Her mother muttered, “Why I’m dolling myself up like this…”
“You’re putting on armor. You want to be strong.”
“I can put on my own mascara.”
“Let me do it. It was something I never got to do with you.”
At five o’clock, while Pip was lighting a fire, Jason called to report that he and Tom were stuck in traffic near Los Gatos. Her mother, sitting on the sofa, was looking altogether very good in her vintage dress, like the older Anabel she was, but she was doing her rocking thing, her mildly autistic thing. “You should have a glass of wine,” Pip said.
“I feel betrayed by my Endeavor. The time I most need it … where is it?”
“Endeavor to drink some wine.”
“It will go straight to my head.”
“Good.”
When the Zipcar finally came up the lane, its wipers laboring hard, its headlights making a white fury of the downpour, Pip left the side porch where she’d been waiting and ran, under an umbrella, to greet Jason. He looked a little harrowed by the drive, but his first thought was her first thought, which was to lock lips. Then Choco barked, and Pip opened the car’s rear door and let him lick her face.
Tom emerged from the car tentatively, umbrella first. Pip thanked him for coming and kissed his meaty cheek. Somehow in the fifteen feet between car and front door Choco managed to get not only soaked but covered with wet redwood needles. He squeezed past Pip and ran inside. Her mother raised her arms, as if to ward him off, and gazed with dismay at the needles and muddy paw prints on the floor.
“Sorry, sorry,” Pip said.
She corralled Choco and led him back onto the side porch, where Tom was scuffing his feet. “That is the most hilarious dog I’ve seen in my entire life,” he said.
“You like him?”
“Love him. Want him.”
They went inside, followed by Jason. Her mother, by the woodstove, wringing her hands, shyly raised her eyes to look at Tom. It was clear to Pip that both of them were struggling not to smile. But they couldn’t help smiling anyway; both of them, broadly.
“‘Hello, Anabel.’”
“‘Hello, Tom.’”
“So, Mom,” Pip said, “this is Jason. Jason, my mom.”
As if in a trance, her mother turned away from Tom and nodded to Jason. “Hello.”
Jason gave her a kind of vaudevillian two-handed wave and said, “Hey.”
“So, like I said,” Pip said, “just a quick H and G here. We’ll come back after dinner.”
“You’re sure you won’t stay?” Tom said anxiously.
“No, you guys need to talk. If there’s anything left to drink later, we’ll help you drink it.”
Before any entanglement could develop, Pip hurried Jason outside. Choco was so long and the side porch so narrow that he couldn’t turn around to make way for them but had to skitter backward. “Can we leave him here?” she asked Jason.
“I brought his porta-bowl and lemons.”
Pip had intended to give her parents two hours alone, but in the event it was closer to four. First she and Jason had to go to the state park and make love in the back seat. Then, when they’d managed to get their pants back on, they had to take them off and do it again. After that they had dinner at Don Quixote’s, where a local cover band, Shady Characters, was playing. Just when it was time to be leaving, the band launched into a must-dance song, the soul-sister song.
“Hate the lyrics,” Jason said, dancing. “Hate the cooptation for a car commercial. And yet—”
“Great song,” Pip said, dancing.
They danced for half an hour while the rain came down and the San Lorenzo rose. Jason was a silly dancer, a thinking dancer, and Pip loved that he could do what he did and she could do what she did, which was not think, just move, just be happy in her body. When they finally went outside, the rain had paused and the roads were end-of-the-world empty. Driving up her mother’s lane, they saw Choco standing on the cabin’s side porch, a lemon in his mouth, his tail swishing in its complex way. Jason let the car roll to a stop in the driveway.
“So,” Pip said. “Here goes.”
“Are you sure I can’t just stay in the car?”
“You’re getting to know the parents. These are the parents.”
But as soon as she opened her door, she heard the voices. The shouting. The sound of raw hatred. It was coming right through the cabin’s thin walls.
I did not say that! If you’re going to fucking quote me, quote me accurately! What I said was—
I’m telling you the DISGUSTING SUBTEXT of what you said. You hide behind what everyone agrees is normal, you get the whole world on your side that way, but you know in your heart that there’s a deeper truth—
The deep truth that I’m wrong and you’re right? That’s the only deep truth you ever knew!
You know it yourself!
You just ADMITTED that you have no case! That there isn’t another person on earth who thinks you have a case—
But I do and you know it! You know it!
Pip shut the door again, to block out the words, but even with the door closed she could hear the fighting. The people who’d bequeathed a broken world to her were shouting at each other viciously. Jason sighed and took her hand. She held it tightly. It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn’t sure she would. Only when the skies opened again, the rain from the immense dark western ocean pounding on the car roof, the sound of love drowning out the other sound, did she believe that she might.
A Note About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of four other novels, most recently Freedom and The Corrections, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project, all published by FSG. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. You can sign up for email updates here.