The Most Fun We Ever Had (48 page)

There were parts of life in her hometown that tugged at her pleasantly, though—the familiarity of the trees, the muscle memory that kicked in when she walked down the street, and the way she could enter any of the old shops and be transported back decades by the sick-sweet milk of the ice cream parlor or the chlorinated sawdust of the hardware store. She had a distinct memory of herself—one of few not marred by her parents’ emotional detritus—riding on her father’s shoulders, him dipping down in order to enter Mallory’s Hardware without bashing her head against the frame, the jangle of wind chimes, the fishbowl full of Dum Dums.

“Marilyn Connolly? Where are all those babies of yours?”

Now, on the sidewalk outside Mallory’s, she turned to see an old friend of her mother’s from Sundays at St. Catherine–St. Lucy (her father called the cumbersomely named parish St. Mouthfuls Aquinas). She couldn’t for the life of her remember the woman’s name.

“Not babies anymore, I’m afraid,” she said and was surprised to feel real emotion in her throat after she said it.

“They can’t all be in school?”

“Every single one,” she said, forcing a smile.

“What are you doing with yourself, then? Luxuriating?”

She hadn’t stopped to consider her own forward momentum. Gracie was only in kindergarten; she still wore Pull-Ups to bed. Liza required constant chauffeuring and surveillance. But her days were notably quieter, and she hadn’t given much thought to what was next for her.

As an adult, she visited Mallory’s Hardware with no real regularity, but it was where they went when they needed potting soil or birdseed, tools for David’s one-off home improvement projects. It wasn’t that she had any deep-seated attachment to the place, but it held pleasant associations, and sometimes she believed in signs, and there was a bit of money left over from her inheritance from her father, and while there was no such thing as leftover money when you had four children, it seemed only fair that she should be able to spend some of it on herself. She and David would never be able to leave for their children what her parents had left for her, fiscally speaking, but she hoped they would provide a legacy of happiness, or at least the earnest pursuit thereof.

She stopped by David’s office on the way home, shamefully aware of Gillian’s absence—she had recently left the practice to start her own in Andersonville.

“Hey, sweet,” he said, and she remembered what Gillian had said about how his voice changed when he was talking to her. She closed the door behind her and went to sit in his lap behind his desk, cognizant of the ridiculousness of the gesture but wanting to be near him. She wrapped her arms around his neck.

“I’d like to do something kind of radical,” she said.

His hands cupped her waist. “Overthrow the government?”

“I’m serious,” she said.

He furrowed his brow, trying to hide amusement. “Noted.”

“Do you support me?” she asked.

“I don’t know what it is that you’re—”

“Generally, historically speaking. You trust me?”

“More than anyone on the planet, kid.”

She kissed him. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I never said you were.”

“A new chapter, I think, maybe.”

“You going to enlighten me, sweetheart?”

She stood up, held out her hand. “Let’s take a walk.”

—

F
or as long as Wendy could remember, she’d wanted a house with a quiet garage. When she was growing up, the telltale crunch of the garage door had signaled impending doom: her parents’ arrival home from a PTA meeting or dinner or work, which would mean a Chore List or a lecture on how she had ditched school. She wanted a quiet door that swooshed open, a quiet door through which some quiet, humming European car would glide, driven by a man who was just slightly alternative, who smoked and drank but not too much, who had read
Crime and Punishment
and burned incense.

It was a fairly simple request. Quiet garage, interesting life. With Miles she got everything she wanted, though not exactly in the way she imagined. He was, for starters, fifteen years her senior. And this was
fine,
despite the reactions of her family. She was twenty and he was thirty-five. And—okay, her teacher: that was another detail that her parents weren’t crazy about, but that was barely true, an inconvenient fact of no more than an hour’s duration. She met him in a Foundations of Economics class that she was taking in the Continuing Education program at Harold Washington (she saw an ad on the Halsted bus; she shelled out her saved tips and found herself taking two night classes). She’d had to leave home eventually. Violet was immersed in her Connectican liberal-arts situation with the vigor of someone far more purebred. Grace was adorable but maddening, always sneaking into the room when Wendy was watching
The Kids in the Hall.
Liza was a weird, temperamental quasi adult who misused words like
quasi
and didn’t get why that was funny. Wendy had been sick of it all, so she’d left.

