The Most Fun We Ever Had (34 page)

Grace shrugged, jamming her thumb into her mouth and pulling her arms tighter around Violet’s waist.

“Is it weird that I kind of want to see?” Liza asked, and Violet and Wendy both jumped.

Wendy turned to her. “Jesus fuck; you’re such a ghoul. Did you
float
here?”

“I mean, you’ve kind of
intrigued
me,” Violet admitted. “I’m a little curious.”

“You know what?” Wendy hissed. “Fine. Let’s go see them.”

They all met eyes in a complicated, giddy web across the room. Violet rose from the bed and transferred Grace to Liza’s arms and then Wendy led the way downstairs. The third stair creaked with the combined weight of Wendy and Violet, and their parents—it was true, twined together, their father splayed and their mother writhing—both startled.

—

M
arilyn, usually content to exist in her husband’s castoff Oxford shirts, had chosen to make an effort for Gracie’s graduation ceremony, one of her old sundresses, navy with little green flowers. Wendy wasted no time in making her feel self-conscious about it.

“God, Mom, are you wearing
that
?”

“What’s wrong with it?” she asked, looking down at herself. Standing across the room from her teenage daughter—who had a full face of makeup and dramatic highlights in her hair—Marilyn suddenly felt matronly, dowdy and old compared to the startlingly sexualized young woman who allegedly shared half her genetic material.

“What
isn’t
wrong with it? No offense, but you sort of look pregnant, for one.”

How was it possible that she had birthed such an insufferable aesthete?

“I know you feel this license for verbal abuse because I’m just your
mother
but it’s really a bad way to go about your interactions.” She faltered. “Listen. I’m asking you for one hour of your time. For your sister.”

“I have
plans,
” Wendy said, sitting before a closed trigonometry book, staring at her with a bald-faced hatred she’d grown very used to over the past year.

“It’s her graduation.”

“It’s
preschool,
” Wendy replied.

“What’s the biggest difference between the first kid and the fourth?” someone had once asked Marilyn, and she’d actually said, “Hopefully everything.”

“I’m busy,” Wendy said.

She made a fist, digging her nails into her palm. “You said that,” she said. “But Dad was busy, too, and he traded shifts with someone. And Liza’s skipping her water polo practice.”

“Liza sucks at water polo.” Wendy was now painting her nails a dark, vampy red; the smell wafted across the room. “Oh my God, is your life really so pathetic that this is the only thing you have to focus on? She’s
two.
”

She had to admit that Wendy had a point. Gracie attended “school” for ninety minutes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. She was less “graduating” than she was moving from one group of tiny uncoordinated people to another, slightly older group, advancing from the Pineapple Room to the Grapes Room across the hall. But there were so few opportunities left for their family to unite, and this microscopic milestone seemed like such an easy, innocent way to bring all her girls together.

“It would mean a lot to Gracie.”

Wendy snorted. “Mom.
Rugrats
means a lot to her. Her retarded eraser collection means a lot to her. She’s not going to care whether I watch her graduate from a fake school or not. She doesn’t even know what graduation
means
.”

“That’s not the point.”

The real reason, she suspected, that Wendy didn’t want to go: because David had proposed that they all go out for ice cream afterward. It made her at once indignant and devastated, defensive of the life she’d created and hopelessly sad for her daughter, for the pain she was in, for the extremely unbecoming way that pain manifested itself, a way that made her impossible to comfort. What if she hugged her? What would happen if she came into the room and wrapped her arms around Wendy?

“I’m not going,” Wendy said.

“Would you go for me?” It was laughable: Wendy doing something for her was about as likely as her eating a boxful of ice cream sandwiches, but she thought it was worth a shot. Occasionally pockets of humanity shone out of teenagers.

Wendy, predictably, started laughing. She rose from her desk chair and traipsed over to her dresser. “Are we pretending to be in a Lifetime movie now?” she asked. “God, Mom. You can’t be a totally shitty mom for like a thousand years and then suddenly try to guilt me into watching a bunch of toddlers sing Phil Collins songs.”

It was like being slapped. “That’s an incredibly hurtful thing to say.”

