Читать книгу Family And Other Catastrophes - Alexandra Borowitz - Страница 8
ОглавлениеEmily
AT SOME POINT during her Benadryl-induced stupor, Emily had gotten chilly, stolen David’s heather gray sweatpants from his carry-on, and put them on underneath her dress. By the time they landed at JFK around seven in the morning, she was too tired, and still too cold, to remove them.
“I thought you said you needed to look good every day this week or it would be embarrassing,” David teased.
“Not now. I’m freezing. Why do they make planes that cold? And then they offer air-conditioning on top of that? When it’s negative a hundred degrees outside, why not offer adjustable heat dials instead of AC? I know why—because they’re sadists.”
“Let’s just get to your mom’s house. We’ll feel a lot better when we see Lauren, my biggest fan.”
“Are you still upset about that? I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s actually not a bad thing. I can finally stop pretending to like her.”
“So you didn’t like her before?”
“I didn’t really interact with her long enough to form an opinion. I saw her—what, once, that time in Brooklyn? We had lunch in that Americana dim sum place with the grilled cheese gyoza.”
Emily turned to David. “Be honest. Is there anyone else in my family you don’t like? I may even agree with you.”
“Same question to you.”
“I like your family.”
“Okay, same answer.”
“Except you don’t actually like them. Your family is a million times nicer than mine.”
“Yeah, my family seems great, but trust me when I say they can be annoying too. What about my brother?”
“Oh, well, I mostly meant your father.”
“He’s not perfect either, believe me.”
“Emily!”
She turned and saw a young woman with long curly brown hair, a wide friendly smile and a Muppet-like bouncy walk. Emily couldn’t place her at first but squinted and got a better look as she approached. Finally she recognized the ten-year-old frayed cross-body bag with the faux tribal stitching. It was Stephanie Morris, an old friend from high school—so old, in fact, that Emily hadn’t seen her since her sophomore year in college when she was home for spring break. They had gotten coffee in Chelsea, but had very little to discuss other than Stephanie’s love of silent movies and hatred of designer fashion. The two of them once had a lot in common—they were both artistic, extroverted and energetic—but since Vassar, Stephanie had changed dramatically. Of course, Emily hadn’t spent enough time with her to know this firsthand, but she assumed as much from Stephanie’s social media posts. If Stephanie wasn’t posting about the dangers of vaccinations, she was posting about how meditation could cure cancer or how the only good decision a young person could make is to quit her job and live in Bolivia for a year without doing any research first. After Stephanie got her bachelor’s degree in psychology, she went backpacking in Europe and presumably had sex with a flock of rich hippies named Travis or Jared in hostel beds for a year and a half. She had neglected to find another job since returning to the United States. It had been six years. Of course, such important life-changing experiences were a lot easier when your parents paid your rent and subsidized your shrooms habit.
“Emily, is that seriously you?” she squealed. “How are you? You didn’t tell me you were back!”
Emily never told Stephanie when she was back home—because, naturally, they barely knew each other anymore—but every time Stephanie got any whiff of Emily’s return to New York on social media, she eagerly asked her if she wanted to meet up for coffee in Brooklyn. She never stopped to consider that Emily’s parents lived in Westchester.
“Oh, I’ve just been so busy with the wedding stuff.”
“When’s the big day?” she asked, her electric-green-lined eyes widening. She had gotten a nose piercing. That was new.
“Oh, just...in a week,” Emily croaked.
“A week? Oh, so, like, it’s a small ceremony with just you and your parents?”
“Um...not really. We have a few other people coming.”
Emily watched it slowly dawn on Stephanie that she wasn’t invited to the wedding. Eight years ago when they met up in Chelsea, Stephanie had promised Emily that she would give a kick-ass speech at her wedding. It seemed intrusive and weird even then, especially since Emily was single at the time. She racked her brain for all the consoling things she could say to Stephanie—for example, that her parents were limiting her to inviting five friends. Of course, the real reason she invited so few friends was that she didn’t have many friends. Her mother had actually urged her to invite more and said that she feared that she was self-sabotaging by “pushing people away” because it was implausible for a woman her age to have only two close female friends. Surely, her mother assumed, Emily had other friends she was intentionally alienating.
“I didn’t realize you wanted to come,” she said to Stephanie. “Also, we don’t have a raw vegan option for dinner. You’re still raw vegan, right?”
“Yeah, but it could still work out! Especially since I’m currently fasting, except for alcohol, so you wouldn’t even need to provide a dinner for me. I’d even bring my own craft whiskey. Can I still come anyway?”
Emily desperately wanted to turn to David and share incredulous looks, but she knew that doing that would plunge them both into fits of laughter. It would be just like the time they were riding the 47 bus downtown in San Francisco and a middle-aged man wearing nothing but a clown wig and leather harness got on, his soft, leathery penis flopping around like a very large skin tag. Everyone pretended not to notice, because that was the go-to San Francisco reaction to a lunatic. Emily, however, had made the mistake of mischievously glancing at David. He began to laugh, and so did she, and before long the naked clown was serenading both of them with a surprisingly competent rendition of “Every Breath You Take.”
Emily smiled tensely. “Um... I mean... I can talk to my parents and see if they’re okay with it, but they’re being really strict about it. They’re paying and they’re on a tight budget, so it’s kind of their rules.”
“Well, I won’t even eat anything, so I don’t think anyone would even notice me. What day is it again?”
“Next Saturday.”
“Oh,” Stephanie looked down at her hands, as if discovering them for the first time. She shrugged. “Saturday is actually no good for me. I’m going to a reconstructed Druid bonfire that day. Poop! This totally sucks! There’s no way we can do another day?”
“What, like, reschedule my wedding?”
“Oh, of course not! What was I thinking? You probably already paid all the fancy caterers and whatnot. Can we hang out a different day?”
“Let’s totally do that next time I’m in town,” she said with no intention of returning to New York for at least a year. Next holiday season, she would definitely try to go on vacation with David alone, to somewhere warm and peaceful where she could wear a bikini and a breezy cotton kimono. Slighting both sets of parents for the holidays seemed easier than slighting only one—at least they couldn’t be accused of favoritism. The previous year, they had visited his parents, because they had seen her parents the year before that. With her parents in Westchester and his in Fairfield, Connecticut, they could easily visit both in one trip, but whichever family paid for the ticket seemed to feel horribly insulted if they spent even a few minutes seeing the other family. Emily learned that the hard way when she visited her own family for the holidays and made the mistake of seeing David’s parents for lunch one day. For the rest of the week, her mother lamented that they were “stealing” her and deliberately trying to destroy what little Emily’s parents had left of a family. This somehow devolved into the accusation that David’s Catholic father was trying to steal her away and convert her to Catholicism because “for them it’s not enough for Jews to be only two percent of the population, they want us at zero percent.” The holidays had gone from something Emily enjoyed celebrating as a child—in a secular, Claymation-movie-based sort of way—to something she dreaded each year.
“What about Friday?” Stephanie asked. “Are you free to chill at my place?”
“Your place in Brooklyn?”
“Yeah, it’ll be low-key. We can just chill for an hour or so.”
“I mean, I’m staying with my parents in Westchester. Also, that’s the day of the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, you know...it’s kind of a busy day.”
“I’m sure you have an hour free. Come see me! I never see you anymore!” She jutted out her lower lip like a kid begging for a rainbow slushy.
“Well, actually it would be like, three or four hours if you include the commute.”
“Figure it out! Don’t be a party pooper! We can smoke a little weed, drink the home brew that my neighbor made and watch Nosferatu. It’ll be rad.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” She squeezed David’s hand, as if to send a distress signal, but he already knew she was distressed and seemed to have no intention of intervening.
“Sweet, let’s totally do that!” She tried to high-five Emily. “Shit, my Uber is here. I have to go.”
“No worries, I’ll see you later.”
Emily waited until she was gone and turned to David.
“Why does she even like me? What about me is even likable to a person like that?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but her interest in you is just as confusing to me as it is to you.”
“We’re talking about someone who uses her emergency allowance money to go to Burning Man. What does she want with me? My organs?”
“Possibly,” David said with a grin. “Since you went grain-free, your digestive system is probably top-notch.”
