A Friend of the Family (7 page)

“Protons, that’s right,” Elaine said. “That was last summer, wasn’t it?”

“Hah,” Alec muttered again.

“You know, if it matters at all, not only do I not remember mentioning Neal Stern in such admiring tones, but if I did, it wasn’t because I wanted you to act more Nealish,” I said. We were already almost at the Sterns’ house. The day was sunny; we could have walked. “I’m just as surprised at that kind of ridiculous achievement as you are. I was mentioning it only as a sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Not as an object lesson.”

“Yeah, well, for your information, Neal Stern has always been a total asshole.”

“Hmmm …,” Elaine murmured. “Is that true? An asshole? But don’t outrageously smart people often have rather poor social skills?”

“That’s a stereotype,” Alec said.

“Or maybe he’s just a little inept?”

“Mom, he’s an asshole. Not to break your heart or anything.”

“Pete, is that true?” Elaine was incapable of thinking the worst of people, especially kids. She looked over at me, and I shrugged.

I knew that Joe, too, often thought his oldest son was something of an asshole, although he rarely let on. But throughout the kid’s childhood, I’d seen Joe offer him some fatherly trifle — a game of catch, a bowl of salami and eggs, a trip to Great Adventure with me and Alec and a few other neighbors — only to watch him get rebuffed without so much as an apology. “Dad, I don’t have
time
for that” — redheaded Neal typing vigorously on his expensive laptop, and Joe retreating in wonder and sadness.

“You know who’s going to be there, actually,” said Elaine as we found a parking spot a block away from the Sterns’ already-crowded street. “Laura. She’s home from California. She moved back into the house last week. Iris set her up in the basement. I think she’s planning on staying for a while.”

“You’re kidding.” I hadn’t seen Laura Stern in at least a decade, if not longer. Joe and Iris kept us apprised of her peregrinations, but rarely in great detail. “I thought she was raising high-end goats or something.”

“She was,” Elaine said. “But then she decided enough was enough and she wanted to come home.”

“High-end
goats?”
said the incredulous boy who wanted to spend four years backpacking from Belgrade to Barcelona. “Who
are
these people?”

“Iris’s sister has some kind of farm in Sonoma,” Elaine said. “She was making goat cheese for restaurants. You can buy the stuff at Zabar’s.”

“Goat cheese,” Alec said dismissively as we walked up the Stern’s cobbled path. “Kills a baby and goes off to Sonoma to make
goat cheese.”

“Alec.”

“Smashes in the skull of a—”

“That’s enough,” Elaine said sharply. Alec sighed heavily but kept his mouth shut.

The party was already in full swing and the Sterns’ house was crowded with the spicy holiday odors of perfume, eggnog, French toast, and a wood fire. Someone’s children chased someone else’s children up and down the staircase. I heard Vince Dirks, my office mate, chortling in the living room. Bill Rothman found me as we tossed our coats in the guest bedroom. He placed a heavy hand across my shoulder.

“I’m a wreck.”

“You drank too much last night, Bill. I tried to stop you.”

“Three bottles of Dominus. Three bottles! You can’t waste that. What could I do?”

“You have a point.”

“Janene’s still passed out at home. The kids think it’s hysterical. They’ve never seen their mother with a hangover before.”

“She’ll be okay?”

“I left some aspirin and Pepto by her bed.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“The least I could do.”

“Happy New Year, Bill.”

“Happy New Year, Pete.” And then he hugged me, because he was a pediatrician and that kind of guy.

Downstairs, I wove my way through the New Year’s revelers and traded auld lang synes with my familiars. You live in a suburban town for twenty-three years, you can’t help knowing every local. Through the French doors to the kitchen I saw an elderly man I didn’t know talking to Christina Sherman, recently engaged to a Manhattan
lawyer, Shelly told me, and as gorgeous and lithe as ever. She would always be recovering from Louis’s death, but she was too wise to let herself rot in grief. She’d taken a teaching job at Round Hill Country Day, and I often saw her early at the JCC, her in her spandex running clothes, me sweating, embarrassed, in baggy shorts. The old guy was standing very close to her, practically breathing down her neck, but Christina was too polite to back away. I thought about going to say hello to her. I hoped she wouldn’t leave our little town for the big city.

“Pete!”

