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“Honestly, looking at it now it’s nothing short of a miracle that we’re all still alive, that the kids didn’t kill each other, that Pete and I didn’t kill ourselves or each other, that nobody fell down an uncovered well or got abducted from the bus stop. It was complete chaos for— Well, it still crops up now, because some of them have their own kids, or wives I can’t stand, or—well, various bouts of arrested development. The crises never fully abate, I’m sorry to say. And
She’d never seen people who talked to each other like this and still liked each other; Helen and Pete seemed to be constantly sparring but with a strong undercurrent of affection, though it was layered on top with Helen’s somewhat patronizing exasperation and with Pete’s obliviousness, both of which seemed to Julia like affectations.
it was something more storied and time-tested, the glow of two people who’d chosen to go through life together, who’d figured out how to navigate the shared space of a marriage, the rules of bathroom doors and breathing room and honey could you take a look I’ve got this weird thing going on with one of my molars.
she suspected he may have shrunk over time, to make room for Helen. “I’ll
Helen had explained to her that stress could manifest itself in how one knit, that her vise-grip rows suggested she needed to think about meditation or possibly quaaludes.
And Helen frequently dropped little tells like that, inconspicuous missives that spoke of money, generations of comfort, upper-middle-classicality—“Well
she’d always thought it would have been nice to know that there were people, older people, who cared about her existence;
But there is no happy medium in a marriage when one party wants to be alone and the other doesn’t. There is no way to have it both ways; someone always loses, and tonight, apparently, the loser is she.
Alma looks at her lethally and she takes a tentative seat a safe distance away on the chaise, because daughters—daughters you nursed, daughters you bathed, daughters whose sleeping teenage hair you now kiss at twilight when you creep into their bedroom just to share the same oxygen at a time when they aren’t conscious—are physiologically averse, at seventeen, to touching their mothers.
since he was a toddler he’s had a wild imagination for catastrophe. He
she could feel herself radiating inadequacy as steadily as her son radiated goodness.
She’d been a much different mom to Alma than she’d been to Ben, much more confident, much less terrified. And those things yielded a child who invited fear into her life, sought it out, perhaps taking for granted its unlikelihood.
This is what she feared from him, this infuriating, unnuanced optimism, the belief that they’ll be able to make everything okay because they have the resources and because Mark operates with a kind of don’t-look-it-head-on logic, warding off unpleasantness by sheer force of will.
Marriage is exhausting in this respect, constant stop-and-start, scrambling to catch up and then wishing you could lag behind again just a little bit.
Goodwill: the ammo of the congenial. This has always been a point of contention between them; Mark likes others easily and Julia barely at all.
She stays awake long after she hears him fall asleep, resenting the slow deep sounds of his breathing while hers remains shallow, keeping chaotic time with the metronome of her thoughts.
Julia had never felt this comfortable—this brazen—with any of her friends. She was unpracticed, undersocialized, the most lackluster of guests, but Helen seemed not to notice, or not to care, and she never once appeared anything but happy to see Julia.
Julia wondered how some people orchestrated their lives to be like that, primed and ready at all times to be walked in on, pots enticingly a-simmer and alluring projects under way, as if they’d never been started and would never end and instead just exist, in perpetuity, in a picturesque in-between.
childhood amnesia; she’d read about it in a magazine at the dentist’s office. It was common, not always linked to trauma, and hers hadn’t been traumatic, not exactly; that’s what was hard to explain to someone like Mark, that nothing had been gravely wrong, per se, but very little had been right, either.
Rich people, too, had a knack for making romance out of historic hardship; she supposed it was easier to cinematize the past when you had the right set dressing.
Everyone is scrambling to distinguish themselves, but Alma has simply kept her head down and worked hard, which Julia admires both for its virtue and because it has not required her to buy her daughter a large medieval instrument or to applaud her twerking for change.
Mindless television is not a bonding activity you are supposed to have with your child, and yet it is her only mainstay with Alma of late besides mealtimes and verbal abuse.
A calm comes over her daughter; she sheds her huffy affectations and her tightly wound teenage façade and allows herself to speak easily to her mother. To acknowledge any of this would be to ruin everything, so Julia sits, sometimes, in complete stillness, trilling, like a rock absorbing sunlight: the marvelous fact that, for an hour, her daughter is her friend.
her face shines with the particular pride that comes from a magnetic older person openly admiring you.
“Dude,” he said. “It’s two degrees outside; what are you doing?” She had come so far, really, past the point of having to suffer the indignity of being called dude. And yet.
