The Most Fun We Ever Had (33 page)

“Sweetie,” she said. “Let’s use our inside voices.”

In his defense, Eli dropped his singing to an adorably low whisper.
My mama told me
.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

“Mama,” Eli said, interrupting himself. “A lady.”

“Yes, sweet pea, Mama’s a lady,” she said.
Don’t ask Dada about Mama being a lady; the jury is out at the moment on that particular verdict.
Ashton Treslo’s mother was walking across the parking lot cradling a newborn; Violet hadn’t even sent her a card; in a past life she would have made several dozen of those killer fontina risotto cakes and brought them over along with a copy of that heartbreaking Iron & Wine album that had lulled Eli to sleep in his early days. Not so long ago at all she’d been the first one on the asphalt at pickup, lipsticked and North-Faced and caffeinated, Eli strapped to her chest like an adorable bomb.

“No, a
lady,
” Eli said. She looked up and her heart sank. Gretchen Morley was coming toward the car, face ablaze with an unnaturally white smile.

“Fucking
hell,
” Violet hissed, her face trying to arrange itself into something similar, some alarming shell of a grin that would throw the vultures off her scent. “I’ll give you ten Oreos if you start crying in a minute, buddy,” she whispered in Eli’s direction, but he had already started singing again. She pressed the button for her window.

“Violet,” said Gretchen. “If it isn’t our favorite recluse!”

It seemed odd—and sad—that the removal of Violet’s social life from her overall life hadn’t had much of an impact on her. The Shady Oaks moms—Gretchen! Jennifer! Ashton’s mom, whose name she could not currently remember!—had once been vital cogs in the machinery of her days, filling the blank spaces with pottery-making birthday parties and lakeside cappuccinos. They were her
friends,
weren’t they, so why didn’t she care more that she never saw them anymore? There was a distance, now, between the life she’d built and the one she was currently living. A Jonah-shaped distance; a Wendy-shaped distance; and, smartingly, the Matt-shaped distance.

“So good to see you,” she said to Gretchen, her face still frozen in a ghoulish approximation of a smile. “We’ve been so busy.”

They’d worked so hard, she and Matt, to get where they were. And yet her reflection, in the torso-only recessed walnut mirror opposite their California king, had begun to startle her, its athletic thinness and the dark circles beneath newly prominent eyes, big brown orbs that had lost their inquisitive luster and produced only a fraction of the laugh lines that she assumed would have accreted over the course of thirty-eight years. She’d skipped her Bikram class five weeks in a row and her children had eaten bunny-shaped pasta for dinner the last three nights, though she had ample time to make them something greener and higher in protein.
I have never felt so lost in my entire life, Gretchen Morley.

Gretchen seemed to grin harder and leaned in closer to Violet through the window. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of the other moms,” she said.

I know I forgot the cupcakes for the Sudanese bake sale.
I know my roots are showing. I know it’s my turn for book club and I know I’m supposed to pick something “less dark” than Flannery O’Connor.

“I just wanted to say congrats,” Gretchen said. “And offer you
any
of Harrison’s old stuff if you want. I’m sure you have plenty from Eli but just in case there’s anything you gave away.”

“Any—?”

“Wyatt told Harry he’s getting a new brother,” Gretchen said, and then, horrifyingly, she winked, closed one big tastefully shadowed eye and opened it again. “You still look so
thin
.”

No, no, no, but also
of course
this was happening, surprising and inevitable, of course her darling, enthusiastic kindergartener had been unable to keep the lid on their “family secret.” Of course they never should have asked him to lie, of course Matt had been right to be reticent, of course she’d done a botched job of all of this, but fuck if she wasn’t gobsmacked to be confronted with it now, in her very own car, by a woman holding her bouffant in place with a forty-dollar Lululemon headband. “Well, thanks,” she said. “I— That’s because I’m not—”

“I figured it was probably early. That’s why I didn’t say anything in front of the ladies.”

