The Most Fun We Ever Had (39 page)

“Mom?” Her mother was filling out camp registration forms for Liza, and she kept jumping up to check on something in the oven. She could never just sit down and have a conversation; she was always holding Grace or a pile of laundry or a pot of water or one of her garden tools or sometimes combinations of those things, balancing Gracie on her hip while folding towels with a trowel sticking out of her back pocket. She inked in Liza’s middle name and looked up.

“What is it, honeybunch?”

“Why didn’t you finish college?”

They’d heard bits and pieces about their mother’s wild undergraduate days, information characterized primarily by Marilyn’s embarrassment and David’s teasing. That evening her mom frowned, rising to get the Wite-Out from the drawer by the phone.

“A slight hitch in cosmic timing.” She squinted, blotting at the paper with the tiny brush.

“But why did you— I mean, you were so close to finishing, weren’t you?” Her mother had always seemed highly intelligent, well read; last week she had come up behind Violet and, peering at the pages of
Jane Eyre,
said, “Oh, she hasn’t learned about Mr. Rochester’s
wife
yet?,” ruining the surprise. “You had— Didn’t you
want
things? Why did you just—stop?”

“I wanted a life with your dad,” she said, and it struck Violet as wildly narrow-minded, old-fashioned,
sad
.

“But you could have finished college in Iowa, couldn’t you?”

“Almost none of my credits transferred, as it were. And we were broke. And then Wendy arrived.” She spoke as though Wendy had orbed down from a star or staggered through their door on the run from a refugee camp. She’d stopped filling out the form, set down the Wite-Out. “Does it embarrass you, Viol? I’m— I have to say, I don’t know where this is coming from. It just wasn’t in the cards for me. I’ve thought about going back since, but I— Well, things got in the way. I didn’t finish college because I chose not to finish college.”

“But
why
?” Not going to college, for Violet, was a decision akin to relinquishing a limb.

“What kind of a question is that, sweetheart?”

She was trying to picture the fact that her mother had once been her same age, that she’d once been in high school, the world at her fingertips. She knew her grandmother had died when her mom was a teenager, and that her grandfather had worked a lot, but her mom had plenty of options regardless; she’d grown up with money, certainly more money than they had now, especially with four kids instead of one.

“But didn’t you want
more
?” she asked.

“More what, Violet? For God’s sake.”

“Like more—for yourself?”

Her mom looked down at the form in front of her, twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “There were times when I wanted that, sure. But you can’t— Sweetie, it all looks so black and white right now, I know. But that’s not how life ends up being. There’s— It’s mostly gray areas. It’s not
this
versus
that
. It’s just—things come at you, and you twitch in one direction or the other, and suddenly you’re graduating from medical school.” She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. “Or you’re an exhausted mother of four, trying not to burn the pork chops while your teenage daughter grills you about your lack of tutelage.”

“I didn’t mean— I just meant that I don’t understand why.”

“I’m crazy about your father. I’m nuts about the whole lot of you. That’s why.”

“Because you’re insane?”

Her mother, having regarded her previously with testiness, laughed, hard. “Well, that’s what it comes down to for all of us, isn’t it? God, where did any of you girls come from?” The spell had been broken; her mom had risen again to look in the oven.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When the doorman called Wendy to tell her that her sister was in the lobby, she was momentarily excited, envisioning Violet with her tail between her legs—or, better yet, Violet in combat mode, ready to have a candid conversation with her, finally, for the first time in over a decade. But it was Liza to whom she opened her door a minute later, wan and wide-eyed.

“Hi,” her sister said. “Ryan left me.”

And while she acknowledged the parallel—Violet had said as much to her, fifteen-plus years ago,
Rob left me and I’m pregnant
—this was, of course, entirely different, and it was actually kind of chilling because she and Liza got along well enough, but they’d never been close, certainly never show-up-in-crisis-unannounced close.

“Strong lede.” She ushered Liza inside. “Do you want—water? Decaf? Arsenic?”

