Modern Lovers

MARY ANN O’CONNELL REAL ESTATE

New Listing

Gorgeous 5-Bedroom Victorian Showstopper in Prime Ditmas Park. Many original details including pocket doors, moldings, intricately carved grand staircase. Kitchen updated, new roof. WBFP. Two-car garage. Gracious living in the heart of the neighborhood, close to shopping and fine dining on Cortelyou Road, close to trains. A Must See!

One

In June, the book club was at Zoe’s house, which meant that Elizabeth had to carry her heavy ceramic bowl of spinach salad with walnuts and bits of crumbled goat cheese a grand total of half a block. She didn’t even have to cross a street. None of the dozen women in the group had to travel far, that was the point. It was hard enough to coordinate schedules and read a novel (though, only half the group ever finished anything) without asking people to get on the subway. Make plans with your real friends on your own time, drive your car across the borough to have dinner if you want to, but this was the neighborhood. This was easy. It was the last meeting before the annual summer hiatus. Elizabeth had sold houses to six of the twelve. She had a vested interest in keeping them happy, though, in truth, it was also good when people gave up on Brooklyn and decided to move to the suburbs or back to wherever they came from, because then she got a double commission. Elizabeth liked her job.

Of course, even if the rest of the book club was composed of neighbors who might not otherwise have crossed paths, she and Zoe were different. They were old friends — best friends, really, though Elizabeth might not say that in front of Zoe for fear that she would laugh at the phrase for being juvenile. They’d lived together after college way back in the Stone Age in this very same house, sharing the rambling Victorian with Elizabeth’s boyfriend (now husband) and two guys who had lived in their co-op at Oberlin. It was always nice to carry a big bowl of something homemade over to Zoe’s house, because it felt like being back in that potluck-rich, money-poor twilight zone known as one’s twenties. Ditmas Park was a hundred miles from Manhattan (in reality, seven), a tiny little cluster of Victorian houses that could have existed anywhere in the United States, with Prospect Park’s parade grounds to the north and Brooklyn College to the south. Their other friends from school were moving into walk-up apartments in the East Village or into beautiful brownstones in Park Slope, on the other side of the vast green park, but the three of them had fallen in love with the idea of a house house, and so there they were, sandwiched between old Italian ladies and the projects.

When their lease was up, Zoe’s parents — an African-American couple who’d made their tidy fortune as a disco duo — bought the place for her. Seven bedrooms, three baths, center hall, driveway, garage — it cost a hundred and fifty grand. The moldy carpet and the layers of lead paint were free. Elizabeth and Andrew weren’t married yet, let alone sharing a bank account, and so they sent their separate rent checks to Zoe’s parents back in Los Angeles. Zoe had borrowed more money to fix it up over the years, but the mortgage was paid. Elizabeth and Andrew moved a few blocks over for a while, all the way to Stratford, and then, when their son Harry was four, a dozen years ago, bought a house three doors down. Zoe’s house was now worth $2 million, maybe more. Elizabeth felt a little zip up her spine thinking about it. Neither Elizabeth nor Zoe thought they’d still be in the neighborhood so many years later, but it had never been the right time to leave.

Elizabeth walked up the steps to the wide porch and peered in the window. She was the first to arrive, as usual. The dining room was ready, the table set. Zoe pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in each hand. She exhaled upward, trying in vain to blow a lone curl out of her eye. Zoe was wearing tight blue jeans and a threadbare camisole, with a complicated pile of necklaces clacking against her chest. It didn’t matter if Elizabeth went shopping with Zoe, to the consignment shops she frequented and to the small, precious boutiques she liked, nothing ever fit Elizabeth the way it fit Zoe; she was as preternaturally cool at forty-five as she’d been at eighteen. Elizabeth knocked on the window and then waved when Zoe looked up and smiled. Zoe gestured for her to come in, her thin fingers waggling in the air. “Door’s open!”

The house smelled like basil and fresh tomatoes. Elizabeth let the door shut heavily behind her, and set her salad down on the table. She shook out her wrists, which crackled like fireworks. Zoe walked around the table and kissed her on the cheek.

“How was your day, sweets?”

Elizabeth rolled her head sideways, from one side to the other. Something clicked. “You know,” she said. “Like that. What can I do?” She looked around the room. “Do you need me to go home and get anything?” Even in Ditmas Park, a twelve-person dinner party was a lot for a host. Usually only a small quorum of the book club was able to come, and so the hosts could scrape by and cram everyone around their normal dining-room table, but every so often (especially just before the summer) all the women would happily RSVP and, depending on who was hosting, the group would have to carry extra folding chairs down the street in order to avoid sitting on the floor like pouting children on Thanksgiving.

Overhead, there was the sound of something heavy falling to the floor—thump—and then twice more—thump, thump.

“Ruby!” Zoe yelled, craning her chin skyward. “Come say hello to Elizabeth!”

There was a muffled reply.

“It’s fine,” Elizabeth said. “Where’s Jane, at the restaurant?” She opened her mouth to say more — she had actual news, news not fit for their neighbors’ ears, and wanted to get to it before the doorbell rang.

“We have a new sous, and I’m sure Jane is standing over his shoulder like a goddamn drill sergeant. You know how it is in the beginning, always drama. Ruby! Come down here and say hello before everyone you don’t like shows up!” Zoe rubbed her eyebrows with her fingertips. “I just signed her up for that SAT prep course you told me about, and she’s pissed.” She made a noise like a torpedo.

A door slammed upstairs, and then there were feet on the stairs, the nimble herd of elephants contained by a single teenage body. Ruby stopped abruptly on the bottom step. In the weeks since Elizabeth had seen her last, Ruby’s hair had gone from a sea-glass green to a purplish black, and was wound up in a round bun on the very top of her head.

“Hey, Rube,” Elizabeth said. “What’s shaking?”

Ruby picked off some nail polish. “Nothing.” Unlike Zoe’s, Ruby’s face was round and soft, but they had the same eyes, slightly narrow, the sort of eyes that were made to look askance. Ruby’s skin was three shades lighter than Zoe’s, with Jane’s pale green eyes, and she would have been intimidating even without the purple hair and the surly expression.

“Graduation is Thursday, right? What are you going to wear?”

Ruby made a little noise like a kazoo, her mother’s torpedo in reverse. It was funny, what parents did to their children. Even when they weren’t trying, everything got reproduced. She looked toward her mother, who nodded. “I really want to wear one of Mum’s dresses. The white one, you know?”

Elizabeth did know. Zoe was not only good at buying clothes, she was good at keeping them. It was lucky that she’d married a woman who wore the same blue jeans every day and a small rotation of button-down shirts, because there was no room in their giant walk-in closet for anything else. The white dress was a relic from their youth: a crocheted bodice that was more negative space than material, with a skirt made of dangling strings that started just below decent. It was the kind of dress one wore over a bathing suit while on vacation in Mexico in 1973. It had originally belonged to Zoe’s mother, which meant it probably had quaalude dust ground deep into the seams. Before she met the Bennetts, Elizabeth had never met parents that had the kind of life that made their children both proud and embarrassed simultaneously. Cool was good, but only up to a point.

“Wow,” Elizabeth said.

“It’s still under debate,” Zoe said.

Ruby rolled her eyes, and jumped down the final step just as the doorbell rang. Before their neighbors began to pour in, each one holding a dish covered with tinfoil, Ruby had streaked in and out of the kitchen and was running back upstairs with a plateful of food.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” three women trilled in union.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” Elizabeth and Zoe trilled back, their voices performing the song of their day, the enthusiastic cry of the all-female dinner party.

Two

When Elizabeth was out at night, it was up to Andrew to feed Harry. Unlike most teenage boys, who would eat cardboard if it was topped with pepperoni, Harry had a delicate appetite. He ate around things like a toddler, piling up the rejects on one side of his plate: no olives, no avocado unless it was in guacamole, no cream cheese, no kale, no sesame seeds, no tomatoes except in tomato sauce. The list was long and evolved regularly — it seemed to Andrew that whenever he cooked, something new had been added. He pulled open the fridge and stared inside. Iggy Pop, their skinny calico, rubbed his body against Andrew’s shoe.

“Harry,” he said, turning his head toward the living room. He could hear the repetitive beeps and bloops of Harry’s favorite video game, Secret Agent. The game starred a frog in a trench coat and deerstalker cap and, as far as Andrew could tell, was made for eight-year-olds. Harry had zero interest in Call of Duty, or Grand Theft Auto, or any of the myriad other games that celebrated murder and prostitutes, and for that Andrew was glad. Better to have a son who liked frogs than automatic machine guns. Andrew himself had played gentle video games and read three-inch-thick fantasy novels about mice. They were two of a kind, he and Harry, soft on the inside, like underbaked cookies. It was what people always wanted, wasn’t it?

“Harry,” Andrew said again. He closed the refrigerator door and stood quietly. “Harry.”

The game noises stopped. “I heard you the first time, Dad,” Harry said. “Let’s just order a pizza.”

“You sure?”

“Why not?” The noises started again. Andrew pulled out his phone and walked through the doorway into the living room, Iggy following behind. It was still light outside, and for a moment Andrew felt sad, looking at his gentle son, so happy to stay indoors on a beautiful June evening. No solo penalty kicks in the park, no pickup basketball, not even any contraband cigarettes on a secluded bench. Harry looked pale — Harry was pale. He was wearing a snug black sweatshirt with the zipper pulled all the way up to his neck. “Want to play?” Harry asked. He looked up, his brown eyes shimmering, and then Andrew put his sadness away in a deep, deep pocket and sat down next to his son. Iggy Pop jumped onto his lap and curled up. The frog winked, and the music began.

It was someone’s job to write that music — a tinny little melody that played in the background on repeat. It was someone’s job to write the music that played behind actors’ dramatic pauses on soap operas. Cell-phone ringtones. Someone was getting paid, maybe even cashing royalty checks. Andrew had never been a very good bass player, but he had always been good at coming up with melodies. It was probably the only thing he’d ever really loved doing, professionally speaking, even though it was never exactly professional. Still, whenever he was feeling low, which was more often than not, Andrew would think about his own royalty checks, his and Elizabeth’s, and how they were paying for most of Harry’s tuition at private school, and it would cheer him up a little. There was always someone doing better, especially in New York City, but fuck it, at least he’d done something in his life, something that would be remembered.

“Dad,” Harry said, “it’s your turn. I’ll order the pizza.” Harry pushed the hair out of his eyes and blinked like a baby mole seeing sunlight for the first time. He was such a good kid, such a good kid. They talked about it all the time, ever since he was a baby — Andrew and Elizabeth would huddle together in bed, cozy and content, the baby monitor between them, listening to his coos and hiccups. He’d always been easy. Their friends all warned them that the next kid would be the doozy, here comes trouble, but the next one never came. And so it was just the three of them, steady as anything. At first people would ask why they’d had only one child, but the longer you went, the more people assumed it was by choice, and let it go. Even their parents had stopped asking by the time Harry was six. And who needed more grandchildren when Harry would climb into his grandmother’s arms and kiss her on the cheek without being prompted? Who could ask for more than that? Some people in the neighborhood — not really their friends, just people they waved at when they were taking out the trash — had three or four kids, and it always struck Andrew like something out of the last century, where you needed as many small hands as possible to milk the cows and hoe the fields. What did you do with that many kids in Brooklyn? Were their genes that good, that important to the human race? He understood when it was for religious reasons — the Lubavitchers up in Williamsburg, the Mormons in Utah — they were in it for the endgame. But he and Elizabeth? They were just doing their best, and their best was Harry, sweet Harry. Andrew half wanted him to bomb the SATs and live at home forever. But of course he’d ace those, too, thanks to the purple prose of the novels he loved. Even when he was a baby, Harry had loved multisyllabic words—“this is exTRAWdinary,” he said before he was two, about the fountain at Grand Army Plaza, which shot jets of water high into the air.

“Love you, buddy,” Andrew said.

Harry was staring into his phone, pushing buttons. “Ordered.”

Three

Ruby hated the fucking SAT as much as she fucking hated high school. Both were examples of the patriarchy’s insistence on male domination and total sexist bullshit like that. Whitman was a good school by Brooklyn private-school standards — not the best, but not the worst. Maybe one kid would get into an Ivy, but maybe not. Most people would go to places like Marist or Syracuse or Purchase. But not Ruby. Ruby was taking a gap year. That was the polite way to put it. The truth was that she had gotten into exactly none of the five schools she’d applied to, and her falsely optimistic mothers were convinced it was her SAT scores that were to blame, not her bad attitude or bad grades or shitty essays about being a black Jew with lesbian moms (the essay that everyone incorrectly assumed she would write), and so she was going to have to take another prep course, the summer after her senior year. Who even did that? Nobody did that. It was a joke, and she was the punch line.

Her phone vibrated on the bed: MEET ME AT PLAYGRND AT 10? Dust was nineteen, with a chipped front tooth and a shaved head. He was one of the church kids, the tiny gang of skaters that spent all day kick-flipping off the church steps right across the street from Whitman. None of them went to school, as far as Ruby could tell, not even the ones who were under eighteen. The Whitman security guards sometimes chased them away, but they weren’t doing anything illegal, and so it never lasted long. Dust was their leader. He wore jeans that were the perfect size — not so tight they looked girly, but not too baggy so they looked like somebody’s dad’s. Dust had muscles that looked like they had occurred naturally, like he was a 1950s greaser who spent a lot of time working in a garage. Everything Ruby knew about the 1950s was from Grease and Rebel Without a Cause. Basically, being a teenager was the worst for everyone, unless you were John Travolta, who was obviously twenty-nine years old, and so it didn’t matter anyway. The only kids at Whitman who ever spontaneously burst into song were the musical-theater geeks, and Ruby hated them as much as she hated the athletes, who were even more pathetic given that Whitman barely had a gymnasium. Then there were the regular geeks, who did nothing but study for tests, and then there were the do-gooders, who were always trying to get you to sign their petition to kill the whales or save Ebola or whatever. The church kids were really her only hope, sexually.

CAN’T, she wrote back. MY MUM’S BOOK CLUB IS HERE. PARTY TIME/SHOOT ME.

IT’S COOL, he texted, and then nothing.

Calling her mother “Mum” wasn’t a British affectation — there were two of them, Mom and Mum, and so she had to call them different things. Anyway, it didn’t matter about the book club. That was only the most recent excuse. Ruby wouldn’t have gone to the playground regardless. She’d broken up with Dust three weeks ago, or at least she thought she had. Maybe she wasn’t clear. There was the time they went to Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, right by school, and she wouldn’t let him pay for her french fries, and then two days later, she was leaving school and Dust was across the street on the church steps and she pretended not to see him and walked straight to the subway instead of letting him walk her into the park, where they would do as much fooling around as one could possibly do in public, which was a lot.

The thing about Dust was that he wasn’t smart or interesting except if you were counting skateboarding or oral sex. For a few months, his messed-up teeth and his bristly head and his crooked smile were enough, but after the effects of those wore off, they were left talking about American Idol (which they both hated) and the Fast and the Furious franchise (which Ruby hadn’t seen). The problem with Ruby’s moms was that their restaurant was three blocks from their house, and so you never knew when one of them was going to be home. What Ruby knew for sure was that she didn’t want them to meet Dust, because them talking to each other would be like trying to get a dog to speak Chinese. Dust was not made for parents. He was made for street corners and nuggets of hash, and Ruby was over it. She slumped off the bed and onto the floor and crawled over to her record player. While her mom was no one’s idea of cool, with her kitchen clogs and her barbershop haircut, Ruby’s mum had her moments. The record player had been her mum’s in college, in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, but now it was Ruby’s, and it was her most prized possession. If Dust had been worth her time, he would have known all the bands she loved to play — the Raincoats, X-Ray Spex, Bad Brains — but he only listened to dubstep, which was obviously one of humanity’s greatest atrocities.

Ruby pushed through the pile of records on the floor, spreading them out like tarot cards, until she found what she was looking for. Aretha Franklin, Lady Soul. Aretha had never had a zine and probably hadn’t pierced her own nose, but she was a fucking badass anyway. Ruby put on side A, waited for the music to start, and then lay back on the rug and stared at the ceiling. From the floor, she could hear the book club starting to cackle more. Honestly, it was like no one over thirty had ever gotten drunk before, and they were always doing it for the first time. Pretty soon they’d start talking about their spouses and their kids and her mum would whisper when she said anything, but Ruby could always hear her, could always hear everything — didn’t parents get that? That even when you were on the other side of the house, your children could hear you, because they had hearing like a fucking bat and you only thought you were whispering? The summer already sucked, and it hadn’t even started yet.

Four

It was almost eleven, and the only women still at the party were all in the kitchen helping Zoe clean up. Allison and Ronna were both new to the neighborhood and eager for details. Elizabeth had sold them both their places — a lovely old fixer-upper on Westminster between Cortelyou and Ditmas for Allison, and an apartment on Beverly and Ocean for Ronna. They were in their thirties, married, no kids. But trying! Young women loved to tack that on, especially to real-estate agents. Elizabeth had been a therapist, a marriage counselor, a psychic, a guru, all in the name of a quicker closing. There were things you weren’t legally permitted to discuss — the strength of the local public schools, the racial breakdown of the area, whether or not anyone had died there. But that never stopped people from trying. They were so excited to meet each other, too, giggling about looking for faucets and wallpaper hangers. Elizabeth kissed them both on the cheek and sent them off to inspect each other’s kitchens.

Zoe stood at the sink, her wet hands sending sprinkles of soapy water across the floor every few minutes. “You got me,” Elizabeth said, brushing some water off her arm.

“My deepest apologies,” Zoe said. “Well, that was nice. What was the next book, again?”

“Wuthering Heights! Chosen by Josephine, who has never finished a book in her life! I wonder if she thinks she’ll just rent the movie. In fact, I’m sure that’s exactly why. There’s probably some new version of it that she saw on her HBO Go, and so now she’s going to pretend to read the book. She’s going to spend the whole night talking about how it takes place on some beautiful Caribbean island.” Elizabeth picked up the stack of clean plates and put them back in the cupboard.

“You really don’t have to help, Lizzy,” Zoe said.

“Oh, come on. That’s what you say to people when you want them to leave.”

