Andersen, Kurt (3 page)

Chuck returned with a steaming cardboard basket and scooted back into the booth next to Alex, as always. In junior high, any other public seating configuration for the three of us—me with either of the boys across from the other one—might have implied a coupling. We were best friends, but just friends.

“Hey,” Chuck asked as he dribbled ketchup over his fries, “you know who that new grill guy looks exactly like? Scott Carpenter! I mean
exactly.
”

Carpenter was the astronaut who’d orbited Earth three times the previous week. In order to let us to watch his splashdown, the assistant principal wheeled TVs into the cafeteria and made us whisper while we ate lunch, which was sort of exciting, as was the fact that Carpenter had landed hundreds of miles off-target. But John Glenn’s single-orbit flight three months earlier had been the big deal, so this latest flight struck me as an anticlimax. The space program was the first time I ever experienced sequel boredom.

“The astronauts all seem the same to me,” I said. “Like gym teachers.”

“
What?
” Chuck replied, aghast. “They’re real-life James Bonds!”

We all badly wanted to be cool, but at thirteen, Chuck was finding it difficult to grow out of his space-program excitement. His main nonmusical hobby, apart from reading the Bond books and swimming, was making and flying giant radio-controlled model airplanes with his dad, what he called “RC aerobatics.”

Alex was ignoring us. Chuck waved a french fry in front of his face. “Alex Macallister, this is Cape Cap Com on emergency voice, do you read me, over?”

Alex sighed and finally reengaged with us. “I have an idea for us to do this summer. A cool idea, I think.”

“Is this the smuggling-explosives idea?” I asked. The previous summer, Chuck got some serious firecrackers from his cousin in Milwaukee, and ever since he had talked about pooling our money and taking the bus to Wisconsin to buy a gross of cherry bombs or M80s that we’d import to Wilmette and sell for five times what we paid. “Because if so,” I went on, “
no
—I
hate
selling things.” When I was in Camp Fire Girls, I’d made my mother buy my entire case of candy, and we still had unopened boxes of Almond Caramel Clusters and P-Nuttles in the pantry.

“Uh-uh,” Alex said. “Remember last fall, Hollaender, when you thought we should make up and then act out our own scenes playing characters from the books”—by which he meant, naturally, the Bond books—”and film them with my parents’ movie camera?”

“And you said, ‘That’s
retarded,
Hollander, who wants to make
silent
James Bond movies?’ Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, so I was thinking,” Alex explained, “that we could do, you know,
theater.
”

Chuck grimaced and made an elaborate choking sound.

3

“Wow, Grams, for real?” Waverly, my only grandchild, age seventeen, is visiting me for Christmas and New Year’s and lying prone in front of the fireplace as I write. It’s late. She’s in her nightgown playing My Little Pony: The Runaway Rainbow on my antique Game Boy as she sips her glass of tonic water. I just told her that when I was about her age, I’d once gone rainbow hunting with two boys. “That is
so
gay,
” she says.

“It wasn’t ‘gay’ at all. We flew in our own little airplane, bouncing around on the edge of a thunderstorm for an hour. It was completely terrifying.”

Waverly continues poking at the tiny Game Boy buttons with her fast-motion thumbs and fingers. “Was it a hippie thing? Were you, like, high?”

“No! We weren’t hippies. Although it was the summer of 1967.”

“Whenever you talk about the past, it’s funny how you make such a big deal out of the exact year. ‘It was
1967—
the
summer
of 1967.’ I mean, 1964, 1967, 1973, whatever. Like when we went to see
X-Men: First Class
? And you were all, ‘There were
not
miniskirts in 196
2
!’”

I smiled. “I know, but—I bet you’ll be the same way when you’re older.”

“
Uh
-uh,” she says, “because how is right now any different than 2007 or 2002? I’m seventeen instead of eleven or six, but in terms of the way people act and talk and dress and style their hair, and music and movies and
everything
? Everything’s been the same forever. It’s like everything’s
stuck.
”

“Politics are different,” I say. “Crazier.”

“Nine-eleven is my earliest memory—”

“Really?”

