At Barnard, having written her honors thesis on “Class, 1945–Present” had seemed daring, because Americans flattered themselves as beyond class. But that was before the fabled economic downturn that fatally coincided with her college graduation. After which, Americans talked about nothing but class.
Florence embraced a brusque, practical persona, and self-pity didn’t become her. Thanks to her grandfather’s college fund, her debts from a pointless education were less onerous than many of her friends’. She may have envied her sister’s looks, but not Avery’s vocation; privately, she considered that fringy therapeutic practice, “PhysHead,” parasitical humbug. Florence’s purchase of a house in East Flatbush had been savvy, for the once-scruffy neighborhood had gone upscale. Indians were rioting in Mumbai because they couldn’t afford vegetables; at least she could still spring for onions. Technically Florence may have been a “single mother,” but single mothers in this country outnumbered married ones, and the very expression had fallen out of use.
Yet her parents never seemed to get it. Although they fell all over themselves proclaiming how “proud” they were, the implication that into her forties their eldest required you-go-girl cheerleading was an insult. Now their fawning over this shelter position was unendurable. She hadn’t taken the job because it was laudable; she’d taken it because it was a job. The shelter provided a vital public service, but in a perfect world that service would have been provided by someone else.
True, her parents had suffered their own travails. Her father Carter had long felt like an underachiever in print journalism, being stuck for ages at Long Island’s Newsday, and never snagging the influential, better remunerated positions for which he felt he’d paid his dues. (Besides, Dad always seemed to have an edge on him in relation to his sister Nollie, who hadn’t, in his view, paid any dues, and whose books, he’d insinuated more than once, were overrated.) Yet toward the end of his career he did get a job at his beloved New York Times (God rest its soul). The post was only in the Automobiles section, and later in Real Estate, but having made it into the paper he most revered was a lifelong tribute. Her mother Jayne lurched from one apocalyptic project to the next, but she ran that much-adored bookstore Shelf Life before it went bust; she ran that artisanal deli on Smith Street before it was looted during the Stone Age and she was too traumatized to set foot in it again. And they owned their house, didn’t they—free and clear! They’d always owned a car. They’d had the usual trouble juggling family and career, but they did have careers, not plain old jobs. When Jayne got pregnant late in the day with Jarred, they worried about the age gap between a new baby and their two girls, but neither of them anguished, as Florence had when pregnant with Willing, over whether they could afford to keep the kid at all.
So how could they grasp the plight of their elder daughter? For six long years after graduation Florence had to live with her parents in Carroll Gardens, and that big blot of nothingness still blighted her résumé. At least her little brother Jarred was in high school and could keep her company, but it was humiliating, having toiled on that dopey BA only to trial novel recipes for peanut-butter brownies with mint-flavored chocolate chips. During the so-called “recovery” she moved out at last, sharing cramped, grungy digs with contemporaries who also had Ivy League degrees, in history, or political science, and who also brewed coffee, bussed tables, and sold those old smart phones that shattered and you had to charge all the time at Apple stores. Not one lame-ass position she’d copped since bore the faintest relation to her formal qualifications.
True, the US bounced back from the Stone Age more quickly than predicted. New York restaurants were jammed again, and the stock market was booming. But she hadn’t followed whether the Dow had reached 30,000 or 40,000, because none of this frenzied uptick brought Willing, Esteban, and Florence along with. So maybe she wasn’t middle class. Maybe the label was merely the residue of hailing from a learned, literary family, what you clung to in order to separate yourself from people who weren’t much worse off than you. There weren’t many dishes you could prepare from only onions.
“Mom!” Willing cried from the living room. “What’s a reserve currency?”
Wiping her hands on the dishtowel—the cold gray water hadn’t cut the grease from the pork patties—Florence found her son freshly washed with his dark, wet hair tousled. Though having grown a couple of inches this year, the boy was slight and still a bit short considering he’d be fourteen in three months. He’d been so rambunctious when he was small. Yet ever since that fateful March five years ago, he’d been, not fearful exactly—he wasn’t babyish—but watchful. He was too serious for his age, and too quiet. She sometimes felt uncomfortably observed, as if living under the unblinking eye of a security camera. Florence wasn’t sure what she’d want to hide from her own son. Yet what best protected privacy wasn’t concealment but apathy—the fact that other people simply weren’t interested.
Also somber for a cocker spaniel—though the forehead’s perpetual rumple of apprehension may have indicated a drop of bloodhound—Milo was flopped beside his master, chin glumly on the floor. His chocolate coat was glossy enough, but the brown eyes looked worried. What a team.
Typically for this time of evening, Willing wasn’t propped before video-game aliens and warlords, but the TV news. Funny, for years they’d predicted the demise of the television. Channels were streamed, but the format had survived—providing the open fire, the communal hearth, that a personal device could never quite replace. With newspapers almost universally defunct, print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose. Television news was about the only source of information she faintly trusted. The dollar now having dropped below 40 percent of the world’s… a newscaster was yammering.
“I’ve no idea what a reserve currency is,” she admitted. “I don’t follow all that economics drear. When I graduated from college, it was all people talked about: derivatives, interest rates, something called LIBOR. I got sick of it, and I wasn’t interested to begin with.”
“Isn’t it important?”
“My being interested isn’t important. I swear, I read newspapers front to back for years. My knowing any of that stuff, most of which I’ve forgotten, hasn’t made the slightest difference. I wish I had the time back, frankly. I thought I’d miss newspapers, and I don’t.”
“Don’t tell Carter that,” Willing said. “You’d hurt his feelings.”
Florence still winced at that “Carter.” Her parents had urged all their grandchildren to address them by first names. “Only” fifty and fifty-two when Avery had her first child, they’d resisted “Grandma and Granddad” as connoting a geriatric status with which they couldn’t identify. They obviously imagined that being “Jayne and Carter” to the next generation would induce a cozy, egalitarian palliness, as if they weren’t elders but buddies. Supposedly, too, the rejection of convention made them bold and cutting-edge. But to Florence, it was awkward: her son referenced her parents with more familiarity than she did. Their refusal to accept the nomenclatural signature of what they actually were—Willing’s grandparents, like it or not—suggested self-deceit, and so was purely a gesture of weakness, one that embarrassed her for them if they didn’t have the wit to be embarrassed on their own accounts. The forced chumminess encouraged not intimacy but disrespect. Rather than remotely nonconformist, the “Jayne and Carter” routine was tiresomely typical for baby boomers. Nevertheless, she shouldn’t take her exasperation out on Willing, who was only doing what he was told.