The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  I know I forgot the cupcakes for the Sudanese bake sale. I know my roots are showing. I know it’s my turn for book club and I know I’m supposed to pick something “less dark” than Flannery O’Connor.

  “I just wanted to say congrats,” Gretchen said. “And offer you any of Harrison’s old stuff if you want. I’m sure you have plenty from Eli but just in case there’s anything you gave away.”

  “Any—?”

  “Wyatt told Harry he’s getting a new brother,” Gretchen said, and then, horrifyingly, she winked, closed one big tastefully shadowed eye and opened it again. “You still look so thin.”

  No, no, no, but also of course this was happening, surprising and inevitable, of course her darling, enthusiastic kindergartener had been unable to keep the lid on their “family secret.” Of course they never should have asked him to lie, of course Matt had been right to be reticent, of course she’d done a botched job of all of this, but fuck if she wasn’t gobsmacked to be confronted with it now, in her very own car, by a woman holding her bouffant in place with a forty-dollar Lululemon headband. “Well, thanks,” she said. “I— That’s because I’m not—”

  “I figured it was probably early. That’s why I didn’t say anything in front of the ladies.”

  “I’m not pregnant,” she said, and Gretchen paled. Wyatt’s new brother is my illegitimate lovechild and he hails most recently from a rustic trash heap in south Oak Park. She swallowed. “We had a— Um, it didn’t work out.” Who cared if it was bad karma? It was also bad karma to shove your big coiffed head into someone’s car and ask her if she was pregnant.

  “Oh,” Gretchen said. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  “Well.” Her quick-thinking litigator brain again: tortuous fallopian tubes. She’d read about them in Us Weekly. “It’s this awful condition. Tortuous fallopian tubes.”

  “Oh, I—” Gretchen squinted. “Torturous?”

  “Tortuous,” Violet corrected her, keeping an eye on the dashboard clock.

  “Well, that’s—that’s so terrible, Violet. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes, well,” she said. “It’s been really hard on all of us, so if—if Wyatt says anything, it’s best to just—not give it much credence. It’s confusing to the kids.” It’s confusing to the kids when Mama throws them directly under the luxury party bus of Gretchen Morley. For a bizarre handful of seconds, she found herself missing Wendy, the wildly creative liar who’d cooked up the yearlong Parisian farce that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. Certainly this news would travel further. Certainly Gretchen—who’d very likely already shared the news of Violet’s phantom pregnancy with the other moms, despite her insistence that she hadn’t—would go slithering back to her entourage and share, with mock sympathy, the tragic tale of Violet’s imperfection. The Shady Oaks moms were her friends only as far as surface-level life analysis, Pilates and Mini Boden. Social currency was everything in this world, but it could gain or lose value in an instant, and someone could steal your shares right out from under you if you weren’t paying close attention.

  From the backseat, Eli whimpered.

  “Just a second, honey,” Violet said.

  “Well, listen,” Gretchen said. “I know you’re supermom, but…” Violet was sure she wasn’t imagining the condemnatory glint in the woman’s eye as she said this. “If you need anything, if you need me to take the boys so you can go to—the doctor, just say the word.”

  She smiled. She’d choose Jane Austen for book club and bring a case of wine. For a brief moment, she even imagined one day confessing the epic fallout of her youthful imprudence, sharing that Wyatt’s brother had not, in fact, been quashed by her reproductive organs and was currently enrolled in very expensive Israeli military training on her sister’s dime.

  Behind her, Eli began to wail.

  “Oh,” Gretchen said, and she backed away from the car. “Okay, well. I’d better go. Anyway—sorry about—you know. I mean—I’ll text you!”

  She watched Gretchen bounce back across the blacktop and then she turned to her son. “Sweetheart, what is it?”

  Eli stopped crying as abruptly as he’d started and grinned at her. “Ten Oreos!”

  She started laughing, the kind of laughing where you were also partially crying; she had always associated it with exhaustion and psychopathy and her mother.

