She awoke to the show where the girl spy always seemed to be wearing wigs and boots and kicking someone in the face. When she got downstairs, the DJ was exhorting people to do the electric slide, but the party was clearly winding down.
He’s going to break up with me, she thought. No one had ever broken up with Michelle before. She could beat him to the punch, have her pride, but she didn’t want to stop seeing him.
Adam’s friend-what was his name?-pulled out her chair and didn’t comment on the fact that she had been gone for more than an hour. He continued to chatter to her, and she tried to make appropriate responses, but it was like speaking to someone on a very bad cell connection. His voice seemed to come from so far away that she had to keep asking him to repeat himself. She looked around the room, desperate to find someone better with whom to flirt. Adam? Inappropriate, even for her. Alec? Funny, but he really disliked her to this day. Everyone else, except her mother, was part of a set-including her two sisters, who were keeping tabs on her, as always. Get a life, she wanted to say to them. What will you do when you don’t have me to gossip about, disapprove of? Linda looked angry, while Rachel just had her usual sympathetic simper on, which was far worse.
“Is the bar still open?” she asked-Barry. That was his name. “Would you get me a vodka martini?”
“She’s almost thirty-one,” Linda fumed to Rachel. “When is she going to get her act together?”
“She’s nervous about her job,” Rachel said. “The rumors are they won’t make it through the year.”
As a website designer, Rachel was plugged into Baltimore’s tiny tech community. Everyone knew that Michelle’s company, Sinergie, was going to go down; the only question was when and how. Michelle said she was sticking it out to the end in hopes of a severance package, but how could a company pay severance when it was already stiffing vendors and landlords? Linda thought Michelle was lazy, but Rachel knew their baby sister was scared. It wasn’t lost on her that Michelle had wandered into a job that combined her sisters’ two fields-communications for Linda, tech for Rachel. And neither one suited her. Michelle needed to find her own thing.
“A therapist I know”-Rachel was careful not to say my therapist; only Joshua knew she was seeing someone-“says there’s a theory that traumas leave us arrested at the age of the trauma.”
“Michelle doesn’t even remember Daddy. And that would make you forever fourteen, me sixteen. With all due respect, your therapist friend is kind of a quack.”
Twenty-four for me, Rachel thought. That was my traumatic year, although I didn’t realize it until recently. And, no, Linda wasn’t frozen at sixteen, that was true. Linda had been earnest and idealistic as a teenager, qualities she had carried into adulthood. But a professional lifetime of choosing her words with care had left her blunt and hard in her most intimate relationships. Henry handled it well, but it grated a little on Rachel, even though she almost never came in for Linda’s criticism.
Then again, Rachel was expert at keeping things from Linda. From everyone, when need be. An open, sunny nature is a great cover for secrets, as Rachel discovered long ago. Even now, with the therapist, she couldn’t open up completely. She had gone, at Joshua’s pleading, to discuss her depression over not being able to conceive, but she wouldn’t give the therapist all the pieces needed to understand the bigger picture. She also refused any medication. So what was the point? Rachel knew why she was sad, and she also knew she wasn’t going to do anything about it. Maybe her therapist was an idiot not to see through her.
Joshua came up and put his hand at the small of her back. Together nine years now. Eight years ago, even three years ago, he would have pointed to one of the children present and said: “Ours will be cuter.” He knew better than to do that now. She was almost forty-two. No one got everything in this life. Her mother had children, but no husband. Linda had a family, but supporting them meant spending much less time with them than she wanted. Michelle didn’t have a family or a real career, although she clearly had a boyfriend who was buying her very nice things. Rachel had Joshua-lovely, marvelous, really-and her business, small but successful. Rachel had always thought small. Why was she like that?
These would probably be very good questions to explore with her therapist. If she were inclined to tell her therapist such things.
Bambi was exhausted, but Lorraine and Bert expected her to stay until the end. Well, Lorraine did. That was the price of having friends like family. They treated you like family. Worse, there was the fact of all the money “lent” over the years, although that was more of a Bert thing and he never guilted her. Bambi had a hunch that Lorraine really didn’t know the extent, the various subterfuges Bert had used to prop her up. She always insisted she would pay him back one day and he was always gallant enough to pretend he believed her.
She calculated the cost of the event, a habit she would never quite break. Bambi knew the price of everything. But also its worth, she was no fool. Adam’s fiancée came from a family of modest means, working-class types from Southwest Chicago, so Bert had insisted on paying for the wedding. “It’s not like we’re going to have to pay for Sydney’s,” Lorraine had said, happy to have the control that came with signing the checks. Such a joke showed real progress for Lorraine, who had gone from being Very Brave about Sydney’s lifestyle-“As close as Lorraine will ever come to saying ‘lesbian,’ ” Linda had observed-to being almost capable of accepting Sydney’s girlfriend as a de facto spouse. And although Lorraine had always favored her boys, she was, with Adam’s marriage, coming up against the hard truth that daughters are forever, whereas sons are absorbed into their wives’ families more often than not. Adam was staying in Chicago and wherever Adam was, Alec would probably end up.
Plus, it was Sydney who had delivered the first Gelman grandchild, an adoptee from Guatemala. The little boy was gorgeous, although Bambi had to wonder how that worked, a Latino boy named Reuben being raised by two women in Brooklyn. Could that end well?
Probably about as well as a married-in-name-only woman raising three girls in the Baltimore suburbs without any real income.
She pulled a wrap around her shoulders. The ballroom had felt overheated when it was full, but as the last guests lingered, it took on a sad chill. Fifty, sixty thousand she guessed. Maybe as much as a hundred thousand, but Bert was good at negotiating. And for what? A meal, wine, music, flowers. Within forty-eight hours, the only physical remnants of this night would be the boxes of cake slices that no one ever remembered to put in the freezer. The bride’s dress would go into a sealed dry cleaner’s bag, and the bridesmaids’ dresses would go into closets, never to be worn again. At least they were black. The bride, Alina, had been gently dissuaded from her original color scheme, a red-and-white Valentine’s Day tribute. She was a sweet girl, though. Lorraine would take her in hand, best she could over a distance of seven hundred miles, and train her, much as Bambi had trained Lorraine back in the day. Who, for all her money and social status, had been very unsure of herself when they first met, in need of a mentor when it came to clothes and style. The student had surpassed the teacher long ago, but Lorraine was gracious enough to still seek Bambi’s advice on most matters.
Bert sank into the chair next to her. “One down, one to go. If only Alina could have had a twin. I’m sure Alec would have married her, and that would have saved me a bundle.”