Strangers at the Feast (5 page)

Eleanor thought she’d endure a few years of mild scoffing, after which they’d return to being best friends.

Once, she surprised Ginny with a Hello Kitty doll. “Bunny rabbit, look! Remember how much you used to love this?”

Ginny looked confused. “Thanks, Mom. That’s sweet.” And she stood on her bed and set the doll on top of her bookcase.

“
The Sound of Music
is on tonight.”

“I have homework.”

“You work too hard.”

“That’s a very unparental thing to say.”

“Well, you used to beg me to let you stay up and watch the whole thing!”

“I was like nine.”

Eleanor could not prevent a long sigh from escaping her. “Ginny, you’ve changed so much.”

“Mom, isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”

Sometimes, if Ginny was whispering on the phone in her room, Eleanor had the awful sense her daughter was bad-mouthing her.
Would you believe my mother wants me to watch a musical?
A few years earlier, there had been no friends! It was only the two of them. But with adolescence, Ginny shed her plumpness, her braces came off, and she was becoming an attractive young woman. She no longer needed Eleanor, and the betrayal hurt.

The ache of losing her own mother had been so deep, Eleanor could not fathom the ease with which Ginny dismissed her. Didn’t she understand that nothing in life could ever replace a mother?

With high school, their relationship worsened.

At the dinner table, when Ginny talked about classes she would grasp her cheeks in horror if Eleanor accidentally revealed that she did not know the location of the Red Sea or the name of the third president of the United States.

“The electromagnetic force, Mom. It’s only what holds everything in the world together. Did you know that Gaby Towers’s mother is an astrophysicist?”

“Did you know that Betty Lundberg’s daughter never talks down to her mother?”

In college, Ginny would return for the holidays with gift-wrapped books for Eleanor:
The History of the World in 500 Pages; Understanding Politics; The Modern Woman’s Guide to Liberation.

As Eleanor joined the family by the Christmas tree, wearing a new holiday sweater, her hair carefully pinned up, Ginny would say, “Mom, you don’t always have to wear makeup. Natural is pretty. You don’t have to set your hair every night. It’ll fry the ends.”

Ginny was nineteen, at the height of her beauty, the age Eleanor had been when she met Gavin. How glittery the world had seemed then. How Eleanor had radiated self-assurance, certain of a blessed future.

So she sat, she listened, she smiled at her daughter’s confidence. Because she knew, sadly, it would not last.

DENISE

What an utterly stupid plan, Denise thought as she unpacked Laura’s dolls and stuffed animals in the crowded living room.

Esmerelda at the school had told her that the Spanish phrase for in-laws was
familia politica
—your political family. So you had to play politician.

“Ginny, really,” she said, “how great to be here.”

“Was traffic bad?” Ginny asked.

For days Denise had been working herself into a state of agitation over the prospect of driving forty-five minutes in heavy traffic to eat her sister-in-law’s gelatinous stuffing and runny mashed potatoes that as far as she was concerned, the whole day was already a flop. So clearly had she envisioned the brake lights of the interstate that she had only the vaguest recollection of their uneventful thirty-minute drive from Stamford.

“Bumper-to-bumper,” she lied.

“Well, you poor kids,” Ginny said to Brian and Brandon, leaning over with outstretched arms to tickle them. “Trapped in that big car!” People without children were always tickling other people’s children. It was their sole kid trick. Like rubbing a dog’s ears. “Well, you’re here now and it’s going to be fun, fun, fun.”

Denise sat on the couch, relieved and amazed that for once she didn’t have any chores. She wondered if the afternoon might actually turn out nicely. After all, in just three months Ginny had bought
a house and adopted a child—things no one, not even Douglas (who overlooked her every flaw), would have imagined from her.

“So everything’s in the oven?” she asked.

“In a few minutes I’ll just put the turkey in… Kidding! Fifteen minutes per pound, fifteen minutes per pound. It’s my new mantra. That bird has been in since nine thirty this morning.”

Denise tried to laugh. “Mantras are good!”

She and Ginny always spoke like local news coanchors making small talk between segments: forced camaraderie.

As far as sisters-in-law went, Denise liked Ginny. Ginny had a good heart and had given a ridiculously long but touching toast at their wedding about the historical significance of marriage. Both times Denise was in labor Ginny had taken off from work and waited at the hospital with Douglas.

