“It’s so lovely to meet in person,” Meg says, perceiving Tiffany’s discomfort and seeking to remedy it. “James speaks the world of you. Thanks for taking care of our girls on such short notice.”
Meg leads Tiffany to the kitchen, where she orchestrates small talk with gymnastic dexterity. Despite herself, Tiffany wonders about the money: Would it amount to much in a big city, or does it merely coronate Meg and James within the shipwrecked economy of Vacca Vale? Up until now, Tiffany had assumed that Meg would wear thick makeup and strong perfume, balayage her hair, partake in trends like rompers and basket purses, receive fancy manicures in hip colors twice a month, and harbor few informed opinions. Tiffany’s not sure why she assumed this. In fact, Meg is earthy and bookish. Articulate. Intelligent. Barefaced. Kind. The brutal fact of her unnerves Tiffany. “Are you okay?” asks Meg as Tiffany coughs. Tiffany is having some kind of allergic reaction to the house. When Tiffany notices the water and power bills on their kitchen island, shame roils inside her. Don’t they know that she is a child, too young to care for fellow children?
A health, culinary, and lifestyle blogger, Meg writes vegan cookbooks. She has a YouTube show in the works, along with half a million followers on social media—facts she manages to relay to Tiffany without bragging. She says Tiffany should help herself to the roasted paprika root vegetables in the fridge, then describes some of her favorite recipes. They all sound folkloric. “Would you like some elderflower soda?” she asks Tiffany. “Lavender lemonade? Rosemary rhubarb fizz? Dandelion and rosehip tea?”
Perhaps noticing that Tiffany is too distracted by the house to select a beverage, Meg gives her a tour of the first floor. Her sister Gwen is an architect in Copenhagen, she explains. “She helped with the renovation. Some of my family updated the place over the decades, and a lot of their choices were appalling. James and I wanted to honor the home’s history, so our changes were mostly about unearthing the past rather than imposing the present. We wanted to restore the house to its original beauty.” Frightening oil paintings. Relics of travel. Creepy, gratuitous technology. Engraved wooden doorways. Stained glass windows. Imported rugs with stories woven into them—stories that belong to other people, other eras. Tall ceilings and sublime windows. A bewitching scent that seems to emanate from the floorboards. Tobacco and cedar and vanilla. Frankincense. Tiffany breathes and breathes, unable to get enough.
“The city keeps trying to buy the house from us,” Meg explains, “but we’re determined to keep it in the family. They say they want to turn it into a museum honoring Woodrow, local history is sacred, blah blah blah, but remember what they did to Cecil’s estate? Oh, you didn’t hear? It’s just a few blocks down from us—you should swing by at some point. The city couldn’t pull the funds together to update it, so they just left it vacant until the pipes burst, and the roof collapsed. Now they say that the museum conversion is on ‘indefinite hold.’ Next thing you know, it’ll be a parking lot. No thanks.”
All of the children’s toys seem to come from the eighteenth century: no plastic, no batteries, no jingles or flashing lights. Hardcover books stock wall-to-wall shelves; the cats match the furniture; the furniture is surprising. Logs in the fireplace. Mahogany floors. Tiffany treads in this flood of beauty, overwhelmed nearly to tears. She feels like one of those cows in the wake of a hurricane, swimming without a destination, doomed by a task that she was not designed to perform.
Presently, Meg leads Tiffany down a hallway that displays a gallery of black-and-white portraits. “Ancestors,” explains Meg. “Impeccably dressed and miserable—every last one of them. A family trait.” In both size and magnitude, the portrait in the center is the greatest: a steely, suited man in his fifties. Walt Whitman beard. Hollowed Renaissance eyes, pitched in shadow, staring. Tiffany recognizes him from history books. “Yeah, that’s Woodrow,” says Meg, her expression unreadable as she studies him. “Woodrow Huxley Zorn the Third. The founder himself. He’s not my great-grandfather or anything. We’re related pretty distantly. But I was the only member of the family who stuck around in Vacca Vale, so when my parents got too old to maintain the house, it made sense for me to become the . . . the steward, I suppose. I grew up here, so I feel some obligation to it.”
