Eligible (32 page)

“That’s quite a list,” he said. “Though I think of you as more of a midwestern narcissist than an East Coast one.”

“Believe it or not, I do understand why people have kids. For most of my life, I assumed I’d be a mother, and I’m sure it
is
rewarding, when they’re not having tantrums. But the older I’ve gotten, the less I’ve wanted it for myself. Watching Jane go through her insemination process was the clincher. I like my life now, there’s stuff I want to do in the future that isn’t compatible with having kids, and it’s not even a big, tortured decision. It’s a relief.”

“What do you want to do that’s not compatible with motherhood?”

Liz shrugged. “Travel. Write a book. Run a marathon. Be a super-doting aunt, without having to deal with things like potty training.”

“I don’t want children, either.”

“Really?” She was genuinely surprised.

He smiled slightly. “Which reason do you think applies to me?”

“You’d know better than I would.”

“When I went into neurosurgery, I was making a choice that either I’d be the kind of person who lets his partner do ninety-five percent of the parenting or I wouldn’t be a parent, period. Anyone who claims that surgeons pull their weight in their own families is lying. The hours make it impossible, and for me, that’s before you factor in research. And, yes, I’ve heard the argument that not having children is selfish, but that’s ridiculous. If you really want to do something unselfish, adopt a seven-year-old black boy from foster care. I assume you’ll make fun of me for saying this, but I believe the skill set I have means I can contribute the most to society as a scientist and doctor. Any man with a viable sperm count can become a dad, whereas only some people can perform a decompressive craniectomy.”

“Why would I make fun of you for that?” Liz grinned. “I already knew you were an egomaniac.” The truth, however, was that he did not seem egomaniacal to her; he seemed principled and thoughtful, and she felt a vague embarrassment that she worked for a magazine that recommended anti-aging creams to women in their twenties and he helped people who’d experienced brain trauma. But surely this wasn’t the moment to turn obsequious.

Aside from disrobing, they hadn’t engaged in any additional preliminary activities. Nevertheless, a few minutes earlier, she had wondered if he had an erection, and she was now sure that he did. She rocked her hips forward once. “I think it’s time to get this party started,” she said, and she leaned down and kissed him on the lips.

SHANE HAD WARNED
Liz that the inspection of the Tudor could take up to six hours, and it was after much deliberation and with much dread that, for the date on which it would occur, Liz had proposed to her parents a day trip to Berea, Kentucky. A town of fourteen thousand just under two hours from Cincinnati, Berea was known for a thriving artistic community that created and sold paintings, sculptures, jewelry, pottery, and weavings. For many reasons, a visit there seemed likely to be a terrible idea—Liz worried that its wares would be too homespun for her mother’s taste
and
that her mother would impulsively purchase, say, an enormous and expensive birdbath—but for the length of the inspection, the goal was to transport Mrs. Bennet out of Cincinnati and render her incapable of returning to the Tudor of her own accord.

When Liz broached the topic of Berea with her father, Mr. Bennet said, “I can scarcely imagine a less tempting invitation.”

“Right,” Liz said. “But your enjoyment is actually irrelevant.”

Mr. Bennet chuckled. “Tell me when we leave.”

Mrs. Bennet was only slightly more cooperative. “Deb Larsen commissioned a lady in Berea to make a hooked rug that looks like their house in Michigan,” she said. “The likeness is amazing.” But then a scowl came over her face. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing, Lizzy.”

Before departing, Liz emphasized to Kitty and Mary the importance of staying away from the Tudor until she told them that the inspection had concluded. “If you guys are still thinking of getting an apartment together, today would be a good time to look around,” Liz said, and Kitty said, “Maybe, but I’m going to a rowing class Ham teaches at eleven.”

Liz’s contingent used Mrs. Bennet’s car: Liz drove, her father rode in front, and her mother sat in back. It was a relief to Liz to take on the role of chauffeur, both because her parents were awful drivers and because Liz had always felt profoundly uncomfortable spending two-on-one time with them. So divided had their attention been for so many years that on the rare occasions when it wasn’t, something felt wrong; there was too much opportunity for scrutiny and uninterrupted conversation. In the interest of avoiding both, Liz had checked out of the Hyde Park Branch Library an audiobook she hoped would occupy the narrow overlap of her parents’ mutual interests—a nineteen-hour, thirteen-CD biography of a robber baron, published four years earlier and honored with many literary accolades.

The Bennets were approximately six minutes into the first CD when Mrs. Bennet began remarking on topics ranging from the temperature of the car (it was positively icy in the backseat) to the ongoing indignities of selling the Tudor (and besides, what guarantee did any of them have that Shane was trustworthy? Yes, he may have gone to Seven Hills, but there was something about him she didn’t care for. She couldn’t put her finger on what, but something) to the dullness of the audiobook (for heaven’s sake, did the author really expect people to keep track of all those names and who was related to whom and how?) to speculation about whether Ham would propose to Lydia by Christmas (Mrs. Bennet would have preferred Lydia’s husband to have a steadier source of income, God only knew if CrossFit was one of those fitness fads that would come and go, but he did seem to have enough of a head on his shoulders that if this business went under, he could find employment elsewhere).

An hour and fifteen minutes in, Mr. Bennet murmured to Liz, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. When we get to Lexington, you’ll drop me off at the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. You’ll pick me up three hours later. What you and your mother choose to do in the interregnum is up to you.”

Thus Liz and Mrs. Bennet ended up forgoing Berea for a leisurely lunch at a restaurant called Doodles, where Mrs. Bennet expanded upon several of the subjects she’d introduced in the car while also sharing, in depth, the progress of the item solicitation for the Women’s League auction. Though Mrs. Bennet conveyed her disappointment at not reaching Berea, her chagrin seemed expressed more than felt.