  1994–1995

  Wendy had crept downstairs to use the adult line—following the unceremonious disconnection of the kids’ line once it was discovered that she’d used it to call Spencer Stallings, who was, yes, technically, a cocaine dealer but also just her friend—but she froze three stairs from the bottom. In the living room, a movie was playing—Malcolm X; obviously her mother’s choice—but her parents were not asleep.

  It was a moment during which every molecule of her physical composition impelled her to look away, but something combative in her brain resisted, a perverse piece of genetic makeup that said, my parents are making out on the couch; another time my parents were making out resulted in me. “Making out” was an understatement. This was not kissing. They’d all seen kissing: their mother gravitationally suctioned to their father when he came in the door from work; their father leaning over to peck their mother on the cheek waiting at a stoplight; Marilyn curled against David on the loveseat in the backyard, her head tilted up like that of a marionette or a movie star, kissing with such vigor that the balsa creaked. They kissed at Little League games and the grocery; they kissed each other’s elbows and necks and hair; they kissed with their hands in each other’s pockets and their arms slung around each other’s waists; they kissed good morning and goodnight and hello and goodbye; they kissed just because.

  This was not kissing. This was something else, something more. On the stairs, she watched, frozen. Save for the ragged keening of her mother, steady and coarse, like the rhythmic hiss of a long freight train, the house was quiet. Her father made a gasping noise. He was so much larger than her mom, so much taller and broader and darker; she almost looked like a doll pressed against him like that. Her mother had mounted him—that was the most accurately disgusting word for it—and he was lying half-down on the couch, the couch where they sometimes watched Seinfeld together as a family, where little Grace had, hours earlier, in her tiny, unsullied Batman pajamas, been turning the pages of Guess How Much I Love You, where Wendy herself sometimes ate. It was sacrilege; that couch was a chaste, communal space.

  There was a kind of reciprocal grinding activity taking place. Her mother moaned. They were both still clothed—thank all the heavenly bodies above—but her mother’s shirt was lifted in the back, lifted by her father’s hand, and Wendy could see the white horizontal slash, like a painted traffic line, of her bra.

  What to do? If she startled them, who knew what she would see? She couldn’t tell what the situation was with her father’s pants; her mother was blessedly impeding her view. She crept back upstairs. A major benefit to weighing 101 pounds at five foot eight was stealthiness.

  She went to her sister’s room, not bothering to knock before she opened the door. Violet was stretched out on her bed, still wearing the ugly plaid headband she’d had on at school that day, following the text of her ethics book with a pencil. She looked up blearily.

  Wendy slipped inside. “In case you wanted to know, I’m dead.”

  “Doors were invented for a reason.”

  “I just died, Violet.”

  “Can I have your hair dryer, then?”

  “Something’s happening downstairs. Something…sick.”

  “A dead mouse?”

  “No. Like, obscene. I think Mom and Dad are having sex.”

  Violet frowned.

  “I mean, not like sex-sex, but like—a prelude.” The word felt lewd and disgusting in her mouth, an extra tongue. She couldn’t help it: she laughed.

  * * *
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br />   —

  Violet was just trying to finish her homework. Violet was always trying to finish her homework; finishing your homework was a difficult endeavor when you lived in the loudest house in Illinois. It was a noble pursuit, she thought, this aspiration toward academic accolade.

  And now, apparently, her parents were having exhibitionistic sex. It did not surprise her in the least. She couldn’t wait to go to college, to leave behind all in her life who were indulgent and anorexic and carnally motivated.

  “There were noises,” Wendy said, “that I will never unhear.”

  Her parents’ bedroom shared a wall with her own. Violet had heard the unhearable. She turned, skeptically, to that west wall, which prominently featured her framed induction certificate from the National Honor Society, and an unframed, thumbtacked poster of Whitney Houston.

  “On the couch,” Wendy said. “In the living room.”

