The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  A horn honked outside.

  “Wendy, I swear, if you walk out that door—”

  Wendy reeked of perfume; she leaned in to kiss Grace on the cheek, surprisingly tender. Marilyn wanted to nuzzle her, to wipe away some of her eye shadow, to kiss the sweet peach fuzz on her cheekbones. Wendy stepped away. “Good luck, Goose,” she said. “Knock ’em dead.” And she was out the door before Marilyn could counter.

  Grace would repeat this phrase, knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead, while Marilyn helped her into her tiny polyester ensemble, while she herded the girls into the station wagon and drove them to St. Edmund’s. At the ceremony, she wept as the iridescent glob of gown-clad toddlers swayed around, “the bright blessed day; the dark sacred night.” David put his arm around her, thinking her sadness hormonal nostalgia. And she supposed that was part of it—the simple sweetness of the song, the heartbreaking innocence of her little girl trying to mouth along to the words, graduation cap pushing her bangs down over her eyes; this ascent, suddenly, onstage, from baby to young person. But as she cried against her husband—attracting some attention from fellow parents, a few moms who looked on with bemused empathy and a couple of fathers who just looked concerned—she was thinking, overwhelmingly, not of her youngest daughter but of her eldest.

  “Knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead,” Grace said in the car.

  “Knock it off,” Marilyn snapped, and everyone—she herself—was surprised.

  * * *

  —

  Three hours later, after crayon-drawn diplomas and sprinkle-doused ice cream, after David had returned to work and Liza and Violet were, in a rare moment of sisterly generosity, pulling Gracie around the block in the Radio Flyer that had been left in the driveway, Marilyn pushed open the door to the laundry room to find the most horrific scene she’d yet witnessed as a parent: her daughter spread-eagle on top of the washing machine, connected at an invisible point to the lithe Aaron Bhargava, whose muscled buttocks—she had to admit—were a sight to behold.

  “Mother of God,” she said, and though both bodies stiffened to attention, Wendy met her eyes languidly across the room and held her gaze as Aaron scrambled for his clothes. This composure stilled her further, as did the ladder of her daughter’s rib cage, pale and stark beneath her near-nonexistent breasts. She couldn’t remember quite what she’d said after that. She averted her eyes as they scurried into states of dress, Wendy moving at a more leisurely pace than her companion.

  She’d previously been grateful for Aaron Bhargava, her daughter’s on-again/off-again boyfriend. Every few weeks Wendy would bring a different boy home, one who was blonder or broader or more brainless, but Aaron seemed to be a mainstay, a boy who was charming in comparison to the roster of others—“the Hitler Youth,” David called them behind closed doors. Aaron was polite and straitlaced, an athlete (good heavens, those glutes!). He was goofy with Gracie; he’d bonded with David over their shared affinity for the Cubs. He was a boy whom she could envision progressing successfully into adulthood. He’d probably never look her in the eye again.

  Because of her own father’s complete denial of her as a sexual person, Marilyn had high hopes of being more engaged with her children, encouraging open lines of communication and providing strings-free contraception, rearing a crop of psychosexually healthy young women who knew what they wanted, knew how to say no, and grew to find sex a point of pleasure rather than confusion or shame. She wanted them to know the comfort of stable relationships and have partners who cared about them and found joy in their bodies. She didn’t want them to end up, as she had, being schooled in the art of fellatio on an abandoned staircase at a state university.

  She wanted to be the kind of mother they could come to with questions, with stories, with Mama-is-this-normals. Or so she thought, until her daughters started growing into women and she watched warily as the transformation began: the languor of their long-legged gaits; their pert breasts and the declension of their hips; the loss of baby fat in their faces, how this made their eyes at once wider and wilier. They began to surpass her in height and, it seemed, in knowledge of the outside world; they gave knowing smirks when she asked how their days were and what they were doing at so-and-so’s birthday sleepover. She told herself she was overreacting, that of course this was a traumatic transition for her as a mother, to see her tiny girls sprouting up from the ground like orchids, growing striking and graceful like ponies. Of course it was hard to watch, at times, and tugged cruelly on the parts of her insides that remembered them as newborns, as chubby oblivious toddlers.

