Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts (33 page)

“Wow,” he says, gazing around. “You really cleaned this out.” Where there once were stacks of books and journals and old mugs filled with broken pens and partially used pads of paper, there’s now just the daybed and the desk and the empty bookshelves. It took me three days to clean it out.

“I’m glad we’re almost done packing up. I am so sick of sorting through decades of junk.” I cross the room and sit down on the daybed.

“Story of your life?” he suggests. “Cleaning up your family’s messes?”

“I make plenty of my own. As you probably know better than anyone.”

He shakes his head, comes over to the sofa, and sits carefully at the other end, leaving plenty of space between us. He starts to say something, stops, then just says, “Sorry about Hopkins and all that.”

“She was trying to be funny, I guess. But it just seems so sad to me.”

“That’s the problem with having a heart,” he says. “Stuff like that gets to you. Clearly not a problem for Hopkins.”

“Maybe she got an extra brain in her chest instead of a heart?” I suggest. “That would explain the supernormal intelligence.”

He waves his hand dismissively. “Eh, she’s only smart in some ways.”

“Yeah, just in the ways that matter.”

He shakes his head. “You’re the one who’s smart in the ways that matter. Nice in the ways that matter, too.”

I feel myself blushing. It’s a weird compliment—but it feels good right now, right when I need it, right when Jacob is the one delivering it. He’s calling me nice. I didn’t think that would ever happen again.

“So,” I say after a moment of silence. “How’s life?”

“Pretty good. I’ve been working hard. I want to actually finish my dissertation this fall. I’m tired of being a professional student.”

“And then you’ll look for a new job?”

“I’ll look, but it’s rough out there right now. I think I can get some kind of instructor position here to tide me over for a while if nothing else comes through. With your dad’s help.”

“At least you’d stay in the area that way.”

He nods. “I don’t want to leave Boston, but I’ll have to go where the jobs are.”

“Anything else going on in your life?” I’m fishing, wanting to ask about Cathy, curious why she’s not here when I know Mom invited her—but I’m scared to ask outright, because the last time I did, he said he’d never talk to me about his romantic life again.

“Not much. Classes are over for the year. I spend my time doing research for your father, research for myself, writing, eating the occasional cheap meal…”

He’s still not answering the question I haven’t asked. I say cautiously, “Any chance we’re friends again enough for me to ask what’s going on with Cathy?”

“Yeah, we’re friends enough,” he says evenly. “But Cathy and I stopped seeing each other a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh.” It takes an effort to sound sympathetic, not eager. “What happened?”

“I think we just reached a point where it was time for things to either move to the next stage or end. And ending seemed more right. For me, anyway. She claimed she felt the same way.” A pause. “It’s possible she was just trying to make me feel better.”

“She would do that.”

“She would.”

I hear someone calling my name, and then there’s a clattering on the stairs and Hopkins appears. Today she’s wearing an oversized Oxford shirt—maybe from the men’s department?—which might have looked chic over leggings, but she’s got on baggy jeans, and the whole outfit just looks too big, like she pulled her clothes out of someone else’s closet that morning. “There you are,” she says. “What are you guys doing up here?”

“Talking,” I say.

She raises her eyebrows. “What a nice secluded spot to have a conversation in. Anyway, Mom told me I had to apologize to you. Apparently I was rude. Jacob, could you help me with something?”

“Hold on,” I say. “Was that your apology?”

“Clearly.”

“I just wanted to make sure. It didn’t really sound like one.”

She rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Jacob, there are a couple of boxes for me downstairs.”

“Yeah, I packed those,” I say.

She ignores me. “I need to mail them to my apartment, but I have an early flight tomorrow so I can’t do it. Would you mind?”

“What time’s your flight?” I ask before Jacob can respond.

“Eleven.”

“The post office opens at seven thirty. You have plenty of time to do it yourself.”

“I can’t risk missing my flight—I have patients who need me. Anyway, it’s none of your business. I’m asking Jacob.” She turns back to him. “You don’t mind, do you?”

I wait for his resigned acceptance of the task. He always does everything we Sedlaks ask him to do.

But then he surprises me. “I agree with Keats. Just get to the post office early enough, and you’ll be fine.”

She scowls. “It’s going to make my morning really rushed.”

“Some mornings are like that,” I say.

“I’m supposed to do an interview with a reporter from the
Globe.
I said maybe we could talk tomorrow morning. But if I have to go to the post office—”

“You’ll figure it out,” I say calmly. “You’re a supergenius.”

“Well, at least help me load the boxes into the car.” It’s not clear which of us she’s talking to. Whoever will actually do it, I guess.

“In a minute,” Jacob says without moving.

She folds her arms across her chest. “Dad and I need to get going pretty soon.”

“They’re not that heavy,” I say. “I know because I packed them and carried them downstairs in the first place. If you can’t wait for us, feel free to load them yourself.”

She throws her hands in the air, annoyed, but with no good argument left to make. “I don’t even know why you guys are all the way up here,” she snaps irritably. “You planning to make out or something?”

What is she—thirty going on fourteen? “Maybe,” I say.

“Thanks a lot.” She flings herself angrily down the stairs, done with us since we refused to wait on her.

We’re silent for a moment, then Jacob says, “I know she does really good work in the world, but I’m beginning to think she may be just a tiny bit spoiled.”

“I’m proud of us for holding our ground.”

“Yeah, we were magnificent.” Another pause. He shoots me a sideways look. “So about that making-out idea…”

I grin. “What about it?”

