“Yeah. Fine. So, okay, wedding dress. Let’s make a plan.”
They make a plan—next Wednesday, at Bergdorf’s—then they talk, more, almost an hour longer, and later, falling asleep, Sarah realizes she has no idea what it is the two of them talked about for so long.
Chapter 11
The water looks the way Lauren expects it to: unreal. Seen from above, unfolding all around them, the color of toothpaste. There’s an impossibility to it, but also that disappointment she’s thought, until this point, specific to the experience of encountering a famous, much-reproduced work of art in its original form. Come face-to-face with the Pietà and feel nothing profound. Gaze upon those Bacon triptychs and feel no more disturbed than any other day. So now, leaning forward in her seat to peer out of the window that is, for some reason, set a couple of inches in front of the seat rather than comfortably abutting it, she takes in the expanse of the sea and thinks the things you’re supposed to think (like jewels, like silk, so blue, etc.) but feels unmoved nonetheless. Not that she isn’t looking forward to getting into that water. She’s not insane.
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and the airport is crowded, but so, too, more surprisingly, is the plane. She did not know about this, before; that a significant subset of our fellow Americans say fuck all to grace and grub with their racist great-uncles, get onto planes, and fly off to resorts where the only concession to the holiday is a turkey and cranberry sandwich on the lunch menu. Lauren’s parents were unthrilled when she bailed on what’s one of the family’s last remaining rites.
“Oh, a bachelorette trip, that’s nice,” her mother said, meaning the same thing every mother says when she uses the word nice.
It’s the latest way she’s found to disappoint her mother: denying her the pleasure Lauren knows she derives from seeing all three of her children, arrayed around the table, just like old times. Lauren feels sorry for her mother, a terrible truth. She’d gone to college, married a sweetheart, and taken a job at the doctor’s office thinking of a future of three or four children, vaccinated and checked up, gratis, by the Doctors Khan. That had all come to pass. Why the pity, then, if everything had gone swimmingly? Because it wasn’t enough. Even with the scholarship, there was scrimping related to Lauren’s schooling. Her parents consider Macy’s a splurge.
They had singled her out for this not because she was smart, though she was not dumb, but because she was theirs, and therefore special. Plus her mother had in her, deep somewhere, a feminist feeling about the thing. Lauren suspected that her mother harbored fantasies of being a doctor herself, and that filing insurance claims for the Doctors Khan was the closest she had come to it. Bella wanted more for Lauren. She still did, needled her about things like a title change, and flextime, and business cards, things she must have studied up on, having no personal experience with them. At least, then, there was some concession, some good news.
“The good news I won’t be able to tell you in person is that I’m getting promoted,” Lauren had told her mother.
A squeal, a sigh, and so many questions: more money, more responsibility, a new title, a new role, her own office, new business cards?
She’s happy she’s got this to give back to her mother. She’s made it! Or she’s making it. It was worth it! Or at least it seems more so now. Lauren’s always been held to a standard different from the ones against which her brothers are measured. Theirs is more forgiving, and against theirs, well, they’re both sort of succeeding. Ben believes in real estate. Alexis helps him with staging: fluffing pillows and putting a frozen apple pie in the oven to evince a sense of hominess. Just picturing them in their hatchback, the magnetized door sign advertising Ben’s credentials and telephone number, is depressing, though in truth they probably make more money than Lauren does. It’s true that Adam had broken their dad’s heart by foundering in community college, then giving it up to work at a nursery and landscaping business that belonged to the father of a high school friend. He lives at home, but this seems, in some odd way, to please them.
Lauren tries to imagine what the Brooks family’s attempt at togetherness in her absence will look like, but can’t dwell on it because it makes her feel too guilty. She’s a terrible daughter.