We weave our way to their table, and my mom stands, clasping Raina’s cheeks in her palms, kissing her on each side.
“Now this is a surprise. Both of our children at once.”
“There’s a third child too, Mom,” I say, as the waiter pulls out my chair, and I sit.
“Oh well, Oliver. The only way that I know anything about him is that Tweeter.”
“Twitter,” I say.
“Oh, yes, that!” she answers enthusiastically.
“Hello girls.” My dad reaches for my hand and kisses it. “Raina, what brings you here? I thought you were preparing for a trial.”
“Shawn is at the Yankees game with Nicky. Last-minute sort of thing.”
“I do have a trial, but I made the time.” Raina talks over me.
My dad motions for the waiter. “It’s just as well,” he says. “There are things we wanted to talk about with just you.”
“Just me?” I’m unsure if it’s the Xanax that has me confused, or if he’s intentionally being vague.
“Just our children,” my mom replies, pursing her mouth, her ruby red lipstick sinking into the fine lines just above her lips. She looks tired, more worn than the last time I saw her, even though that was just last month at this very same restaurant at this very same table.
“Is one of you dying?” Raina asks with genuine concern. I can tell that she’s adjusted to the pill, the brain-softener; that this is a regular habit, like candy, like a glass of white wine. She’s lucid but soft, softer anyway, at least for Raina.
“Neither of us is dying,” my mother says, though she fiddles with her fork and doesn’t meet either of our eyes.
My dad offers: “Let’s order dinner. I’m starving. I’ve been on CNN all day and their green room is for amateurs.”
“That was very adept,” Raina says. “That humblebrag you just pulled off.”
“A what?” My mother looks confused.
“Forget it,” Raina says.
“Don’t talk to me that way, young lady,” my dad snaps. “Whatever ‘humblebrag’ may mean, I do not like your tone
.” He raises and lowers his hands to form air quotes, which strikes me as really odd, like he’s trying to be a teenager or something, but then I reconsider. My dad was happy to put quotes around just about anything: it was his way of rewriting someone else’s story.
He presses on: “There was an earthquake in Burma today, and a lot of people lost their lives, and I was only trying to lend my perspective on air. They had me on for the entire span of the news rush.”
“I know, Dad,” Raina says, mostly just to placate him. And since the waiter has now poured the wine, she reaches for it and rather than speak further, takes a generous sip.
I smile a crooked, partially-lobotomized smile. I’d forgotten how feisty Raina could be; how she refused to accept my father’s prophesies, how she’d found a way to discover her own voice, her own perspective, even if that meant drowning herself in law school and work and children and then more children and charity and Escalades and a live-in nanny who now evidently got Saturday nights off as Raina searched for that ever-elusive thing that all moms search for: balance. Oh. And also, a Xanax dependency. But still, she didn’t take shit from my dad, and that might have qualified her for a very unique club of one. Well, and the Nobel Review Board, if you count those five gentlemen, which surely my dad does not. (And Punjab Sharma too, of course.)
“Listen, if one of you is dying, please just tell us now,” I say, my eyelids feeling unusually heavy, my mind feeling unusually light. It’s not so bad, this floating. I think about Theodore, and how maybe I should write him back. I wanted to trust myself enough to, but then there was that tricky part about not trusting myself to at all. I was always doubting everything, even though I was also always placing my faith in the meant-to-be. My brain was at constant odds with itself, a bubble of confusion fostered by my father himself, and then nurtured by my paralysis in making any defiant moves against his philosophies.
Theodore knew this because he knew me as well as anyone had, though who I was at twenty-five and who I was now were hopefully different enough that he couldn’t actually know me that well anymore — it had been seven years. A lifetime. Or part of a dog’s lifetime anyway.
I close my eyes and listen to the clinking of forks against plates, the waft of conversation, the piano dimly floating out of the restaurant speakers. And then I consider that I may have gotten married and worked my way up the agency and found a different apartment and become a step-aunt and peed on a bunch of pregnancy tests, but really, I’m sitting here with my parents at the same restaurant we always sit at, and my sister is bickering with them, and my dad is the same old megalo-maniac, and my mother is enabling it all, and Shilla (the name is growing on me) is perhaps very acutely imploding. And then I realize nothing has really shifted too much at all. That who I was at twenty-five is actually very akin to who I am now.
