Audio: Allegra Goodman reads.
They were a family of long marriages. You might sleep in separate bedrooms and wash dishes in a fury. You might find a moldy peach in the refrigerator and leave it on the counter for three days as evidence in some private trial—but you would never leave. Dan and Melanie had been married for thirty years. Steve and Andrea were coming up on twenty-five. Andrea felt a certain vindication about this anniversary because she had married in, and her own parents had split when she was young.
Steve’s mother, Jeanne, used to ask Andrea, in a melancholy way, “How is your mother?” and then, after a long pause, “How is your father?” Clearly, divorce was hereditary, and Andrea a carrier. Real Rubinsteins had the marriage gene—except for Aunt Sylvia and Cousin Richard, who was Sylvia’s son, so there you go.
And yet, despite Andrea’s unfortunate heritage, she and Steve remained married. Were they happy? Yes, of course. They were at least as happy as everybody else. And why was happiness the criterion, anyway? They had endured health scares, teen-agers, money problems. They were struggling even now, because they had spent their professional lives in educational publishing. Steve hated what was left of his job, and Andrea had lost hers altogether. Nevertheless, Steve kept schlepping to the city, where he worked in a new open-plan office and was allowed no shelves, no files, just one drawer. Andrea now toiled in the finished basement as a private college counsellor. And together they kept paying their bills, their taxes, their older son’s tuition, and their interest-only mortgage. Jeanne would have approved if she had lived. This was a woman who praised a shirt: it wears like iron. Who lay on her deathbed refusing to accept that she was dying. As a couple, Steve and Andrea had staying power—a virtue Jeanne had prized more than youth, beauty, joy. And why not? Youth ended, beauty faded, and where was joy when you needed it?
Joy was not the word that came to mind when Andrea remembered her late mother-in-law. Toward the end of her life, Jeanne lost patience with everyone, but particularly with her grandsons Zach and Nate. Their high-school teams meant nothing to her. Their classes, friends, activities did not register. In her delirious last days, Jeanne kept asking Andrea why her sons did not read. Why they did not talk. “They do talk,” Andrea protested, and Jeanne said, “But why can’t they carry on a conversation?” The last time Jeanne saw the boys, she spoke obsessively of music, and kept asking Nate, “What do you play?” She could not comprehend his answer—soccer.
No, Jeanne had not been sympathetic, and yet Andrea appreciated her, now that she was gone. Was it pity? Was it distance? Was it knowing that Jeanne could no longer hurt her? Or was it that Andrea’s own work required such extraordinary tact? Counselling students and consoling parents, Andrea looked back in awe at Jeanne’s breathtaking honesty.
“I don’t think there’s enough of you in this essay,” Andrea told a girl named Lizzie, but she knew what Jeanne would have said. Oh, I disagree. The less said, the better.
“I think she’ll have good options,” Andrea reassured Lizzie’s mother on the phone, but she could hear Jeanne. With that transcript?
At night, when Andrea heard Steve’s heavy footsteps, she ascended the stairs. “Hello,” she said, by which she meant how was your day?
“Hi,” Steve answered, which meant don’t ask.
“Did you find the other clicker?” The garage-door opener was broken.
Steve stared at her as though he had never heard of a clicker, or a garage. “Are we having dinner? Or is everyone just fending for themselves?”
Andrea said, “You know what? I’m not even going to answer that.”
Steve opened the fridge and gazed inside. Finally, he took out the remains of Nate’s birthday cake and cut himself an enormous slice. You don’t need that.
It was strange, hearing your mother-in-law like a Greek chorus, in the kitchen. Weird, tragic, gothic, which didn’t match their sixties split-level, but there she was.
There had been a time when Jeanne regularly brought Andrea to tears. Then Steve would say, The truth is, my mom is a good person, but she has no filter. And Andrea would say, She hates me. And Steve would say, No! How could anybody hate you? These were their actual conversations. Now Andrea stood in the kitchen doorway, and Jeanne hovered at her shoulder. Bad habit, guilty pleasure, good without a filter.
Meanwhile, Steve ate the cake, with its thick slab of buttercream. “Where’s Nate?”
Andrea glanced down at the tiled entryway. His cleats were lying by the door, but his sneakers were missing, which meant he was with Mackenzie, his girlfriend. And what were they doing? Not college applications. Yes, while Andrea built spreadsheets and schedules with some of Nate’s classmates, he rejected such prosaic methods. He had joy to spare, and very little sense of time. His parents worried, disapproved, and envied him.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be here after practice?” Steve said.
