The Most Fun We Ever Had
Page 25
So much of marital misunderstanding stemmed simply from trying to keep the peace. They both did it. Efforts to ameliorate resulted, 75 percent of the time, in fights, simply because annoyance was the most easily accessible emotion.
“She won’t be up for an hour,” Marilyn said. She poured a mug of coffee, sipped it, winced.
He went to the freezer for an ice cube, dropping the cube into her mug before he kissed her temple. Then he reached past her to pour his own cup of coffee.
“There’s not a chance in hell you’re having caffeine right now,” she said, and she intercepted him with such vigor that coffee sloshed onto the counter. “You’ve been up since yesterday. Go upstairs. Now. Sleep.”
“Do you know where my blood pressure cuff is?”
“Your— Oh, for God’s sake, David.”
But he was already looking, rifling through the multiple junk drawers in the kitchen. It felt pressing, suddenly: his daughter asleep under the influence of something other than fatigue. He squatted before the Tupperware cabinet, pushed aside stacks of plastic bowls. Marilyn left the room.
Wendy in his arms, legs looped over his forearm, having fallen asleep in the car on the way home from a family day trip to the Warren Dunes. Wendy at two, riddled with fever, draped listlessly over his shoulder, delirious and trusting him to fix things.
“Hey.” Marilyn was back, and he turned, came face-to-face with his pressure cuff, dusty with misuse. “It was in the mudroom.”
He touched her arm before he went upstairs. Their bedroom didn’t smell like vomit—he wasn’t sure how Marilyn did it—but it felt different with his daughter there, her small unconscious form illuminated by his wife’s bedside lamp. He sat on the edge of the bed and unwrapped the cuff—he winced at the Velcro sound, deafening in the quiet room, but his daughter didn’t stir—and then secured it around her arm. He was never this close to her anymore, and he saw how thin she was. He’d asked Gillian about it at work last week, about his daughter’s weight loss, her moodiness, about whether or not it sounded like cause for alarm, and she’d suggested that they not overreact, chalk it up to routine adolescence but keep an eye on her. She told him the situation would likely right itself, and that they shouldn’t worry unless she began to display signs of malnourishment.
He primed the pump—waiting, all the while, for his daughter to awaken, to mock him for his hypervigilance, his dorky dad concern. But she remained sleeping as he pumped the cuff to bursting and then released the air, watching the gauge. A little higher than normal, but an increase that could be attributed to the alcohol. He pressed his fingers to her wrist. Sixty-four beats per minute. He thought of her falling asleep on the couch on Davenport Street between him and Marilyn, begging to stay up later with them, her feet in his lap and her head in Marilyn’s. The acrobatics required to lift her from the couch without waking her. Now she was pale against their sheets—the fancy flowered sheets that Marilyn had forgotten to pack when they were moving to the house on Fair Oaks, that she’d seemed so sad to lose, that he’d rescued from the curb and stowed in the cubby with the U-Haul’s spare tire.
He brushed her hair from her face—her forehead felt temperate—and scooted up beside her, leaning back against his own pillow so his ear was near her mouth. He looked at his watch and listened for her exhalations, vaguely asthmatic. In and out, as her breathing should be. A little curtain of hair fell over her face and he pushed it back, studying her features, so like her mother’s, but—now, yes—gauntly angular, not fleshed out with adolescence. There were circles under her eyes, bookending the familiar freckles on her nose.
People said the infant stage was the hardest but he had never found that to be the case. Gracie, almost five months old, was sound asleep in her crib, zipped snugly in her little pajamas. Liza, on the other hand, was standing outside the entrance to puberty, refusing to step over the threshold. Violet’s type A personality, so promising in young childhood, was converting their daughter into one of those insufferable, solitary students, propelled unpopularly forward by the promise of extra credit that would give her a leg up into the Ivy League.