* * *
Emily got chills when she saw her father, Steven, behind the wheel of his gray Volvo waiting to pick them up at the airport. This sight brought her back to the terrifying days when Steven attempted to teach her how to drive, shouting “Ah!” and “Ooh!” every time the car went above two miles per hour. Now, at twenty-eight, she was still afraid of actually taking her road test. Fortunately, in San Francisco everyone just took Uber.
Steven looked older to her, even though he and Emily’s mother, Marla, had visited her in San Francisco the year before. He had gained some weight that had settled in his lower face. He had slightly less hair and a slightly longer beard with more gray in both. He was only sixty-three, which she knew wasn’t really that old, but she often felt ripped off when she considered that her older siblings would wind up with more years of living parents than she would. Then again, he was only thirty-five when he had her. Having a child at thirty-five was no longer old by current standards. If anything it seemed recklessly young compared to what people attempted in San Francisco. Emily always dreamed of having her first child at thirty, but now that she was in her late twenties, such an act seemed outrageously premature. People who had children before thirty were part of the multitudes who occupied the land mass between New York and California, watching game shows, trampling each other in Walmart on Black Friday and remaining shockingly unaware of gluten. She knew it was classist to think that way, but she couldn’t help it. She blamed Linda.
Emily’s boss was an overachieving blonde Amazon who firmly believed that a person was incapable of committing to another person properly until they were both forty and had a net worth of over a million dollars (each). Linda proudly regaled her with stories about how she had the foresight to freeze her eggs at the age of thirty-seven, only to fertilize them at the age of forty-eight when she met her sixty-year-old husband. “In this technologically advanced day and age,” Linda said, in her usual chipper but abrasive tone, “women no longer need to get married. My little Harper won’t get married until I’m dead. That’s the rule.” Then she laughed and added, “Not literally, of course. But she better not be under forty, or I’m not paying for that wedding! Unless she’s already at C-level. She’s gifted, so it’s not a totally crazy idea!”
Whenever Emily thought about how difficult her own mother was, she contemplated little three-year-old Harper, only allowed to watch PBS and forbidden from playing with dolls or anything that would discourage her from a career in science or engineering, the only acceptable fields for a woman in Linda’s world, despite the fact that Linda worked in PR. Linda didn’t want Harper wearing makeup or pink frilly dresses, but Linda got her roots touched up every few weeks, wore fitted, surprisingly sexy sheath dresses to work and never left the house without her fuchsia lipstick and heavy mascara. Eventually, Harper would start asking questions, especially if she was really so gifted, and the result wouldn’t be pretty. Emily still recalled Linda’s chilly, thin-lipped response when she had told her about the possibility of an American Girl Place opening up in Union Square and how much fun Harper would have there. Poor Harper was a science experiment from day one, as if Linda were playing The Sims and wanted to build the perfect Sim from the beginning—complete with the right genetics, the right skills, the right interests. But wait! Screw Harper! Harper only saw her mother for two hours a day, but Emily had to work with her and suffer her unsolicited pseudo-maternal advice for nine hours a day. Every time Linda opened her mouth to dispense some pointless aphorism, usually along the lines of “dump your fiancé and focus more on your career, but of course you can have it all, just not in your twenties,” Emily cringed as she realized she was literally growing older with every second that she spent with her. Emily deserved far more sympathy than stupid Harper. Harper was naturally blonde anyway—life would come easily for her.
“Emily!” her dad called out. She ran toward the car. The sweatpants were too hot now that she was being hit with the humid air of New York in June, not to mention that her legs were double-insulated with both sweatpants and blood-clot-preventing socks. Sometimes she felt she should be compensated just for living with anxiety and all the inconveniences that came with being a hypochondriac. Could she possibly enroll herself in some kind of medical study? It would certainly beat scheduling Linda’s meetings all day.
“Good to see you, Professor Glass,” David said, climbing into the back.
“Haha, ‘Steven,’ please. So how’s work? Is there going to be an IPO?”
“We’re out for a second round of funding. Once that closes, we’ll start the countdown to an IPO. So fingers crossed and say a prayer.”
“I’m an atheist, so I don’t pray,” Steven said, peeling out and cutting off a taxi, then nervously slamming on the brakes so that the taxi almost rear-ended him. “But it is fascinating how, historically, people have resorted to prayer as a way to feel in control of a completely chaotic universe.”
“Oh...well, I just meant—”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bore. I recently wrote a book on early Jainism but you probably wouldn’t find it very interesting. So who’s your funding coming from? Google? It seems like they’re buying up everything.”
“No, actually—”
“Apple?”
“No, um...it’s a VC firm called BluCapital.”
“Like Blu-ray? I’ve heard of Blu-ray.”
“No, it’s...it’s something else. I don’t want to jinx it anyway.” Emily could tell David wanted the topic to end. Whenever they traveled back East, people Steven’s age were always ravenously interested in his work for a start-up. Half of David’s stepmother’s friends thought he worked for Amazon, and the only reason he didn’t correct them was that he didn’t feel like explaining what he actually did.
“So what happens when you do the IPO?”
David fiddled with the zipper on his backpack. “We’ll hopefully make some money.”
“I’m sorry, but what is your company called again?”
“Zoogli.”
“Right, right. And what does Zoolie do again?”
“Zoogli, and we—well, we are the liaison between mobile tracking SDKs and the mobile app developers. We help to aggregate spend in a way that is more accessible for the developer. Our slogan is, So easy, even a marketer can get it.”
“Oh, so you make apps? I have this flashlight app on my phone, it’s outstanding.”
“Oh, no, we don’t make apps.”
“So you...how would you say it...promote the apps?”
“No, not exactly.” David cleared his throat. “We are the liaison between the people who make the apps, and the people who track how many installs the apps get when the apps are being promoted.”
“But you don’t promote the apps?”
“No, we don’t.”
“Oh, so you’re the guys who...track the installs the app gets when the app is being promoted?”
“No, we’re the liaison between them and the app developers.”
“Oh, okay. Well, hopefully, the IPO will happen soon.” He looked back at Emily in the rearview mirror. “Em, what are you wearing?”
“Oh, they’re just compression socks because of the flight. I don’t want to get blood clots.” She took off her sweatpants and compression hose. She had unflattering red marks around her knees. “Are Lauren and Jason at the house?”
“Yes. You know, sweetie, it would really be nice if your boss were a little more understanding about the time you need to plan a wedding out here. Your mother had to do most of it herself and she’s driving herself crazy with it. How is it that Lauren and Jason had no trouble getting a week off for your wedding, and you practically had to beg for it?”
Emily took several deep breaths, as one therapist suggested she do when she felt filled with rage. “Well, Dad, Jason is the pretend CEO of a company that doesn’t exist and Lauren is a writer for a magazine that barely exists. You’d be surprised at how lenient bosses are with vacation days when your job isn’t real.”
“Jason and Lauren are taking risks. You aren’t happy where you are—why not do something of your own? Your mother keeps saying you’re wasting your creativity over at TearDrop.”
“ClearDrop. And I’m not meant to create my own company. Why does everyone in the world think they’re equipped to start a company? I like my job security. The work’s boring, but I get to do my own fun stuff on weekends. David and I just want to make enough money to live comfortably, and enjoy our life together.” She looked at David, who nodded in solidarity. Every time she mentioned her future with David, she felt the urge to make sure he was on the same page. Even though they were getting married in a week, she still worried about the age-old problem of “What are we?” Sometimes she worried that if she referred to him as her fiancé, he would say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn’t realize we were doing labels.” There was no legitimate reason to worry about this, but there was no legitimate reason to worry about any of the things she worried about.
“Obviously, I’m thrilled that you have established such a stable life for yourself,” Steven said, almost sideswiping a bread truck. “But what about your creativity? What if your crafting was your job, and you got to come home whenever you wanted? Whatever happened to that cute little craft blog you were making?”
“A bunch of teenagers started commenting on it and said I looked like a naked mole rat in my profile picture. So I had a mini nervous breakdown and deactivated it. And besides, it never got enough traffic to make me any money.”
“Well, after David’s company goes public—”
“It’s actually not my company,” David said. “It’s my boss Robert’s company.”
“My mistake. But as I was saying, once Zookie goes public—wait, David, did I get the name right?”
“Yep.”
“Then you can focus on something that actually utilizes the stronger areas of your mind. Then you can both come home more often, see your niece and nephew...”