Zoe laughed. Elizabeth turned around and leaned against the counter. “There actually was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Zoe turned off the sink. “Oh, yeah? Me, too. You first.”

“Someone is making a movie about Lydia, and they need the rights. Our rights. To the song, and to us. Someone famous is going to write it, someone good, I forget their name.” Elizabeth made an excited face, and then gritted her teeth. In ancient times, before Brooklyn and before kids, Elizabeth and Andrew and Zoe had been in a band, and in addition to playing many, many shows in dingy basements and recording their songs into a pink plastic cassette deck, they had sold exactly one of their songs, “Mistress of Myself,” to their friend and former bandmate Lydia Greenbaum, who then dropped out of college, dropped the Greenbaum, got signed by a record label, released the song, became famous, had her hair and clothes copied by all the kids on St. Marks Place, recorded the sound track to an experimental film about a woman who lost her right hand in a factory accident (Zero Days Since), shaved her head, became a Buddhist, and then dropped dead of an overdose at twenty-seven, just like Janis and Jimi and Kurt. Each year, on the anniversary of her death, “Mistress of Myself” played nonstop on every college radio station in the country. It was the twentieth anniversary, and Elizabeth had been expecting something. The call had come in that morning. They’d been asked before, but never by people with actual money.

“What?!” Zoe grabbed Elizabeth’s elbows. “Are you fucking kidding me? How much do we get paid?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet, but Andrew wants to say no. Technically, they need all of us to sign our life rights, and they need us to agree to have the song in the movie….”

“And they can’t make a movie about Lydia without the song.”

“Nope. I mean, they could, but what would be the point?”

“Hmm,” Zoe said. “Who could play her? Who would play you? Who would play me? Oh, my God, Ruby, obviously! Oh, my God, it’s too perfect, I love it, yes, give me the forms, I say yes.”

Elizabeth waved her hands in the air. “Oh, I think that part doesn’t matter as much. I’ll have the woman send you the thing to sign. I’m pretty sure they’ll just make us into one giant composite, like Random College Friends One, Two, and Three. But Andrew’s never going to agree to give them the song. It stirs it all up for him, you know?” For the past ten years, Elizabeth and Andrew had quietly been writing songs again, just the two of them, mostly during the afternoons when Harry was in school if they didn’t have to work. They sat on two chairs in the garage and played. Elizabeth couldn’t tell if their new songs were any good, but she enjoyed singing with her husband, the way intimate bodies could be feet apart and still feel like you were touching. No one else knew. Andrew wanted it that way. “Anyway,” she said, “what was your news?” There was half a pecan pie on the counter, brought over by Josephine, who baked it every month, even though it was totally unseasonable and therefore largely ignored by the book club. Elizabeth picked at it with her fingers.

“Oh,” Zoe said. “We’re talking about getting a divorce again.” She shook her head. “It seems kind of like it might really happen this time, I don’t know.” Bingo, Zoe’s ancient golden retriever, lumbered out of his hiding place under the dining-room table and leaned sympathetically against her shins. Zoe squatted down and hugged him. “I’m hugging a dog,” she said, and started to cry.

“Honey!” Elizabeth said, and dropped to her knees. She threw her arms around Zoe, the dog wedged in between them. There were good questions to ask and bad questions. One was never supposed to ask why, or to appear either surprised or the reverse, which was actually more offensive. “Oh, no! What’s going on? I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Does Ruby know? Are you talking about selling the house?”

Zoe raised her head from Bingo’s back, a dog hair stuck to her wet cheek. “Me, too. Yes. No. Well, maybe. Probably. And I think so? Oh, God.”

Elizabeth petted Zoe’s head and plucked the dog hair from her face. “I’ll help. With any of it. You know that, right?” Zoe nodded, her lower lip puffing out in a pout, its pale pink inside the color of a seashell.

Five

Whitman Academy was a small private school, with only sixty-eight students in the senior class. Ruby was one of twelve students of color in her grade: three African-American, four Latino, five Asian. It was pathetic and depressing, but that was private school in New York City. Zoe felt conflicted about sending Ruby — she wanted her daughter to be surrounded by a diverse student body, but all the private schools were just as bad, the public schools in their zone were appalling, and Whitman was the closest to home. It was what it was.

The graduation ceremony took place after dark, which made the working parents happy, and made the students feel like it was more of a red-carpet affair, as if such measures were to be encouraged. The school was on Prospect Park West, which meant that it was always impossible to find a parking spot, but Ruby had worn heels, and refused to walk from the subway. They should have taken a taxi, but it was raining, and trying to get a cab in the rain in Ditmas Park was like trying to hail a polar bear. It just wasn’t going to happen. Zoe sat in the driver’s seat of their Honda, idling in the driveway. They had twenty minutes to get there. Jane had taken the night off, which meant that she was probably standing in their kitchen instead of the restaurant’s kitchen, on the phone ordering twenty pounds of heirloom tomatoes from a purveyor in New Jersey, chewing on the end of a pen until it looked like the gnarled root of a tree. The radio was tuned to NPR, which Zoe wasn’t in the mood for, and so she hit the button to find the next station, and the next. She stopped when she heard the chorus to “Mistress of Myself” and Lydia’s signature shrieking. It was a good song, sure, but really it had just been the right song at the right time, sung by the right mouth.

At Oberlin, Lydia hadn’t been anything special. She was a little doughy, like most of them, a few new layers of fat added by the cafeteria food, the soft-serve ice cream and Tater Tots they ate at every meal. They’d all been in the same dorm, South, which was across campus from where most of the freshmen lived, but housed lots of conservatory students. When her parents dropped her off, Zoe had watched a girl and her mother maneuver a full-size harp up the staircase. But Zoe and her friends weren’t musicians, not compared to the conservatory kids, all prodigies who’d been chained to their instruments since birth. Zoe could play piano and guitar, and Elizabeth had been taking guitar lessons since she was ten. Andrew was a rudimentary bass player at best. Lydia was supposed to be their drummer, but she didn’t have a drum set, just a pair of sticks that she would bang against whatever was closest. Back then, her hair was brown and wavy, like the rest of the girls’ from Scarsdale. Of course, once Lydia became Lydia, she wasn’t from Scarsdale anymore.

Zoe heard some shouting from the house. She shut the radio off and rolled down the window. Ruby and Jane both hustled out the front door, Ruby in the white fringe dress and Jane in a mask of disbelief.

“Are you kidding me with this?” Jane said, poking her head into the passenger-side window.

“Mom, God, it’s just a dress,” Ruby said, slumping into the backseat.

“That is definitely not an entire dress.” Jane let herself collapse into the seat, her heavy body rocking the small car as she pulled the door shut and buckled her seat belt. She spoke without turning to face Zoe. “I can’t believe you agreed to let her wear that.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Ruby said.

Jane kept staring straight ahead. “Let’s just go. I can’t even.”

Zoe put the car in reverse. She caught Ruby’s eye in the rearview mirror. “We’re so excited for you, sweetie.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. It was an involuntary gesture, like breathing, an automatic response to whatever her mothers said. “I can tell,” she said. “You could always just drop me off with Chloe’s family, they’re going to the River Café for dinner.”

“The River Café isn’t what it used to be,” Jane said. “Those stupid Brooklyn Bridge chocolate cakes. It’s for tourists.”

“I know,” Ruby said, and turned to look out the window.

• • •

When they got to the school, Jane hopped out and switched places with Zoe — someone was going to have to circle the block to find a parking spot, and they both knew that Ruby would have a meltdown if she had to drive past her school three hundred times before going inside. All the seniors and their families were milling around in front and in the lobby, everyone dressed like they were going to the prom. Whitman didn’t have a prom, of course — that was too square, too suburban. Instead they had a party with the entire faculty in a converted loft space in Dumbo. Zoe was waiting for the e-mail to go out that the students and teachers had been caught having a group orgy in the bathroom. Most of the teachers looked like they could have been students, maybe held back a couple of grades. The young men almost always grew scruffy little beards or goatees, probably just to prove that they could. Ruby had skipped the party, “Because eww,” which Zoe secretly agreed with.

Zoe let Ruby lead her through the crowd in front of the school, weaving in and out. She nodded and waved to the parents she knew, and squeezed the arms of some of the kids. It was a small school, and Ruby had gone there since she was five, and so Zoe knew everyone, whether or not Ruby deigned to speak to them. Ruby’s intermittently loving and cruel cluster of girlfriends — Chloe, Paloma, Anika, and Sarah — were already inside, posing for pictures with their parents and siblings, and Zoe knew that Ruby was likely to ditch her and Jane for her friends as soon as possible. Impending-graduation hormones made regular puberty hormones seem like nothing — Ruby had been a lunatic for months. They went inside through the heavy front door, and Zoe saw Elizabeth and Harry across the lobby.

“Hey, wait,” she said to Ruby, pointing. Ruby reluctantly slowed to a stop and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Ruby! Congratulations, sweetheart!” Elizabeth, bless her, couldn’t be stymied by Ruby’s death stares. “That dress looks phenomenal on you. Yowza!” Zoe watched her daughter soften. She even managed to squeeze out a tiny smile.

“Thanks,” Ruby said. “I mean, it’s just high school. It’s really not that big of a deal. It’s really only a big deal if you don’t graduate from high school, you know what I mean? Like, I also learned how to walk and to use a fork.”

Harry chuckled. “I can tie my shoes,” he said. He kicked his toe into the floor for emphasis, and also to avoid looking Ruby in the eye. Even though Harry and Ruby had grown up together, had lived three houses apart for most of their lives, things had changed in the last few years. When they were children, they’d played together, taken baths together, built forts and choreographed dances. Now Harry could barely speak in front of her. Mostly, when he was standing next to Ruby, all Harry could think about was a photograph that his mother had on her dresser of him and Ruby when he was one and she was two, both of them standing naked in the front yard. His penis looked so tiny, like the stubbiest baby carrot in the bag, the one you might not even eat because you were afraid it was actually a toe.

“Exactly.” Ruby scanned the room, looking over Harry’s head. “Oh, shit,” she said. Zoe, Elizabeth, and Harry all turned to follow her gaze. “Mum, stay here.” She hustled across the room, elbowing people out of her way.

Zoe craned her neck — the room was getting more and more crowded. “Who is she talking to, Harr?”

“It’s Dust,” Harry said, and immediately regretted it. He’d seen them kissing in front of school, and on their street after dark, standing in between parked cars. Dust was obviously not the kind of boy a girl would bring home to her parents, even if her parents were cool, like Ruby’s. There would be too many questions. Dust was the kind of guy, if life had been a sitcom, that Ruby’s moms would have tried to adopt, because it turned out he couldn’t read and had been living on a park bench since he was twelve. But in real life, Dust was just kind of scary, and Ruby should have known better. Harry had lots of good ideas about who she should go out with instead, and they were all him.

“Dust?” Elizabeth asked.

“Is that a name? Does he go to school here? How old is he?” Zoe said.

“What?” Harry said, waving his hand by his ear. It was getting loud in the school’s lobby, and he was sweating. It was better to pretend he hadn’t heard. Ruby was going to be so mad at him. Harry felt a deep, sudden longing for the indifference she’d shown him since the ninth grade.

The head of the high school came out and shouted for the seniors to get lined up, and the crowd began to disperse. Excited parents took photos of each other with their phones, and a few with real cameras. Teachers wore ties and shook hands. Elizabeth cupped Harry’s shoulder. “I’m sure it’s fine. Should we go get seats? Zo, you want me to save you and Jane spots?”

“Hang on,” Zoe said. Now that people were filing into the auditorium, it was a straight shot through the lobby to the door, where Ruby was having an argument with the boy, who looked like a skinhead. Were there still skinheads? He was taller than Ruby and was stooped over to talk to her, his shoulders rounding like an old man’s. Ruby looked furious, and the boy did, too. His face was pointy and sharp, and his chin jutted out toward her daughter’s sweet face. “Harry, spill it.”

Harry felt his face begin to burn. “Shit,” he said. “He’s her boyfriend.”

“Is his name Dust or Shit?” Elizabeth asked. “What’s the story?” Chloe and Paloma were inching across the room toward Ruby, teetering on their new heels like baby dinosaurs.

Harry opened his mouth to answer — he’d never been good at lying — but just then Ruby let out a little scream, and before he could think about what he was doing, Harry was running across the room. He threw his entire body at Dust, and the two of them hit the floor with a thud. Harry felt Dust roll away and then saw him scurry up and out the door like a hermit crab, on his hands and feet. Ruby stood over Harry with her own hands on her mouth. For a second she looked actually frightened, and the dangly white tassels of her dress shook a tiny bit, almost like she was dancing. It was the most beautiful dress Harry had ever seen. It wasn’t just a dress; it was a religion. It was an erupting volcano that would kill hundreds of pale-faced tourists, and Harry was ready for the lava to flow. Ruby regained her composure and looked around the room. A half circle had formed around them, and their mothers were cutting through it, mouths open like hungry guppies. Ruby turned toward the crowd, smiled, and did a pageant-winner wave, her elbow gliding back and forth. Both Chloe and Paloma made mewling noises and reached for her with grasping fingers, but Ruby ignored them. “My hero,” she said archly to Harry, and extended her hand to help him up from the floor.

Six

Elizabeth and Andrew’s bedroom was too warm. All three windows were open, and a large oscillating fan swiveled its face from left to right, but the room was still hot. Iggy Pop had forsaken his usual spot on their bed in favor of one of the windowsills, and Elizabeth was jealous. The air conditioners were in the basement. It was one of Andrew’s points of pride to wait as long as possible before putting them in. One year, before Harry was born, they’d waited until July 15. Elizabeth kicked the top sheet off her body, and rolled onto her side.

“I thought rain was supposed to make everything cooler,” she said.

“The planet is dying,” Andrew said. “You’ll appreciate it more in January.” He nudged her with a toe, teasing.

“Oh, stop it,” Elizabeth said. She wiped her forehead. It was almost midnight. “I can’t believe Harry attacked someone.”

“It sounds like it wasn’t really an attack,” Andrew said. “Rescue, maybe? You’re right, though, it doesn’t sound like him. Maybe there was some kind of wasp and he was trying to get the kid out of the way.” Andrew rolled onto his side, too, so that he was facing his wife. “That doesn’t sound much like him, either.”

“No, Harry dove for this kid like he was a grenade about to explode. He was running, and then he was in the air. It was like an action movie. I have never seen him move so fast in his entire life.”

“Weird.” Andrew sat up and took a few gulps of water. “I can’t believe it’s going to be him next year.”

“Let’s just hope that no one tackles him. That kid also looked about twenty-five. I bet he was held back three grades. Remember being held back?” Elizabeth flopped onto her back and let her legs splay out to the side. “Anyway,” she said, “want to talk about Lydia? I told them I’d give them an answer as soon as I could.”

“Can we not? I’m tired, okay?” Andrew said. Elizabeth grumbled. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Love you.” He clicked off his bedside lamp and kissed Elizabeth on the forehead. “Good night.”

Elizabeth stared at the back of her husband’s head. His dark brown hair was going gray at his temples and in seemingly random spots around his head, but his hair was still thick and curly at the ends when it had been months since his last haircut, like now. She listened to his breath even out until it was involuntary and soft, inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. Andrew had his share of anxieties, but sleep had never been one of them. He was like a robot — when it was time, he just closed his eyes and he was done.

It was funny to think about Lydia. When they’d all met, they were just two years older than Harry was now, a year older than Ruby. Elizabeth could remember so much about that time — how she felt when she walked into parties, what her skin looked like after three days of beer and no showers, sleeping with new people for the first time. Sleeping with people for the only time! She always assumed that she would have more years of exploration, of awkward mornings with strangers, but she and Andrew had met so early, and then she was done. Five men. That was Elizabeth’s entire sexual history. It was pathetic, really. Her friends who hadn’t met their spouses until they were in their thirties had easily slept with twenty people, if not more. Taylor Swift had probably slept with more people than she had, and good for her. Most of the parents at Whitman were a decade older than she was — she and Andrew had started too early, probably, before they were even thirty, an act that seemed horrifying to the other parents she knew, as if she’d been a teen mother. But Zoe and Jane, only two years into their romance, had Ruby, and Elizabeth had suddenly felt her biological clock (or her inner keeping-up-with-Zoe clock) ticking like mad, and they were right behind them, screwing every day between one period and the next.

Elizabeth was happy in her marriage, she really was. It was just that sometimes she thought about all the experiences she’d never gotten to have, and all the nights she’d listened to the sound of her husband’s snores, and wanted to jump out a window and go home with the first person who talked to her. Choices were easy to make until you realized how long life could be.

It was flattering, the way her song had stayed relevant. Some hits aged badly — no one felt that “Who Let the Dogs Out” accurately described their inner workings — but “Mistress of Myself” had aged better than most. Pissed-off young women, sensitive young men, teenagers of any description as long as they were angsty, breast-feeding mothers, everyone who had a boss he hated or a lover she wasn’t getting enough attention from — the song was applicable in a surprising number of categories. She’d written the lyrics quickly. It was the fall of her sophomore year, and she was sitting in one of the round orange chairs in the school library. Designed in the 1960s, they were called “womb chairs” because they were deep enough to crawl into, round and cozy, and surely there had been at least one student who had tried to stay in one for nine months at a time. The insides were upholstered, and it was best not to think about how hard they were to clean. Elizabeth liked to curl up in one of them and read or write in her notebook. Everyone else at Oberlin was all hot and bothered about Foucault and Barthes, but she was far more interested in Jane Austen. She was reading Sense and Sensibility for pleasure, and that’s where she saw it — on one of the very last pages, when Elinor Dashwood was trying to prepare herself for a visit from Edward Ferrars, with whom she was deeply in love but who she believed had forsaken her. “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself,” Elinor thought.

Elizabeth understood it completely: the desire to be in control, the need to speak the words aloud. No one in St. Paul, Minnesota, had ever been truly her own mistress. Elizabeth’s mother and her friends all went to the same hairdresser, shopped at the same stores, sent their kids to the same schools. She was pretty sure that they all ate the same things for dinner, except maybe Purva, whose parents were Indian, and Mary, whose parents were Korean. Elizabeth swiveled the chair around so that it was facing the window, and opened up her notebook. The song was finished fifteen minutes later. She showed the lyrics to Zoe and Andrew and Lydia later that afternoon, and the rest of the song was done by the time they went to bed. The band was called Kitty’s Mustache, a hat tip to Tolstoy’s heroine. They were regular college kids, in love with the idea of their own cleverness. No one had ever thought of anything before. It was the best night of her life to date, easy.

