The Most Fun We Ever Had (25 page)

Marilyn had been preparing dinner when she learned that her father had died, Liza on her hip, the ends of her ponytail in Liza’s mouth, a bag of potatoes in her free hand, the receiver wedged between her chin and her shoulder.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” said the nurse on the other end, but she had already sat down heavily—startling the baby—in a kitchen chair. Liza, sensing her unease, began to fuss.

“Shh,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking to the baby or to the nurse.

“Your father’s had a heart attack, Mrs. Sorenson.”

“I know,” she murmured into the top of Liza’s head. Because she’d always kind of expected this, since she left Oak Park, hadn’t she? “I know, I know, I know.”

“We weren’t able to resuscitate him. I’m so sorry.”

It surprised her anew—as it had when she and David signed their lease, when she wrote the monthly check to the gas company, when the girls were born—how these instances of adult responsibility were just foisted upon you, without preamble or training. Suddenly she didn’t have parents, and there was nobody around to tell her what that meant, or how she was supposed to feel about it. In some ways, her father had done her a kindness by allowing her such a swift and clean exit from his life, by failing to express interest in her or his grandchildren. She tried to picture her own children growing up, progressing into adulthood, and she tried to imagine not being utterly riveted by their every step, as she was now.

“You’re wonderful, my lambs,” she’d whisper to the girls at night in the weeks after his death, memorizing the parts in their hair. “You’re Mama’s best things.”

Now Violet ambled into the room, having visibly wet her pants, having been too wrapped up in the game she’d been playing with Wendy where their dolls were sea explorers and the dustpan was a boat, which Marilyn had known would happen, because her eldest girls were so tightly wound sometimes that they had to be forcibly extracted from their imaginative world to deal with workaday inconveniences like urination. She knew them so well. So much better, already, than either of her parents had ever known her. Violet’s eyes were brimming with embarrassed tears, and Marilyn—her shoulder pressing the phone to her ear as the nurse began to review logistical details, Liza sucking again on the ends of her hair—opened her free arm to her daughter and pulled her close.

—

S
he was quieter in the weeks following her father’s death, he thought, but it was also hard to tell, because the way their life was structured didn’t really allow for a mourning period; he’d offered to take some time off work but she’d just smiled at him and insisted she was fine.

And then suddenly she was back.

“Darling, I hate it here,” she declared dramatically one night a few weeks later when he walked in the door, one hand elbow-deep in a rubber glove and the other holding a martini like some kind of missed-bus holdover from their parents’ generation; he was pretty sure she was even wearing makeup.

“Good evening to you too,” he said. He tripped over a tiny pair of rain boots as he went to set down his briefcase. He followed her into the kitchen, where she was wiping down the counters, Springsteen playing softly on the radio, which could indicate any number of her moods, from overwhelmed to furious to completely and insatiably aroused.

“There’s a dead mouse in the basement,” she said. “And the crack in the girls’ ceiling is getting bigger; I think it might be from ants. The librarian asked me if I’d
gotten myself pregnant again.
She said she’s been noticing that I’m gaining weight.”

“You’re not gaining weight.”

“I
am,
though. I am because there’s nowhere to
go
around here and so I’m just always
sitting
. I made you a drink if you want.”

“Thank you.”

“Sit down.
I’ll
get it.” She tossed her glove into the sink and spun toward him, stopping to kiss him as she passed; when she pulled away he could taste the waxy sheen of her lipstick. “I’m the one who needs more physical activity.”

“For God’s sake, honey; you get plenty of physical activity. You’re chasing three kids around all day.”

“Which brings me,” she said, thrusting out his martini, “to the girls’ room.”

“The ants. You said.”

“No. They’re going to kill each other in there, David.” She sat down next to him, laughing, her domestic façade proving itself to be just that, a theatrical little lilt to make her day more interesting. She still had a sense of humor about it all. She enjoyed their life, sometimes; of course she did. Sometimes he’d catch her humming when she was folding the laundry; her face lit up with pleasure every time Liza did her great hysterical baby-cackle; she’d just planted a row of tulips in the front yard. He reached for her free hand and clinked his glass against hers with the other.

