Strangers at the Feast (3 page)

“Mom,” Ginny had cut her off, “all you need to do is finally meet Priya. Just come.”

Her mother went silent, having been chastened many times—perhaps unfairly—for her bossiness, a tendency that by this age Ginny knew her mother could not control. Then she whispered, in what almost seemed the voice of a child, “I’m excited.”

DOUGLAS

Douglas was getting ready to load the car as Denise skipped down the stairs in her aerobics-class way, wearing pink velour sweatpants and an old sweater. Her bright blond hair was pulled into the tight, high ponytail she wore for yard work. The twins, Brian and Brandon, and his youngest, Laura, followed sluggishly in their play clothes.

Denise clapped. “We’re leaving in T minus ten, everybody, okay?”

“That’s what you’re wearing?” Douglas asked.

“I didn’t want to make Ginny feel like we’re expecting something fancy.”

“You look like you’re expecting hot dogs.”

“I’m allowed to be comfortable.”

“You wear a cocktail dress for Arbor Day.”

“Suddenly you’re Mr. Fashion? This meal will not involve sipping from china, I guarantee you.”

“Denise, would you rather visit your own family?”

This, as always, silenced her. Douglas did not want to engage in the all-too-familiar argument that would end with Denise storming his cluttered desk to pull out unpaid bills. This was the first day in months he was going to be able to spend with his children and he was feeling festive. He was also eager to see Ginny’s “phenomenal deal.” She’d bought just after the bubble burst, snagging a preforeclosed three-bed, two-bath. The listing she had e-mailed three months earlier—subject line, To Buy or Not to Buy?—had said oak floors, a
sunporch, and a buildable acre, under $350K. Not to mention a good school district. All just thirty minutes north of Manhattan.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
For a person who didn’t know the first thing about finance or real estate or even a credit report, Ginny had snagged a bargain. At least someone was benefiting from the 2007 market massacre.

Denise was clearly miffed, though. If anyone other than Douglas’s mother was going to cook a family feast, she thought it should be her.

“Well, I’m putting on a tie. My sister is not serving us Schlitz.”

“Put on a tuxedo if you want, Doug. I don’t care.” Which wasn’t quite true. Denise liked to pick out his clothes: blues and grays that she said brought out his eyes, loose-fitting sweaters that hid the spare tire he’d recently developed.

Denise, on the other hand, had maintained her figure, as well as her year-round tanning-bed glow. His wife had a stunning ability to keep herself together, to stay fit, better than most women her age with three children. In fact, she looked almost identical to the twenty-four-year-old version of herself he’d married, except for her eyebrows. Over the past year her eyebrows had been plucked to near invisibility. At night, he’d see her leaning into the bathroom mirror, tweezers glinting from her hand. It was frightening to watch, but even when she climbed into bed, the crescents above her eyes red and swollen, Douglas politely pretended not to notice. It was stress. And he, alone, was the cause.

One of her balding eyebrows arched at him now:

“Would you at least first hand me the juice boxes,” she said, “and the disinfectant towelettes and help me get ready for this unnecessary drive?”

They packed up the Lincoln Navigator, loaded the dolls and the Game Boys, an array of antibacterial gels and wipes, the car seat, the GPS, and his present for Priya. Over the years their trip preparations had become militaristic: checklists and double checks; a final inventory. If push came to shove, they could survive an ice age in that car. Denise had set her watch alarm to a five-minute departure
warning, and when the alarm beeped, they herded the kids in—chop, chop, chop—programmed Ginny’s address, and started the engine.

So later that night, when the detective asked, Douglas knew with certainty that it was 11:00 a.m. when they left the house.

GINNY

I said I was doing the cooking, Mom.”

Her mother had arrived early, alone, hugging a pyramid of gravy and cranberry-sauce vats.

“Don’t be silly! These are just little tidbits. Nibbles.”

From her purse she pulled an apron and fastened it over her Thanksgiving sweater. “Put me to work!” She planted a noisy kiss on Ginny’s cheek. Ginny thumbed off the parentheses of her mother’s Maybelline Pink Peony lipstick, a vibrant fuchsia she had worn religiously since Easter brunch 1996, when Ginny’s father looked up from his lamb roast and said, “You know, Eleanor, that pinkish stuff brings out the green in your eyes.”