She and Andrew weren’t serious. They’d slept together three or four times, almost always when they were drunk, or, once, on some Ecstasy that she thought was probably just aspirin with a tiny bit of cocaine sprinkled on top, like parmesan on a lasagna. Andrew was quiet and a little angry, an irresistible combination. He only wore black. Black Dickies, black T-shirts, black socks, black shoes. There was something rigid about him that Elizabeth liked, but she wasn’t sure. His parents were rich, and he hated them — it was an old story. Elizabeth was nineteen, Andrew was twenty, and it didn’t really matter. But then she was twenty, and then twenty-two, and then twenty-four, and then they were married. When Lydia asked the rest of the band if she could license the rights to the song, to actually record it and put it out, Elizabeth didn’t even need to think about it. She’d never had the chance to be the mistress of herself, not really. None of them thought Lydia could sing — empirically, she couldn’t. What could it possibly matter?

It had been hardest for Andrew, watching Lydia’s version of the song take off the way it did. Elizabeth believed that songs — great songs, perfect songs — belonged to the universe. Did it matter who wrote “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” when both Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday could sing the hell out of it? Good songs deserved to be heard. It was better to be sanguine about your own output. Why did it have to be emotional? She’d written it, she’d put it on the page. Lydia did a better job putting it out into the universe. Andrew was more of a hoarder. Zoe knew from her parents that the whole music industry was fucked, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

Since they’d graduated from Oberlin, Elizabeth had had three jobs. First she’d worked as an assistant to a former associate of her father’s, a lawyer who worked near Grand Central. Getting there from Ditmas Park had taken forever, and she worked so many hours that she often fell asleep on the subway home and woke up at the last stop, in Coney Island. Her second job was also as an assistant, but this time to an art-book publisher in Chelsea. Her boss was in the midst of selling her town house and moving to Brooklyn, and it was Elizabeth’s job to help. She was measuring walls and taping up boxes of books, packing and unpacking. That was how she fell into real estate. It was so long ago now that the job felt like a part of her soul, like being a teacher or an artist who made things out of sand. You never really saw the results — you just trusted that you knew what you were doing and that everything would work out okay in the end. Sure, every once in a while a television actress would buy a house from her and there would be photos of it in a magazine, but that wasn’t Elizabeth’s triumph, not really. It was a modest career, like being a flight attendant. She helped people get from one place to another.

It was hard to say what Elizabeth liked most about selling houses — she liked the imagination that was required. She liked walking into a space and considering the possibilities. She made a good percentage of her income selling apartments, some of them new and glossy and soulless, but what she really loved was selling old houses to people who appreciated them. Elizabeth swung her legs out of bed and slid forward until her feet hit the wood floor. The floorboards creaked, because the house was a hundred years old, and that’s what floorboards did. She got up and walked over to the window, over on Andrew’s side of the bed, and looked out onto Argyle Road.

“I will be calm calm calm calm calm,” Elizabeth sang in a breathy shout. “I will be calm calm calm calm calm!” The words sounded funny coming out of her mouth. They had felt so vital at the time, as if a channel inside her had opened up and some beam of raucous feminist light was pouring through her — she wrote the lyrics in her notebook in her small, orderly handwriting, the letters getting messier as she wrote faster and faster. As soon as it was down on paper, Elizabeth knew it was good. She didn’t know — couldn’t have known — what would happen next, but she knew that the song was the best thing she’d ever done. Andrew snored. Elizabeth stared out at the street until Iggy Pop jumped off the windowsill, landing with a yowl on the hardwood floor, distraught that something was amiss. She picked up the cat, held his thin body against her sweaty chest, and climbed back into bed.

Seven

Jane had taken to sleeping in the guest room. Now that Ruby knew that they were having problems, problems that might actually end their marriage, it felt both better and worse in the house. She and Zoe didn’t have to pretend that everything was fine, but Jane had enjoyed pretending. She enjoyed it so much that she would often make it all the way through the day and evening and only remember when she got home after the dinner rush and Zoe glared at her from her spot on the couch. Jane couldn’t turn on the television; she couldn’t change the music. She could choose to sit quietly and not bother Zoe, but if Jane was on her laptop, getting work done, she’d get shit for that, too. It was as if Zoe thought that they were all just swimming through oceans of time, endless vast amounts of time. Who sat in one place for three hours reading a book? Maybe that’s why they were talking about getting divorced. Dr. Amelia, the couples therapist they’d seen years ago, said that all marriages went through rough spots, and that it didn’t mean the union was faulty or unsound. It just meant that you had to kick a few tires, or tighten some bolts, or adjust the seasoning. Dr. Amelia hadn’t been afraid of metaphors. Sometimes, when they were sitting on the low orange sofa in her office, Dr. Amelia would tilt her head back and go through long lists of them, trying to find the right one.

It wasn’t like the beginning, when they spent their days eating their way through the Chinese shopping malls in Queens, or when they opened Hyacinth and they were both on their feet fifteen hours a day, too exhausted to fight, or when Ruby was born and they were too in love to have to. Now Zoe spent so much time hunched over her computer, working on the payroll and the schedules and the billing, that Jane took it as a silvery stop sign. Somehow, now that they weren’t needed in the space every second of every day, instead of having more time together they had less. Jane went to dinners at the James Beard House by herself, she drank whiskey with the cooks after closing at the bar down the street. For the first time in her life, Zoe went to bed early. There were big problems and little problems, the latter of which seemed to multiply in the night like rabbits. Jane cared about Yelp comments too much, she drank too much. She didn’t care about Zoe’s friends. She didn’t care about her own friends. She didn’t have friends! She was too bossy, she wasn’t bossy enough. She didn’t care about Patti Smith. When they met, Zoe was wild, and Jane had felt like a steadying force — her sturdy body anchoring Zoe’s rangy limbs to earth. That’s what she still wanted to be. It wasn’t the word, or the feeling, of failure, which is what Jane’s mother was so mopey about, having to call her aunts and uncles and cousins, and tell them that it hadn’t worked. Her mother acted like it was an affront to Jane’s gayness, the divorce, like she’d been granted the right to vote and then slept through the election.

The guest-room bed was full size, a lumpy leftover futon. Until recently, they’d kept it folded up unless Ruby had a friend sleeping over, and then they’d drag the mattress onto the floor of her room and the girls could jump and flop all over it. Kids didn’t care. Jane cared. Her back felt terrible, and so did her knees. Standing up at the restaurant was bad enough, but sleeping on a piece of glorified cardboard was worse. Every morning, she rolled off to one side and had to come up through hands and knees, as if she’d just crawled across a desert. She felt like she was a hundred years old. Meanwhile, Zoe was always dipping in and out of Pilates classes. She’d been wearing makeup, a glittery dusting on her eyes, some bright pink on her lips. It was hard not to feel as though Zoe was dancing on her grave. It wasn’t as if Jane had ever kept Zoe from doing whatever she liked — it didn’t make sense. Jane liked it when things made sense. It wasn’t even a question of rocking the boat — Zoe was carving the boat in half with a chain saw. God, she was as bad as Dr. Amelia.

They were just moving into true summer — tomatoes were perfect, round and sweet. Soft-shell crabs were perfection. Corn was everywhere, so fresh you could just peel the silk back and eat the kernels right off the cob. Hyacinth was less busy in July and August, when so many people left the city, but June was still brisk, and Jane woke up thinking of specials to add to the menu. She almost always opened her eyes to visions of food — not breakfast, never breakfast — things she could serve at the restaurant. A dessert with strawberries and peppercorns. A salad with enormous watermelon radishes and fat wedges of avocado. Fresh pasta with asparagus pesto. And then she’d think about Zoe.

They’d always talked about what would happen when Ruby left home — when she was little, it seemed like a hilarious nightmare, the idea that this tiny, helpless creature would ever be able to pay her own bills or pull open the fridge door. When she was five or six and in school every day, Zoe had flipped out. At first, it was thrilling — so many hours in the day! such freedom! — but then she began to complain about how much time Ruby was spending with other adults, worrying that she was going to be influenced by them. “They’re teachers,” Jane would tell her. “That’s what we’re paying them for.” It didn’t matter — Zoe was always five or ten minutes early to pick Ruby up, pacing back and forth in front of school, as if she thought that her daughter might have forgotten her in the hours she’d been gone. In those years, Zoe clung to Jane like a loving barnacle. They were a power couple, rich in kale and quinoa and fizzy glasses of rosé.

Jane rolled onto her side. The ceiling fan was on, whirring around in circles. The house was quiet, but there was some construction going on outside. Jane could have sworn there used to be rules about jackhammers on weekends, but there they were. It was so strange to be in her house, sleeping in another bed. She felt embarrassed, and ridiculous. What did any of this have to do with sleeping arrangements, anyway? All she wanted was her normal, easy life. She thought it wasn’t anything they couldn’t fix. Maybe once Ruby left home, things would be easier. There would be more space for them to talk — to argue, even. It wasn’t as if Zoe was prone to the idea of divorce — her own parents had stayed married through the seventies and eighties and cocaine and all the rest. They were still married and drank gin and tonics together in front of the fireplace, though Los Angeles was usually too warm for them to turn it on. Jane loved Zoe’s parents for many reasons, but that’s what it boiled down to — she loved that they were happy, utterly devoid of neuroses.

She and Zoe were a mixed marriage, both racially and religiously speaking — Jane was a Jew from Long Island who’d been taking ulcer medication since she was a teenager, and Zoe was a Martian who never worried about anything, who believed that Chaka Khan played everyone’s sweet sixteen. They’d always balanced each other out, but now Jane felt like instead of balance, she’d just been a brick tied to Zoe’s ankle, a rusty anchor trying to drag her under. Maybe, after all this time, it turned out that Zoe was right, that working hard and having fun were all that mattered, and everything else should just vanish in a puff of smoke. Ruby’s clothes, Ruby’s grades? The server at the restaurant who was always high, like Hyacinth was the Odeon and Bret Easton Ellis was about to walk in the door? Her mother’s latest fight with her postal worker about how she was stealing her magazines? She wanted to let it all go. All Jane wanted was to look at Zoe’s beautiful face every day for the rest of her life.

“Zo?” Jane said. She stood up slowly, her knees creaking. “Rube?” She walked with stiff legs into the hall and peered into the other bedrooms. There was no sign of either her wife or her daughter. “Guys?” she called, her voice loud and clear. The house was empty. This is what it would be like for the rest of her life — calling into empty rooms and waiting for responses that weren’t coming. Getting married was the easy part, even though they’d had to wait until Ruby was twelve to do it legally. When they got together, it was all balloons, all hope. Now that they knew what the future held — what the future looked like — it was much harder. Why couldn’t everyone stay young forever? If not on the outside, then just on the inside, where no one ever got too old to be optimistic. Zoe would have laughed at her, standing like a mope in the middle of the hallway in her pajamas. Jane had no idea what time it was. Was it too late? She rested her forehead against the wall.

Eight

The SAT prep course was held on Saturday mornings in a karate school on Church Avenue, the northernmost thoroughfare in the neighborhood, populated by laundromats, bodegas, and the occasional coffee shop that sold freshly baked scones and croissants to the laptop crowd. The class was two hours long, every week for eight weeks — two whole months. Harry didn’t mind much. He didn’t have anything better to do, and it was nice to get out of the house, almost healthy. Taking tests didn’t scare him, and he was pretty sure that he didn’t have to get a perfect score in order to get into the schools he wanted to go to — maybe Bard or Bennington, somewhere small like Whitman but without any of the people. Reed sounded good. A little crunchy, but good. Being far away was a bonus.

Harry pulled open the door to the studio. There were folding chairs set up facing a dry-erase board along the back wall, and a projector screen was already showing off the crowded desktop of somebody’s laptop. A few other kids were milling around, and about half the chairs were occupied. Harry ambled over to the back row and sank into a chair. He recognized two girls from his grade sitting in the front row and pulled his hood down over his eyes.

“Hey,” someone said, smacking him in the back of the head.

Harry put his hand up to protect himself, spinning around as quickly as he could. Ruby stood behind him, smiling.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Hey.”

They hadn’t spoken since graduation. After the Dust incident (girls like Eliza and Thayer, now four rows ahead of him, had christened the event “#dustup” on Instagram, which they thought was hilarious until Ruby threatened to kill their parents), Ruby and Harry hadn’t even been in the same room. Harry had walked by Ruby twice, once when she was sitting on her front porch with her dog, and the other when she was standing on line at the grocery store on Cortelyou, buying milk and the same hippie deodorant that his mother used. He hadn’t said hello either time, because it was much easier to stare at the ground than it was to figure out what to say, but he had spent a lot of time smelling his mother’s deodorant.

Ruby picked up someone’s backpack that had been sitting in the chair next to Harry and moved it over one. “Mind if I join you? I hear the shrimp cocktail is out of this world.”

“And the martinis,” Harry said. “Very good olives.” He had a momentary panic that martinis didn’t have olives, and that he sounded like an idiot.

Ruby let her bag drop to the floor with a thud and then slid into the folding chair. “Are they going to dim the lights? It is definitely my nap time.”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. Ruby was six inches away. Her breath was toothpaste-minty. “I’m sorry about the other day.”

She looked surprised. “Why? That was fucking awesome.”

“No, I mean, I’m glad and everything. I’m just sorry that that guy was being such an asshole. At your graduation. That sucks. And I’m sorry that I had to tell your moms about him. I just hope… you know, that I didn’t get you into trouble.” Harry was sweating. The plastic folding chair was digging into his back. He pushed his hood off and then pulled it on again.

“It’s cool, man,” Ruby said.

A woman with glasses and a large Starbucks iced coffee walked to the far side of the room, the direction they were all facing, clapping her hands like they were a roomful of kindergartners. She waved a stack of paper. “Hey, guys, I’m Rebecca, and I’ll be your SAT prep tutor for the next eight beautiful Saturdays! I went to Harvard, and you can too! Let’s get started! Who’s down with some vocab quizzes?”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Ruby said.

“Want me to tackle her too?” Harry said. Ruby laughed so loudly that Eliza and Thayer both turned around, saw who it was, and quickly snapped to attention.

“I like your energy!” said Rebecca, flashing a double thumbs-up.

Ruby let her head loll back and pretended to hang herself.

Nine

It wasn’t a kind first thought, and it wasn’t a very hopeful one, but it drove Elizabeth slightly bonkers to think that Jane was going to profit from Zoe’s foresight and investment and commitment. That was marriage, agreeing to share bank accounts and bookshelves, even when you didn’t want to, even when it made things messier in the case of an eventual split. In her years as a real-estate agent, Elizabeth had come across several couples with separate checkbooks, which seemed like a red flag. Too cold-blooded, too pragmatic. It was like announcing that you hadn’t decided if you were going to stay married or not. Take me, take my overdraft charges! Take me, take my embarrassing number of books with teenage vampire protagonists! Elizabeth had never considered the alternative — it was as bad as signing a prenup. Why bother getting married, going through with all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn’t think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.

She knocked on the door — Zoe was on the sofa reading a magazine and waved her in through the window. Elizabeth opened the door and glanced up — the ceiling in the vestibule was cracked and needed a new coat of paint. Looking at the house was easier than looking at Zoe and telling her what was broken and needed fixing. They had always been close — in college and even more so in the years after, when they’d lived together inside these very walls — but after marriage and crawling children there wasn’t an easy way back. Like many, their friendship had slipped a disc somewhere along the way. Yes, sure, they would sometimes have dinner, just the two of them, and then they’d have a Big Talk about everything in their lives, but that was only once every three or four months. Their friendship was still there, but it also felt like it was a million miles away, viewable only through a time machine and a telescope.

“Do you want to talk?” Elizabeth asked. It had been her idea to come over. Zoe had expressed some interest in knowing what the house was worth, just in case. “Do you have a piece of paper? I want you to write it all down so that you can talk to Jane about it, about what needs to be done, okay?” Elizabeth had been in the house a thousand times — more, maybe — had lived here, had slept on the couch, had thrown up in the toilet. She had a good idea of what needed to be done, but she needed to show it all to Zoe. It was impossible to really see a space when you’d lived there for so long. All the eccentricities began to seem normal — the way you’d never properly rewired the doorbell, and so you had to push it extra hard to the left; the way the guest bedroom was two different shades of cream, because… well, why was it? It was a mistake, just a part of life, but now someone else was going to buy that mistake, and that someone was going to offer a hundred thousand dollars less because of it.

Elizabeth was in her work clothes. In Manhattan, the agents wore outfits that looked like they could double as evening wear: tight black dresses and heels. Luckily, no one in Brooklyn wanted that. It made people uncomfortable, that much gloss, but she still had to step it up a notch. Her biggest concessions were ditching her clogs for a pair of flats and putting on actual pants in place of jeans. It was important to show respect for the fact that people were plunking down their entire life savings for three thousand square feet. Sometimes, because it was New York, people spent all their money on five hundred square feet. That’s when Elizabeth wore heels, when she felt a little bit guilty.

“You look nice,” Zoe said.

“I had to,” Elizabeth said. She dusted off her blouse. “I have a closing today, a house up in Lefferts.” She wondered how bad she normally looked. Her hair was straight and naturally blond, which is to say a light, innocuous brown, and cut short, just below her ears, with little bangs like a schoolgirl’s. She liked to think that she looked like a gamine, but that probably wasn’t true anymore, if it ever had been.

“Hmm,” Zoe said, not really listening. “Shall we begin the processional death march?”

No one was ever interested in the business part of Elizabeth’s job — all anyone ever wanted to know was if she found people’s sex toys or whether the sellers were getting a divorce. No one wanted to buy bad juju. If she were a better liar, Elizabeth would always have told prospective buyers that the sellers were retiring and moving to Florida after several happy decades in whatever space she was trying to sell, with entirely redone mechanical and electrical systems. That’s what people wanted — the promise of a satisfied life with very little work to do. Of course, no one in New York City was ever satisfied. It’s what kept her busy. Even people who liked where they lived kept an eye out for something better. Shopping for a new place to live was easier than shopping for a new husband or wife, and less traumatic than going into analysis.

