Playing House

by Ruby Lang

  “You’re quiet, Ma,” Nat said. “Maybe we should’ve gone to someplace in Manhattan instead. Given you something to complain about, at least.”

  “No,” Ma said. “I just miss it here, that’s all.” She took a deep breath. “Your brother was right all along. That house isn’t right for me. I want to move back to Elmhurst.”

  There was a silence. Well, as much silence as could be obtained with glassware clinking, and the chorus of diners chattering and enjoying their you tiao and fresh soy milk.

  Macy was the first to recover. “But, Ma, your place is beautiful and the neighborhood is so clean. Is it the neighbors? Are they unkind? Is someone making trouble for you?”

  “The neighbors are fine. They are very nice.” She spat that word out. “But I’m not fine. I can’t do my shopping or see people unless you give me a ride—”

  “But the bus—”

  “Hardly ever arrives, and I have to wait in the sun all afternoon for it to come. I never talk to my friends anymore.”

  “You hate your friends,” Nat said.

  “Yes, but I’ve known them all so long.”

  All the adults took a breath right then.

  Macy looked...crushed. Nat was amused. His mother seemed defiant? Excited? Whatever it was, it was an expression he had never seen on her face before.

  As for him, Oliver wasn’t sure what he felt. His mother had said he was right, and although he enjoyed it, it was bewildering, confusing. OK, he mostly wanted to say I told you so, but this wasn’t quite the moment in which his insight would be appreciated.

  “Mom, why don’t we get you driving lessons? And then we could pitch in for a car,” Macy said.

  “I’m old. I don’t want to spend the rest of my time in Queens traffic. I want to be able to walk around while my legs are still good. I want to be able to get good groceries.”

  “But you could buy bulk and put the food in a car and bring them back and that would be cheap.”

  “I live alone, and I’m sixty-seven. Just how much bulk do you think I eat?”

  “I just don’t want to think of you living here again.” Macy sniffed.

  “What does that mean? You grew up here. Everyone knows everyone. There, I fall down. No one hears me screaming for two days behind those triple-pane, burglar-proof windows.”

  “We can get you a—”

  “No. I heard about an apartment. Mrs. Wu and Mrs. Tsai live in buildings that have places I can look at. I won’t be alone.”

  “But where are the kids going to play when we come to visit?”

  “I could go see you.”

  “But—”

  Ma gave Macy a look, and it was as if his sister—and all of them—finally realized that she’d been contradicting her mother for five whole minutes.

  Nat piped up. “Or the girls could come to mine and Oliver’s place. Or we could go out to brunch sometimes. I could take you all out for something expensive and terrible.”

  Even his mother laughed at that. And Oliver hugged Nat for being generous and funny in so many ways.

  Nat said, “Goes to show, we should’ve listened to Oliver when he said it wasn’t a good fit for you.”

  “Yes, Oliver was right,” Ma said. She flicked a glance at her middle son, “Don’t let it go to your head.”

  “When am I ever allowed to let anything go to my head?”

  Nat snickered, and Ma tried to shoot them both stares, but it was hampered by the mischief in Nat’s face and the mutiny in Oliver’s.

  Macy still seemed to be having trouble processing. “I don’t get it. I thought you loved that house. I thought this would be a wonderful move.”

  “I love that house, but I don’t like me in it. It wasn’t great for me, but I understand what you were trying to do. All of you. Things were not easy after your dad left that last time. You are trying to make my life better now. But it is stupid for me to pretend that I like living there, that way, by myself. We can resell for a good price, maybe even make some money for all of you. I already talked to a neighbor who was interested if I ever wanted to put the whole thing up for sale. Maybe, Oliver, you can speak with him because you know the most about the condition of the house and the yard.”

  Macy opened her mouth and shut it.

  Ma added, “It’s better than all of you paying the mortgage for forty years.”

  “But you’ll still have to rent,” Macy muttered.

  “Homeownership isn’t necessarily a good in and of itself,” Oliver couldn’t resist pointing out.

  “I can afford rent. And if I can’t, I’ll ask you kids for help.”

  Nat thumped Oliver on the shoulder.

  Oliver still wasn’t sure what had happened, but it seemed that his mother might have actually been listening to him.

  They drove back to the house soon after. Nat was pulling Macy up the walkway, talking to her softly while the kids ran ahead. Ma stayed and wandered around to the backyard. He couldn’t remember seeing her out here before, although of course, she must have come out, if only to yell at him.

  “It’s pretty,” she said after a while.

  “Don’t tell me you’ll miss it—not now. We don’t want Macy to get her hopes up.”

  Ma snorted. Then she said, “I thought I would enjoy it. It wasn’t just Macy—I thought that this was what I needed out of life. What we were all working for. But it wasn’t like I expected.”

  “Our goals have to change as we adapt to new situations and environments, Ma.”

  “Sounds like something out of your undergrad thesis.”

  “Did you really read that?”

  “I tried.”

