The Most Fun We Ever Had (20 page)

She opened her mouth and closed it again. What
was
going on with her? To articulate it seemed damning somehow; to vocalize it was to give permanence to what she hoped wouldn’t last. “I’m just wondering whether or not you ever had any doubts about Dad.” Her mother must have felt this guttural terror at some point, must have experienced moments of revulsion when watching her husband eat asparagus, dreaded the future in which he talked about how it made his pee smell. Of course everyone had those problems, even her parents, who had been married for a hundred thousand years and still winked at each other across the dinner table.

“No, I suppose I didn’t. But, Liza, that doesn’t mean— It’s
okay
to have doubts, honey. It’s perfectly fine to feel anxious or uncertain about another person. It’s a
huge
thing you’re undertaking with Ryan, sweetheart. It’s natural to be scared. But it’s better if you find a way to be scared together.”

Did you ever lie awake worrying what you might be passing on to us through Dad’s genes? Did you ever for a second think that he wasn’t good enough? Did you ever wonder if it would be your fault if he wasn’t?
She’d spent a handful of afternoons at Marcus’s apartment in the past month, hazy, easy days between his plaid jersey-knit sheets; avoiding Ryan, avoiding reality. She squirmed, feeling a trilling anxiety at the back of her neck.

“It’s funny,” her mom continued. “I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but it’s much easier said than done, don’t you think?”

If her mother—her ever-perceptive love guru of a mother—seemed genuinely unworried about Ryan, maybe that was enough of an endorsement. The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number of times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.

What she’d been doing with Marcus was cruel, simply put. It was the most textbook kind of cruelty there was: letting him fuck her from behind, letting him make her laugh, letting him drop her off at her parents’ house and kiss her in his car while Ryan was at home with his Netflix and his pretzels and his pervasive despondency. It was cruel to Marcus and Ryan both. When her mother went inside to make them some tea, she pulled out her phone and began to type, verging on something novelistic,
This has been really fun but I recently found out that I’m pregnant—it happened before we got together so please don’t worry—and I feel as though it’s what’s best for my health and the health of my relationship and also my libido has really been slowing down in the last couple of weeks but I really do wish you the best and I hope that Walter’s hip replacement goes well and that—

“Everything okay out here?” her mother asked, and she deleted the text before sending it. She looked up—her mom was blithe and optimistic, blind to her daughter’s terrible behavior—and resisted asking if Marilyn would be willing to break things off with Marcus for her.

She fired off a quick message—
We need to end things. Personal stuff going on. I’m really sorry. Xx
—and shut off her phone before smiling up at her mother.

1983–1984

Marilyn was beginning to think—more than think: theorize—that her elder daughter was a sociopath. She arguably had too much time to think about it; she was, as one of the many parenting books that now lined the built-in shelves purported,
too close to the problem
to have perspective. But who could judge if not she? She spent every day with the children, was awakened by them each morning and read to them until they fell asleep each night. And she loved those versions of her girls—the warm, sleepy, pajama-clad bodies that tucked themselves next to her at sunrise, breathing their sweet stale breath into her neck, querying about breakfast and telling her about their dreams; the drowsy, heavy heads, trying to stay awake until the end, that lolled against her as she whispered lines of Dr. Seuss.

She liked her children best, then, when they were sleeping. Which perhaps was part of the problem, but she was fairly certain that a larger part of the problem was Wendy, whom she sometimes imagined sending to a boarding school that accommodated distressed preschoolers.

Earlier that day, she had denied Wendy’s request for chocolate milk, and then watched as Wendy sank into a ball in the middle of the kitchen floor. Her daughter hugged her knees and started making a strange, fiercely focused face. Her cheeks turned, after several seconds, bright red, and Marilyn realized that she was holding her breath.

“Wendy, stop it,” she said. Motherhood had rendered her more fatalistic than ever, and she was picturing blood vessels bursting in Wendy’s eyes, in her brain. Her heart started pounding. Violet was propped up on several phone books in a chair at the table, coloring, regarding her sister with curiosity. “Wendy, I mean it. Stop that right now.” But Wendy didn’t stop; she hugged herself tighter and her eyes bulged a little bit and her face got redder and redder until finally Marilyn dropped to her knees and shoved her fingers into her daughter’s mouth, the only thing she could think to do. And Wendy bit her,
hard,
and she hissed,
“Fuck”
and Wendy, breathing laboriously, glared up at her and said, “Mama said a bad word.”

She sent Wendy to her room, fighting back tears herself, and she sank into a kitchen chair across from Violet and wept when she heard the bedroom door slam. Violet looked scared, scrambled down from her seat and climbed into her lap.

“It’s okay, Mama,” she said. “It’s okay.”

She looked down at her petrified daughter and in an instant realized that this was precisely the kind of scene she had vowed to avoid making as a parent herself, the kind of scene that was completely commonplace to her when she was a child. Her own mother—maybe drinking; probably drinking—would get wild-eyed or melancholy, dissolve before her eyes into a puddle of despair or fury.

“Don’t cry,” she would say, bringing her tissues, stroking her mother’s hair. She remembered these memories as some of her first, from when she was five or six. Or possibly even four, like Violet was now, her own tiny daughter staring up into her face, reaching little starfish hands to her cheeks to dry her tears.

“I’m okay, pumpkin. Mama’s okay. I’m sorry I scared you, little bear.”

David was not usually home during Wendy’s meltdowns and so when she tried to describe them to him in bed at night they came out sounding embellished—though they
weren’t
. Her husband would pull her against him and rub her back.

“Just a rough stage, honey. Kids throw tantrums.”