They started on the ground floor — the kitchen was old but sweet, with a nicely expensive stove, well used. House shoppers would be impressed, even if the cabinets hadn’t been painted in twenty years. The dining room needed paint, too, and less furniture — Jane had stacks of chairs in all four corners, in case of an impromptu dinner party for thirty, which Elizabeth knew they often had. The living room was okay — ditch the family photos, the vintage knickknacks they’d so lovingly acquired at yard sales, Ruby’s piles of clothing everywhere. The staircase needed a little love — nails were poking up all over the place, and the skylight on the landing hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. Upstairs, all the bedrooms needed paint jobs, and Ruby’s needed a hazmat expert. The two bathrooms were pretty terrible, but not worth doing. Throw out the mildewy curtains, get all the dog hair off the floor. Whoever came in with that much money was going to want to do things their way. Elizabeth and Zoe stopped in the master bedroom.

“You want to talk about it?” Elizabeth asked.

Zoe sat on the edge of her bed, which was low to the floor and rumpled. Bingo padded over and sat down on her feet. “It’s been coming forever,” she said. “You know that. After Ruby was born, I didn’t think we’d last two years. Then, when we opened the restaurant, I thought we were done for sure.” She ran her hands back and forth over Bingo’s stomach. “But then when Hyacinth started doing well and Jane was always there, it didn’t seem as pressing. How sad is that? We were too busy to split up.”

“So why now? Why do it?” Zoe wasn’t the first to get divorced — slowly, Elizabeth and Andrew’s circle of friends had come closer and closer to the national average. At first, it was just one couple, then another and another. Now half of Harry’s friends had parents living apart from each other, and the kids bounced back and forth like tennis balls. Andrew sometimes expressed worry about it, whether Harry was absorbing some of that stress and angst from his friends, even though it had never seemed like an issue.

“The last time we had sex was in January.” She paused. “Last January.”

“Sex isn’t everything,” Elizabeth said. She took another look at the bed that Zoe was sitting on. It looked like the bed in a hipster hotel, streamlined and Danish, a more expensive Ikea model — Zoe’s choice, clearly — the kind of bed where people did nothing but have sex or maybe read each other some translated poetry. Zoe had always had scores of lovers at school, and afterward — she’d had women chasing her down streets and out of dance clubs, throwing their phone numbers at her like so much confetti. Jane had sleep apnea and sometimes slept with a special mask that Zoe said made her look like the villain in a science-fiction movie, and yet it was Jane who had stolen Zoe’s heart at a bar, the kind of place where you were supposed to meet one-night stands, not wives, and Jane who had stolen her from Elizabeth.

Zoe shook her head. “It’s not nothing. I don’t know. I think we both finally came around to the idea that we could be happier apart. It’s one thing to be in a lull, but it’s another thing to stare down the next thirty years of your life and just be filled with depressing fucking dread. I don’t know if it’ll really happen, but it sure seems like it.” She gave Bingo a few good pats on his head. “As long as this guy comes with me, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, so we need dog-friendly.” That ruled out certain buildings in the Slope and Cobble Hill. It was easier to think about Zoe and Jane this way, in terms of concretes, especially in an area where she could really help. Zoe needed her; it was nice.

“Dog- and old-queer-lady-friendly, yes.”

“Easy.” Elizabeth leaned against the wall. “So where would you want to move? Would you want to stay in the hood? Leave?” They’d been pioneers in Ditmas, planting the flag before the neighborhood had any decent restaurants or a good public school or a bar with a cocktail menu. Before tree guards, before block parties with bouncy castles.

“God, I don’t know. I mean, why am I here, right? It was sort of random, and now it’s home, but I don’t care about the outdoor space or a stupid lawn. That’s why people move to the city! I want that. I want to move somewhere where I can walk to a good movie theater by myself at nine o’clock at night, and eat pad thai, and buy jewelry on a whim. Does that exist? I want Ruby to think it’s cooler than wherever Jane goes. Jane’s talking about moving into a studio above the restaurant. She’ll be a monk until she finds someone else to be her housewife.” Zoe flopped backward onto the bed. “I need a massage. And some acupuncture. And a yoga class.”

“When did you guys do the roof?” Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens’ place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She’d heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three layers — the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup of old signage and other people’s failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she’d fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that’s how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.

“Five years ago, maybe? Shit.”

“It’s okay,” Elizabeth said, turning back to face Zoe, who had covered her face with a pillow. “It’s okay.”

Ten

Harry’s room was painted dark purple, and it was a little bit like sleeping inside a gigantic eggplant. He could have asked his parents to paint it another color, but it didn’t really matter, seeing as the purple only peeked out here and there between the edges of the posters and other things he’d taped to the walls. He was going for one complete layer, like the people who got tattooed over their entire bodies, even their eyelids. Harry didn’t care about everything he’d put on the walls, but at some point he’d cared enough to put it all up there, and he respected his own process. It was okay to grow out of things and keep them around. He liked being reminded that he’d been obsessed with Rugrats and Bart Simpson and, for a few inexplicable months around his thirteenth birthday, Kobe Bryant. He didn’t even like basketball. Mostly the walls were covered with pages ripped from magazines and things he’d printed out, pages from books that he’d copied at school. It was like Tumblr, only 3-D, with no scrolling. The narrow strip of wall next to his closet was completely covered by pictures of sandwiches. Teenage girls got all the credit for being angsty and weird, and it wasn’t fair. Even at Whitman, which was supposed to be progressive and artsy, the boys bragged about the time they went to a shooting range with their grandfathers in Connecticut or Virginia. They wanted to learn how to drive and listened to hip-hop. Harry wasn’t interested in any of it. Luckily, his father wasn’t the kind of guy who insisted on things — everything Harry had ever done was because he wanted to, like the child sultan of a palace with only two servants.

Going to one school from age five to age eighteen was like being buried in amber. It wasn’t even like his walls, which were covered with layers of things — you had to be the same person from start to finish, with no big cognitive jumps. Harry was quiet and sweet and did his homework. He had three close friends, two boys and one girl, and he wasn’t particularly fond of any of them. He didn’t vape or drink malt liquor, because there were other kids who did that and he wasn’t one of them. He had smoked weed a few times, but he knew that his parents did, too, so it didn’t seem that bad. Harry lived in a monastery built of his childhood likes and dislikes. His parents loved it, and he never got into trouble, and it made him want to scream.

His phone vibrated in his pocket: COME OUTSIDE. It was from a number he didn’t have in his phone. Harry walked over to the window and pulled the curtain to one side. Ruby was leaning against a parked car, holding her phone over her face, with her giant dog leaning against her legs. Harry’s parents were in bed, or working — their bedroom was upstairs, and his mother often worked late at the small desk in their room. BE RIGHT THERE, he texted back. Harry changed his T-shirt twice and then tiptoed down the hall. The route to the front door was creaky but clear.

“What’s up?” Harry said once he was a few feet from Ruby. She hadn’t moved. Her hair was spread out over the passenger-side window like big purple jellyfish. Bingo sniffed genially in Harry’s direction.

“Walk with me, my moms are being total dicks.” Ruby pushed herself back to standing and pulled Bingo’s leash in the direction of the park. Harry put his hands in his pockets and followed. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and stuck one in her mouth. “Want one?” she said through her teeth.

Harry shook his head and watched Ruby cup one hand around the end of her cigarette and flick a lighter with the other. He was amazed at how brazen she was — smoking on their very own block, where they knew the people inside every house, all of whom could have picked up the phone and called her mothers. Very few kids at Whitman smoked. It wasn’t like when their parents were young, when everyone had packs of ciggies in their back pockets instead of cell phones. Now everyone understood about lungs and cancer and how the tobacco companies were trying to appeal to youth. It seemed borderline pathetic to give in, not that Harry could have thought that anything Ruby did was pathetic. It looked bad on other people, was all. The small contingent of smokers at school went around the corner to do it, or crossed the street and sat on benches in the park. Harry had never smoked a single cigarette — he’d actually never been offered one before. That was how small Whitman was. It wasn’t even a question. Harry Marx didn’t smoke. It was a fact.

They walked three blocks straight up Argyle, until they hit the soccer fields and the back of the tennis center. It was dark, and the park was closed, but there were still a few people kicking around a ball. “Rebels,” Harry said, and Ruby laughed. They crossed Caton Avenue and walked into Prospect Park proper. Harry didn’t like going into the park at night, even though there were always people running or biking around the main loop. It just seemed like one of those things that people did right before something bad happened to them, like running upstairs instead of out the front door in a horror movie. At least they had the dog with them, even if Bingo was geriatric and had permanent tearstains under his sad eyes. Ruby nudged Harry toward the bridle path, a soft dirt road that went a little bit farther into the park than Harry would have liked, but she moved with such confidence that he didn’t want to be lame. Bingo seemed to know where they were going. Finally, after a few minutes, Ruby plopped down on a bench. They were completely alone, staring out at the lake.

“People fish here, have you seen that?” Ruby asked. She lit another cigarette, and this time didn’t bother to ask Harry if he wanted one. “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to eat a fish that was born in Brooklyn.”

“I’m pretty sure no one is paying anyone a million dollars to eat anything that was born in Brooklyn,” Harry said. He watched the red end of Ruby’s cigarette move up and down to her mouth. It got brighter when she inhaled, and for a second Harry imagined that he was the cigarette, his entire body, and when she drew the smoke into her lungs, he felt himself slip inside her throat and slide down into her body. He felt the softness of her lips and the thick velvet of her tongue. “So that SAT lady is pretty bad, huh.”

“Um, yes,” Ruby said. She gripped the cigarette in her teeth and pulled her hair to one side and wove it into a thick braid. “She’s a fucking psycho.” Bingo opened his mouth in a wide, stinky yawn.

“Speaking of psychos, has Dust called you? Do I need to hire a bodyguard?” Harry tried to make his voice sound as light as possible, but he had been worried. Dust seemed like the kind of guy who had a lot of scary-looking friends who knew how to do things like get into fights, which Harry definitely, definitely did not.

“Oh, he’s totally harmless,” Ruby said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“What about your moms?” Harry said. There were ducks in the lake, swimming from one side to the other, and Harry wondered when ducks slept, and how long they lived with their parents. Then he wondered if kids who grew up in Manhattan thought ducks were mythological creatures, like cows, things that existed only in picture books and in cheese commercials. Or maybe they had ducks there, too, in the park. There were some kids at Whitman who took the train from the city every day, which seemed beyond stupid, like walking up the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building. There were easier ways to accomplish the same thing.

“They’re probably getting divorced. I don’t officially know that yet, but I know your mom does, so maybe you do, too.” He didn’t. Ruby shrugged. “It sucks.”

Harry had heard his mother tell his father about Ruby’s mothers, but he hadn’t been told directly, and so it was easy enough to pretend. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s their marriage, not mine,” Ruby said. “I’m a modern girl. I know it’s not my fault.”

“Still,” Harry said.

“Still,” Ruby allowed. She took another drag.

“Can I have some?” Harry asked.

Ruby cackled. “Oh, shit,” she said. “I thought you didn’t smoke.” She held it out to him, upright, like a candle.

“I don’t,” Harry said. He plucked the cigarette from between her fingers and put it up to his lips. The filter felt rough against his tongue. Was he supposed to lick it? Probably not. Harry inhaled — he had smoked weed before, after all, he wasn’t a total noob. The smoke flooded his lungs, sharp and harsh. He coughed once and tried to swallow a few more, which just made him cough harder. Ruby hit him on the back. The dog offered a sympathetic snurfle.

“Ride that pony!” she said, laughing. “Ride it!” Harry thrust the cigarette back at her, but she waved him off. “No way,” she said. “Not until you tame that beast.”

Harry waited for his breathing to return to normal and for his eyes to stop swimming, and then he tried again.

Eleven

In the age of the Internet, when his son couldn’t walk three steps without checking his phone, Andrew appreciated a Xeroxed advertisement stapled to a telephone pole. Usually it was just ads for the nerdy guy who taught guitar lessons or for lost dogs or cats, but Andrew always looked. He was between jobs. Between careers, if you wanted to be specific. There was enough family money that he didn’t have to worry too much, plus the royalties, plus Elizabeth’s income, and so Andrew had spent his adulthood to date following his inspirations. A decade ago, he’d taken a cinematography course at the New School and had worked on some short films, including one about an abandoned mental hospital in the Palisades. Before that, he’d taught English as a Second Language at a high school in the Bronx, but that had only lasted a year. More recently, he’d been working on a lifestyle magazine for Brooklyn fathers, doing some editing and soliciting but mostly acting as a consultant. It was good to be around younger people — kept the blood flowing. Next, Andrew thought he’d do an apprenticeship at a butcher shop or with a woodworker. Something with his hands.

His usual routine was to get up with Harry and Elizabeth, send them off to school and work, and walk down to Cortelyou to get some coffee. Now that Harry was out for the summer, Andrew felt like it was even more important to keep busy. He ordered a small coffee and walked back out onto the street.

Ditmas Park was great in the summertime. The sycamores and oaks were full and wide, leaving big pools of shade along the sidewalks. Families were on their porches. Kids were throwing balls around and learning how to ride their bikes. Neighbors waved. Andrew ambled to the corner and waited for the light to change, feeling happily aimless. Harry would stay in his room for much of the day, taking SAT practice exams or playing video games or reading books, bless him. Even though that was the point of parenthood — to raise smart, happy, self-sufficient people, Andrew mourned the loss of the days when Harry cried out “Daddy!” every time he walked in the door, even if he’d only been gone for ten minutes. Andrew was staring into space, thinking about Harry’s two-year-old body, the hugs he would give at night before bed, when a flyer stapled to the pole next to the crosswalk caught his attention.

It was a drawing of a lotus flower, like the logo of a yoga studio, with hand-drawn petals. Underneath the flower, large block letters spelled out “WE ARE HERE. ARE YOU?” Below that there was just an address on Stratford Road, three blocks from where Andrew was standing. No hours, no phone number, no website.

“Huh,” Andrew said. He thought about ripping it down so that he could hold on to it, but that would look bad. He didn’t want any of his neighbors to see — they’d think he was either for or against it, when he didn’t even know what it was. Instead, Andrew typed the address into his phone and crossed the street.

It was definitely going to be woodworking. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Butchering would mean vats of blood, saws, bones. Andrew wasn’t squeamish, and he loved the idea of knowing more about where his food came from, but a rooftop vegetable farm was probably more his speed. That didn’t appeal, though. Vegetables took too long. Andrew had always liked a simpler equation; he wanted to see the payoff before an entire season had passed. When he and Elizabeth met, he’d worked in the school’s bike co-op, fixing old beaters that careless students had left locked outside over the summer, and he’d loved his dirty, greasy hands at the end of the day. The spinning wheels. Woodworking — carpentry — would be like that. He would have calluses and maybe burns. He would whack a fingernail by accident, and it would turn black. That was just what he was looking for. He’d build a desk for Harry, a new pair of end tables for their bedroom. Maybe they could do it together.

Elizabeth’s professional problem was the opposite — instead of Andrew’s searching, she had the answer but chose to ignore it. It was a lost cause at this point, though he did coax her to start playing again by saying that he wanted to do it. She would do it for him, he knew, but not for herself. His wife was a true talent — unusual, smart, gifted — all the words that places like Whitman loved to throw around to describe perfectly ordinary students. But Elizabeth wasn’t ordinary. She was incredible, and she had stopped playing for such practical reasons, as if practicality had anything to do with it.

Instead of turning right and walking back home, Andrew turned left and walked to Stratford. He never walked in that direction — it was toward the gas stations and the one bar that had recently opened that he hadn’t been to yet. Come to think of it, the bar wasn’t that new anymore, it was probably a year old, but he still hadn’t been. Andrew turned right on Stratford and walked another block — he was now parallel with his own house, only two blocks east.

The house had once been white but was now the color of dirty city snow. The windows were old; Andrew could tell just by looking at the outside. He’d learned a lot about houses from Elizabeth, what to look for. Together, they’d been inside most of the houses in the neighborhood. The steps were sinking in the middle, and the floorboards of the porch were cracked. It wasn’t a hard fix, but it would be expensive, especially if they got soft enough that the mailman fell through and decided to sue. Andrew hovered for a minute on the sidewalk, not sure what he was going to do. He should go home and start his day. Zoe knew a guy who built things, some kid from Maine who lived in the neighborhood and built dining-room tables for people in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights. Andrew was going to give him a call. The door to the house was open, and Andrew could see another flyer taped above the doorbell. He took one step toward the house, and then stopped. He could see a man inside. The guy had a beard, not quite ZZ Top but heading that way. It was impossible to tell how old he was. The man turned toward the door, saw Andrew, and waved as if he’d been expecting him. Andrew waved back, then climbed the stairs to introduce himself.

“Welcome,” the man said. From close up, he looked younger than Andrew had thought, maybe not even forty. His beard was speckled with red and gray hairs, like a duck egg that was so beautiful and complicated that you couldn’t believe it just happened that way, with no intervention from a design team.

“I saw your poster,” Andrew said. Inside, the house itself was nothing special — sort of falling down, really, but the floors were clean and painted white, as were all the walls. The thin curtains were pulled to the side, and light came pouring in. Andrew immediately felt at home.

“This is EVOLVEment,” the man said. “I’m Dave. Come on in.” He spoke softly, the way that people did when they knew others were going to listen. There was no reason to speak loudly, not in this house. Andrew got it right away. This was calm. This was a sanctuary. He thought about the monks he’d seen in Tibet, and upstate, when he’d gone for silent retreats. This was one of those special places, or it was going to be, and right here, in his own neighborhood.

“What can I do?” Andrew asked. His hands were empty. He wanted to help.

