The Most Fun We Ever Had (30 page)

“Please please please,” he said aloud to anyone, everyone, to his daughter, who didn’t deserve to be burdened with this kind of responsibility but who deserved more than anything to meet her mother, the woman who’d been joking, hours earlier, between contractions, about how mole rats were known to give birth to two dozen babies at once, about how lucky she was to have it so easy. “Please,” he whispered to the baby, but she had fallen back asleep.

—

“I
thought you said it was a boy,” Wendy said with some amount of distaste, peering skeptically at the bundle in her father’s arms. Liza was worriedly examining the dry-erase board on the wall.
Mom: Marilyn,
it read in loopy cursive, a heart over the
i
in her mother’s name.
Goal: healthy baby!
Her dad’s dad had driven them to the hospital after staying with them overnight, and though he’d been extra jokey in the car, she could tell something was wrong, was deeply suspicious of the fact that her mother was absent from their introduction to their new sister and of the fact that her father wouldn’t quite meet any of their eyes.

“What’s dilation?” Liza asked.

“We did say she’d be a boy,” her father said. “We were wrong.” Then, to Liza: “Ask Mom about that some other time.”

Wendy relaxed slightly. Their mother must not be dead if Liza was being encouraged to ask her irritating questions.

Her mom had come in to say goodbye in the middle of the night; Wendy had awakened to find her sitting on the edge of her bed.

“Sweetheart, wake up for just a minute,” she’d said, her voice gentler than usual but also weirdly awake-sounding, given that it was still dark outside. “Wendy. Hey.”

“Mom,”
she said, trying to sound exasperated, but in actuality her heart was pounding. She didn’t want her parents to leave. She couldn’t admit this, because she was fifteen, but she wanted their family to stay exactly as it was.

“Darling, I’m turning on your lamp for just a second, okay?”

Wendy heard the click and suddenly the blackness of her pillow was edged with eye-watering yellow light. “Oh my
God,
” she said.

“Honey. It seems like this baby might be trying to join the ranks. Daddy and I are going to go to the hospital.”

She didn’t react.

“Grandpa’s downstairs,” her mom said. “He’ll get you guys off to school, all right?”

“Fine. Can I go back to sleep?”

“Want to wish me luck first?” Her mother’s voice had changed. Wendy chanced to look at her, just for a second, and saw, beyond her anxious smile and the exhausted puffiness around her eyes, something almost frightened on her mom’s face.

“Good luck,” she said. “Can you turn off the light?”

Her mother seemed to deflate. “I— Sure. We’ll call soon. I love you.”

She hadn’t said it back, had yanked her blankets up and rolled away and buried her face in the mattress. She hadn’t said it back, and now her mother had disappeared and her father looked epic levels of weird, his hair sticking up in the back and his eyes big and hollowed-out like Beetlejuice, gazing down at the baby.

“It kind of looks like a boy,” she said disdainfully.

“No she doesn’t.” Violet crept closer. “She looks like Mom.”

“I think,” he said, “that she looks a bit like all of us.”

Liza took a step toward them. “Like how?”

“Well.” Their father settled back in his chair, tucked in a corner of blanket around the baby’s neck. “Mom’s nose. The same little hands that you had, Viol. Wendy’s mouth. And Lize’s long legs, which you’ll see when she’s not swaddled.”

He’d told them their mother was resting and that they couldn’t see her because of germs.

“She’s going to have her feelings pretty hurt if no one volunteers to hold her,” he said. “She may begin to develop some kind of a complex.”

“I will,” Liza said.

“Remember to support her head,” Violet said, her voice lowered to baby volume in a way that made Wendy want to punch her in the face. Their mother had been giving them lessons in infant care in the last few weeks but Wendy hadn’t really paid attention.

“Remember to support her head,”
Wendy mimicked.

“Dad,”
Violet said, “can you tell her to stop being such a—”

“Girls,” their father said flatly. “Please.”

“Don’t drop her,” Wendy said. She brushed Violet with a sharp elbow as she went to sit on the windowsill. Her dad rose and rested the baby in Liza’s arms.

