When Wendy walked her to the door later, Marilyn surprised them both by throwing her arms around her daughter.
“I hope you know how much I love you,” she said, and Wendy stiffened.
“God, Mom, melodramatic much?”
“You didn’t ruin my life, Wendy. Quite the opposite. I can’t say that enough.”
“Okay, but, Mom, I was kind of a monster,” she said.
She studied Wendy’s face, the parts that hadn’t changed since those frigid mornings in the house on Davenport. She watched her daughter, the strangely sure-footed woman she’d become, and was suddenly able to see all incarnations of her, infancy onward, in a bizarre tessellated flip-book that disappeared as quickly as it had materialized.
“I would’ve killed me if I were you,” Wendy said.
“You wouldn’t have.” She brushed a strand of her daughter’s hair away from her face. “You would’ve done your best and powered through and then, decades later, gone to your firstborn’s house for a lunch of wine and cigarettes.” Who’d’ve thought that Wendy would emerge victorious in the measurement of her daughters’ current performance? Her first baby, who’d figured out, herself, how to power through. “And you would be just astounded by what a remarkable woman she’s become.”
1996
Gillian Levin had saved his wife’s life. This seemed somehow to advance their relationship to a new plane, a liminal level between collegial and concomitant. One evening, she appeared in his office, her lab coat replaced with an incongruous little motorcycle jacket.
“Going home?” she asked.
He paused, holding one of the clasps of his briefcase. “Not quite,” he said.
“I was going to go grab some dinner. You don’t want to join me, do you?”
He dropped the clasp, uncertain. “Join you?”
“No pressure.” She smiled at him and he felt his face get redder. He spent so much time in the company of women, but none of them—not even his wife, not anymore—looked at him like this. They had one seriously distressed kid and three other statistically average high-maintenance ones. They’d returned to their lives like soldiers from battle, atrophied, squinting, sun-deprived hostages. He’d never felt as distant from her as he did lately.
“Oh,” he said. “Well—sure. I just have to make a quick phone call.”
She held up her hands. “I’ll go lock up the supply closet. Take your time.”
He and Marilyn had now spent months in an exhausting union, monitoring Wendy’s doctors, her food intake, the number of times she left the house, her visits to the bathroom (standing outside the door, listening for retching—it felt like such a violation). They’d spent months handing Gracie back and forth and reminding each other to check in on Violet and Liza, reminding each other to be enthusiastic when Violet won the nebulous Trapeze Prize for her hard-hitting English essay on “Hills Like White Elephants,” when Liza, against all odds, made the water polo team. They’d spent months falling into bed beside each other and drifting immediately into deep sleep, never touching. Their interactions weren’t hostile, but they weren’t talking beyond businesslike exchanges about the children, about the dog, about the house, and this made him more nervous than anything else. They had weathered years and years together, winging it, but nothing had prepared him for this, for the illusion of normalcy when in fact everything was precisely how it wasn’t supposed to be.
Gillian probably assumed that he was calling Marilyn. But instead he dialed the clinic, where he’d been volunteering extra evening hours for the past few weeks, cited a minor emergency at the office and told them he wouldn’t be coming.
He chose a table by the window so it would be clear he wasn’t hiding anything. He was allowed to have dinner with a colleague. Just because he and Marilyn had never really had a vibrant social life outside of each other didn’t mean that he couldn’t have a friend. Gillian was telling an elaborate story about her brother, a news anchor in Cincinnati, and he was trying to pay attention, trying to act casual.
“It’s just tough,” Gillian said, “constantly being in that shadow. Even though we’re both adults. But I guess it’s— Well, you know all about sibling rivalry.”
“I’m an only child, actually,” he said.
She smiled. “I meant your daughters.”
“Oh.” He felt his face get warm. They’d been so far from his mind for the first time in months. Liza had a friend who lived in an apartment building on this side of town. He pictured Marilyn driving by in the Volvo, catching sight of him through the window. But he wasn’t doing anything wrong. And would Marilyn even care if he was? He sipped his scotch.
“You seem agitated,” Gillian said.
He shook his head. “Just a little—underslept.”
“How’s Wendy doing?” she asked gently.
When he’d taken the day off to be with her in the hospital, right after her overdose, he’d simply told their office manager that one of his girls was sick. But he’d told Gillian the full story upon his return; Gillian, who’d been the first person he went to when Marilyn started expressing concern about Wendy’s weight; Gillian, who understood women in a way that he never could.
“Getting there,” he said. She watched him, waiting, and he found himself continuing: “Wendy, actually, is almost back to a hundred percent. As for the rest of us—well. A lot left to be desired.” It was astounding how suggestive everything could come to sound when you were having dinner with a woman to whom you weren’t married.
“Are your other girls having a hard time?” Gillian had stopped by the house one night when Marilyn was in the hospital, after Gracie was born, to drop off Chinese food and a little bag of presents for the older girls, Archie comics and slap bracelets.