“Did Mom ask you to say this?”
“I do not recall,” Steven said, as if giving a deposition.
“Well, off the record, if Mom brings up the fact that I haven’t visited home in a while, and how she’s had to do everything for the wedding, let her know that’s a byproduct of me having a real job. If she wants to pick on anyone for not coming home enough, tell her to yell at Lauren and Jason. They both live in the city. They don’t even need to take a plane.”
Steven nodded. The car’s front tires squeaked as he absentmindedly drove into the curb.
* * *
Emily looked out the window at the house where she grew up. It was a pale blue colonial on a winding road lined with oak trees. The street would have been picturesque if people from other neighborhoods didn’t use the vacant wooded lot on the corner to dump their old TVs and mattresses. When she was eleven, she had sworn she saw two deer humping on one of the discarded mattresses, but her mother had dismissed the story as a ploy for attention, and briefly diagnosed her as histrionic.
“Ah, your mother is home,” Steven said, pulling into the driveway. In the carport she saw her mother’s Subaru Impreza, maroon like her trademark shade of lipstick. Her brother Jason’s used red Corvette—his first postdivorce purchase—was parked nearby as was a white Nissan Altima, which she assumed her sister, Lauren, had rented. It had to be a rental, since Lauren had sold her car to reduce her carbon footprint, and if she ever wound up buying another car, it was unlikely that it would be free of pro-choice or anti-meat bumper stickers. The last bumper sticker Emily recalled her sister having was a black one with white lettering, reading Got Privilege?
David and Steven lugged the bags inside, declining Emily’s mostly empty offer to help. She carried her wedding dress, still in the white garment bag. In the car, she had checked it every few minutes to make sure it hadn’t ripped, but every time she checked it, she worried that the zipper had ripped the lace, so she eventually stopped checking.
“Here comes the bride!” Her mother was at the front door. She was wearing her usual summer outfit, which Emily was convinced was the warm-weather uniform mandated to all sixty-year-old female Jewish psychologists: blue cotton shell top with a long beige linen kimono, matching palazzo pants, flat, thick-soled sandals with nondescript “ethnic” beading on them and a chunky amber necklace.
“Hi, Dr. Glass,” David said.
“Oh, come on, it’s ‘Marla’ now. We’re all family!” She hugged Emily, keeping her hands on her daughter’s shoulders after the hug ended. She looked her over.
“You look skinny. Are you eating enough? I hope this isn’t wedding nerves.” She rubbed the sides of Emily’s arms, as if trying to warm her up.
“Hi, Mom.”
“I’m a little worried that your wedding dress isn’t going to fit you now.”
“I went in for a fitting last week. It’s fine.”
“Why do you do this to yourself?” She threw her hands up in exasperation. This was a new record for her—normally she waited until Emily was actually inside the house to start criticizing. Emily supposed there was a first time for everything. “You had such a wonderful figure, and now you’re some kind of heroin-chic toothpick runway model. I know weddings are stressful, but you need to remember to eat.”
“I did eat. Actually, I think I gained weight.”
Marla crossed her arms. “Well, I haven’t seen you in a very long time. Maybe I just can’t remember what you look like.”
Emily refused to take the bait, even though that comment was difficult to ignore. She gave her a fake smile. “I didn’t lose any weight, Mom.”
“I’m not paying for any extra alterations that were caused by your unhealthy body image,” Marla said. “I’ll only pay for alterations done before you dropped below 130 pounds, because while I love you to death, sweetheart, I can’t be an enabler for your anxiety.”
“Mom, you’re not helping,” came a shout from inside the house. “Don’t blame women for their own oppression.” Lauren was home.
Marla stayed focused on Emily. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s not argue now.”
“I actually didn’t go under 130. I’m 132. I’ll weigh myself in your bathroom if you want.”
“You don’t look it. You probably gained muscle and lost fat, that’s why. You used to have such a nice lovely shape, and now you’re looking a bit...hard. It’s all that LifeSpin garbage.”
“Mom, stop body-shaming,” Lauren called out again, this time in a harsher tone.
Emily could hear Lauren’s four-year-old son, Ariel, ask “Mommy, what’s ‘body-shaming’?”
Marla shook her head in a long-suffering way. “I promised myself we wouldn’t fight this week. I must just be overwhelmed with all the planning that I’ve had to do all by myself. Let’s just get you settled in.”
Emily stepped inside. David followed her but stood frozen, still carrying the two bags, afraid of putting them in the wrong place. The living room hadn’t changed much since Emily was a kid. Her father’s antique Japanese bronze bowl sat in the middle of the low cherrywood coffee table, while a few family photographs hung over the mostly decorative marble fireplace that hadn’t been lit since 1992. Light flooded through the windows. The only light fixture in the room was a dim, Japanese lantern-style floor lamp next to the black leather sofa. The television was the same bulky, old-fashioned one that Emily had watched throughout her childhood because Steven and Marla both believed television made people dumber and saw no need to upgrade. Emily had seen discarded ones in the vacant lot that were more up-to-date.
“Hi, Lauren,” Emily said. Lauren got up from the sofa. She had gone from slightly soft to legitimately big, a label that Emily knew Lauren wouldn’t mind. Matt, her beanpole-shaped, perpetually silent “partner and parental unit,” stood next to her. He apparently had a strong preference for larger women. Emily knew this because Lauren told her about it every time anything tangentially related to weight came up. But Emily was happy that her sister had found someone she loved. For a woman who raged so much against body expectations, Lauren’s taste in men had always been very conventional: thin, white, young and tall. Matt checked all those boxes, but his neck tattoo and long blond Viking beard were a good disguise for his conventional looks. Thanks to that beard and tattoo, Lauren didn’t look like too much of a sellout.
The two sisters hugged, Lauren’s black cat-eye glasses jabbing into Emily’s forehead. Emily still couldn’t get used to being taller than her older sister, after so many years of looking up at her. She hugged Matt, his bony sternum pressing against her chin.
“Don’t listen to Mom,” Lauren said. “She’s been on a warpath all morning. Ariel ate the last of her nectarines and it’s been downhill ever since.”
“I heard that,” Marla said. Beyond the living room was an open kitchen, where Marla was opening the fridge to get a mixed berry Greek yogurt. For as long as she could remember, Emily had never seen her mom eat a full meal. Marla ate constantly, but all her meals looked like unsatisfying snacks you would grab quickly before running to the airport.
“I like your hair,” Emily said. Lauren had cut her dyed black hair to her chin with baby-short bangs across her forehead that made her look a bit like a creepy 1920s doll. Emily didn’t really like it, in the sense that she would never have mutilated her own hair like that, but she knew the bizarre impression it gave was exactly what Lauren was going for, so the compliment was still somewhat genuine.
“Oh, thanks. I took Ariel to the salon with me and let him choose it. It was either this or a purple buzz cut. Then we both got manicures. Ariel, show Aunt Emily your fingernails.”
“No!” Ariel shouted. His long pale blonde curls whipped from side to side as he shook his head with his arms crossed over his chest. He wore a blue T-shirt with a fire engine on it, along with a fluffy pink tutu and a pair of yellow floral rain boots.
“Ariel, do you need to pee?” Matt asked him, noticing how he was grabbing his crotch and dancing around.
“No!” Ariel said. “I’m just touching myself!” Matt shrugged and went to pour himself a glass of water.
“Ariel, I think that’s for private time,” Emily said.
“No, it’s not,” Lauren said. She patted Ariel on the head. “There’s so much anti-masturbation stuff in the media nowadays, we may as well let him enjoy his own body while he’s little enough not to understand shame.”
“Is he wearing a...skirt?”
“Ariel dresses himself,” Lauren gloated. “Some people say it’s strange, but fuck them.”
“Mommy, what’s ‘fuck them’?”
“Nothing, Ariel. I’m just speaking with Aunt Emily.”
“You curse in front of him?” Emily asked, lowering her voice a bit.
“I like him to be present for adult conversations. It is ridiculous how people underestimate their kids and baby talk to them. You know, I take Ariel to work with me once a week. He needs the exposure to the adult world, especially in a female-positive, body-accepting space that recognizes and calls out his inherent privilege.”
“Don’t you work at a place called Cunt Magazine?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t matter to Ariel. Children are innocent. He loves his Fridays at Cunt. Don’t you, Ariel?”