“I’m not pregnant,” she said, and Gretchen paled.
Wyatt’s new brother is my illegitimate lovechild and he hails most recently from a rustic trash heap in south Oak Park
. She swallowed. “We had a— Um, it didn’t work out.” Who cared if it was bad karma? It was also bad karma to shove your big coiffed head into someone’s car and ask her if she was pregnant.

“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“Well.” Her quick-thinking litigator brain again:
tortuous fallopian tubes.
She’d read about them in
Us Weekly
. “It’s this awful condition. Tortuous fallopian tubes.”

“Oh, I—” Gretchen squinted. “Torturous?”

“Tortuous,”
Violet corrected her, keeping an eye on the dashboard clock.

“Well, that’s—that’s so terrible, Violet. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

“Yes, well,” she said. “It’s been really hard on all of us, so if—if Wyatt says anything, it’s best to just—not give it much credence. It’s confusing to the kids.”
It’s confusing to the kids when Mama throws them directly under the luxury party bus of Gretchen Morley
. For a bizarre handful of seconds, she found herself missing Wendy, the wildly creative liar who’d cooked up the yearlong Parisian farce that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. Certainly this news would travel further. Certainly Gretchen—who’d very likely already shared the news of Violet’s phantom pregnancy with the other moms, despite her insistence that she hadn’t—would go slithering back to her entourage and share, with mock sympathy, the tragic tale of Violet’s imperfection. The Shady Oaks moms were her friends only as far as surface-level life analysis, Pilates and Mini Boden. Social currency was everything in this world, but it could gain or lose value in an instant, and someone could steal your shares right out from under you if you weren’t paying close attention.

From the backseat, Eli whimpered.

“Just a second, honey,” Violet said.

“Well, listen,” Gretchen said. “I know you’re supermom, but…” Violet was sure she wasn’t imagining the condemnatory glint in the woman’s eye as she said this. “If you need
anything,
if you need me to take the boys so you can go to—the doctor, just say the word.”

She smiled. She’d choose Jane Austen for book club and bring a case of wine. For a brief moment, she even imagined one day confessing the epic fallout of her youthful imprudence, sharing that Wyatt’s brother had not, in fact, been quashed by her reproductive organs and was currently enrolled in very expensive Israeli military training on her sister’s dime.

Behind her, Eli began to wail.

“Oh,” Gretchen said, and she backed away from the car. “Okay, well. I’d better go. Anyway—sorry about—you know. I mean—I’ll text you!”

She watched Gretchen bounce back across the blacktop and then she turned to her son. “Sweetheart, what is it?”

Eli stopped crying as abruptly as he’d started and grinned at her. “Ten Oreos!”

She started laughing, the kind of laughing where you were also partially crying; she had always associated it with exhaustion and psychopathy and her mother.

1994–1995

Wendy had crept downstairs to use the adult line—following the unceremonious disconnection of the kids’ line once it was discovered that she’d used it to call Spencer Stallings, who was,
yes, technically,
a cocaine dealer but also just her
friend
—but she froze three stairs from the bottom. In the living room, a movie was playing—
Malcolm X;
obviously her mother’s choice—but her parents were not asleep.

It was a moment during which every molecule of her physical composition impelled her to look away, but something combative in her brain resisted, a perverse piece of genetic makeup that said,
my parents are making out on the couch; another time my parents were making out resulted in me.
“Making out” was an understatement. This was not
kissing.
They’d all seen kissing: their mother gravitationally suctioned to their father when he came in the door from work; their father leaning over to peck their mother on the cheek waiting at a stoplight; Marilyn curled against David on the loveseat in the backyard, her head tilted up like that of a marionette or a movie star, kissing with such vigor that the balsa creaked. They kissed at Little League games and the grocery; they kissed each other’s elbows and necks and hair; they kissed with their hands in each other’s pockets and their arms slung around each other’s waists; they kissed good morning and goodnight and hello and goodbye; they kissed just because.

