All Adults Here(18)
“’Tis a pity,” Rachel said. “Next time with martinis.”
“Next time with whiskey and martinis,” Porter said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 10
NFG
Astrid wanted everyone to show up at eleven, but Elliot’s twins napped at noon, so brunch was at ten A.M. They were nonstop, Aidan and Zachary, and Astrid knew that Wendy cherished those solid hours in the middle of the day when they were asleep. Of the three of Astrid’s children, she’d always thought that Elliot would be the one to have a truly big family, in part because he was the one least likely to actively parent on a daily basis, and so what was the difference between one and five children except a decibel level at mealtimes, but he was thirty-eight when the twins were born, and Astrid was pretty sure that Wendy was closed for baby-making, in part because she wanted to go back to work someday and also because the boys were such hellions that only a fool would willingly ask for more.
Sometimes, when more than one of her children were in the same room, Astrid thought about their father walking in—their father, her husband, Russell, who hadn’t made it to the twenty-first century, who had never had a cellphone. Sometimes Astrid thought about that, about Russell traveling to and from his home and office, landline to landline, and it seemed impossibly quaint. She had lived most of her life without one, too, of course—she’d had a flip phone until Cecelia was born, and she understood the pull of always having a camera in her pocket—but Russell never even touched one, she didn’t think. One of his college friends, a rich show-off who they had occasionally visited in California, had a car phone the size of a shoebox, and it was something that they laughed about, this hotshot fool who thought what he had to say was so important that he needed to be reachable even in his car. She’d had a dream about sitting at a restaurant with Birdie and seeing Russell walk by outside, and running out the door to catch him, but by the time she got outside, he was gone, and it turned out that she was barefoot anyway, and then the restaurant was gone and she had to walk home. Dreams didn’t mean anything. Nicky thought they did, but Nicky had always been so good-looking that he believed in all kinds of things that less good-looking people weren’t allowed to believe in, because people would laugh at them. No one laughed at gorgeous white men. It was a design flaw in the universe.
Before Barbara died, Astrid had thought about telling her kids about Birdie, but it never seemed to matter. Now it was time. It was time. They were adults, and so was she. Astrid could say the words.
It was 10:20 and no one had arrived yet. Even Cecelia was still in her room, though Astrid heard her clomping overhead.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to compare daughters-in-law, just like it wasn’t fair to compare sons, but Astrid couldn’t help it. Children were the people they were from the beginning and, with the exception of a few social mores (public nose-picking, chanting about poop), rarely changed drastically from toddlerhood on. Nicky had always been a leaf in a river, content to float. His ease in his own skin had made him irresistible to other people, all his life. Elliot was the opposite—he tried so hard to be big enough, smart enough, charming enough, that he was none of the three. He was dedicated to the idea of perfection. As a boy, he’d whined for the largest toy, the biggest scoop of ice cream, the starting spot on the JV basketball team, no matter his skill. And both Nicky and Elliot had found the partners they needed. At least they’d found partners, unlike their poor sister.
It felt something like haunting the house of your widower and his new wife, to see the needs your adult children possessed and the people who filled them. Nicky met Juliette at a party, and they were married at City Hall two weeks later, their fingers always clutching and unclutching like mating spiders. She was decisive and focused, if self-destructive, she was French, and once Astrid met Juliette, she could see it all: the love affair, the unplanned child, the swan dive into normalcy, the gradual separation, the end. She felt psychic with visions of doom. Never mind that they were still married—they were trying to live some easygoing fantasy concocted in a forest ceremony, guided by a crystal. It was hooey, and everyone knew it but them. With Elliot, it was the reverse. Both Elliot and Wendy lived to check the boxes of adulthood. They had an engagement party. They had a wedding with two hundred people, three-quarters of them Wendy’s enormous Chinese family, and a reception with a costume change halfway through. They had a baby shower, a gender-reveal party, and at each one of them, Elliot and Wendy would smile in the exact same way, even and false, their hands light on each other’s backs, and Astrid would think, What the fuck? In some ways, Astrid thought that Wendy was just like her, a perfectionist, and was flattered that Elliot had looked for his mother, in some ways, just like the Greeks said. But Wendy’s perfection didn’t have anything to do with Astrid, not really—she cared about nutrition, not taste. She cared about calories, not exercise. But mothers-in-law don’t matter in marriages except as points of contrast.
Russell Strick had never understood a single word that Astrid’s mother had said, her English both heavy with Romanian and low in her throat, but he had liked her kasha varnishkes. His mother had been quiet, a dormouse, and Astrid knew that he liked having a wife who was not afraid to speak. Their mothers were not part of their daily lives, as parents. They were not on the rug in their socked feet, playing with the children, the way grandparents were nowadays, the way Astrid’s children expected her to be. Russell had been the softie of the two of them. He would have let Cecelia cover his face with stickers, would have let the twins use his body as a trampoline. What would Russell have thought about Birdie as his successor in Astrid’s bed? He would have liked her, and then he would have handed her his dirty plate to take back to the sink. He wouldn’t have understood. Russell was the kind of man who met women who had lived with another woman for fifty years and thought, Oh, how nice, roommates. But Astrid herself had changed in the last twenty years—no doubt Russell would have too. That was a melancholy mystery: how his chest hair would have grayed, how he would feel about gender-neutral bathrooms, what he would make of Donald Trump. Some days, Astrid felt like she was the same person she’d been when her husband died, but most of the time, that person felt like a distant relative, a cousin in another time zone, seen mostly in old photographs wearing unfashionable clothing.