She watched Miles come into that first class and quickly turned to the people seated around her, expecting her female classmates to be abuzz. Instead she saw indifference. She glanced up to the front of the room again. There he was, pulling a few books from his bag, running a hand through floppy, graying hair (prematurely, surely), and—ah—shoving a pack of American Spirits deep into one pocket. Why wasn’t anyone else noticing?

She pulled out a legal pad and pushed her hair from her face. It was then that he met her eyes, and Wendy knew, immediately, that he was going to be hers. She couldn’t help but smile, and it horrified her. She was smiling like those terrible people who just couldn’t wait to get to the punch lines of their bad jokes.
Grinning
. Repulsive. But she couldn’t stop. She watched him clear his throat and chew the inside of his bottom lip (a nervous habit, she later learned).

“Hey,” he called, rapping on his desktop with his knuckles. Slowly, the room quieted. He sat on the edge of his sad linoleum desk and shoved his hands in his pockets. She noticed a watch, at once delicate and imposing, on his right wrist. Cartier. She had, after years of entertaining the suburban elite, an eye for luxury. “I’m Miles Eisenberg. I’ll be your instructor for this term.” He suggested that they start out with an icebreaker and his eyes fell, again, on Wendy. “How about you? Would you mind starting us off?”

Wendy was born for such situations and sat up straighter in her chair. “Me? Sure.”

“Great. If you could pick a partner, get us started pairing off. We’re going to interview one of our classmates. Just to make sure we’re all acquainted. Would you choose someone?”

She swallowed, crossed her ankles, and looked up at him. “Can I pick you?”

There were a few titters from neighboring chairs. Miles Eisenberg flushed a deep red.

“I—well, sure. Sure you can. Why doesn’t everyone else partner up and we’ll talk for…” He glanced at the clock. “Five minutes.” It was an uncomfortably long time but she was ecstatic. She went to join her future husband at his desk.

She went home with him that night and they made it to his foyer—he had a
foyer,
a whole brownstone, in fact, in the desirable part of Hyde Park—before things started to get weird. She sat back on her haunches, straddling him.

“If you say one more thing about how young I am, I’m going to leave right now and go find a willing fifteen-year-old boy.” She made him laugh; he reached to brush her hair from her face.

“Wendy, you’re my
student.
”

This had already occurred to her. First, in class, perched on the edge of his desk telling him about her job at McCormick & Schmick’s. And it had occurred to her again a half hour ago when they were making out in his car—an
Audi;
such kismet that she’d settled for a community college instructor only to find out he was secretly loaded.

“Why the
fuck
are you teaching Misfits 101 if you can afford a car that’s worth like a billion times more than all your students’ sold plasma combined?” she’d asked him in the front seat, when they’d risen for air.

“I find it fulfilling,” he said.

There was something unendingly satisfying about this answer: a person doing something because he could, because it brought him joy. In the foyer, pressing herself teasingly against his groin, she thought of him in the front of the classroom, the awkward grace of his presence.

“I’ll drop your class,” she said. “There. I’m not your student anymore.”

He leaned his head back. “This is so fucking surreal, you know that?”

“If you want me to leave, I will,” she said, and she hoped she sounded convincing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A Christmas miracle: Ben appearing on her doorstep in the early afternoon, the hood of his parka pulled up against the gray drizzle. She was so happy to see him that she forgot she was wearing her raccoon boxers and a T-shirt commemorating her middle school graduation.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, stepping aside to let him in.

