The Most Fun We Ever Had (38 page)

“Did you find it?” Wendy called.

She forced the air out of her lungs, slid the paper back into the file, and opened the middle drawer. There, among paper clips and Post-it notes: the Advil. She shook the bottle for validation. “Found it,” she called.

She had so many regrets about Wendy. She regretted that she’d had her so young, during a time in her life when she was so lonesome. She regretted that she’d never really given Wendy her full attention, overcome first by delirious exhaustion and then by preparations for the unexpected arrival of Violet, the born-too-soon second child who kicked everything into such chaotic overdrive. She regretted—not
Grace,
certainly, but the impulsive moment during which she and David had decided to try again, when she perhaps should have been noticing the increasing moodiness of her eldest, the troubling relationship Wendy was developing with food. She regretted whatever she had done to make her daughter loathe herself so. She wondered what she’d done to make Wendy so entranced by a life loftier than the one she was living.

She was disturbed by the way their lunch had unfolded, by Wendy’s accusations, by the swift dexterity—indicative of bad habit—with which her daughter had opened the bottle of wine. And it occurred to her for the first time that she was maybe the only person in their family who knew uniquely the kind of loss Wendy had endured, that she hadn’t lost a husband and a baby but she’d lost her mother before she’d had a chance to figure out who she was as a person. That there was no way to measure suffering, of course, but that she—whose entire childhood had been an exercise in settling—knew better than anyone else what Wendy was going through.

She could see herself in all of her children, most often things about herself that she disliked. Violet knew how to put on a brave face, even if to her own detriment. Liza regarded her parents with undue reverence in the same way that Marilyn once had, watching her own parents—likely both extremely intoxicated—waltzing around the living room together one Christmas Eve, blind to the things both of them had to swallow in order to continue their relationship. Grace was malleable and conflict-avoidant. But Wendy had the strongest hold on her. Her daughter was impulsive, compulsive, turbulent. She spoke her mind as Marilyn had before she had children. She was self-conscious and self-critical and self-destructive.

She’d never say it—for fear of ruining a good thing in a way that only a well-intentioned mother can—but Wendy’s marriage to Miles reminded her the most of her own, the way that her daughter seemed to come into herself only after she’d met her husband, a man who was older than she and more serious—as David had been in 1975. And this made everything harder. Wendy was harder to approach, harder to soothe, harder to pity. She thought of all the times she’d tried to comfort her as a teenager, all the times her daughter’s sticklike limbs had remained flaccid beneath her touch, all the times Wendy had sneered at her mother’s efforts to connect.

Wendy: that first baby, that first person who demanded that she love the world around her in addition to and on behalf of the tiny person in her arms, who woke up a part of her heart whose existence she had not previously known and who made her realize its potential, those infinite and ever-shifting thresholds. Wendy: strong-willed and infuriating. Wendy, the first person on the earth in whom she had seen her husband’s exact same eyes.

She could never explain this to her daughter.
You made me recognize that my heart is in fact a bottomless hole of simultaneous pleasure and despair.
She could never say,
You gave my life meaning and ruined it at the same time
. She spent six months with her firstborn, conjoined, buried in blankets against the long winter, noticing
You got my mom’s nose
and
Other people may not think your eye contact means anything but I know that it does.
But then Violet came, along with the excuse to say,
I am now the mother of two infants and any mistakes I make can be chalked up to exhaustion.

And then Ivy had died. She’d been in agony for her daughter, for the grandchild she’d never get to meet. In the office, she steadied herself against Wendy’s desk. All these years she’d thought her granddaughter had lacked a middle name in the same way that Grace did—she’d never faulted David for the oversight, picturing him making a knee-jerk decision, holding their newborn, certain his wife was dead.

There was a fullness in her chest. Perhaps Wendy didn’t hate her as much as she’d always assumed.
IVY MARILYN EISENBERG
, on the certificate she’d just tucked back into its resting place in Wendy’s desk, just above the date.

When Wendy walked her to the door later, Marilyn surprised them both by throwing her arms around her daughter.