But they had little in common.

Denise looked around the room, taking in the cracked ceiling, a rotted windowsill, a buckled oak door frame. The floor was scratched and scarred as though a dozen feral cats had fought there. It had the wrecked feel of a place where she had, in her younger years, spent too many late nights, and the occasional morning: a frat house.

“It’s amazing how fast you moved in,” Denise said. “Our first house, God, we looked for months, and then it took a millennium to close.”

“Who knew preforeclosures move like lightning?”

Denise did. The thought of people falling so far behind on their mortgage payments they had to pack up their home in weeks made her sick.

“Whatever you do, do not let Douglas talk you into flipping this place,” she said. “He gets dangerously optimistic.” She could hear her husband thudding around in the basement, no doubt measuring spaces to install a kitchenette, built-in bookshelves, track lighting. She’d long wondered if there was a name to describe his affliction: renovation addiction, home investmania. Recently, at Parents’ Profession Day, he told the fourth-graders he was a “real-estate mogul.”
Which Denise learned secondhand, from her sons, because she was busy working her nutritionist job at Jefferson High School to make their mortgage payments.

“The only thing I ever flip is my finger.” Ginny grinned. “To social conservatives.”

Denise was a far cry from conservative, but never in a million years would she try a stunt like Ginny’s. Having a lousy husband, even a husband who considered himself a real-estate mogul while on the brink of bankruptcy, was better than raising a child solo. And adopting a seven-year-old from India? Denise had seen a
20/20
special on orphans who went years without being held and ended up setting fire to bathroom curtains, dropping hamsters down the disposal. All the noble intentions in the world wouldn’t stop a kid like that from taking a paring knife to your throat while you slept.

“Where is the little one?” she asked.

Ginny’s head cocked somewhat defensively. “Getting ready. I’d better check on her.”

As Ginny disappeared upstairs, Denise watched Brandon and Brian—one donning a feathered headdress, the other a cowboy hat—run around the room in gleeful circles. Brian tapped his fingers to his mouth, Brandon swung a shoelace lasso.

Her sons were identical twins, and even Denise couldn’t explain why Brian was obsessed with sailing, scuba diving, Jacques Cousteau, and anything else ocean related, while Brandon had a disturbing passion for tae kwon do, horror films, and slingshots.Nature? Nurture? There were a gazillion variables. After all, Denise was the only member of three generations of her family to escape their blue-collar neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

Laura splayed herself across a rainbow rag rug and flipped through a book called
Images of Colonial Women at Work.
“I want chickens,” Laura said with a sigh. “And I want one of these…” She pointed to a picture of an old woman hunched over a loom.

“Sweetie, that’s toiling. No one should ever want to toil.”

Denise knew about toiling. She’d had a dull full-time job for six years. Add to that the exhausting show she had to put on for Douglas’s family that everything was fine—it left her with little desire to now feign enthusiasm for Ginny’s hosting skills.

Ginny was good at describing how Colonial women made soap from bone marrow, or telling the story of the lost colony of Roanoke. Even her dating anecdotes were amusing. But whipping up a nine-person holiday meal was not within Ginny’s skill set. At the previous year’s Thanksgiving she’d shown up with a three-hundred-page report on the birth-control methods of indentured servants. She sat reading, her mammoth wool socks propped up on a mahogany butler table, while Eleanor and Denise slaved over the meal. Every few minutes Ginny looked up (oblivious to the platters that needed to be carried out), slid off her purple cat-eye glasses, and said, “Nobody show me a jar of apple-cider vinegar for the next twenty-four hours.”

Of course, the new culture of overacceptance forbade anything resembling honesty. Denise wasn’t supposed to acknowledge that anyone was bad at anything. She saw it in the schools; children were taught that there was no such thing as losing, that there was no wrong way to do things. Incorrect answers to factual questions were respected:
Well, in some ways, yes, you could say that the South won the Civil War…

At a recent parent-teacher conference, Denise asked the fourth-grade teacher if she would encourage Brian to stop picking his nose.

“His nose picking bothers you?” the teacher asked, scribbling something in her notebook. “Why is that? Do you want him to feel
ashamed
of his behavior?”