And Wendy: tiny and vulnerable, but not in the same ways as Grace. She was hard to love and exceptionally easy to worry about and it was an exhausting combination. He felt unexpected tears in his eyes.
“Sweetie?” Marilyn was watching him from the foot of the bed.
He blinked rapidly, willing the tears away, aware of the fear in his wife’s eyes. “It’s okay,” he said. “Respiratory rate is normal.”
She nodded, came over and lay on the other side of their daughter. She propped herself up onto an elbow, cradling an arm around Wendy’s head, and he pushed himself up too, curving around their daughter, a couple of protective apostrophes. As they’d done when she was a baby, curled around her in their bed, her mom and dad, marveling over the mere fact of her being.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When Jonah had finally met Ryan, all he could think of was seeing Liza kissing the guy in the Subaru at his first dinner at his grandparents’ house, before he knew who she was, when she was just a random lady in an orange scarf making out with a gross Rivers Cuomo–looking guy in a green station wagon.
He was surprised that the guy he’d seen in the car wasn’t Ryan, unless Ryan had lightened his hair and lost a bunch of weight and gotten tattoo sleeves in the months since then. But Ryan and Liza were both so friendly to him—inviting him over to play Halo with Ryan, telling him he was welcome anytime, Liza once bringing them a tray of pretzels and grapefruit seltzer—that he just decided to go with it, figured it was just some weird adult thing he hadn’t encountered in person until now. He forgot about this pretty quickly, because Ryan had more video games than it seemed normal for an adult to have. He hadn’t been allowed to play video games at the Danforths’ house because Hanna thought they “promulgated violence and misogyny.”
Hanging out with Ryan felt more like hanging out with someone his age, though Ryan was actually twice his age and about to become a dad himself. Plus, Liza and Ryan’s house was regular-nice—way more normal than the other Sorenson homes—and Liza would pop in sometimes to bring them snacks or ask Jonah about school, and Ryan was funny, and really fucking good at video games.
“What’d you think of that last level?” Ryan asked, doing a Spartan Charge like it was no big deal.
“It was cool,” Jonah said. “I liked the—you know, blue clone lady? With the bowl haircut?”
“Right? She’s a total badass. She’s confident, and she has a sense of humor, and she’s, like, proportionate, more or less. The bar’s not very high, but she’s better than most of the others.” Ryan laughed. “Liza would disagree.”
He was curious about Liza, though she wasn’t often around because she had a job. He’d never known anyone pregnant before, and of course Liza was planning to keep her baby. He’d been moved out of foster placements so many times that he couldn’t help admiring someone’s willingness to commit to a kid before she’d even met it.
“Hey, man, how have things been going for you lately?” Ryan asked suddenly. He’d get like this sometimes, awkward and scholarly, like Jonah was someone he was studying in a lab.
“Good,” he said.
“Things are okay at David and Marilyn’s?”
In fact, Jonah had been spending a lot of time with David lately, doing random projects around the house—rehabbing the gnarly shower in the basement, putting winterizing plastic on the windows, climbing on low branches to trim the trees in the backyard. And it felt like how he’d always imagined it would feel to hang out with your dad, long stretches of silence that weren’t awkward at all, oldies playing on the radio, David every so often stopping whatever he was doing to explain something to Jonah—“Try to find a faucet with integrated shutoff valves, if you ever find yourself doing this again.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Really good.”
He unpaused the game and Jonah sat back to watch for a minute, considering. It was kind of intense how Marilyn was always making sure he’d eaten enough, slept enough, gotten enough fresh air, gotten enough attention from his teachers, but it was a nice kind of intense. And Wendy and Violet were definitely intense—a less nice intense—but he’d successfully avoided both of them when they’d stopped by in the past few weeks.
“I didn’t mean that in an asshole way,” Ryan said. “They’re good people. Just kind of—a lot. You know? I definitely didn’t grow up like Liza did.”
