I'm Glad About You(7)

Alison wanted to slam down the phone and break her mother’s unthinking eardrum. This was going to take hours to get over and she really did have a big audition tomorrow and she had not prepared for it yet because she’d had three catering shifts back to back, none of which she had the luxury of passing on at this financially precarious moment in time. “Look, I have to go,” she finally said. “I really do, I have to go.”

“Okay! Well, maybe we’ll talk next week,” Rose replied, careening instantaneously into an attitude of maternal good cheer. It was one of her most inexplicable tricks but she used it often, when caught in a bind with one of her children: Just pretend that nothing upsetting was happening at all. Be positive. That was all anyone could do. “You should see Megan!” she announced, falling into the second default position: Change the subject and talk about one of the other kids. “She’s really showing now. Those babies are on their way!”

“Yes. Yes, they are.” Alison sighed. “Bye, Mom. Bye. Tell Dad I said hi.” Panicked now, she felt terrible for having been mean to Mom. It wasn’t her fault, she knew. This is all your fault, and you know it. “Tell Megan I can’t wait to meet the twins!” She wanted her mother to know she cared, she really did. “Another baby, that is going to be so fun. See you later, Mom. Bye. Bye.” She hung up.

She glanced back to the hallway, hoping that neither of her largely invisible roommates were in the apartment and listening to her pathetic phone call. There was unfortunately no actual door in the doorway to her room—some previous tenant had made off with it two years ago, for unknown reasons—so the empty door frame stood open to the hall and the small kitchen and living room as well. Which meant, among other things, that you had to keep your voice down if you didn’t want anyone overhearing your calls. Unfortunately, Mom was already losing her hearing and when you tried to talk softly she would just say, “I can’t hear you!” or “These cell phones are terrible! Can you not afford a real phone?” and then Alison would have to repeat everything extra loudly anyway. Sometimes it bothered her, and sometimes it didn’t. Tonight, even though the apartment was practically ringing with its own emptiness, it bothered her a lot.

It was all context. The previous weekend, Lisa’s parents had come into town from Philadelphia; they had an extra ticket to a Broadway play and Lisa had invited Alison along. It was a startling gesture of generosity—Alison was well aware that those tickets were worth more than a hundred dollars apiece, which was why she could never afford to go see a Broadway play on her own nickel. But Lisa’s date had fallen through at the last minute and they couldn’t return the ticket and, Alison realized, she had somehow become Lisa’s pet project, her neophyte friend who needed help adjusting to the trials of a famously difficult city. The invitations from Lisa always came with little lessons about what this event or that gesture meant, in the social fabric of New York. A free ticket to a Broadway play, which would have seemed excessively generous, even unacceptably so, in Ohio, was nothing here. Everybody of a certain class tossed Broadway theater tickets about willy-nilly. To offer to pay for it would be not so much an insult as a faux pas.

So Alison had, after some coaching from Lisa, accepted the extra ticket with good grace and found herself treated to dinner as well, at a rustic and expensive restaurant on a seemingly shitty block of Forty-sixth Street. The decor was unprepossessing but the food was spectacular, and Lisa’s father, a tall man with a full head of steel-gray hair, ordered a bottle of Barolo which cost more than eighty bucks. Her mother, who insisted that Alison call her Sally instead of Mrs. Hastings (making Alison feel briefly like the rube she was), wore a sea-green raw silk suit which managed to look both casual and chic. There were no matching shoes or excessive strings of pearls, and her easy grace made her seem almost a regal presence in that crowded eatery. The waitstaff allowed her to change her order four times, one waiter even laughing as he trotted back to the kitchen to stop the chef from tossing her salmon on the grill because she had changed her mind yet again, finally settling on the halibut. Her husband, Alan, was clearly annoyed but he did nothing more than gently chide her by sighing her name, “Sally!” on the fourth go-round.

In between discussions about the wine and the penne arrabiata and the salmon and the halibut, Alan and Sally chatted energetically about art and politics and the foibles of the money market and the disasters emanating from Washington in the name of public policy. They inquired about Lisa’s boyfriend, who was in a permanent state of evaporation by that point, which Lisa didn’t bother to lie about. Both Alan and Sally expressed complete support for her. They asked about the rounds of auditions Lisa had made in the past few weeks, which were significantly more numerous than Alison’s. They expressed more interest in the theater auditions than the television ones, because those were more serious, although even if Lisa landed one of those parts it wouldn’t pay her a penny, really. Sally was reading a new novel which had gotten a terrific review in the New York Times. She frankly found the book disappointing but wanted Lisa to look at it, to find out if she just wasn’t getting something. They talked about the play they were going to see, and how they preferred straight plays to musicals, because the musicals were all so banal and geared too blatantly to the tourist trade.

Next to these people, her own parents were, Alison knew, unsophisticated and boorish. She had never thought of them that way—they were from Cincinnati, for crying out loud, not some hick town in Nebraska—but their suburban manners and Catholic values marked them as surely as one of those Cockney accents leaping like a curse out of the pages of a Dickens novel. She felt mean and disloyal even acknowledging it to herself in her secret heart, but in the circles to which she aspired in New York, her parents were an embarrassment.