“I love Cunt day!” Ariel flailed his arms around and twirled.
“He isn’t using it as a gendered slur, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s just taking away the word’s power,” Lauren said. “I don’t want to tell him to stop saying it. It might damage his self-esteem.”
“Uh-oh, did I walk in on another debate about Photoshopping plus-size models to get rid of cellulite?” Emily’s brother, Jason, stood in the doorway. Emily hadn’t seen him since his divorce, and she was struck by his new single look. It had been a while since Jason qualified as attractive, and now that he was in his midthirties, balding could be added to the list of attributes that made him solidly average looking. However, he had slimmed down a bit, losing some weight in his face, and he had stopped wearing white Reebok sneakers with jeans unironically. Now he wore skinny jeans and an intentionally distressed Urban Outfitters T-shirt, dusty blue and paper-thin, with a faded image of a Fender Telecaster printed on it. He resembled the middle photo between “Before” and “After” on the LifeSpin progression board that was posted between the AeRate™ oxygen bar and the FloTate™ flotation chamber.
“Hey, Jason,” Emily said. “Nice shirt. You look good!” She hugged him.
“You too, Em. Christina is coming by to drop Mia off later, by the way. She posted a picture of her on Facebook, and I have to say, she looks pretty cute in her flower girl dress. You’re going to like it.”
“Aw, I can’t wait to see her.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Not Christina. Mia.”
“Oh. Yeah, me too. Last time I saw her was three weeks ago. I miss my little girl. I had to miss our last weekend together for my friend Mike’s bachelor party, and then Christina was too much of a bitch to give up the weekend after. Says it will ‘ruin the schedule.’”
Marla strode over to them. “I couldn’t help but overhear. Jason, have you heard from Christina yet?”
“Please refer to her by her proper name—Satan. And the answer to your question is that I haven’t heard from Satan since last night when she said she’d be dropping Mia off today. Maybe she’s been busy causing plagues in Africa or possessing the bodies of rural teenage girls.”
“Hmm. Well, would you please ask her to give us an ETA?”
“Why would I ask her that? ETA for what? She’s just dropping Mia off.”
Marla turned to Emily. “He doesn’t know. You told me you would tell him.”
“I never said that.”
“Well, he obviously doesn’t know.”
“What don’t I know?” Emily would have taken his concern a lot more seriously if he hadn’t been swiping through Tinder while expressing it.
“Emily invited Christina to the wedding,” Marla said. “She also invited her to David’s parents’ barbecue. I told her it would cause problems, but she wanted her there. So now I’m just trying to avoid your constant drama, like always. Every time with you kids.”
Jason looked up from his phone to glare at Emily. “Em! Dude! What the hell?”
“Look,” she said, her heart beginning to race. “I didn’t want her there. I invited her because it seemed really cruel to ask this woman—who I’ve known for years—to drop her kid off at my wedding and then drive away. I couldn’t bring myself to do that.”
Back when Jason and Christina were married, Christina had been the feminine, graceful older sister that Emily never had. She had given her fashion tips, and they had even gotten makeovers together at Macy’s one Christmas. But with every loving, sisterly embrace came unsolicited advice, needless pep talks and confessions of problems that were actually brags, such as the fact that her butt was too round and made her look slutty if she wore white pants. Even so, as much as Emily was sometimes tempted to write Christina off as a delusional, self-important jerk, she couldn’t. Christina had been the only person in her family to take her college social dramas seriously, or any of her mini crises, for that matter. When she was the only girl in her hall not to be accepted by a single sorority, Christina stayed on the phone with her for over an hour listening to her vent. Meanwhile, her father had only emailed her: Sororities are a waste of time and money anyway. Study. Love, Dad. Every time she worried about getting herpes from a toilet seat, Christina was armed and ready with her own handful of stories about herpes-afflicted friends and how none of them got it from a toilet seat. That made Emily feel better, and afterward she only Googled herpes for an hour.
“I can’t believe you,” Jason said. “Inviting my ex-wife when you know she’s the worst person on Earth.”
“You won’t even have to see her. And this is my wedding anyway.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately she was at my wedding too. I’d like to go to a family wedding where this woman doesn’t ruin it. Lauren, when are you getting married?”
“When same-sex marriage is legal in every country.”
“Okay, so after Saudi Arabia is wiped off the face of the Earth by an alien invasion.”
“That whole part of the world will be wiped off the face of the Earth anyway. Thanks to our corrupt government’s white American imperial colonization.”
“You are going to get married, though, right? If you honestly wait for gay marriage to be legal everywhere, it’ll just never happen.”
“So be it. I won’t use any privilege that is only afforded to me because of my whiteness or straight-passing.” Lauren picked up Ariel, as if to use him as a conversational shield.
“You’re not straight?” Jason said. “You only ever date men.”
“I’m pansexual and heteroromantic.”
He blinked and turned back to Emily. “Did you seriously need to invite Christina to this stuff?”
“Jason, just relax about Christina,” Marla said. “Don’t let her rent space in your head for free. She never deserved you.”
“She never deserved him?” Lauren said. “He cheated on her and emotionally abused her for years. You’re blaming the wrong person, Mom.”
“Abuse her!” Ariel said.
“Men can’t help it,” Jason said, quieter this time, as if to prevent Ariel from hearing him. “We’re just not monogamous. We’re always looking for the youngest, hottest thing around. Don’t kill the messenger—it’s just biology.”
“Jason, that’s ridiculous,” Emily said. “Christina is beautiful.”
“You’re missing the point. Sure, she’s hot, but she’s only one woman. Would you tell a gay guy to stop being gay? I’m only attracted to hot, young women, and I can’t be with one woman at a time. At least I admit it. You guys should be proud of my self-awareness.” He smiled to himself, eagerly anticipating an argument. This was something he had been doing since he was a kid. In 1997 he told Marla he was a Republican just to get a rise out of her, and she cried for days after declaring she had failed as a mother.
Emily had heard enough. “You’re not young or hot, Jason!”
“Women don’t care about looks. They care about personality.”
“Okay, well, you also have a shitty personality.” It wasn’t often that Emily sensed approval from her sister, but she knew Lauren agreed with that comment.
“Look, I know both of you are self-conscious about your looks or age or whatever,” he said. “You shouldn’t be. I’m not saying all men are like me. Obviously you’re both with guys who are fine committing to a woman. I’m just of a different caliper.”
“It’s caliber, actually,” Lauren said.
“Uh, where should I put these?”
Emily turned and saw David, still holding the two bags, his back against the wall. He looked like someone who had just seen a digitally remastered version of The Exorcist in the front row of a 3-D Imax theater. He always asked her why she tried to limit the time he spent with her family. Now he knew.
* * *
“The four horsemen of the apocalypse are here,” Jason said, looking out the living room window as Christina’s Audi pulled in to the driveway.
“Not your best,” Emily said. “There aren’t even four people, just two, and one of them is your three-year-old daughter.”
Emily went outside to greet Christina. She saw Mia for the first time in a long time as Christina lifted her from her car seat. Mia had Jason’s brown hair, cut into a clean little bob, and Christina’s upturned nose as well as her sparkling gray-blue eyes. At times, Emily felt jealous of Mia, knowing that when she was old and unattractive, Mia would be young and pretty—prettier than she ever was. But she stopped herself. Her vanity had to have a limit, and being jealous of the future version of a three-year-old had to be that limit.
“Hey, sweetie.” Emily hugged Mia.
“Mommy, is that a man or a lady?” Mia asked, her plump finger to her lips.
“I’m so sorry about her,” Christina said, balancing Mia on her hip. “She’s starting to figure out the difference between boys and girls and she’s having a little trouble with it.”
“No, I’m not,” Mia protested.
“It’s okay,” Emily said. “She’s hasn’t actually seen me in person since she was tiny... I’ve been a pretty bad aunt.”
“Nonsense. You do you.” She leaned in to kiss Emily’s cheek. Christina had changed her hair since she last saw her. It was blonder, straight and parted down the middle, stopping right above her shoulders. Christina had delicate, girlish features that always looked feminine and youthful even though her skin was freckled and lightly lined from years of tanning to a deep brown during her teenage summers in East Hampton. She seemed like the type of woman who would go for Botox, but her insistence on self-love and acceptance probably prevented her.