  After Aaron fled, she went to Wendy’s room and found her daughter sprawled on her stomach on the bed, bikini top tied around her neck and cutoffs baring long tanned legs. From this angle, she seemed like a healthy, glowing girl, a little on the skinny side, but David had been lanky too. And Marilyn stilled for a moment, watching her from the hallway, face buried in a weathered copy of Frankenstein—Marilyn’s own copy, she realized, from college. And she remembered, before she thought of the partying, the dieting, and, now, the fornicating, the goofy, eager eight-year-old Wendy had been not so long ago, playing at the beach with her little sisters, reading herself to sleep with The Baby-Sitters Club.

  “Is this like linger-in-the-doorway day or something?” Wendy asked, startling her. “I know, I’m still grounded. Am I more grounded than before? Is there, like, a grounding gradient?”

  “Wendy, you— I had no idea that you—that it had gotten that serious. With Aaron.”

  “What serious?” Wendy asked.

  “Put the book down.” She inched into the room and sat down in Wendy’s desk chair. “Are you using protection?”

  “He pulls out,” Wendy said, and a chill ran down the insides of her arms.

  “Oh, lord, sweetheart, that’s not—that is not a reliable— Oh, Wendy, have you been—”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom, I’m joking. I’m on the Pill,” Wendy said.

  “You—what? Since when? How?”

  “Just a couple months.”

  “Honey, I wish you’d—” This in no way resembled the open communication she’d envisioned herself having with her daughters; she’d pictured genial late-night conversations and meaningful hugs, not this stilted, clumsy navigation after she’d caught her daughter in the act. “I know it’s uncomfortable but one of my primary jobs as your mom is to teach you how to—”

  “Have sex? I’m good, but thanks.”

  “I didn’t have my mom around to talk to me about this stuff. And you don’t know how much I wish I did.”

  “Mom, I’ve got it covered, Jesus,” Wendy said.

  She rose, her knees shaking. “My father would’ve killed me if I talked to him the way you’re talking to me.”

  Wendy glanced up at her once, quickly, darkly. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t— I’m not sure what to say about any of this, Wendy, but we’ll have to discuss it again at some point.”

  “Wow, promise?” Wendy said meanly, changing on a dime like she did, leaping from being genuine to being cruel in the span of a few seconds. “I have absolutely zero desire to get chlamydia. Or to get pregnant with demon spawn like you did. God, Mom, we literally all walked in on you and dad boning on the couch a few weeks ago. It’s not like you’re this virtuous model for how to live.”

  “You could do so much worse than me as your mom,” she said. She turned to go.

  “It— Mom, seriously. I’m being safe. I swear.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” she said, and she left her daughter’s room.

  It didn’t fully sink in until later, when she was folding laundry and Gracie was sitting at her feet, tiny pink tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, scribbling with page-tearing ferocity in a Muppets coloring book. She was not thinking of them, specifically; her attention to Aaron’s physique had been passing; she wasn’t
some sort of predator. She was preoccupied by their ardor, their urgency, the extent to which they seemed to be enjoying themselves. She and David didn’t have that anymore, not quite like they used to. That kind of desire was so far removed from the routine of marital lovemaking, which was certainly nice but so often either drowsy or militant, a means to an end, a final act—like locking up the house—before they fell asleep. That kind of desire—the sweet substance of their intimate encounters before they married—took too much time.

  A terrible mother. Was it all her fault? she wondered. Sitting astride David on the couch, the world around them fuzzed into static, right in the middle of the living room, where anyone could see them, did see them: her daughters, lined up on the landing of the stairs like a firing squad, watching them with the kind of intensity they usually reserved for The Real World. And then—even then, with the children in the room!—she’d been sharply aware of the parts of her they couldn’t see, the mellow throbbing in the cleft between her legs, the intensity with which she wanted to drag her husband upstairs and let him have his way with her, a lights-on, unapologetic physical union with the ropy muscles of his legs and the broad solidity of his chest, with his gentle strength, the sweetness of the inside of his mouth, the limitless click that happened when he entered her, how it always felt good even though she’d known him for a hundred million years.

