She and Harriet had passed Palmyra on the way back from the Chautauqua trip. Where the Mormons came from, Harriet had said as they drove by.
Rochelle looked at her in surprise. “Yes. The most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Hundreds of corn-fed Americans in a field, dressed up like extras in Ben-Hur, reenacting the Book of Mormon. I mean, I understand why we went. For his roommate. And you need to be respectful. But it was so bizarre. Oh!” she said, “this is the weirdest thing, but he has the same last name as you. My boyfriend, not the Mormon roommate. I had no idea it’s such a common name. That’s what he said, when I told him about you.”
When I told him about you.
Sally, working her way through this, said nothing.
“And what about you? Are you seeing…” Rochelle seemed to falter. “Anyone?”
Nine months on the other side of their little room, and it was the first time this question had been asked. It was so banal, so pedestrian. Sally wanted to hurl it back.
“What do you mean, ‘seeing’?” she said unkindly.
“Oh, you know.”
A long and uncomfortable moment passed.
“Sally,” said Rochelle, “I’m so happy we were roommates. I felt really lucky. And sometimes I thought, how would I have ever met Sally if I hadn’t been matched up with her by some computer or something?”
“But you didn’t want to keep rooming together,” she said. She was a little surprised to hear herself say it out loud.
Rochelle looked around uncomfortably. “I didn’t handle that very well. I think I just wanted some privacy…”
“For the boyfriend.”
“Well, yes. Partly. And I wondered if … if we were becoming too dependent on each other.”
If I was becoming too dependent on you, Sally thought. That’s what you mean.
“We could have talked about it,” she said.
“Yes. We should have. I take responsibility for that. But it’s why I was so glad you got in touch with me. Because I’d be incredibly sad if I thought we weren’t going to be friends anymore.”
She felt something inside herself soften, but even as it did the volume of her outrage was rising. Rochelle had been victimized no less than herself. More than herself! And by Lewyn, that snake, more snakely still by virtue of the fact that his snakeliness had lain dormant all these years. Cruelty from Harrison: that was a given, a no-brainer. Harrison could smell weakness in his siblings, track it to its source, then lay the perfect trap to reap the most exquisite harvest of sibling distress, all without dropping an Oxford comma. But Lewyn? Lewyn, indolent in his loser role, his weirdo role, too passive to even contemplate a vicious act against anyone, let alone the triplet who was not the triplet who’d been such an asshole to him since birth—who would have guessed what depths of vicious calculation he’d harbored, all these years!
“What’s his family like?” she asked, more to cut Rochelle off than anything else, but also because she wondered how Lewyn had managed to handle that one.
“I haven’t met them yet,” Rochelle admitted. “Well, he hasn’t met my mom, either. I think you understand the freak-out potential there,” she sighed. “I thought I might get invited home with him at the beginning of September, but he has to go on some family retreat or something, and it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing where you invite a friend.”
Sally frowned. A family retreat. That was one way to describe the mandatory observance of the birthday at the Martha’s Vineyard house. Harrison would be coming from New Hampshire, she supposed. Lewyn, obviously, from Ithaca.
And then it came to her, that rare, perfect synthesis of calculation and raw emotion: the loss of her friend (because no matter what happened now, her friend was lost to her) and the repudiation of her brother, and the bleakness of what she saw when she looked into those packed and filthy houses, and the dying woman who lived downstairs, and the father back in Brooklyn she could not bear the sight of, and the mother, playing out her long-debunked theory of what our family was supposed to be.
“You know,” Sally said, curling her damp hand around her cappuccino cup, “why don’t you come out to Martha’s Vineyard with me? My mom and dad would love to meet you, and we can go to the beach and relax for a few days before we need to get back here for fall term. I mean, if the dates line up with your boyfriend’s family retreat, that is.”
Interestingly enough, they did.
Chapter Twenty-Four
An Inescapable Assembly of Oppenheimers
In which Sally, Lewyn, and Harrison Oppenheimer converge on the eve of disaster, for an evening of disaster
Early in September, all three Oppenheimer triplets turned toward Chilmark for the ritual observance of their birth. Harrison, only recently returned to Roarke from Charlottesville, had stopped long enough to interview candidates for a faculty position in philosophy (and a good thing, too, because several of them were idiots) before taking a bus from Concord to the New Bedford ferry. Sally drove Harriet Greene’s car straight to Woods Hole and onto the boat. And Lewyn paid an Ithaca taxi driver to take him to the Albany airport, where he got a flight to the island. Not one of them even considered coordinating with the other two, not even Sally, who had a car at her disposal, a long ride ahead of her, and a sibling starting from and going to the exact same places. Especially not Sally.
Johanna and the baby had been on the island most of the summer. She’d tried enrolling them in the very same Parent and Child Musical Jamboree! program in Edgartown to which she’d once hauled the triplets, but now her fellow moms (only moms, despite that supposedly post-patriarchal “Parent and Child”) were thirty-year-old attorneys and entrepreneurs, still maintaining their Dartmouth crew or Swarthmore squash bodies, and they all seemed to know one another. They were pleasant, of course, and cooed at the baby, but there was none of the laughing and talking and commiseration Johanna remembered from years before, or maybe there was, but it was happening somewhere she wasn’t. Besides, a lot of them didn’t actually stay for the class, opting to hand off their babies to an au pair or a mother’s helper so they could get in a Pilates session before the weekend guests arrived, or taking their laptops to one of the cafés in town. Johanna had no one to hand her baby off to (Marta had wisely declined the invitation to accompany them for the summer), and the weeks on the island, accordingly, had been exhausting. It was the first time Johanna’s true situation, the actual impact of her decision, had fully come home to her: she was a forty-eight-year-old woman with an infant to raise, and all the money in the world could not adjust the very long horizon before her, nor the lonely road she would need to walk in order to reach it. That road, as it turned out, would be even lonelier than she had reason to fear.
The three of them—Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally—arrived within a day of one another to find our mother frantic, our father sequestered behind the closed door of the upstairs room he used as an office, and an unsteadily toddling toddler who wept at the sight of them. They gave one another perfunctory nods where possible, and perfunctory hugs where required, and they patted the infant (no longer, obviously, an infant) on whatever part of its body seemed least repellant. Sally’s bedroom overlooked the eroding sands of Long Point Beach. Harrison and Lewyn’s bedroom was under the house’s eaves, looking east. The infant was in a small room across the hall from the boys and next to the bathroom the three of them shared, which was far too close if it was doing anything besides sleeping.