“I don’t know. I’ve been working.”
“Well, so have I.” Steve carried his plate to the kitchen counter. (No one but Andrea ever opened the dishwasher.) “You should talk to him.”
“I tried!”
Steve could have answered this. He could have said, Why are you shouting? But he was beyond bickering. He sank down on the couch in the living room and closed his eyes, because if exhaustion were a competition he would win. Andrea got to set her own hours, while he sifted ashes nine to six at Hillier-Nelson, where scarcely anyone remained and Steve awaited termination. He was the working dead, his projects cancelled, his assistant fired. He had nothing left—not even survivor’s guilt. At one time, he had acquired books. “Composition Across the Curriculum.” “Writing for Everyone.” As a senior editor, he had shepherded each manuscript to publication. Now he thought only of his severance package. No, that wasn’t true. He mourned his house—once proud, once famous—merging, swelling, and then collapsing like a dying star, retrenching to the backlist, selling dead authors, then giving up entirely on print editions.
Eyes closing, he dreamed lightly of new titles. “Research Across the Universe.” “Writing Without Readers.” He saw paper and black print and poetry, his first love, the yellow wood he had forsaken.
The room chilled; the windy night rushed in. Steve started up. “Nate.”
“What?” His son was already bounding up the stairs. He was always bounding, jumping, hair flopping in his face.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday,” Nate said.
“No, tell me the date.”
“October.”
“It’s October the eleventh,” Steve informed his son.
“O.K.” Nate smiled, gracious and a little condescending, as if to say, I’m not gonna argue.
“So, when are you going to work with Mom on applications?” Nate didn’t answer, because, of course, he had no intention of working with his mom on anything. Other people paid good money for her services. Parents and students testified to Andrea’s insight, her compassionate approach. No way did Nate want any part of that. He didn’t know he needed an edge. He had good grades, great scores, and he was a pretty decent athlete, but he had won no prizes; nobody was scouting him. Obviously, he needed all the help that he could get. “Just use your common sense,” Steve said. Unfortunately, Nate did not have any. He was applying to Brown on November 1st, and he had not started his essays—or so he said. Secretly, Steve hoped his son was going it alone, crafting a brilliant piece of writing. Nate cultivated a careless look, but he was more thoughtful than he appeared. This was what Steve had always told his own mother.
Jeanne never disputed the point. She just said, “He should play an instrument.” As a violinist, Jeanne saw music as a sign of character as well as competence. Steve had labored at the piano all his childhood, practicing alone, then with his brother, who had it even worse, sawing his small, gloomy cello. Beethoven should have been their birthright, except that they had no talent or motivation. It was a great day when their father announced that they could stop, indeed that they should stop playing, for the good of everyone around them. Jeanne had never entirely forgiven him for that, just as her sons had never entirely forgiven her for forcing lessons on them all those years. Steve refused to repeat the experiment, and his sons grew up happy to a fault. Zach was now at Rutgers, mostly playing rugby. Nate, who really was quite bright, was gliding through the end of high school, last-minuting every assignment.
“You have to start,” Andrea told Nate the next morning. “You have to put some time in. You can’t just close your eyes and say, ‘I’m gonna get into Brown.’ ”
“You have an in-house college counsellor,” Steve added, but Nate was rushing, gathering his stuff for school. Notebook, laptop, graphing calculator.
When Andrea said, “You’re just leaving your bowl on the table?,” he clattered cereal bowl and spoon into the sink. “Don’t break it!” she snapped as he ran down the stairs and out the door.
Then Steve told Andrea, “You don’t have to yell.”
She said, “That wasn’t me. It was your mother.”
Andrea had to make a conscious effort to block Jeanne’s voice, because she could not speak that way. She was not so old, or so angry, or so bitter. Nevertheless, Jeanne tempted her.
A student named Jonah came to her that afternoon, and at one point he said, “I’m not going to get in anywhere.”
Andrea whipped off her reading glasses. “We will build a list of schools that are right for you!” Of course there was a school for everybody, even the worst student. There was absolutely a college out there. A lid for every pot, Jeanne whispered.
Too cynical. Too true. This is not who I am, Andrea told her mother-in-law. I never even liked you. Yes, I know, she heard Jeanne answer. Sometimes Andrea hummed to drown Jeanne out, but it was difficult. She felt haunted, although she did not believe in ghosts. Jeanne said, I don’t, either.
On November 1st, Andrea made a supreme effort. When she saw Steve digging into the leftover Halloween candy, she did not say a thing. When Nate skipped school to write his application, she did not say, Oh, now you’re trying to do it all on the last day? Her clients had already submitted. They had completed the process a week ago. Meanwhile, her son holed up in his room.