Her Shalimar, as usual, nearly knocked Ginny down. Her mother was a potpourri of consumer scents: Oil of Olay, Listerine, Woolite, the sulfuric bite of her Loving Care. If her mother ever abandoned her array of chemicals, Ginny doubted she would recognize her.

“Well, when do I get to meet my new granddaughter?”

“She’s napping,” Ginny said.

“I’ve been waiting months!”

“Wine, Mom?”

“It’s much too early for wine, dear.”

Her mother began unpacking her elaborate collection of dishes in the shapes of the items served in them. Then she unloaded a plastic-wrapped tart. “It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without my
pear tart with the graham-cracker crust.” Her mother opened the refrigerator and gaped at the disarray. “Goodness, let’s just leave it out.”

Ginny uncorked a bottle of Chardonnay and poured a glass. She took a long sip and scanned the kitchen: an assembly line of bowls and pots and cutting boards.

“I did come early so I could be the first to meet her.” In fact, Ginny’s mother arrived early for everything—dentists and doctors appointments, of which there were many; movies, so she could get an aisle seat in case of a fire; her own surprise fiftieth birthday party, which she had sniffed out, arriving early to set up the proper cups and napkins and plates rather than endure a noisy chorus of
Surprise!

“You want to go shake her awake, Mom?”

Her mother waved away the suggestion. “Listen, sleeping can be a sign of illness. I raised two children. I have expertise. All my lady friends are bombarded with questions by their daughters. Does my daughter even ask me about which bedtime stories to read? What to do for a runny nose? You must turn to somebody with questions.”

“God bless Google,” said Ginny.

“And you trust these strangers on the Internet?”

“You make them sound like child predators.”

Her mother’s eyes flared and she shook her head vigorously, as though shaking away the image of a man in a dark van offering a lollipop to a girl on the street. Then, as though remembering the times Ginny had chided her anxiety, her mother collected herself and smiled brightly.

“Well, it won’t do to have you drinking alone. I’ll have a little sip. Just a taste to keep you company. Oh, that’s way too much. Ginny, it’ll go to waste!” Ginny and her brother called this their mother’s refuse-and-booze strategy. By initially refusing alcohol, in her mind, she never actually drank it. “Well, okay, yum, that is lovely. Zip dee do,
straight to my head!” She touched her cheeks. “You know, you look very good, Ginny. You’re rosy. Like an Eskimo.”

“Mom, you’re always assessing me.”

“Arrest me for paying my daughter a compliment.”

Her mother couldn’t help herself. Ginny was
her
product. Like an apple in the supermarket she was inspecting for wormholes.

Ginny dumped the potatoes into the sink, let the faucet hiccup on. “Look, there’s a recipe on my laptop screen out in the living room. Would you print it?”

Her mother sipped her wine, adjusted her bulbous gold clip-on earrings. “I hope those aren’t
russet
potatoes. Please, if you love your family at all, you must use red potatoes, red creamer potatoes. And honestly, I cannot go mucking around with people’s printers. Don’t you think someone should set the table?”

Her mother looked at her watch, eyes widening with alarm, and dramatically tightened her lips, making it clear she was extending the maternal munificence of keeping them zipped. She grabbed a fistful of utensils and strode to the table.

God knows why I thought she could click
print,
mused Ginny. Her mother couldn’t change a tire or a lightbulb. She didn’t know the difference between a flat head and a Phillips screwdriver. Remote controls? VCR? It’s not that she was stupid. She went to Wellesley. But she grew up having things done for her, first by her father, then by her husband. She would sooner stare at a broken television for hours than crouch down to see if it was plugged in.

Suggest she jiggle a cable, and she’d say, “Ginny, do I look like an electrician?” Or, Ginny’s favorite response, “My hair is wet.” Her mother didn’t want to be electrocuted.

If anyone lacked the frontier spirit, the desire to meet a challenge, it was Ginny’s mother.
Excuse me, but how long before we get to Oregon? I was told this was a trail. This doesn’t feel at all like a trail.
Ten miles out of Missouri her mother would have been shoved from the wagon.

