All of Us and Everything (2 page)

They crowded Ru's window.

Ru tried to keep the limb balanced there with her baton, but it was no use. The winds were too strong, the wires too flimsy, the branch too thick—a barrel-chested thing that made her think it was a manly branch—it made her think of the word
father
because they were talking about her own father, his existence.

She couldn't save the manly branch.

She sighed, dropped her arms, and the limb exhausted its support; the wires broke, snapping with electricity. The tree limb fell hard, denting the hood of their own wide green station wagon, which had been parked beneath it.

“Damn it,” Augusta said.

The electricity clipped off, and the whole world dimmed, darkness bleeding out over the ocean where heat lightning strobed. The music whined into minor chords as the needle ground to a stop.

Esme, Liv, and Ru looked at their mother in the dim light.

She stared out at the shore. She said all she was able to say on the matter of their father—three Statements of Personal Honesty that were also facts: “Your father is a spy. He can't be known. I love him, despite myself.”

Ru circled back to the beginning of the lesson. “There's a fourth kind of person. The kind who tries to control a storm, right?”

“Correct, Ru. More or less,” Augusta said. She patted Ru on the head. “You did the best you could.” She held her fist to her compromised heart.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2012

“I didn't know you were supposed to shave collies,” the headmaster said while he patted the dog's long thin snout and took a seat in Esme's living room. “I mean, I've just never seen it.”

“I don't think it's recommended but imagine living with him! It's like having a Russian in your living room who refuses to take off his fur coat and hat in the middle of the summer. Like Dostoevsky himself, brooding away.” Littering a conversation with literary and pop-culture references had become an anxious habit for Esme, maybe the result of the stiflingly crowded overeducated population that made up faculty housing at a boarding school. On campus, all of the dogs and cats—and many of the faculty children themselves—were named with some clever allusion in mind. Atty, Esme's daughter now fifteen and sitting beside her on the sofa, was named after Atticus Finch, a man's name, yes, but Esme didn't want to saddle Atty with the name Scout and she was set on which book she wanted to allude to. Ingmar, the collie, was often mistaken for a Bergman reference but actually it was a more obscure reference to the lead character in a Swedish film that Esme and her husband, Doug, saw when they were dating.

“But it's October,” the headmaster said. “Shouldn't he be bulking up his winter coat?”

“Still, the metaphor stands even if it's cold out.
I mean, hey, take off your coat, fella, and stay awhile!
Am I right?” Esme said, trying to lighten the mood. She'd actually shaved the dog specifically for this meeting. Ingmar's coat had become matted from muddy romps out by the pond, and dogs weren't supposed to be off their leashes. She looked at her daughter for a little help.

Atty—a budding social media guru—looked up from her iPhone, leaned forward, and said, “This dog's no Dostoevsky. Don't you worry.” As if the burden of being in the same room with a dog capable of literary genius would be too much for the headmaster to bear. “A corgi on human growth hormones, maybe, but that's about it. He couldn't get a kid out of a well if his doggy life depended on it.” She then tweeted both sentences with the hashtag
#lifewithcollie.

“There are no wells on campus,” the headmaster said, defensively.

Atty looked at Esme in a challenging way. Neither of them was a great fan of the headmaster. Behind his back, they both referred to him as Big-Head Todd. He had a very big head and the history teacher, also a Todd, had a very little head so they called him Little-Head Todd. Atty's look was meant as a reminder to her mother that she'd promised to call the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face, one fine day, before she graduated.

Esme understood the look immediately and shot her a look that meant,
Not now.
Then she smiled at Todd. “Listen. What do you need to tell us? You're here, making a house call on a Sunday with a huge storm moving up the coast.”

“A
Frankenstorm,
” Atty added. She'd been following video clips on weather.com, the growing buzz of online hysteria, mandatory evacuations on the coast—even in Ocean City, New Jersey, where her grandmother lived. Did her mother really care about this storm? Was she too busy bracing for this meeting, which was clearly going to be about Atty's shit midterm grades and her diminishing prospects for a good college education? Atty could almost hear the headmaster saying,
We're talking fourth tier at best, now. Fourth tier.

“And you didn't cancel because of the storm, which would have been fine.” Esme knew this visit might have something to do with Doug. He had led a group of sophomores on a study abroad program in Europe. Atty was a sophomore but her grades had been too low to make the cut, which meant that Esme had to stay behind with her. Esme had asked if Doug was dead as soon as Mrs. Prinknell had called to make the appointment. “No, no,” Mrs. Prinknell had assured her, “for deaths, he calls people in pronto.”

But that was Friday evening and this was Sunday morning, and Doug had missed their Skype session, which had made Esme anxious. He was the type to prioritize one of the student's emergency issues over his own life and so she'd decided this was an issue with one of the kids on the trip.

The headmaster was still balking. “It's just, maybe Atty has some studying to do and we can talk privately.”

“I believe in honesty,” Esme said. “Not just, you know, expressing one's feelings, and listing your grievances and airing out emotions, but the
truth,
the
facts.
I have nothing to hide from Atty.” The dog looked at her sharply with his very small eyes. It was a genetic problem; his eyes were literally too small for his head, but these looks—little admonishments—always reminded Esme of her mother. The collie looked like pictures of her mother from the late 1950s—skinny arms and legs and a boxy middle, wearing woolen skirts with formfitting pleats tight through her ample hips. Why had she gotten a dog who reminded her of her mother? Maybe she'd done it subconsciously.

“Okay, okay.” Todd pulled back his suit jacket and looked at a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “If the squawk box goes off, I'll have to take it. Sorry about that.”

“That's okay. I've got a call in to my mother, who's being evacuated on the Jersey shore.” Her mother was the stubborn type who refused to leave during storms. Esme was prepared to try to talk her into leaving, knowing she'd fail.