“Me either,” he said, though it occurred to him that Ryan already knew that, that everyone in this family had a weird level of knowledge about his upbringing while he was still learning about each of them bit by bit.
“Just letting you know I’m relatively objective,” Ryan said, performing an elaborate series of commands on his controller that made one of the swords emit a cloud of sparks. “If you ever need—you know, a nonjudgmental audience.”
It was nice, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what Ryan meant. “Thanks, man.”
“For sure,” Ryan said. “Everything else okay? School’s good?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You dating anyone?”
He colored. He had never kissed a girl, which he knew was pathetic. He tried to imagine reaching a point in his life where he could meet someone pretty and mature who would know where to find pale blue curtains like the ones on Liza and Ryan’s windows. Where he could feel connected to another human being like that. Because, the truth was, since the viaduct, he had never felt legitimately tied to another person, a parent or a sibling or a girlfriend. He had never, since then, felt like he couldn’t be returned at a moment’s notice.
“Uh-uh,” he said, noncommittally. Ryan seemed to fit in well enough with the Sorensons, even though he wasn’t around much, didn’t show up to family dinners. He’d managed to convince Liza to have a baby with him, apparently, which seemed like a pretty permanent decision. “How long have you and Liza been married?”
“Almost ten years. But we’re not married, actually.”
“You’re not?” He thought of the Rivers Cuomo guy again, Liza’s orange scarf.
“Nope. We just haven’t— I mean, we are in every sense of the word but legally.” Ryan glanced at him. “I mean—we’re just not really into labels. And it’s—whatever, marriage is just a social construct anyway.”
“How’d you guys decide—like, is it some hippie thing?”
“No, we just—” Ryan shrugged. “We’re not into that boring cookie-cutter suburban thing. The nine-to-five; the picket fence. We go our own ways. I’m trying to get into the agribusiness software game; Liza’s got her teaching gig. She does her thing and I do mine.”
“That’s cool,” he said. Ryan was talking to him sort of how Wendy used to, like he was mature enough to understand, like he was worth trying to impress. “I’m not really into labels, either.”
Ryan laughed at that, and Jonah felt embarrassed all of a sudden, diminished and little-brotherly. Ryan was more fun to hang out with than his aunts, and playing SoulCalibur was cooler than pruning the lilac bushes with his grandfather. He scrambled to regain the equal footing he’d felt earlier. “Does it weird you out to have an open relationship, though?” He thought that was what it was called. “Like, when Liza hooks up with other people?”
“What?” Ryan snorted. “No, man, I— No, I meant, like, we file our taxes separately. We aren’t like swingers.”
“Oh.” But it must have taken his face a second to catch up because Ryan was suddenly not smiling anymore.
“Why did you ask me that, man?” Ryan asked, and Jonah could hear that he was trying to make his voice sound casual.
“No reason,” he said. “I just thought you meant that, like…”
“Did you—are you asking me this because you—did you see Liza with someone else?”
He shook his head, very much wishing he were scraping mold from a shower stall with David instead of sitting next to a guy whose pregnant wife was apparently cheating on him. He was a terrible liar; the staff at Lathrop House used to find it totally adorable.
“No, no, I just thought you meant—when you said—like, she does her own thing, I thought you were talking about…not that she…it just made me think of when…”
“When what?” Ryan looked kind of afraid now.
“Just a time I saw—Liza. Just once. Like a really long time ago. Like the summer.”
It was weird to say something that made another person look so crushed.
“Saw her where?” Ryan asked.
“Just outside. At my grandparents’ house. In a car.”
“Doing what?”
“Um. Kissing. Some guy.”
Ryan dropped his controller into his lap. “What did the guy look like?”
“I couldn’t really see him. Kind of dorky. Glasses. Dark hair.”
“What kind of car?”
“A station wagon. A green one. It was quick. It was just—”
“What kind of kiss? Like—just on the cheek? Or—”
He didn’t reply to that, mortified, and Ryan’s face fell.