“Yes!” Denise couldn’t believe the conversation. “Shame, mortification, whatever it takes. Nose picking is not a form of expression, Ms. Persimmon. Neither is ass picking. Why on earth would I want my son to keep picking his nose?”

“Mrs. Olson”—the teacher closed her notebook, uncrossed her
legs, and slid forward in her chair—“is there by any chance a lot of stress in your household right now?”

Denise had had enough. She grabbed her purse, made for the door. “Listen, I don’t need my children to be rocket scientists or Nobel Prize winners. But my job as a mother is to make sure they are basically fit for society. I do not want them to be nose pickers. Can you manage at least that?”

Denise accepted that she might lose her house, her savings, her husband—but she would
not
lose her grasp on reality.

She didn’t need to pretend Ginny was going to pull off this meal. And in truth, this day had given Denise a point on which to focus her annoyance, an outlet for her anxiety that had permitted her, briefly, to overlook the larger mess she and Douglas were in. For weeks she had been venting to friends and colleagues about having to haul ass in the middle of the day to Mamaroneck to her sister-in-law’s for Thanksgiving. In the school cafeteria, she had ranted about the idiotic details of the plan.

Later, when Denise learned who the boys were and where they went to school, she would be forced to admit to the police that someone perhaps had overheard her. She would wonder whether her fierce conviction that the day would be a disaster had, in fact, caused the disaster.

GINNY

Upstairs, in the small pink room, Ginny tiptoed toward the sleeping girl.

Asleep. Again.

She’d been to three doctors in the past month, each of whom had run tests of Priya’s blood and urine. They all said the same thing: Priya was fit as a fiddle. At first Ginny had thought it was jet lag, then maybe lingering malnutrition. But she’d recently come to accept that, from her own experience, she knew exactly what sleeping all day meant: depression.

“Sweetheart?” She stroked her daughter’s shoulder and the girl let out a congested sigh. Wisps of hair clung to her forehead. “You need to get dressed and come downstairs now. Your dress is hanging right over there.”

Priya opened her eyes—red, as though she’d been crying again—and looked to the maroon dresser, which Ginny had painted with a border of sunflowers. Above it hung a framed bright blue map of the world. The entire room was the product of dozens of hours of scraping wallpaper, plastering holes, painting walls, and glossing moldings. Ginny had hired someone to lay new carpet—fuchsia with a bathmat-like soft pile—but the rest of decorating she’d done herself.

“Everyone is dying to meet you.”

Priya offered a resolute nod, the way she did each morning as Ginny pried her from sleep. She swung her bare legs over the side of the bed, slid on her white slippers, and immediately began straightening the sheets.

“I’ll do that,” said Ginny, stilling her arm. But as usual, Priya insisted on her morning tidying.

At least they had a routine.

It was hard to believe that only three months earlier they’d been flying back from India. That eternal flight. Ginny’s eyelids blinking anxiously against the dry cabin air as she swigged four mini Merlots. Across the aisle a middle-aged woman intently turned the pages of a mass-market thriller beneath her reading lamp, occasionally glancing over at Priya, who carefully tore pictures of perfume bottles from the in-flight magazine while frowning at the flashing wing lights. Ginny had expected Priya to be terrified, flailing at the rumble of the beverage cart, crying during takeoff. Instead it was Ginny who was sickened by nerves, a thick tangle that had amassed when, weeks earlier, she’d stood before an Indian district court and won guardianship of a seven-year-old girl.

In the taxi to Ginny’s apartment, Priya’s excited breaths left an oval of steam on the window as she gaped at Manhattan, the gleam of towering glass and metal, sharp and spiky, like a forest of cutlery.

Ginny chattered nervously, explaining how it had all once been farmland, that just three hundred years ago it had looked like parts of India.

Finally, with relief, Ginny lifted their bags and stepped into her apartment. Then, like a fugitive, she bolted the door. Priya pattered around the furniture, eyeing paper clips, bookends, letter openers, pens, scissors, thumbtacks. She climbed precariously onto Ginny’s elliptical trainer. Oh God, thought Ginny, the place was a death trap. There were no bars on the windows. And what on earth was tucked away in all her drawers? Expired antibiotics, bottles of melatonin, condoms?