Andrea stood outside his door and begged to help—but he would not relent. Hours passed, and she could hear Nate typing. Half a day, and she worked down in her office. Leave him alone, she told herself. No more pleading or berating. All she did was slip her Essay Guidelines under Nate’s door. This was a two-page handout that included topics to avoid:
Actually, Andrea steered her students away from writing about challenges of any kind. Asian, Jewish, and just plain white, her kids had real troubles, but they were not homeless, stateless, or first-gen anything. They had not walked across Sudan to freedom, or escaped the killing fields, or lived as refugees. Some had parents or grandparents who had done these things. Nate’s own grandfather had been a Holocaust survivor who had rebuilt his life, working his way through college and then law school—but, to state the obvious, Zeyde was not the one applying. (Andrea’s sixth topic to avoid was “Impressive relatives.”) Demographically, a kid like Nate just couldn’t win. All he could do was write with wit, humility, and self-knowledge, and hope that someone would take a second look at him.
At dinnertime, Nate emerged to refuel in the kitchen. He toasted two bagels and smothered them with cream cheese, which melted through the holes.
“How are you doing?” Andrea asked, as he licked his fingers. “Do you want me to look?”
“No.”
The garage door was rumbling open, now that they had found the other clicker. Steve thumped up the stairs and said, “Hey, Nate. How’s it going?”
“O.K.”
“Taking a break?”
“Yeah.”
“We should at least proofread,” Andrea interjected.
“Sh-h-h,” Steve said.
What? Andrea demanded silently, because hadn’t she kept quiet almost the whole day? And wasn’t her kid sending in his application that very night with no help, no oversight? (“Every essay will benefit from a second pair of eyes.”) She told Nate, “Just let me look for typos,” but he was already running to his room with a one-pound bag of pretzels.
Steve reproached Andrea. “Can’t you see you’re triggering him?”
“I’m not triggering anyone!”
“You chased him right out of here.”
“I did not.”
“Now you’ll never see that application.”
“That’s not my fault!”
“Because you are always ordering him around.”
“I was making a suggestion.”
“You are incapable of suggesting anything. Every statement is an injunction.” Not for nothing had Steve edited “The Hillier Handbook for College Writing,” ninth edition.
“Stop!” That wasn’t Jeanne talking; that was Andrea, trapped there in the kitchen with her husband. She a college counsellor, he an editor, both banished by their son—and now what? They were supposed to take it calmly? Applaud his budding independence? Let go and watch him fail? Fuck that. Why was their kid the one who had to learn the hard way? And why was this somehow Andrea’s fault? “I wanted to help him. I tried to help him.”
“But you have no idea how to talk to him,” Steve said.
“I talk to people all day.”
“That makes you even worse.”
“You try coaching five kids an afternoon.”
“I wish,” Steve said. “I wish I had your job.”
“You do not,” Andrea shot back, and this was true. He wouldn’t last five minutes; he would lose his mind. At the same time, she had no idea what he was going through. Andrea had been laid off two years before, along with lots of other people. There had been esprit de corps, and goodbye coffees, common cause. She’d left when business was merely bad. She had not seen worse. She had never known the loneliness, the dread, the poison in the air. He was about to say all this when Nate flew down the stairs.
“Nate!” Steve called, but he was already standing at the door.
“Hey,” Nate said softly, and Steve thought, Oh, great.
“Hi, Mackenzie,” Andrea called down to Nate’s first love, a junior with her whole life ahead of her, no applications for an entire year.
“Hi, Andrea,” Mackenzie answered, as Nate rushed her to his room. Jeanne said, That’s what she calls you?
“Now Nate has his second pair of eyes,” Andrea told Steve.
“Wonderful.” Steve stalked to the living-room couch, and Andrea sat in the matching armchair. He opened a book. She wondered if Mackenzie could differentiate between “there” and “their.” “What time is it?” Steve asked.
“Just eight.”
Steve opened “The Hillier Anthology of Short Fiction,” because this is what he did now. He salvaged old books from the office. These were the stories he had studied back in college. High school. This was his youth. “Araby” and “A. & P.” “Lady with a Lapdog.” “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.” He said, “I really thought they’d fire me today.”
“Yeah, I know,” Andrea said. November 1st was a good crisp date for termination. Slowly, she said, “It’s been so long, I don’t think they’ll ever do it.”