Abruptly, Meg turns from Woodrow and walks on. “Enough of him,” she says. The hallway deposits them into a small room wallpapered in repeating minimalist bird drawings. Blind contours. They look like hawks to Tiffany. At the center of the room stands a grand piano, its gold feet perched in Moroccan wool. B?sendorfer, says gold script on its side. Tiffany tries not to ogle it, but she can’t look away; it is the most enchanting object she has ever seen. “This is James’s room,” says Meg. “I don’t have a musical bone in my body, and the girls despised their lessons, so we gave up. But James is a genius at the piano. Have you ever heard him play?”
A bit too violently, Tiffany shakes her head. “Never.”
“Oh,” replies Meg. “He could’ve been a professional—he’s totally transfixing. Maybe we can force him to perform for you, one day. In any case, the kids go to bed around seven, fall asleep by eight.” Tiffany’s coughing again, but Meg has the grace to ignore it. As she speaks, she leads Tiffany through the first floor, back to the foyer. “All the doctor information and emergency contact stuff is taped to the fridge—you’ll see it. Dinner’s all prepared; you just have to serve it. We never force them to finish anything, but they know they don’t get dessert unless they eat the vegetables. Emma will be happy to explain their bedtime routine to you—she’s the boss around here. They’ll want you to read about eleven hundred stories. We try to limit it to three. What else? Oh—we keep the cats out of the kids’ room at night. Just call or text if you have any questions.”
That’s when Tiffany notices James ambling down the stairs, tucking an Oxford shirt into navy slacks. Flushed and clean, scruff grown out, hair unkempt, laugh lines pronounced, altogether taller than Tiffany remembered. He devastates her. Hardly noticing the children trailing him, Tiffany offers James a normal smile like she is a normal student, like she is a jolly nameless babysitter, like her nerves have not just burst into opera for the dad on the stairs. Her body reacts to James exactly as it reacts to his house: all this splendor, precisely calibrated to her innermost desires, and none of it will ever be hers.
“Godspeed,” James tells Tiffany.
The neutrality with which he delivers this greeting cancels all other evidence. Tiffany understands, with a force that nearly shoves her to the ground, that she has misinterpreted everything. She is delusional, foolish, disposable, grotesque. Humiliated.
“I love you,” says James. “I love you so much.”
His daughters cling to him, begging him to stay. Only Meg can wrench them from his legs. “Be good, my loves,” she says, kissing their heads. “You are both so good.”
After a few more reassurances that Tiffany can call them at any point, the parents leave.
As the children—ages five and eight—peer up at Tiffany, she is reminded of a pair of macaws she once saw at the zoo. At first, they stare at her with suspicion, then fascination, then delight. In their matching NASA pajamas, they resemble neither their father nor their mother, but they are copies of each other.
“I’m starving,” says the older daughter, Emma. “Do you like tagine?”
Feeding them is bafflingly difficult. They keep bolting from the table and sprinting in circles around the first floor, cackling like mad scientists. They make animal noises at random and refuse to use forks. Rosie, the younger one, has a lisp. They shout, “TIMBERRR!” as they drop throw pillows from the couch to the floor. Tiffany admires the untempered weirdness of children in general, and these in particular, but she is already exhausted, and she’s only been there an hour. After dinner, the children lead Tiffany upstairs and scream about strawberry toothpaste.
“We could’ve had different rooms,” says Emma. “But we share, because she doesn’t like to go to sleep alone.” She points at Rosie, who is crossing her eyes in the mirror.
“And do you like sharing a room?” Tiffany asks.
“Yes,” replies Emma. “I don’t like waking up alone.”
Rosie curates a stack of books while her sister explains why they have so many toothbrushes. “Our dad is always buying toothbrushes,” Emma says. “He always thinks we’re out of toothbrushes. He’s always saying: ‘The good news is, I remembered to buy toothbrushes!’ ”
Under the sink, there are about two dozen packs.
Changing her tone, Emma gravely points to a bottle of pain reliever. “You know when something shows the ‘actual size’ on the label?” she whispers to Tiffany. “That really freaks me out.”