Liza shook her head, folding her legs up Indian-style on the couch. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this. I didn’t have anywhere else to—”

“What’s that?” Wendy said, joking, as ever, to avoid betraying that she was hurt. “I’m your first-choice sounding board in the event of any emergency? I’m the most sage and levelheaded person you know?”

Liza smiled dimly.

She sat down beside her. “What happened?”

“I’m not—sure. A lot of things.”

“Like, he just left, physically, now?”

“Last night. He’s moving to the Upper Peninsula.”

“Shit,” she said.
“Why?”

“He has a friend who’s a wind scientist or something.” Her sister shook her head hard, like a little kid adamantly denying blame. “It was— It’s complicated.”

“Does it have anything to do with the fact that you smell like men’s deodorant?”

Liza colored. “I’ve been wearing Ryan’s. The smell of his makes me feel less nauseous than the smell of mine.”

“Nause
ated,
” Wendy corrected her, their decades-old joke, gentle mockery of their medically precise father. She recalled Miles correcting her in the same way, in the early days of their marriage, and he’d sounded so like her dad that she’d laughingly threatened annulment. “Look at you. Knocked up. Wearing Degree for Men.”

Her sister smiled feebly, but she could tell she was being too jaunty for Liza’s taste. People had this reaction to her more often than not.

“Tell him to come back now. If he doesn’t get why that’s important, I’ll tell him for you.” She paused, Miles on her mind now, not that he wasn’t always, not that he hadn’t taken half her mind and left her with half of his. “Miles and I got into a huge fight when I was pregnant. About humidifiers.” She saw herself, across from him in their under-construction nursery, Richard Scarry themed; she’d been not quite as pregnant as Liza was now and was railing at her husband about the potential toxicity of humidified air; Miles had printed an article from the Internet and was waving it in her face, how the air wasn’t
toxic
but
pur
ified, that they’d all sleep better if they put one by the crib. “It was dumb,” she said. “But he left for, like, six hours, at eleven o’clock at night, and when he came home I told him that if he left us, he’d be a biological coward.”

“A biological coward?”

“If you leave someone when she’s pregnant with your child you’re solidifying the fact that you’re evolutionarily weak. Which most men are, in my opinion, but not quite so overtly. But shit happens. The important thing is coming back.”

“I’m not sure I want him coming back,” Liza said quietly. “I’m not sure either of us wants that. I’m starting to think that it— I don’t know. I think maybe this is how it has to be.”

“Pretty fatalistic thinking.”

“I’m trying to be
real
istic, actually.”

“Could be the same thing.” She squeezed Liza’s knee. “God, it’s hard to be a person in the world, isn’t it?”

Her sister nodded blankly.

“I can’t fucking handle it sometimes,” Wendy continued. “Everything’s so miserable, and we’re all just a bunch of giant narcissistic babies wandering around pretending we know what the fuck we’re doing. Everyone except Mom and Dad, who are so fucking happy they make me want to put my head in the oven.”

“Are you—being serious?” Liza asked, suddenly straight-spined and teacherly.

“Define
serious.
”

“I just mean that nobody would blame you,” Liza said.

Wendy registered the statement in all its humorlessness, then looked up at her sister, who was staring at her like some kind of Vision-Questing interventionist. “Jesus Christ, Liza, are you fucking joking?”

“No, no—I mean—of course we would all—I just mean you’ve been through a lot, and it would be an entirely natural reaction to that level of—you know,
trauma,
to just shut down. To lose the will to…”

“Are you saying you’d understand if I lost the will to live?”

“
No,
I just mean that it wouldn’t be— God, you’re boxing me into a corner here, Wendy.”

“You don’t counsel people, do you? Like, at your job?”

“Not really.”

“Good,” Wendy said. “I’m not being serious. Jesus. And we’re talking about you. Whose life, for once, seems to be more fucked up than mine.”

