I'm Glad About You(61)

“It’s not for helping the poor, Mom,” Alison contradicted. “Tweeting is just a lot of people saying absolutely inane things because they want to be famous.”

“That’s why you have to do it! You’re famous now,” Megan insisted.

“I’m a television actress, that doesn’t make you famous.”

Megan was having none of it. “Everyone in Cincinnati tweets about your TV episodes as soon as they come on,” she informed her. “My friend Suzanne tweets about you constantly. When she hears you are going to be in this movie, honestly she is going to flip.”

“Why does your friend Suzanne care about what I do?”

“It’s just fun, it’s a fun thing,” Megan said. “It’s something cool that we can talk about.” One of the twins was getting to the tail end of her Cheetos, and her orange face was starting to register exhausted bewilderment. Alison didn’t know much about kids in general, but she knew enough to recognize Megan’s precious seconds of adult conversation were coming to an end.

“Well, I haven’t been offered any movie, and you cannot tell your friend that I’m dating this movie director because it’s just not true,” she warned her sister. “I mean it, don’t go telling people that. I could get into a lot of trouble if something like that showed up on some dingdong’s Twitter feed.” Because she was afraid, this pronouncement came out more forcefully than she had intended. Megan picked up her orange-faced baby and tried not to look hurt, and Alison wilted inwardly. That’s not what I meant, she wanted to blurt, but too many years of being the black sheep kept her mouth shut and Megan turned away from her, fussing with the children, closing herself off from what had mere moments before seemed like pleasant, nonsensical banter.

Honestly, everyone in her world treated her like a complete idiot. Her agent, her publicist, every director she ever met, bloggers—with the exception of Schaeffer, that nutty guy who seemed to think she hung the moon. Now here she was in Cincinnati, and they all thought she was an idiot too. Only in a more Midwestern, you’re so ungrateful kind of way. And it wasn’t what she meant! She loved that Megan was tweeting with her friends about Alison and her slightly silly television show. She liked her fans, they were pretty nice people, when she bumped up against them. They were all so happy to have their pictures taken with her, and gossip about what was happening on the show.

“Here, come help Grandma with the soup.” Rose lifted one of the twins into the air and handed the kid a piece of chopped carrot. “You just put it in there. Perfect!” For indeed, the tiny fist had immediately hurled the bit of vegetable into the giant pot of water on the stovetop. With an unconscious ease, Rose handed the second twin her own bit of carrot, so that both children would have a turn. The simplicity of the moment was weird and graceful, plugged innately into a kind of knowledge Alison couldn’t penetrate. How did these women know so instinctively what those kids wanted? Even chopping vegetables was a mysterious enterprise these days. It was a given that you would just buy them already chopped, at Dean & Deluca.

The phone rang. Everyone’s focus had so completely moved on to the task at hand—dropping vegetable bits into that giant pot of water—Alison was the only one available to pick the thing up. “Hello,” she announced.

“Alison, hi.” Time flipped. The past and the present kept smashing into each other in completely untenable ways. How did people do this? Why was she so bad at it?

She called upon the actress. Chipper, bold, secure. “Hey, Kyle, hi!” Megan glanced up, but somehow managed not to raise an eyebrow. They were all moving on.





fifteen





KYLE’S WIFE SEEMED to float. She was gliding around the glorious open kitchen, a kid on one hip, pushing a perfect wisp of a blonde curl off her forehead, turning with a faint look of confusion and then smiling, welcoming, couldn’t be happier to see Kyle’s ex in her fantastic home. Wow, Alison thought. She’s like a painting.

She was like a painting, a painting of a wife inside a painting of a house. As she hurried across the room to greet Alison, the illusion of perfection gave way to a kind of harried happiness, which seemed even more perfect. She was so pretty it was like a state of being; she clearly had carried it with her from childhood. Alison knew these girls. There was something about being told you were pretty from the second you were born; it did something to your brain.

“Alison! I am so glad you could come.”

“Thanks! Thank you, Van.” Alison was abashed in the face of the other women’s lovely enthusiasm. Van seemed like such a nice person; of course Kyle would marry a nice person. “Here, I brought you this.” The standard offering, a generic Malbec, the guy in the store had promised it was good. Van laughed at it, finally a slight note of brittleness.

“Oh, I wish I could! I’m breastfeeding, I can’t have a drop of anything. And my milk is so erratic. I know you saw Kyle buying formula, which I so didn’t want to do, but my placenta tore, there was blood everywhere and I was anemic for three days, the milk just didn’t come and didn’t come and you’d think being married to a pediatrician they’d warn you what that might mean—”

“I did warn you,” Kyle noted, reentering the room with another guest. Thank God, this was an actual party, there were going to be strangers to meet who would keep the whole thing complicated and social. “Alison, this is Martin Emory. Martin is a friend of ours from St. Luke’s. Martin, this is Alison Moore, she’s visiting from New York.”