He stands up, looking formal and overcome by emotion. I feel a little pulse of alarm as he clears his throat. “To our sweet little Marnie, the survivor! I just want to say, Ducky, you’ve been hit with some hard blows, but I knew you were going to be all right the moment you opened that door to your apartment in Burlingame, and I saw you were baking. Baking! Isn’t that what we said, Millie? This girl is going to take care of herself. She just needed to be back among family and old friends!”
There’s the clink of glasses as they toast, and then we pass around all the food—the salad and the overcooked hamburgers (my father has a fear of medium rare that rivals what people feel about circus clowns and rattlesnakes)—and for a moment we’re all busy with our plates, and I wonder what would happen if I were to suddenly burst into tears.
Maybe it’s the fuzziness from the wine mingling with the excessive humidity and the argument about vegetables and olive oil (olive oil!) and also the tension from the sky, which I now see is gathering itself for its late afternoon performance event—a violent thunderstorm. But also there’s something else, some huge hurting thing taking shape within me, what it means to be here with these two couples who know each other so well that even their squabbles—the ones that bring me up short and make my heart start palpitating—are simply routine for them. They fuss and argue and kiss and somehow just keep plowing along through life, racking up grievances and then forgiving themselves and each other again and again. No one is going to stand up and say, “You know what? I can’t do this anymore.”
And I am an outsider, and yet these people around me are my tribe, the people who have the right by birth and DNA and blood type to have opinions about my life.
“Are you okay?” Natalie whispers, and I wish I could stand up and tell them the truth, which is that my mother has no right to have a Noah Knot! A Noah Knot! That means that they have been discussing him and me so much that Natalie knows just where the knot is and how to cheer my mother up out of it. And just look, I’d say to her—just look at our father, who is so shrunken next to Brian, like he’s already abdicating ever so slightly his own place as head of the family. Brian will soon be managing his portfolio and his lawn maintenance plan, will be scheduling the tuning of the furnace, and eventually suggesting nursing homes.
And I—I am just a damaged object they’re all trying to patch up and haul back onto the sales floor. They love me and they will sit with me while I find the necessary prerequisites for their estimation of a happy life: a new job, a new man, a new car, and later on, furniture, a house, some babies. I need endless help, apparently.
In the meantime, they say, here’s the story we’re giving you: California was a mistake. Your life up to now has all been a big, blurry mistake, but luckily you’re moving on. We caught you just in time.
My California life, my adulthood, quietly folds itself up like a map and tiptoes away. Nobody but me even sees it go.
ELEVEN
MARNIE
One night, I pass the door of my parents’ room, and I can hear them arguing. It’s nearly midnight, and she is saying, “. . . needs more time, she’s recovering. Don’t you see that?”
So of course I stop in my tracks and sit down on the floor outside their room.
He says, “She’s got to get back out there. She needs to get back on the horse. Something bad happened to her, sure, but she can’t let it get her down. Can’t let it stop her in her tracks.”
“Ted, that was not just ‘something bad’ that happened to her,” my mother says. “Those were two big blows she suffered. Losing her husband and her job.”
For a moment, it seems simply a fascinating discussion, as though they’re talking about somebody else, or the Theory of Big Blows. I would love to join in. Do I need more emotional rehabilitation or to get back on the horse? What could be the point of either? What does the research say about such things? Fight or flight? Rest or work?
“You know what she needs,” my mother says in that voice of certainty she uses. “She needs to find a man to go out with.”
“Millie, for God’s sake, that is the last thing she needs! Why do you always act like that’s going to solve any problems whatsoever? She needs to find herself first! And why am I the only feminist in this conversation? The girl needs a career. Then, if she wants to, she can find a man.”
“You don’t know anything. She needs love.”
“Well, fine. Maybe she’ll meet a nice guy at work. But first she has to get a job.”
“Listen,” my mother says, and I’m surprised by the sudden intensity in her voice. “Don’t you dare take this away from me! Ted, right now we have two daughters in town, and I want to keep it that way! Imagine how nice life would be if both of them could live in the neighborhood permanently and have nice husbands, and then their children could grow up as cousins, and they’ll all be best friends, and they’d all come over on Sunday afternoons, and we could eventually put in a swimming pool—”
“A swimming pool?” he says.
“—and a swing set, and we could babysit for the kids, you and I. And I think we can get Marnie to stay here, unless you start pressuring her to get a job! She’ll go off on her own once again, and we’ll just have to worry about her like I did every single night while she was in California. Every single night, Ted, I worried! But—if she meets a guy here, then maybe they’ll both stay.”
“Oh my lord God in heaven. You are out of your mind.”
“No! I’m right about this, Ted MacGraw. It’s happened over and over and over again to my friends. If your kids fall in love with a local person, they stick around. It’s love, not work that keeps a person nearby.”
“And how do you plan to make this happen?”
“Well, that’s just it. I can’t.”
“Well, there you go.”
“Well, there you go.”
“Turn off the light, will you? I’ve got to get up in the morning. Somebody in this house has to work.”
I am getting to my feet, about to depart for the couch so I can think this over more comfortably, when she says quietly, “I did hear something interesting today.”
I stop in my tracks.
“I cannot even imagine what that might have been.”
“If you’re going to be like that, then I won’t tell you.”
“It seems I am going to be like this. Please, I’m begging you, turn off the light. You’ve already got my blood pressure so high, I’m not going to be able to sleep.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Good night. I hope you have very pleasant dreams.”
“Thank you. I am certainly going to try.”
“And when our daughter moves away because you push her to work—”
“Ah, Millie, you are driving me crazy; do you know that? Go ahead and tell me, so we can both get some sleep.”
It’s fortunate he says that, because I’m thinking I’m going to have to pound on the door and demand that she tell all of us.
“Jeremy’s back in town,” she says. She starts talking very, very fast before he can stop her: “He came back six months ago when his mom got sick, and now he’s a physical therapist with a real practice, and he’s living with his mother. And he’s a nice guy, and she liked him a lot, and I think this could be just the answer we’re looking for.”
“Who’s looking for?” says my father. “No, really, Millie, who?”
The couch is calling me. I stand up and tiptoe away before I have to hear my mother explain to my father her very misguided notion of my love life.
Okay, so Jeremy Sanders was my boyfriend during our senior year of high school, which is the very first year when boyfriends might start to mean something—like they could very well be a real part of your future. My parents certainly thought so, anyway. Even though Jeremy and I didn’t have a whole, huge, madly passionate thing going, we were good together, that kind of good—companionly, sweet, adorable—that parents think is going to be enough for your whole life.
He was sarcastic and smart, and so was I, and because neither of us fit in with the desirables, we had a great time making fun of everything the popular kids cared about. We made it through high school on our snark alone.