“Soon.” He turned to face her. “Do you want to come with us?”
She took a sip. Too sweet. “You guys should do your guy thing. Drink beer. Eat hamburgers. Talk about football.”
“I think it’s baseball season.” He turned to face her, hunching over the counter.
“I’m impressed that you know that.”
“Well, I’m not sure, actually.” He smiled.
“Okay,” she said, sighing. Against her will, she felt wounded by this small abandonment. Stupid, stupid, she thought. She saw him almost every night. But in a couple of weeks he’d be in L.A. and she had a suspicion he wouldn’t be coming back.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.
“No,” she said, perhaps too curtly. “I have brunch. Then I’ve got to work.”
From behind her, Lil and Tom Satville materialized, grabbing tall bottles of wine and sniffing them.
“A gewürztraminer,” Tom Satville cried.
“Sadie brought that,” Lil responded, clapping her hands and shooting Sadie a look of amazement, which Sadie chose to ignore. “Is it one of your dad’s?” Lil pressed.
“No.” Sadie caught Tal’s eye. “It’s from the wine shop on Court Street. The one that looks kind of ghetto. With the bulletproof glass.” She turned to Tom Satville. “Have you met Tal?”
“Sadie’s dad collects wine and sometimes he gives us his castoffs,” Lil confided. “Her parents are amazing.”
“Amazing,” said Tal, nodding.
Lil ignored him. “Tell Tom about your mother,” she instructed.
“What about my mother?” she asked, though she knew full well what Lil wanted—tales of the wacky Peregrine clan, straight from the annals of Salinger. Why don’t we talk about your family, she sometimes wanted to say, for she knew Lil had funny stories about her father’s practice—the aging porn star who wanted to up her cup size to J (Dr. Roth had refused, saying breasts of such magnitude would be disproportionate to her height—five two); the lingerie model who’d asked for fat to be sucked from her pubic area, because it “puffed out too much” (on this, he had obliged)—and her general rearing in Los Angeles, a city of vast mystery and fascination to New Yorkers. “My mother’s really not that interesting,” she said, with a yawn.
Lil rolled her eyes. “Sadie,” she complained, shaking her head. “Sadie’s mother is the most amazing woman. She’s actually from Greenpoint! She grew up there, in the fifties.”
“The forties, actually,” said Sadie, smiling at Tal, who shook his head. He didn’t share Lil’s adoration of her mother, which came as something of a relief to Sadie.
“The forties?” said Tom Satville skeptically. “She must have had you late in life.”
“She was forty-two,” confirmed Sadie. “It was scandalous at the time. Everyone used to think my dad was my grandfather.”
“You must have older siblings,” the man said, rather presumptuously, she thought. She was used to this question, and yet it always bothered her. The funny thing was, now it was perfectly normal for people to have kids in their forties. And yet everyone always acted like it was just bizarre that her parents were two generations removed. “Are you one of many?”
“I have a brother. A half brother.” She refrained from mentioning that this brother was dead. For this, in fact, was how her parents had met: Her father’s child from his first marriage, a boy named Ellison, arrived at the Dalton infirmary—where her mother, widowed by the Korean War, doled out aspirin and bismuth—complaining of a headache. Thirty hours later he was dead of meningitis. Or something like it. Sadie wasn’t exactly clear on this, the disease itself. She’d never asked and neither of her parents had ever volunteered the grim particulars, not even Ellison’s age at his death. Her father’s first marriage hadn’t survived the tragedy. The story came to her from her aunt Dora, her father’s sister, after Sadie happened upon some photos in a drawer (a beautiful boy, with her own deep-set eyes), and was later confirmed by her cousin Bab, in London. Sadie herself hated mentioning this brother, for what did she have to say about him but that he was dead. She hadn’t known him, nor had her parents told her anything about him—and yet it seemed somehow dishonest to say she had no siblings.
“But the thing about Sadie’s mom,” Lil went on, though it seemed to Sadie that Tom Satville was not particularly interested in hearing about Sadie’s mother, of all people, “is that she’s brilliant. When she was young she looked like Joan Fontaine. Do you remember her? From Hitchcock? Vivian Leigh’s sister. And she’s still gorgeous now.”
“She is,” confirmed Tal. “She’s like something from a different era.”
“She is,” Sadie clarified, “from a different era.”
“She doesn’t watch TV.”
“She watches a little,” said Sadie. “She loved St. Elsewhere.”
“And she was really into the first season of Survivor,” said Tal.
“She was?” cried Lil, a look of horror on her face.
“No,” Sadie assured her. “No.”
“Oh,” said Lil, turning to Tom. “Sadie had, like, a storybook childhood.” This was, of course, how Rose liked to characterize Sadie’s early years.
“Which means,” said Sadie, who had now resigned herself to playing the role Lil had chosen for her, “I had no friends. All the other kids thought I was weird.”
“Can you believe it?” Lil asked.
“I can’t,” said Tom Satville, shoving his hands in the pockets of his corduroy pants and rocking back on his heels.
“Oh, it’s true,” said Tal. “She was a major dork. I’ve seen the pictures.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Sadie. “My mother would throw birthday parties for me and invite my whole class. And the kids would come and bring these big, expensive presents and then whisper ‘You smell’ as soon as my mother left the room.”
“Poor little rich girl,” said Tal, stroking her palm.
“You don’t know my pain,” said Sadie.
“Why did they hate you so much?” asked Tom Satville.
“I was weird,” said Sadie dispassionately. “I was fat. My mother dressed me like it was the fifties.” Her mother had also prohibited her from watching any television, except Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theatre and, moreover, striven to give Sadie a “women’s education” in the style of the class Rose had made her own—albeit one, as Tal had said, of a far-bygone era. Sadie took lessons in piano, painting, dance, gymnastics, tennis, skiing, singing, and golf. She rode in Central Park and skated at Wollman Rink. She learned to sew and knit and bake. She took Saturday classes at the Met, where she picked up the difference between a Manet and a Monet, and Sunday classes at the Museum of Natural History, where she studied dinosaur bones and the earliest forms of humanoid life. She learned to throw pots from a married pair of potters, with a kiln in the basement of their Ninetieth Street brownstone. With the city parks commissioner—a tan, wiry fellow, who lived around the corner and played squash with James Peregrine—she studied different sorts of trees and shrubs and plants and birds. At eight, she dissected a cow’s eyeball in an after-school biology tutorial, and drafted illustrated storybooks in the manner of Edward Gorey, with titles like “The Girl and the Monster” and “Penguin Have Sharp Teeth.” She refused to drink soda or eat sugared cereals or packaged cakes and went through a period of vegetarianism in her tenth year. She was an excellent student, but never the top student, which her mother took as a sign of success (“Sadie has interests outside of school”) and her teachers took as a sign of boredom, since she was always finishing her work ahead of the other students and withdrawing a thick book from the woody interior of her desk, or sketching complicated William Morris–like patterns on filmy sheets of onionskin with a set of calligraphic pens and colored inks. All of this, of course, was why she’d had no friends. She hated now to think of her childhood—at least the part lived at school, outside the safety and comfort of home.