Pineapple Street(8)
“What’s going on this weekend?” Brady started, unwrapping a sandwich and popping open a can of seltzer.
“Going to Philly to see the wife’s family,” his friend replied. “What about you?”
“I think some college friends are going to be in town, so we’ll be at the Long Island Bar Saturday night,” Brady said before taking a bite. Georgiana looked up at him, and he caught her eye and smiled. Was he saying that for her? Did he want her to come and meet him? No. That was delusional. He was having a conversation about his weekend plans like a normal person and she just happened to be sitting there, and he smiled at her because he was not psychotic or a total misanthrope.
She dotted the corners of her mouth with her paper napkin, closed the lid on her salad, and mumbled, “Bye, guys,” before returning to her desk. She couldn’t just sit there and pretend to eat. Just being near Brady made her feel like she’d taken nine shots of espresso and her hands were shaking.
* * *
—
Lena and Kristin didn’t have a read on the situation. Was he just making conversation, or did he want her to meet him? Either way, she lived in the Heights, she occasionally went to the Long Island Bar on Atlantic Avenue, and it wouldn’t be weird if she happened to be out at the same time, so on Saturday night she dressed carefully, spent an extra ten minutes drying her hair, and wore the boots that kind of hurt her toes because they looked really great with jeans. Lena, Kristin, and their friend Michelle walked over to the bar with her. They got there at eight and ordered tequila sodas, and by the time they finished them Brady still hadn’t arrived. Kristin and Michelle had another party they wanted to go to, so they left, but Lena stayed to hang out. They had another drink and gossiped about Lena’s sister, who was engaged to the most boring man on the planet, then about their old high-school teacher, who had run away with the squash coach, and Georgiana’s mother, who refused to whiten her teeth because she thought it would be bad for her, but now drank red wine through a straw at home so as not to stain them further, resulting in her drinking twice as fast and twice as much, which had to have equally deleterious health results. At midnight Brady still wasn’t there, so they left, hugging goodbye on the street corner. Georgiana let herself into her apartment, used a wipe to take off her careful makeup, and flopped on the bed in an old basketball T-shirt. She felt lonely and pathetic, but she knew that all across the city there were girls just like her who had spent their Saturday nights waiting for something to happen, nursing a drink or reading a paperback in a coffee shop or scrolling endlessly on their phones, alone and biding their time until their real life would begin.
In the morning, Georgiana dressed in tennis whites and met her mother at the Casino, their club on Montague Street. They hit for an hour, and with each swing of the racket she felt her frustration pounding out. Georgiana was a strong opponent, she hit hard, and she had been taking lessons since she was four, but her mother was a backboard. She was nearly seventy, but her footwork was so practiced that she never had to run; her shots weren’t hard, but she got a racket on everything; and her form was so impeccable that she had Georgiana sprinting all over the court chasing the ball. Playing tennis was and always had been the cleanest line of communication between Georgiana and her mother. Tilda was hard for her to talk to; she was of a generation that despised difficult conversations, and shut down at the slightest hint of conflict or unpleasantness. When Georgiana was a teenager, she found this infuriating, every venture at true closeness put on ice. But tennis had saved them. When they couldn’t talk, they played. Her mother cheered her on, complimented her best shots, gave her strategic pointers, and marveled at her agility. In the years when Georgiana wasn’t sure her mother even really liked her, she knew that at least she approved of her game.
In an alternate universe they would have gone to a gossipy brunch after tennis, and Georgiana would have confessed her humiliation at the Long Island Bar. She would have told her mother all about Brady, the way other project managers looked up to him, the way she swore she sometimes felt him looking at her, the crush so powerful she dreamed about him regularly and woke up simultaneously thrilled to have been with him and devastated that it was only in her sleep. Instead, she zipped her racket into its case and followed her mother out the big swinging doors of the Casino and down Henry to their new apartment, where her mother set out a lunch made by Berta, served on her favorite flowered china with matching napkins, and they ate while looking at the newspaper and not speaking except to occasionally read interesting bits aloud.
It was weird seeing her parents in their new home. Georgiana had lived in the house on Pineapple Street since she was a baby, and every piece of furniture, every scar in the wooden banister, every speck in the granite countertops felt essential to her family, like the very place had leaked into their DNA and they had leaked right back. They were meant to live in a drafty old limestone, meant to creak and age along with their antiques, and seeing her mom and dad puttering around a glossy marble kitchen island sometimes felt like watching Ben Franklin using a Nintendo Switch.
Even weirder than seeing her parents in their new apartment was thinking about Cord’s new wife living in her childhood home. Georgiana had been open to Sasha at first, but two things happened that soured any possibility of a warm and fuzzy sister-in-law relationship. The first happened a month before Cord’s wedding, when he showed up drunk at Darley’s house with swollen eyes because Sasha had refused to sign the prenup, had left his apartment and not come back. At some point, a week later, Sasha had reappeared. Cord wouldn’t speak of it again, and neither Georgiana nor Darley knew the details. The second thing happened the night of the wedding. Georgiana and Darley joined all the younger guests at a bar on Stone Street for the after-party. Sasha’s cousin Sam had been snorting coke all night and had become wildly indiscreet. He buttonholed Georgiana at the end of the bar and asked her bluntly just how loaded her family was.