Across the table, Francie put the tips of her unsteady fingers to her eyelids, which were creased with a violet shadow making the lids look more bruised than anything else. “I don’t want to have this conversation again.” She opened her eyes and looked around the table, surprised, as always, when face-to-face with her children.
Francie knew she wouldn’t win any prizes for motherhood—she’d never aspired to any—but she hadn’t been this horrible, had she? What had Leonard wrought with the money he thought would just be a small dividend later in their lives? How had they raised children who were so impractical and yet still so entitled? Maybe it was her fault. She’d wondered that often enough, what mother hadn’t? She’d been twenty-five and married less than a year when Leo was born, and Jack and Bea had followed so quickly. She’d been overwhelmed to the point of being listless. And just when she felt she was coming back to her old self, gaining control of the situation—Leo was six, Jack four, Bea months away from three—everyone finally sleeping—and surprise! Melody. She was bereft when she found herself pregnant with Melody and for many years after, counting down the hours of the days until she could have a drink to dampen her anxiety. These days, she supposed, she’d be diagnosed with postnatal something and given a pill and maybe it would be different. Harold—solid, confident, reassuring Harold—had rescued her.
Maybe the fault was with her marriage to Leonard; their relationship had been fraught, disconnected (except for the sex, she still thought about having sex with Leonard, his unlikely voracious exuberance, her ability to be yielding and attentive in bed in a way she wasn’t anywhere else; if only they’d been a little more careful about family planning), and probably their parenting had suffered as a result, but had they really been different from anyone of their generation? She didn’t think so.
“Mom?” Francie was jolted back into the conference room by Melody’s voice, away from the pleasant memory of Leonard and the unlikely places they would couple when the children were little and everywhere and wanting her constantly. The laundry room with its locked door had been a favorite, the whirring and thumping of the washer and dryer giving them a certain auditory privacy. She still had a Pavlovian type of arousal when she smelled Clorox.
And here they were—her children. Three of them, anyway. Jack, who had emerged from the womb aloof and self-contained. He was always trying to sell Francie some inferior kind of antique for her house, something from his shop that was overvalued and overpriced. She didn’t know if he was dumb or if he just thought she was.
Beatrice had seemed like the easiest of the four, but then she wrote those stories. Francie was proud when the first one was published, ready to buy dozens of copies and show them to her friends—until she read the story with a character who was meant to be her, a mother described as “distant and casually cruel.” She’d never mentioned the story to Bea, but she still remembered bits—a woman who “viewed the world through a prism of bottomless desire; her sole fluency, disappointment.” Luckily, her friends didn’t read those kinds of magazines anyway; they read Town & Country, they read Ladies Home Journal. Bea’d always had her secrets, always. Francie wondered what was going on in that bowed head now as her hands flew with needles and yarn.
And Melody. Maybe she would slip Melody some cash, enough for some Botox or a facial or something to brighten her pallor. She was the youngest and somehow the most faded, as if the Plumb DNA had thinned with each conception, strong and robust with Leo and each child after being—a little less. She couldn’t claim to be close to Leo, but he was the least needy and, therefore, the one she thought of with the most fondness.