The Most Fun We Ever Had (35 page)

She rose, her knees shaking. “My father would’ve killed me if I talked to him the way you’re talking to me.”

Wendy glanced up at her once, quickly, darkly. “Sorry.”

“I don’t— I’m not sure what to say about any of this, Wendy, but we’ll have to discuss it again at some point.”

“Wow, promise?” Wendy said meanly, changing on a dime like she did, leaping from being genuine to being cruel in the span of a few seconds. “I have absolutely zero desire to get chlamydia. Or to get pregnant with demon spawn like you did. God, Mom, we literally
all
walked in on you and dad boning on the couch a few weeks ago. It’s not like you’re this virtuous model for how to live.”

“You could do so much worse than me as your mom,” she said. She turned to go.

“It— Mom, seriously. I’m being safe. I swear.”

“Thanks for telling me,” she said, and she left her daughter’s room.

It didn’t fully sink in until later, when she was folding laundry and Gracie was sitting at her feet, tiny pink tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, scribbling with page-tearing ferocity in a Muppets coloring book. She was not thinking of
them,
specifically; her attention to Aaron’s physique had been passing; she wasn’t some sort of predator. She was preoccupied by their
ardor,
their urgency, the extent to which they seemed to be enjoying themselves. She and David didn’t have that anymore, not quite like they used to. That kind of desire was so far removed from the routine of marital lovemaking, which was certainly
nice
but so often either drowsy or militant, a means to an end, a final act—like locking up the house—before they fell asleep. That kind of desire—the sweet substance of their intimate encounters before they married—took too much time.

A terrible mother.
Was it all her fault? she wondered. Sitting astride David on the couch, the world around them fuzzed into static, right in the middle of the living room, where anyone could see them,
did
see them: her daughters, lined up on the landing of the stairs like a firing squad, watching them with the kind of intensity they usually reserved for
The Real World.
And then—even then, with the children in the room!—she’d been sharply aware of the parts of her they couldn’t see, the mellow throbbing in the cleft between her legs, the intensity with which she wanted to drag her husband upstairs and let him have his way with her, a lights-on, unapologetic physical union with the ropy muscles of his legs and the broad solidity of his chest, with his gentle strength, the sweetness of the inside of his mouth, the limitless click that happened when he entered her, how it always felt good even though she’d known him for a hundred million years.

What kind of example were they setting for their children? Certainly a better one than her own parents had for her, wasn’t it? Gracie, who craved physical contact like a sloth, leaned against her shins, and she reached down to stroke her little graduate’s wispy dark hair, woven by Liza into tiny French braids, and she decided that if she was guilty of anything in this particular parental gaffe, it was of still being attracted to her husband, and as far as motherly transgressions went, this one seemed fairly innocuous. NPR bled into white noise and Gracie returned to her picture and for a while she was left alone with her thoughts, with a dull stirring between her legs.

—

“M
om?”

Marilyn’s eyes had been sagging closed but she roused herself at the sight of Wendy. She’d stopped waiting up for her eldest out of physiological necessity; Grace ran her ragged all day and slept fitfully at night and her body’s need for sleep occasionally eclipsed vigilance. David was working late. She held her place in her book—why did she unconsciously make these efforts to seem preoccupied when she was around Wendy? Wasn’t her real preoccupation enough?—and pushed herself up against her pillows.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Can I come in?” Wendy asked, and it tugged at something in her heart, something that radiated downward, a millisecond twinge of digestive churning that she recognized immediately as a particular kind of overwhelming, unrequited love.

“Of course, honey.”

Wendy climbed into David’s side of the bed, surprising her further. She collapsed a little bit, shoulders caving inward, pulling up the covers over her knees. She smelled like beer and burning leaves, the remnants of a bonfire. “Mom do you ever feel like—like you’re a lot older than everyone else your age and you just want to either go ahead without them or just find a bunch of people who—like,
do
act your age?”