“What about you, Dad?” Violet asked. “What part of her looks like you?”

He suddenly looked like he might be sick. She’d never seen her father throw up before.

“Dad?” Violet asked. “Are you okay?”

He smiled weakly. “I’m great. Of course. Just have to take a leak.”

Wendy wrinkled her nose. “Dad, gross.”

He laughed too forcefully, making his way toward the bathroom. “I want three pairs of eyes on that baby, okay? Mom’ll kill us all if we let someone kidnap her.” He closed the door behind him and turned the water on, but beneath it Wendy could hear a strange noise, not a throwing-up noise but a shuddering sound that she did not recognize immediately as crying.

“I want to see Mom,” Liza said, holding the baby with a prim, infuriating exactitude.

“Shut up,” Wendy said. Through the door she now heard the distinct heaving sound of a sob, and it made the hair on her arms stand up.

“I don’t have
that
many germs,” Liza said thoughtfully.

“Shut
up,
” she said again. She couldn’t stand her mother, but she didn’t want her to die, didn’t want their last exchange to be the one they’d had last night. She started cataloging all of the mean things she’d said to her mom in the last year, in the last three years. All the times her mom looked at her like she’d just floated down from Pluto. The way she hadn’t said
I love you
back.

Her father emerged a moment later, patting at his face with a wad of paper towels. “Girls.” His expression was grim. “We’ve gotta talk about Mom.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Violet was on her way out the door, headed to Wine Night at Jennifer Goldstein-Mayer’s, when she was waylaid by—pulled to, magnetically—the dishwasher. The nature of domestic life, she mused, a suburban inevitability: at some point, you were going to find yourself having a heated argument over which end up the forks should be in the silverware basket. The subjects of her fights with Matt had become progressively pedestrian, achingly trite. She remembered laughable debates from their early days together—heated, vitriolic shouting matches about politics (oh, the Romney days!) and propriety (Matt still didn’t understand why it was iffy that he used
Jew
as a conversational noun) that usually ended in fantastic sex.

Things had become more complicated, of course; their alone time was virtually nonexistent, especially since Matt had made partner. They had two young children and a mortgage; they had wealth to be managed and a house to be maintained; and, now, they had the insertion of a controversial teenage person who threw a wrench into the well-heeled maintenance of all of those things. It bore revisiting, the Jonah subject, but instead it had become their unvisitable thing, the taboo topic that they edged their way around and pretended they weren’t bumping into.

So there she was, fuming instead over the fact that when her husband had loaded the dishwasher he’d put all of the silverware blades and tines up, making the emptier prone to minor stabbings, even though she’d told him last night for the seventeenth time to always put the blades down.

“I thought you were leaving,” he said, appearing in the doorway. She watched him register what she was doing—carefully, pettily, unloading one piece of cutlery at a time, to make a point. He squared his jaw. “You really want to do this, Violet?”

She bristled. “I didn’t even—”

“Can’t you just go drink wine with your friends? Is it not possible for us to have a single night where you don’t freak out about something completely inconsequential?”

“I’m not
freaking out,
” she said. “It’s just that we talked about it yesterday.” If she really listened to herself she would be appalled by how she sounded, but she sort of wanted to kill him at the moment, and perhaps this was one of the problems with constantly talking about things other than the thing you actually needed to talk about, because she was reaching a level of anger about the silverware that was appropriate only for something much more apocalyptic.

“I was distracted,” he said. “I won’t forget again.”

“What’s going to stop you from forgetting again?”

“I can’t give you a scientific analysis,
babe,
” he said, his final syllable bordering on hostility. “But I’ll give it my all to remember, okay?”