“Oh yeah?” he said. He sipped his martini. “
Lord of the Flies
situation?”

“Really.”

“The librarian wasn’t right, was she? You’re not pregnant again?”

“Christ, no. But I’m losing it here, David.”

He often felt guilty when he came home to her, not because his day had been
fun
but because she so often appeared completely drained. He would come over to her on some of those evenings and lean to kiss her and feel afraid when her eyes met his because they were so unfamiliar to him. She’d get this vacant, glassy look, usually accompanied by a weak shell of a smile, and she’d sometimes kiss back and sometimes just let him kiss her, and then inevitably one of the kids would make a noise or the pot she was filling in the sink would overflow and just as quickly she’d snap out of it, wrenched from her rumination by the chaotic onslaught of their household.

He felt bad that he’d never given her the opportunity to get to know herself better. At twenty-nine, she’d become so staunchly, irrevocably
Mom
to three girls that there was no room for anyone else, and even if there had been room, there
wasn’t
anyone else, because she hadn’t had the chance to discover any of her other selves prior to the births of their children. She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he had been so fixated on
having
her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had. This was how he saw it:
getting
her, winning. It wasn’t fair. She deserved more.

He observed the room around him: every inch of real estate on the fridge was covered with waterlogged paintings of princesses with pink hair and rainbow-striped dinosaurs. There was barely room at the table for Liza’s high chair, and the sink was lined with drying sippy cups and Strawberry Shortcake plates. And his wife, losing her mind in the middle of all of it, in the kitchen she’d impulsively painted blue before either of them had any idea what it meant to be overwhelmed.

“I got a call from my father’s lawyer today,” she said.

“Oh?”

“We’re homeowners.” Her voice was tentative. “If we want to be.”

The house on Fair Oaks: her father’s house, her childhood home, with the lilac bushes and the ginkgo tree beneath which she’d taken his virginity.

He hated Oak Park, and not only because he’d grown up in the city and rued the moneyed profusion of the suburbs—yards that could fit nine of his father’s house, fussy cobblestone streets. He hated it because of those things, but he also suspected they wouldn’t quite fit there, not like they did in Iowa City. They weren’t rich enough and they had too many kids. Oak Park: not north where the Jews lived or south where the
Catholic
Catholics lived, but just west of the city, a land populated by regular, lazy Catholics and agnostics, those who were skeptical or jaded or just liked to sleep late on Sundays. Oak Park: the land of wide lawns and narrow minds, the birthplace of Hemingway and Ray Kroc and home, then, to a bunch of walking contradictions afflicted with what his equally conflicted social liberal/fiscal conservative father-in-law had referred to as “a mean case of NIMBY syndrome.” Oak Park, the topography of which David could barely stand to comprehend, such a far cry from the pragmatic gray land upon which he had been reared, not very far away at all but aesthetically unrecognizable, apples and oranges, Frank Lloyd Wright versus the Tom, Dick or Harry who’d mapped out the bland vinyl-sided walk-up in which he’d come of age. Houses with bowling alleys in the basements and indoor swimming pools, houses that had once been inhabited and embellished by Depression-era mobsters but were now owned by white-bread investment bankers and neurosurgeons, people whose kids drove BMWs and had spots on reserve for ineffectual social science degrees from Marquette and Cornell. He hated the thought of living somewhere so precious and affluent.

But his wife—his wife who’d come with him to Iowa and given him this beautiful, chaotic life, made a father and a doctor out of him, loved him amid the tumult—hated it here. And so it was. They were bursting at the seams, and thank God they were still able to laugh about it, but he wasn’t sure how much longer that would be the case. He owed her. She would be there, wherever they lived. The rest, he supposed, didn’t really matter.

She was watching him with apprehension, and he smiled at her, and the relief that crossed her face made everything worth it; for the simple fact of her hand squeezing his, he would have moved a dozen times over.

—

T
he third step from the bottom still creaked as it always had. Marilyn came down from putting the girls to bed and found David on the couch, looking small and uncertain in their underfurnished living room. He saw her and smiled; she came and sat beside him.

