monday in February. Don’t vacations start on Friday? And didn’t you just have a vacation?”
Lydia tried to come up with a quick lie.
“What happened?” her grandmother asked.
“I got in trouble,” Lydia said.
“I figured so much. For what, exactly?”
“I don’t want to say.”
This, Lydia thought, may have been the single most substantial conversation she’d ever had with her grandmother. It was not as if she hadn’t been a good grandmother when Lydia was young—with candy bars, and ghost stories, and Marilyn Monroe movies—but then some inability to communicate settled over them. Lydia supposed it was the generation gap. Too much time had passed between them. Years equaled difficulty. Her grandmother had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking world, in a tiny hot apartment, around old men who had fled pogroms and village burnings and marauding Cossacks. Her grandmother could not understand the umbilical connection to gadgetry that Lydia insisted on. And it had not helped matters that Lydia was indifferent to the things her grandmother liked so much: Henri Matisse, Clark Gable, Peking duck. Once, over dinner, her grandm
other had said something in passing about wanting to take Lydia to Paris with her. A grandmother-granddaughter vacation! A bona fide cultural expedition! Lydia was maybe nine. She had, for reasons still mysterious to her, burst into tears at the idea. “With you?” she’d cried out. Macarons and pain au chocolat somehow provoked a miniature panic attack. After that, conversation between them had never been easy.
Lydia wondered if their more recent difficulty wasn’t just a simple case of intimidation. Lydia had not escaped her grandmother’s notoriety, or whatever it was you called the legions of senior citizens who gawked at her. Her grandmother was more or less invisible to younger people, but to a certain generation, she was suspended in time as an advocate for reckless sexual joy. How else to explain a man coming to their table at Sally Ling’s, just a year ago, maybe a little drunk on dragon bowls, merely to ask, “So you’re saying I should use my tongue?”
But there was something else. Beneath the kitchen lights, Lydia couldn’t help but see her grandmother’s wry smile and easy obvious magnetism as proof of the exact kind of coolness that Lydia herself lacked. The books, the ready glass of wine, the Pat Nixon stories, the obvious fearlessness, the ready command of Marxist-feminist-sociopolitical dialectics, the religious distaste for regurgitated political idiocy—it made sense why Lydia felt so cowed. What would her grandmother care about stupid stories of boarding school? Or about tiny boys afraid of butterflies?
Her grandmother reached out and touched her cold hand to Lydia’s wrist, just exactly as Charlie had done. “Seems to me you have things to get off your chest,” her grandmother said.
Lydia looked down. “I have the opposite problem, actually.”
Her grandmother knew somehow. Her face shifted. Instantly she understood. Lydia was not sure how, but immediately she felt relieved not to have to go into detail. Her grandmother stepped forward and hugged her close to her chest, close enough that Lydia could hear her grandmother’s heart beating, a sensation that for the first time struck Lydia as terrifying: this heart, going and going, and maybe, eventually, possibly stopping.
“What’s your general advice on things like this?” Lydia asked. “Shame. Humiliation. Nonstop harassment.”
“Tell me,” her grandmother said. “How bad is it?”
Lydia put up her hands. “On your scale?”
“On your scale, honey. My scale is the professional’s scale.”
“On my scale? Somewhere between nightmare and really fucking bad nightmare.”
“Would it help if I told you that society is addicted to sexual shame? And that you can choose not to accept it?”
“Not very much,” Lydia said.
Her grandmother nodded. “In that case, usually I tell people to drink.”
Lydia smiled. “It’s just a picture,” she said. “That’s all. One picture.”
“Your mother knows about this?” Henrietta asked.
“She does.”
Her grandmother offered the most minute and defeated shrug. “I should probably defer to your mother. But there are actual things to tell you. There’s a substantial literature on the matter, if I understand what it is you’re telling me.”
Lydia felt as if suddenly her grandmother had become part X-ray machine.
“And by your posture and by the way you’re crossing your arms across your chest and by the fact that your mother was looking at you earlier like she’d just had her own bones operated on without anesthesia, I’d say I understand you perfectly.”
Lydia managed a tiny nod. “You do?”
Her grandmother hugged her again. “Unfortunately I do, dear.”
“Maybe there’s a way to just put everything in your brain into my brain very quickly?”
Her grandmother laughed. “You don’t want my brain,” she said. “It’s filled with wickedness and memories of the nineteen seventies.”
“I’d settle for half of your brain, then. The good stuff.”
“I tried that with your mother, unfortunately. Wholesale transplantation. It didn’t take.”
The fighting in the other room stopped. The atmosphere shifted. Lydia’s mother came into the room, her sleeplessness radiating off her.
“Someone needs to invent a cure for idiocy in middle-aged men,” she said, not realizing that Lydia was there. Right away, she put her hand to her mouth. “I shouldn’t do that,” she said to Lydia. “That’s bad form.”