Happiness seemed to come to him either easily or not at all. He sighed a lot, and succumbed to meditative silences and sad, faraway looks, and in between those things he came impishly to life, making her laugh, telling her stories about nothing. He seemed, at times, like just a normal guy,
It seemed to her they were both missing something that most people had. Different somethings but nevertheless; neither of them ever walked outside feeling completely prepared to be one with the world.
Trying, trying, trying, the nicest mom in the world: “Of course, honey.”
It does a mix of things to her, this line, her kid saying my kid, and the sudden awareness that she herself doesn’t exactly fill the bustling shoes of a grandma. Myriad new ways to let down her kid and, now, his.
“You’re constantly worrying about things that aren’t your business, but they’re never the things you actually want your mom to worry about; it’s always—like, things we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. You assert yourself then, when we don’t need you; and then when we actually need you you’re too busy worrying about the stupid other stuff to be there for us.”
There are various Mom Approaches that could theoretically be taken in an instance like this, Wounded Mom or Don’t-Take-That-Tone Mom or, a page torn from her own mother’s playbook, Mocking Mom. It’s how she, lacking instincts, navigated her life when he was a baby, a toddler, stopping and taking stock: How would a normal mom handle this? And she’d borrow whatever seemed to make the most sense and if that one didn’t work she’d try another, substitutions in a recipe.
“Forget it,” he says. “I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry too,” she says. Sorry for singing you to sleep every night until you were five. Sorry for helping you build a scale model of Hogwarts out of Legos. Sorry for sneaking you in to see Andrew Bird at the Hideout for your seventeenth birthday, you unbelievable ingrate.
“Should we just go?” She suddenly wants to cry. “Sure,” she says. “I’ve got to get home; Ollie’s waiting.” Ollie is not waiting. Nobody is wholly reliant on her anymore, and this is supposed to be a good thing.
She can see it now, immersed as she is in her own suburban life, more cynically: the smug flag planting in territories considered beneath yours simply because you could, the snobbish cultivation of down-home hobbies by people with too much money. But at the time she’d found it intoxicating,
though they had an antique hutch full of crystal, she always served drinks in decades-old Tupperware bell tumblers.
seeing Helen at the grocery had reminded her of the fact that she’s always felt her most important internalizations—fear, or jealousy, or love—like a fist around her gut.
She shifts slightly toward the house; she can still conjure the shape of her son in her periphery, behind her in his car seat, the son who is now six-two and sovereign and mad at her.
Happiness never came easily to her until she had children; on their behalf it has always sprung forth readily, and she is proud of herself for that, if not for many other facets of her mothering.
And she can see it, instantly, can’t she, what their lives may have looked like if everything hadn’t gone as wrong as it had?
There was nothing on the earth so tedious as a child’s playdate at which the parents were required to be present;
Monica was exactly who she expected Monica to be, Serenity Smiles through and through, pure Ativanned Stepford brahmin, luxuriously sweatpanted and improbably gaunt, a ponytail that looked like it would whisper about you when you left the room.
“And that’s Cure.” Cure. Cure! She wanted to call Mark. The impulse to tell him ludicrous things still existed; there was a comfort in that.
Francine was one of those elegantly plump, sun-kissed women whose cloud of pale hair didn’t move when the rest of her did. Julia had never completely trusted her, a condition that was not ameliorated whatsoever by the fact that she was peering around the foyer like someone doing a radon inspection.
Julia hadn’t, in fact, hated being pregnant; it was in some ways the time she felt the most whole, justified, on the precipice of something and constantly accompanied by someone whom she never felt to be judging her, someone whose needs her body knew innately how to fulfill, someone who almost never made her feel like she was meant to be doing anything else,
Did you know that “borrow or rob” is a palindrome? Did you know a group of owls is called a parliament? Did you know “I Will Always Love You” was actually written by Dolly Parton?
“This isn’t mad. You haven’t seen mad.” She’d suddenly become her mother; it almost never happened to her but there it was,
Monica was still in the kitchen, now sternly nursing the other potato, lecturing it about the importance of finishing what it started.
she had asserted herself, from day one—with the weeping and the band T-shirt and the congenital confusion—as a child, and Helen was content to treat her as such, because Helen, too, liked when people fit neatly into boxes, and she liked to keep them inside of those boxes whether they remained the right boxes or not.
This was one of the problems with getting close to someone: it became much harder to lie.
Helen was just being herself. And Julia, it seemed, was being herself too, stumbling through life incapable of not hurting the people who cared for her.
