“I would love to take a movie class,” I said, trying to make her feel more comfortable. I was amazed. We’d just had the most explosive, uninhibited sex I could possibly imagine and I hadn’t detected any embarrassment, yet this embarrassed her.
I looked over at the clock. It read five p.m. I panicked. How had it gotten so late? I was due to meet Sherri at Elio’s at six for dinner with my girls. It was our family tradition to meet at Elio’s every Sunday night. Marilyn and I started it when the girls were teenagers so that we’d be guaranteed some face time over the weekend, and it stuck. It grew from the four of us to six with the addition of my two sons-in-law, then to six and a high chair for my beautiful granddaughter. When Marilyn died we kept it going. I think it was my girls’ way of checking on me and getting me out of the house on weekends, when they worried, I think, that I would just shuffle around the apartment in my pajamas. The first time we walked in without Marilyn was brutal. There was our table in the corner, set for six and a high chair, as usual. One of my sons-in-law whispered in the ma?tre d’s ear and we watched as a busboy removed the sixth chair. Not one of us uttered a word that night. Even the baby seemed to sense our pain and just sat there sucking ziti from her little fingers.
Over the past few months with Sherri my Sundays have been very different. My old Sundays with Marilyn involved reading the Times cover to cover, maybe taking a walk in the park, and usually seeing a movie, either at the theater or right here in the very bed I was lying in with Felicia. Sundays with Marilyn were blissful and familiar. Kind of like this Sunday had turned out, though now there was the minor addition of my having suddenly become Don Juan at sixty—a whole new definition for sexagenerian! Sundays with Sherri, on the other hand, usually involved brunch at some “amazing” new place downtown with an organic menu featuring artisanal cheese, heirloom tomatoes, and, if I was lucky, the occasional gluten-free doughnut. I once made a joke about Sherri’s generation speaking about gluten the way mine spoke about crack, and was stared at blankly by her six young friends. These boozy brunches were followed either by a shopping spree or, occasionally, a gallery visit. But no matter how we filled our Sundays, they all ended with me heading uptown alone to get ready for dinner with my family while she moped because she wasn’t invited. I could hardly tell her the real reason that I didn’t want her to come: I couldn’t bear for her to sit in Marilyn’s seat, or the looks from the staff at Elio’s when they saw I was dating someone closer to my daughters’ age than my own. But I had an ironclad excuse; the rules of Sunday night dinners had been set long ago, as soon as our oldest started dating: no significant others until they were engaged. We still met plenty of boyfriends over the years, but Sunday night was family night, and there were no exceptions—until the Four Seasons mix-up, that is. When I’d been unable to produce the little black dress, I had attempted to make up for it with an invitation to Sunday night dinner at Elio’s. Don’t ask me why I felt the need to keep pretending with Sherri. I just couldn’t bear to disappoint her, although I knew that it was coming, and that it would ultimately be for the best. But tonight wasn’t the right time to end things with her. So I had one hour to get Felicia out of my apartment as chivalrously as possible, shower, and get to the restaurant where a woman that I had nothing in common with would sit in my wife’s seat while my daughters faked happiness for me and the waiters rolled their eyes at the cliché I had become.
CHAPTER 13
#ThisWasSoNotThePlan
By Sophie Stiner, Brown Graduate
Age: Nearly 23
I never saw this coming, at least not anywhere in the pages of my carefully mapped-out life plan. According to that, the year after college graduation was to be filled with after-work meet-ups with old friends and new colleagues in smart outfits chosen from my modest but stylish closet. In that plan, said closet would be found either in my shared Junior 4 in a part-time-doorman building uptown or in my own studio walk-up downtown. In my daydreams it was never found, as it now stands, in my childhood bedroom, partially co-opted by my mother’s off-season wardrobe.
I have always been a planner in a family of nonplanners. I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and began my education at PS 6, the local public elementary school with a reputation for being all that. It was fine, but by the third grade I had started downloading applications to Dalton, Trinity, and Columbia Prep and leaving them next to the coffee machine for my parents to peruse with their morning brew. When that didn’t work, I tried sticking them right in their briefcases, and then in their gym bags.