Pineapple Street(14)
“Thanks so much, Berta.” Darley tried to stand, but another wave of nausea overtook her.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go home for my grandkids.” Berta’s daughter was a nurse who often did late shifts and counted on her mother to fill in.
“Of course, Berta. I’ll call my brother or my sister. Thanks so much for coming over. Can you just turn on a movie before you leave?” Darley knew that if a movie was playing her kids would leave her alone for at least an hour and a half. She couldn’t face them, she worried she’d frighten them (their death obsession didn’t help), or worse, get them sick.
Berta nodded and closed the door softly. Darley shut her eyes. Georgiana had work in the morning. Cord and Sasha had work in the morning. Darley’s mother, well, Darley’s mother had already shown what she was willing to do. She picked up the phone.
“Soon-ja?”
“Darley, my love, how are you and my babies?”
“I’m not great, Soon-ja, I think I have the stomach flu. I’m vomiting and Malcolm is heading to Brazil for his deal . . .”
“I’ll be right there. I’m getting in the car now. I should be there by nine at the latest. You hang in there, my love, and don’t worry about a thing.”
Darley fell back against her pillow, the sound of cartoon characters singing in high creepy voices seeping into feverish dreams of birds’ nests and pigeons.
In the morning, Darley woke to see the sun already peeking through the blinds. She could hear Soon-ja in the kitchen making breakfast. Her stomach and throat were raw, her eyes felt scratchy with sand, and she was pretty sure she smelled worse than the class hamster they had taken for spring vacation. But she was better. Until she flipped her phone over on her nightstand and saw the text from Malcolm: I’ve been fired.
FOUR
Sasha
On birthdays and holidays, special occasions when the wine was flowing, the family would linger over dinner and reminisce, telling stories of bad behavior and shenanigans over the years. Cord would talk about the time he and his high school friends got drunk, then lost, in Paris while they were supposed to be sketching at the Louvre on a class trip. Georgiana would talk about sneaking out after dark down at their club in Florida. They delighted in their flirtations with deviant behavior and cackled away, even when they all knew the stories by heart after dozens of retellings. Sasha loved hearing them, even the ones that were familiar, and she laughed and laughed, but she never contributed her own. She knew better than that. It was because her family stories made their craziest misadventures seem like a night sipping O’Doul’s at math camp.
The truth was, Sasha came from a very wild family. Her cousins were infamous in the small beach town outside Providence where she grew up, and most of them had only avoided mile-long rap sheets because her uncle happened to be the chief of police. For the most part, their antics were met with slaps on the wrist or warnings. But her cousins drunkenly stole Boston Whalers for joyrides, they stayed up all night snorting coke on houseboats in the bay, they crashed weddings at the mansions in Newport, and they claimed to drive better drunk than sober, an assertion countered by their dented fenders and broken fence posts. While Cord may have suffered a broken arm from a ski accident, Sasha’s cousin Brandon suffered a broken arm from falling off a second-floor balcony wasted on Jameson and NoDoz. It was just a different level of bad behavior. On rich people these exploits looked funny, but on Sasha’s family she knew they just looked trashy.
After the disaster that was Sasha’s engagement party—her older brother, Nate, was thrown out of the Explorer’s Club for trying to feed the stuffed polar bear a leg of lamb—she made her father read the entire family the riot act before the wedding, reminding them that their uncle was not the chief of the New York City Police, and that while they should feel free to act like complete buffoons and degenerates in Providence, they would be embarrassing Sasha in front of her new family with that sort of behavior at her wedding. The lecture was greeted with general merriment among her cousins—they loved nothing more than being reminded of outrageous past transgressions—and they proceeded to be utter lunatics at her reception, dismantling a floral arrangement to drink champagne out of a giant vase.
In spite of her family’s behavior (or, truthfully, partially because of it), Sasha loved her wedding. It was grand, it was elegant, and it was just wild enough to make sure nobody would ever forget it. The celebration was held at the Down Town Association, a private club on Pine Street founded by J. P. Morgan as an all-men’s club for bankers. Cord had lunch there several days a week, and they had attended champagne tastings and lectures there in the evenings—once even an Italian-themed dinner with wine pairings that was so boring Sasha accidentally got hammered on Barolo just to survive. The club was three floors of old-fashioned New York glamour, with sky-blue ceilings, dark wooden railings, a walk-in cigar humidor, and a massive marble barbershop in the back of the men’s room, where they filmed the Jodie Foster movie Inside Man.
Cord and Sasha fed each other cake, he swung her delighted mother around the dance floor (all those cotillion lessons as a boy paid off), and Sasha gamely tried to keep up with her father-in-law, who led her in a waltz to Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Malcolm and Darley cut loose for once, Malcolm putting his tie around his forehead like a character in Animal House, and when a friend of the family got turned around on his way out of the men’s room and walked in on Cord’s business school roommate feeling up Sasha’s cousin in the barbershop, he laughed and told everyone it was the best party he’d been to in a decade.