“And she was Daria,” Jeffrey says. He’d spoken hardly at all during dinner and Ellie’s startled a minute by the sound of him.
She looks at them blankly. She doesn’t know who Daria is.
“Oh, god,” says Jeffrey. He holds tight to Annie’s ankle, face formed to pretend-terror. He hasn’t looked directly at Ellie since he poured her wine. “We’re really old.”
Annie shakes her head at him and swats his hand away. “It was this show,” she says. “On MTV.”
“You know MTV, right?” asks Jeffrey.
Ellie nods. She takes one small sip of wine and doesn’t swallow right away.
“She hated everyone,” he says.
Annie hits him again, pulls her legs off of his lap, and pulls them underneath her. “I wasn’t that bad.”
“She was one of those girls who wore a lot of black and scowled at people.” Jeffrey furrows his brow, first at Annie, then just shy of Ellie’s ear.
“You make me sound awful,” Annie says.
They both laugh, and Ellie envies this: the playful closeness, the story that’s been told so many times.
“Your mom was her only friend.”
Ellie stiffens at the mention of her mother. She reaches for her wine and takes too big a sip.
“Also true,” Annie says.
“Did you guys know each other then?” Ellie asks. She wants to keep the story just on them.
“Definitely no,” Annie says.
“She’s much older,” says Jeffrey.
“Screw you,” Annie says to Jeffrey, then turns to Ellie. “Two years.”
“But she’s also a genius,” he says. “So she was four years ahead of me in school.”
“Geniuses don’t run fried fish restaurants.”
Jeffrey shrugs.
“I would have hated him,” Annie says.
Jeffrey laughs, swatting Annie’s ankle. “Right back at you, kid,” he says.
Ellie pulls the blanket folded over the couch back and spreads it across herself. She stares out the window, rustling trees, takes two small sips of wine.
“Your mom saved me, though,” says Annie. “I was this sad and angry little ball of nerves.”
“Feral,” inserts Jeffrey.
Annie ignores him, eyes on Ellie. “She took me in,” she says.
“You know. She’s not so good with boundaries, your mom.” Annie smiles toward her feet. “She was so young then. At first you forgot how young she was because she was so smart. And she could talk, you know? Even then. She had no training and she was pretty clearly just making it up. But she talked and talked and at some point you realized what she was saying might be worth something. She wore flip-flops to class and she’d sneak out to run on the beach during her off periods. I had her in the afternoon and there were usually specks of sand on her feet by the time she taught our class.”
Ellie can almost imagine all of this, but still, it’s impossible for her to see it fully in her head. Her mom is so completely the person she’s been Ellie’s whole life.
“I was reckless. You know? I was sixteen. I had no idea what all of it was for. I went to school because I was supposed to. My parents’ line was always, we go to work, so you go to school. That’s an awful way to sell it. I skipped a ton of class. I drove around a lot and listened to the same awful music over and over. I’d drive six hours down to Key West, go swimming, and drive back.”
“She had a convertible then too,” says Jeffrey. “It’s always more fun to be the tortured depressed teenager when your parents are rich.”
Annie doesn’t look at him. He gets up and pours himself a glass of wine. He brings the bottle from the kitchen into the living room and is already refilling Ellie’s glass, not looking at Annie, before either of them can tell him no.
Annie eyes her husband. Then fixes her gaze on Ellie. “Your mom listened to me. All I really wanted was to talk, you know? To cry to someone without them telling me I was sick.” She reaches behind the couch and pulls a throw out of the basket filled with blankets. It’s still over eighty late at night, but Jeffrey keeps the air conditioner at sixty-two. Annie wraps the throw around herself and burrows back into the corner of the couch, not touching Jeffrey. She could be Ellie’s mom in that moment, folding in on herself.
Winter 2013
Maya rides the subway just after rush hour, standing, holding the pole, and brushing up against a man in a suit who types furiously on his phone. There are empty seats, but she can’t sit. She’s going to a dinner party by herself. She and Stephen rarely socialize together anymore. She explained briefly where she was going. He’s agreed to try to have a nice conciliatory dinner with their son.
Maya’d dressed carefully, showering, dabbing lipstick, swiping mascara, making herself stare back at herself longer than usual in the mirror over the sink in the bathroom in their room. She wears a dress, even though she hardly ever makes this effort in winter, the tights, the sweater, the slightly more than sensibly heeled boots. It’s the third thing she tried on. She wanted to feel a little less like the person that she always is. The dress hits just above the knee, in big patches of blue and purple. She bought it with Laura. With Laura is the only time she shops and the only time she buys clothes in colors other than black or gray. She has brushed her hair back and fastened it loosely at her neck with a small wooden clip. She feels, if not pretty, necessarily, then foreign enough to feel capable of interacting in the unstructured setting of this gathering.
There are few people who could get Maya to leave the house after dark these days, but she hasn’t seen Caitlin in almost two years. She is one of Maya’s former students, applied to the program four years ago, explicitly to work with Maya. And Maya had lobbied hard to get Caitlin in. She’d gone to a not-well-thought-of state school, and while her grades were impeccable, her other achievements were unremarkable. Her writing sample had been messy, unedited, not academic really at all. It had read like a sort of literary love letter to Woolf, whom she’d meant to focus on. She’d written on the moment in Mrs. Dalloway when Septimus sits with his wife to make a hat. About how he had an eye for colors, could see things most people couldn’t, but needed his wife to bring his ideas to fruition in the world, about the impossibility of communication, the need to turn the abstract into the tangible, how some people cannot achieve this without the help of someone else.
Maya’d been so moved by her writing. She’d finally managed to convince the committee that the potential evident in Caitlin’s work was worth the risk of taking on a less-credentialed student. And Caitlin had, immediately, delivered on the potential Maya had seen. Caitlin had always seemed older than most of the other grad students; she lacked that smugness so many people her age possessed, that certainty that though they’ve made so few major life decisions up until this point, when they did they would somehow prove better and less compromising and complex than all those that came before. And then, after two years of being exactly what Maya hoped she’d be, Caitlin abruptly left. She’d been effusively apologetic. She wanted to write: novels, fiction, her own art — she’d said all of it in a whisper, in Maya’s office, a sweater wrapped around her and her arms crossed as she spoke, afraid, maybe, to throw the full weight of such aspirations out into the world.
Caitlin had met Ellie once as well. Ellie loved it at first, Maya bringing students home for dinner. When she was small these students all doted on her. She was precocious then and perfect-looking, the big dark eyes, the long sharp nose. When Maya brought students home — twenty-somethings, quiet, awkward, with their broken-in leather bags and their furrowed brows — she promised them a home-cooked meal that Stephen then cooked. She was proud of this as well, being a woman for whom the man made the meals — she took pleasure in showing them off, her gorgeous happy family, the warm quiet world in Brooklyn that they’d built for themselves.