“It’s fine,” Lydia said.
“No. It’s not good. All the books say that’s destructive. He’s not an idiot.”
“Really, Mom. I can hold two ideas in my head at once. Father and idiot.”
Her mother rested her hip against the countertop, closed her eyes, and let out a series of long deep breaths. When Lydia was young, she’d seen her mother go days without sleeping. Her hospital shifts were long and punishing and then, at home, she wanted so badly to be present. Lydia knew this because frequently there were books stashed in the house on the subject—workbooks, manuals, self-published meditation guides with embarrassing astral-inspired cover art. Across the room, her mother appeared to fall asleep on her feet for a second. Lydia saw her grandmother move to her. A tiny instinct. Correspondingly, her mother moved away. Her mother hadn’t even needed to have her eyes open to feel the gravity change. Apparently, you can always sense your mother coming close.
“I’m fine, really,” her mother said.
“You’re comatose,” said her grandmother.
“I’m conscious,” she said, blinking slowly. “Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Let me take you up to bed,” her grandmother said.
Her mother smiled. Such a simple, lovely sentence. Lydia needed to be reminded of this occasionally. That her mother was a daughter. That there was, between the generations, a permanent, if not occasionally begrudging, sense of responsibility, even in middle age, and even for the basic things: food, shelter, sleep.
“Honestly, Lydia,” her mother said. “I don’t want you to think that I’m here saying these sorts of things behind your father’s back. He’s a good man.” She recalibrated. “Or decent. He’s trying. He’s trying to try. Okay? He’s failing most of the time. But he’s attempting, at least, not to fail, which is progress. Kind of. I think. Right?”
He came through the back door then, snow on the shoulders of his camel hair. The room fell quiet.
“Talking about me?” he said, not really joking.
Her mother took a few steps, perhaps involuntarily, away, across the room, toward the hallway.
Against the wall, in boxes, there were stacks of napkins from her parents’ wedding reception. Pink, square, embossed with flowers and roses and something that looked like a dancing teddy bear, they might as well have been artifacts from an alien visitation. Her dad peeked in and saw them.
“Look at this,” he said sweetly, holding one up, first to Lydia, and then to her mother, who turned away. “Remember this?”
For a long moment no one spoke or moved much and the discomfort grew so thick that Lydia began absently to flip through her grandmother’s book until she got to a diagram of a long-haired man, spittle on his lips, bearing fangs and claws. Illustration of the hungry gentleman in need of women or property, it read. She looked up at her dad.
9.
Weeks ago, when the real estate agents came, Henrietta stored most everything in the garage. At first it had not bothered her so much to do this. The new furniture and decorations arrived by truck. Bright colors. Fresh tulips. So much white. She had thought the house would sell quickly, but the paint was too dull, she was told. The creak of the floorboards sounded too much like an effect in a horror movie. And there was an unmistakable smell of mold, one of the agents said. Likely something in the walls. Water gets in, day after day for years. It has no place to go. Can’t you smell it? Henrietta walked around for days, inhaling vigorously. Apparently this meant the house would not sell as quickly as she hoped. Apparently all the water in the house and all the mold meant that the bones
of the place had all this time been vanishing bit by bit without her knowing. Someone suggested that Henrietta simply advertise the land. People do this all the time, they told her. Sell the acreage. Accentuate the timber alone. Forget the house. Make it easy, they told her, for someone to come in and bulldoze the hell out of the place and build something new and clean and better.
“People do it all the time? That’s never a good reason for anything,” she said to Spencer, leading him out through the back door and down the small slope behind the house to the garage. On the off chance that she had mistakenly packed away this surprisingly valuable weathervane, she needed to look through all her boxes, or at least have her son-in-law do it for her. He was strong enough, barely, to lift the heaviest ones, compliant enough to deal with the filthiest, and also, he was the easiest member of the family to extract information from.
“You know what else people do all the time?” Henrietta asked. “People also murder other people all the time. Like their real estate agents.”
“You didn’t say that out loud, I hope,” Spencer said.
She laughed. “Surprisingly, I do have some impulse control left.”
“They really said it smelled like mold? It’s a house! It’s not a showroom! Stuff breaks in a house. People actually live here!”
“Apparently we people smell like mold.”
Spencer lifted the garage door. Light snow breathed in across the threshold, mixing with dust and probably toxic mold. She had some of her furniture here, and her crates of books, and her old lecture notes, everything in boxes and draped beneath layers of plastic. This was where she’d packed all of the things she had decided not to show Juliet. The most vital things: Harold’s wallet as it was the day he died, the menu from opening night at the Feast. Spencer flipped on the lights. Two incandescent bulbs hung on loose strings that lurched in the wind. “I know they were just trying to be helpful,” she said. “It’s an old house. It’s practically falling apart. I’m not dumb. I get it.”
The Inseparables Page 9
