“Really, Anna,” Lily had said. She’d been trying to sound knowing and world-weary, but the truth was she hadn’t given the matter much thought. She hadn’t necessarily considered that sex was something she was going to keep doing; she’d been focused entirely on the hurdle of
virginity loss, and being questioned about birth control now felt like being immediately grilled about postgraduation plans when you’d just come running into the room with a college acceptance letter. “If you are going to have any fun in college, Anna-Banana,” said Lily, “you are going to have to learn to relax.”
She and Anna had been closer when they were small—back then, at least, they had shared a serious interest. Like all children, Lily and Anna were generally bored by things that had happened before they were born—but the subject of Janie was, of course, the great exception, and it consumed them with a curiosity that was terrible and electric and shameful and insatiable. It was also, Lily realized now, probably normal, though they hadn’t known that then. All they’d known at the time was that their inquisitiveness came out as cruelty. Lily had learned this the hard way when, at the age of four or five, she’d asked Maureen something horrifically blunt about Janie—something about the fate of her dead body, she thought, though she was not totally sure now and shrank from trying very hard to remember. The visceral, involuntary pain on Maureen’s face in that moment had shocked Lily, as had the awful curdled quality of her voice as she answered, and Lily had suddenly realized that Maureen was very, very sad and was trying not to blame her for it. Lily could still remember the desolation of wondering—for the first of many, many times—if everything was more complicated than it seemed.
And so, because they loved their parents and did not want to hurt them, Lily and Anna had stopped asking questions. But their natural-born preadolescent morbidity—squashed and suppressed as it was—could not disappear entirely, and sometimes it came out in strange ways.
“We could die,” Lily had whispered to Anna late one night. She was seven and Anna was five. It was the summer Lily slept in her Mulan sleeping bag every single night and pretended to camp. “Either of us. Don’t you know that?”
“No, we couldn’t.”
“Janie died. We could die any time.”
“Janie was very sick,” said Anna sternly. This was the family’s compulsively repeated mantra—to this day, Lily could hear it recited in an eerie, almost singsong chorus:
Janie was very sick, Janie was very sick—
and Anna was prone to slavishly parroting whatever Maureen and Andrew said, which Lily found annoying even when they were very small.
“Either of us could
get
sick, though,” said Lily.
“Shut up,” said Anna, her voice quavery. Even when they were little, Lily hadn’t really known what would upset Anna. She had actually envied other girls who seemed to know exactly what would make their sisters sad, and what would make them angry, and what would make them tattle, and what would overwhelmingly gross them out. Lily didn’t know those things; Anna was like an egg on a spoon that she was always dropping, even when she didn’t mean to.
“We won’t get sick,” Anna had repeated fiercely, over and over, that night and many nights after. “We won’t. We won’t.”
And she was right. They had not.
Lily squinted at the phone. The basement’s artificial light was somehow shriller than usual, and she found herself dialing Andrew’s number. Her father was either in on a Saturday evening or he was out, and either possibility had vaguely gruesome implications. Lily waited. An interminable row of numbers would be popping up on her father’s caller ID. Lily could still feel dregs of the woman’s spit on her cheek, though, of course, that was impossible. Andrew picked up the phone.
“Lily!”
“Hello, Father.”
“To what do I owe the honor?”
“Just thought I’d check in on you.” Lily had called him, but now she had to pretend that the calling was for reasons of business, not pleasure. “Make sure you weren’t having too much fun without me.”
“Clearly you needn’t worry. What about you? Shouldn’t you be out with that guy?”
Sebastien. Lily had mentioned him in a postcard ten days ago, feeling the thrill of the unconventional spelling and capitalization, giddy with the sophisticated joy of sending little stamps of excitement into
the dull slog of the lives of the people she’d left behind. Now she wished she hadn’t said anything.
“Do you think it’s morally problematic to be on study abroad in Argentina?” said Lily.
“Ah, talk to your mom about this,” said Andrew. “You know she’s the only real Marxist in the family.”