My dad always says that we can’t change, and by God, if my thirty-two years are any indication, he’s right.
Jesus.
I open my eyes in time to see my mom settle her napkin in her lap and move it just so. “Let’s just enjoy the sea bass,” she says.
I am happy to just enjoy the sea bass if I’m being honest, but Raina coils up her face like a corkscrew, and since she has armed me with this unusually pleasant sense of nirvana, I feel the need to stand strong with her.
So I say: “We can’t enjoy the sea bass if one of you is dying.”
“If one of us
were
dying, I would hope that you wouldn’t treat it as lightly as you are now,” my dad says. “Even though” — because he can’t help himself — “it would be whatever was meant to be. If either your mother or I were to die unexpectedly, I hope you know that I wouldn’t want a big to-do.”
A muscle in Raina’s jaw flexes, and she stretches her neck to one side, the
pop!
audible across the table.
“So what it is?” she says. “Because once we know,
then
I certainly will enjoy the sea bass.”
My mother clears her throat and purses her lips once, then twice. She eyes my father but then glances away, and he is no help (of course).
“Okay fine, I’ll just come out with it.” My mom reaches for her wine before continuing. “Your father has had…a difficult year. With…the Nobel…”
“Dad, you realize there are worse things in the world than being on the short list for a Nobel, right?” Raina says.
“Well, it was very devastating for him,” my mom interjects. “And then there was that unfortunate restraining order.”
“Punjab had no right! No claim!” my father cries, a shard of bread flying from his mouth and landing unceremoniously in the olive oil on my own bread plate. My mouth curls down, and I inch the plate toward the center of the table.
“Well, with all of that happening, your father came to some decisions. And I don’t necessarily agree with them, but…well…you know.” My mom waves her hands, as if this explains it.
Well…you know.
It does explain it though, as good enough shorthand as any in this family.
My dad dislodges the mucus in his windpipe, then announces:
“What she is trying to say is that I intend on taking a lover.”
At this, Raina spits her wine back into her glass. And though my head is cloudy and buzzy and thick, even I sense a widening of my eyes, a slackening in my face.
“Jesus, Dad!” Raina folds her hands over her face and drops her head. “Honestly! Just…Jesus Christ.”
“I’m glad I didn’t order the sea bass,” I say.
“Well girls, let’s be fair about this,” my mom suggests, like she needs to defend him, like her staying with him for four decades hasn’t been the greatest gift she could give him. “Your dad and I have been married for a very long time, and it’s normal to consider other options. And well, he came to me and presented this in a reasonable way, and now I’m thinking that I might just go get a lover too!”
The waiter has arrived to take our order, but stops short and then turns quickly to a neighboring table.
“Mom!” Raina snaps. “Oh my God!”
“Honey, you’re almost forty. I should be able to tell you the truth.”
Raina fishes in her purse for her phone.
“I should check on the kids. Excuse me. And I’m not even close to forty.”
She stands abruptly, and we all fall silent watching her flee.
“She always was a rule follower, Willa. Not like you,” my dad says, his eyes still on her until she disappears out the lobby. What he means is: she never quite came around to my way of thinking, which also means: she never loved me as much as you did.
“Oh please. Shut up.” I can’t even bear it.
My father’s chin remains stoic but I can see his pulse throb in his neck.
“Willa.” My mom moves her hand over mine.
“Mom,” I say, my eyes suddenly full.
She leans in close enough that I can smell her Chanel perfume, a memory of my childhood, of complicated nostalgia, and then she says: “Don’t be sad. If anything, after forty years, it’s a bit of a relief.”
7
Shawn makes eggs for breakfast. It’s one of our things. A thing that Raina would add to the list of “Shilla things,” like our joint manicures, if she were to make such a list. (Which she might.)
The smell of the grease doesn’t wake me, but the doorbell does. The Xanax rendered my sleep a blackout, dreamless, and I wake disoriented, my lids crusty, my mouth tacky as if I’d eaten glue.
There’s a knock on the bedroom door, and then Vanessa pokes her head in.
