Will You Won't You Want Me?: A Novel (6 page)

Suddenly, she felt like she’d fallen through a wormhole. She could distinctly recall crafting some story about a girl stuck inside a flip book (what else?). She’d left indelible teeth marks in many a pencil while her mother suggested big words like “imperceptible” and then instructed her to “look them up.” Now she thumbed to the book’s back, finding an About the Author written in her then unpolished hand (clearly ignoring any editorial guidance from the teacher, since the story itself was without mistakes) beside a Polaroid of her ten-year-old self in a flowered sundress and clunky New Balance sneakers.

Marjorie Plum is a riter and artist. She will one day live in a big blue glass house, where she will rite storys for movies and books. She will have two cats named Bimpy and Bop, and a million freinds will visit to do art projects together. She will be very happy. She will never eat cooked carrots, EVER.

Marjorie could hardly bear the innocence.

Next, she excavated a blue leather coin-collecting kit with slots for pennies, their open mouths waiting to be fed. Mac, she thought, would relish this proof of her inner geek.
Mac, Mac, Mac.
Had he cornered the market on contentment? Was that the secret: spending nights tanked, mornings alone drinking high-end espresso, your only guiding principles anonymous sex and a good personal trainer?

Marjorie’s phone finally sprang to life, a flurry of
bings, bongs,
and
whooshes.
Picking it up, she scrolled through: mostly texts from Tina, before and after the insanity.

Massaging her aching head, Marjorie pulled her hair out of its bobby pins. Amid the nausea and upset, she realized with alarm that on some twisted level she’d been disappointed that the messages were not from Mac. She allowed herself for the first time that day (and she hoped the last time
ever
) to think about the night before: how they’d laughed after Vera left, how he’d looked at her after that first kiss, how they’d lain drifting off to sleep, pillow to pillow, his hand warm and comforting on her lower back. What felt right under the cover of night now seemed so misguided.

She shook her head clear and looked around. She had been a child with interests beyond her own complexion and next vodka tonic. Where had she gone
wrong
? (One might point to a certain day in June 2002, when—in a silly maroon cap and gown—she accepted her diploma but never actually left the auditorium.)

As if in response to her question, a photograph fluttered from the messy bookshelf onto the floor: A sixteen-year-old Marjorie sat on a neighborhood stoop with Vera and their other friend Pickles, swigging from a forty-ounce bottle of Olde English malt liquor. Pickles blew smoke rings, in challenge, at the camera. Marjorie’s crimson-smeared lips pushed against the bottle’s mouth. She looked like a child playing dress-up, cheeks full, eyebrows unplucked, free.

Marjorie had distance from most of her teenage memories, which dropped away with her baby fat and abandon. But, for an instant, she was inside the picture, feeling the rough concrete under her thighs, smelling chocolate croissants baking at Zabar’s, nearby. And it was too painful. She dropped the photo, walked to the bed, and lay down on her side, exhausted. Tucking her legs up toward her belly, she pressed her hands together at her cheek, as if in prayer.

6

Marjorie awoke, disoriented and creased, to the smell of garlic sautéing in olive oil.

Her outlook after a rare midday nap—when she rose to find the sun slipping away—was bleak, even on a good day. Now, as reality set in, she was miserable. What was she going to tell her parents? Should she wait until the end of dinner? Until second glasses of wine?
Shit.
She should have come armed with unemployment statistics and complaints about “big business!” (That was a thing, right?) Was it too late to occupy Wall Street? She never did like camping.

She walked to the bathroom and looked at her disheveled self in the mirror. The Tiffany necklace she’d worn since high school graduation had left a red indentation on her chest—a scarlet heart. She borrowed white jeans and a slouchy French blue button-down from her mother’s closet, showered, dressed, then crept out into the living room. The Plums were nowhere in sight. The family feline, Mina the Cat—a Siamese with grace but not poise—leapt off an antique chair. She rubbed her spindly body against Marjorie’s legs and let out a gravely grunt, more smoker’s cough than mew.

“Hi, Goof!” Marjorie scooped up the runt, who began grooming her human pal with her sandpaper tongue. “Okay, okay, okay. Thank you, but that’s enough.” The cat settled against Marjorie’s chest, a purring, kneading fur ball.

