The Inseparables (8 page)

Jerry was the only person who she talked to about this. He knew, for instance, that at the end she had dressed Harold's body for the burial. Had put him in his favorite socks. His favorite shoes. These were the most impossible things to consider. Why did he need shoes? Where was he walking to? They had left her alone in the mortuary to do this because she'd begged. She had stood there, in the frigid room, and she had held his foot in her hand for the longest time. They made her wear gloves. She took the sheet off his face so she could see him, and touch his cheek, even though it was horrible.

Outside, the grass was white and covered from the porch to the road and from the road to the river. A yellow birdhouse remained low in the crook of an alder that went blood orange in October. It was here when she'd arrived, a craft project made by the children of a previous owner. She had no plans to take it with her. The speed of life felt cruel and unreal.

“I remember the first time I ever saw Harry,” Jerry said. “Seven years old. He was wearing a sweatshirt with his name on it. We were at baseball practice.”

He did this often lately. Talked like this. Repacked her husband's life. At first it had bothered her. The grief of others only made the absence worse, she had thought. But now she was not so sure.

“He was awful at it. Maybe the worst in town.”

She laughed. “How did I not know he played baseball?”

“Probably because he managed to get himself hurt every game. It was incredible. The ball always got him right in the mouth.”

She laughed harder. “In the mouth?”

“It's how he lost his baby teeth,” he said. “I swear. Baseballs to the mouth. How many baby teeth do you have? Twenty? That's how many baseballs he took to the face.”

She squeezed her hands together into a fist, both to warm them and as a matter of self-preservation. She didn't know about his teeth. He had all these stories she did not know.

After the restaurant closed, Harold had written her letters, mostly love letters, but not all of them. He hid them around the house. It was a kind of game. It took her a year to find them all. They were often the simplest things, folded pieces of plain paper.
To you,
they read,
from me.
She continued to find them after he died. She had told Jerry this, which was a mistake, because every time she saw him he asked if any more had turned up.

“Nothing?”

“I've found them all,” she said.

“You checked in his suitcase?” he asked.

“It's just a suitcase,” she said, nodding and lying. “Now what do I do about this thing?” she asked, meaning the weathervane.

“I'm guessing you're not going to let it go.”

“I don't want to say that I really need that money.”

“But you really need the money.”

She wanted to explain more, but he very likely knew already. Jerry always asked how she was. Not
How have you been?
but
How are you now?
He knew the language of grief. The delusions involved, the imagined visitation of spirits. The density of loss. He knew about the urgent importance of having something, anything, to do. She was terrified, was usually the answer. Everything now is so goddamned different. Companionship, partnership, stability, money, family, shelter. She was trying to make that list shorter by one.

“The funny thing,” she said, “is that I would have thrown it out. It wasn't worth anything to me. It was junk. Rusted metal. But if it's worth something to someone else, I'll gladly profit.”

“You check all the boxes in there?”

She felt herself smiling involuntarily. “Yes I did.”

“Well, you could call the police, but they won't find it. Not in this town. Those guys are basically professional traffic supervisors.”

“I don't want to call the police,” she said.

Jerry looked around the room. “This whole place is so rickety. I don't imagine it's hard to get in.”

“Don't creep me out,” she said.

“One of those realty guys probably took it,” he said.

“I had that thought, too.”

“You had so many of them in here.”

“So assuming somebody took it, where do people go to sell stolen things?”

“You're asking me?” he said, laughing. “I'm a gentleman! Why would I know these places?”

“Because deep inside you're an unscrupulous schmuck and you know these things.”

He let out a big loud laugh. “Harold told you this?”

“You're saying you're not? I've known you forty years.”

He shrugged. “Give me a day to think on it.”

Mendelssohn's Third Symphony played on the stereo while he refilled his pipe. The music made her feel like she was at the end of a very dramatic World War II movie. He loosened his necktie. On the coffee table was her lease for the new apartment. He'd come with her to sign it. All this time she had figured she'd go back to the city. But she could not go too far afield, it turned out. Four decades and she had become stuck in orbit here. Aveline with its wide boulevards, its brick downtown, its Chinese food. Harold's town had become her town.

They were quiet awhile and then finally he turned to her.

“Are the new people keeping
any
part of the house?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“They're going to bulldoze the whole thing,” she said. “Every inch of the place. All of it.”