The fondness in Andrew’s voice as he said this made Lily wonder, for the trillionth time, why her parents had split up—though she had to marvel over their inability to do anything, even divorce, with any real verve. It was very hard to tell how bad their marriage had been, exactly, as it was staggering around its terminal lap. It was certainly true that, for all their espoused progressivism, the family seemed to adhere basically to the national statistics about labor divisions in housework: Andrew seemed to make everything marginally dingier and dirtier without really trying as he moved about the house; Maureen swept quietly along behind him with a similarly effortless-seeming tidiness and order. But Lily knew it couldn’t be that simple. There was a story that Maureen and Andrew told—sometimes separately, sometimes jointly, but always in a tone suggesting profound symbolic content—that Lily thought might contain some clues: Toward the end of Janie’s life, apparently, the next-door hippie neighbors had brought over some crystals, and had stood on the porch (in Maureen’s telling), smug, serene, beaming with the beautiful obviousness of the solution. Over the years, the crystals had become some strange and dark and utterly unfunny inside joke between Maureen and Andrew; whenever one of them turned to the other and said, emphatically, those
crystals
, it was clear that something tedious and adult was going to go sailing right over the heads of Lily and Anna, who knew better than to try to really probe the matter.
“I tried,” said Lily. “She wasn’t home. I’m stuck with you.”
“Go dig latrines in Mongolia after you graduate,” said Andrew. “What the hell else are you going to do anyway? You’re a philosophy major.”
“And women’s studies.”
“They’re still regarding that as an area of academic inquiry?”
“I feel so useless.”
“Well, you are useless, Lil. But the Peace Corps will still be there later. You might as well have fun now. Are you having fun?”
Lily felt deflated at the use of this word, “fun.” She hadn’t thought of Buenos Aires in terms of “fun”; she’d thought of it in terms of “transformative purity.” But she realized now with a minor shock that it had been fun—the exploring, the psychic revelation of language acquisition, the drinking, the literary preening, the growing sense of herself as a fashionable waif in a foreign film. It had all been very fun until, somehow, it wasn’t.
“Fun has been had,” she said sadly.
“Well. Don’t let mistakes get made. Listen, I’ve got to run. Garry Kasparov is on CNN in a minute.”
“You love that guy.”
“I
love
that guy. But listen—you’re doing all right? Everything’s fine?”
“Everything’s all right, everything’s fine. Blow Garry a kiss for me.”
Andrew was gone, but Lily kept holding the phone to her ear, listening to the particular silence of a concluded phone call, staring right into the light above her until she saw black striations in her vision. She thought about the shrieking woman in the doorway. She tried to play back in her head what the woman had said, tried to retroactively unravel and translate it, but it was no use. The woman had been indecipherable, and would be incomprehensible now, always. Lily hung up the phone.
That night, Lily was on her best behavior with the Carrizos. She showed up to dinner early, asking Beatriz if she needed help with anything—though she was sure Beatriz could see her visibly hoping that help would not be needed—and decided to make a particular point to be more gracious to Katy. With Carlos, she knew, it would be easy: All she had to do to make him like her even better was to talk even more—
about the plotting of multinational corporations, the undeniably imperialistic ambitions of the United States, the dastardly scheming of the IMF. Lily was dimly aware that she did not strictly believe all of this stuff—a lot of it was the kind of talk you engage in to socialize, to announce your well-honed moral identity—but she was certainly not going to quibble with an actual citizen of a developing economy about the intentions of the IMF. And at any rate, Lily was not wholly sure that Carlos really believed in all of it entirely, either. He regarded conversation as sport, and Lily loved anyone who regarded anything in life as sport (except for actual sports).
“Nobody even believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” she said to Carlos, to start things off. She poured herself a glass of wine.
“Nobody,” he said forcefully. “That’s the big deception. Now everyone knows they were wrong, but what nobody understands is that even
they
never thought they were right.”
Lily nodded cheerfully. Maybe you could see Carlos’s depression underneath it all, though it was so different from the resigned white-knuckled terminal WASP depression of her own family. Carlo’s sadness wasn’t the grim death march of Maureen’s—who had basically made a studied and understated decision to simply never enjoy anything again, ever. Instead, it seemed to push Carlos toward a fatal indifference that almost seemed like a kind of freedom. He probably laughed as much as he did anything.