  What kind of example were they setting for their children? Certainly a better one than her own parents had for her, wasn’t it? Gracie, who craved physical contact like a sloth, leaned against her shins, and she reached down to stroke her little graduate’s wispy dark hair, woven by Liza into tiny French braids, and she decided that if she was guilty of anything in this particular parental gaffe, it was of still being attracted to her husband, and as far as motherly transgressions went, this one seemed fairly innocuous. NPR bled into white noise and Gracie returned to her picture and for a while she was left alone with her thoughts, with a dull stirring between her legs.

  * * *

  —

  “Mom?”

  Marilyn’s eyes had been sagging closed but she roused herself at the sight of Wendy. She’d stopped waiting up for her eldest out of physiological necessity; Grace ran her ragged all day and slept fitfully at night and her body’s need for sleep occasionally eclipsed vigilance. David was working late. She held her place in her book—why did she unconsciously make these efforts to seem preoccupied when she was around Wendy? Wasn’t her real preoccupation enough?—and pushed herself up against her pillows.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Can I come in?” Wendy asked, and it tugged at something in her heart, something that radiated downward, a millisecond twinge of digestive churning that she recognized immediately as a particular kind of overwhelming, unrequited love.

  “Of course, honey.”

  Wendy climbed into David’s side of the bed, surprising her further. She collapsed a little bit, shoulders caving inward, pulling up the covers over her knees. She smelled like beer and burning leaves, the remnants of a bonfire. “Mom do you ever feel like—like you’re a lot older than everyone else your age and you just want to either go ahead without them or just find a bunch of people who—like, do act your age?”

  Marilyn set down her book. “I— Sure. Sure I’ve felt that way. Did something happen?”

  Suddenly she felt the weight of Wendy’s head on her shoulder.

  “I just had a really bad time tonight,” Wendy said. She could smell the alcohol on her daughter’s breath, a sick saccharine odor that reminded her of old men on the CTA, the desperate ones who drank mouthwash. She made the swift decision, closer to Wendy than she’d been in ages, that this particular fight could be fought tomorrow. She put her arm around her oldest daughter.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, both because it was what she would’ve said to the others and because she was sorry: sorry for the state of her daughter’s life, sorry she didn’t know how to fix it.

  “I’m sorry.” It was the first time she’d heard Wendy say the words since she was microscopic, apology edging its way out of her mouth around the impediment of her thumb.

  She pressed her lips into Wendy’s hair and kept them there, feeling like she’d felt when they’d adopted the dog last year, her daughters and her husband looking to her to be effortlessly affectionate when in fact Goethe—who’d seemed like a beast at the time—initially made her nervous. She caught herself comparing Wendy to their yellow Lab and reddened but she didn’t change positions, only moved her hand to tuck some of Wendy’s hair behind the warm flimsiness of her ear, over and over, and then she took a breath and spoke: “So, honey, what happened?” It was what she would have asked the other girls, what she wouldn’t have had to ask David because he’d already know she was interested. “Why was tonight so bad?”

  But Wendy, it seemed, was already asleep, and she would blame herself forever that it wasn’t until several hours later—early Sunday morning, David asleep on the couch, Wendy beside her, her breathing alarmingly feeble—that she tried and failed to wake her daughter up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ryan was packing up his trunk when she pulled in behind him in the driveway, and it struck her that she would have to move her car in order to let him out.

  “What’s going on,” she said, not quite a question. Ryan slid a box into a snug space, reminding her, for just a second, of her father. “Ryan.”

  He turned to face her. “I’m not sure what to say.”

  “Say about what? What’s all that stuff?”

  “I was hoping I’d be out of here before you got home. I know it’s not good for the baby when you get stressed out. But I’m not sure I have it in me to be civil to you, Liza, so maybe you should just— Could you move your car?” There was an energy in his voice that she hadn’t heard in a long time, and a hard-edged anger that made her incredibly nervous.