Twelve

Hyacinth sat forty-two people. On a good day, the restaurant was half full at lunch and then busy from six p.m. until nine thirty p.m., with stragglers hanging around the long, narrow bar until eleven, when they closed. Even ten years after opening, Jane couldn’t charge what she wanted to charge — no one would pay twenty-seven dollars for skate this deep in — but she got by. There was a small desk right next to the hostess stand, and that’s where Jane liked to sit when she wasn’t in the kitchen, or upstairs in the office, or downstairs checking the walk-in, or walking the floor, which the servers hated. Jane had to wedge her body in between the wall and desk to keep from getting elbowed by the hostess, but she didn’t mind.

She had sous-chefs now, good people whose taste buds she trusted, but there was no substitute to being in the room herself. Jane liked to sweat, and to yell, and there was no better place to do that than in a tiny restaurant kitchen. Elizabeth had found the space — they had looked for months, waiting for the right place, and Elizabeth had taken it on like her own little pet project. They didn’t just look in Ditmas, though that’s what they wanted, of course. There would be less foot traffic, but they both loved the idea of helping make the neighborhood a place where people wanted to live, not just sleep. Jane and Zoe had fallen in love eating food, talking about food, about what they dreamed of eating down the block from their door. Zoe was old-fashioned and wanted to open a French bistro, somewhere to eat steak frites at night and soft eggs during the day. Jane wanted to do Thai, or better yet, Vietnamese. There was nothing in the neighborhood but pizza and a Chinese place with bulletproof glass in front of the cashier. There were so many holes, and they wanted to fill one.

They’d looked everywhere — in Williamsburg, in Carroll Gardens. Nothing was right. But when Elizabeth called and said she’d found the space, Jane could hear in her voice that she was right — she and Zoe walked over holding hands, giddy. Hyacinth was one of their girl names, for when Ruby had a little sister, but Ruby was already in first grade and it didn’t seem like she was going to get a sister after all, so Hyacinth went up on the wooden sign and got painted in gold leaf on the door, and they were open for business.

Jane was in charge of food, and Zoe was in charge of everything else. She picked out the chairs and the water glasses, the flatware and the floral arrangements. She did the payroll and the billing. She dealt with the staff, which was the worst part of owning a small business — someone was always getting fired, or showing up late, or hitting on too many customers, or on drugs. As long as they didn’t need money or sleep, life was easy. Ruby’s babysitter would bring her straight to Hyacinth after school, and when they couldn’t afford the babysitter anymore, Ruby would come on her own, and sit at the bar with her homework. Elizabeth and Andrew would pat her on the head, and she’d join them for some french fries. The regulars loved it — their own little Brooklyn Eloise. After dark, Zoe would take her home and put her to bed and then come back if they were really in the weeds. They had an elderly neighbor who fancied herself the mayor of Argyle Road, and both Jane and Zoe felt sure that she would never let anything bad happen to Ruby while they were out.

It was early, just after nine. They didn’t open for lunch until eleven. Jane shut the window with her menus and her lists for the purveyors and opened the Internet. She wasn’t really looking for a new place to live, not yet. Once Ruby left, wherever and whenever that happened, and when Zo found a place she liked, then she’d look. If it really happened. Jane wasn’t in a rush. If it were up to her, they’d stay married forever. So what if they weren’t as happy as they’d ever been? They were adults, with a nearly grown child. “Happy” was a word for sorority girls and clowns, and those were two distinctly fucked-up groups of people. They were just wading through the muck like everyone else.

At twenty-four, Zoe Bennett was the sexiest thing Jane had ever seen. They met at Mary Mary’s, on Fifth Avenue, a proper lesbian dive bar that was always full of service professionals, especially after midnight. Jane went two, sometimes three times a week and rarely did more than drink beer with her friends, but one night, this electric little nymph shows up at the end of the bar, pirouetting around like she owned the place, and by the end of the night, she did. Jane was working as a garde-manger at the Union Square Cafe, and Zoe was a hostess at Chanterelle. They didn’t even talk that first night — Jane swore that Zoe fell onto her lap while singing along to a Bonnie Raitt song on the jukebox, but Zoe didn’t remember doing any such thing. They were both lushes, ready to eat and drink until the reservoir was empty and the lights were on. Three weeks later, Jane moved in.

The bell over the door rang, and Jane looked up. Johnny, her UPS man. He wheeled in a tower of boxes — paper towels, toilet paper, all the things she never wanted to have to think about. That was Zoe’s job, keeping them stocked and ready for the apocalypse. They hadn’t figured that part out yet — what about Hyacinth? It would be strange for Zoe to keep doing her job, but it would be stranger for her to stop. Everything was in both of their names. They didn’t need to be married for them to keep working together, of course, but what if Zoe started sleeping with Allie, the adorable hostess? They always joked about her, about how she was in love with Zo, but now, if she were single, what if it were true? Jane could see it so clearly — peeking out of the kitchen and seeing Zoe touch Allie on the back, or tuck her hair behind her ear. Maybe Jane would fire her before Zoe got the chance — she wasn’t great at her job anyway. It wasn’t part of Jane’s job, dealing with personnel, but she was the chef — everything was her job, really.

“Hey, hey,” Johnny said. He nodded toward the supply closet. “Want it over there?”

“Please,” Jane said. She wasn’t just talking to him, she was beseeching the universe. When Johnny was gone, she locked herself in the bathroom and cried. It was the only room with a door that locked. She’d told her mother that they were considering splitting — not any friends, not the staff, no one else. Jane thought that if no one ever found out, it might not really happen, the way they didn’t tell anyone that Zoe was pregnant until she was four months along, or like when Jane was sixteen and knew she was gay but didn’t come out until she was twenty. If it really happened, her parents were going to be crushed — they’d always loved Zoe, her mother in particular. Maybe Jane could avoid talking to them entirely for a few months, or a year. Maybe they didn’t have to speak until Ruby got married, at which point they might be eighty and hard of hearing and not fully understand. Maybe she could wait until they were dead.

Someone knocked on the door to the bathroom. “Yeah,” Jane said. She stared at herself in the mirror. She was over fifty, with moles she’d been meaning to get checked out and a lone chin hair that sprouted up again every time she plucked it. Life was a fucking disaster, but it was time to organize the lunch prep and to call the butcher, and so Jane unlocked the door.

Thirteen

The Mary Ann O’Connell Realty Group was a boutique firm, with just five agents. Elizabeth was the only one who didn’t have the last name O’Connell — in addition to eighty-three-year-old Mary Ann, there were her two children, Sean and Bridget, plus Sean’s wife, Deirdre. The office was on the corner of Cortelyou and East Sixteenth Street, half a block from the rumbling Q train. Elizabeth and Deirdre shared a desk, which Elizabeth had always found a bit odd, that Sean would rather share a workspace with his sister than with his wife, but the O’Connells were nothing if not odd, and so it was to be expected. Family businesses were deeply complicated organisms, and it was almost always best to stay as far away from the decision-making processes as possible. Elizabeth would happily have worked from home, as she had when Harry was young, but Mary Ann got nervous when she didn’t see her crew hard at work or hear the jingle of keys as they left for a day of showings. Her office was in the back, and the door was never closed. When you came in or went out, even if it was just to get a sandwich, Mary Ann’s white corona of hair would begin to vibrate slightly, like a rung bell. Deirdre liked to joke that her mother-in-law had been struck by lightning as a child and the jolt reappeared whenever she thought she was about to make money. She also liked to joke that the only reason she and Sean were allowed to get married was that on paper she (born in Trinidad) sounded as Irish as he did. Deirdre was the only O’Connell whose company Elizabeth actually enjoyed.

It was a glorious day outside — not yet the full summer warmth, but balmy enough for people to bare their arms and legs without the fear of goose pimples. Those windows of time were so short in New York City, which was in all ways a place of extremes. They’d thought about leaving, for that reason among many others, but the steadiness of California’s seventy-two-degree days didn’t appeal either. It was good to have things to complain about, to build character. Elizabeth leaned back in her chair and admired what she could see of the day through the window. The three desks were arranged by seniority, which meant that Elizabeth, a company veteran of only a decade, was sitting three feet from the sidewalk outside.

Sean walked in from lunch after a morning full of showings — early summer was always their biggest season, and inventory was high. The bell tinkled, and Elizabeth heard Mary Ann start asking Sean questions before he’d passed fully through the doorway. He nodded a greeting at Elizabeth and kept walking into his mother’s office. Elizabeth’s cell phone rang and she answered without looking at the caller ID.

“Hello?” she said. There was a pause, then a click.

“Holding for Naomi Vandenhoovel,” a young woman on the other end said.

“Excuse me?” Elizabeth said. She put a finger in her right ear to block out a fire truck roaring down the street. “Hello?”

“Lizzzzzzzy,” another voice said. “Thank you so much for speaking with me. I so appreciate it.”

“I’m sorry, who is this?” Elizabeth swiveled her chair away from the window. The whole office dotted with sunspots. “This is Elizabeth Marx,” she said, wondering if someone had called the wrong Elizabeth, scrolling quickly through the E section of her contacts.

“Elizabeth, it’s Naomi. Naomi Vandenhoovel. I’ve been in touch about the rights for the Lydia biopic. I work for the studio. We’ve e-mailed.”

“Oh, Naomi, yes,” Elizabeth said. She turned back around and opened her e-mail, frantically searching for Naomi’s most recent missive. “I’ve been meaning to get back to you.”

“Listen, Elizabeth, I know it seems crazy, after all this time, to just sign over the rights to your work and to your story, but this is a go picture. Do you know how hard it is to get a movie made these days?” There was a whooshing sound. “Sorry, I’m in my car. Let me close the window.”

“But how did you call me from your car? Your person just had me on hold!” Elizabeth was asking a serious question, but Naomi only laughed.

“I know, right?” she said. “Anyway, we really need the song. You know we need the song. And the life rights. I know that sounds scary — like, LIFE RIGHTS, but it’s just a fancy term for agreeing for there to be a character who may or may not have anything in common with you. Really. I can give you a few more weeks to work on your husband, but that’s really it. They want to start shooting in the fall. Don’t you want millions of teenage girls to go to the movies and see some badass fucking chicks playing rock ’n’ roll? Like, wahhhhhhh on the whammy bar, or whatever, you know? Don’t you want to be an inspiration? Forget about Lydia — just think about a girl in the middle of nowhere who thinks life is sucky and boring and then she sees this movie at the mall and she goes and buys a guitar and starts writing songs in her bedroom.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. She hadn’t been able to talk to Andrew about Lydia at all. He’d gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the conversation — he’d booked dentist appointments, taken their otherwise neglected car in for an oil change. This imaginary girl in her bedroom, though. That might work. Her life saved by music, by the movie, by them! It was certainly working on Elizabeth. She felt tiny tears forming, as suddenly as with a truly excellent Kleenex commercial. “I’ll try.”

“I’ll send over the forms again. The world needs to see this story, and to hear your song. Anecdotally, it’s my favorite song of all time. I’m sure you hear that a lot, but it’s true. I have the chorus tattooed on my rib cage.”

“You don’t,” Elizabeth said, though it wasn’t the first time she’d heard of such a thing. Once she’d seen a whole slide show of them on BuzzFeed.

“I do!” Naomi said. “I’ll send you a photo.”

“You really don’t have to,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, I want to! It looks fucking great!”

Elizabeth’s e-mail dinged, and she swiveled around to look. Sure enough, there was a rib cage with the words I will be calm calm calm calm in cursive. “Wow,” Elizabeth said. “Wait, how did you just send that, aren’t you driving?”

“I was so tan this summer, it was sick,” Naomi said, ignoring the question. California was a terrifying place. “Anyway, sign the forms and get them back to me as soon as you can, okay? Thank you so, so much.”

“I will,” Elizabeth said, not meaning to agree, but just that she’d let her know. She was nothing if not polite. Harry was always teasing her for calling to cancel restaurant reservations or appointments at the Apple Store Genius Bar. No one cares, Mom, he’d say, but Elizabeth believed in courtesy. She waited for Naomi to say more, but realized she was already gone.

Fourteen

The garage was unfinished — unlike some of their neighbors’, who had converted the spaces into playrooms or offices, and put in plumbing and heat and wood floors, Andrew and Elizabeth had the old-fashioned kind, with rusting shovels and half-empty cans of paint. They pulled the car in only when huge snowstorms were expected — otherwise, the large center of the space was empty, with a rug from Andrew’s parents’ house and two creaky wooden chairs. Elizabeth’s small Marshall amp was on her side, and Andrew’s boxy Orange amp was on his. Andrew rolled the garage door high enough for them to walk under, and then slid it halfway back down to the ground. People walking along the sidewalk could see their legs, maybe, but only if they were really looking, and there were far more exciting things to look at. Middle-aged rock ’n’ roll hobbyists were about as thrilling as old ladies gardening, and significantly more embarrassing. Andrew knew how things looked.

He had his notebook with him. He’d been writing things down, not whole lyrics but ideas for songs. Elizabeth was much better at making things sound good. She had a notebook full of lyrics, too, or at least she used to. Now her notebook was filled with this couple or that’s likes and dislikes, their contingencies, the size of their bank accounts.

“Want to play that one from the other day, the bum-bum-bum-ting one?” Elizabeth asked. She settled into her chair and pulled her guitar onto her lap. She plugged it in and slid the strap over her shoulder. Andrew loved the way his wife looked with a pick between her teeth. It went straight to the very essence of him. Once, in high school, his history teacher had gone on an epic tangent about how Barbara Stanwyck was his “sexual profile,” and everyone got extremely creeped out, but that was how Andrew felt about women who played the guitar. It didn’t matter if they were really good or really bad or just holding one. If they could really play, forget it — he was done. It was deeply sexist, and so he’d never said it out loud (that was what Oberlin had been good for, teaching him that most things men thought on a daily basis were rooted in sexism), but it was true. With Elizabeth, it wasn’t just that she could play, but that she was really fucking good at it.

“What?” Elizabeth said, the pick still between her teeth.

“Nothing,” Andrew said. He grabbed his bass by the neck. “Sure, let’s play that one.”

“Actually, honey, I meant to tell you — the people called about Lydia again.” Elizabeth puckered her lips. “Can we talk about it? We’re supposed to let them know soon.”

A garbage truck clattered down the street, its brakes squealing every thirty feet. Andrew let go of his bass and ran his fingers back and forth through his hair. “I just don’t like the idea of signing a piece of paper that hands over the control to some giant corporation. Next it’ll be in a Kleenex commercial.”

“I’m pretty sure that we can stipulate exactly how they can use it,” Elizabeth said. “The movie is about Lydia, not about us. They don’t care about us, honey.” She leaned the smooth back of the guitar against her sternum.

“That’s exactly my problem,” Andrew said. “You didn’t write those words for Lydia to sing. We didn’t write that song to have teenage girls in the mall in New Jersey pretend to be punk.”

“You mean like teenage boys who grew up in Manhattan pretended to be punk?” She rolled her eyes. “Pot, kettle.”

“It was the eighties! I wasn’t pretending! I was fucking angry, and the fact that my parents were Reagan-loving demons had a lot to do with that. Come on, Lizzy.” Andrew crossed his arms over his chest and took a few deep breaths. “I just don’t want to contribute to some soft-focus portrait of Lydia Greenbaum as some kind of folk hero. Why should we help them?”

“Because they’ll give us money?”

“Are you really that cheap?”

Elizabeth felt the words as acutely as a slap. “Excuse me? Andrew, I understand that you and I feel differently about this, but the fact that I am willing to get paid a very healthy additional fee for work I did two decades ago does not make me cheap. Harry is going to go to college, you realize. Soon. This house needs twelve new windows. Our basement is a resort for cockroaches. We could use this money — the Marx family trust doesn’t have to pay for our lives, you know. I’m not being greedy.” She started to sweat. “And it’s not just about Lydia, you know, or us, even. It’s about being inspiring to young women, to girls who feel like maybe they could play music, too. Like that Girls Rock Camp or whatever.”

When they’d met, in Ohio, so far away from their families and from their real lives, there was no way to tell that Andrew had money and that she didn’t. Everyone was exactly the same. They all wore thrift-store clothes and carried bags from the army/navy supply shop. Elizabeth had always thought her parents’ house was normal — nice, even — until Andrew reluctantly brought her home for a visit during their senior year’s winter term.

They drove Elizabeth’s car — Andrew didn’t have a license, nor did he seem to have a sense of how to get around. He kept directing Elizabeth to go one way and then cursing when he realized he’d sent them in the wrong direction. They spent an extra hour driving in circles in New Jersey before finally finding the Lincoln Tunnel, then another hour crawling through traffic to the Upper East Side. Elizabeth drove with her shoulders hunched over the wheel, looking for a parking spot on the quiet, dark streets.

“This is where your parents live?” she’d asked, when he pointed out the building. It was on the corner of Seventy-ninth and Park Avenue, with a giant metal sculpture of a cat out front. They lugged their bags into the lobby, all marble and spotless black countertops. A doorman with a cap hurried to help them and greeted Andrew by name.

“Yeah,” he’d said, mortified. That night, when they curled up together on his childhood bed, in a room that overlooked Central Park, he’d told her how he fantasized about running away, about hopping on trains or sleeping on a bench in Tompkins Square. At Oberlin, Andrew majored in religion and was doing his senior thesis on Hindu goddesses. He wanted to move to Nepal. He wanted to sleep on the floor. He told Elizabeth over and over again how little his parents’ wealth mattered to him, and when she said that she was hungry, he called a diner on Lexington Avenue and had them send over scrambled eggs.

“I’m sure your parents have eggs in the kitchen,” she’d protested, but Andrew insisted that the diner’s were better. Elizabeth thought about those eggs on an annual basis, if not more often — still warm, and yes, delicious — and how they told her more than Andrew ever could about how he’d grown up. Sometimes even the brightest people had truly no idea.

“We don’t have to decide today,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “You play, I’m going to make lunch.” She put her guitar back on its stand, clicked the amplifier off, and walked out of the garage.

Fifteen

This time, Eliza and Thayer didn’t even pretend to say hello to Harry. They turned, saw him walk in with Ruby, and continued their conversation with no visible break. Rebecca, their fearless leader, was shuffling papers on her makeshift desk beneath the projection screen. Thick blue mats that the karate school used to teach people how to not get murdered by ninjas were still out, and a few kids in the class were doing somersaults.

“Oh, they are totally getting into Harvard,” Ruby said.

“I think that one looks more like a Yalie,” Harry said, pointing to one guy who had toppled over onto his side. “Maybe Princeton.”