“Nice,” she says, like I should’ve known she was coming over, and I should’ve been better prepared, should’ve been gussied up.
“What are you doing here? It’s…like, 8 a.m., and I’m unemployed. So…go away. I want to sleep.”
“It’s Sunday, so unemployment has no bearing. And you said you’d come to the free fall with me. The warm-up for the
Dare You!
book.”
I’d forgotten. In order to boost tourism in the city, the mayor’s office had implemented a simulated free fall off the Brooklyn Bridge. It was basically an over-hyped bungee jump, and if the mayor ever bothered to go to 42nd Street, he’d see that we should actually be attempting a mass exodus of tourists, not inviting more in. But still. The
Dare You!
producers set it up to announce the book deal: blasting out a press release to the trades wasn’t exactly their speed. Throwing their writer off a bridge was. Vanessa had asked me to tag along because she grew paralyzed when transported to any level above five floors, though her paralysis wasn’t enough to scare her off the job or off anything really. It never would be.
I probably put the free fall in the
Together To-Do!
app, but I hadn’t checked since spiraling down my Xanax haze. I reach for my phone on the nightstand.
Together To-Do! has one notification:
Bungee with Vanessa: book deal announcement!!!!
“Ugh,” I croak. “Okay. Hang on. Give me ten minutes.”
She slides the door closed, and I stretch up, my back cracking, my mind gray. I sit on the precipice of the mattress until I can physically will myself to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, splashing water on my cheeks, grabbing sweatpants and a tank that were abandoned on the floor at some point earlier in the week. I gaze in the mirror — I am wrinkled and pale and borderline inhuman — until I have nothing left to do but get moving and stomach the day.
“You lost your job?” Shawn says when he sees me. I was deep into REM when he and Nicky got home from the Yankees game. He must have slept on the couch again. He’s still wearing a Jeter jersey.
I glower at Vanessa. “You told him?”
“I didn’t tell him anything. I’m just eating eggs. Minding my business.” She flourishes her fork in the air and takes an overzealous bite as if to make a point.
“Nicky told me. Were you planning to?”
“I
was,
of course.”
I pull out a stool, and out of habit, like an assembly line technician, he sets a plate in front of me. He has made eggs every Sunday morning since we moved in together. When we first married, he would place bacon in the shape of a smile at the base of the plate and two little strawberries up top — a face to greet me to start my day. Now — I eye the eggs with distrust — now, they’re just a plop of
eggs
. I should be grateful that he’s still honoring our Sunday ritual, that he hasn’t insisted on, like, brunch at some hip place in Williamsburg or bought a crepe maker from
Sur La Table
or something, but the gratefulness is seeping out of me now, slowly, like my appreciation has been dumped into a sieve. I move some of the eggs around with my fork, buying my time.
“I was planning to tell you,” I say finally. “I just really haven’t seen you much alone since it happened. But now you know. Hannah was all coked up and made me do Adult Diapers by myself, and I told you that the meeting was disastrous, and so they dropped us as a client, and then she got fired, and then I got fired. And you know, it’s all live free or die, Shawn! That’s what it’s about!
Live free or fuckin’ die!
”
Now it’s my turn to take an overzealous bite of eggs, as if stuffing them in and bulging my eyes is the exclamation point for my story
.
“What does that even mean? What are you even talking about?”
“It’s the goddamn universe, Shawn!” I bark. “Like, what the hell was I supposed to do anyway?”
Vanessa sighs audibly and Shawn scowls. “Why are you taking that tone with me? I’m not to blame here.”
I swallow and drop my forehead to the counter.
“I’m sorry,” I look up at him. “I should have told you. And I’m sorry for my tone. I’m resolving as of this moment to stop being mad at you. Anger is pointless.”
Vanessa makes a face like she bit into a sour grapefruit.
“I didn’t realize that you
were
angry with me,” Shawn says.
He dumps the remaining eggs in the pan onto a spare plate and sets them aside for Nicky who will likely make a gagging noise at the sight of them and just ask for, like, some Pop Rocks and Sprite for breakfast. Which we’d give him. (That kid from the ’80s’ stomach totally didn’t explode, in case you were wondering about our parenting. I googled it.)