“MaryJo.” I turned. Bert had died eight years ago, but MaryJo still made the rounds. So did her kids, and her grandkids, now old enough to bring their own tubs of rigatoni to a neighborhood potluck. I kissed all the Birches on the cheek and helped myself to a steaming ladleful of pasta and ricotta before anyone else could get a spoon in.

Out on the deck, Joe was wearing a beat-up parka and a Santa Claus hat, whipping up his special New Year’s peppermint martinis (schnapps, vodka, a candy cane for a stirrer) for all comers. “Dr. D.!” he said when he saw me. “Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year yourself, old man,” I said, slurping down my rigatoni, wishing for some reason I had a Santa hat of my own. “You got any grown-up drinks back there?”

“Bloody Mary?”

“I said grown up.” I was a firm believer in the hair of the dog.

“Attaboy.” Joe grinned and poured me a scotch. There was a hearty minyan milling on the deck, all men except for a fierce, feline-looking Asian girl in enormous pants, a camouflage jacket, and steel-tipped combat boots. Soon Neal Stern emerged from the kitchen with a mug of hot chocolate in his hand and put a possessive arm around the girl, whose frown softened into a gentle sneer. Neal was balding, just
like his dad at his age, but he’d had the questionable inclination to shave his head, making him look both dorky and felonious. He was freckled, skinny, with a bulbous Adam’s apple and dark eyes set a bit too close together; I had no idea what he’d done to win the girl, but I imagined it had something to do with the very profitable future he seemed assured of.

“Dr. Pete,” Neal said—Dr. Pete was what all the Stern kids called me — and removed his arm from around his girlfriend to shake my hand. “This is Amy.”

“Nice to meet you, Amy. Happy New Year.”

Amy blinked at me. “Well, yes,” she said like a sphinx. Then she turned her wintry gaze to Neal. “I’m totally frozen out here. I’m going inside.”

“Broads,” Neal said to me after she’d removed herself from our company. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, right?” He chortled in a mirthless way, and I knew that if Alec were outside with us he quite possibly would have socked Neal right in the freckles. But I was an adult, so I made conversation.

“I hear your sister’s back in town, huh?”

Neal circled a finger around his ear to signify “crazy,” then took a fat sip of hot chocolate. “She showed up with her backpack last week, looks like she hasn’t showered in days. Almost ten o’clock at night. I’d just gotten home from school. Amy was in the guest bedroom, you know? ‘Cause Amy’s from Hong Kong and she wasn’t going to go all the way home for break. So she was just going to stay here, with me, but of course my parents are like, No way is she staying in your room.” Neal made the crazy gesture again, and I thought of old Mrs. Stern, keeping me and Elaine separate on our trips to Philadelphia.

“So I ask her, What are you doing here? And she says, Is this my house or isn’t it? I’m here because I’m here. Let me in. And what
could I say?” He laughed. “She hasn’t lived here for thirteen years, though, you know? So how could this be her house?”

“I guess it’s been a while since you two spent much time together.”

“Since I was a kid,” Neal said. “I mean, it’s not like I really know her—it’s more like I just know
about
her.”

Joe, I could tell, was listening in, even though he was faking interest in a conversation with Stu Hurdy about the koi pond Stu was installing. Joe kept his eyes on Stu, nodded intermittently, but tilted his Santa’s hat in our direction and sucked on the vodka end of his peppermint stick. Joe almost never mentioned Laura anymore; he was too protective. I suddenly felt like a prick for bringing her up with a shmo like Neal.

“What I mean is, Laura’s been gone ever since I was, I don’t know, seven years old, so it’s not like we’re great friends or anything. I’ve only seen her once a year, if that.”

“Anyway,” I said, trying to divert the conversation.

“And you know, the way she lives, it’s just laughable. Like she’s some sort of renegade. Remember how she was living on that island down near Puerto Rico, dreadlocks down to her ass, making jewelry for a ‘living’?” Neal put the quotes in with his hands. “Met us in Florida so she could ask my parents for ten grand. Which they gave her, of course, no problem. Because God forbid she should lose her mind and do something stupid and they have to pay for more lawyers.”

