Where was Michelle? She hadn’t slipped out before the prayer, had she? That would be in very bad taste on her part. Not that anyone would remember, tomorrow.
Michelle wandered the upstairs, looking for a computer. She wanted to check her e-mail. Since September 11 she had been even more obsessive about going online. She checked her e-mail as often as possible, used random chat rooms. Everyone was checking in on each other. A few girls from Park, even Adam Gelman, who still had a crush on her. Sometimes she thought she should take him in hand and break him, like a horse. A third-year law student, he was still something of a thuggish frat boy. It would be a good deed for all womankind to tame him and put him back in the population, gentled. But he didn’t have any money to spend on her, much less time. So-no thank you.
Adam and Alec’s room was as it had been when they left for college, only clean. Their mother had tried to impose her will on the room to a certain extent-the sports and music posters were beautifully framed, not tacked up with tape or thumbtacks. The built-in desks, the bright red chairs, even the basketball hoop mounted to the wall-these were not IKEA finds, Michelle knew. She remembered an earlier version of this room, with two sets of bunk beds. Because, of course, Adam and Alec must have both options, up and down. They had never wanted to have separate rooms. They had gone to college, shared a dorm room, and now they were at DePaul together. Weird. The only profound difference between them, as far as Michelle could see, was that Adam had a crush on her and Alec couldn’t stand her.
No computers here, although there was a television set. She thought about turning it on, settling in, but it wasn’t TV she longed for. She wanted to talk-only not to the people downstairs. She wanted to talk on the computer, where people were wittier and understood her jokes and it was okay to be a little ADD. To talk past people, as opposed to talk to.
And to try, again and again, to chase her father down the rabbit holes of various search engines. She was still fond of Alta Vista, although curious about Google, which suddenly seemed everywhere. Imagine, she had been at College Park at the same time as Sergey Brin. Now there was a lost opportunity.
She checked Bert and Lorraine’s room. Lorraine didn’t even have a television set in here, much less a computer. Michelle lifted the sheets, looked for labels. Frette. Not silk, she decided, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. Cotton that felt like silk. She filed the name away as she often did with the brands she discovered at the Gelman house, adding it to a voluminous wish list.
She had been living in Rachel’s old apartment for five years now, but she yearned to move. Everyone said of her new job, “Oh, you can walk to work!” Sure, if she wanted to wear flats or put on sneakers and then change into her heels. Both options struck her as untenable. What she wanted to do was buy a condo across the street from her office, in this gorgeous building called Canton Cove, with harbor views and all sorts of amenities. But even with the new job, she wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage. And almost anyone could get a mortgage these days. You could buy a place with no money down and, by the time you signed your loan documents, you’d already have made ten, twenty thousand dollars on paper. But Michelle had credit card debt. It was Rachel’s fault, letting her have the apartment, with its relatively low rent. That had lulled Michelle into thinking she had more money than she did. She had spent what she wasn’t paying toward her rent, and then some, and now she was in debt.
She left Bert and Lorraine’s room and went down the hall to Sydney’s room. For a moment, she thought she had gotten confused. Surely, this was the old guest room? But Sydney’s room was now a home gym, a proper one-elliptical machine, treadmill, a television mounted to the wall above them. A rack of weights, serious ones. Those must be for Bert. And-wow, a sauna. Michelle opened the door and leaned in, drinking in that lovely dry-wood smell. When had Lorraine done this? After Sydney moved to New York to take a job?
Or after she had announced right before graduation that she was moving to New York to live with a thirty-five-year-old woman she had been dating secretly for two years?
Lorraine and Bert had taken it very well, everyone kept saying. Michelle and her sisters found that hilarious. As if Sydney had shamed them. Sydney was only the most disgustingly perfect person in the world, so perfect that even Rachel didn’t seem quite as shiny alongside her. (Truth be told, it pleased Michelle that Rachel was second to someone, brain-wise and perfection-wise.) Sydney was so wonderful that she had called Bambi and Ida to express her sympathy for the loss of Aunt Harriet, then explained that she would miss the funeral because she was volunteering at a soup kitchen that was providing meals for rescue workers.
No, Sydney was not the kid that Lorraine and Bert should be putting on a brave front about. But then Lorraine and Bert somehow didn’t know how awful the twins had been as teenagers. Mellowed now, presumably, but there had been the incident with the drunk girl, the video they had made of her. They hadn’t touched her. They had just filmed this poor girl stumbling, then throwing up, and then, with the logic of the inebriated, removing her clothes because they were covered with vomit. They filmed every moment, with a droll running commentary, then screened it for their friends in the Gelmans’ den. When the prank-Bert’s term-caught up with them, the boys insisted they were protecting themselves against what the girl might say later. “We were just documenting it,” Alec said. It was her house, her father’s liquor, and the twins were sober. But Michelle thought that was the truly creepy part, the twins’ self-control, their clear-eyed decision to sit back and record this girl’s humiliation.
She closed the sauna, turned, and found Bert at the door of the room. She felt guilty, thinking such mean thoughts about his sons while prowling through his house, cataloging Lorraine’s things, learning to want items she hadn’t known existed.
“Your mother’s looking for you.”
“I was hoping to lie down. I have the most ferocious headache.”
“The guest room is made up. Or you could use our bed.”
His kindness made her feel even guiltier. Too bad Bert’s sons weren’t more like him. They had his looks, but something was lacking. Bert made her feel safe.
“I’ll be okay. I’ll just throw some cold water on my face, maybe take some aspirin.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know, Michelle, for a moment-in this dim light, I thought you were your mother. You may end up being even more beautiful than she was in her prime.”
Michelle realized that Bert thought this high praise, but really. “Aren’t I in my prime right now?” she asked.
“Not quite.”
“When, then?” Said with a pretend pout. She looked up at him through her lashes, parted her lips. She suddenly wanted Bert to kiss her. And when Michelle wanted men to kiss her, they did.
But Bert said only: “I think your mother’s prime started in her midthirties or so. Maybe even forty. And she’s still in it. Find that aspirin, Michelle, then come downstairs, okay?”
He probably didn’t realize what she had offered him, old man that he was. Michelle went to the powder room, took a Tylenol she didn’t actually need and stared in the mirror, wondering how anyone could be in one’s prime at forty.
Rachel had noticed Michelle was missing, but not in the way Linda had, which was to say Rachel wasn’t furious.
“Michelle won’t stay at any party that’s not about her,” Linda sputtered. “She did the same thing at Rosh Hashanah dinner last week, went into my bedroom and watched television.”