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Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?
Phyllis had a suspicion, a deeply Jewish one borne of events that had played out in her very lifetime, that actually it was her connections that would help her here instead of the law enforcement that was tasked with it—that the fast and enthusiastic location of her missing son, more and more missing as time went on, would happen not by someone obligated to help her but by someone trying to please her.
But all that money was like the white picket fence around the Fletcher estate: It obscured the view. You couldn’t see the Fletchers clearly through the mist of their fortune and whatever it was that you brought to your viewing of it.
She’d stopped summoning those superstitions, those shots in the dark for protection, pretty much completely after she met and married a man whose wealth was its own elaborate system of safeties.
She knew by then that whereas she had long considered that her life was divided between before and after her marriage to Carl—between girlhood and womanhood, between poverty and wealth—now she knew that the divide had only begun on their wedding day. The divide was actually this vast thing that included their wedding and their children and ended at this moment, with her in a waiting room and her husband two hallways away from her, her future unknown, and that it started right now, the real division of her life: before the kidnapping and after it.
“Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in.”
They agreed that the best thing for the kids was to not call attention to anything that had happened, to allow the whole horrible ordeal to fade into history.
When Nathan couldn’t form a sentence for his stammering. When the school called home about Bernard’s behavior. When Jenny would refuse to engage in the feminine activities that Ruth thought a daughter should be eager to engage in: shopping, makeup, learning to bake, what Bernard would later refer to as the Great All-Night Nose Job War of 1998. These were a dybbuk in the works, a time when things went more wrong than mere physics and logic could account for.
“Baruch dayan ha’emet,” the rabbi said. “What a force she was.” “Yes,” Ruth said, and they were both silent for a singular moment. That silence contained half a century of mutual, shared dread. Once it was over, they proceeded to make the arrangements.
he was not here because he liked being here; he was here because it allowed him to exist as a normal, upright human being out in the world all the other hours of the week.
Theirs was a marriage, seven years going, in which they moved forward, together, side by side, eyes fixed on the horizon, not ever asking any questions that would rattle the equilibrium
You don’t actually talk about things you know about people; you just live with the knowledge and allow it to ride quietly in the backseat of your relationship.
No, what really bothered him was that he hadn’t recognized his own situation as a perfectly viable story. He hadn’t harvested it himself.
Even at their age, Liesl and Wolfie already knew to laugh along with their parents; they knew that life didn’t work like that, that danger wasn’t behind every single door but the random twenty-third and fifty-sixth doors—that danger was the rarity and not the condition, which was what made it so scary. They understood, even at their age, that danger was dangerous because it was unpredictable; you couldn’t game it like this.
“There is something so dangerous about having too much money and just enough time,”
What Ruth didn’t understand, what she couldn’t realize for as much of a mind-reading witch as she was, was that his marriage and family and even his job represented not just his great success but his lifelong goals: children who did not resemble his own family at any angle, and a wife who served as his very own Mayflower to take him to a new world, away from his terrified, haunted family before they drowned him off the shore.
In the foyer now, he felt a swirl of desperation, just briefly, at his grandmother’s absence. It was not that he was so fond of her; it was that this was, perhaps, the first true loss of his life.
Still no Carl and Ruth, and even crazier, still no mention of Carl and Ruth. And just like always, Beamer knew somewhere inside him that he shouldn’t ask, that if he did, the thing in his family that was already bent beyond its capacity would break.
“The tall one, which was mine, said, ‘We’ll call it the Long Island Compromise, because you’re Jewish,’ ” Ethan said. They all laughed. “First they came for my butthole, but I was a virgin, so I said nothing,” Beamer said.
He was exhausted. The memories, the violent way they wouldn’t stop. How could you start on your fresh start when you were standing in the graveyard of your past?
the Fletcher children had not been immune to the inertia of all rich kids, which was to lack the imagination that the money could ever possibly stop coming in. They spent their money like third-generation American children do: quickly, and without thinking too hard about it.
Nathan Fletcher had grown from that little boy making twenty-four-hour four-point contact with his mother during his father’s kidnapping into not so much a whole man but a collection of tics: a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future and rarely in a particular current moment unless that moment contained more fear than the past and future put together and therefore deserved his complete attention. It was the fear that always felt like the truth to him.
There are worse things than being spoiled and lazy.” “Like what?” “Like being poor,” she said.
Now he understood, maybe too late, what had happened. His wife insulated his children from criticism and hurt feelings, she protected their emotional health, she pursued a growth mindset. His grandmother was right. His children were useless. (Though, of course, technically his grandmother had called him useless, not his children.)
That was how easy it was. This was how the world worked, now he understood. Nathan was finally seeing the other side. That if you could be momentarily unsafe in your head, there was even more safety guaranteed to you for miles. He would go home and fuck his wife like a king. If she was in the mood to do that!
He walked out thinking that it hadn’t been so bad as he thought it would be. He hadn’t realized that if you could just leap over the not even very high bar of risk and chance that, on the other side, the rewards would dissolve the fear. How had nobody ever told him that?