“Yep, yep. Hurricane Sandy has us on a twenty-four-seven alert. All-in, you know.”

“All-in,” Esme said, “of course.” She had no idea what
all-in
meant, and she hadn't been paying attention to the storm. If storms defined people—those who love storms, those who fear them, and those who love them
because
they fear them—Esme was the type to try to ignore them because you can't control them. She preferred limiting her life to things she could more easily control. It's why she'd fallen for Doug. He was so practical, so tractable and reliable. And Esme had thought motherhood would be an experience of ultimate control—shaping a child, molding and nurturing them into adulthood. Raising Atty had proven her wrong.

Todd smiled sadly, and then he actually swept his hand over the wisps of hair on his big head and bent forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. It was the least robotic thing Esme had ever seen him do. In fact, it was so deeply human, she was worried. The news was bound to be very, very bad. “Doug's left the study abroad program.”

“Left?” Esme said.

“It seems he's run off with his dentist.”

“My dad's gay?” Atty said. This wasn't about her shit grades? She didn't have to give her speech on the psychological effects of being a faculty brat? She immediately thought: My father has always kept a very tidy closet, but really gay?

Todd shook his head. “His
female
dentist.”

For a second, Atty felt guilty for assuming that the dentist was male. “Sorry,” she said, apologizing for her sexism.

“It's not your fault!” Esme said quickly. She knew kids would blame themselves for marital issues. She herself had wondered if she'd been to blame for her absentee father. For years, she'd wondered if there'd been some good fatherly type that she'd driven away—so early in her life she couldn't remember him.

Atty assumed her mother was taking blame for having raised Atty in a sexist culture, but didn't dwell on it. She pulled out her iPhone and tweeted,
I feel weirdly abandoned.
Her tweets were usually so sarcastic that her followers weren't sure what to make of the vague emotional baldness. If Atty's grandmother were a follower—she didn't have a Twitter account—she would have recognized it as a Statement of Personal Honesty, the factless variety, which she preferred.

It was a true Statement. Atty
did
feel unmoored—that disorienting moment in childhood when you realize that you've reached up and grabbed the wrong father's hand and a stranger looks down at you and says, “Are you lost?” When this happened to Atty once at a Memorial Day parade, she'd gotten so embarrassed she turned it on the man. “I'm not lost! Let go of me, creeper!” And then she'd walked off and started crying. Doug found her in seconds.

Esme barely registered her daughter typing away with her thumbs. She irrationally assumed that Atty was going to look up the headmaster's story on the Internet—as if she could find out if it was a hoax or an overseas scam—
I'm stuck in Paris. A female dentist stole all of my credit cards and identification. Can you please wire money?

Part of Esme knew the story was possibly true. One of Doug's molars had been killing him. She'd encouraged him to get it checked out. They were in Paris. Socialized medicine and all…

Esme stood up. Her arms hung at her sides. They felt loose, almost unattached from her body. She felt armless. She walked to the bay window. It was dark and rainy. The storm was coming.

“He's no longer an employee of the school,” Todd went on.

“You fired him?” Esme asked.

“He quit.”

This was a very bad sign. “He quit? But he doesn't have another job…” She shook her head. “He's not the kind to run off. He has a really strong TIAA-CREF account. He's not like this.”

“He told me that he has a plan.”

“You talked to him?”

“Well, yes. It's how I knew he quit.”

Somehow she thought it had been handled by rumors and hearsay, as so many things were handled on campus. But, no. Doug had called the headmaster. And with this small detail, she knew that her marriage was over. She quickly blamed her mother-in-law. That side of the family was so uppity and elitist that there had been marriages between first cousins that had resulted in poor teeth, which meant Doug had to go to a dentist in Paris in the first place.

And then she thought, irrationally, that maybe her marriage was ending to make room for Ru's. Augusta had told Esme the news one week ago today. What if there was a kind of curse—the family of three daughters and one mother could only contain one real marriage at a time. Esme's brain used the caveat
real
because Liv's marriages—all three of them—had always felt fragile and dubious—mainly because Liv so loudly insisted that these loves were great, sweeping epic loves that none of the other women in the family could really grasp. What was there to grasp? Liv married for money and did it well.

Once Esme had flitted through all the blame she could muster, she wanted to feel something. A deep splitting ache in her chest. But she wasn't sure she loved Doug. Countless times, she'd imagined him leaving her, her leaving him, his sudden death. Awful things, but in truth she was not sure she'd ever loved him. She knew she'd never loved him the way she did her first love, Darwin Webber, who disappeared from college, not even leaving her a note. (And he was still nowhere to be found. She'd Googled him a bunch of times and he had no Internet footprint—not even a death notice.) She'd met Doug a year later, and having given up on the idea that she could love anyone again, she opted instead for what felt like a good partnership. (Was she just in the earliest stage of grief?)

“Do the kids on the trip know?” Atty asked.

Esme turned and looked at her.

“I mean, Maeve Brown is on that trip, and Piper Weir and George and Kate and Stew,” Atty rattled off. “What about the other chaperones? Jesus!” She rotated the small stud earring on one of her earlobes the way she'd been taught to do in the months that followed getting her ears pierced—when she was eight years old. Esme wondered if she was regressing before her eyes. “Do you know how big this is?” she said to her mother, wide-eyed, cradling her iPhone.

Her daughter had no idea how big this would be—personally. “This isn't a public phenomenon, Atty. It's a private matter.”

“What world do you live in?
Everything
here is public. We aren't an actual family. We live on campus and
represent
an actual family so the boarding students can see how they function on a daily basis. We're like those American towns set up in Russia so Russian kids can grow up to learn to be American spies.”