She had sold the house to a development company that wanted the land and nothing else. Jerry was the only person who knew this. The money was barely enough to clear the debts and keep her afloat for a year. After that, she had no idea what she would do.

She sat quietly. The house was warm.

Outside, wind tore over the small hills near the river.

Lydia brought all of her belongings out to the car. Having been given only a few minutes to pack for the week, she'd made the quick decision, standing over her tiny dormitory-issue mattress, that she would not come back. Why stay and endure the humiliation? Why allow herself the torment? It would only get worse. She put her phone on the nightstand. She worried that every buzz signaled a new anonymous burst of harassment.
Lydia, baby, come suck me off. Hey slut, where you at? Why aren't you on my dick? Lydia, baby, why don't you___?
(Any sex act could do here; she'd received every possible permutation.)

Thankfully it was lunch hour and the building was empty and she could pack in private. The dormitories for girls—never women—were named for things perfectly anodyne and sweet. Periwinkle. Kansas. Rosewater. In the brochure pictures, a group of girls had lingered on the beds here, perfectly made up, with salon-diffused hair and luscious-looking mohair shawls, every one of them holding hardcover editions of
Learn How to Speak Mandarin for Business.
Surely these were Danish catalog models, she assumed, brought in by a PR firm to reinforce some idea of what boarding school was supposed to be like—namely, full of tall blond girls, excellent on the field hockey pitch, fluent in French, and destined for Harvard or Oxford. When she arrived, she was shocked to find that they were real—all of them, every girl, and all of it: the conversational-grade Mandarin, the mohair, the diffusers, the blondness. Just yesterday, she'd mistakenly been on the receiving end of a mass message in which these same girls amended a version of her naked torso with their own diagrammatic commentary. Crude arrows pointed to blemishes on her chest:
acne or crabs?
Arrows to her nipples:
ew, just ew.

Her parents had parked on the lawn. Her dad waited outside, leaning against the car door in his favorite camel hair overcoat, looking stunned, maybe nauseated, possibly mortified, while her mother waited inside, the engine running and the radio on. They were, it was obvious, unwilling to share space with each other for any longer than they needed to. Her father wore a sweater the color of moss. It was too large for him. Heartbreak had shrunken him, maybe.

Her dad, seeing the amount of luggage, knew immediately. “You're just going to quit? Just like that? Give up?”

“Looks that way,” Lydia said.

Her mother got out. There were dark rings beneath her eyes. She was famous in the hospital for her capacity to go without sleep.

“What's happening?” her mother asked.

“Lydia's dropping out,” her dad said. “She brought all of her luggage. Look. She's just giving up.”

Lydia dropped the bags. “Call it whatever you want. I just can't come back to this place,” she said. She held up her phone. “If you're interested in why, maybe you can read the wonderful, gentle tributes my classmates are writing me.”

“But you got a scholarship,” he said. “Think about that. Think about what that means.”

“It means that I applied for a scholarship and they accepted me.”

“Think harder,” he said.

She was used to this routine. It was her father's way of dispensing with his guilt, which was considerable and legendary. White guilt, male guilt, househusband guilt, ex–corporate attorney guilt, owner of a sports utility guilt, soon-to-be recipient of alimony guilt.

“You took the spot from some poor kid somewhere who's dying to come study whatever it is you're studying.”

“
Star Wars
and fascism?”

“Yes!”

“Good news for that poor kid! There's an open spot in my Leni Riefenstahl seminar!”

“You're just going to let them bully you?” he asked.

She swiped at the phone. The screen brightened. She selected at random.
“This ho Lydia has the tits of a ten-year-old boy with a peanut allergy.”

Her father threw up his hands. “What does that even mean? That's nonsense. Peanuts? You can't let that bother you.”

“You want me to read you more?”

Her mother stepped in. “Let the girl take her goddamn bags home with her if that's what she wants.” She hoisted the biggest of the suitcases and tossed it into the back of the Toyota. Slamming the door shut, she looked at him. “Get in the car.” Then at her. “Put your phone away. Don't torture yourself.”