“Oh, no,” he said. “They’re all—well enough. Kids are resilient.” He realized that one could apply the process of elimination: subtract his daughters from “us” and you were left with him and Marilyn and the dog. He cleared his throat. “Tell me about you. What’s it like in the outside world?”
Gillian shrugged. “Same old. I’m noticing lately that I don’t have hobbies. Do you have hobbies?”
“Does sleeping count?”
She smiled. “I feel like I used to be more interesting. I used to do things. Rollerblading. Crossword puzzles.”
“Rollerblading?” He couldn’t help it; he laughed, and then she did too.
“Don’t knock it till you try it,” she said. “Maybe your kids could teach you.”
“Oh, they’d have a field day.” He smiled, shook his head. “You’re a successful doctor,” he said. “You have a good excuse for not having hobbies.”
“Ah, but at what expense? I never imagined it would be so hard to find someone who I’m just happy to be around. Because that’s really what it comes down to, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Among other things. But that’s a— Yes, I’d say that’s a pretty important one.”
“You and Marilyn knew each other before you started med school, right?”
To have his wife suddenly on the table between them surprised him. “We did.”
“That must be the way to do it. I don’t have the time anymore. I don’t know when I’m supposed to meet anyone normal. Ask my patients to set me up in exchange for delivering their babies? This is the first time I’ve been out socially in months. It’s a nice change from microwave popcorn and ER.”
Of course it was a nice change for him too—a change from not loneliness but its opposite: the chaos of his household, his ever-present daughters and the constant demands of family life, and the newfound estrangement from his wife, who was his only source of shelter from the bedlam. “A doctor watching ER’s a bit of a cliché,” he said.
“Did you love anyone before you loved Marilyn?”
He coughed. Then: “No, actually. We got very lucky.”
/> Her eyes dimmed a little. “That’s sweet,” she said. “I’d just like to at least find someone who—I’m not sure. Feels lucky to be with me.”
“That’s critical,” he said. “Having a partner who knows you’re the most necessary element in his life.” These were things it would never make sense for him to say to Marilyn; there was no place for them between drowsy goodnights and grocery lists. “You deserve to be with someone who can sit across the table from you and understand that it’s the best thing that’ll ever happen to him.”
Gillian’s eyes were shiny. “That’s a high bar.”
“There’s no reason to settle for someone who isn’t nuts about you.”
She laughed. “No offense to your gender, but you’re awfully insightful for a man.”
“Well, I—”
“You’re making good use of having daughters,” she said, smiling at him, and it confused him, his children being invoked in a sentence that seemed flirtatious.
“We’ll see about that.”
“Any interest in doing this again?” she asked.
He could rearrange his clinic hours again, free up another evening. “Yeah.” He grabbed the check before she could try to split it. “How’s Thursday?”
* * *
—
Violet was obsessive about college, about where she would get in and what she would study. And yet her mother seemed sort of bored by the whole affair, making little asides about her determination and patting her gamely on the head as she took SAT practice tests. She’d gotten tired of it—tired of the dysfunction around her, of the hypersensitive focus on Wendy and of the subsequent fact that this was the most important thing she’d ever done and her mother didn’t even seem to care.
“Mom?” Her mother was filling out camp registration forms for Liza, and she kept jumping up to check on something in the oven. She could never just sit down and have a conversation; she was always holding Grace or a pile of laundry or a pot of water or one of her garden tools or sometimes combinations of those things, balancing Gracie on her hip while folding towels with a trowel sticking out of her back pocket. She inked in Liza’s middle name and looked up.
“What is it, honeybunch?”
“Why didn’t you finish college?”
They’d heard bits and pieces about their mother’s wild undergraduate days, information characterized primarily by Marilyn’s embarrassment and David’s teasing. That evening her mom frowned, rising to get the Wite-Out from the drawer by the phone.
“A slight hitch in cosmic timing.” She squinted, blotting at the paper with the tiny brush.
“But why did you— I mean, you were so close to finishing, weren’t you?” Her mother had always seemed highly intelligent, well read; last week she had come up behind Violet and, peering at the pages of Jane Eyre, said, “Oh, she hasn’t learned about Mr. Rochester’s wife yet?,” ruining the surprise. “You had— Didn’t you want things? Why did you just—stop?”
“I wanted a life with your dad,” she said, and it struck Violet as wildly narrow-minded, old-fashioned, sad.
“But you could have finished college in Iowa, couldn’t you?”
“Almost none of my credits transferred, as it were. And we were broke. And then Wendy arrived.” She spoke as though Wendy had orbed down from a star or staggered through their door on the run from a refugee camp. She’d stopped filling out the form, set down the Wite-Out. “Does it embarrass you, Viol? I’m— I have to say, I don’t know where this is coming from. It just wasn’t in the cards for me. I’ve thought about going back since, but I— Well, things got in the way. I didn’t finish college because I chose not to finish college.”
“But why?” Not going to college, for Violet, was a decision akin to relinquishing a limb.
“What kind of a question is that, sweetheart?”