Taking a deep breath, Marjorie crossed the spacious living room into the open exposed-brick kitchen: sweet potatoes baked in the oven, a roast chicken cooled in its juices atop the stove, a pot of artichokes steamed.

“Mom?”

“Marjorie?” The voice originated from a small adjoining office, once the maid’s quarters, typical in a classic eight New York apartment. “Is that you, sweetie?”

“Well, I certainly hope so. Otherwise someone’s broken into your house and is kidnapping your cat.”

Mina the Cat, unconcerned, snuggled in closer.

“Coming, coming! Are the sweet potatoes ready?”

“How would a person know that exactly? You know I burn water.”

Barbara Plum appeared from around the corner, looking surprised—as she frequently did—by the delight she felt at seeing her daughter. Marjorie had not been a “miracle baby” per se, but she was a last-minute decision and the couple’s only child. Barbara had never liked babies and thought she wouldn’t want one, but, as she was fond of quipping, her biological clock simply ran slow.

For dinner’s sake, she opened the oven with a checkered mitt before greeting her daughter. “They’d be brown and crispy, almost caramelized.” She had changed from workday clothes into a black T-shirt, yoga pants, and shearling-lined L.L. Bean slippers. Her gray-streaked, chin-length hair, once auburn like Marjorie’s, was tucked behind her ears. “Everyone burns everything until they learn to cook. You have to be bad to get good.”

Just another reason to feel inept, thought Marjorie. Her mother had gone to Fairway Market, bought food, and prepared a no doubt amazing meal—no big deal. Where had Marjorie been at that time? Pulling on underwear in Mac’s doorway? Getting fired?

She stroked Mina the Cat in silence, as her mother lifted the artichoke pot’s lid, pulled off a leaf, and handed it over. Marjorie tasted it and nodded.

Turning off the burner, Barbara faced her in proper greeting, brushing her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “You look pale. Are you feeling okay?”

“Um,” began Marjorie, suddenly undone by her mother’s touch. “Um, um, um.”

Barbara’s forehead crinkled in concern, and it occurred to Marjorie that she might have caused the three jagged lines traveling faintly across her mother’s otherwise youthful face. “What’s wrong, sweetie? Did something happen?”

Through crossed blue eyes, Mina the Cat stared her in the face too.

“I’m okay—” Marjorie’s voice faltered. “I just didn’t have … a very good day.” A single tear rolled down her cheek, trailing off into the dry creek bed of her jaw. She wiped it away. What a disappointment she must be. “It’s nothing.”

As if sensing a coming storm, the cat leapt off of Marjorie and scampered to the safety of the living room.

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“I’m fine.” Marjorie exhaled, a vibrato wheeze. “Only, I think I can’t breathe.”

Barbara put an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and led her to the couch. “It’s okay,” she said. “
Are
you okay?”

That’s when Marjorie’s father arrived. And, from the look on his face, he wished he’d waited a couple minutes. Chipper Plum disliked confrontation; he contributed opinions—gruffly—only on politics and TV. Years before, he’d perfected the art of zoning out when tension arose between his two favorite women, answering “
What?
” with genuine confusion when asked to take sides. Now, with his long limbs and pale skin, he stood by, evoking a birch tree. But there was no hope of escaping undetected. Instead, he adjusted his round wire-rimmed glasses and ambled to Marjorie’s unoccupied side. “What happened?”

Marjorie took another shaky, accordion breath. She needed to offer an explanation, lest her parents imagine something catastrophic. Anything but the truth would do. “It’s the Middle East,” she tried, covering her eyes with her palm, “It’s just so messed up over there.”

“Over where exactly?” asked her father doubtfully.

“You know. There! Syria, Egypt, Morocco … whatever.”

The Plums exchanged a look.

“If it’s any consolation, sweetie, Morocco is in an unrelated part of Africa,” said her mother. “They really did a horrible job of teaching geography at that school of yours.”

“Well, it’s everything. I mean, what’s wrong with this world? Did you know that they might cancel
Parenthood
? Sometimes I just want to give up.”

“You’re having suicidal thoughts because of a TV show?” said Barbara.

“It’s not like it’s
Cheers,
” said Chipper seriously, whose deep love of television history made the complaint more plausible.

“Oh, forget it,” Marjorie wheezed. “I can’t even lie effectively! I got fired. That’s why I’m upset … fired, fired,
fired.
”

“Okay, sweetie. Stay calm.” Barbara pulled a travel-size Kleenex pouch from her purse and offered a tissue.