Wendy shrugged and she fought the urge to seize her daughter by the shoulders and shake her; she remembered the anger she used to feel when Wendy was a toddler and she longed for that kind of anger now, benign and manageable, though it hadn’t felt to be at the time.

“You’re grounded,” she said, though she would’ve liked to say
What the fuck did I ever do to you?
and
Do you understand how much worse you could have it?

“I already have plans,” Wendy said.

“That’s too bad.”

“Mom, Aaron is
literally
going to be here in less than—”

“You’re grounded, Wendy.” She left it at that, slammed the bedroom door on her daughter’s openmouthed protest. She went into her own room and lay back on the bed, letting tears leak from the corners of her eyes and drip down past her temples and into her ears. Growing up amid chaos had tamed her, she supposed. She didn’t have it in her to yell at her children, usually. She was instinctively submissive around her teenagers; they made her nervous.

Eventually she composed herself, reapplied her mascara and changed first into jeans and then, ultimately, defiantly, back into her sundress. She went downstairs in search of Grace. Her youngest was still always excited to see her, to touch her. It was a cheap form of gratification but she seized it. She heard Wendy’s voice and stopped just before the kitchen doorway. Grace was in Wendy’s arms, her toddler pudge making her sister look even thinner.

“Are you
so
excited to graduate, Goose? Are you the valedic
to
rian?” She bounced Grace a few times and Grace cackled, throwing back her head. “Are you gonna give a
speech
and throw your
hat
and get a di
plo
ma?” With each syllable she bounced Grace again and with each bounce Grace laughed anew. “Are you gonna be the cutest graduate
ever
?”

“Yeah!” Grace said.

“I’m going to see you tomorrow,” Wendy said. Marilyn noticed then that her daughter had her purse slung around her shoulder. “I’m going to see you in the morning and you’re going to tell me
all about it,
okay?”

“Okay,” Grace said.

“Should we put on your gown? Wanna put on your hilarious gown?”

At this, Marilyn stepped into the room. “I’ve got it.”

Wendy slumped visibly at her entrance. “I was just—”

“I told you you’re grounded, Wendy. It’s unclear to me why you look like you’re on your way out.” She wished her voice were more measured. She was the adult; she was supposed to be able to table her pettiness, her hurt. She reached for Grace, who clambered eagerly into her arms.

“I told you I already made plans,” Wendy said.

A horn honked outside.

“Wendy, I swear, if you walk out that door—”

Wendy reeked of perfume; she leaned in to kiss Grace on the cheek, surprisingly tender. Marilyn wanted to nuzzle her, to wipe away some of her eye shadow, to kiss the sweet peach fuzz on her cheekbones. Wendy stepped away. “Good luck, Goose,” she said. “Knock ’em dead.” And she was out the door before Marilyn could counter.

Grace would repeat this phrase,
knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead,
while Marilyn helped her into her tiny polyester ensemble, while she herded the girls into the station wagon and drove them to St. Edmund’s. At the ceremony, she wept as the iridescent glob of gown-clad toddlers swayed around, “the bright blessed day; the dark sacred night.” David put his arm around her, thinking her sadness hormonal nostalgia. And she supposed that was part of it—the simple sweetness of the song, the heartbreaking innocence of her little girl trying to mouth along to the words, graduation cap pushing her bangs down over her eyes; this ascent, suddenly, onstage, from baby to young person. But as she cried against her husband—attracting some attention from fellow parents, a few moms who looked on with bemused empathy and a couple of fathers who just looked concerned—she was thinking, overwhelmingly, not of her youngest daughter but of her eldest.

“Knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead, knock ’em dead,” Grace said in the car.

“Knock it off,” Marilyn snapped, and everyone—she herself—was surprised.

—

Three hours later, after crayon-drawn diplomas and sprinkle-doused ice cream, after David had returned to work and Liza and Violet were, in a rare moment of sisterly generosity, pulling Gracie around the block in the Radio Flyer that had been left in the driveway, Marilyn pushed open the door to the laundry room to find the most horrific scene she’d yet witnessed as a parent: her daughter spread-eagle on top of the washing machine, connected at an invisible point to the lithe Aaron Bhargava, whose muscled buttocks—she had to admit—were a sight to behold.