The smartest girl in the room,
Matt had said of her once. How false it was. How sick she made herself. She’d opted for all of the decisions exactly opposite from her mom’s; she had done all of the things that her mother had chosen not to do. And she was no better off. She was, arguably,
worse
off. Her mother, at least, had a sense of herself, despite being a college dropout who’d followed a man to the middle of nowhere, let him pursue his passion while she exercised her gravidity. Her mother’s story, for all she’d judged it, resisted it, was far more poetic than her own. Look at where they’d arrived: the mundane started out being ironically exciting and suddenly you were sexlessly fighting about silverware while your children watched
Wonder Pets!
in the next room. Something was shifting; something had blown in through the front door and they were both breathing it in, losing ions of love by the second. Never mind the unacknowledgeable fact of Jonah. She shuddered involuntarily.

“It’s dumb,” she conceded. “It’s such a dumb thing to be fighting about.”

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I
know,
” she said. “I’m apologizing. That was me apologizing for bringing it up.”

“Ah, I missed that. Have fun at Jennifer’s.”

He went off in pursuit of the kids without looking at her again. She carefully removed the rest of the knives from the dishwasher before following him into the den. She stood in the doorway and observed. Matt was on the couch with Wyatt’s socked feet in his lap. Eli, who she had just laboriously bathed, was absorbing his father’s postworkout sweat. She took a deep breath.
Let it go,
she told herself.
Drop it, drop it, drop it.
She exhaled louder than she intended to, with a bovine hum, and Matt looked up at her.

She smiled at him, trying, really.
Invite me over,
she willed. She could ditch the Shady Oaks moms, join her boys and snuggle and be snuggled and they could have an extremely photogenic family evening that concluded spiritedly with a romantic reunion with Matt, possibly some kind of avant-garde union in an obscure place—the kitchen table?—after the kids were in bed. She could see it vividly, could feel the pleasurable dampness of her husband’s Double Door shirt and the smooth, electric cool of her sons’ little feet and the sleepy complacency of a night in with your sedate young children, watching a show where hamsters wore baseball hats while the man you loved traced lines up and down your spine with his fingertips. They could find themselves again, get back on track, erase some of the tension of the previous months. All he had to do was smile back; all he had to say was
Get over here, darlin’
.

Instead he looked confused. “Are you still mad?” he asked.

“Am I—?” She stopped, hurt. “No.”

“You look mad.”

“I was smiling at you.”

“Mama, I can’t hear,” Wyatt interjected politely.

She pressed her lips together. “Forget it,” she said, and the crack between them widened further, the Matt-shaped hole grew larger, and another day would go by with them failing to connect.
I’m lost,
she wanted to say.
Help me, Matty; help me, help me.
She wanted to tell him that the accretion of these kinds of days could be fatal to a marriage. She wanted to tell him that the entire
point
of being married was so neither party would ever have to go through times like these alone. She wanted to tell her husband that she missed him a lot, but that she missed herself even more.

“I’ll see you guys in the morning,” she said instead.

Driving to Jennifer Goldstein-Mayer’s, she started feeling anxious, the kind of anxiety she could feel burning through her sternum and lifting the hair on her arms. She became suddenly aware of the terrifying responsibility of driving a car, navigating two tons of steel at forty miles an hour, how easy it would be to turn the wheel a little and end up wrapped around an elm tree or floating in Lake Michigan. The thought startled her so much that she missed the light turning green, causing the car behind her to honk, which made her even more anxious, and so she flipped on her blinker and turned onto a side street, parked the car, rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

This kind of anxiety was disturbingly familiar to her. She tried to slow her breaths. She’d never been good at relaxation exercises; in yoga classes, during corpse pose, her mind always raced wildly from her grocery list to the deadline for summer camp registration to whether or not her sports bra was giving her back fat. Now she felt as though her lungs weren’t filling completely with air, like she had to yawn but couldn’t quite finish. This was supposed to be a fun night out for her, a foray back into the Shady Oaks social set, pinotage and petty gossip, but the more she fixated on not being able to take a full breath, the harder it became, and she also couldn’t stop thinking of her car, barreling down McCormick Boulevard; how quickly things could change; how easily things could end. She rolled down her window and tried to remember the rules of nadi shodhana breathing, which nostril was supposed to be the calming one. Who knew what would come tumbling out of her in a routine Shady Oaks conversation?
I’m celibate now! And a pathological liar! And prone to panic spirals!