“I hope you know how much I love you,” she said, and Wendy stiffened.

“God, Mom, melodramatic much?”

“You didn’t ruin my life, Wendy. Quite the opposite. I can’t say that enough.”

“Okay, but, Mom, I was kind of a monster,” she said.

She studied Wendy’s face, the parts that hadn’t changed since those frigid mornings in the house on Davenport. She watched her daughter, the strangely sure-footed woman she’d become, and was suddenly able to see all incarnations of her, infancy onward, in a bizarre tessellated flip-book that disappeared as quickly as it had materialized.

“I would’ve
killed
me if I were you,” Wendy said.

“You wouldn’t have.” She brushed a strand of her daughter’s hair away from her face. “You would’ve done your best and powered through and then, decades later, gone to your firstborn’s house for a lunch of wine and cigarettes.” Who’d’ve thought that Wendy would emerge victorious in the measurement of her daughters’ current performance? Her first baby, who’d figured out, herself, how to power through. “And you would be just as
toun
ded by what a remarkable woman she’s become.”

1996

Gillian Levin had saved his wife’s life. This seemed somehow to advance their relationship to a new plane, a liminal level between collegial and concomitant. One evening, she appeared in his office, her lab coat replaced with an incongruous little motorcycle jacket.

“Going home?” she asked.

He paused, holding one of the clasps of his briefcase. “Not quite,” he said.

“I was going to go grab some dinner. You don’t want to join me, do you?”

He dropped the clasp, uncertain. “Join you?”

“No pressure.” She smiled at him and he felt his face get redder. He spent so much time in the company of women, but none of them—not even his wife, not anymore—looked at him like this. They had one seriously distressed kid and three other statistically average high-maintenance ones. They’d returned to their lives like soldiers from battle, atrophied, squinting, sun-deprived hostages. He’d never felt as distant from her as he did lately.

“Oh,” he said. “Well—sure. I just have to make a quick phone call.”

She held up her hands. “I’ll go lock up the supply closet. Take your time.”

He and Marilyn had now spent months in an exhausting union, monitoring Wendy’s doctors, her food intake, the number of times she left the house, her visits to the bathroom (standing outside the door, listening for retching—it felt like such a violation). They’d spent months handing Gracie back and forth and reminding each other to check in on Violet and Liza, reminding each other to be enthusiastic when Violet won the nebulous Trapeze Prize for her hard-hitting English essay on “Hills Like White Elephants,” when Liza, against all odds, made the water polo team. They’d spent months falling into bed beside each other and drifting immediately into deep sleep, never touching. Their interactions weren’t hostile, but they weren’t talking beyond businesslike exchanges about the children, about the dog, about the house, and this made him more nervous than anything else. They had weathered years and years together, winging it, but nothing had prepared him for this, for the illusion of normalcy when in fact everything was precisely how it wasn’t supposed to be.

Gillian probably assumed that he was calling Marilyn. But instead he dialed the clinic, where he’d been volunteering extra evening hours for the past few weeks, cited a minor emergency at the office and told them he wouldn’t be coming.

He chose a table by the window so it would be clear he wasn’t hiding anything. He was
allowed
to have dinner with a colleague. Just because he and Marilyn had never really had a vibrant social life outside of each other didn’t mean that he couldn’t have a
friend
. Gillian was telling an elaborate story about her brother, a news anchor in Cincinnati, and he was trying to pay attention, trying to act casual.

“It’s just tough,” Gillian said, “constantly being in that shadow. Even though we’re both adults. But I guess it’s— Well, you know all about sibling rivalry.”

“I’m an only child, actually,” he said.

She smiled. “I meant your daughters.”

“Oh.” He felt his face get warm. They’d been so far from his mind for the first time in months. Liza had a friend who lived in an apartment building on this side of town. He pictured Marilyn driving by in the Volvo, catching sight of him through the window. But he
wasn’t doing anything wrong
. And would Marilyn even care if he was? He sipped his scotch.

“You seem agitated,” Gillian said.

He shook his head. “Just a little—underslept.”

