Lisa began eating dinner at Stacey’s house. She knew this was partly because of Bethany; Lisa never made it a secret that they had been at odds ever since she started dating Bill, and Lisa wanted out of the house. Meanwhile, Stacey’s parents loved having her. Partially they were relieved that she was spending so much time with a girlfriend instead of sneaking around with Ben, who’d graduated and who—as good of a guy as he was—just had the slick, honeyed look of a kid trying to fuck your chaste daughter.
Lisa could also set her charm wattage to “parent” better than anyone. She called Stacey’s dad “Moore’s Law”—not for any computational reason (her dad worked with mulch), but because Lisa told him, “We have to get Hollywood to green-light a sitcom about you, and it’s gotta be called Moore’s Law. It just has to, I’m sorry.”
Stacey’s father was the kind of buttoned-up Eisenhower-era holdover who loved nothing more than hard work and hustle, which for him were interchangeable terms. When he coached her sixth-grade YMCA basketball team, which consisted of her, Hailey Kowalczyk, and a bunch of girls who couldn’t dribble, his most enthusiastic and frequent compliment was, “That’s good hustle! Love that hustle.” So when Lisa bopped out her sitcom music for Moore’s Law, Stacey’s mom would find it hysterical, and her dad, who had no sense of humor or irreverence at all, would always make the same joke: “Far as I can tell, it’s just a show about Lisa Han eating my food.”
Her mom, on the other hand, was a total goofball. She could scat off puns at a worrisome, embarrassing clip. During the avian flu scare of 2004: “Stace, have you been to the hawkspital yet? Owl always worry about you, even though I know you’ll survive on a wing and a prey-er. No egrets, right? Boy, this dinner is parrotdise.” Her dad laughed at most of these, which might have explained their entire marriage.
Her mom thought Lisa was a total firecracker. Once, memorably, the two of them got into an argument about senior pranks. The class of ’03 held a milk-chugging contest in the cafeteria. Supposedly it was physically impossible to drink a gallon of milk in an hour, which, based on this experience, seemed accurate. All participants failed, vomiting dueling blue-white jets into nearby trash cans.
“It sounded like a plane landing on an aircraft carrier,” Lisa told Stacey’s mom, recounting the incident from the previous spring. It was one of the last times she found herself missing those friends: Bill, Rick, Kaylyn, and Ben. “Most unbelievable throw-up noise I’ve ever heard.”
“Lisa, I’m so disappointed in you.” Despite her mom’s middle age, she still had eyes that somehow looked years younger. Bright and pale blue, they glittered when she smiled. As a child, Stacey envied her elegance, but as her mom aged and put on weight, Stacey felt herself wanting to stall time, to preserve her mother’s joyous beauty in amber. “That’s not even clever. You know what we did my senior year at Massillon? We found the frame for the make and model of the principal’s car, and the boys assembled it on the roof of the high school. Not the whole car, mind you. Just the frame with the right paint color. Then my boyfriend at the time, he broke into the principal’s car with a coat hanger, popped the brake, and we towed it to someone’s house to hide it. The whole town thought we’d disassembled and reassembled the principal’s car on the roof, and no one had any clue how we pulled it off. Then the next day we put his car back. How’s that? Now that’s a prank.”
“Sounds like real braking news,” said Lisa. “It must have been the torque of the town, huh?”
Stacey’s mom threw her head back and positively howled.
The game was called Clawmaggedon. Quarter already deposited, waiting for her to smack the START button, Stacey instead held her phone and stared at the blank e-mail she’d opened. She tried typing: Listen, I’m about to see your mom in New Canaan. I was wondering about you…
And she quickly deleted it, the letters vanishing one at a time and then in wordly chunks.
She tried: How have you been? So I’m in New Canaan because Bethany managed to track me down…
And deleted it just as fast.
She tried: You fucking cunt, hope you’ve had a splendid nine years…
And deleted that as well.
She set her phone aside and slapped the START button. She crept the joystick to the corner as the timer began. There was one prize no one could ever get, these big stuffed lobsters that dwarfed the other toys. They were too big to grasp. The claw’s pitiful tripod digits would close around the blue fur (like the lobsters were choking) and barely budge the behemoths. The only person she’d ever seen lift one out of the scrum was Rick Brinklan, who’d been preternaturally skilled at the game. He used to get a prize from the pit to the chute nearly every time for Kaylyn.
Rick had been the subject of one of her early fights with her brother, Patrick—although Patrick never really fought. He presented very cogent arguments in as agreeable and pleasant a manner as he could summon. He was polite and kind in his argumentation. She’d decided not to come home for Rick’s funeral or parade. She’d stayed in Springfield for the summer, already researching teaching-abroad opportunities for when she graduated in a year, and the truth was she didn’t feel like she still knew this person or owed him anything. More importantly, at that point in her life, she wanted to avoid the people she might see there. It was hard to describe to her brother when she finally did come home for Thanksgiving break.
“We weren’t that close.”
“You knew him from the time you were in sixth grade,” he scolded in his reasoned, nonjudgmental way.
“It’s just death, Pat. We’ll all be there soon enough.”
They were in his kitchen, and she remembered he was making her and the girls each a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Her nieces ran amok in the living room, spazzing out over some kind of pink plastic toy with blaring, tinny speakers. As soon as these words left her mouth, she felt terrible about them. When she’d first started dating Ben, Rick had welcomed her to the group in his own Rickly way: by making it a running joke that she was too pretty, too smart, too good to date a “bubblegum airhead like Harrington.” He got a lot of mileage out of that, and it wasn’t so much that it made Stacey laugh as it made her feel comfortable around all of these older kids.
“What I want to know,” said Patrick, “is what you did with my kid sister.” He spun the top off the Sam’s Club tub of peanut butter.
The arrogance of a wannabe academic humming sub-audibly beneath her every sentence (not to mention a burgeoning wish to hit back at her oldest brother), she did what most undergrads do, which was to pass off the very last thing she’d read as her own idea.
“It’s like there’s this simultaneity of the years 2003 and 1258. In 2003 we invaded Iraq, which kicked off the destruction of Iraq’s museums and archives and all the looting of priceless pieces of art and artifacts in the aftermath. Which isn’t that different from 1258 when Genghis Kahn’s grandson rolled with his Mongols into town, sacked the city, and destroyed the archives of that same civilization. For Iraqis, 1258 and 2003 might as well be one generation removed.”