“I love your dress,” Christina said. Emily knew she didn’t really mean it. If she saw it in a store, she’d say it was cheap.
“Oh, thanks. It’s probably all sweaty now. I should change.”
“It is what it is. Never doubt yourself. You are a goddess. Just like me, and just like Mia. Every woman is a goddess. Aren’t you a goddess, Mia?”
“No, I’m a princess. I’m Elsa.”
“Are you coming to the barbecue at David’s house?” Emily asked.
“Of course. I’m sure Jason will be a p-r-i-c-k about it, but then again, when is he not?”
“Yeah.” Emily laughed a little. “I love your nail polish, by the way.”
“Oh, thanks. It’s one of those shellac manicures.” It was clear and neutral, matching her flowing ivory silk top and gray skinny jeans. Such a simple manicure easily could have been done at home, but Christina usually chose the priciest option for anything. Even her toilet paper was organic. Everything about Christina was refined and subtle, expensive and tasteful. She came from Greenwich old money, and, as a result, had grace that Emily would never have, even if she became insanely rich overnight. On top of her family money, Christina worked at a New York ad agency and presumably was paid well there. Emily sometimes wondered if Jason had to pay alimony, or if Christina did, but she was afraid to ask. They both acted as though the divorce settlement was horribly unfair. No matter which one of them she spoke to, the story was one of gross injustice.
“So are you...dating?” Emily tried to get a feel for whether or not that question would offend Christina. But she didn’t know what else to ask.
“Not in front of Mia,” she whispered. “But...yes. I’m surprised at how well it’s going. I am prouder and prouder of my decision every day.” She pressed Mia’s head to her chest and put another hand over her ear. “Between you and me, the only reason I’m fine with him having partial custody is that at least I have the occasional weekend to get a pedicure and go on a date. I honestly think he’s a horrible father.”
Emily wasn’t sure what to say. “Anyway, we’re going to the barbecue in a few hours. Come inside and we’ll get you some coffee. Ariel is there in case Mia wants someone to play with.”
Christina turned to Mia. “Mia, are you excited to see your cousin? Gosh, it’s been too long! I don’t think she remembers meeting him.”
“Just a warning,” Emily said. “If she’s having trouble telling boys from girls, she’s going to have a lot of trouble with him.”
* * *
David’s childhood home looked like a modern, more expensive version of a log cabin. In front there was a wraparound wooden deck, an expanse of freshly cut grass and a tire swing hanging from an old maple tree. A well-worn wooden playhouse, painted red like a miniature barn, still stood out on the lawn. David’s father had built it when he and his brother were little and later converted it into a shed for his tools. Nick was the type of manly-man father that Emily only saw on television. He had worked for years in risk arbitrage and was now retired. He was in his late fifties, and despite being able to afford to hire people to fix things around his home, he took pleasure in home improvement: building decks, fixing pipes, woodworking.
“Hello!” he called from the front door. Emily always marveled at how excited David seemed to see his father: no deep breathing to prepare, no nervous fidgeting, no anticipation of attacks, no deployment of prearranged conversational shutdowns. Nick gave David a long, effusive hug, as if it had been years since they last saw each other. Nick and his wife, Susan, had visited San Francisco just a few months earlier, and a similar hug had occurred then.
“Emily,” Nick said, reaching out to hug her. He had a strong jaw like David’s, the same blue eyes. He had a receding hairline, short brown hair sprinkled with gray, and freckles on his nose. Sometimes when Emily looked at Nick, she wondered if he was what David would grow up to be. She could do a lot worse.
“Emily, sweetheart!” David’s stepmother, Susan, bounced over and hugged her. She was barely five feet, so Emily had to bend down. Susan had met Nick on eHarmony two years earlier. She had been living in Idaho, so they had a long-distance relationship for a year before she moved to Connecticut to marry him. She was plump with dyed blonde hair and hazel eyes. She liked to wear festive earrings that matched the season. Today she was wearing tiny dangling watermelons.
“Susan!” Emily said, giving her a hug. “You smell awesome, what is that?”
“You’ll laugh,” said Susan. “I went shopping with Maddyson and bought the latest Britney Spears perfume. I was worried she’d laugh at me for trying too hard, but apparently ‘only older people like Britney Spears’ anyway.”
“That’s crazy. I still love Britney Spears!”
“Well, Maddyson is eighteen so she thinks everyone is old. So how are things in San Francisco? See any great shows?”
Susan had very limited experience with big cities, other than the few times she and Nick had ventured into Manhattan to see the Rockettes or The Lion King. When they’d visited David in San Francisco, she had insisted on riding the cable cars everywhere.
“I don’t really go to live shows very much,” Emily said. “You mean music, right?”
“Any show!” Susan laughed. “You are so lucky. Young and in a big city!”
Steven and Marla approached. Emily tensed. Her parents had met Nick and Susan before, right after she and David got engaged. Emily had delayed that encounter as long as possible because she had a palpable fear that her parents would alienate Nick and Susan so much that they would advise David to break up with her. Once they got engaged, she felt a little more secure, and finally told her parents that David’s parents lived close enough for them to meet up. Luckily for her, Marla and Steven only saw Susan and Nick for lunch once at a Mexican place called Cha Cha Cha Sombrero. Marla and Steven didn’t make much of an effort to see them after that, despite Susan occasionally sending them invites to events they would obviously hate, like the Fairfield Pumpkin and Gourd Festival. Emily imagined the scene at the Mexican restaurant: Marla declining to order anything from the menu, instead producing a plum and a yogurt from her bag while regaling Nick and Susan with an exhaustive list of the anti-anxiety medications Emily was prescribed in high school. After the lunch, Marla called Emily to tell her that Nick and Susan were “nice people,” which Emily knew was the real kiss of death for Marla. Later, Marla complained over the phone to Emily about a mass e-card Susan had sent her for Easter, featuring pastel cartoon rabbits somehow hatching out of eggs, which she found offensive because “she should know we don’t celebrate that.”
“Well, if it isn’t the most brilliant woman in the tri-state area!” Susan said, giving Marla a hug. “You look lovely!”
“Thank you, Susan. Such unique earrings.” Marla hugged her, then gestured toward Susan’s earrings as if she had just received an underwhelming piece of noodle art from a seven-year-old.
“Aw, thanks. There’s this adorable little jewelry place I went to when Nick and I were visiting Beantown. I thought of you the whole time. What a kick it must have been to grow up there. All the shows!”
“It was nice.”
“Do you get back there often?”
“Not that much. The last time I was there—God, I don’t think I’ve been there since my last Harvard reunion.”
Never misses a chance, Emily thought.
“Ooooh, Harvard! I forgot you went there!”
“Oh, let’s not get into Harvard,” Marla said, waving it off, a few bangles clinking against her narrow wrist.
“You know who you’re like? JFK! Funny factoid, but he went there too.”
Marla smiled weakly, and Emily could already see beads of sweat forming on her mother’s freshly waxed upper lip. “Well, I don’t think I’m that much like JFK, but I’ll take the compliment.” Marla had a distaste for Catholics that made little sense. It was an attitude more typical of lapsed Catholics with nightmarish memories of parochial school. Marla said her anger came from perfectly justifiable outrage over anti-Semitism, but Emily thought it seemed odd to single out Catholics for that. She was fairly certain that Marla’s prejudice had more to do with a girl from her high school in Boston named Colleen Sweeney—a transfer from a Catholic girls’ school—who in 1973 had won both the Latin award and the science award, two awards Marla believed she deserved. The Colleen story had been told to Emily various times over the course of her childhood, with a different moral each time. Once, the takeaway was that even if you fail at something when you are younger, you can always grow up to prove your critics wrong. (At the end of the story, Marla gleefully revealed that Colleen later turned out to be a stay-at-home mom.) Another time, she ended the story with the assertion that even if you are brilliant, if you don’t work hard enough, some “idiot” with a better work ethic could beat you.
“So how is the psychiatry racket going?” Susan asked.
“Psychology, actually.” It was a distinction that Marla wasn’t proud of, and Emily was surprised she even owned up to it.
Susan turned to Emily. “What a kick, growing up with a mom who’s a therapist! Did she ever diagnose you with anything?”
“Um, yes.” Emily dug her heel into the lawn. “I mean, she diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder. And some other stuff that she later revised.”