  The thought of anyone—let alone her haphazard, pragmatic parents—having sex on a sofa was unfathomable. Ethics in journalism, chapter 6: Wendy was an unreliable source.

  “Mom made a noise too,” Wendy said.

  “Like a snoring noise?”

  “There is nothing less like snoring than the noise I heard,” Wendy said.

  Violet sat up. She marked the page in her book and regarded her older sister, emaciated and sensationalistic and sporting new bangs that didn’t suit her face. “What kind of noise?”

  “Like—” Wendy made a face that made her laugh. Wendy, the most annoying, wonderful person she knew, could always make her laugh. “Like pleasure. The most horrifying kind of pleasure.” Then Wendy laughed too, and it lightened her, and for a few delightful seconds they were both dying of laughter, whinnying like ponies, a scandalized, limitless duo.

  “Mama?” A tiny voice broke the blissful sibling respite like an alarm. All the girls had developed a motherly radar for it, several pitches above the voices they were used to hearing, sometimes crying but more often than not imploring, solemn and curious, through the darkness of their house. Mama, is there water? Daddy, are you here? Anyone; is anyone there? Wendy turned to open the door. Grace was there, foot-pajama clad, thumb a few centimeters from her mouth. Wendy was still laughing. Violet opened her arms to her littlest sister.

  “Shh,” she said. “Mama’s busy, Goose.” Which, of course, incited a fresh torrent of cackling from them both as Grace made the arduous journey of a two-foot-tall person onto Violet’s mattress.

  “Where’s Mama?” she asked. It was her most-oft asked question.

  “She’s downstairs,” Violet said. “What do you need, Goose? It’s late.”

  Grace shrugged, jamming her thumb into her mouth and pulling her arms tighter around Violet’s waist.

  “Is it weird that I kind of want to see?” Liza asked, and Violet and Wendy both jumped.

  Wendy turned to her. “Jesus fuck; you’re such a ghoul. Did you float here?”

  “I mean, you’ve kind of intrigued me,” Violet admitted. “I’m a little curious.”

  “You know what?” Wendy hissed. “Fine. Let’s go see them.”

  They all met eyes in a complicated, giddy web across the room. Violet rose from the bed and transferred Grace to Liza’s arms and then Wendy led the way downstairs. The third stair creaked with the combined weight of Wendy and Violet, and their parents—it was true, twined together, their father splayed and their mother writhing—both startled.

  * * *

  —

  Marilyn, usually content to exist in her husband’s castoff Oxford shirts, had chosen to make an effort for Gracie’s graduation ceremony, one of her old sundresses, navy with little green flowers. Wendy wasted no time in making her feel self-conscious about it.

  “God, Mom, are you wearing that?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asked, looking down at herself. Standing across the room from her teenage daughter—who had a full face of makeup and dramatic highlights in her hair—Marilyn suddenly felt matronly, dowdy and old compared to the startlingly sexualized young woman who allegedly shared half her genetic material.

  “What isn’t wrong with it? No offense, but you sort of look pregnant, for one.”

  How was it possible that she had birthed such an insufferable aesthete?

  “I know you feel this license for verbal abuse because I’m just your mother but it’s really a bad way to go about your interactions.” She faltered. “Listen. I’m asking you for one hour of your time. For your sister.”

  “I have plans,” Wendy said, sitting before a closed trigonometry book, staring at her with a bald-faced hatred she’d grown very used to over the past year.

  “It’s her graduation.”

  “It’s preschool,” Wendy replied.

  “What’s the biggest difference between the first kid and the fourth?” someone had once asked Marilyn, and she’d actually said, “Hopefully everything.”

  “I’m busy,” Wendy said.

  She made a fist, digging her nails into her palm. “You said that,” she said. “But Dad was busy, too, and he traded shifts with someone. And Liza’s skipping her water polo practice.”

  “Liza sucks at water polo.” Wendy was now painting her nails a dark, vampy red; the smell wafted across the room. “Oh my God, is your life really so pathetic that this is the only thing you have to focus on? She’s two.”