This was not kissing. This was something else, something more. On the stairs, she watched, frozen. Save for the ragged keening of her mother, steady and coarse, like the rhythmic hiss of a long freight train, the house was quiet. Her father made a gasping noise. He was so much larger than her mom, so much taller and broader and darker; she almost looked like a doll pressed against him like that. Her mother had mounted him—that was the most accurately disgusting word for it—and he was lying half-down on the couch, the couch where they sometimes watched
Seinfeld
together
as a family,
where little Grace had, hours earlier, in her tiny, unsullied Batman pajamas, been turning the pages of
Guess How Much I Love You,
where Wendy herself sometimes
ate.
It was sacrilege; that couch was a chaste, communal space.

There was a kind of reciprocal grinding activity taking place. Her mother moaned. They were both still clothed—
thank all the heavenly bodies above
—but her mother’s shirt was lifted in the back, lifted by her father’s hand, and Wendy could see the white horizontal slash, like a painted traffic line, of her bra.

What to do? If she startled them, who knew what she would see? She couldn’t tell what the situation was with her father’s pants; her mother was blessedly impeding her view. She crept back upstairs. A major benefit to weighing 101 pounds at five foot eight was stealthiness.

She went to her sister’s room, not bothering to knock before she opened the door. Violet was stretched out on her bed, still wearing the ugly plaid headband she’d had on at school that day, following the text of her ethics book with a pencil. She looked up blearily.

Wendy slipped inside. “In case you wanted to know, I’m dead.”

“Doors were invented for a reason.”

“I just
died,
Violet.”

“Can I have your hair dryer, then?”

“Something’s happening downstairs. Something…
sick.
”

“A dead mouse?”

“No. Like,
obscene.
I think Mom and Dad are having sex.”

Violet frowned.

“I mean, not like
sex
-sex, but like—a prelude.” The word felt lewd and disgusting in her mouth, an extra tongue. She couldn’t help it: she laughed.

—

V
iolet was just trying to finish her homework. Violet was
always
trying to finish her homework; finishing your homework was a difficult endeavor when you lived in the loudest house in Illinois. It was a noble pursuit, she thought, this aspiration toward academic accolade.

And now, apparently, her parents were having exhibitionistic sex. It did not surprise her in the least. She couldn’t wait to go to college, to leave behind all in her life who were indulgent and anorexic and carnally motivated.

“There were noises,” Wendy said, “that I will never unhear.”

Her parents’ bedroom shared a wall with her own. Violet had heard the unhearable. She turned, skeptically, to that west wall, which prominently featured her framed induction certificate from the National Honor Society, and an unframed, thumbtacked poster of Whitney Houston.

“On the
couch,
” Wendy said. “In the
living room.
”

The thought of anyone—let alone her haphazard, pragmatic parents—having sex on a sofa was unfathomable. Ethics in journalism, chapter 6: Wendy was an unreliable source.

“Mom made a noise too,” Wendy said.

“Like a snoring noise?”

“There is nothing less like snoring than the noise I heard,” Wendy said.

Violet sat up. She marked the page in her book and regarded her older sister, emaciated and sensationalistic and sporting new bangs that didn’t suit her face. “What kind of noise?”

“Like—” Wendy made a face that made her laugh. Wendy, the most annoying, wonderful person she knew, could always make her laugh. “Like
pleasure.
The most horrifying kind of pleasure.” Then Wendy laughed too, and it lightened her, and for a few delightful seconds they were both dying of laughter, whinnying like ponies, a scandalized, limitless duo.

“Mama?” A tiny voice broke the blissful sibling respite like an alarm. All the girls had developed a motherly radar for it, several pitches above the voices they were used to hearing, sometimes crying but more often than not imploring, solemn and curious, through the darkness of their house.
Mama, is there water? Daddy, are you here? Anyone; is anyone there?
Wendy turned to open the door. Grace was there, foot-pajama clad, thumb a few centimeters from her mouth. Wendy was still laughing. Violet opened her arms to her littlest sister.

“Shh,” she said. “Mama’s busy, Goose.” Which, of course, incited a fresh torrent of cackling from them both as Grace made the arduous journey of a two-foot-tall person onto Violet’s mattress.

“Where’s Mama?” she asked. It was her most-oft asked question.

“She’s downstairs,” Violet said. “What do you need, Goose? It’s late.”