She regretted saying it as soon as the words left her mouth. Susan placed one hand over her freckled chest, another over her mouth, her eyes widening as if she’d just found out that Emily had a terminal illness.
“It’s not a big deal,” Emily said. “Honestly.”
“Marla,” Susan gasped. “I had no idea! I am so sorry.”
“It’s nothing to feel bad about,” Marla said. “Emily has had her fair share of challenges, but it’s very important to us that we strive to help her function as well as she possibly can.”
“Mom, I’m literally right here.”
“Well, this is nothing you don’t know. I never wanted you to be treated differently because you struggle with anxiety. It was hard enough that you were profoundly gifted. Trying to help you assimilate socially proved challenging for me.”
“Okay, I’m getting some food now.” Emily took David’s arm and waved goodbye to the four parents. She panicked for a moment, worrying that in her absence Marla would unleash embarrassing stories about her worst anxiety attacks—like the time when she was fourteen and she cried in a restaurant because she suspected a waiter had not washed his hands after using the bathroom and her parents made her eat her baked ziti anyway. But knowing Marla, she would try to keep her conversation with Susan as mercifully brief as possible.
“They’ll be fine,” David said, squeezing her hand.
Nick went to man the grill, donning an apron with a corny Mr. Good Lookin’ is Cookin’ slogan next to a cartoon of a goofy, big-eared and big-nosed barbecuing man with a head two times bigger than his body. Nick sometimes made Emily wistful; she couldn’t help comparing him to her own father, who spent family dinners deriding other faculty members he was convinced were trying to sabotage his chances at tenure.
“My dad has already texted me since I’ve gotten here,” David said, looking at his phone. “Why does he do this? This one just says, Dave, so proud of you! You have really become a man!”
“It’s cute. He cares about you, and he still thinks texting is new and fun.”
“Yeah, but I’m like ten feet away from him.”
“I can’t really blame him. When you come home it...well, I think it reminds him of your mom.” Emily still felt uncomfortable approaching the topic of David’s mother. No matter how angry she got with Marla, she didn’t think she’d be able to go on if Marla died. She didn’t understand how David didn’t break down crying now and again. She liked to think he showed that people could bounce back from tragedy, but instead his calm attitude signified that she was just far too emotional compared to normal people, and that if and when her mother did die, she’d suddenly collapse and die too.
“I just don’t need to hear how proud he is of me every time I eat a Hot Pocket,” David said.
“At least he’s proud of you.”
“Yeah, well.” He took a swig of beer. “I guess when my brother is the only other child he has to compare me to, I seem like Richard Branson meets Nelson Mandela.”
She wondered if David ever felt that her praise and affection was too smothering. He never said so, but if he found it so irritating coming from Nick, he must occasionally feel the same way about her staring at him while he watched basketball, putting cute little notes on the bathroom mirror for him, and sending him heart emoji for no reason during the workday. She had tried to play hard-to-get when they were first dating, but it was so difficult not to fall off the wagon and start inundating him with kisses and compliments.
Emily looked over at the barbecue guests through the haze of smoke and flies. There was Jason, T-shirt slightly too small and revealing his belly, raising his arms in the air in what appeared to be a low-effort version of the Macarena. He was drunk.
“We are going to have an epic wedding week!” he cheered, raising his Heineken. He had finally stopped sulking about Christina’s presence. It helped that she avoided him as much as possible. She had taken a liking to Joss, one of Susan’s fiftysomething granola-ish friends from the cat shelter where she volunteered, and the two of them were huddled in the corner having girl talk.
“You do you” Emily heard Christina say.
“Your brother is getting drunk,” David said.
“No shit.” Emily laughed. “Hey, where’s your brother?”
“Hmm, I don’t know. I assumed he’d be out of his cave by now.” He looked for Nathan, and finally spotted him at the back door, half-hidden by a wooden column. He called out to him. “Nathan! Aren’t you going to say hi?”
Nathan trudged over. He was only a few years younger than David, but Emily often thought of him as if he were a teenager because it was hard to remember he wasn’t. He lived at home with Nick and Susan, and although he was usually eager to boast about his superior intelligence, he didn’t have any work history or accomplishments to show for his self-evaluated IQ of 170. He was rotund, with flappy triangular man boobs outlined in sweat on his black T-shirt. His shoulder-length brown hair was gathered into a greasy ponytail. Growing along the underside of his double chin was an untrimmed beard with the texture of pubic hair. He was wearing his uniform: a faux leather trench coat, cargo shorts, white Nike sneakers, and a gray tweed dollar-store fedora.
“Salutations, David,” he said. “Susan suggested I wear le hat for such a fancious occasion.”
“Fancious?”
“It means fancy. I believe that it’s a Middle English term but I could be wrong.”
“Well, I’m really excited to have you as a part of our wedding,” Emily said. She gave him an awkward hug, patting him on the back and trying to avoid the smell of his ponytail. She had met him once, last Thanksgiving—they had spent the holiday with David’s family because Emily’s parents were in the Vineyard—but hadn’t spoken to him very much. He had spent the vast majority of the weekend playing World of Warcraft in his room, and at one point he proudly announced at the dinner table that he had made a thirteen-year-old cry after debating him online about atheism.
“So, Emily, do you have any fair ladies-in-waiting who would be pleased to make my acquaintance?” he asked. “Anyone looking for a gentleman?”
“Ladies-in-waiting?”
“Bridesmaids, as the plebeians say.”
“Well, my friend Gabrielle is the maid of honor, but she’s pregnant and married...”
“You didn’t make your sister the maid of honor?” He looked horrified. Even someone as socially inept as Nathan knew how weird that was. Emily blushed.
“I just...it’s a long story. She’s kind of anti-wedding. I didn’t think she’d do a good job at it.”
“Cold, m’lady. But I remain intrigued. Prithee continue.”
David frowned. Emily could tell it was taking all his restraint not to punch Nathan in the face.
“Oh, my other bridesmaids? Well, there’s my friend Jennifer but she’s...” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence without saying “out of your league,” so she just said, “a lot older than you.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Hmm. Five years older than myself. That’s pushing it, but I’ll consider her if she enchants me. Women that age sometimes have a certain...je ne sais quoi.”
David shook his head. “Nathan, don’t. Just trust me when I say no.”
“And well,” Emily said, “the only other bridesmaid is... Maddyson. But, ha-ha, since she’s your stepsister that pretty much...” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.
“Don’t be so quick,” David said. “Nathan has been hung up on her ever since Susan married our dad.”
“What, really?”
“He’s being oversimplificated,” Nathan said. “I am not hung up on my stepsister. I merely admire a beauty such as she.”
Emily involuntarily cringed.
“Dude,” David said, “she’s way too young for you. I am not doing this with you again.”
“Eighteen is legal, for your information.”
“Yeah, but it started when she was sixteen.”
Nathan put his hand over his chest in a bad imitation of a pearl-clutching old lady. “Dear Lord! Sixteen! Reproductive age, legal in almost all of Europe and fully able to make her own choices! Whatever must we do with this pedophile?”
“I don’t get why you can’t just date girls your own age,” David said.
“The older women get, the more demanding they become. If I were to approach a twenty-five-year-old, for example, she would be attractive but wouldn’t have Maddyson’s fertile, nubile looks. And to make matters more unsavory, she would look down on me for not having a so-called traditional job. Maddyson doesn’t have a job, ipso facto, we are actually a good match. Moreover, if we lived just a few hundred years ago I would be the natural first choice to take her maidenhood—intelligent, wise, generous, successful—and in the same family line.”
“How are you successful in any way?” David asked. “You just said you don’t have a job.”
“In days of yore, my good sir, I would have been successful. The trades in which I am highly skilled are not valued by our declining society. Sword fighting, for example.”
Emily looked over at Maddyson, leaning against a column. She had wavy brown hair cut to her shoulders with a streak of pink. (Emily had objected to the dye job because Maddyson would be in the wedding party, but she wound up allowing it for fear of looking like a bridezilla.) She wore a pair of frayed acid-washed shorts, Converse sneakers and a large white T-shirt that looked intentionally splattered with green paint. She was looking at her iPhone with her eyes glazed over, giving a surly, slightly openmouthed expression to the screen. Emily noticed that Nathan had seen her staring at Maddyson, so she quickly averted her gaze.