Her parents had told her they were living apart by way of a letter—two sheets of paper in the same envelope, one from her mother, one from her father. Not that it came as a surprise. She had tracked the progress of their various therapies and last-ditch attempts at love with the same energy that children in the forties expended to track the progress of the Allies against the Axis. When she'd received the letters, she had no idea how to react to such an old-fashioned touch. Her father's handwriting was bold and careful. Her mother's was quick, and she had used red ink, which must have meant something. Lydia had tried to divine some larger psychic meaning or hurt or honesty in the differences of penmanship. They were the first actual letters Lydia had ever received. She didn't know what to do with them afterward. Do I keep them? she asked her roommates. What do you do with real letters?

It was a fact that she had taken her mother's side in the split. Maybe her father knew it. Not that she knew anything about relationships or cohabitation or intimacy. She had kissed one boy in her life, a distressing statistic for a twenty-first-century fifteen-year-old, and that boy was Charlie Perlmutter. They had done something that was maybe almost dating for a little less than two months, a period of time in which she had confided in him, in which she had deigned to touch her tongue to his, and had experienced something that she was loath to admit was almost fun. And then, the moment he tried to take off her top, it had ended. All week she had wanted to confront him. Through intermediaries, they'd arranged to meet by Lake Rose last night at midnight, and dutifully, she'd snuck out of her dorm and skulked her way down to the water. Her willingness to do these things for him felt troubling. She had no idea what she would say to him aside from
Why, why would you, what's wrong with you, I trusted you, that's why I kissed you, what's your fucking malfunction?
These, she guessed, were not questions he would be able to answer. Nor would he ever be likely to tell her why it was that she had momentarily found him attractive when it was so clear now that he belonged to that certain species of teenage assholes whose one clear goal was to sexually coerce her. She waited for an hour. She contemplated the relative advantages of violence versus diplomacy. It didn't matter: he never showed.

The family drove in silence. Soon they were on the highway. Her father drove with both hands on the wheel. The car was cool. The windows fogged. Lydia sat in the middle of the back three seats, equidistant from her parents, each of them leaning as far from the other as possible. “If I don't go back, do you think I could just finish high school online?” she asked at one point, and no one answered. “Or should I just reenroll back at home?” She tried to relax into the seats. They were leather or fake leather. She couldn't get comfortable. This was the first time Lydia had ever been in this car. Its size instantly miniaturized her. It was basically a small military vehicle, she thought, large enough to topple a village, with enough room in the back to stash two or three kidnap victims. “Is anyone going to talk to me?” she called out, sometime before they crossed from Vermont into Massachusetts. “Hello? Anyone there?” She leaned forward so that she was in between them. Her mother and father. “Whose house am I going to live at?”

It was clear they didn't know.

Her mother tapped listlessly against the glass. Her father occasionally cracked his neck. The sleet changed to rain and then to snow. Fantastically large kid-scissor snowflakes dive-bombed the windshield. Frozen icicles hung from the rock formations by the road, and they looked to her like gigantic teeth. Every few miles a hand-painted road sign advertised maple syrup. Six months in Vermont, and all she knew about the place was syrup.

“So are you guys not talking at all?” she asked, after an hour on the road. “Or is this just a show for my benefit?”

“We're talking,” her father said, after a minute of silence.

“Yes, we're talking,” said her mother.

“Right now, in fact,” her father said.

Up front, her mother nodded. “This sounds like talking.”

“Oh good,” said Lydia. “Because I was worried the divorce would turn you two against each other.”

Two hours later, they were pulling into Aveline. She recognized the stretch of forest and the river near her grandmother's house. Lydia had surprised her mother last month with the trip home. An hour before the train reached Boston, she'd texted,
I had to get out. I just had to. Want to meet up for dinner?
During the weekends at Hartwell, you were gently urged to enroll in one of its optional seminars: Van Gogh's Ear: Madness or Sword Fight? or Mathematics as an Art Form. She had gone away to school believing that homesickness was endemic only among weak people with perfect families. She'd felt bad about ditching school until she saw how excited her mother was for the visit. The problem, though, was that she hadn't told her father. When her mother drove her back to school that night, she'd begged Lydia not to say anything.
This will really hurt his feelings,
or something like that, which indicated that she had continued to maintain an unhealthy balance between her own freedom and his sadness.

Lydia wondered whether her mother had issued the same warning to her grandmother. As the car climbed the long drive to the house, passing the rows of dead birch, the animal pens, the swollen river, Lydia grew worried. Her grandmother stood waiting out on the front porch.

“Oh this is going to be great,” Spencer said.

