“This isn’t gossip for me, Dee. This is her whole life. I mean, he may never work again. You know when he started at that firm? The seventies. Only place he’s ever been, and now the name won’t even exist. It’s, I mean. It’s a tragedy, really.”
“Sure,” Denise muttered, and Mina could hear her attention begin to wander, her voice pointed now toward the wet nail polish she’d be applying to her toenails, or the dried bits of tomato sauce she’d be scraping from the oven walls. Denise, the baby of the family, almost the wrong side of forty and back living with their mother, in the house on Long Island where they’d grown up. She’d come to Greenwich a few times, early on, when they’d first bought out here. But now she hadn’t been out to visit for even an afternoon in more than a year, and neither sister ever said out loud that this was because Tom spent the entirety of her last visit darting around the house, wincing at their braying laughter, addressing Denise with the same absent censure he’d once used on Jaime.
“Oh, sure, we miss her,” he’d said one night at dinner. They’d been eating pad Thai, which Mina had cooked from scratch, and peanut sauce had gathered at the corners of his mouth in a way that looked almost obscene. “But there’s great things about having the kid gone. You wouldn’t know this, Denise, but that’s something that automatically arrives with the first kid. Constant noise.” Denise had left the next morning, citing their mother, left home alone that week, as her excuse.
“It’s really a tragedy,” Mina repeated.
“Not for him, it won’t be,” Denise said, her voice sharpening. “Where’s he from again? Italian, right? Not from out here though, is he?”
Mina snorted. “He is, if this is possible, even less Italian than we are, Dee. He’s from that Italian part of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. I don’t even know if the neighborhood still exists, honestly. But the mother refuses to leave, she’s renting to NYU kids, or something. Isabel’s not big on the mother-in-law.”
“Well of course,” Denise said. “She’s not new to this, and the newbies talk way, way too much about how much money he makes, right? I’m sure the mom loves to. God forbid. You know deep down Isabel probably hates the guy. No way that’s a happy marriage, even before.”
“The relationship guru of Long Island over here,” Mina teased, even in a moment of levity careful not to use the word marriage with Denise. She shivered, too, hearing the hard g creep back into her speech, hearing the way her sentences sped up during a phone call with her sister.
Mina had first met Tom at Dorrian’s, and it had taken him a week to call. He’d written her number on his hand and she’d been so certain he’d wash it off, think nothing more of it. It was the late eighties; you could lose information so easily back then, it was so much simpler for blithe fate to intervene. But still, she’d stepped it up while she waited for his call. Her campaign to smooth the Long Island from her voice. It had been a goal, that first year in the city; after she met Tom, it became an urgency. She’d watched old movies, gone to restaurants she couldn’t afford and sat at the bars and listened to the women who were drinking vodka tonics and waiting for their dates. She’d always been a decent mimic—Denise had thought she should try to be an actress, as if that was all the job required—and it hadn’t taken but a few weeks. By her fifth date with Tom, you wouldn’t have been able to place, anymore, where exactly she’d grown up. She’d joined the ranks of young women in the city, the girls from Columbus or Pittsburgh or Overland Park or Moorestown. The girls whose personalities got them only so far, leaving them washed up on the shores of Manhattan. Where they could wipe themselves clean and unshackle themselves from their memories and histories, so the city could mark them as who they really were, without resistance.
She wouldn’t have been able to imagine, back then, that half the women who married men like Tom had accents like hers, and that few of them ever bothered to try to sound like any other sort of girl. It was only when she’d ended up out here in Connecticut, when she settled in to live the life she’d spent years planning, that she realized how excessive it had been, that fear of discovery. Almost every woman out here, with the exception of Isabel, was settling in. Their husbands moved through days of shining, brand-new success; everything was constantly turning over, rewarding a lack of history, an unknown name. The old families, the people Mina had once imagined mocking her accent, were all the people who owned the decaying Greenwich properties Tom’s friends started snapping up.
“Brooklyn,” Dee was saying when Mina snapped back into the conversation. “Interesting. And what’s this all about? He lost everyone’s money?”
“Just one newspaper, Dee,” Mina said, the satisfaction swelling in her throat. “You could read any newspaper. Not even the paper—just the front page.”
Her sister waited in hostile silence, and Mina sighed.
“It’s too complex to go into right now,” she said. “They took too much risk, really. And everyone’s getting hammered, right now, so if your neck’s stuck out too far . . .” She snapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Chopped off.”
“I see,” Denise murmured. Her sister knew Mina was grasping at straws. She knew that if Tom hadn’t fully explained it, then Mina hadn’t figured it out.
“Just his bank? They’re all losing their jobs, I saw, but what about the others?”
“His bank was one of the big five,” Mina said. “The others are—I don’t know. I don’t know, Dee. It’s so sad, like I said. He’s been there forever.”
She wanted these losses to sound big, the way they’d felt when she was over at Isabel’s these past few days. Coming down from the darkened bedroom with the same glasses she’d brought up the previous afternoon, the bubbled, day-old water.
She wanted her sister to feel what it was like, here. She didn’t want it to keep sounding so small, so petty and meaningless.
“Well,” Denise said. “I mean, imagine those secretaries. Imagine the girls there like us, Min. They’re sure as shit not gonna pay out anyone’s pension now, are they?”
Mina made a noncommittal noise, but she knew her sister would hear that this hadn’t even occurred to her.
“Maybe you’re right, probably they’ll take care of their own,” Denise said, smooth as ever. “I’m just saying. That’s just how my mind works. I think about all the little ripples.”
“I know you do,” Mina said, leaving it there.
“What does Tom say?”
“Tom has been in the city for a week.”
“You haven’t talked to him? God, him, too, huh?”
“No,” Mina shot back. “No, not at all. I just, I made the mistake of trying to talk to him about a fall visit, to drive up to see Jaime.”