“She’s beautiful,” he said with a knowing smile. “No shame in looking.”
“I wasn’t...”
“It’s fine. All women are slightly bisexual.”
“Nathan,” David said. “That’s enough.”
Nathan shrugged. He was relatively immune to criticism. Emily couldn’t tell if it came from abnormally low or abnormally high self-esteem. Either he was so used to negative feedback that it no longer affected him, or he was so delusional that he refused to believe that anything could be wrong with him. Perhaps she’d ask Marla to analyze him. She was sure there would be an interesting cavalcade of diagnoses on the ride home. All of Emily’s ex-boyfriends had earned their places in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from histrionic personality disorder to borderline personality disorder to chronic depression. Marla followed up each assessment with, “not that I’ve personally examined him or anything” as if trying to avoid liability. She had diagnosed Christina with narcissism back when she and Jason were dating, and Matt with compliant codependency. David was the only one who had evaded a diagnosis so far, probably because Emily had rigorously prevented him from spending too much time with her mother.
Jason
Jason was wasted, there was no way around it. He was mindlessly peeling the label off his Heineken and glaring at Christina from behind glassy corneas. Why did everyone like her? Why did people respect her and not him? It was because she was a woman. The woman always got to play the victim and nobody asked any questions. He thought ruefully of Lauren’s article in Cunt Magazine: “It Happened to Me: I Was the Victim of Grade-Shaming.” It was an article devoted to the one time in high school when she got a C on an essay, and how it was not only an undeserved grade given to her purely because of sexism, but it also gave her lifelong brain-image issues. He had trolled the article briefly under the username Butthole_Dude_80 and told her she was a delusional bitch...and later felt bad about it briefly before finding it funny again.
That was when he saw her: the famed jailbait. Was it jailbait if they were eighteen? He had heard that David had a much younger stepsister, and there she was in all her slender, tanned glory. She was hanging around Nick’s porch looking bored, as if she were afraid some friends at school would make fun of her for being too enthusiastic around her family. He had heard that girls her age—no, women her age, she was legal—absolutely loved older men because they saw them as confident, distinguished provider types. Jason wasn’t at the sugar-daddy level quite yet, but that hardly mattered when it came to a one-night stand. The only problem was where they would do it. Certainly her room would be full of creepy childhood items, like teddy bears that said “I wuv you” when you pressed them, ballet participation certificates from elementary school, posters featuring those douchebags from One Direction and old haunted-looking Barbie dolls with tangled hair and rubbed-off eyes. Not to mention her bedroom was under the roof of her inevitably protective stepfather. Jason’s room wasn’t much better as it was under Marla and Steven’s roof, with Lauren, the self-appointed Cockblocker-in-Chief, across the hall. He did have a car, though.
“Hello,” he said, sidling up to Maddyson. She looked up from her phone, which displayed the Snapchat app. She met his stare, her eyes widening slightly. Either she was intimidated by his confidence and swagger, or creeped out. He was inclined to believe the former.
“Hey,” she said, looking bored again. “Sorry, I didn’t see you standing there.”
“What’s with the pink streak of hair?” Jason asked. “Is that a wig? You’d look better if you were Asian.”
“Are you a friend of my dad’s or something?”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” he said with a smirk. He could never let comments like that get to him. Then he would be just as emotional and self-centered as Christina, or any other woman for that matter. He had to remain stone-cold and keep his alpha game tight.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just trying to get through this party without having to talk to anyone.”
“This attitude is going to stop being cute when you’re older.” He had to keep the smile on his face or else he’d just seem mean. The goal was to be cheeky—rude, maybe even arrogant and slimy, but never antagonistic. He felt a tap on his shoulder and a man’s voice. “I implore you to leave her alone, good sir.” The accent was vaguely British, like the generic old-fashioned accent used in gladiator movies.
He turned and saw an overweight man in his early twenties. He looked as if he were in a community theater production of The Matrix, complete with a shiny black trench coat lightly coated in sweat and giving off the fishy, chemical smell of synthetic leather.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I am Nathan, good sir, brother of the groom.”
“Wait, I heard about you. Are you the one who got banned from the live-action role-playing group for scaring those women with your sword?”
“Even LARPers can’t always appreciate true historic accuracy,” he said a little defensively. “In bygone days, females appreciated valiant warriors, and I never intended to fight a lady. In fact, I wasn’t fighting anyone—merely displaying my sword-fighting skills for the womenfolk to behold. My plan was to throw my handkerchief to the most beautiful one once my performance was done...but next thing I knew, the police were there, and I was being asked not to return. Chivalry is dying in this society, verily.”
“Damn,” Jason said, taking another sip of beer. “You couldn’t just talk to the girls?”
“Good sir. Do not try to debate me on the importance of chivalry. I implore you to step away from the lady.”
Jason almost laughed but then realized he wasn’t joking. “I’m sorry, I’m a friendly guy. I was just chatting with her.”
“I am the protector of her innocence.”
“Nathan,” Maddyson groaned. “For the last time, I’m not a virgin! Both of you, go away!”
“Nonsense, milady.” He turned to Jason. “You, sir. Be gone, unless you desire a duel in the arena of intellect. Care to discuss Descartes?”
“I don’t want any trouble, buddy.” He paused. An idea. “See that woman over there, man?”
He pointed to Christina, who had moved on from Joss and was now sipping some sauvignon blanc with Susan, laughing as she plopped a plastic ice cube into her glass. He could only hope she wasn’t talking about him and his “constant infidelity” or “alcoholism.” Women would complain to anyone who would listen, and Susan seemed like enough of a chump to fall for Christina’s whole self-pitying routine.
“Yes,” Nathan said. “The fair blonde lass.”
“You want to intellectually duel someone? Duel her. She loves being told when she’s wrong. Makes her hot.”
Nathan smiled smugly, as if Jason had just made an embarrassingly basic grammar mistake.
“What?” Jason asked. “What is it now?”
“A gentleman cannot duel a lady. For if he did, he would no longer be a gentleman.”
“Oh, brother. How about this? I promise to leave your sister alone if you—”
“Stepsister.”
“Okay. I promise to leave her alone for the entire night, if you go and talk to that blonde lass. I hereby beseech you to flirt with her, serenade her and defend her honor.”
“But why? I don’t know her.”
“Look. I know her. She loves guys like you who are romantic and old-fashioned and whatnot. So if you’re looking for a girlfriend, go talk to her.”
“Intriguing.” Nathan nodded and tipped his fedora. Then, with a whoosh of his trench coat, he headed for Christina. Jason sat back on one of the patio chairs, put his beer to his lips and prepared to enjoy the show.
Nathan
Nathan took a deep breath as he approached her. The closer he got, the older she looked, but she was still pretty. She reminded him of how he always imagined a miller’s wife or tavern wench would look in the books he read—a bit weathered compared to her much more attractive eighteen-year-old counterparts, but comely still with clear blue eyes and flaxen locks. Below her loose-fitting top he could make out a relatively ample bosom.
With all the aplomb he could muster, he bowed deeply, removing the fedora from his head with an elaborate flourish. “Milady...” he said, staring at her feet. After sufficient time, he straightened himself and made eye contact. She looked frightened. Perhaps she had never met a true gentleman before.
“Um...hello,” she said. His stepmother had vanished. For all her faults, she always knew when to make herself scarce.
“What is your name, sweet lass?” he asked, taking her hand. She had a dry, freckled palm like a farmhand, but her fingers were small and delicate.
“Christina,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’m the mother of the flower girl. And you are...?”
“Nathan Porter. Best man and second in line to the country seat of Portershire.”
She looked past him to where Jason was sitting. “Okay. Be honest with me. Did my jackass of an ex-husband tell you to come over here?”
“I know not the man of whom you speak.”
“Okay. That’s what I thought. Go back and tell Jason this shit isn’t funny, and if he wants to see his daughter at all this week he’s going to need to act like an adult.”
“Milady, is it so difficult to believe that a gentleman of my age would be interested in you? I value more than just looks, you know, and besides, you’re like a seven at least.”
She sighed. “Go away. Tell Jason to quit it. Bye, Nathan.”
He marched back to Jason, fixing his stare on the balding slob, who was drinking beer before sundown like a tavern drunkard. Nathan stood before him and put his hands on his hips. “Jason,” he said. “That woman is your ex-wife!”
