All Adults Here(83)

Chapter 36





Astrid Is Ready



Astrid drove Birdie to the shop, dropped her off, and kept driving, her big car slow and heavy on the shadow-dappled roads. October was the most glorious month of the year—the summers could be hot and the winters snowy, but fall was perfection. She could drive these streets blindfolded, if there were no people or dogs to avoid, that was how deeply her muscles knew every turn. She drove past Spiro’s, past the grocery store, past Clap Happy’s red barn, past the YMCA, past Heron Meadows’s fat spider body, past the train station, past Porter’s house, past the church where Elliot and Wendy had gotten married, past the junior high school, past the high school, and around the roundabout six times, crisscrossing back and forth across town. Nicky had texted to say he was in town, and had stayed at Porter’s for the night, and would come over and visit in the late morning. Nicky back at home made her nervous—she knew he didn’t like Clapham, or maybe that he didn’t like her. With two parents, there was always someone else to blame for being difficult, but with one, there was no cushion. Astrid wanted to make their relationship better, even though whatever she’d tried to do to make it better usually made it worse. Giving him space, not getting angry when he was out late, the way she’d been with Elliot. She had tried to correct mistakes! That was the problem with being part of a family: Everyone could mean well and it could still be a disaster. Love didn’t cure all, not in terms of missed communication and hurt feelings during an otherwise uneventful dinner conversation. Love couldn’t change the misread tone of a text message or a quick temper.

She had called Nicky and Juliette individually and explained what had happened at Cecelia’s school. At this school. Astrid knew that she’d been distracted for the poor girl. If Barbara had died earlier, she might not have said yes to their idea of Cecelia’s coming to stay at all. Astrid was happy to have her—she loved Cecelia. The problem was Barbara. The problem was that she, Astrid, a woman, a person, turned out not to be made of steel the way her children thought she was.



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It was the first time Nicky had been in Clapham since the twins were born. Three years! Astrid could remember when three years seemed like an eternity, when her children had to count their ages using quarters and halves because an entire year was an endless expanse they could not yet see across. Now three years seemed like days or weeks, except that Nicky was her baby, and long or short, fast or slow, any time without him within her walls felt like a tragedy. But who could she complain to? Porter and Elliot were used to living in Nicky’s charismatic shadow, and that wasn’t fair, she couldn’t complain to them. Russell was gone. And two out of three of her children lived within five minutes—Astrid also couldn’t complain to any of her friends, whose children had all moved to Los Angeles or Portland or Chicago, places that required airplanes and scheduled FaceTime dates so that their grandchildren remembered what they looked like. Juliette and Cecelia had come to visit two or three times a year, spending weekends here and there just for fun, to hit up the petting zoo and swim in the local pool, when Brooklyn got too sticky. It wasn’t that long, really—they weren’t estranged or anything horrible like that, he just didn’t like to come, and he liked to be by himself, and he liked to travel. Once children appeared, there were not limitless opportunities to visit. Astrid understood. It felt greedy, unseemly even, for a mother to hunger after her adult son’s love.

Astrid turned and found herself on Elliot’s street. She supposed that she had been headed there from the beginning. It was that way with children—they each wanted different things. Where one would always want to be cuddled and hugged, another would want space and silence. Astrid had tried, she had tried, to give each of her children what they needed, but it was an impossible job to do perfectly. She assumed he hadn’t seen his brother yet, and Astrid wanted to invite Elliot over for dinner—she wanted to have all her children and grandchildren in the house at the same time. It was such a simple idea—not for a holiday or a celebration, where one person was the center maypole, around whom everyone else spun, but just because they could, because they were all alive at the same time, and wasn’t it a miracle? The older Astrid got, the more she understood that she and her parents and she and her children were as close as people could be, that generations slipped away quickly, and that the twenty-five years in between her and her mother and the thirtyish years in between her and her children were absolutely nothing, that there were still people who had lived through the Holocaust, which had happened less than a decade before she was born, but which her children had read about in their history textbooks. It happened before you could blink. Her children had been children, and now they were adults; they were all adults here, now.

Astrid parked her car in Elliot’s driveway and then rang his bell, which was loud and electronic, an ostentatious imitation of bells. No one answered, and so she tried the knob and found that the door was open. The picture window in the living room showed Wendy and the boys outside. Wendy was on her knees tending to someone’s boo-boo. She was a good mother—tough but loving. Astrid respected Wendy, who seemed to have endless patience for two children who could be extremely trying. Astrid thought the twins were more difficult than her own children had been, but the 1980s were a different time, and less had been expected of her. They’d barely had seatbelts. She wanted to offer more to Wendy—more babysitting, more advice, more charming tales about Elliot and his siblings as small children, but she knew it would be unwelcome and so she kept her mouth shut. Whenever she had let herself start to babble about something tiny baby Elliot had done, the way he’d plop down on his fat diaper when he was learning to walk, Elliot would narrow his eyes and stare at her like she was asking about the current state of his bowel movements.