Marilyn set down her book. “I— Sure. Sure I’ve felt that way. Did something happen?”

Suddenly she felt the weight of Wendy’s head on her shoulder.

“I just had a really bad time tonight,” Wendy said. She could smell the alcohol on her daughter’s breath, a sick saccharine odor that reminded her of old men on the CTA, the desperate ones who drank mouthwash. She made the swift decision, closer to Wendy than she’d been in ages, that this particular fight could be fought tomorrow. She put her arm around her oldest daughter.

“I’m sorry,” she said, both because it was what she would’ve said to the others and because she
was
sorry: sorry for the state of her daughter’s life, sorry she didn’t know how to fix it.

“
I’m
sorry.” It was the first time she’d heard Wendy say the words since she was microscopic, apology edging its way out of her mouth around the impediment of her thumb.

She pressed her lips into Wendy’s hair and kept them there, feeling like she’d felt when they’d adopted the dog last year, her daughters and her husband looking to her to be effortlessly affectionate when in fact Goethe—who’d seemed like a beast at the time—initially made her nervous. She caught herself comparing Wendy to their yellow Lab and reddened but she didn’t change positions, only moved her hand to tuck some of Wendy’s hair behind the warm flimsiness of her ear, over and over, and then she took a breath and spoke: “So, honey, what happened?” It was what she would have asked the other girls, what she wouldn’t have had to ask David because he’d already know she was interested. “Why was tonight so bad?”

But Wendy, it seemed, was already asleep, and she would blame herself forever that it wasn’t until several hours later—early Sunday morning, David asleep on the couch, Wendy beside her, her breathing alarmingly feeble—that she tried and failed to wake her daughter up.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ryan was packing up his trunk when she pulled in behind him in the driveway, and it struck her that she would have to move her car in order to let him out.

“What’s going on,” she said, not quite a question. Ryan slid a box into a snug space, reminding her, for just a second, of her father. “Ryan.”

He turned to face her. “I’m not sure what to say.”

“Say about what? What’s all that stuff?”

“I was hoping I’d be out of here before you got home. I know it’s not good for the baby when you get stressed out. But I’m not sure I have it in me to be civil to you, Liza, so maybe you should just— Could you move your car?” There was an energy in his voice that she hadn’t heard in a long time, and a hard-edged anger that made her incredibly nervous.

“Ryan, you’re not making any sense.”

“That guy in your department, right? The one I met at the Christmas party?”

She was so caught off-guard that she had the impulse to sit down in the driveway. She steadied herself against the car, tried to breathe normally. “How do you—”

“Glasses?” Ryan said. “Dark hair?”

“Wait, no, Ryan, how do you— I never meant to—” She gathered herself. “It just happened a few times. And I’m not— We’re done. It was only—over the summer. And it’s—over. It was never even— Let’s talk about this, please.”

She could see, from the way his face fell, that he’d been harboring some hope that he was wrong, and that she’d just showed him a hand he hadn’t expected her to be holding.

“Is it—is there a chance it’s his?” He motioned to her belly.

She would never forget how this gutted her, would never forgive herself for putting him in the position of having to ask such a devastating question. “No,” she said. “It didn’t start until after I got pregnant.” This sounded much worse aloud than it did in her head. The onus was on her to explain herself, but it struck her simultaneously that she hadn’t given any thought to an explanation. Her mind was vexingly blank. She opened her mouth and closed it, twice, like a guppy.

“Was it to—what, punish me?”

“No, of
course
it— Ryan, how did you even— We need to
talk
about this. Would you—come inside? Please? Let’s—”

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you,” he said flatly.

“Ryan,
please,
it was just—a stupid thing, a stupid hormonal thing, and I’m sorry; I’m so sorry I did that to you but it’s
over,
and if we can just
talk
about this…” She didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted salt. She wiped her cheeks. “How did you—know?”

Ryan studied her evenly. “I put two and two together.” He cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry you—however you figured it out.”

“Least of my concerns.”