“Yeah, guess I left that out. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers.”
“She knew you sent me over. You have disrespected me in mine own home. Now prepare for that duel.”
Jason began to laugh. “Take it easy, buddy. I just wanted to have some fun. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I was trying to mess with her, not you.”
That was more of an apology than Nathan had expected. Back in high school, the popular boys would play similar pranks on him, like the time they told him there was a sword fight tournament being hosted in Gym A, and Nathan didn’t realize that was where the Womyn’s Empowerment Club was having their “safe space” sexual assault discussion group. He was the one who got suspended for a week after that, all because he arrived brandishing a sword and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Some people took political correctness much too far.
“I appreciate your apology, good sir,” Nathan said. “But I need assurance that you will not exploit me for your merriment again.”
Jason got up from his seat, wobbling slightly. “Sorry if I took advantage of you. It was just such a perfect opportunity to piss off the ex. You know how it is.”
Nathan nodded. He had never had a girlfriend, but that had not stopped him from plotting his revenge on other women. Already he had made one of his female tormentors cry on Twitter by calling her an imbecile for misspelling lavender. He smiled serenely to himself at the memory of that triumph.
“So you respect me?” Nathan asked.
“Sure. As much as I can respect a guy in a tweed fedora and sneakers.”
“Do I have your gentleman’s word?”
Jason threw his head back and laughed. “Yeah. My gentleman’s word.”
Emily
The air smelled of slightly burnt hot dogs, a childhood smell that filled Emily with nostalgia. She looked around and saw that the two families appeared to be mixing nicely, or at least being polite to each other. Marla and Susan were still talking. Marla was looking ever so slightly over Susan’s head, her chin tilted upward, a very full glass of pinot noir in her hand. Emily heard Susan exclaim “So you’ve actually been to Madison Square Garden? In the Big Apple?”
Meanwhile, her father had cornered Nick by the grill. “I don’t want to bore you with this, but the brutality of the Han Dynasty has been exaggerated by popular media. It was a topic I covered in one of my more famous articles. I’m not sure I would recommend it to you. If you’re not in the field, you might consider it a bit dry.”
“There you are, Emily!” She saw Marla waltzing over to her, her palazzo pants rippling in the wind. “I was looking all over for you. I’m calling a small family meeting outside. Wipe under your eyes, by the way, your mascara is melting.”
“Calling a family meeting at another family’s home?” Emily asked. “Come on, that’s pretty rude.”
Marla feigned pearl-clutching, which actually consisted of clutching her amber necklace, and appeared less satirical than she intended. “Oh no, Emily! Maybe they’ll tell David not to marry you! The horror!”
“That’s not—” Emily paused. She wouldn’t pick this battle.
“If you must know, Emily, I’m doing this here because I fear you and your siblings would lash out at me if we were in private. Discussing this in a public setting makes it more likely that you’ll all behave appropriately.”
Emily wondered how Marla defined appropriate, but she decided not to say anything about it. Having done many “inappropriate” things in her childhood, which Marla still held up as examples of her missed social cues, she wanted to avoid having any of these failures paraded again. One incident in particular was a tantrum she threw at the age of eight when her mother refused to let her get a second candy bag at FAO Schweetz. She’d thought that, twenty years later, such a story would be merely funny or forgettable, but it still embarrassed her deeply, since Marla always made a point to relate all her modern-day anxieties to this one moment and harp on the fact that she was “much too old” to be getting so upset in public. “This is just like that time at FAO Schweetz,” Marla would say, as Emily cried to her on the phone about a fear or hang-up that had nothing to do with candy. “You have problems handling a lack of control.”
Emily followed Marla to a handmade wooden bench at the far end of the patio, where Lauren and Jason were already sitting. Matt sat at the end of the bench, looking like a startled deer. Marla glared at him.
“Matt,” she said sharply, “this is a family meeting.”
Matt nodded and slunk away. Emily took his seat on the bench.
“Mom, you didn’t have to be so mean to Matt,” Lauren said.
“He needs to stop following you everywhere. He’s worse than Ariel.”
“Actually, Ariel is profoundly independent. We still do skin-on-skin bonding, but he doesn’t insist on it.”
“I see.” Marla turned to face the group. “Okay, I’m just going to say it. I want us to work together on what I think you’ll all agree are some troubling issues facing our family.”
“What issues?” Jason asked.
“It’s no surprise that we aren’t exactly close. As I get older, I want to spend time with my children, and while both you and Lauren live within driving distance, or a quick train ride on Metro-North, I rarely see you. And Emily, I know you live all the way in California, but we haven’t seen you since two Christmases ago. I can’t even remember the last time we saw you for Thanksgiving.”
“You and Dad always go to the Vineyard on Thanksgiving.”
“Yes, but only because we anticipate that you won’t want to come home. Meanwhile, Lauren doesn’t even celebrate Thanksgiving.”
“That’s because it should be called National Genocide Day,” Lauren said. “Although to be fair, that’s every day of American history.” She leaned back as if waiting to collect high-fives.
“Look, I’m not here to blame any of you kids. It’s not your fault that we aren’t as close as we should be. I take full responsibility for being too trusting. I was silly to assume you would all want to stay in touch with me as I got old.”
“Mom, don’t do this,” Emily said. “We just have our own lives—it doesn’t mean we don’t want to see you.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “since we’re all together this week, I’ve decided that we should do a special family exercise. I think it will help us repair what has gone wrong.”
“What is it, Mom?” Emily asked. She feared some kind of competitive team-building exercise, like the trip to Six Flags that ClearDrop organized, where everyone had to go on rides together in a group of thirty, and nobody could separate. But no, Marla was too cultured for something like that. Emily still recalled the disdain in her mother’s voice when she found out that her friend Naomi’s daughter got married at Disneyland with some guy dressed as the genie from Aladdin officiating.
“Well,” Marla said, her voice cracking theatrically, “I sometimes feel that I have failed you as a mother, considering how none of you are particularly close. Lauren, when you were born, I was hoping you would become a best friend for Jason, and Emily...”
“I know I was an accident, Mom.”
“Well, I did tell your father that the antibiotics I was taking might interfere with my birth control, but when he gets in the mood...anyway. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that we need to bring this family together before the wedding. If we’ve fought this much only a few hours in, just imagine how this week will be. This might be the last time we all see each other before I die.”
“Are you sick, Mom?” Emily asked. Her throat tensed up.
“I could be,” said Marla. “Many cancers are asymptomatic. But in terms of actual diagnoses, no. Nothing that I know of.”
Lauren groaned. “Mom, you can’t just say something like that to Emily.”
“I apologize, Emily,” Marla said. “But death is a reality, and I will die someday. And I don’t want that to happen before we have all come to terms with our problems.”
“So what’s the plan?” Jason asked, frowning at his empty beer bottle.
Marla took a deep breath. “Family therapy.”
Lauren looked incredulous. “Dad actually agreed to this?”
“Dad won’t be involved. Just me. This is about you kids, not him.”
“Then why would you be there?” Lauren asked.
“Because I’m going to be the therapist,” Marla said triumphantly, as if revealing a stunning M. Night Shyamalan twist.
“You can’t be the therapist for your own children,” said Emily. “That’s unethical.”
“Ethics are important up to a point, but it’s also important not to be too rigid about them,” she said. That, at least, was true. Marla bravely resisted societal pressure to be ethical. “Frankly, Emily, when you call me unethical I think you’re projecting. What you really fear is that your own moral flaws will be uncovered. Don’t be afraid of that. This is for personal growth.”
“And if I don’t want to go to this?”
“Then I will cancel your wedding.”
“What?”
“I’m serious.”
Emily had a feeling she wasn’t serious—after all, too many deposits had already been put down, the guests were all set to arrive, it would be a massive embarrassment—but why argue? If she didn’t say yes to the therapy, she would have to deal with constant unpleasantness for the next six days. And perhaps it would be a good outlet to tell Jason and Lauren about all the times they had wronged her. She enjoyed complaining about other people, and if she could do it in an environment where nobody was allowed to yell at her for it, that would be even better.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” she finally said.
She turned to Lauren and Jason, who both reluctantly nodded. At first she wondered why they didn’t put up more of a fight, and then she remembered that her parents paid for Lauren’s rent and Jason’s divorce lawyer.