“I’m sorry, Ryan, I didn’t mean to—”
Ryan abruptly got to his feet.
Jonah stood too. “I can go, if you—”
Ryan nodded, and while this didn’t surprise him, it was disappointing.
“I’m sorry if I—”
“All good,” Ryan said briskly. He wasn’t making eye contact; his hands were balled in fists at his sides. “But you should probably just—”
“Yeah.”
“The guy. Was he old or young?”
“Oh. I— Medium, I guess? Like—your age, maybe?”
Ryan smiled faintly at that, but Jonah wasn’t sure why.
* * *
—
Violet had come to regard the weekday arrival of three o’clock, kindergarten pickup time, with the live-wire wariness of a death row inmate. The inside of her Infiniti, she was certain, was rank with anxious sweat. It was 2:58 and she watched the others gathering, Genevieve Wilmot’s mother and bouffanted alpha mom Gretchen Morley and Jennifer Goldstein-Mayer in her floral visor, tailored and bushy-tailed and chomping at the bit. She hadn’t had sex since June. Her hair was in the same ponytail she’d slept in. And Eli was in the backseat singing “Shop Around,” which she would normally find endearing but was currently setting her molars on edge.
“Sweetie,” she said. “Let’s use our inside voices.”
In his defense, Eli dropped his singing to an adorably low whisper. My mama told me.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
“Mama,” Eli said, interrupting himself. “A lady.”
“Yes, sweet pea, Mama’s a lady,” she said. Don’t ask Dada about Mama being a lady; the jury is out at the moment on that particular verdict. Ashton Treslo’s mother was walking across the parking lot cradling a newborn; Violet hadn’t even sent her a card; in a past life she would have made several dozen of those killer fontina risotto cakes and brought them over along with a copy of that heartbreaking Iron & Wine album that had lulled Eli to sleep in his early days. Not so long ago at all she’d been the first one on the asphalt at pickup, lipsticked and North-Faced and caffeinated, Eli strapped to her chest like an adorable bomb.
“No, a lady,” Eli said. She looked up and her heart sank. Gretchen Morley was coming toward the
car, face ablaze with an unnaturally white smile.
“Fucking hell,” Violet hissed, her face trying to arrange itself into something similar, some alarming shell of a grin that would throw the vultures off her scent. “I’ll give you ten Oreos if you start crying in a minute, buddy,” she whispered in Eli’s direction, but he had already started singing again. She pressed the button for her window.
“Violet,” said Gretchen. “If it isn’t our favorite recluse!”
It seemed odd—and sad—that the removal of Violet’s social life from her overall life hadn’t had much of an impact on her. The Shady Oaks moms—Gretchen! Jennifer! Ashton’s mom, whose name she could not currently remember!—had once been vital cogs in the machinery of her days, filling the blank spaces with pottery-making birthday parties and lakeside cappuccinos. They were her friends, weren’t they, so why didn’t she care more that she never saw them anymore? There was a distance, now, between the life she’d built and the one she was currently living. A Jonah-shaped distance; a Wendy-shaped distance; and, smartingly, the Matt-shaped distance.
“So good to see you,” she said to Gretchen, her face still frozen in a ghoulish approximation of a smile. “We’ve been so busy.”
They’d worked so hard, she and Matt, to get where they were. And yet her reflection, in the torso-only recessed walnut mirror opposite their California king, had begun to startle her, its athletic thinness and the dark circles beneath newly prominent eyes, big brown orbs that had lost their inquisitive luster and produced only a fraction of the laugh lines that she assumed would have accreted over the course of thirty-eight years. She’d skipped her Bikram class five weeks in a row and her children had eaten bunny-shaped pasta for dinner the last three nights, though she had ample time to make them something greener and higher in protein. I have never felt so lost in my entire life, Gretchen Morley.
Gretchen seemed to grin harder and leaned in closer to Violet through the window. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of the other moms,” she said.