This couple is performing, and Nathan watches. It’s strange not to have his own partner. His stories are good too, but without Marion, he can become cerebral. He’s on his third glass now, and aware that he’s on his way to being drunk but doesn’t care. It seems fine.
The chicken is ready, so the children are called down. Plates are carried out from the kitchen to the dining room. Anna has given her guests and her family members each a small piece of chicken, a spoonful of rice, and some vegetables. This family is thin because they don’t eat very much, rather than purely because of genetics. Looking down at his plate, Nathan knows that he and Jane will need seconds, and if they aren’t offered, he may order takeout when he gets home. If it isn’t too chilly, he may even take Jane for ice cream.
Beatrice whines about not getting into Brown. She eats with her fingers (the chicken and the vegetables; she doesn’t eat the rice) and rolls her eyes when her mother talks. Nathan finds himself staring at her throughout the meal. She still looks like a little girl; she is slim, and her skin is unblemished. He is not attracted to her, thank God, but he’s curious if this is what will happen to Ginny. Beatrice says she doesn’t want to go to college, and the family fights about it for a while. Beatrice talks about taking a year off, and Tom is worried that she’ll never go, and Beatrice asks if that is so bad. Nathan won’t say anything, but he agrees with Beatrice. Let her wait tables, Marion would say. Let her enjoy the world without a degree and see how far she gets. She’ll be begging to go to college in a year, maybe less.
The fight escalates, but the family isn’t embarrassed that this is happening in front of guests. The fight concludes when the boy starts talking about his favorite television shows—he favors half-hour comedies that feature wacky thirtysomething women—and the college topic is tabled for the time being.
Then the boy asks, abruptly, where Ginny and Marion are. Beatrice kicks him under the table, and he looks wounded and says “What?” Only younger siblings can feel these wounds in this particular way.
“Well, Ginny is home studying, and Marion is visiting her friend upstate,” Nathan says, and he says it well. He says it on cue, and the boy goes back to talking about his favorite TV shows. Nathan puts his hand on Jane’s shoulder and notices that her breathing is off. He looks at her, and she’s crying again.
“Did you see SNL last night?” Nathan asks Ben.
Ben looks to his mother for permission to re-create his favorite sketches. She gives it with a nod, and he gets up from the table and plays all the different characters and explains why it’s funny, and the table laughs and is thankful.
Mothers Who Abandon Their Families
Ginny takes her laptop down to the kitchen because she is wildly hungry. Her father was correct—there isn’t any food in the house save a bowl of raw cookie dough. Ginny takes it out of the fridge along with one of her father’s beers and places both on the table next to her computer. She’s been Googling.
She Googles her mother’s name. Her mother’s work profile appears, as well as the photo of an orthopedist from New Jersey who is particularly active on LinkedIn. She traces her mother’s past, and looks into the orthopedist because why not? The orthopedist has long dark hair that falls lushly around her shoulders but doesn’t distract enough from a beaked nose.
Next Ginny Googles mothers who abandon their families. It is a rarer occurrence than fathers who abandon their families. Not as rare as Ginny expected, however; she is in good company. The side effects on the children are extensive. Experts say the absence of her mother will define Ginny’s adulthood.
She opens the beer and takes a swallow. It tastes bitter and alive, and she immediately burps into the empty room. She eats a spoonful of cookie dough. She eats another. She can taste the butter, and this is nauseating, so she concentrates on the chocolate chips as they break between her teeth.
Ginny has a history exam on ancient Mesopotamia the next day. She has a chapter she should be reading, and notes she should be revisiting. She should be memorizing the geography of the region: two rivers, the Tigris and the other one.
She clicks on her mother’s picture and it gets larger. Her mother’s behavior has not been unforeseeable, but Ginny can’t explain why. She loves her mother and also misses her, but there was something lacking in her mother’s eyes, or maybe her forehead, when she looked at Ginny.
Ginny tries to hack into her mother’s personal email. She tries her own name, her birthday, her nicknames as passwords. She tries Jane’s name and birthday, but it is all unworkable. The spoon digs into the cookie dough repeatedly. A headache mounts behind Ginny’s temples. The beer fizzes away.
Ginny’s grandmother, Marion’s mother, died last winter, and Marion went to the funeral alone. Nathan wanted to go, and Jane wanted to go. Ginny didn’t want to go but would have for her mother. Marion shook her head to all of this, just spent the week in Sheepshead Bay. She slept at home, but every morning she took the train far away and didn’t return until late. When she did, she looked in on Ginny and Jane before going to bed. Her hair seemed frizzier, and her outfits became strange. She wore long shapeless skirts with scuffed running shoes. One day Ginny noticed that her mother had forgotten a bra. When asked what she was doing in Sheepshead Bay, Marion answered that she was mostly throwing away food. When asked about her family in Sheepshead Bay, Marion said they looked like her but they didn’t talk like her, and most everyone owned a boat. Boats were all they talked about, actually, she said. She said she wished her mother had died over the summer because then they would be out on their boats and they wouldn’t be cooking so many casseroles. After a short pause, she retracted that statement. Then she would have to deal with the catch from Long Island Sound, a suspect food group if ever there was one. January was better. Better to hear about the catch than to eat it.
She said this sitting on Ginny’s bed, as if she were talking to someone else in the room, but it was just Ginny, so Ginny agreed. Her mother looked at her sharply.
“Don’t pretend.”
Dinner Party
After dinner the adults move to the living room to drink more, but to drink differently. Nathan is handed a single malt of some kind that he won’t properly appreciate. He wishes Marion were here to make an exclamation of gratitude over the something-something-aged-something years.
Jane is supposed to leave and play with the other children so the adults can talk about grim realities now that they are sufficiently liquored, but Jane doesn’t want to go.
“I don’t want to play,” she says.
“Sure you do. I bet Bea could show you some new YouTube videos.”