Alternate Side(6)

Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES is Ricky permitted to park his van in the lot. He has been REPEATEDLY told this. Any suggestion that he has permission from Mr. Stoller to do so is INCORRECT.

Inform me IMMEDIATELY if you see him parked there or at the entrance to the lot.

George





During the week between the end of their summer internships and their return to college, Rachel and Oliver came home, to see their friends from high school and to spend money, she on clothing, he on computer gear. Nora was both delighted to have her children around and a little weary of being awakened in the middle of the night by footfalls on the stairs. She sometimes thought that if she had envisioned the twins as young adults she would have put the master bedroom on the top floor and Oliver and Rachel below rather than the other way around. But when she felt mildly disgruntled as someone stomped by her bedroom door at 3 A.M., she would consider the future, with Rachel living in her own place somewhere, with Oliver living in his own place somewhere else, with she and Charlie living in a quiet house, just the two of them. Some of their friends had started to complain about college graduates who circled around and, because of high rents and low-paying jobs, wound up back in their childhood bedrooms. Nora always thought she wouldn’t mind that one bit.

When the twins came home the house was always full of people, although none of them stayed long, except for one or two of the girls, who would tumble into Rachel’s bed at night and appear again in the late morning, tousled, in boxer shorts and T-shirts. The others just passed through: Hello, Nick; Hello, Bronson; Hello, Grace; Hello, Elise. Charlie’s mantra was “What is her name again?” He was even flummoxed sometimes by Rachel’s two oldest friends; their names were Bethany and Elizabeth, and Charlie still sometimes confused the two. Luckily the girls thought this was hilarious, except for Rachel when she was in a mood, when she would say what kind of father can’t be bothered to figure out his daughter’s best friends’ names. Then she would flounce, although the more time she spent at college, the more she had traded flouncing for tromping.

Because no one used the doorbell anymore, preferring to text one another OMG I’m outside let me in instead, there was no telling who was down in the kitchen while Nora and Charlie were asleep two floors up and the faint smell of smoke, cigarette or pot, drifted up from the backyard to their bedroom window. When they awoke, the counter was usually littered with the remains of food eaten long after they had retired, and the garbage can was full of takeout containers.

“Who drinks beer with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” Charlie muttered to himself.

Dad so weird park lot wtf, Rachel texted Nora in the middle of the night, when the twins and all their friends were wide awake. It was as though they lived in different time zones, as though the parents were in China to their children’s America. Nora couldn’t get used to the notion that when she was asleep, her children were awake, and vice versa. “Mom, please,” Rachel had said. “Don’t text me at eight in the morning. Just…no.”

“You don’t have to read it then.”

“My phone is under my pillow. It wakes me up.”

“I will never understand why you sleep with the phone under your pillow.”

“Never mind. Just. Never mind. If I block you, you’ll know why.”

“I thought people only blocked stalkers.”

“You are my stalker,” Rachel said, going upstairs with her phone in hand.

“You walked right into that one, Bun,” Charlie said.

“Can I text you at eight?” Nora asked Oliver.

“I guess?” he said.

Oliver’s internship had been with the Massachusetts River Consortium. He was testing the Charles River for contaminants. Rachel had been on the Cape, working for The Nature Conservancy. Neither had ever shown much interest in wildlife before, except for the early years, when Rachel had begged for a puppy and Ollie had kept a tortoise under his bed who ate whatever lettuce in the fridge was too limp to serve and who was so sedentary that Nora would regularly check that he was still alive.

Go, dad! Oliver had texted when Charlie sent a photo of his car in the lot.

Car pic omg wtf ice, Rachel texted Nora.

“Ice?” Nora said to Oliver.

“I can’t even,” Oliver said. “Get with the program, lady.”

Nora was not surprised that Charlie had texted the twins pictures of his car in its new space. Nothing had pleased him so much since Parents’ Weekend at the twins’ respective colleges, where he had participated in a rugby game with Rachel (Williams) and a sculling competition with Oliver (MIT). Nora knew only in the vaguest way that her husband had had a spate of recent disappointments at work: a former classmate who had promised to send something his way and hadn’t, a headhunter who had come after him hard for a big job and then disappeared. “Nora,” he called her on those nights, instead of “Bunny” or “Bun,” the term of endearment he had come up with so many years ago and had become the substitute for her actual name. They were more commonplace now, those evenings when he arrived home with a face like a fist and went straight for the vodka.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“Are you okay?”