  She had to admit that Wendy had a point. Gracie attended “school” for ninety minutes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. She was less “graduating” than she was moving from one group of tiny uncoordinated people to another, slightly older group, advancing from the Pineapple Room to the Grapes Room across the hall. But there were so few opportunities left for their family to unite, and this microscopic milestone seemed like such an easy, innocent way to bring all her girls together.

  “It would mean a lot to Gracie.”

  Wendy snorted. “Mom. Rugrats means a lot to her. Her retarded eraser collection means a lot to her. She’s not going to care whether I watch her graduate from a fake school or not. She doesn’t even know what graduation means.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  The real reason, she suspected, that Wendy didn’t want to go: because David had proposed that they all go out for ice cream afterward. It made her at once indignant and devastated, defensive of the life she’d created and hopelessly sad for her daughter, for the pain she was in, for the extremely unbecoming way that pain manifested itself, a way that made her impossible to comfort. What if she hugged her? What would happen if she came into the room and wrapped her arms around Wendy?

  “I’m not going,” Wendy said.

  “Would you go for me?” It was laughable: Wendy doing something for her was about as likely as her eating a boxful of ice cream sandwiches, but she thought it was worth a shot. Occasionally pockets of humanity shone out of teenagers.

  Wendy, predictably, started laughing. She rose from her desk chair and traipsed over to her dresser. “Are we pretending to be in a Lifetime movie now?” she asked. “God, Mom. You can’t be a totally shitty mom for like a thousand years and then suddenly try to guilt me into watching a bunch of toddlers sing Phil Collins songs.”

  It was like being slapped. “That’s an incredibly hurtful thing to say.”

  Wendy shrugged and she fought the urge to seize her daughter by the shoulders and shake her; she remembered the anger she used to feel when Wendy was a toddler and she longed for that kind of anger now, benign and manageable, though it hadn’t felt to be at the time.

  “You’re grounded,” she said, though she would’ve liked to say What the fuck did I ever do to you? and Do you understand how much worse you could have it?

  “I already have plans,” Wendy said.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Mom, Aaron is literally going to be here in less than—”


  “You’re grounded, Wendy.” She left it at that, slammed the bedroom door on her daughter’s openmouthed protest. She went into her own room and lay back on the bed, letting tears leak from the corners of her eyes and drip down past her temples and into her ears. Growing up amid chaos had tamed her, she supposed. She didn’t have it in her to yell at her children, usually. She was instinctively submissive around her teenagers; they made her nervous.

  Eventually she composed herself, reapplied her mascara and changed first into jeans and then, ultimately, defiantly, back into her sundress. She went downstairs in search of Grace. Her youngest was still always excited to see her, to touch her. It was a cheap form of gratification but she seized it. She heard Wendy’s voice and stopped just before the kitchen doorway. Grace was in Wendy’s arms, her toddler pudge making her sister look even thinner.

  “Are you so excited to graduate, Goose? Are you the valedictorian?” She bounced Grace a few times and Grace cackled, throwing back her head. “Are you gonna give a speech and throw your hat and get a diploma?” With each syllable she bounced Grace again and with each bounce Grace laughed anew. “Are you gonna be the cutest graduate ever?”

  “Yeah!” Grace said.

  “I’m going to see you tomorrow,” Wendy said. Marilyn noticed then that her daughter had her purse slung around her shoulder. “I’m going to see you in the morning and you’re going to tell me all about it, okay?”

  “Okay,” Grace said.

  “Should we put on your gown? Wanna put on your hilarious gown?”

  At this, Marilyn stepped into the room. “I’ve got it.”

  Wendy slumped visibly at her entrance. “I was just—”

  “I told you you’re grounded, Wendy. It’s unclear to me why you look like you’re on your way out.” She wished her voice were more measured. She was the adult; she was supposed to be able to table her pettiness, her hurt. She reached for Grace, who clambered eagerly into her arms.

  “I told you I already made plans,” Wendy said.