“Oh, they will.” Steve’s fate had been decided when his editorial director left, and her deputy left, too, and then Hillier restructured to bring in a new V.P. named Erin. This Erin, who was thirty-one years old, had an even younger assistant, named Cody, who had a Ph.D. in composition from Wayne State, and answered the phone “ ’Lo?,” sounding remarkably like Nate. Who was upstairs in his room with his girlfriend and his essay on his laptop on his bed. “What was that song we used to sing to the kids?” Steve asked Andrea. “About the branch on the tree and the twig on the branch?”
“And the nest on the twig,” she remembered immediately. “And the egg in the nest, and the bird in the egg, and the feather on the bird, and the flea on the feather.”
“That’s what it’s like,” he said, because the older you got, the faster everything went. Childhood, school, college, marriage, kids—egg, bird, feather—each nesting inside the other. You tried to hold on. You tried to get your kid to listen. You wanted to change the outcome somehow, but that wasn’t happening.
Strange how much better Steve felt in the morning. Andrea was sipping coffee in the kitchen, and she looked better, too. One minute before midnight, Nate had sent his application in. Relief! Of course, he would have many more to write. Andrea’s students had a Plan B and a Plan C, their applications cued up like airplanes on a runway. Nate had nothing. He would have to spend all of winter break writing new supplemental essays after he was rejected from Brown, but they couldn’t think about that now.
You just couldn’t get this crazy every time. You could not let the darkness and the aggravation win. And what if, by some chance, Nate had done it right? Steve’s secret hope returned. What if his essays sparkled with originality? And what if Mackenzie had actually done some proofreading and he got into Brown without adults? What a triumph that would be—like navigating by the stars. Steve thought about this at work, where Erin was presenting in her eager way to what she called the team, and what Steve knew as the remnants of the company.
“We’re very excited about this project!” she announced. “We’re taking our content off ‘The Hillier Handbook,’ and what we’re doing is creating a series of interactive trainings.” As she played video clips, Steve imagined telling people, I never read my kid’s college applications. No! they would cry, disbelieving. How could you let him send them in without even proofreading? Steve would answer modestly, He didn’t need my help. He decided to go it alone, and I respected his decision.
“That’s what’s cool about this platform,” Erin was explaining, and Steve remembered that he had not respected his son’s decision at all. He still doubted whether Nate had done the right thing.
Nate hated personal essays. He was a whiz at math, and a political savant, but he didn’t read a lot off screen. He was the kind of student Erin hoped to reach, although Steve could not imagine Nate undergoing video trainings—not for writing.
One dark night in December, Steve told Andrea, “This interactive thing is the end.”
Andrea thought he was talking about the company. “Not necessarily.”
“No, I mean the end of me. I’m writing my resignation letter.”
Jeanne slipped out. “Oh, please.” Steve should have been writing cover letters. He should have been meeting with his headhunter. Instead, he produced a yellow legal pad with a handwritten screed:
Andrea said, “Oh, come on.” Because here she was, building her home business hour after compassionate hour, and all he wanted was to burn his ships. “You’re not sending that anywhere.”
“Why not?” He was proud of his manifesto, his jeremiad.
“You should be working on your next steps.”
“I am!”
“This is not one of them,” Andrea said, because what was he thinking?
Actually, he was thinking about how he’d given up on poetry so he could earn a living. Ha, he thought, the joke’s on me. He was thinking about technology and whether he could find another job without going to boot camp. Steve’s brother, Dan, knew a musicologist who had changed careers that way. You came to camp a Baroque specialist, coded non-stop, and emerged a programmer with marketable skills. “But I’d be terrible at it,” Steve told Dan on the phone.
“You never know until you try,” Dan answered. “I’m saying, Think out of the box.”
You’re an insurance agent, Steve thought. Meanwhile, Dan’s wife, Melanie, got on the phone. “Hey, happy anniversary!”
Steve exchanged looks with Andrea, who sat close enough to overhear. “Thanks,” he said, as Melanie asked, “How are you guys celebrating?”
It felt like a trick question. Not what are you doing for your anniversary but how are you guys doing?
When he got off the phone, Andrea said, “Only Melanie would remember that.”
“So, you forgot, too,” Steve ventured hopefully.
“Oh, I didn’t forget.”
“Well, you didn’t mention it.”
“You know what?” Andrea said. “I’m tired of reminding everyone of everything.” She had been e-mailing students, and now she closed her laptop, because all she did was say, Don’t forget to send me your next draft, and Time to register for the next SAT. She was the scheduler and list-maker and timekeeper. What else is new? said Jeanne.