“How’s Wendy doing?” she asked gently.

When he’d taken the day off to be with her in the hospital, right after her overdose, he’d simply told their office manager that one of his girls was sick. But he’d told Gillian the full story upon his return; Gillian, who’d been the first person he went to when Marilyn started expressing concern about Wendy’s weight; Gillian, who understood women in a way that he never could.

“Getting there,” he said. She watched him, waiting, and he found himself continuing: “Wendy, actually, is almost back to a hundred percent. As for the rest of us—well. A lot left to be desired.” It was astounding how suggestive everything could come to sound when you were having dinner with a woman to whom you weren’t married.

“Are your other girls having a hard time?” Gillian had stopped by the house one night when Marilyn was in the hospital, after Gracie was born, to drop off Chinese food and a little bag of presents for the older girls,
Archie
comics and slap bracelets.

“Oh, no,” he said. “They’re all—well enough. Kids are resilient.” He realized that one could apply the process of elimination: subtract his daughters from “us” and you were left with him and Marilyn and the dog. He cleared his throat. “Tell me about you. What’s it like in the outside world?”

Gillian shrugged. “Same old. I’m noticing lately that I don’t have
hobbies.
Do you have hobbies?”

“Does sleeping count?”

She smiled. “I feel like I used to be more interesting. I used to
do
things. Rollerblading. Crossword puzzles.”

“
Roller
blading?” He couldn’t help it; he laughed, and then she did too.

“Don’t knock it till you try it,” she said. “Maybe your kids could teach you.”

“Oh, they’d have a field day.” He smiled, shook his head. “You’re a successful doctor,” he said. “You have a good excuse for not having hobbies.”

“Ah, but at what expense? I never imagined it would be so hard to find someone who I’m just happy to
be
around. Because that’s really what it comes down to, don’t you think?”

“Sure. Among other things. But that’s a— Yes, I’d say that’s a pretty important one.”

“You and Marilyn knew each other before you started med school, right?”

To have his wife suddenly on the table between them surprised him. “We did.”

“That must be the way to do it. I don’t have the time anymore. I don’t know when I’m supposed to meet anyone normal. Ask my patients to set me up in exchange for delivering their babies? This is the first time I’ve been out socially in months. It’s a nice change from microwave popcorn and
ER.
”

Of course it was a nice change for him too—a change from not loneliness but its opposite: the chaos of his household, his ever-present daughters and the constant demands of family life, and the newfound estrangement from his wife, who was his only source of shelter from the bedlam. “A doctor watching
ER
’s a bit of a cliché,” he said.

“Did you love anyone before you loved Marilyn?”

He coughed. Then: “No, actually. We got very lucky.”

Her eyes dimmed a little. “That’s sweet,” she said. “I’d just like to at least find someone who—I’m not sure. Feels lucky to be with me.”

“That’s critical,” he said. “Having a partner who knows you’re the most necessary element in his life.” These were things it would never make sense for him to say to Marilyn; there was no place for them between drowsy goodnights and grocery lists. “You deserve to be with someone who can sit across the table from you and understand that it’s the best thing that’ll ever happen to him.”

Gillian’s eyes were shiny. “That’s a high bar.”

“There’s no reason to settle for someone who isn’t nuts about you.”

She laughed. “No offense to your gender, but you’re awfully insightful for a man.”

“Well, I—”

“You’re making good use of having daughters,” she said, smiling at him, and it confused him, his children being invoked in a sentence that seemed flirtatious.

“We’ll see about that.”

“Any interest in doing this again?” she asked.

He could rearrange his clinic hours again, free up another evening. “Yeah.” He grabbed the check before she could try to split it. “How’s Thursday?”

—

V
iolet was obsessive about college, about where she would get in and what she would study. And yet her mother seemed sort of bored by the whole affair, making little asides about her determination and patting her gamely on the head as she took SAT practice tests. She’d gotten tired of it—tired of the dysfunction around her, of the hypersensitive focus on Wendy and of the subsequent fact that this was the most important thing she’d ever done and her mother didn’t even seem to care.