  “Ryan, you’re not making any sense.”

  “That guy in your department, right? The one I met at the Christmas party?”

  She was so caught off-guard that she had the impulse to sit down in the driveway. She steadied herself against the car, tried to breathe normally. “How do you—”

  “Glasses?” Ryan said. “Dark hair?”

  “Wait, no, Ryan, how do you— I never meant to—” She gathered herself. “It just happened a few times. And I’m not— We’re done. It was only—over the summer. And it’s—over. It was never even— Let’s talk about this, please.”

  She could see, from the way his face fell, that he’d been harboring some hope that he was wrong, and that she’d just showed him a hand he hadn’t expected her to be holding.

  “Is it—is there a chance it’s his?” He motioned to her belly.

  She would never forget how this gutted her, would never forgive herself for putting him in the position of having to ask such a devastating question. “No,” she said. “It didn’t start until after I got pregnant.” This sounded much worse aloud than it did in her head. The onus was on her to explain herself, but it struck her simultaneously that she hadn’t given any thought to an explanation. Her mind was vexingly blank. She opened her mouth and closed it, twice, like a guppy.

  “Was it to—what, punish me?”

  “No, of course it— Ryan, how did you even— We need to talk about this. Would you—come inside? Please? Let’s—”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you,” he said flatly.

  “Ryan, please, it was just—a stupid thing, a stupid hormonal thing, and I’m sorry; I’m so sorry I did that to you but it’s over, and if we can just talk about this…” She didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted salt. She wiped her cheeks. “How did you—know?”

  Ryan studied her evenly. “I put two and two together.” He cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry you—however you figured it
out.”

  “Least of my concerns.”

  “Ryan.”

  “I’m not sure what else to do,” he said. “It’s not fair. To either of us. To—” He gestured vaguely at her. “To the baby, either. If I’m dragging you down and you hate me enough to hurt me like this—it’s toxic, Liza.”

  “I don’t hate you, Ryan, Jesus.”

  “I think this is the decision that’s going to be the least harmful to everyone.”

  “What decision?”

  “One of the guys I knew at LemonGraphics is doing a wind energy thing in the Upper Peninsula. He’s got a spare room and he said he could use a hand with some of the tech stuff. He actually posed the idea a few months ago, but I didn’t even mention it to you because—well, at the time I was thinking of—the two of us.” He rubbed his forehead. “The three of us.”

  She felt both very sad and very angry, and because she couldn’t decide which was more appropriate she grabbed the one that allowed for less guilt. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you’re moving to Michigan? You think you’re in a good enough place to be moving by yourself to Michigan?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You really think you’re in a position to be asking me that?”

  “I just mean that you haven’t been in the healthiest—”

  “You cheated on me,” he said evenly. “I’m humiliated and I’m furious and I’m fucking devastated, Liza, because of you. So I’d argue that alone makes Michigan a healthier place for me to be, given the alternative.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly and she was almost proud of him for challenging her.

  But then she remembered herself, their life together for the past few years, the baby in her belly. And Ryan, catatonic on the couch, his impenetrable misery. Was this not, in its own way, the escape hatch she’d been seeking when she first came clean to her father? Was this not—unintended and wholly unexpected—a version of what she’d wanted? That it might be better this way, without him—hadn’t that been what she was thinking all along, caring for her child without having to worry about its father, allocating all of her resources in one direction instead of spreading them around? She hadn’t cheated on him so he’d leave her, and yet here he was, leaving her, freeing her, in a sense, from all she’d wanted to get rid of. But she wanted, to some degree, to feel in charge, to hang on to some of the indignation she was entitled to as the partner of a seriously troubled man. She wanted them both to feel responsible. Because, yes, she’d done something awful, but he was leaving her to care for their baby by herself. The shift from hypothetical to actual struck her with vigor and she was suddenly terrified. She was alone—expansively, islandically alone.