“—so America’s been at war but not
really
at war my whole life. At least when Mom was growing up, personal computers and video and the Internet got invented.”

“A couple of days ago you told me you thought life was better before VCRs and DVRs and Hulu—when people had to make choices about what TV shows and movies they were going to watch at a certain time and commit to their choices.”

“I’m just saying the Internet was something
new
and
big
that
happened.
”

“I know what you mean. When I was a kid, it was as if the whole country—the whole world, everything—slipped into a wormhole and shot out the other end in some alien sector of the space-time continuum.”

“Awesome.”

There’s been nothing like it since. It’s hard for her and for my children to appreciate how different 1962 was from 1969. I think of each year of the 1960s as distinctly as they think of whole decades. My brother, Peter, born seven years after me, has never considered himself a baby boomer. Our experiences were so different, he thinks, because I’d been old enough to know the world as it was in the 1950s and early ‘60s, before everything changed, whereas he was still a child when the late ‘60s arrived. By the time he got to high school and college in the ‘70s, he says, the youth revolution had already cowed the grown-ups into doing away with all the old-fashioned codes of behavior.

“All the digital stuff is all new,” I say to Waverly. “That’s what people your age have.”

“No, that’s what people
Mom’s
age had. The new computer stuff today is just … a little faster than when I was a kid, and more unavoidable. I mean,
this,
” she says, nodding down at the Game Boy, “is really old and kinda clunky but not really that different than things now.”

“I should buy some new games for it.”

“No, no, I’m not saying that. The less stuff we buy, the better.”

She loves the simple black rubber Armani raincoat I gave her for Christmas. I bought it on sale, but even so, she’d be grossed out if I told her how much I paid. At IKEA you could buy a sofa for the same price.

“I mean,” Waverly continues, “I’ve paid for
nothing
except Christmas presents and food, locally grown food, for the last two months almost.”

“Not including your airplane ticket here.”

“We didn’t actually pay money for it. Mom and Dad used miles.”

“Also: nice iPad Four.”

“It was a birthday present from Mom and Dad, and I didn’t even
ask
for it. Anyhow, I actually like playing these
old
games, and—Oh,
fuck!”
She had made some Game Boy error. ”Buying new games for this would be kinda gay. To
me.
” She turns off the device and sits up in a lotus position. “I mean, I’ll be
eighteen
in less than a year! How weird is that?”

“Super-weird,” says Grandma. “To me.” I put down my legal pad. “Wavy, I’ve got a question for you.”

“I’m sorry I said ‘fuck’.”

I make a “Phhhht!” noise and roll my eyes. “No, I mean ‘so gay’—I just wonder exactly what you mean, someone like you, when you say something is ‘so gay.’”

“My LGBTQI friends don’t mind when I use it that way, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Bingo.” I wonder when that
I
got appended to LGBTQI and what it stands for. As a university dean in 2013, I ought to know.

“When I said it last fall in English when we were discussing Keats or Byron or one of those guys, the teacher reprimanded me, like, whoa, this truly mad beef. I mean, he stopped the class and everything. It was crazy. But the two
gay
kids in my class
laughed
at
him.
”

I pick up Waverly’s empty glass on my way to make myself another gin and tonic—or maybe, since the tonic’s almost gone, a martini. (Stirred, not shaken, and I don’t buy Gordon’s or Beefeater, Bond’s brands.)

Late-night cocktails at Christmastime with the one and only child of my children, high on a hill overlooking Los Angeles in an odd and perfectly cozy wooden house built in 1946:
perfection,
or close to it.

When Greta, Waverly’s mother, was seventeen, her brother, Seth, was eight, and we were living in Brooklyn Heights. I was a litigation partner at a big law firm working twenty-four hundred billable hours a year, plus another several hundred pro bono that involved trips to Eastern Europe, as well as devoting Lord knows how many hundreds more, nonbillable, trying to jolly up the successful triathlete and increasingly unhappy composer whom I’d married for better and for worse. And also teaching at Yale. Which is to say, my life didn’t allow for much meandering, apparently purposeless conversation between teenage daughter and forty-two-year-old mother. We were not
The Gilmore Girls.

Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage “quality time,” that it was yuppie parents’ smiley-face equivalent to lawyers’ “billable hours.” Which is true enough. But I’ve come to understand that my noisy aversion to the phrase was meant to hide (from me) my guilt about failing to give my eldest child enough quality time. My plan as a young woman had been to have my first kid around thirty-three. I had not intended to raise a one-year-old as a twenty-six-year-old clerk for the 7th Circuit in Chicago, or to raise a two-year-old while clerking eighty hours a week for the Supreme Court in Washington. To my friends at the time, going through with an unplanned pregnancy at age twenty-five had been the one unfathomable, shocking thing about me.

Anyway, unlike my friends my age now, whose children’s children are mostly infants and toddlers, I’ve already got a granddaughter who takes birth control pills and calls herself “freeganish” and “a culture-jammer.” In other words, for a couple of weeks every year I am the guardian of a teenager with whom I enjoy hanging out the way I should’ve enjoyed hanging out with Greta when she was young. So my relationship with Waverly is kind of a do-over.

“That’s the last of your brew,” I say, handing her a glass of tonic.

“I can make some more.” She’s looking at her screen, which is a patchwork of five or six instant-messaging windows, several containing live video images of young faces. It looks like a wanted poster from the future.

“Good,” I say, “because otherwise all that stuff will rot before you’re back.”

Waverly has boiled up a batch of homemade tonic water. I think I’ve shown heroic restraint by not mentioning that the ingredients she made me buy (cinchona bark, allspice berries, citric acid) cost as much as a case of Schweppes, and also by not wondering aloud about the carbon-footprint cost of shipping cinchona from Peru to southern California. Our only two arguments during the last ten days were over my refusal to replace the low-water-use toilets, purchased three years ago at her insistence, with locally built dry-composting ones, and her discovery that I have a stash of incandescent lightbulbs in my pantry, which she thought were illegal to own as well as to sell. (“Oh,” she said after I explained, “so it’s sort of like weed.”)

She turns away from her computer to face me. “My friend Hunter? He got diagnosed with diabetes in the fall, Type 1, and his doctor told him he shouldn’t drink alcohol.”

“That’s probably good advice.”

“How come you do?”

“Because I never get drunk, and over the last forty years, I’ve learned how to manage my blood sugar around it.” And because it would be wrong—aesthetically, if not morally—for a sixty-four-year-old to smoke weed in front of her seventeen-year-old granddaughter. I live in Los Angeles, but I have not gone completely native.

“Hunter and I are thinking of going down to Miami in March for Occupy the G-20.”

The global economy is so screwed up that the overlords have decided to hold two G-20 summits this year, one in Australia and an extra in South Florida, as if more meetings and sunny photo ops will fix everything. Two falls ago Waverly attended the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in lower Manhattan for five weekends running, each visit chaperoned by her mother. I told Greta that instead of being a hockey mom, she’d become a protest mom.

“Exactly why,” I ask, “do you want to go protest the G-20 summit?”

“Are you
kidding
me? Because even though we live in a post-scarcity time, the World Bank and the IMF and all those smiling assholes are all about the rich white people and the giant corporations trying to stay as rich and powerful as possible at the expense of the poor dark people.”

My friend Sarah Caputo, who went to Malawi for three years after college to work for the Peace Corps, runs the clean-water programs for the International Development Association, the arm of the World Bank that lends money to the poorest countries. During the G-20 summit in Canada a few years ago, some protesters dumped a tub of manure on her, then took smartphone videos of her, which they posted on the Web.

“There are good, decent people who work for the World Bank, really trying to improve the lives of poor people.”

“I’m sure,” Waverly says. “There were nice Nazis, too, right, who wanted to ship the Jews from Europe to Africa to start their own country. But the Nazi system was still the Nazi system.”

My peevishness with her is so intense that I wonder if I’m on a hypoglycemic downward slide. I keep glucose meters all over the place—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, right here on the coffee table—so I prick my finger and squeeze out a drop: 117. Good: I’m just angry, not too low, for my meter tells me so.