Our Little Racket
Angelica Baker
PROLOGUE
There was a night, in the year before everything happened, when Madison’s mother came to see her.
Isabel just appeared at the bedroom door one night, a few hours after dinner, and at first she said nothing. She hadn’t done this since Madison was small. Madison could feel her standing in the doorway, watching.
“I wanted to see if you need anything before you turn in,” her mother said when Madison finally looked up. And then Isabel smiled, her large blue eyes watchful above the crinkled mouth. There was something undefined about the smile, like an image reflected in rippling water.
It had been only a few months since Isabel’s parents had died; first Grandpop and then Gran Berkeley, succumbing one after the other that winter. Madison knew her mother was still moving through the cluttered daily air of new grief.
“I was just going to do my hair,” Madison said. “Before I go to sleep.”
Normal touching, affection: For Isabel, that was contact without purpose. Grooming, on the other hand, had function. It was far from superficial; it was the only real bulwark against the world outside. Not only outside the house, beyond Greenwich, but even beyond this very bedroom, the whole world beyond their own two bodies.
“Sit,” Isabel said. “Let me do it.”
Her fingers began to work absently through Madison’s hair, the way another sort of mother might sift flour before baking.
“People were talking at lunch today about how their parents met,” Madison began.
“Which people?”
“I don’t know. Me, Amanda, a few other people. Wyatt Welsh was there, but none of the boys seem to know their family’s stories.”
“Well,” Isabel said, snorting. “Of course they don’t.”
“Would you tell it again?”
“Don’t you prefer it when your father tells it? He tells a better story than I do. He always has.”
“But he’s at work,” Madison said.
And her mother’s fingers began to work more quickly.
EVERY DETAIL OF THE STORY was familiar, something Madison had rubbed smooth in her mind. The parts that were left vague, known only to her parents, were surely inconsequential; she imagined and reimagined the parts she already knew, so that the mysteries seemed less important.
Her mother had been working nights as the hostess at a club, right after she moved to New York. She was twenty-two.
“Your grandfather thought it was hilarious, me taking a second job,” Isabel said. The bristles of the hairbrush grazed Madison’s scalp. “He thought I was bluffing. He would show up to take me to lunch twice a month, fly the shuttle up from D.C. and take me to midtown, 21 or one of the steakhouses. He’d wait until the very end of the meal, as though I didn’t know what was coming, and then he’d draw a check from his breast pocket and hold it out to me. And we never said anything, he just held it there for a few seconds and then laughed and put it away.”
“And you didn’t even have enough money every month to buy groceries.”
“It’s so funny to think this was only, what? Two years before I had you? And I was still such a child.”
Madison could hear, though, the wistful pride in her mother’s voice. Misery in the absence of danger, misery you’d signed yourself up for, carried with it an ersatz thrill, a shiver along your spine that couldn’t be found anywhere else. It was like a soreness on your skin rather than in your bones. Madison had realized, by the time she hit middle school, that this feeling was something open to her that was open to almost no one else in the world. She’d kept this to herself.
“But one night, Daddy came in.”
Isabel parted Madison’s hair down the center of her scalp, as though preparing to split her daughter into two equal, tidy halves.
“And one night, your father came into the club, yes.”
THOUGH SHE’D BEEN FOURTEEN when he died, Madison did not think of herself as someone who’d known her grandfather very well. Her memories of him could be sorted into several specific categories: his visits; Gran’s cocktail parties at the town house in D.C.; his annual birthday dinner at the Yale Club, near Grand Central.
Madison’s father liked her to mix his drinks, especially when other men from the bank were over at the house. By the time she was ten years old, she already knew every possible way Bob D’Amico might take his bourbon, or when he’d prefer scotch, which he only ever took one way. But Grandpop always sent his drinks back, usually for unforeseeable reasons. She learned quickly that she would not be able to anticipate anything other than his dissatisfaction, that he would reject the first drink she made. He never told her in advance whether he wanted an olive or an onion, for starters, and he always wanted what she didn’t have. He’d tell her that anything worth enjoying should be sent back once or twice, because a good drink is wasted unless it’s a perfect drink. He’d look askance at her father, taking steady slugs from the very first drink his daughter had proffered, and shake his head.
Sometimes, when they were in D.C., Grandpop would wait until Bob was talking to an important guest, someone he knew would have his son-in-law on edge—from the State Department, or something—and then creep up behind him, manic glee on his face, to tap Bob’s beer with his own brown bottle.
The first time she saw this happen, Madison was seven or eight. It wasn’t just that her grandfather had tapped the beer, that the geyser of foam had spilled all over Bob’s sleeve. Grandpop had been mocking her father all night, usually waiting until a few guests had clustered in a corner before launching into some unflattering analysis of her father’s role at the bank.
Twenty minutes or so after the spill, Madison wandered into the kitchen to see if she might poach something from a leftover tray, a toast point layered with buttery smoked salmon or maybe a cucumber sandwich, anything her mother’s uninterrupted gaze had prevented her from touching earlier. But when she came into the room, she only saw her mother and father.
Isabel had him backed up against the sink, one hand tucked into the collar of his shirt, her hips canted up toward his. He pressed one hand to the small of her back, rumpling her silk blouse, and balled the other into a tight fist. Isabel leaned into him until his head fell into the space between her neck and her shoulder. Madison waited a few moments, trying to imagine her place were she to enter the room. Where she might tuck herself, whose arm would have to loosen to enfold her in their closed embrace. She couldn’t see any place that made sense, though, and so she returned to the party, found Grandpop, crawled up onto his knee to listen to the thrum of his voice against his chest.