“George W. Bush’s unresolved daddy issues are the only reason you guys were even there,” Carlos was saying.
Katy and Beatriz stayed mostly quiet when politics was discussed, which it always was. This made Lily vacillate between the dark suspicion that Katy was politically ignorant and the even darker suspicion that she might be politically moderate. Beatriz, she figured, was just bored of Carlos, which Lily could understand.
“The felling of the Twin Towers was a symbolic castration of America,” said Lily. “That’s why the U.S. took it so hard.” Somehow the mood at the table was darkening. Beatriz was grimacing into her steak with
slightly more than her usual amount of exasperated chagrin. Lily looked at Katy for backup, but Katy stared at her levelly with what Lily thought might be some degree of tired amusement. Lily was alone.
The conversation bobbled onward, and Lily found herself issuing ever less provocative assertions and ever more lukewarm assents until she noticed that Beatriz had cleared the table and Katy had left the room and all that was left in the wine bottle was a few grainy ruby-red drips.
Afterward Lily found Katy on the bunk bed, reading. Lily stared at her for a moment, wondering what kind of perfect thoughtlessness could buy you such serenity. “What’s that about?” she said.
“Governmental secrecy about inflation rates,” said Katy, not looking up.
Lily didn’t mean to say anything, and then she did. “Why don’t you ever talk?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you ever say anything at dinner? Don’t you have any opinions on anything?”
Katy put down the article. “You’re not serious.”
“How would I know if you did? How would I know if you had a single opinion in your head?”
“There is no possible way you want me in that conversation.”
“Of course I do.”
“No. You don’t.”
“You’re never going to change anyone’s mind by sitting there and rolling your eyes.”
“I wasn’t rolling my eyes.”
“You were. You were rolling your eyes as far back in your head as they would go.” Lily could feel the wine sluicing somewhere back in her skull. She hiccupped. “I think you never want to say anything because you just can’t stand to have someone mad at you. You just want to make sure everyone likes you. That’s all you care about.”
“Better than just wanting to feel right all the time, even if you’re not actually doing anything to fix anything.”
“I was the vice president of Amnesty International!” said Lily, throwing her shoe at Katy. It missed her by a wide margin. “I organized three petitions for a Free Palestine!”
Katy looked at the flip-flop appraisingly, then picked it up and handed it to Lily. “Calm down,” said Katy. “We don’t need to fight about it.”
There was a pause. Lily hoped she looked less angry than she actually was.
“Maybe you’re right,” said Katy soothingly. “It’s just—I don’t know. I don’t think they’re good conversations. I don’t think they’re good for Carlos. He gets so drunk. He’s so depressed.”
“I am so sick of everyone being so depressed,” said Lily. She was. Good Lord, how she was. Sometimes she felt like her own family was essentially the world’s most passive suicide cult. Couldn’t her host family at least have a different set of problems? “Doesn’t anyone understand that you have to
try
not to be depressed?” said Lily. “You have to make it a marginal priority? You can’t just get a free pass on your whole reality because you’re so depressed? We’re all going to be dead one day. We’re all in the same boat.”
Katy let this pass, and Lily could hear what she’d said swirl around the room in widening loops. She felt suddenly wretched and childish. She felt, suddenly and for the first time, like she wanted to go home.
“Why is he so depressed, though?” Lily said after a while.
Katy gave her a marveling look. “They’re being sued,” she said. “He’s losing the business. Don’t you pay attention to anything?”
The night after visiting the jail, Andrew dreamed of Lily. In his dream she was swaddled in an incubator, with tubes running in and out of her ears and eyes and nose. She was soft featured and infantile, yet the size of his adult daughter, and when she spoke—although Andrew could not understand what she said—she spoke with his adult Lily’s low voice, clear and pleading, until he woke up.
Andrew was disappointed with himself. His whole life, his dreams had been dispiritingly common, crudely metaphorical, and always right on schedule: He’d dreamed of falling, he’d dreamed of unnoticed nakedness, he’d dreamed of forgetting about a class he was signed up to take, and later, to teach. He would have liked to at least be a little more original in a crisis.