“Ryan.”

“I’m not sure what else to do,” he said. “It’s not fair. To either of us. To—” He gestured vaguely at her. “To the baby, either. If I’m dragging you down and you hate me enough to hurt me like this—it’s toxic, Liza.”

“I don’t
hate
you, Ryan, Jesus.”

“I think this is the decision that’s going to be the least harmful to everyone.”

“What decision?”

“One of the guys I knew at LemonGraphics is doing a wind energy thing in the Upper Peninsula. He’s got a spare room and he said he could use a hand with some of the tech stuff. He actually posed the idea a few months ago, but I didn’t even mention it to you because—well, at the time I was thinking of—the two of us.” He rubbed his forehead. “The three of us.”

She felt both very sad and very angry, and because she couldn’t decide which was more appropriate she grabbed the one that allowed for less guilt. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you’re moving to
Michigan
? You think you’re in a good enough place to be moving by yourself to
Michigan
?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You really think you’re in a position to be asking me that?”

“I just mean that you haven’t been in the healthiest—”

“You
cheated
on me,” he said evenly. “I’m humiliated and I’m furious and I’m fucking
devastated,
Liza, because of you. So I’d argue that alone makes Michigan a healthier place for me to be, given the alternative.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly and she was almost proud of him for challenging her.

But then she remembered herself, their life together for the past few years, the baby in her belly. And Ryan, catatonic on the couch, his impenetrable misery. Was this not, in its own way, the escape hatch she’d been seeking when she first came clean to her father? Was this not—unintended and wholly unexpected—a version of what she’d wanted? That it might be better this way, without him—hadn’t that been what she was thinking all along, caring for her child without having to worry about its father, allocating all of her resources in one direction instead of spreading them around? She hadn’t cheated on him so he’d leave her, and yet here he was, leaving her, freeing her, in a sense, from all she’d wanted to get rid of. But she wanted, to some degree, to feel in charge, to hang on to some of the indignation she was entitled to as the partner of a seriously troubled man. She wanted them
both
to feel responsible. Because, yes, she’d done something awful, but he was leaving her to care for their baby by herself. The shift from hypothetical to actual struck her with vigor and she was suddenly terrified. She was alone—expansively, islandically alone.

“You don’t think we should break up?” he asked.

“Well—no, I guess I’m not saying that.”
I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying. I don’t know what the fuck I want. I don’t want to be the only one responsible for making decisions.

“I don’t know what else to do, Lize,” he said, and she didn’t recognize the smallness of his voice, and in the smallness she realized his desperation.

In a weird way, Ryan’s suggesting that they split up was the most mature, unselfish thing he’d done in years. But she started crying anyway because
she
knew better; she would always know better and her kid would not; her kid would never awaken at night and join them in bed, sleep between its parents; her kid would never catch them making out on the living room couch and turn its head away in prideful disgust; her kid would never come down in the mornings to find them together, leaning half-asleep against the kitchen counter in each other’s arms, waiting for the coffee to brew; her kid would never feel the ironclad suburban security that accompanied any of these things, the comfort of offhandedly telling some embarrassing story to friends beginning with “
Ugh,
my mom and dad”;
mymomanddad,
her kid would never get to say that.

“So you’re just going to bail,” she said.

“Fuck you for making it sound like I’m the bad guy. Jesus Christ, Liza. This is one of the worst things you could possibly do to someone else. I’d
never
do something like this to you. I know I haven’t been the easiest person to live with but I’d
never
hurt you like this. And I’ve never felt fucking worse than I have in the last few hours.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. She’d lived with him for eight years. Woken up beside him nearly every single morning for the last decade. He met her eyes, and she examined the loveliness of his face, the face she’d known since she was nineteen, those kind gray eyes.

“Maybe this’ll be good for us,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I— But I guess it’s hard to picture things getting much worse. Nowhere to go but up.” He shook his head. “I’ll send money when I can. And I hope you’ll—keep me in the loop.”