She wanted to
feel
useful, but not be useful.

When Ginny’s mother came of age, housework could eat up the week. But in the last twenty years, the world had belched out an array of machines and services that allowed women to squeeze chores into one day. Microwaves and laundry machines. Wrinkle-free fabrics, frozen dinners, Cuisinarts, nonstick pans—Febreze! As far as Ginny was concerned, nothing in world history had done more for women’s liberation than Chinese takeout. A piping-hot, tasty meal for four in little white cartons! For under twenty-five dollars! That had been the subject of Ginny’s first published paper: “How General Tso Liberated American Women.”

These changes should have given Ginny’s mother time to learn Spanish, or yoga. But new activities frightened her. So cleaning house turned into a tea ceremony. She stretched out errands as though she were paid by the hour, by the number of times she opened and closed the trunk of her powder blue Lexus. One day she needed milk, the next day she had to
carpe
the sale on red seedless grapes. Dry cleaning was picked up and dropped off on entirely different trips. It would have taken a team of Nobel Prize—winning physicists a month to calculate her carbon footprint.

Like the work of tollbooth collectors and movie-ticket sellers, her services were being rendered obsolete by technology.

But what happened to people when the world made their sacrifices unnecessary?

“
I
could have gone to Columbia graduate school,” her mother sometimes reminded her children, stressing how their grandmother advised her to forsake a master’s degree and instead start a family when their father returned from Vietnam. She said it with a demure but self-righteous smile, or with laughter—as though she couldn’t believe she would ever have done such a crazy thing! But who mentioned a thing so frequently unless it bothered her?

If her mother had more than one glass of wine, she would bring it up several times at dinner. “Children, do you know where I could have gone after Wellesley?” and Ginny’s father would say, “Since we’re on the subject, Eleanor, do you know where
I
could have gone?”

Then she simply asked someone to pass the spinach.

DOUGLAS

Good, his father’s car wasn’t at Ginny’s house yet. The last thing Douglas wanted was extra time with his father, who would no doubt grill him about the latest round of subprime write-offs. Once they got the game on, they’d be fine. They’d talk sports. He just had to stall until then.

His mother’s car had already claimed the only patch of blacktop, so Douglas parked on the street. Even at a distance, he could tell her tires were low. It irked him that his mother, a woman terrified of car accidents—she religiously read the police blotter to identify dangerous local roads—was so lax about car maintenance. He’d have to check her engine oil, ask her when she’d replaced her brake pads. The last time he’d been in the car with her it had rained, and her windshield wipers merely smeared the water around. Worse, she had contentedly leaned forward, her nose virtually to the glass, squinting through the blur as though she had no idea wipers existed that would allow her to see the road.

“Welcome, welcome!”

A storm door slammed as Ginny stepped out of the house in flip-flops and blue jeans. She hugged herself in a long, rust-colored cardigan. Her red hair was pinned in its usual loose bun, her freckled face happy and glowing. She wore her signature purple cat-eye glasses. Douglas always felt a momentary shock when he saw this carelessly glamorous woman who was his sister. A far cry from the pudgy child whose doughy face was scaffolded with braces and bifocals.

Douglas threw open the door of his Navigator. “We bring hungry mouths, Gin!”

“God, you all look like you just stepped out of a William Merritt Chase painting!”

Denise shot Douglas a glance. She found Ginny’s compliments pretentious. But Ginny was an academic; it was to be expected.

Stepping from the car, Douglas took in the yellow colonial saltbox—a post-and-beam construction with a flat front and center chimney. Ginny had explained that the layout was a holdover from the time when houses were taxed on the number of stories: the front was two stories, but the back roof sloped down to one. All Douglas cared about was that home buyers paid 10 percent more for anything quaint: developers had started building saltboxes again.

“So you went colonial,” he said.

She grinned. “It did seem fitting.”

The place desperately needed a paint job and new shutters, the yard was strewn with yellow and red leaves that needed to be raked, but it was set back nicely on a level, buildable one-acre lot. Normally, it would have sold for a good half million. His sister had done well.

Ginny stepped forward to help unload the car. “Don’t tell me you got another SUV?”

His sister’s social conscience was a gland that never stopped salivating.