Joe was still listening over Stu’s deadpan description of koi hibernation; he turned and glared at Neal. I remembered the Florida extortion, more than seven years ago — a family trip to Miami to celebrate some cousin’s bar mitzvah, Laura appearing out of nowhere, like a winsome rag doll in handmade clothes. She’d been living in a trailer on Vieques with a girlfriend who spoke no English, working to rid the island of its U.S. military presence and, yes, making jewelry out of
cowrie shells. She needed money for an operation for her roommate. She’d been out of the psych ward for eighteen months. Joe and Laura wrote her a check, on the condition that she get a haircut, buy a dress, and come to the bar mitzvah. She vanished from the Marriott lobby while they were at the reception desk, checking her in.

“So now we’re supposed to welcome her back with open arms even though she’s treated us alternately like a bank and a group of strangers for ten years.”

“Neal, stop it,” Joe said, cutting Stu right off. “You’ve said enough.” Joe’s voice was mild, but his expression was fierce in a way I rarely saw it.

“Whatever, Dad. You might be in her little cult, but that doesn’t mean—”

“Neal,” Joe said, and that was all, but his tone now matched his expression, and Neal was smart enough to shut up. There was something about the subject of Laura that made all us parents prickly. Joe turned back to Stu. Neal looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“So anyway …,” he said.

“Anyway.”

“I guess I’ll go inside and find Amy.” Marginally louder: “And don’t worry, Stalin, I’ll mind the censors.” Did Neal really just compare his father to Stalin? I watched as he loped back into the kitchen, an ironic tilt to his shaved head.

“That kid,” Joe said, his expression softening but that fierceness still in his eyes. He forced a little laugh. “Never fails to say what’s on his mind, you know?”

“A strong personality,” I said.

Joe sighed heavily. “That’s one way to describe it.”

“Anyway, Joe, the thing about it is you’ve got to watch for raccoons.” Stu Hurdy was unstoppable. “Raccoons can fish just like
bears. You’ve seen those nature movies? They stick their paws into the pond and scoop them out like it’s nothing. It’s really quite remarkable to watch. But evidently there are certain plants that are naturally raccoon-repellent, you install them around the pond and it saves the fish from …”

Joe gave me a bleak look. I tipped an imaginary Santa’s cap in his direction and went into the kitchen to find my wife or kid. I was hit with the woodsmoke and eggnog but also something else — the vague but persistent smell of striving, of other people’s koi ponds. Round Hill isn’t New Canaan or even Bernardsville; for the most part it’s a new-money kind of place, more Jewish than those other chimneyed suburbs, more Korean and Italian, too. We’ve got more doctors here than socialites, more lawyers than casual investors, and many more outer-borough accents. Our children, who attend fancy colleges and decide to become oil painters (or set designers, animal behaviorists, poets) are not like we are, we who went to City College or Queens College or Pitt on scholarship. They take things for granted that we never will, talk casually about tennis and the Tate Modern in ways that give us secret, overweening pleasure. As for us, we like it here in Round Hill because we’re twenty-five minutes from the Old Country, because as Jews we’re always afraid of being run out — but at least from here it’s easy to get back home: the Bronx, Brooklyn, my own little Yonkers.

“Dr. Dizinoff! We were just talking about you!” Shelly Sherman and the beauteous Christina were standing over the Crock-Pot of hot chocolate, and Ashley Sherman, now almost fourteen years old, was leaning shyly against her mother’s flank. Ashley, after a promising start as a toddler, had turned out to favor her father’s phenotype almost exactly: the same frizzy brown hair, the same owlish eyes, the same hooked Ashkenazi nose. I assumed, however, that she was as smart as her dad had been; she was our town’s reigning junior-level
chess champion and had been written up several times in the
Round Hill Robin.

“What were you saying about me?” If I were the type, I would have muttered, Aw shucks. “Only good things?”

“It’s the Nets you like, right? That’s the team?”

“It is,” I confirmed, kissing Shelly and then Christina New Year’s hellos.

“Oh, good,” Christina said, extending her cheek, “because my friend Harvey has some season tickets he’s just too darn busy to ever use. I thought you might want some.”

“Why not?”

“And not to brag,” she whispered, “but I think those tickets are very good.”

After a decade and a half in the Northeast, Christina still had her loose-voweled Atlanta drawl, and for a minute I feared I was reddening under her close attention.

“I don’t know the least thing about basketball, and this one here” — she tousled Ashley’s rough curls — “she’s too busy with her school-work to want to go all the way to the Meadowlands for a game.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you. I’ll buy them from you.” Sports tickets were favored currency in Round Hill: tickets, time-shares, late-night medical advice.