Liz’s phone pinged as she was standing outside the front of Doodles, waiting for her mother to use the restroom.
Call me,
read the text from Shane.

When she did so, he did not mince words. “Your parents have a spider infestation,” he said. “We need to get pest control to the house as soon as possible.”

Liz winced. “An infestation meaning, like…?” She trailed off. “Like, how is that quantified?”

“That’s what pest control will determine, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Are the buyers still interested?” Liz asked.

“No,” Shane said. “But that’s not our biggest problem now.”

OFTEN, ON THE
last day or two before an issue of
Mascara
shipped to the printer, Liz found herself in extremely frequent contact with her editor: A sentence needed to be added to reflect that the actress Liz had profiled had just entered rehab, or that the member of the women’s national soccer team was now pregnant; the additional sentence meant that an equivalent number of words elsewhere in the article needed to be cut. Either in person in the offices of
Mascara
or by text, email, or phone, Liz and her editor would communicate constantly, in an increasingly exhausted and loopy shorthand. And though by the time the article closed, Liz felt utterly sick of whatever it was about—few readers, she believed, had any idea of the amount of work that went into the casual reading experience they enjoyed while riding the subway or taking a bath—when it was all finished, Liz rather missed her editor and their urgent and knowing exchanges.

Later, when Liz looked back on what she thought of as the Week of Fumigation, she felt a similar and perhaps even more surprising nostalgia for her frequent conversations with Ken Weinrich, the proprietor of Weinrich Pest Control & Extermination and the man who steadfastly guided her on a tour into the unsavory and bewildering world of spider infestation. They first spoke when she was still standing outside Doodles in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was the next morning when he parked his truck in the Bennets’ driveway. A sturdy, middle-aged white man, Ken Weinrich entered the house wearing a short-sleeved button-down tan shirt, jeans, and work boots and carrying a flashlight and a clipboard.

The intervening hours had represented, without question, the worst night’s sleep of Liz’s entire life, even counting elementary school slumber parties, college hookups, and overseas plane flights. For legal reasons pertaining to the former buyers’ retraction of their offer on the house, Liz hadn’t spoken directly to the person who’d conducted the Tudor’s inspection. However, the inspector had told Shane, and Shane had told Liz, that he’d found spiders on every floor, including inside fireplaces, ceiling light fixtures, and showerheads, and that they were most concentrated in the basement and attic. For this reason, Liz slept, or tried to sleep, in Lydia’s bed, but every few minutes she awakened convinced that she could feel the tickle of arachnid legs crawling across her skin. The inspector also had told Shane that the violin-shaped spots on the back of dead specimens indicated that the spiders were the brown recluse kind, whose bites were known to cause swelling, nausea, and flesh-eating ulcers. When Ken Weinrich confirmed the species, Liz’s first reaction was relief that Jane was gone from the Tudor.

There were probably, Ken Weinrich estimated, thousands of the spiders hiding in the Tudor, though true to their name, they were mostly reclusive. Not
that
reclusive, Liz thought as she recalled her various encounters with them during the past three months. In retrospect, the evidence was plentiful that calling an exterminator was something she ought to have done during her first week at home.

Assuming no rain, the fumigation was scheduled for two days hence and would require tarps to cover the house from the outside; once they were in place, sulfuryl fluoride gas would be released within them, and special fans would circulate the gas. The Bennets would need to be absent from the property for three days. Repeatedly, Ken Weinrich assured Liz that sulfuryl fluoride didn’t leave residue, and that not only the Bennets’ furniture but even their food would all be safe for future use. The cost of the fumigation was $10,000.

Mr. Bennet seemed resigned, while Mrs. Bennet met news of the infestation with indignance. Much the way they might have had Liz reported the sighting of a single mouse, neither of her parents appeared all that troubled. “I’m sure it’s not
thousands
of spiders,” Mrs. Bennet said. During the fumigation, they would stay at the country club.

Liz’s sisters, by contrast, were horrified, though in Lydia’s case the horror contained a rather gleeful undertone only partially compensated for by Ham’s immediate offer to let any Bennets bunk at his house in Mount Adams. However, that very day, Mary and Kitty found a two-bedroom apartment—just, as it happened, a few blocks from Darcy’s—and Liz was the one to pay the first month’s rent and cosign their lease. Not wishing to risk the transport of spiders into this new living space, Mary, Kitty, and Liz drove to the Ikea thirty minutes north of Cincinnati, where Liz bought each sister a bed and, to share, a couch, a kitchen table, and chairs.

She wasn’t ignorant of the advantages to her of underwriting their acquisitions: Now beholden, they’d have no choice but to obey the directives she laid out for after her departure from Cincinnati, among them instructions about monitoring their father’s diet; keeping the Tudor in a state appropriate to be visited by Shane, other real estate agents, and their clients; and making themselves available to their mother for miscellaneous errands in the forty-eight hours prior to the Women’s League luncheon. Though the luncheon itself was little more than two weeks away, Liz had decided not to remain in town for it. She just couldn’t stand Cincinnati anymore. She didn’t want to spend another night in the now-spidery, soon-to-be-chemical-laden Tudor. She didn’t want to sleep for two weeks on Mary and Kitty’s couch. And although she appreciated the offer, she didn’t want to move in with Ham and Lydia and watch them kiss and coo and drink kale smoothies. With an abrupt urgency, she wanted to be home, in
her
home, which was Brooklyn. She wanted to get saag paneer and samosas delivered from her favorite Indian restaurant and eat them alone on her living room couch while reading a magazine, blasting her air conditioner, and not defending her lack of a husband.