He returns the grin. “Nothing. Just thought it was an interesting subject to explore.”

“I’ll bet you did.” I shift toward him. “Did you know that Mom keeps making me go out with all these random guys? She says I have to make up for all the years of dating I missed.”

“How’s that working out?”

“Honestly? It’s made me miss hanging out with you.”

“Yeah?” Now it’s his turn to move a little closer. “That’s nice to hear. So why haven’t you called me or anything?”

“Well, one, you basically threw me out last time I tried to talk to you—”

“I’m sorry. I was mad. But I got over it.”

“But mostly I thought I should leave you alone because of Cathy.”

“That’s just—” He stops. “Actually, that was kind of decent of you.”

“I know, right? You don’t need to sound so surprised.”

He laughs. “Well, Cathy’s out of the picture now, and I’m not angry anymore. So do you think you’d be willing to have dinner with me sometime? Or is your schedule too full with the random guys your mother keeps fixing you up with?”

The relief is almost unbearable, almost like joy. “I think I could squeeze you in.”

“Good,” he says, and then we just sit there for a while, close to each other but not touching, listening to the sold house creak and Hopkins yelling for my mother to come help her with something and Milton’s door closing shut below us, and it feels like everything is ending and starting all at the same time.

Reading Group Guide

Essay: The Only Normal One

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman of independent means and moderate disposition will, upon returning to her ancestral home for a visit of any length, suddenly come face-to-face with the realization that her family is totally bat-shit crazy.

The working title for this novel, which always made me smile, even though I knew it would never make it onto the actual cover, was
Cousin Marilyn in Massachusetts
. It was partially a J. D. Salinger tribute—“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” being the greatest short story ever written—but I was also referencing an iconic female character from my childhood, Cousin Marilyn from the 1960s TV show
The Munsters
.

Cousin Marilyn was blond and beautiful and normal and lived happily with a family of monsters. Nice monsters. Loving monsters. Caring monsters. But still…monsters. Vampires, werewolves, dead body parts put together to make a man. Like that.

Being the only
non
monster made Marilyn the family freak, kind of like in that
Twilight Zone
episode where the beautiful blond is considered ugly because everyone else in the world looks like a deformed pig. (You know, it just occurred to me that all my references come from black-and-white TV shows—clearly I never went to school when I was a kid, just pretended to be sick and watched old reruns all day long while my mother made me Jell-O.) Poor normal Marilyn stood apart from the rest of her kin, accepted and loved by them, but always visibly different.

She never seemed to find any of this disturbing—up to and including the fact that Grandpa liked to suck blood and little Eddie slept in a coffin—but you’ve got to figure that once in a while she lay in bed at night thinking,
Why are all my relatives so…you know…
monstrous
? How come I’m the only normal one? Why couldn’t I have had a human family like all my friends do?
And maybe even,
I wonder if I was switched at birth with a harpy, and my real home is a nice split-level in New Rochelle?

Don’t we all occasionally wonder why the other members of our families are so much crazier than we are? Certainly almost everyone
I
know does. Of course, it’s like the statistic that eighty percent of adults over thirty think they look younger than their age. A certain percentage of us must be in denial. So while you may be the sane one from
your
perspective, odds are your sister Sue over there thinks you’re totally cuckoo and can’t wait to leave family dinner to go complain about you to her boyfriend.

Keats Sedlak, the protagonist of this book, starts off fairly certain that she’s the only one who’s escaped her family’s particular brand of lunatic brilliance and that her only hope for continued sanity lies in making a life for herself that’s as separate from theirs as possible. But as her family pulls her back in (families have a way of doing that, don’t they?), she finds her place with them again and realizes that maybe she does belong there after all.

She might be more competent, more social, more self-aware than anyone else in her family, but deep down she’s still very much a Sedlak, just as Cousin Marilyn was, despite her blond beauty, a Munster to the bone. We can ponder the mysteries of our crazy (and sometimes monstrous) families all we want, but two facts remain: they are us and we are them.

Reading Group Questions

1. Do you relate to being “the normal one” in a nutty family, or do you feel like an outlier or outsider in your more traditional family? 
   
2. Were you rooting for Keats and Tom to stay together, or did their eventual breakup seem inevitable to you?  
   
3. Have you ever known a couple like Larry and Eloise, who continue to live together after the decision to divorce is made? Is it possible to move on while you’re still under the same roof as an ex? 
   
4. Have you been in the position of seeing one of your parents back on the dating scene? Is it inspiring? Uncomfortable? A little of both?  
   
5. Keats tries to get Milton out of the house throughout the book—what has changed by the time she’s actually successful?  
   
6. How does your impression of Hopkins throughout the book change when she shows up in the latter half? 
   
7. Do you think that the Sedlaks are rude to or dismissive of Tom? Or is Keats projecting some of that attitude onto her family? 
   
8. What do you think of the story of how Tom and Keats met? Do you think it’s charming or creepy? 
   
9. What do you see happening to the Sedlaks after the book ends? 
   

About the Author

Claire LaZebnik lives in Los Angeles with her TV writer husband and four children. She is the author of
Knitting Under the Influence
,
The Smart One and the Pretty One
, and
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
. For more information, go to
clairelazebnik.com
.

Praise for Claire LaZebnik’s Previous Novels

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

“Zany and sweet.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A clever yet poignant gaze at a young mother navigating budding romance, living at home with mom, and the treacherous labyrinth of a typical L.A. private school.”