  Oliver stood quietly, trying to process that. He hadn’t thought she’d cared enough to attempt to look through his (in retrospect, embarrassingly naive) paper on fair housing in historic preservation districts.

  After a while, she clucked. “You should just say, I told you so.” She added, “Soft-hearted.”

  This time it didn’t sound like an insult—not the way it usually did. Maybe it never had been.

  She went on, “You could be harder on me for wasting time and money. But instead, you are too nice. When you were four years old, we took you kids to the duck pond, and you wanted to feed the ducks your snack. I told you ducks can get their own food. So the next time we go to the pond, you had a pocket full of rice for the ducks. Cooked rice! You were four years old and you planned and kept it in your pocket for a week! All your smartness goes to helping ducks. Too nice. Just like your father.”

  Oliver blinked. “My father was too nice to ducks?”

  “No. He helped others before he helped us. Always scared of letting other people down. When he couldn’t do anything about that, he left.”

  “Well, I’ve certainly never been scared of disappointing you.”

  Unexpectedly, she laughed. “That’s true. Maybe you aren’t nice at all. You never did one thing I wanted for you. Everyone says you are my kindest child. But you are quiet but stubborn. It is a slow strength. Sometimes I don’t recognize your qualities because they’re so different from what I know.”

  “Ma, are you complimenting me?”

  “Tcchhh.”

  He could have said that he was starting a new position with a new company, he might have given her this. In a lot of ways, telling his family was more official than receiving or putting his name on the paperwork—paperwork that still hadn’t arrived. But he kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t yet opened his email because he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the attached offer documents. And, of course, it didn’t help that a wrathful Fay might be waiting at the end of this job.

  All of this flitted through his head before he opened his mouth again. And what came out surprised him.

  “Ma,” he said quietly, “You know, if you think I’m such a failure, then you’re going to
have to admit that you failed when you raised me. But I don’t think you want to because you’re strong and just as stubborn as I am, and you taught me to be resilient. Trust me that I know what I can and should do. Trust the work you put into me.”

  Ma stared at him for one moment, and for that minute, it was like he saw all the annoyance, all the love, all the worry, all the ambition, all the betrayal she’d endured from his shiftless father. All the everything shone in her eyes as she gazed at him.

  Or maybe it was the glare of the sun reflecting in her eyes. She blinked. It was gone. She turned and motioned him to follow. “Let’s go see what trouble your brother is making inside.”

  * * *

  Teddy had been out sick for most of the week leading up to the long weekend. Sulagna wanted another set of eyes on Oliver’s offer papers before she sent them to their new hire, so now the documents sat on Fay’s computer. It didn’t bode well that despite the fact she wasn’t supposed to be involve in Oliver’s hiring, she was overseeing so much of it. She let the file sit there. She let her confusion sit, too.

  On Saturday, Fay resisted the urge to go into the office. Instead, she finally unpacked her apartment. She cleaned out the kitchen cabinets and put in her dishes and plates and bowls. She started a new list of furniture she needed to buy—a couple of stools for the counter, a night table, some shelves, a coffee table—and hired someone to retile her bathroom floor. Her genial super, Roberto, helped install an air-conditioning unit in a living room window and told her he liked what she’d done to the place. The bed she ordered arrived, and she managed to put it together by herself. She smoothed clean sheets over it and arranged the pillows. Her bed looked so comfortable and her room so changed, and she was so tired that she cried and then felt silly about it. It was just a room. She should have done this weeks ago.

  Why hadn’t she done this weeks ago?

  Of course, the previous weekend, the mattress on the floor had made her happy in other ways. Correction: Oliver had made her happy in other ways. It seemed another case of not knowing she was sad until she was hit with how she’d been making allowances for everything she did.

  She told herself that if she got a nightstand, she could have a drawer full of vibrators. Every shape and size and speed and intensity.

  But that wasn’t it.

  What she’d had with Oliver had not been just about sex. If it had been that, then she could have stayed married and gotten all the vibrators, too.

  She sighed and stared at the documents now open again in front of her. Pretty straightforward stuff. She read through the nondisclosure, changed the font, and changed it back. She hated to admit it, but she was almost looking forward to having Oliver work there. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to talk with the people she worked with, to understand how proud she was of her firm. After all of this, she wanted to see Oliver succeed—she knew he would.

  How had she become this pathetic?

  Well, someone had to send these offer papers to the man. And if she didn’t get cracking they wouldn’t get these out.

  She emailed her approval to Sulagna and was relieved to get a reply back almost immediately. She wasn’t the only one checking work email on a Saturday. Thank goodness they’d stopped prying about her relationship with Oliver—unless Oliver had said something in the meeting that had satisfied their curiosity. No. She knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t do that.

  If she, Teddy, and Sulagna had been more organized, less frantic, Oliver would have been working at the firm before she’d ever run into him at that house tour. She would have felt instant relief at seeing him—strong, sharp, a pillar of Oliver—but she would have hesitated to touch him because she would have been something else to him instead of a friend looking for support.

  Maybe there was some way she could fix this.