“Barf,” Ruby said.

This was the only way that Ruby would talk about the future. She knew that Harry must be wondering why she was taking the class — no one took an SAT prep class for fun, especially not after their senior year — but Ruby never volunteered any information. She made fun of everyone who was going to good schools, but she also made fun of everyone who was going to big party schools and everyone who was going to tiny liberal-arts schools. It was open season on everyone but her. It wasn’t anyone’s business. So what if she’d applied to eight schools and not gotten into any of them? It didn’t make her a bad person, it made the admissions committees look like idiot snobs who deserved to be covered in honey and walked into the bear cage at the zoo. There wasn’t even really a point to going to college, not anymore, not for her. The thought of sitting through another four years of bullshit lectures about things that happened and books that were written hundreds of years ago was the world’s biggest waste of time and money. Ruby’s personal essay had been to that effect, and it appeared to have accomplished its goal. If either of her parents had thought to proofread her applications, they might not be in this pickle. She’d written the essay half as a joke, but then the joke had turned into her actual life. Ruby was sure that someone would stop her eventually. When she clicked the button to send in her applications, knowing what the attached documents looked like, Ruby kissed college good-bye. She wasn’t surprised when the applications were all rejected. At first, her mothers didn’t even know, because they were waiting for letters to show up in the mail, not realizing that nowadays letters only showed up if the news was good.

“Wait, that’s actually the best idea,” Ruby said.

“What is?” Harry asked. They were standing four feet inside the door. Rebecca clicked on her computer, and a drawing of a cat taking the SATs popped up on the projection screen.

Ruby folded over herself, her hands clutching her stomach. “Oh, no,” she said. “Rebecca, I really need to go home, I think I’m going to throw up.”

Thayer and Eliza turned around, their mouths open. Harry folded over in sympathy. “Are you okay?” he said, their faces both upside down. Ruby winked.

“Is it okay if I make sure she gets home?” Harry said, righting himself. Rebecca hustled over with some handouts. Ruby made a sound, dark and low and rumbling, that sounded like an approaching subway. No one wanted to see what was on that train.

“Of course,” Rebecca said, pulling the corners of her mouth down into a cartoon pout. “Feel better, okay!” She patted Harry on the back.

Ruby grabbed onto Harry’s wrist. “We have to get out of here right now, or else I am going to puke all over the dojo,” she said. “What belt would that get me?” Harry let her lead him out the door. Ruby kept moaning until they’d crossed Church Avenue and rounded the corner. Even though they were now out of sight, Ruby went over to a waiting mailbox and pretended to vomit into it, complete with sound effects. Then she stood straight up and took a deep, graceful bow. Harry looked at her with awe, and Ruby saw the rest of her summer in his face: he could be her project, her hobby, her doll.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Do your parents have food?”

“Your parents own a restaurant,” Harry said.

“Which is exactly why they never have food. I can tell you right now what’s in the fridge: yogurt, three different kinds of fish sauce, and pâté.” Ruby had once searched online for a support group for children of those in the food-service industry, for kids like her who’d never been allowed to eat milk chocolate or Cheez Whiz or Marshmallow Fluff or the extra-sweet supermarket peanut butter, but she hadn’t found anything.

“I think we have some chips and salsa,” Harry said.

“That’ll do.”

• • •

The living room was empty when they walked in. Harry called out “Hello?” but his parents didn’t respond. It was nine forty a.m. “My mom’s got some open houses, I think,” Harry said. “I don’t know where my dad is.”

“Whatever,” Ruby said, and walked straight into the kitchen. “If he comes home, just tell him that I got sick, and that your house was closer, so we came here.”

“Like fifty feet closer.”

“If you’re barfing, fifty feet is a lot of feet.”

“I guess that’s true.”

Ruby loved being in other people’s kitchens. Her mothers were such total freaks — the salt had to be a special kind of salt, unless it was for baking, in which case it had to be some very particular kind of normal salt, that sort of thing. Elizabeth and Andrew were just regular. They had Diet Cokes and a giant block of orange cheddar cheese. Ruby took the jar of salsa and the bag of chips off the counter. “Want to go to your room?”

“S-sure,” Harry said. Iggy Pop slowly climbed down from his perch over the refrigerator, and Harry scooped him up and held him like a baby. Ruby walked past the two of them toward the staircase.

Ruby hadn’t been upstairs in the Marxes’ house since she was little, but not much had changed. The walls were still a very pale orange, like a melted Popsicle after a rainstorm, and the same pictures were on the walls. There was one painting hanging by the door to Harry’s bedroom that Ruby had always liked, a village scene, with a Japanese woman watering some flowers in one corner and some free-range chickens in another. The Marxes’ house was always neat. Everything had its place. Unlike Ruby’s mum, who came home from every trip with some colorful trinket to put on a shelf to gather dust forever and ever, Elizabeth and Andrew seemed to have no useless objects. Ruby wandered down the hallway, poking her head into rooms.

“My room’s over here,” Harry said, behind her.

“I know,” Ruby said, still walking. “What’s this?” She stopped in front of an open door — the smallest room in the house.

“It’s the guest room,” Harry said. “The couch folds out. Plus, it’s just, like, storage, I guess.”

Ruby walked in, and over to the metal shelving along the wall. There were big clear plastic bins, each of them labeled. She ran her finger along the bins. “Wow, your mom is kind of OCD, huh.” Harry shuffled in after her and sat down on the couch, his hands in his lap. Iggy Pop, who had darted up the stairs after them, jumped into his lap.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s just organized.”

“Is this what that looks like?” Ruby asked. “Oh, shit, wow!”

Harry stood up quickly, sending Iggy back to the ground. “What? Is there a mouse?”

Ruby turned around to look at him, her purple hair flying. “Why would I say ‘wow’ if I saw a mouse, you weirdo? No, look, it’s all Kitty’s Mustache stuff.” She pulled one of the bins on the top shelf down to the floor and unlatched the lid. The box was filled with stuff — flyers and cassettes and seven-inches and posters and zines and college newspapers with reviews of their shows. Ruby leafed through the pile on top and pulled out a glossy photograph. “Check this shit,” she said.

From left to right, it was a picture of Lydia, Andrew, Zoe, and Elizabeth. None of them smiled or looked at the camera. Her mum was wearing a suede jacket with fringe and had a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, like a pissed-off movie star who’d just come back from a bender in the desert. Elizabeth was wearing a floor-length black skirt, with dark lipstick, her then-long blond hair tucked behind her ears, her body pointed toward the rest of the band. Andrew wore a white shirt and a flannel tied around his waist, his hair curling past his shoulders. Lydia was sitting cross-legged on the ground, holding her drumsticks in an X over her head.

“When is this from?” Harry said, taking the picture out of Ruby’s hands.

“Ninety-two,” Ruby said, pointing to the date in the corner, in Elizabeth’s handwriting. “OCD.”

“They’re so young,” Harry said. “It’s kind of horrifying. Look at my dad’s jeans. And his hair!”

“Look at my mum’s boobs!” Ruby pointed. Zoe wasn’t wearing a bra, and her nipples were clearly visible, even across time and space and this many years. Harry covered his eyes. “And look at Lydia.”

It was weird, knowing that your mother had had a life before you were born, but everyone had to deal with that eventually. Everyone’s mother had had sex at least once, and lots of people’s mothers had gotten drunk and been wild. Ruby knew she wasn’t alone. But it was extra weird to know that your mother had been drunk and wild with someone famous. And not someone famous for no reason, like the stars of a reality show, but someone actually famous and important because she was really good at what she did and people loved her. Ruby pretended that she didn’t care about Lydia because she knew that her mum would find it… annoying? Amusing? Her mum would have thought it was adorable. That was the worst fate of all, for your parents to look at you with their parent eyes and to call your inner turmoil cute. Zoe would have loved it if she knew that Ruby had Lydia’s two solo albums on her phone and that she listened to them when she walked down the street by herself, that they made her feel invincible and angry, but there was no way in hell that Ruby was ever going to tell her.

Ruby shuffled through the stack of posters and photos on top. There were a few more of the band, including one with Lydia standing in the middle with her mouth open in a scream, the rest of the band standing diagonally behind her. Unlike the others, this photo actually looked like Lydia, the real Lydia, the Lydia whose face would be taped on bedroom walls and printed on T-shirts.

“Do you know how much money we could get for this on eBay?” Ruby said. Her mum sometimes sold her old clothes on eBay, vintage dresses she’d had for decades and finally decided she didn’t need.

“No,” Harry said.

“Well, good thing you have me,” Ruby said. Her hobby was paying off already.

Sixteen

Andrew had waited until Harry left for his class, and then slid his feet into his rubber-bottomed slippers and walked quickly to Stratford Road. This time, he didn’t hesitate before walking up the stairs and into the house. The sign was still outside — WE ARE HERE, ARE YOU? — but now Andrew knew the answer. He was.

Dave was in charge, if anyone was in charge, but it wasn’t that kind of place. EVOLVEment was a co-op, and everyone who lived there worked there, too. It wasn’t about ownership, or hierarchy. It was about people, and mindfulness.

A young man with a beard and skinny legs said hello and offered Andrew a cup of tea.

“Is Dave around?” Andrew asked.

“Have a seat wherever you like, make yourself comfortable,” the man said. Normally, Andrew would have been annoyed that the guy hadn’t actually answered his question, but that was how things worked around here, he got it. There were stacks of cushions on the floor. Andrew took one, plopped it down next to a wall, and sat. He was happy to wait. A few other young people flitted around quietly, all of them in bare feet. Andrew pulled off his slippers and tucked them under his knees. After a few minutes, there was some laughter at the top of the stairs, and then Dave was walking toward Andrew with a huge smile, like he’d been expecting him.

“Nice to see you again, Andrew,” Dave said. He was short and stocky, like a gymnast, densely packed. Dave lowered himself down next to Andrew and touched him on the shoulder. They were only a few inches apart, as close as you’d be to a stranger on the subway, but in the big, open room, it felt remarkably intimate, as if Dave had stroked Andrew’s cheek with the back of his finger.

“Sure,” Andrew said. He felt himself blush a little bit. “I’m interested.”

And he was — Andrew was interested in philosophy, and the mind-body connection. He was interested in getting out of his own house and his own brain, seeing if he could link up to something outside, like the cables that ran between houses. He was interested in channeling his anger into something else, into a color, into air, into positivity. It was that kind of talk that Andrew’s parents hated: they didn’t give a shit about process, they only cared about the bottom line. His whole childhood had been wasted that way, bouncing from one after-school enrichment class to another, from one prep school to the next, as if those places were actually preparing him for anything other than a corporate job, where he was sure to be surrounded by all the same people he’d grown up with. Those people made him feel sick to his stomach, their chinos and boat shoes, their scuffed leather luggage with their initials on the side. No one cared about anything except whether the boat was going to be ready for Memorial Day. They were shitty to women and to the people hired to help their lives run smoothly. All Andrew had ever dreamed about was living somewhere with the barter system, someplace where money meant nothing unless it was all in the collective pool. His Oberlin co-op had been his wet dream, everyone cooking tofu together and baking dense little brown loaves of bread. If Elizabeth had been less type-A, and if they hadn’t had a baby, they’d still be living like that, with Zoe or whomever. Not that he’d trade a moment with Harry for anything in the world — if he’d done one thing right in his life, it was being a dad, Andrew knew that much for sure. Everything else was the problem. Andrew wanted to push every angry feeling he had down into his stomach and cover it with mulch and love until it was a goddamn flower bed.

The house — Dave’s house, the collective — was really coming together. The front rooms were used for yoga and meditation classes, open to anyone. If you came to class, or to meditate, or to qigong, someone would slide a finger with essential oils over your temples and you’d go home smelling like lavender and orange and eucalyptus. They were working on getting the permits or the licenses to serve food, but that seemed legally complicated. It might just be juice. Dave was from California, and it showed. He talked like the words were stuck in the back of his throat and he had to coax each one out individually. In his most secret thoughts, Andrew believed that he should have been born to a surfing family, the kind who traveled up and down the California-Mexico coast, sleeping in a Winnebago on the beach. Dave didn’t say, but Andrew was sure that was his story. Sand in a sleeping bag, the waves crashing at night.

A few young women in yoga clothes came into the room. Dave said hello to them, and the women began to roll out a number of yoga mats at the other end of the room, gently placing blankets and blocks beside each place. The women looked no older than Ruby, but then again, Andrew was always surprised by people’s ages now. When he was a teenager, anyone over the age of twenty looked like a grown-up, with boring clothes and a blurry face, only slightly more invisible than Charlie Brown’s teacher, but life had changed. Now everyone looked equally young, as if they could be twenty or thirty or even flirting with forty, and he couldn’t tell the difference. Maybe it was just that he was now staring in the opposite direction.

“We’re about to have class,” Dave said. “You should stay.” He patted Andrew on the shoulder again and then stood up and walked over to the women at the front of the room, crouching between them and touching them both on their shoulder blades. Then Dave stood up again and pulled off his T-shirt, displaying his bare chest. He picked up a blanket off a stack, unfolded it, refolded it in a different way, and dropped down to his knees. Dave cupped his hands together on the blanket, nestled the crown of his head into the web of his fingers, and then slowly raised his legs up behind him until he was standing on his head.

The two women turned around and nodded at Andrew. One of them pulled her hair into a ponytail, and the other began to stretch, shifting her body this way and that.

“Okay,” Andrew said, not sure what was about to happen. He crawled forward onto one of the yoga mats on the floor. More people filtered in and took the spaces around him, and pretty soon the room was full — ten people, maybe twelve. At the front of the room, Dave lowered himself back down and came to a lotus position. He lit a few candles and began to chant so quietly that Andrew wasn’t sure if it was him or a passing car, a low rumble that got louder and louder until all the other voices joined in and Andrew could feel the room begin to vibrate. He closed his eyes. Elizabeth would have laughed, but Andrew loved it. It reminded him of when he was little and his older cousins would use him as their hairdressing doll, braiding and brushing his hair for what felt like hours, how good their fingers felt on his scalp. Andrew had tried reiki before, and that’s what was happening in the room: energy was being pushed around and manipulated in order to heal. He was being healed, even before Dave stopped chanting and asked them to put their hands on their knees and set an intention for their practice. Andrew’s intention came to him, clear as a bell: Be here. Be here. Be here. And when Dave asked them all to move into downward-facing-dog pose, Andrew did. He was the oldest person in the room, and he was going to be whatever he was told. Maybe EVOLVEment needed some shelves built for the yoga equipment, or a small table for the candles so that they didn’t sit on the floor. Andrew was going to meditate on it.

Seventeen

Elizabeth backed out of her driveway and drove the four-second commute to Zoe’s house. She didn’t even need to put the car in park — Zoe was waiting out front, wearing a sundress and a large, floppy hat, and she bounded into the front seat like an excited puppy.

“So, what’s up first?” Zoe took off her hat and held it in her lap. “I feel very weird about this, but I really want to do it, so just pretend that I’m a regular client and not just your friend having a midlife crisis, okay?”

“You’re the boss, boss. First up are two apartments in Fort Greene,” Elizabeth said. “Very different vibes. The first one is in the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, with a view to die for, very mod. The second one is a floor-through in a brownstone on Adelphi. Both are really, really nice.” She turned on her blinker and made the left onto Cortelyou, heading toward Flatbush. “Close to the train, close to restaurants, all that stuff.” She looked over at Zoe. “And if you want to stop, we’ll stop, okay?”

“Sounds good to me,” Zoe said. She twisted the rings on her fingers. “What else can we see?”

“There are a couple of condos on the water in Williamsburg, and one in Dumbo.”

“I think I’m too old for Williamsburg.”

“You’re retro,” Elizabeth said. “You’re like a cassette tape. They’ll go crazy for you.”

Zoe slumped over, pretending to be wounded. “Ack,” she said. “Thank you.”

“No, come on,” Elizabeth said. “You’re just going to get the lay of the land, see what feels good. It’ll be fun.”

“Okay,” Zoe said. She flipped down the mirror and patted the skin under her eyes. “Do I look really tired? I have been sleeping like shit. Like absolute shit.” She turned toward Elizabeth. “Tell me the truth.”

Elizabeth waited for a red light and then swiveled as much as she could in the driver’s seat. Zoe did look tired — but they all did. It felt like a minute ago that they could stay up until two in the morning and still look like normal, well-adjusted human beings the next day. Now when she didn’t sleep, no amount of drugstore makeup could disguise the bags under her eyes, and that’s how Zoe looked, too, even beautiful Zoe.

“You do look a little tired,” Elizabeth admitted.

“Fuck, I knew it,” Zoe said. “I swear to God, it’s all a plot. Jane is trying to make me look like a hideous monster so that no one will ever want to sleep with me ever again, and I’ll just pretend to forget that we’re unhappy, and then nothing will ever change, and we’ll just be sad, lonely eighty-year-olds before you know it.”

A dollar van cut in front of them and Elizabeth honked her horn. “I hate driving in Brooklyn.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. “You sound like my mother.”

• • •

They drove to the first appointment of the day, an apartment on the sixteenth floor, overlooking the Barclays Center. Zoe’s house would sell quickly if they priced it right, and Zoe wanted to have a better sense of where she wanted to go before they put the house on the market. If they wanted to sell. If they actually split up. It was the kind of maneuvering that would have driven Elizabeth totally crazy — a complete waste of her time and energy — if they hadn’t been friends, but they were, and so it seemed like the least she could do. It was the equivalent of fantasy football, she guessed — people who couldn’t actually play pretending that they had some semblance of control over the outcome of games on television.

“I could have a sofa over here,” Zoe said, gesturing toward the windows.

“Or over here,” Elizabeth said, gesturing toward the wall opposite.

“The kitchen’s a little small,” Zoe said, and she was right, it was just a corner of the room with a few cabinets from Ikea and a cheap, glossy black countertop. She ran a finger over the lip of the stove. “This is a piece of garbage.”

“Not everyone is married to a chef,” Elizabeth said, wanting to make light of it, but it wasn’t light at all, and Zoe turned her back.

“Not even me, pretty soon,” she said, and it was time to leave.