“I don’t think I ever really realized how huge this place is,” he said. “I mean—growing up—I think my entire house was maybe the size of this room.”

“My Little Match Boy.”

“I’m serious. I think—I would have slept where the fireplace is, and my dad’s room would have been the…foyer, I guess. Do I have to call it that?”

“You can call it whatever you want,” she said, rubbing his thigh.

“You’re just going to have to bear with me while I get used to this.”

“Yeah, well, likewise,” she said, and he looked at her pointedly. “I’ll be patient.”

Marriage, she had learned, was a strangely pleasurable power game, a careful balance of competing egos, conflicting moods. She could turn hers off in order to allow his to shine. Conservation. Reciprocity. She was allowed to feel confident and excited only when he was feeling anxious and pessimistic. If he worried about everything, she was allowed to worry about nothing. He had given her a gift by agreeing to move here. She curled into him and surveyed the disaster of the living room. They had unpacked the girls’ things, some of them at least—her children had roughly seventy times more possessions than she did—and a few absolute necessities; but everything else was still in ruins, haphazardly stacked boxes and furniture left wherever they had decided to set it and rolled-up rugs like fallen bodies and all of the things her father had left behind—the built-in room dividers with the gilt-edged encyclopedias, the antique end tables that her mother had refinished.

“What should we do first?” he asked, sounding drained. He would start work the day after tomorrow, and had just finished at the hospital in Cedar Rapids yesterday, had come home at midnight and meticulously packed up what remained of their kitchen and modest living room; he had gone to bed at three and awakened at six to pick up their U-Haul and play an elaborate game of Tetris with the complete contents of their domestic life, fitting it all into the truck without a centimeter to spare. (She had discovered, after the fact, one box that she had forgotten in the bedroom closet, and when she presented it to him he had looked so dejected that she had decided she could do without the extra set of linens—though they had been her mother’s, beautiful Pratesi sheets dotted with lavender fleur-de-lis—and set it on the curb.)

“We should drink a beer together on our porch,” she said.

“It’s only eight. Tomorrow’s our only full day to get settled in before I’m back at work.”

“So what?” she said, rising from the couch. “Outside.” He looked first at her and then at the carnage in their new living room. “Forget about it for tonight. We’ve got the next fifty years together to finish unpacking.”

At this he smiled, shook his head and rose to go with her onto the porch. They’d yet to unpack the patio furniture and sat instead on old pool rafts they found in the garage.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Come keep me company,” Wendy demanded, calling in from the patio to where Jonah was watching
South Park
reruns in the living room. It was nice to be able to ameliorate your own loneliness, to beckon a person and have him comply. He looked up, one leg thrown over the back of the couch and his neck at a ninety-degree angle over the armrest. He rose without protest, clicked off the television and came to join her outside.

“You want me to bring the bottle of wine?” he said when he reached the screen door.

She stiffened. “What? No.”

He paused. “Okay. Just checking.”

“How was martial arts?”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “I’m still working on the three sixty defense.”

It surprised her how easily they’d fallen into a rapport, how much he’d relaxed around her over the course of a few months. He joked with her, told her about dumb shit he’d watched on the Internet. He inured her to teenisms,
dope
and
lit
and
meme;
and he told her when it would be normal for her to use those words and when it would just seem try-hard.

“If at first you don’t succeed…” she said idly, lighting a cigarette. Every once in a while he’d bum one from her, but his habit didn’t seem serious.

Bring the
bottle
? As though she were some kind of wino. True: if her recycling bin was any indicator, she probably drank more than she should (though at least she
recycled
). And the guy at the bodega where she bought her cigarettes knew her by name, but she also went there for orange juice and Clif bars, which didn’t necessarily mean she smoked too much—though scientific consensus pegged all smokers as smoking too much. As for the weed, the evidence in her favor was staggering: reduction in anxiety, possible increase in lung capacity and metabolism. Cancer prevention too; people ignored the research on that. She just happened to live in a state where it had not yet been made legal.