Alyssa had grown up poor in New Jersey with an Orthodox father whose equal parts faith in God and his own talent as a clarinetist had proven disastrous to his family.
She said to Nathan that she had plenty of conviction, and she was hoping this didn’t sound shallow and terrible, but that she’d trade the faith she was raised with for the security he was raised with in a second.
Nathan, who was so relieved that he wouldn’t have to defy his mother, told her then for the first time that he loved her. He told her he would take care of her. He watched as she believed him.
But what he got from her in return! He had a person of his very own, to take care of him and love him the most. He’d grown up invisible to his father, bewildered by the exasperation he seemed to cause in his mother.
It was smooth, swift gestures like that that always underlined to Nathan how much a part of the world Mickey was, and how Nathan felt that he was always just catching up.
His father, who was too delicate to ask him about his own day, but who could absorb an untold amount of Holocaust stories, which is as close to describing the modern Jewish condition as you can get.
It was a shock for Nathan to see the inside; he hadn’t been inside in quite a few years. It wasn’t that it looked that different. It was that Nathan hadn’t been in such a blue-collar space in so long that he’d forgotten that it was just this blue-collar space that gave him his white-collar life.
In order to pick what your style was you had to have a more definitive sense of yourself and your tastes, to not feel like such an impostor, and here is where Alyssa failed.
Nathan lay down next to Ari. There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you and love them instead of hate them. That was a surprising thing about fatherhood that Nathan had not anticipated.
something called a plastic hour, that there are these times in our lives when everything is soft and malleable. We tend to suffer during these times, but his point was that actually, these plastic hours are times when you can make actual change.” “What change?” “Whatever change is necessary. For the better. This is a time when you can become better.
No one in the history of Middle Rock, of Long Island, of New York, of maybe America and therefore the world had had the potential and rigor for achievement that Jenny Fletcher had had. When finally she fell, it was from the top of the skyscraper. And like most such falls, it was a suicide. But hold on. Like all the other Bible stories, it’s best told from the beginning.
“I’m my own person, Mom. You would take this all so much less personally if you could see that I’m not some disappointing extension of your life. I’m my own person. You should want that for me!”
Jenny began to think of money as the condition that made you boring: wealth as a crippling starting position.
part of what made the Fletchers boring and dumb, in her opinion, was that they never talked about it. They never talked about what all this money did to them, how it made them look to others, or how it felt for them to have it, how they behaved because of
This was all the fuel Jenny needed to reject the values her mother and grandmother had been trying to pump into her since birth: that anything done in the interest of a family’s protection was warranted, that money is the only true safety in the world, that the systems that had worked till now would be in place forever so a girl had better be skinny and pretty and with the same kind of processed hair and processed nose that all these people had in order to get married and perpetuate a family that would conspicuously consume into the next generation, sitting on an estate with an electrified
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Or you could do what Jenny did, which was fight. You could fight against the whole diaphanous premise that they based their greed and clannishness upon: that whatever they had to do for money was justified because once, a long, long time ago, Jews trusting the world and playing by the rules didn’t go so well.
Her fight was not to fight with her family, but to save her fight for later. For only when it was finally quiet could she finally, truly see her role in her family, which was to be the person running as far from it as she possibly could.
The irony of it nearly crushed her. She had been locked in a debate with herself her whole life about how to be good in the world, and the only thing she left out of that very private conversation she was having was the actual work of being a nice, normal human being.
What is the word for when you know everyone is taking something too seriously, that the way it’s taking over your life isn’t normal, that it’s a little ridiculous, that it’s clearly what a bunch of rich kids stuck in a decade of ivory tower schooling need in order to think of themselves as real, living people?
They weren’t like her bland high school friends who were all falling in line and coupling and working and marrying and giving birth now. Her union friends had sharp opinions and spiky personalities and stood up to the status quo. They cared about everything; they didn’t turn away from suffering. They sat in. They laid in. They died in.
she was finally in a place where her money didn’t matter. And that might not seem like work toward radicalization, but for Jenny to no longer have to see herself through the prism of the prism the people who looked at her saw—her response was further devotion to the union. She was all in now.
Her relationship with Andrew was more like a disease than a romance.
Even still, in her hypnotized state, she recognized that he was largely mediocre. That he wasn’t particularly smart or ambitious—that he had nothing to offer but the promise of an offer.
“Have you learned about the Long Island Compromise?” Beamer said. He had a way of smiling that was friendly but menacing if you knew that he was up to something. Jenny coughed her soup. “I don’t remember the Long Island Compromise,” Ruth said. “You probably didn’t learn it,” Beamer said. “It’s probably not something people learned when you were in school.” “I don’t know what that means,” Ruth said. Then, to Jenny, who was still clearing her throat, she said, “What’s with you?” “Wrong pipe,” Jenny said. “Hey,” Carl said. “That would be a great title for my memoir.” “I’m sorry, what?” Beamer
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