• • •

The next apartment was better, warmer. Elizabeth unlocked the door and walked in first, half a step ahead. As soon as she crossed the threshold, she could feel how much more Zoe would like it. No matter what she claimed to want, Zoe liked old things, and no shiny apartment building was going to be the right choice. The second apartment had moldings and curved doorways and hundred-year-old windows with wavy glass. She loved it.

“And there’s a shared garden,” Elizabeth said, pointing out the back window.

“And we’re three blocks from BAM!” Zoe clasped her hands together, her silver rings little punctuation marks between her fingers. “This is a good one, Lizzy.”

Elizabeth waited in the front room while Zoe poked around the closets. “Do you want my measuring tape?” she hollered, but Zoe didn’t respond.

When she was young, Elizabeth had imagined that she would live in a number of houses as an adult — a garret in Paris, overlooking a cobblestone street; on the beach in California. She and Andrew loved to talk about the possibilities. That was one of the things she’d always liked about her husband, how open he was to ideas. Peru? Sure! New Zealand? Why not?! But after Harry was born, and they found their house, it was harder to travel, to be bohemian in the way they’d always imagined they might be. All their money was in that house, in its bricks and plaster, and if they sold it, they would have to ask Andrew’s parents for money to move anywhere more desirable, and no one wanted that. Not Elizabeth, not Andrew, not his parents. They’d made the trip from the Upper East Side to Ditmas Park eight or nine times, full stop. There were nominal reasons, as if they needed them: Andrew’s father walked with a cane, and his mother couldn’t be in an enclosed space without the fear of a panic attack, and so had been on the subway only a handful of times in her life. Of course they could take a car, but the distance was too much, psychologically. It was easier to make an annual pilgrimage in the other direction, up to the limestone and the army of doormen and the manicured medians of Park Avenue.

Was it too late for them to leave? Once Harry was out of high school, they would be free to make another choice, to move to an adobe house in Santa Fe, but could they make friends? At fifty? Maybe it was better to wait until they were seventy-five, old enough to move to a retirement community, a place on the coast of South Carolina that offered shuffleboard and karaoke. Andrew would rather die. Marfa, maybe, or a place upstate, near the Omega Institute. No place where they’d be surrounded by people like his parents. Sometimes Elizabeth looked at her husband and for a split second, he looked identical to the way he did as a twenty-four-year-old, with his sharp chin and his hooded eyes. He was so much angrier than Harry, even now, after decades of trying to be the opposite of how he was raised. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. When Andrew got upset, she could see the fury rise in his face like on a cartoon, red-red-red-red until his head exploded. Most of the time, he was able to dial it back down, but sometimes, rarely, he still exploded. Harry had only seen it happen a few times in his life, and every time, he had immediately burst into tears, the fire extinguisher to his father’s four-alarm blaze. They worked in both directions, actually — whenever Harry was undone, by a broken toy or a skinned knee, Andrew swooped into action, calm and comforting, a perfect nursemaid. Elizabeth was grateful for that, for their joint sweetness. It was so hard to tell when a child’s personality would harden and fix, but it seemed true that Harry was kind and quiet, a good boy.

“Whew,” Zoe said, appearing at Elizabeth’s side. “I like this one a lot.” She bent forward at the waist and touched her toes. “I could live here, I think.”

“That’s great,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, you can’t live here, unless you want to move before you sell your house, or unless you want to buy this place and keep it empty for six months, but it’s good to know what you’re looking for.”

“Oh,” Zoe said. “Right.”

“Or the timing could work out — you never know how slowly people are going to move. We could hurry up with your house and drag our heels over here, and if you’re not bidding against multiple other offers, it could work.”

They hadn’t talked about a real schedule. Once the balls were in the air, things were going to get messy. The room got a little bit wobbly for a second, while both Elizabeth and Zoe suddenly imagined the fantasy becoming a reality. But “fantasy” was the wrong word — a fantasy was a thatched hut on a faraway beach, a fantasy was a white horse and a castle. The idea of Zoe actually getting divorced — of her being single—was actually horrifying. It was a choice people made all the time, to end a marriage, but it had never happened to them, and they looked at each other for a minute, both grim-faced. If Zoe and Jane could do it, so could she, Elizabeth thought, the notion flickering across her brain quickly and vanishing like a phantom mosquito.

“Can we just sit here for a while?” Zoe asked.

“Sure,” Elizabeth said. They had other appointments, later in the day, but mostly she just had keys to empty apartments, like this one, and spending a few extra minutes wasn’t going to throw off their schedule. This was how decisions got made in her business — sitting in empty rooms, listening to people’s daydreams about furniture and imaginary children.

They sat down on the floor of the living room, or what would become the living room when someone moved in. Elizabeth sat with her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, and Zoe leaned against the opposite wall, with her knees bent. The wood floors were gleaming, with defiant dust bunnies forming in the corners of the room. It was nearly impossible to keep an empty space completely clean.

“I’ve been walking through the house, making imaginary lists of what’s mine and what’s hers,” Zoe said. “It’s surprisingly easy.”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

Zoe ticked the items off on her fingers. “The nice rugs are mine, the kitchen stuff is hers. The trunk we got at the flea market is mine, the records are mine, mostly. The ugly fucking lamp that I’ve always hated is hers.”

“Plus Bingo.”

“Bingo is nonnegotiable.” Zoe rolled her head back so that Elizabeth was looking at her throat. “Ruby, on the other hand…”

“What’s going on with Rube?”

“It’s all so typical.” Zoe shifted her head forward again and smacked her lips. “Teenage girls are teenage girls. Do you remember what giant assholes we were? Or, you weren’t, but I was. Ruby is kind of a giant asshole right now. Not always. When she has a stomachache or the flu and she feels awful, then she’ll still crawl into bed with me and cuddle up and let me pet her, but otherwise? Forget it! She treats me like a warden. Not even the nice warden who gives you extra soap, but the mean one, with the nightstick. It’s horrible.”

“What about Jane?” Elizabeth had often observed Ruby acting like an asshole over the course of her life, but it was an awareness she tried to suppress. Not liking your friends’ kids was worse than not liking your friends’ spouses. And it wasn’t that Elizabeth didn’t like Ruby — she was often funny, and dark in a way that Elizabeth found amusing — but there was a touch of the asshole there, it was true. You couldn’t ever say that, though, no matter how true it was. When the kids were little, she and Zoe had been friends with another mom in the neighborhood, and this lady’s kid was so horrible that they both mentioned it to her, that he seemed like a miniature serial killer in training, and she stopped speaking to them. Pretty soon she moved out of the neighborhood, and Elizabeth guessed it was to move closer to whatever prison facility her son was bound to wind up in. People just didn’t want to hear it.

“Jane is hopeless. She doesn’t even try. Which, of course, makes it so much easier. Jane and Ruby can go eat a thousand chicken wings together and not say more than three words, and they’re fine, like a couple of frat boys. Ruby never says she hates Jane. She only hates me.”

“Ruby does not hate you, Zo,” Elizabeth said.

Zoe crossed her fingers. “Remember when all you had to worry about was how much breast milk they were eating, and what their poop looked like?” She laughed. “Parenthood is the only job that gets progressively harder every single year, and you never, ever, ever get a raise.”

“I’ll give you a raise,” Elizabeth said. She stood up and offered Zoe a hand. “Harry said he’d been hanging out with her in their SAT class, did you know that?”

“I am more likely to learn about my daughter from the mailman than I am to get any information directly,” Zoe said. “But that’s nice. Chivalry, I guess?”

“I suppose,” Elizabeth said. She started to describe the look on Harry’s face when he’d mentioned it — though he tried so hard to be casual, his cheeks were tight with disbelief and happiness — but she stopped herself. Ruby, like Zoe, had a long life of adoration ahead of her, and Elizabeth didn’t feel she needed to fuel the fire. No matter how old you got, there were certain things that clung from childhood — a cool-girl meanness or a nerdy girl’s pining for someone who wouldn’t want her back. Elizabeth saw so much of herself in Harry, even in his silent crushes, the secrets he thought he kept. It was hard to be a boy, just like it was hard to be a girl. “Let’s go,” Elizabeth said, and she opened the front door, happy to have the noise on the street come into the apartment and fill it with something other than her own thoughts.

Eighteen

Ruby didn’t love the idea of working at the restaurant, but her mothers didn’t really give her a choice. It was either work as a hostess at Hyacinth or get a job somewhere else, and anywhere else would require (at the very least) a résumé and an interview, not to mention the clothes she would have to buy at Banana Republic or wherever else lame people with boring jobs bought their gray pantsuits and white button-down shirts. Chloe was in France all summer, and Paloma was at her parents’ country house for the month of June, until she left for a month in Sardinia at her parents’ “cottage.” Ruby didn’t miss them. Sarah Dinnerstein was around all summer, and Ruby wished she weren’t. As soon as graduation was over, Ruby knew that the whole thing had been a setup — not the ceremony itself, but the years preceding it. She wanted to go into a witness-protection program somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, learn to break horses, maybe marry a cowboy, spit in a can for fun. Anything to get out of Brooklyn and her own life. But here she was.

Allie, the current hostess at Hyacinth, who had also been Ruby’s babysitter, seemed to have left abruptly, but that happened a lot in the service industry. Her mom said they needed someone fast, and nothing was faster than Ruby. She agreed to work the lunch shift (which was always slow during the week) and then the brunch shift plus dinner (after her class on Saturdays, and from ten a.m. to three p.m. on Sundays), which was always like being an infantry soldier on a very crowded battlefield. Ruby herself found brunch to be an infantilizing meal, but as her mothers loved to remind her, those long afternoons of eggs and mimosas paid for her tuition. The least she could do was show people to their tables and tell them to enjoy themselves. She didn’t have to like it.

The hostess stand was near the door, across from the bar. Jorge, the daytime bartender, was also a stand-up comedian, and he liked to practice on Ruby while she sat and waited for people to come in. He was an okay bartender but not a very good comedian. The current bit was about how no one watched commercials anymore, and though Ruby wasn’t really paying attention, it seemed to have something to do with a bunch of old white guys sitting around a boardroom table complaining. Jorge was going to be a bartender forever. Ruby laughed charitably when he stopped talking, because she assumed he was finished. She had her phone behind the stand and was playing Candy Crush, level 24.

“Hello? Did you see him or not?” Jorge was drying off glasses with a dish towel, twisting and stacking, twisting and stacking.

“What are you even talking about?” Ruby glanced up from her phone.

Jorge pointed to the left corner of the window. “Look over here. You know this white kid, Casper the ghost? He’s been walking back and forth for like five minutes, just staring at you.”

Ruby shut her phone off and hopped down from the stool. She tiptoed to the end of the bar and peeked out the window. Dust was standing with his skateboard perched on his toe, leaning against the storefront of the Mexican bakery next door. “Oh, shit,” Ruby said, and scurried back to her post.

“You know him?” Jorge asked. “Do I need to go tell him to scram?”

“Scram? Are you still pretending to be an old man? I can’t tell. No, thank you. I can handle this myself. I’ll be right back.” Ruby tossed Jorge a stack of menus. “Just in case.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears and pulled open Hyacinth’s heavy front door. “Hey!” she said to Dust. He was smoking and staring off into space, two of his favorite hobbies. “What are you doing, you stalker?”

Dust saw her walking toward him and smiled. He opened his arms wide for a hug.

Ruby smacked his hands away and crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you, and I heard you were working.” Dust licked the pointy edge of his chipped tooth. “I was around the corner — it’s not some weird stalker shit.”

Dust did have a friend who lived on Westminster. His name was Nico, and he grew marijuana in his closet and in the window boxes outside his bedroom. “Fine,” Ruby said. “Now you’ve seen me.” She didn’t move.

“So is that kid, like, your boyfriend now? Your little private-school ninja bodyguard? Looked kinda young for you.” Dust cocked his head to the side. “You don’t miss me?”

Ruby did miss Dust, sort of, but she would rather have been eaten alive by sewer rats than admit it. Mostly she missed his body, and that broken tooth. It was fun to talk to someone who knew how to flirt, and how to flirt while riding a skateboard. Harry had no idea how to flirt. That was entertaining, too, in its own way, but sometimes Ruby got tired of feeling like Mrs. Robinson. She had already decided that she would kiss Harry back if he ever tried anything, but now it was getting to the point where Ruby had to decide if she actually wanted to kiss him enough to do it herself. Whitman was small — if Harry had ever kissed anyone before, she would probably know it. There was no hiding anything — the whole school was packed so tight that you had to squeeze past couples making out by their lockers, not like in the movies, where there were bleachers and football fields and stuff. The back staircase was where you could see real action, and Ruby herself had done some serious business there. Harry Marx, on the back stairs? That would be like seeing Dust in an SAT prep course. It just didn’t compute. But maybe with some practice.

“I have to go back to work,” Ruby said.

“Text me,” Dust said. He winked at her and dropped his board to the pavement and was zooming away before she could say no.

Nineteen

Elizabeth didn’t like to think of herself as anal, but she did like things to be a certain way. She could have been an architect, if she’d cared more about math. It was why she was good at her job — there were so many offer sheets, comp sheets, pages and pages of contracts — and Elizabeth’s were always in spotless order. It just felt good, to have everything in its rightful place. She wasn’t sure about godliness in general, but if she were, then cleanliness would definitely have been next to it. She was organizing the guest room when she noticed that her storage boxes were in the wrong order. Everything was chronological — her childhood things, Andrew’s childhood things, Kitty’s Mustache memorabilia, files of old letters, Harry’s childhood things. The Kitty’s Mustache box was all the way to the right-hand side of the shelf, three spaces over from where it should have been, and the top had been put on backward. Elizabeth slid the box out and set it down on the floor.

She knew every piece of paper in the box: every press clipping, every photo. At first she saved things just because it seemed like a special time in her youth, but after Lydia died, it seemed more important than that. No one else had pictures of Kitty’s Mustache’s first practice, or of Lydia with her drumsticks sitting on a dorm-room floor. No one else had pictures of Lydia smiling, wearing a sweatshirt, with a ponytail. These were cultural artifacts. Like dinosaur bones, they were proof of previous life, and as precious to Elizabeth as her wedding pictures.

There were a few pictures missing — two band photos, including Elizabeth’s selfish favorite, the one where she thought she looked like a high priestess, with the dark lipstick and the long black skirt. She’d bought the dress for seven dollars at the Elyria Salvation Army, and it was so long that it dragged on the ground behind her, which meant that the polyester began to unravel and wear after a few months of constant contact with the sidewalk.

“Andrew?” Elizabeth called.

“Yeah?” It sounded like he was in the kitchen.

“Can you come up here?” She leafed through — there were three things missing total, she was pretty sure.

“Hey,” Andrew said, eating an apple. “What’s up?”

“Did you go through my pictures, take anything?” Elizabeth held up one of the band portraits. “Remember your flannel phase?”

Andrew shook his head. “God, I haven’t looked at those in forever.” He stepped into the room and plucked the picture out of Elizabeth’s hand. “Man, we look fucking cool. Right? Or do we not? You look incredible.”

“I think we do. Or did. I think we did. You still look like that.” She kissed him on the cheek. Andrew handed the photo back and took another bite of his apple, sending a juicy mist into the air.

“Don’t spray my memories,” Elizabeth said, wiping off the photo on her shirt. “It’s so weird, but I’m pretty sure there are some things missing. You don’t think Harry would have taken them, do you?” She lowered her voice. “Is he in his room?”

Andrew nodded. Elizabeth tucked the picture back in the box and stood up, dusting off her fingers. She squeezed past Andrew and knocked on Harry’s bedroom door. Once she heard his muffled reply, Elizabeth turned the knob and opened the door.

Harry was sitting cross-legged on his bed, an SAT study guide splayed open in front of him. He had his giant headphones around his neck, which made his head look shrunken, as if he’d gotten into a fight with a voodoo shaman.

“Hey, Mom,” Harry said. There were dark circles under his eyes. Elizabeth had never seen him look that way before, like he hadn’t been sleeping enough. She wanted to scoop him up in her arms and rock him back and forth, even though he probably weighed as much as she did.

“Hi, honey,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t know why she was asking him — Harry had never taken anything that wasn’t his, not a pack of gum from the supermarket, not an extra piece of Halloween candy out of a neighbor’s bowl. He didn’t fib. Harry was their little golden ticket. Whenever she got together with other mothers of kids in his class, she would listen to them complain and rail against the demons living in their houses, and Elizabeth would just smile and nod politely. “This is probably silly, but did you happen to be in my storage boxes?” She pointed to the wall. “You know, in the guest room?”

Harry would have made any poker player very, very happy. His face melted instantly, and his lower lip began to wobble. “Um,” he said.

Elizabeth took another step into the room, her hands on the edges of the door. “Honey, what is it?”

He was trying not to cry. “It was just a couple of things. I didn’t know you’d miss them. If I’d known, we wouldn’t have done it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Elizabeth asked. Harry’s friends were the sort with glasses and dirty sneakers, the sort of boys who’d worn sweatpants to school long after they should have. Arpad, Max, Joshua — those boys weren’t thieves. Together, they were a motley crew, like the geeks she remembered from her own high-school days, with squared-off glasses and overbites.

“Me and Ruby,” Harry said. “She thought they were worth a lot of money.” He temporarily brightened, thinking this information might scuttle him out of trouble. “And she was right! We’re already way past the reserves, look!” He opened his laptop and clicked some keys, then spun the computer screen toward his mother. Sure enough, there were her photographs on eBay, each going for over two hundred dollars already.

“Harr,” Elizabeth said. It was unlike him in so many ways — too entrepreneurial, too sneaky, too thoughtless.

Andrew poked his head in. “Did you find them?”

“Oh, we found them all right. Ruby Kahn-Bennett put them on eBay.” She grabbed the computer from Harry’s bed and showed Andrew the screen.

“Are you kidding? What are you going to do next, sell the television set for drug money?” Andrew frowned, his forehead creases deepening into hard lines, as even as ruled paper.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said. He shrugged. “I mean, I guess I knew I shouldn’t, but Ruby thought that it wasn’t a big deal, and that we’d make all this money….”