Her grandmother was walking out to meet them. The car's engine cut. Up front, her mother turned. “It's probably better that you go back home,” she said.

Lydia looked at her father by way of the rearview. “Home?”

“Your actual house,” her mother said.

“But you're not there.”

“That is true, Lydia.”

“There's no room for me here?”

She looked up at the house. The lack of paint. The old roof. The shutters. The sagging porch. Her grandmother's house had been in undeniably bad shape a few weeks ago, but it looked as though in the past few weeks everything, every part of the house, had gotten worse. The real estate agents, she knew, had tried to gussy it up, but the new furniture felt vulgar, all of it unseemly and too bright. It surprised her how much it bothered her to see the moving boxes in her grandfather's old study, books already packed, his collection of hats given away to charity.

Her grandmother knocked at the window, waving.

“Don't say anything to her,” her mother said.

“Don't talk to her?” Lydia asked.

“No. Obviously, talk to her. Just, you know, don't tell the truth.”

“Lie to Grandma. I get it.”

“Don't lie. Just don't talk, or explain, or admit anything,” her mother said.

“She'd probably understand,” Lydia said.

“
I
understand,” her mother said.

“As do I,” said her father.

“Your grandmother will probably want to deluge you with all her theories about, you know, the fucking ontology of masculine depravity.”

“That actually sounds fascinating,” Lydia said. “And probably instructive.”

She was used to this. Her mother harbored a protective urge to shield Lydia from her grandmother's reputation, and sometimes her intellect, and lately even from the fact that if you were to Google “Henrietta Olyphant,” you might find photographs of her beside some genuinely famous people and/or some wildly hilarious india-ink diagrams. Her grandmother, Lydia was to understand, was the ultimate corrupting influence.

They got out of the car. Her grandmother smiled at her widely and yelped with joy before throwing her arms around her. “I was hoping it was you!”

Her grandmother smelled like rose water and talcum. Lydia wanted right then to whisper into her ear,
Don't tell him. Don't tell my dad I was here.
Kissing her wetly on both cheeks and a good portion of her mouth, her grandmother pointed her up to the house. “Come in! Come!”

Behind her, her mother explained, “She's just home for vacation. Spencer was going to get her and take her home. But then we went together.”

Lydia could already see that her grandmother believed none of this. A vacation? In the middle of the week? Lydia wished that at some point in her future she would inherit a bit of her grandmother's shrewdness, or at least her pitch-perfect aversion to bullshit. Henrietta Olyphant, it was certain, had never been the kind of woman who would fall for someone like Charlie Perlmutter.

“I can't see her for dinner?” her grandmother asked. “Or you? Or all of you?”

Her parents looked at each other. Her father fiddled nervously with the buttons on his collar. “I can sit in the car,” he said. “I don't mind. I have snacks.”

“Sit in the car?” her grandmother cried. “You're not an animal.”

He smiled. “I've actually been told the opposite a few times,” he said.

A moment passed in which her parents exchanged between them a half dozen grievously awkward facial expressions. Theirs had become a language of despair that no therapy could cure. Lydia had known this months ago. Her mother looked as if she were chewing off the inside of her lips. Her father appeared as if he had suddenly inhaled poison. Mercifully, her grandmother burst out laughing. “Look at my beautiful, happy family! Look at the joy!”

Inside the house felt warm. It surprised Lydia to see that the amount of boxes and the filth and dust surpassed the amount of boxes and filth and dust of a few weeks before. She made her way into the kitchen, following her grandmother, who was talking about food—the lack of it in the house, the importance of always having
something
at hand, the need to call out for Korean or Thai or
something good and Asian and salty.
Her parents lingered behind. She could hear the low rumbling of a fight brewing. She knew the timbre. Silently these last months she had girded herself for the new reality, the impending shift in personal identity, the transformation from the only child of unhappily wed parents to the only child of estranged divorcés. Because of the hyphen in her name—Lydia Olyphant-Klein—everyone already assumed her parents were divorced. She knew what was coming. The split holidays. The systematic war-waging and guilt-seeking. Her mother's inevitable bout of workaholism. Her father's likely recommittal to his very lapsed Judaism. Pilates classes, intermittent veganism, aspirational attempts at watercoloring. One of them would probably try to write a memoir. She would need to meet their new lovers. She would need to expressly forbid the use of the word “lover.”