She was trying to picture the fact that her mother had once been her same age, that she’d once been in high school, the world at her fingertips. She knew her grandmother had died when her mom was a teenager, and that her grandfather had worked a lot, but her mom had plenty of options regardless; she’d grown up with money, certainly more money than they had now, especially with four kids instead of one.
“But didn’t you want more?” she asked.
“More what, Violet? For God’s sake.”
“Like more—for yourself?”
Her mom looked down at the form in front of her, twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “There were times when I wanted that, sure. But you can’t— Sweetie, it all looks so black and white right now, I know. But that’s not how life ends up being. There’s— It’s mostly gray areas. It’s not this versus that. It’s just—things come at you, and you twitch in one direction or the other, and suddenly you’re graduating from medical school.” She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. “Or you’re an exhausted mother of four, trying not to burn the pork chops while your teenage daughter grills you about your lack of tutelage.”
“I didn’t mean— I just meant that I don’t understand why.”
“I’m crazy about your father. I’m nuts about the whole lot of you. That’s why.”
“Because you’re insane?”
Her mother, having regarded her previously with testiness, laughed, hard. “Well, that’s what it comes down to for all of us, isn’t it? God, where did any of you girls come from?” The spell had been broken; her mom had risen again to look in the oven.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When the doorman called Wendy to tell her that her sister was in the lobby, she was momentarily excited, envisioning Violet with her tail between her legs—or, better yet, Violet in combat mode, ready to have a candid conversation with her, finally, for the first time in over a decade. But it was Liza to whom she opened her door a minute later, wan and wide-eyed.
“Hi,” her sister said. “Ryan left me.”
And while she acknowledged the parallel—Violet had said as much to her, fifteen-plus years ago, Rob left me and I’m pregnant—this was, of course, entirely different, and it was actually kind of chilling because she and Liza got along well enough, but they’d never been close, certainly never show-up-in-crisis-unannounced close.
“Strong lede.” She ushered Liza inside. “Do you want—water? Decaf? Arsenic?”
Liza shook her head, folding her legs up Indian-style on the couch. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this. I didn’t have anywhere else to—”
“What’s that?” Wendy said, joking, as ever, to avoid betraying that she was hurt. “I’m your first-choice sounding board in the event of any emergency? I’m the most sage and levelheaded person you know?”
Liza smiled dimly.
She sat down beside her. “What happened?”
“I’m not—sure. A lot of things.”
“Like, he just left, physically, now?”
“Last night. He’s moving to the Upper Peninsula.”
“Shit,” she said. “Why?”
“He has a friend who’s a wind scientist or something.” Her sister shook her head hard, like a little kid adamantly denying blame. “It was— It’s complicated.”
“Does it have anything to do with the fact that you smell like men’s deodorant?”
Liza colored. “I’ve been wearing Ryan’s. The smell of his makes me feel less nauseous than the smell of mine.”
“Nauseated,” Wendy corrected her, their decades-old joke, gentle mockery of their medically precise father. She recalled Miles correcting her in the same way, in the early days of their marriage, and he’d sounded so like her dad that she’d laughingly threatened annulment. “Look at you. Knocked up. Wearing Degree for Men.”
Her sister smiled feebly, but she could tell she was being too jaunty for Liza’s taste. People had this reaction to her more often than not.
“Tell him to come back now. If he doe
sn’t get why that’s important, I’ll tell him for you.” She paused, Miles on her mind now, not that he wasn’t always, not that he hadn’t taken half her mind and left her with half of his. “Miles and I got into a huge fight when I was pregnant. About humidifiers.” She saw herself, across from him in their under-construction nursery, Richard Scarry themed; she’d been not quite as pregnant as Liza was now and was railing at her husband about the potential toxicity of humidified air; Miles had printed an article from the Internet and was waving it in her face, how the air wasn’t toxic but purified, that they’d all sleep better if they put one by the crib. “It was dumb,” she said. “But he left for, like, six hours, at eleven o’clock at night, and when he came home I told him that if he left us, he’d be a biological coward.”
“A biological coward?”
“If you leave someone when she’s pregnant with your child you’re solidifying the fact that you’re evolutionarily weak. Which most men are, in my opinion, but not quite so overtly. But shit happens. The important thing is coming back.”
“I’m not sure I want him coming back,” Liza said quietly. “I’m not sure either of us wants that. I’m starting to think that it— I don’t know. I think maybe this is how it has to be.”
“Pretty fatalistic thinking.”
“I’m trying to be realistic, actually.”
“Could be the same thing.” She squeezed Liza’s knee. “God, it’s hard to be a person in the world, isn’t it?”
Her sister nodded blankly.
“I can’t fucking handle it sometimes,” Wendy continued. “Everything’s so miserable, and we’re all just a bunch of giant narcissistic babies wandering around pretending we know what the fuck we’re doing. Everyone except Mom and Dad, who are so fucking happy they make me want to put my head in the oven.”
“Are you—being serious?” Liza asked, suddenly straight-spined and teacherly.
“Define serious.”
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 30
