She went back into a stall and (unnecessarily) switched out the wedge of rolled-up toilet paper, and then, her face still flushed with embarrassment but at least newly washed, she left the bathroom herself. Her father wasn’t there, just outside the door, and he wasn’t there in the lobby, or in the main gallery, but in the farthest corner of the farthest room from the entrance she encountered, again, the unmistakable contours of that lovely dark back, Stella’s back, and the hand on that back—intimate, unhurried, and, even from where she stood, across the room, obviously full of love—was instantly recognizable to Sally, and would have been even without the utterly known body attached to it.
She stood for a long moment watching the two of them, watching the space between their bodies narrow and widen and narrow again as they spoke to each other with unmistakable familiarity and ease, not caring that either or both of them might at any moment turn and notice her. She was as appalled at herself as she was at Salo. She was enraged that his was the hand permitted to touch this woman’s back (and, Sally now inferred, every other part of her), which was awful and unfair, and it made her feel sick and it made her feel deeply angry and it made her hate our father, which had never been true before that night but which was going to be true after it, and also she hated the woman, Stella, with her beautiful smile and coiling dreadlocks and kindness. Sally had to fight an urge to rush at them through the crowds and pound them with her newly washed fists, even as she also wanted to run out onto Columbus Avenue and far away from them, and all the others who dressed up to drink wine and look at repellant—but also undeniably beautiful—scenes of tortured children. Either act would have served to bring this ill-judged and horrendously successful expedition—successful because she’d actually done what she’d gone there to do, and learned the thing she’d gone there to learn—to the same pathetic conclusion, but it still took Sally ages to actually turn away from them and go.
Chapter Eight
The Last of the Oppenheimers
In which Johanna Oppenheimer makes a purchase and pays a bill
When the kids began ninth grade, Harrison joined the swim team, mainly because he liked the fact that when he had his head underwater people didn’t talk to him. Lewyn retreated to his room, where he indulged in his hopeless crush on the movie star a year behind them at Walden. Sally, who declined to share her secrets with either of her brothers, of course, was the only one with a seminormal social life, and this she weaponized to keep herself out of the house and away from the other Oppenheimers, as much as possible.
What that meant, in practical terms, was away from her mother. Salo had always been thin on the ground when it came to family time, but he had made himself even more scarce, arriving home on a typical weeknight later than ever, and nearly always after the kids had bolted themselves inside their rooms. He could still be seen in the morning, cooking his own eggs, making coffee for his wife and even his children, asking the kind of terribly interested questions all three of them had come to know and deflect. As for the triplets themselves, fourteen years of honest and even benign lack of affinity had naturally solidified into unmistakable avoidance. Truly, all three of them were, in the idiom of the day and of their generation, not just over it but SO over it.
Still, Johanna soldiered on, hopeless forays across the dinner table.
“So, anything interesting happen today?”
Grunts and downcast eyes.
“Anything not interesting?”
Silence again, this time with rolling of the eyes.
“You have a lot of homework?”
Nods, at least. But nods unaccompanied by noncompulsory speech.
“I went to see Grandpa Hermann today. He asked if you’re going back to camp next summer.”
She meant Harrison. Harrison did not bother to answer. His mother knew that he would not be returning to Androscoggin.
“I told him about the program at Hopkins. I don’t think he understood why you’d give up Maine for Baltimore.”
“Gotta go,” said Harrison. “History paper.”
That was hard, but ordinary. Harrison had been holding her at bay for years.
“Me, too,” said his sister.
That was harder. She could still remember snuggling in bed with Sally on weekend mornings, reading books and watching TV.
“Me, too,” said Lewyn.
That was when she knew it was over.
Her family. The salve to her husband’s mortal wound and the great work of her own life; the art of her life, she might even have said. Those birthday photographs running up the staircase wall: three babies, three toddlers, three children, three young people. Three young people wild to leave.
Johanna spent a lot of energy trying not to think about this. Thinking about this made her take to her bed for long, agonizing days during which she sometimes tried to trick herself into being happy. It was a fine, fine thing that her children were growing up! Children were supposed to grow up, and then they were supposed to go away! It’s what you wanted them to do.
Except that her departing children would leave nothing behind.
And she did mean nothing.
She was not, of course, the first woman to forgo the satisfactions of work “outside the home,” and she would not be the first mother to feel the sharp emptiness of abandonment, the fog of purposelessness, when her children departed for their own lives. Probably, there were support groups out there, full of people feeling precisely what she was feeling and fording the exact same dangerous waters, but Johanna had never been much of a group person. Actually, now that she was really considering her situation, she hadn’t been all that much of a one-on-one person, either.
She was the triplets’ mother, which was exactly what she’d sought to be. And lest she forget, it had taken an act of will—many acts of will—to make that happen. Making that happen had been the signature achievement of her existence.
And here it was, nearly at an end, and also—finally, even she was forced to admit—some form of a failure.
Not because the three of them looked incapable of negotiating the world of adulthood, or were not good people. Not because they were hooked on drugs, had criminal records, or ran away from home to spend wanton nights at raves or in Tompkins Square Park. None of the three had so much as lifted a ChapStick from a corner bodega or failed a class, let alone gotten a girl pregnant (or gotten pregnant) or been caught selling a bag of weed (real or faux) like her own brother. Not one of them had even cursed at our parents or failed to present himself or herself for the rare command appearances in the combined Hirsch/Oppenheimer calendar: Hermann and Selda’s anniversary, Johanna’s mother’s birthday dinners (increasingly sad as she retreated into dementia), the Seder hosted by Debbie and Bruce. Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally were normal young people in just about every obvious way, well educated (despite what even she recognized as Walden’s worst tendencies), globally aware, and not even particularly acquisitive, despite our astonishing privilege. Individually they were a credit to themselves, if not to her.
But as a family, they were still a failure.
And when they left, which was now on the not-so-distant horizon, they would not come back. They would keep on going.
She remembered something she had once read in the memoir of a famous writer. After he left home for college, he never went back to visit, or even called his mother and father. Why not? He hadn’t known he was supposed to.