But she knew it was more than that. Because sometimes—oftentimes—Wendy got mad out of the blue, not because of any perceived injustice but just
because
. They would be sitting together, she and Wendy and Violet, playing kitchen or making Shrinky Dinks or reading
A Light in the Attic,
and suddenly Wendy would shriek
Stop!
and kick a tiny leg out toward her sister, who would be sitting in complete innocence—Violet was a fervent pacifist from the time she was conceived—and then Wendy would spiral downward. Marilyn would watch this, placed squarely between the girls and certain of Violet’s lack of antagonism, watch Wendy’s face harden and Violet’s face sink. She watched Violet learn, after two or three instances, that Wendy’s outbursts would ruin things, at least for a while, that there would be screaming and door slamming and her mother’s barely contained irritation or anguish or fury. Marilyn watched her daughter become aware of this, observed her four-year-old’s first doses of life’s disappointing trajectory, and it would start to break her heart but then she would get distracted by her five-year-old, similarly jaded but much angrier about it all.

The migraines started around that time, too, so sometimes when Wendy made her vociferous exit it was all Marilyn could do to crawl onto the couch and close her eyes.

“Mama has a headache, Violet Rose,” she’d say to her younger daughter, and Violet would climb obediently into her lap, resting unimposingly against her and whispering tiny toddler narratives to the Barbies she held in each hand.

Wendy would emerge later, sometimes in minutes and sometimes hours, looking mildly shamed but mostly seeming as though nothing had happened. And she would come over to her mother, lay a soft hand on her knee or curl up against her belly, and Marilyn would have trouble recognizing this tiny model of penance and fall absolutely in love with her daughter again. But the cycle would inevitably repeat itself, and her appeals to David became more zealous.

“I’m
afraid
of her,” she confessed one night, near tears, beside him on the couch.

“Sweetheart, she’s five years old,” he said, not unkind but a little amused. Doctorhood had rendered her husband slightly more irritating; she’d thought he would be immune to the characteristic arrogance but every so often it surfaced in the form of a knowing vocal lilt.

“You don’t understand what she’s like,” she continued. “She— It’s like she can’t help it. It’s— I feel awful, watching her, because I know it can’t be fun for her to be so—
anguished
. She’s hurting and she doesn’t seem to know how to express it and it…” She trailed off, her voice wobbling. “It breaks my heart, David. I don’t know how to help her.”

“Some kids are just more temperamental than others,” he said. His indifference infuriated her and she moved away from him.

“You don’t
see
her when she does it.”

In fact he had seen her: because Wendy’s outbursts were becoming more frequent, usually three or four times a day, it was now inevitable that David would bear witness. Marilyn was relieved at first but then saw that he still didn’t understand. The first time, Wendy had screamed and purposefully shattered a juice glass because Violet was using the crayon that she wanted, and David had appeared in the doorway, lifted Wendy up under his arm, and started for her bedroom.

“Oh, no you don’t, young lady,” he said, using the Bad Cop voice that he was required to use only on rare occasions. She was, on the other hand, obliged to be the enforcer simply because she was
around
more, and she despised it, observing her daughters flying delightedly into their father’s arms when he got home in the evenings, shunning her because she’d nixed the prospect of cookie baking or a viewing of
Zoom
. David was gentle but stern, and he had a solid grip on Wendy though she was flailing violently as he took her down the hall. “If I
ever
see you do something like that again, Wendy, I’ll take away those crayons forever.” She continued wailing and after David closed her in her room she pounded on the door with her fists in anguish.

It infuriated her, squatting before the mess of glass and cutting herself in the process, the suggestion that all Wendy needed was a little tough love. That all this time,
all these times,
Marilyn had simply failed to effectively discipline their daughter. She was further infuriated when Wendy appeared twenty minutes later, tiptoed from her room and then flung herself at David’s legs in a dramatic act of atonement.

“I didn’t mean to, Daddy,” she said, wailing, and David swept her into his arms and murmured to her meaningfully about how he understood that
sometimes when we’re angry we do things we don’t mean, but that doesn’t give us permission to break things and hurt our sisters
.

Or our mothers,
she thought, finally taking the time to wash and bandage the cut on her palm because it became clear that David wasn’t going to notice it.
Just because we’re angry about absolutely nothing—because we’re five years old and don’t want for anything and our every single whim is indulged and what on earth is there to be angry about?—is no reason to break things and make our mothers clean them up.

There had been several similar instances, instances during which she felt a shameful, agonizing
hatred
toward both her husband and her daughter.

“If I have to wrestle Wendy into bed again tonight I’m going to impale myself on something, David, I swear to God,” she’d lamented yesterday, and her husband, obdurate, rolling his eyes, had replied, “Oh, this again. The Antichrist. Good. Great. Let’s talk about that.”

She knew that she had chosen this life, and yet she would marvel over the fact that less than a decade ago she was making out on Oak Street Beach with Dean McGillis, who once took her skinny-dipping. She would have this same thought each time she was in labor with her daughters and her dopey husband sat by, handsome and ineffectual:
I could be fucking swimming with fucking Dean McGillis
. She could have been there, but instead she was here, sticking a Care Bears Band-Aid to her palm and actively ruing the fact that her husband and elder daughter were having a sweet, lesson-learning moment on the other side of the room. She went into the yard to smoke—trusting that Violet would remain occupied where she sat outside the hall closet, engaged in a heated conversation with her dolls. When she returned, David was sitting at the kitchen table, bluish circles under his eyes, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

“I think we’ve contained the virus,” he said. “I’m guessing that by bedtime she’ll be completely cured.”

She smiled at him tightly.

“Oh, come on, kid. I’m just joking.”

She sat down across from him and started picking through a pile of papers, intermingled remnants of the girls’ artwork. “I’m not in the mood to joke.”

He stared at her for a moment, and when she refused to look at him, he rose and started out of the room. “Well, maybe
I
am,” he muttered, and then he was gone.