“Mother of
God,
” she said, and though both bodies stiffened to attention, Wendy met her eyes languidly across the room and held her gaze as Aaron scrambled for his clothes. This composure stilled her further, as did the ladder of her daughter’s rib cage, pale and stark beneath her near-nonexistent breasts. She couldn’t remember quite what she’d said after that. She averted her eyes as they scurried into states of dress, Wendy moving at a more leisurely pace than her companion.

She’d previously been grateful for Aaron Bhargava, her daughter’s on-again/off-again boyfriend. Every few weeks Wendy would bring a different boy home, one who was blonder or broader or more brainless, but Aaron seemed to be a mainstay, a boy who was charming in comparison to the roster of others—“the Hitler Youth,” David called them behind closed doors. Aaron was polite and straitlaced, an athlete (good heavens, those glutes!). He was goofy with Gracie; he’d bonded with David over their shared affinity for the Cubs. He was a boy whom she could envision progressing successfully into adulthood. He’d probably never look her in the eye again.

Because of her own father’s complete denial of her as a sexual person, Marilyn had high hopes of being more engaged with her children, encouraging open lines of communication and providing strings-free contraception, rearing a crop of psychosexually healthy young women who knew what they wanted, knew how to say no, and grew to find sex a point of pleasure rather than confusion or shame. She wanted them to know the comfort of stable relationships and have partners who cared about them and found joy in their bodies. She didn’t want them to end up, as she had, being schooled in the art of fellatio on an abandoned staircase at a state university.

She wanted to be the kind of mother they could come to with questions, with stories, with Mama-is-this-normals. Or so she thought, until her daughters started growing into women and she watched warily as the transformation began: the languor of their long-legged gaits; their pert breasts and the declension of their hips; the loss of baby fat in their faces, how this made their eyes at once wider and wilier. They began to surpass her in height and, it seemed, in knowledge of the outside world; they gave knowing smirks when she asked how their days were and what they were doing at so-and-so’s birthday sleepover. She told herself she was overreacting, that of course this was a traumatic transition for her as a mother, to see her tiny girls sprouting up from the ground like orchids, growing striking and graceful like ponies. Of course it was hard to watch, at times, and tugged cruelly on the parts of her insides that remembered them as newborns, as chubby oblivious toddlers.

After Aaron fled, she went to Wendy’s room and found her daughter sprawled on her stomach on the bed, bikini top tied around her neck and cutoffs baring long tanned legs. From this angle, she seemed like a healthy, glowing girl, a little on the skinny side, but David had been lanky too. And Marilyn stilled for a moment, watching her from the hallway, face buried in a weathered copy of
Frankenstein
—Marilyn’s own copy, she realized, from college. And she remembered, before she thought of the partying, the dieting, and, now, the
fornicating,
the goofy, eager eight-year-old Wendy had been not so long ago, playing at the beach with her little sisters, reading herself to sleep with The Baby-Sitters Club.

“Is this like linger-in-the-doorway day or something?” Wendy asked, startling her. “I know, I’m still grounded. Am I more grounded than before? Is there, like, a grounding gradient?”

“Wendy, you— I had no idea that you—that it had gotten that serious. With Aaron.”

“What serious?” Wendy asked.

“Put the book down.” She inched into the room and sat down in Wendy’s desk chair. “Are you using protection?”

“He pulls out,” Wendy said, and a chill ran down the insides of her arms.

“Oh, lord, sweetheart, that’s not—that is
not
a reliable— Oh, Wendy, have you been—”

“Jesus Christ, Mom, I’m joking. I’m on the Pill,” Wendy said.

“You—what? Since when? How?”

“Just a couple months.”

“Honey, I wish you’d—” This in no way resembled the open communication she’d envisioned herself having with her daughters; she’d pictured genial late-night conversations and meaningful hugs, not this stilted, clumsy navigation after she’d caught her daughter in the act. “I know it’s uncomfortable but one of my primary jobs as your mom is to teach you how to—”

“Have sex? I’m good, but thanks.”

“I didn’t have my mom around to talk to me about this stuff. And you don’t know how much I wish I did.”

“Mom, I’ve got it covered, Jesus,” Wendy said.