“You always take offense,” Steve said. “You are personally offended at everything I do.”
“No,” Andrea said. “It’s what you don’t do. It’s what you constantly ignore.”
“I’m not ignoring anything.”
“Nate heard from Brown.”
Instantly, Steve’s tone changed. “Was he rejected?”
“I’m sure.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“That’s how I know.”
Steve glanced down at the entryway to check for shoes. He must have taken refuge at Mackenzie’s house. He didn’t like his own house at the best of times—and Steve couldn’t blame him. Unhappiness filled every room. Why should he come home? Why should he tell them anything? He would leave just like his brother; he would disappear into the ether, leaving them to bicker over dying houseplants.
Not yet. The garage door rumbled underneath, and there was Nate in his bike helmet. No Mackenzie, just their own kid, huge and strong, nose red, cheeks glowing.
Nobody spoke, not even Jeanne. In fact, Andrea could not hear Jeanne’s voice at all. She just walked up to Nate and wrapped her arms around his chest, which was the highest she could reach, and said, “I never went to Brown.”
“I didn’t, either,” Steve put in from the kitchen table. “And look at us. Look how well the two of us turned out.”
Nate pulled away, and Andrea studied his face. She saw stubbornness there, and frustration, a little sadness, but mostly surprise. It was the first time he’d been rejected from anything. “You’re gonna be great. Nate the Great!” she told him, and Steve remembered Nate at four in his homemade superhero cape. “This is just the beginning,” Andrea said, as Nate headed to his room. “And this weekend why don’t we sit down and plan your next applications?”
“No, thanks.”
Steve whispered to Andrea, “Did you have to mention that?”
Surely Jeanne would have had a comeback, but at that moment Andrea had no idea what she would say. It was a strange feeling, like shaking water from your ear. “Oh, well,” she told Steve, “I had to ask.”
The next morning, Steve got the call. Cody ushered him into Erin’s office, and she told him how much his work was appreciated, and how much the company had changed and how unfortunately Hillier was restructuring, which meant new roles for everyone.
Steve said, “And no roles for some.” This interruption startled Erin. She seemed to forget her lines, so Steve encouraged her: “Do go on.”
He would have preferred to quit. Much preferred to type and send his letter, but he did not. He simply walked out in the middle of the day. Briefcase in hand, he joined the throngs in midtown, the guys in ski hats, and the other guys in suits, and the tourists with their kids shopping for Christmas in the department stores. So this was freedom. Perfect emptiness. This was what he had been waiting for. What did it say about him that his first impulse was to buy something? He wanted to go out and spend all his nonexistent money—but of course he didn’t. He kept walking. He walked all the way down to the West Village, where you could purchase antique tricycles and letterpress stationery. Then he walked back to Penn Station.
What he really wanted was some chocolate. Andrea liked good chocolate, especially with hazelnuts or almonds—but he didn’t buy any, because she worried he was eating too much candy. He found a florist instead, and stood in front of the glass refrigerator case, a morgue for roses. You could get a dozen in a long box like a coffin.
“Special occasion?” the tiny saleslady asked.
“Anniversary. One day late.” He wasn’t sure why he confessed to that.
“Long-stem red,” she told him with authority, but they looked vampiric, almost black. The orange roses were much better, flaming colors, perfect for a firing—except the flowers weren’t for him.
He looked at potted orchids, azaleas, cacti—maybe a little hostile for the occasion—and then he saw it, an overpriced ficus standing in a ceramic pot, an entire tree with a slender gray trunk and abundant fluttering leaves. “I’ll take that.”
Now the saleslady frowned, as though she were concerned for him. She tied a red ribbon around the trunk and handed him a blank card. “Careful, careful,” she warned, as he left the shop and struggled with the door.
The whole thing was a struggle. The heavy pot and the leaves tickling his face. He almost fell stepping onto the escalator at the station. He wrenched his back, but he fought on, wrestling the tree onto the train. There he sat with the pot on the floor in front of him. Who bought a ficus in the city and took it to New Jersey? Apparently, he did. He should have asked Andrea what she wanted, but she would have said, “Nothing.” His back was seizing, and he regretted not buying the flaming roses—but a tree had roots. It was alive. Meanwhile, the florist’s card was the size of a postage stamp—much too small to say what he was thinking. That he was starting over. That he was glad and disillusioned all at once. That he was lucky to come home to Andrea and Nate—and Zach, who had just arrived for winter break. That this tree reminded him of the song, although it didn’t come with a bird or a feather or an egg. ♦
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