And her sister broke down then, another single pregnant woman self-immolating on her sofa. “I can’t do this my
self,
” she said. “I thought I wanted Ryan out of the picture because he’s been—well, a mess, really, lately; he’s been really struggling, Wendy, for a while, like totally catatonic, and it’s felt kind of like I already
have
a kid, so I’ve been worried about him being able to be a father to his
own
kid, but now that he’s actually
gone
I don’t know what I was thinking. And God, the timing couldn’t be worse with work; it looks like I got pregnant to take advantage of my benefits as permanent faculty; you should
see
how my department chair looks at me now, like I’m fucking radioactive.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Wendy said.

“There’s a
person
inside of me that I’m supposed to keep
alive.
”

She watched Liza’s brain catch up with her mouth, and her sister reached first to touch a hand to her belly, as though in apology to her baby, and then for Wendy’s wrist, squeezing it like their mother sometimes did when she felt emphatic about something.

“Oh, my God, Wendy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I just meant that—”

“You’re fucking terrified,” Wendy said. “Of course you are. But you
are
going to be okay. And you’re not going to be by yourself. Mom and Dad are super-stoked and they’re going to be all over you to babysit. And Violet will seize any opportunity to inundate you with smug parental wisdom and remind you she’s smarter than you. And I’m also not, like, a total miscreant. I can spoil it rotten. I keep walking by these fucking ludicrous newborn culottes in the window of the Dior boutique. I might be just a ridiculous enough person to buy them for you.” Shortly after she’d gotten pregnant, Miles had come home with a Cubs onesie he’d bought from a street vendor by Wrigley Field, and everything had felt real, then, for the first time, her baby and its devoted, doting father. She swallowed. “There will be tons of people to love your kid, Liza. You know that, right?”

“I just had this—image. Like we grew up so—like how you
want
your kids to grow up.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, I think,” Wendy said. “And things usually don’t turn out exactly how we imagine they will.”

Liza paused. “I didn’t mean that nobody would blame you.”

“If I offed myself? Thanks, Lize.”

“You know what I meant?”

“I took it to mean that you think I’ve been pretty violently fucked. But that plays to my point. Shit happens, people leave, and you can still end up being rich enough to live in the same building as Oprah.”

“I thought she left Chicago.”

“I mean, she
allegedly
did.”

“Oprah does not live in your building, Wendy.”

“You can forget about me buying a Burberry trench for your baby if you keep up that attitude.”

Liza smiled. “I came here because I was hoping you would temporarily lure me into the illusion that everything’s going to be okay.”

“And?”

Liza reached for her hand again, but this time she held it, didn’t let go. “Thank you, Wendy.”

—

A
n upswing: Grace had a crush on a boy and she made just enough money to pay her rent and buy a quarterly avocado and/or nongeneric tampons, if she was feeling decadent. These were the important details, and the ones on which she chose to focus. She’d started going to Orion with regularity, stopping after work on days when Ben was there. She’d quickly grown familiar with his schedule, which seemed like either a step in the right direction of a romantic relationship or unequivocal stalker behavior. And she’d sit across from him at the counter, legs swinging from the high stool, and they’d talk about anything—the underratedness of
Pete & Pete,
her weird oboist boss, interpersonal dramas within Ben’s pickup soccer league—and that wonderful thing would happen where hours would pass by in seconds; she’d look at her watch and see it was suddenly 10:00 p.m., a phenomenon anathema to her lately, because every other area of her life seemed to be creeping along, slouching toward nothing at all.

She was most acutely reminded of how royally screwed she was during contact with her family. When they weren’t on the phone, she was able to ignore many of the details of her circumstances, let everything blur at the edges a little like when she watched Netflix without her contacts. She’d begun to limit her communication with her parents and her sisters—the latter was much easier than the former, because all of her sisters seemed to be at peak stations of selfishness; but her parents called her at least once a week, usually more.

“Gosling,” her mom said when she answered. “I’ve missed the sound of that little voice.”

It was a Saturday evening and she had just done a hair mask with her two remaining eggs that were a week past their sell-by date. She sat against the wall next to her refrigerator, where her service was the strongest. “It’s not
little;
it’s just a regular voice.” She paused. “Sorry.”