“Mom. I’m not crying! I’m hyperventilating!”

“Right. Remember what I learned at that seminar about anchoring yourself in the present when you feel anxiety? Look around the room and identify what’s physically here to stop the emotional spiral.”

“Mom!”

“Just try it!”

As a life coach, Barbara Plum stayed abreast of current self-improvement trends. (She did not, however, adopt New Age fashion or beauty principles—never a tribal pattern or patchouli-scent did infiltrate.) Long before, she had audited a Mindful Meditation class, which framed her approach not only to unhinged clients but also to her daughter, who had begun having panic attacks thanks to Brianne’s flagellation. Marjorie resisted these strategies, mostly because her mother suggested them.

“C’mon. We’ll do it together. There is the oak farm table with a splintered slat protruding from one leg. There’s the black leather Austrian Thonet chair with scratches from Mina’s nails down one side, and the Kilim Persian rug with … Oh Christ, did the cat throw up over there?” She turned to face her husband. “Chipper, our living room is a mess! We need to get
everything
fixed!”

Marjorie sighed. “I think we’ve strayed off topic.”

Chipper scratched his head. An anxiety attack wasn’t terrible—not by comparison to a fight. Still, raw emotion was not his forte, having grown up in Darien, Connecticut, where people had the courtesy to use restraint. Residents wore Docksider boat shoes, blue button-downs, and pleated khakis, and had the inbred good sense not to sob or shout in public, except on rare occasions when they mixed white wine spritzers with the wrong prescription pills.

Chipper’s family was unique in that they weren’t Episcopalian or even Protestant. His people were
Mayflower
Jews with nicknames like Fifi and Mims, who decorated a suspiciously large and cone-shaped pine “Hanukkah bush” in blue and white lights every holiday season. Rumor had it that Plum had been changed from Plumberg by Chipper’s great-grandfather “
Just call me Mike!
” Moishe, though the family retold a vague story (accompanied by dismissive hand gestures) about immigration through Ellis Island. “How fortunate,” one dense neighbor commented to Chipper’s mother, Judy, “that your name was changed for the better and not worse! Where did your family emigrate from? Dublin? I much prefer Plum to O’Plummer!”

Having overheard this exchange at ten years old and having a general, albeit unclear, idea that dishonesty was at play, Chipper henceforth referred to his mother as “Mrs. O’Plummer,” which drove her nuts. (She may not have wanted to advertise her Judaism, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be Irish!) And, as an adult, he felt a connection—not the irritation of a phantom limb—when he glimpsed his missing foreskin, solidarity instead of self-loathing in the face of anti-Semitism, pride not envy when he read the works of great Jewish scholars and intellectuals like Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber, literary figures like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. He worshipped Sandy Koufax, lusted after Lauren Bacall and, later, modeled his humor after Lenny Bruce. He
felt
Jewish.

In his teens, he joined the 1960s revolution and became his version of a hippie (all politics; no suede fringe), though he grew his straight blondish hair—which seemed to confirm his family’s passing lie—out to his shoulders. It was not until the late 1970s, when he was twenty-nine years old and still eschewing bell-bottoms, that he met Mrs. O’Plummer’s worst nightmare: his Brooklyn College teaching assistant, Barbara Davida Schwartz (Marjorie’s mother). He fell in love and, within weeks, was learning hands-on about his own heritage from her deeply Jewish family: “Try the gefilte fish! It’s a vehicle for horseradish!”

Ultimately, Chipper and Barbara took their religion lightly, hitting synagogue only on high holidays (
“L’Shana Tova!”
), and stocking the fridge with sour dill pickles. Marjorie was bat mitzvahed (more gifts of sterling silver Tiffany jewelry). And her Grandma Plum did attend, though she declined to don a doily on her graying head during the service.

Chipper rebelled in another way too: Instead of studying law like his older brothers, he became an academic, a media studies professor. His infatuation with radio, film, TV, and other “vast wastelands” had been fostered every time his parents felt lazy and plopped him in front of the boob tube as a child. “Lucille Ball was my babysitter,” Chipper was fond of saying, though he mostly watched precursors to modern reality shows, like
Queen for a Day,
on which women spun sob stories in exchange for sympathy and
fabulous!
prizes.