  The weekend went by, though. Teddy’s whole household had been felled by rotavirus. Fay and Sulagna scrambled to reschedule his meetings and cancel others, make sure projects were staying on schedule. By the time the dust settled, it was Thursday afternoon. Sulagna came into Fay’s office and asked her worriedly, “Have you heard from Oliver?”

  Fay had just been thinking of Oliver. Her couch was supposed to be delivered tomorrow—a coffee table, too. He was probably going to start the week after. She had envisioned taking a picture of her room, with flowers and sunlight and the couch and the old wood floors. She was trying to come up with a quip she could send with this imaginary picture when Sulagna had come to the door.

  Sulagna expected her to still be in contact with Oliver. Fay was doing plenty of chatting with him—in her mind.

  “We sent out the papers a little late,” Sulagna added. “Remember that last prospect we signed who then backed out? Does Oliver think we’re too disorganized? Is he changing his mind? I really hope not. Can I tell you how much we liked him?”

  “When did you send the agreement out?”

  A sheepish hum. “Yesterday. Things got mixed up with Teddy out and with the long weekend and all.”

  “And you haven’t heard from him?”

  “He emailed to say he’d received them, and he’d send them back as soon as he could.”

  “That’s more than reasonable. Let’s wait until Monday. We were late with—well—everything, after all.”

  She could tell that Sulagna had more questions. Why couldn’t Fay pick up the phone and ask Oliver why the delay? Why didn’t she already know? It was clear that Sulagna expected her to give Oliver a little nudge.

  Fay wanted to see him. She had a whole speech prepared and rehearsed for the next time she saw him. She wanted to ask him herself if what they had had been worth anything or if it was just as fake as Darling and Olly. But the efficiency that had returned when Oliver had put her in charge had disappeared once again. She knew what she wanted to say, but she couldn’t say it—not just yet.

  Chapter Eight

  Friday

  Oliver had been up since 4 a.m. reviewing his review of the case study. Spacich Group had appreciated the recommendations he’d made on the project so far. When he finished with this one, they wanted him to start on another. Oliver wouldn’t be able to take more work, of course, if he signed the papers that Fay’s firm had sent him on Wednesday.

  It was a generous offer, but he still couldn’t quite pick up the pen and put his name on the dotted line. He was getting used to being in limbo, so another afternoon of silence wasn’t going to hurt him or anyone else.

  As if reading his thoughts, Bill from Spacich called him. “Oliver, I just wanted to follow up with you again. We have another project that we’d like you to keep in mind. And, just between you and me, with your knowledge of preservation planning, we’re hoping that we can depend on you for a little while longer?”

  Oliver leaned back in the dining room chair he’d been using at his makeshift desk. Was Bill—was he sounding worried?

  “It’s always good to have some continuity on these projects,” he was saying, which made it annoying that they couldn’t out and out hire Oliver.

  But of course, Bill probably wasn’t in a position to make all those decisions even though it sounded like they needed someone like Oliver. Welcome to the new economy.

  He looked at his phone.

  “Oliver? Oliver? Are you still with me?” Bill’s voice came anxiously across the line.

  Oliver laughed a little. He said something sincere yet noncommittal about how he’d enjoyed this project with Bill and how he hoped to continue to have a great working relationship, and something about Oliver’s tone of voice or his words made Bill huff out a sigh of relief before they both hung up.

  But Oliver sat and stared at his phone for a little while longer.

  Granted, he was not the corporate hotshot that his brother was—but could it be that his skills were in demand? He sat back.

  He could make a decent living doi
ng what he was doing now.

  He was making a living.

  He leaped up from his chair and started to pace. The thought didn’t exactly startle him—the numbers had always been at the top of his head, but he hadn’t admitted it to himself until this moment.

  Being in business for himself wasn’t what he’d been working toward—it wasn’t close to what he thought he’d wanted out of life by this point and maybe that was what had him fooled for so long. When he wasn’t worried about what he was supposed to want and what other people wanted for him, he liked this. He wanted to know what Bill had in mind for him. He wanted to know what other firms might have for him.

  Ideas solidified at the back of his mind. No one could say he’d been lazy. No one could say he hadn’t been trying this whole time. He’d been working all along—on projects he’d enjoyed—just not maybe in ways that his family, or say, Fay, understood.

  No, that wasn’t true. Fay understood him better than anyone, because she knew what mattered to him.

  She mattered to him, too, in so many small and big ways. But since he couldn’t live in hope or expectation that what they’d had for those brief moments could be salvaged, at least he should figure out the best way for both of them to go forward.

  He could fix this one thing, make it better for both of them, even if he couldn’t mend the other.

  He started to shake his head, laughing occasionally at himself as he grabbed his laptop and started typing, formulating plans about how he could work with other companies or get in on other projects through the city. His notes were in all capitals. Clearly, he really wanted to shout at someone about this. Luckily, his phone rang and he picked up, ready to shout at the next person, not even bothering to see who was calling.

  It was Fay.