“What are you
wearing,
Sorenson?” He tugged playfully, once, on her ponytail, and she saw him observe her just-vacated nest on the couch: a knot of blankets and a splayed copy of
The Haunting of Hill House
. He turned to smile at her. “I was sort of hoping you’d be caroling or something. Or dressed as a shepherd.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Hanging out with Ben was one of the only things she enjoyed lately, apart from true-crime documentaries and going for occasional drinks with a dorky flutist named Candace who was her age and worked part-time doing payroll in her office. Her life was mostly a mundane marathon of work and sleep, except when it wasn’t, except when Ben made an appearance.

She wasn’t sure how to take initiative. She’d submitted, with a great deal of pleasure, when he kissed her—precisely two times, both when they were both reasonably tipsy—but she also found herself consumed with worry while it was happening, wondering where she was supposed to put her hands, whether or not her body felt lumpy or subpar beneath
his
hands, how to know if she was overstaying her welcome in his mouth, if he was ready for it to end but she was still going at it. And he hadn’t pushed it beyond those two pleasant but minor encounters. She was astounded by his patience and good nature, by the fact that he kept inviting her out, again and again, by the fact that he was willing to just spend time with her, beers at the Comeback or walks around Berkeley Park, nights that had twice ended with nice-but-awkward kissing.

And now he was in her house, on Christmas, bearing witness to her weird hermitage. “Anyway,” he said, looking again at her Shirley Jackson nest, “you seem busy, but if your day frees up, I was hoping I could take you out.”

“Like, murder me?” she asked. She was not wearing a bra and she hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth and her hair was pulled back into what she hoped resembled a chignon but was in fact just an unwashed ponytail that she’d sort of smushed into an orb with her hand.

“For Christmas,” he said. “It’s bumming me the fuck out that you have this giant adoring Kennedy family across the country and you’re spending Christmas alone wearing raccoon shorts.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “You’re Jewish.”

“So what? I’m not taking you to mass.” He smiled at her. “Unless you’re into that.”

“Let me just change,” she said, but first she threw her arms around him, seized by a force beyond her control. “Thanks, Ben,” she said, releasing him immediately, face aflame. She skipped into her bedroom before she could clock his expression.

They ended up, no surprise, at the Comeback, which was empty save for the usual Irish bartender and a couple of regulars at a dark booth in the corner, people whom Ben had once genially described as having been “rode hard and put away wet.”

“That’s going to be us in like forty-seven years,” she said, a few drinks in, clumsy-tongued and giddy. “Lonely old barflies. What would you be doing today if you weren’t here?”

“Today I had a couple of options. There’s a pickup soccer game at the rec center. A family dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house. A few friends from high school are camping in Lazy Bend. A couple of people from—”

“Jesus Christ, I get it. You’re wildly popular.”

“I meant it as a compliment,” he said, and when she glanced up at him his expression was less impish than she’d been expecting. “I’m having fun with you.”

They hung out a lot, but they both seemed to have agreed that their conversations would not cross certain barriers; it was okay for them to make out a little bit under the striped awning of the head shop next to the Comeback before they went their separate ways; they were allowed to die laughing, sitting by Crystal Springs Lake with their feet in the water, about one of Ben’s high school classmates—who had started a crowdfunding page for her “artistic lifestyle,” asking for $1,900 per month in donations to support her pursuit of rendering, in polymer clay, what she referred to as “fractal goat likenesses”—but the second the laughter started to fade, it had become a point of fact that Grace would make a self-deprecating joke (“I, like goats, lack the necessary degree of self-control that should prevent me from eating tin cans”) and defuse any romantic tension that threatened to overtake their platonic camaraderie.

Ben was awkward too, so she assumed she was doing him a favor, sparing him further unfolding. But now he was complimenting her,
having fun,
being
sincere,
it seemed.

Her phone began to buzz on the table between them.

Ben read from the screen. “I get to witness communication with Mama Sorenson?”

Grace, flustered, declined the call. “Sorry about that.”

“Jesus. Did you just hang up on your mom?”

“I sent it to voicemail.” She cleared her throat. “It’s impolite to answer the phone at the table.”