Alternate Side(41)
“Seriously? An off-site?” One of the things Nora loved about running her own operation was that she never had to authorize a retreat, a team-building day, or an off-site. At her last job there had been two off-sites a year, at which they had heard endless speeches from management gurus, done stress reduction exercises, and attended breakout sessions that consisted of writing your greatest fears on index cards and listening to them being read aloud in an NPR announcer voice by the facilitator: disappointing others (obviously a woman), not being promoted (obviously a man), death (everyone looked around the circle).
“Not ours. The old man thinks they’re a waste of time. It’s an invitation from—” Here Charlie mentioned the name of what was obviously a client with whom she was obviously supposed to be familiar, so Nora nodded and began to make oatmeal. Nodding was good. It was attentive, collegial. Charlie dropped client names as though they were celebrities—although he was unfamiliar with most celebrities, so she supposed it all evened out.
The twins had just returned to college after a Presidents’ Day break. “I want more time off,” Rachel had moaned the day they were due to go back to school, standing in the kitchen eating ice cream from the container.
“Me, too,” said Oliver, who was dressed almost exactly like his twin sister, something that Nora had vowed, while staring at the sonogram, that she would never do to them herself.
“Me, three,” Charlie said.
There had been a long silence. Nora knew that normally Rachel would have responded with a wisecrack, but she had been noticeably cold to her father since the Ricky incident. “If I run into Mr. Fisk, I can’t be held responsible for what I might do,” Rachel had said at dinner.
“I hope you’ve learned to always be civil to adults,” her father said sternly.
“Not to adults who attack innocent people,” Rachel replied.
Charlie blamed Nora for this, too.
So it was Oliver who finally said, “Dad humor. Lame.”
Rachel continued to ignore her father and handed her brother the ice cream and the spoon.
“There’s, like, two spoonfuls left,” Ollie said.
“And I saved them for you, bro. Because I love you.”
“None for me?” Charlie said, because he could not leave well enough alone, but Rachel just went upstairs.
“Women,” Ollie said, ever the peacemaker.
The house was now still with that terrible stillness that came after raucous habitation. Nora could only imagine what Rachel’s bedroom looked like. There appeared to be a dearth of food in the kitchen, and the cupboards looked as though they had been ransacked. She was sure there had been bags of granola that had found their way into someone’s duffel bag. She wondered if there were still raisins. There were still raisins. God bless Charity.
“So I will probably be late,” said Charlie, and Nora nodded again. Peanut butter and jelly for dinner, her guilty pleasure. She could scarcely wait.
She put on her waterproof boots and tucked her indoor shoes into her tote. In an act of insurrection Nora might wear the boots all day, although she knew Bebe hated them. Bebe never needed to wear boots herself since her relationship to the sidewalk consisted of the cleared walkway to the door of the museum, the cleared walkway to the door of her apartment building, and the cleared walkway to the revolving door at Bergdorf’s. Nora would wear her boots because Bebe was in Palm Beach until Easter. “I hear it’s snowing there!” Bebe would bellow jubilantly when she called in later in the day, in that way Florida people always did, as though temperate weather alone were equivalent to Lincoln Center, Broadway theater, endless museums, excellent restaurants, Saks. Although Bebe liked to say that the Saks in Palm Beach was very well curated, which Nora assumed meant it stocked only the really, really pricey things.
Nora knew that in a matter of hours she would be sick of the snow, sick of wading through enormous gray puddles of slush at the corners, of tracking the grit the plows laid down into the foyer as Charity rolled her eyes and got out the bucket. But when she first left the house with Homer she was struck by how beautiful the block looked, the scrawny street trees filled out by their white furry coats. The block was always near the bottom of the street-cleaning list, which made perfect sense since it was a dead end, although George vowed every winter to address the issue with their council member, and Jack Fisk insisted he could call a deputy mayor who would move them up the list like that: finger snap. Nora assumed that Jack’s finger-snapping days were now over, his phone calls unreturned. Jack Fisk? Barely knew him.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Alma called from across the street as the Fenstermacher poodle, wearing a tartan coat, sniffed at the curb. It occurred often to Nora that they all tended to be much more solicitous of their dogs than of their spouses, and she was not sure whether that was because their dogs loved them unconditionally, did not engage them in conversation, or simply didn’t live as long. Sherry Fisk always said monogamy had worked better when people didn’t live past fifty. It was a huge event on the block when one of the dogs had to be put down. They would always tell one another, as successive animals approached twelve or fifteen or, in the case of George’s loathsome little yappers, eighteen, because the worst dogs lived longest, that they hoped the dogs would die in their sleep. But that never happened, and after that last trip to the vet there was always a moment on the block when a neighbor arrived home dogless. Hugs, murmured condolences. At their age, a parent could die with less ceremony.