“Which you were going to do what with? Buy your mother flowers?” Andrew’s voice was veering close to a shout, which made Elizabeth’s ears ring. He never yelled at his son — maybe three times in the last sixteen years. Elizabeth knew how important it was to him to keep his temper in check. It had been a problem in their youth, Andrew always flying off into the stratosphere with rage over something totally inconsequential, but since the birth of their son, it had vanished almost completely.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” His cheeks were bright red.

“Andrew, relax,” Elizabeth said. She was upset that Harry had taken the pictures, but it was so clear — so perfectly obvious — that it wasn’t his fault. He was under Ruby’s spell. “It was Ruby’s idea.”

“And that makes it better? I’m going to call Zoe. Right now.” He slid his phone out of his back pocket and dialed Zoe’s cell. In the band, there had been two distinct teams: Elizabeth and Zoe, and Lydia and Andrew. It wasn’t that Andrew and Zoe weren’t friends, officially, it was just that they weren’t friends, actually. Sometimes Elizabeth wondered what her life would have been like if she’d hit it off with Lydia instead of Zoe, what dominoes that would have sent knocking together.

“Oh, my God,” Harry said. He dropped his face into his hands.

“It’s not your fault,” Elizabeth said. He’d been taken hostage, simple as that. In the hall, Andrew’s voice got louder and louder, and Elizabeth walked over to the bed and put her arms around her son.

Twenty

After screaming at Zoe (and then Jane) about their delinquent daughter’s theft, Andrew took a walk around the block, walking away from the Kahn-Bennetts’, just in case the three of them were staring out the window and ready for a rematch. He could feel his blood pumping in his ears. Andrew exhaled loudly through his mouth, once, and then again. Harry’s offense wasn’t so horrible, he knew that, but it was sneaky and wrong, and it was because Zoe was as shitty a mother as she was a person. She’d always been totally self-centered, and Elizabeth couldn’t see it, the way Zoe treated her like a dog. Worse than a dog! Zoe loved her dog, but Andrew wasn’t sure she felt the same way about his wife.

Andrew was at EVOLVEment before he realized that that’s where he was headed. He took the stoop steps two at a time. The door was open, and there was a meditation group in session. A girl with two braids pinned to the top of her head motioned him in, pointing to a blanket toward the front of the room, where Dave was sitting. Andrew climbed over everyone as quietly as possible and sank to his seat. He closed his eyes and felt better already. He sat in silence for an indeterminate amount of time — it could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been an hour. Dave rang a singing Tibetan bowl to reawaken the room, and they all started to move their bodies, sliding their hands over their knees and faces. When Andrew opened his eyes, Dave was looking right at him, smiling.

• • •

He hadn’t seen the upstairs, and was excited when Dave offered the full tour. Like the first floor, the stairs and the upstairs hall had all been painted white, and the only rugs and curtains were white as well, which made the space seem much more open than it really was. Most of the houses in Ditmas were Victorian, which was code for small, dark rooms with lots of wood, but this house had been ripped apart by enough owners that none of the original millwork remained. Young people walked around barefoot, the soles of their feet making gentle sucking sounds. It wasn’t like one of the yoga studios in the Slope, where everyone was wearing ninety-dollar yoga pants, all the logos on their asses lining up perfectly when they were in downward-facing dog. These kids were wearing whatever they wanted, shorts and T-shirts and filmy little dresses. One kid standing near the kitchen was wearing a headband with flowers on it and an open robe, a millennial Hugh Hefner. Andrew ran his hand up the banister. He and Elizabeth had always been on the minimal side of things, but being in EVOLVEment made him want to get rid of everything unnecessary — he wanted blank walls, open windows.

“This is one of the body-treatment rooms,” Dave said. “Reiki, massage. We have so many talented body workers in our community.” He kept walking, with Andrew a half step behind. “This is another treatment room.” A young woman was lying on her back while another dripped something onto her forehead. “Ayurveda.”

“So who lives here?” Andrew asked.

“Right now there are six of us — me, Jessie, who I think you’ve met”—Dave pointed toward the girl with the braids—“three artists-in-residence, plus Salome, who leads the cosmic trances on Friday nights. She’s amazing, you should come. The vibes in this house are incredible. I swear, for three days after, the whole place is still vibrating.”

“I will,” Andrew said.

There were more rooms — bedrooms filled with potted ficus trees and rubber plants, rooms with futons and candles and musical equipment. Every so often, a young woman or man would squeeze by them slowly, touching Dave on the arm and then smiling. Andrew never wanted to leave.

“Do you need help building things around here?” he asked. “I’ve been getting into woodworking. I’d love to help.”

Dave clapped Andrew on the back. He smelled like sage and sandalwood. “That would be great, man. We’d love that. And if you ever need to crash here, go right ahead. There is always room in a bed.”

“Thanks,” Andrew said. It wasn’t clear if the beds Dave was offering already had people in them or not, but it seemed like it. Jessie, the girl with the braids, walked quickly toward them, her feet in ballerina turnout. She held a small cup in each hand.

“You guys have to try this juice I just made,” she said. They each took one and raised it to their lips.

The juice was green and pulpy, leaving stringy pieces in between Andrew’s teeth. Dave seemed to have no trouble sucking it down. “What’s in it?” Andrew asked, after he swallowed. There was a funny taste, medicinal, lingering in the back of his throat.

“Kale, chili peppers, anise, apple, orange, St.-John’s-wort, a few other things. It’s good, right?”

“Delicious,” Dave said. He pulled on his beard. “Mmmm.”

“That’s right,” Jessie said. She took a few tiny steps forward and kissed Dave on the mouth. Then she pirouetted around and walked back the way she’d come.

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn’t done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn’t done anything to drive it away. Andrew thought about Harry and the stolen photos and Ruby and her purple hair, and even though part of him wanted to call Zoe and Jane back and yell at them even more, mostly he wanted to know how it was that he wasn’t the child anymore, how his baby boy had become a teenager, and how it was possible that he — Andrew Marx! — would soon be fifty. It didn’t matter what any listicle said, about how fifty was the new thirty. Harry was going to start having sex, and Andrew was going to be a grandfather, and then Andrew was going to be dead. It was a chain of events that he couldn’t stop, even if he had all of his parents’ money. They had tried — the sports cars in the garage at the country house in Connecticut, the “skin treatments” his mother had every three months in an attempt to erase the lines and spots from her face — but it was all a pathetic Hail Mary. Andrew just wanted to pause time for a little while, to pretend that he was still young enough to do something that mattered. He wanted to drink juice and sit in a quiet room and wait for all the young bodies around him to dance.

Twenty-one

Harry had been weighing the decision for weeks — three weeks, every day since Ruby’s graduation. He was going to kiss her, with tongue. If that’s what she wanted. If she let him! It was unclear how exactly to make a kiss happen. They had to be alone, obviously, and they had to be sitting close enough together that Harry didn’t have to lunge across the room like a zombie, eyes closed and mouth open. Other than that, though, he really wasn’t sure.

He and Ruby hadn’t spoken since the Grand Theft of 2014. Harry’s parents had gone crazy, as if Ruby had taken nuclear-bomb codes from the president’s briefcase. It really didn’t seem like that big a deal, or at least it hadn’t before they’d been discovered. Harry hated being in trouble, but he also hated that Ruby was now going to think he ratted her out. He’d been trying to figure some casual way to tell her that he hadn’t narced on them, but so far all he had was a text that said HEY with the emoji for a bomb and the ghost sticking out its tongue. It wasn’t quite there yet.

It was Friday morning. He’d done nothing all week. On Wednesday, he went to see a crappy movie with Yuri, one of his few friends from Whitman who wasn’t off doing something glamorous all summer long. Most kids were at their summer houses, or backpacking across New Zealand or Israel or France. Yuri lived in Windsor Terrace and was working at a Starbucks and made Harry free iced coffees when he visited. On Friday, Harry and his parents went to the Tibetan restaurant by the train. The entire time, all week long, Harry had been thinking about walking into his SAT class and worrying about whether Ruby would still sit next to him.

There were three houses for sale in their neighborhood, and his mom was working them all — one down by Newkirk, one at the end of their block, and one over on Stratford. Sometimes she dragged Harry along when she was setting up for things. He liked to fill the giant glass bowls with the Granny Smith apples, that kind of thing. It all seemed so goofy, but his mother swore that it worked, as if someone would say, I freaking love apples. I need to buy this house. Mostly, though, it meant that his mother was AWOL most of the time and so was his dad.

Because the bidding wasn’t over yet, Elizabeth was able to take down the listing on eBay. Zoe and Ruby had brought the pictures back, and Zoe stood there in the doorway while Ruby apologized to Elizabeth. Harry sat on the stairs, cringing. It was his fault, too, and he was technically in trouble, but everyone involved knew that he never would have done it without Ruby. Her voice was flat and even, just this side of insolence. Elizabeth nodded and offered her terse thanks, and then Zoe and Ruby were gone. Harry thought he saw Ruby wink at him quickly on her way out the door, but he was probably seeing things. He held his phone in his hand all night long, waiting for a message, but none came.

Harry slid out of bed and pulled on his jeans, still sitting in a crumpled pile on the floor, as if he’d just evaporated out of them. He swabbed some deodorant under his arms and shuffled into the hallway.

“Dad?” There was no answer. Harry poked his head up the stairs, toward his parents’ bedroom. “Dad?” Still no answer. His father was almost always home. When Harry was small, he actually believed that his father didn’t sleep but instead just sat in a corner of a room, waiting to be played with, like the biggest toy in the house.

Harry walked slowly up the stairs. His parents’ room was empty, except for Iggy Pop, who was still curled up in a ball at the foot of the bed. Harry wondered if Ruby had gotten grounded, or if she’d ever been grounded. Being grounded was such an ancient concept, like feudalism, or jazz being cool. It had no place in modern society. Parents couldn’t even take away phones or computers, not really, because then how could you call for help if you were run over by a bus on the way to school, and how could you turn in your reading logs and science worksheets? It would be like giving your kid an abacus and sending him off to his calculus final exam.

His mother’s laptop was sitting open on her small desk, which was against the far wall, away from the windows. Harry sat down and clicked the mouse. Her computer woke up, a photo of Harry and Iggy asleep on the couch together a few years ago as the background. Without thinking about it, Harry clicked the mail icon on the bottom of the screen, and Elizabeth’s e-mail in-box leaped up, alert and dinging.

He wasn’t a snoop — his mother’s e-mails were boring. Of the fifty or so e-mails in her in-box, half of them were from work, and the rest seemed to be junky things that she should unsubscribe from. Harry tried to tell her how to do it, how easy it was to click a few buttons and not get a hundred e-mails a day from the Container Store or whatever, but she didn’t listen. Ruby was right — his mother was obsessive, but not about everything. Her e-mail in-box looked like it belonged to a hoarder with an online-shopping addiction. He scrolled through for a minute, checking to see if Ruby’s moms had written, if they’d said anything about him. It wasn’t like him to read someone else’s private correspondence, but Harry felt bad — felt bad that Ruby had probably gotten into trouble and all he’d gotten into was a hug. His parents were so sure that he’d never do anything wrong, that he wasn’t capable of it, and all that love and trust made Harry want to rob a bank. And so he started reading. It was a low-level crime, but it was a crime, and that’s what counted.

There was one from Zoe, but the whole e-mail thread was just about apartments. He copied down some of the links so he could show them to Ruby, but there wasn’t anything juicy. It was sad, the idea of one of her mothers moving out — which one would go? Would Ruby get to stay? Or would they both move? Even so, Harry pictured Ruby rolling her eyes at the notion of real estate as juicy information. A truly cutting-edge wooing tactic for a teenage boy. He kept scrolling.

About halfway through her in-box, there were a few flagged e-mails from someone named Naomi Vandenhoovel. The first one had the subject “MY TATTOO MISSES YOU,” which made it look like it was written by some weird bot, but she’d written again and again — subjects “MISTRESS OF MYSELF FILM VIP VIP VIP,” “HI AGAIN, CONTRACT DEADLINE FOR KITTY’S MUSTACHE,” “HI HI HI HI HI IT’S ME NAOMI.” The last one seemed to be dictated via Siri.

Harry read them all, one after the other.

This is what he put together: A crazy woman named Naomi was trying to get his mother and father to agree to sell the rights to “Mistress of Myself” for a movie about Lydia. A biopic. Like Ray, or Walk the Line. The kind of movie that would win someone an Oscar, especially if they really sang. And it wasn’t even like they’d have to actually be a good singer, to sing like Lydia. Harry had never liked the way Lydia sounded. His mom was a much better singer, technically. Anyone who had ever watched American Idol or The Voice knew when someone was singing out of tune, and that was Lydia’s specialty, sliding in and out of tune and screeching like she’d just dropped a toaster into her bathtub. So far, Elizabeth had been putting her off, but crazy Naomi (he couldn’t lie, the tattoo picture was kind of hot) was persistent as hell. No wonder his mom had been going through the Kitty’s Mustache stuff.

Most of the time, Harry didn’t think much about how his parents had been cool. It mattered to his daily life significantly less than English muffins, slightly more than the existence of remote-control helicopters. He was glad that they were interesting and interested, that they read books and went to the movies, which wasn’t true for all of his friends’ parents. His friend Arpad’s father was a surgeon, and no one ever saw him. It was like he was a ghost who left expensive things lying around the house in an attempt to get you to solve his murder. Harry’s parents were present; they were nice to him. It was boring, in a good way. And so Harry wasted very little time thinking about how, when they were his age, they had actually been cool. It sucked to feel as if your parents — your embarrassing, dorky parents — had been invited to parties that you would never get invited to, had done drugs no one had ever offered you, had stayed up all night talking to other cool people just because they wanted to. Harry wanted to stay up all night. He wanted to out-Dust Dust. He wanted to take Ruby’s hand and lead her somewhere she’d never been, and to do it with such confidence that she never once questioned that he knew where he was going. The past was the past. Harry was ready to be someone new. What was the masculine form of “mistress”? The “mister.” He was going to be the mister of himself, starting now. He wrote his parents a text that he was going to spend Saturday night at Arpad’s, that he was going there right after his SAT class. His mother texted back some smiley faces and some kisses. He had a day to change the entire trajectory of his life. Simple as that.

Twenty-two

Elizabeth was in the mood for chicken. It was also the only thing they had in the fridge, so it was what they were having for dinner. She’d often thought that being as close as they were to Jane and Zoe should yield some high-level kitchen skills, but so far, it hadn’t. Elizabeth could appreciate good food — she’d been to most of the city’s best restaurants with her in-laws, Andrew always pulling at his shirt collar like an awkward bar-mitzvah boy — but she could never figure out how to replicate those beautiful meals using her own two hands. There were only so many ways to cook things — boiling water, pans, oven — and yet other people seemed to do it so naturally. Whenever she dropped by Zoe’s house for lunch, one of the three of them would be eating some bowlful of brown rice and hard-boiled egg and sautéed kale, with an avocado-miso dressing that they’d just whipped up. Leftovers, they’d say, sheepish, as if it weren’t something that could easily be on the menu at Hyacinth. When Elizabeth felt sheepish about her food, it was because she was an adult with a teenage son and she still counted frozen pizzas among her chief food groups.

It wasn’t easy to have a best friend who seemed so much better at so many of life’s important skills. Maybe it was that she and Andrew had been together so long, or gotten together when they were still so young, or that they’d started out as friends, but Elizabeth couldn’t remember ever experiencing the all-consuming, life-eating early love that Zoe had found with Jane. They’d disappear into Zoe’s bedroom for days, they’d play cutesy and irritating games of footsie at restaurants, they’d go away for long weekends without a moment’s notice. Not to mention the kissing. Elizabeth had never seen so much kissing. In taxicabs, in their kitchen, on the sofa — never mind if there were other people present. Next to their romance, Elizabeth felt like she and Andrew were an incestuous brother and sister, or maybe close first cousins. They had always enjoyed sex, but even Andrew had never seemed to need her body the way that Jane needed Zoe and vice versa. On the one hand, it had made the slide into long-term marriage easier, because they were already comfortable with a lower level of intensity, but Elizabeth had sometimes wondered what it was like to feel that kind of desire and to send it back, gulping, even if it meant for a sharp letdown in the years to follow. Because no one could keep that up, not even Zoe.

• • •

Harry zipped through the kitchen, head down, hurrying toward his backpack, which was in its usual slump by the coatrack.

“Hey,” Elizabeth said. “Where are you going? Hungry?”

“Not right now,” Harry said. He grabbed his bag and ran back up the stairs.

Elizabeth rinsed off the chicken breasts in the sink and put them on a plate. Even before she’d married Jane, Zoe had been good in the kitchen. When they’d lived together at Oberlin, Elizabeth had once washed Zoe’s cast-iron pan with a sinkful of dishes, scrubbed it for hours with a soapy sponge, and when she realized what Elizabeth was doing, Zoe had given her a look like she’d just shaved off her eyebrows while she was sleeping. The Bennetts were California gourmets, all farm-raised and organic before it was cool. Elizabeth thought about her childhood diet of Oreo cookies and jars of Skippy peanut butter and felt embarrassed all over again. Her parents were fine — they were good enough people and she loved them, but her mother had always liked gin more than vegetables. Her father cooked a bloody steak on the grill every Sunday, and that was it. He took pills to make the bad cholesterol go down and the good cholesterol go up, and he had never told her that he loved her, not directly. They never listened to music. Her mother read novels, but only love stories starring beautiful blind girls or war widows. There was so much that Elizabeth had had to figure out on her own.

Andrew came quietly down the stairs and hugged her from behind.

“Hi,” he said, and laid his head against her shoulder.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you okay? I feel like you’ve been MIA.”

“I actually feel great,” Andrew said. He slid one hand into Elizabeth’s waistband, and she wriggled away.

“I have raw chicken hands,” she said.

“I’ll take a little salmonella.” He kissed her neck.

“Oh, stop it,” Elizabeth said, elbowing him gently but happy for his nuzzling affection. “Where have you been?”

Andrew paused. “There’s this new place, over on Stratford. A yoga studio, sort of. I went to a class today.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s good, we need a new one.” Elizabeth was always looking for new businesses to add to her roster. There was nothing that young home buyers wanted more than yoga studios and restaurants, as if they’d be young forever and looking for ways to fill their days. “Hey, so, have you thought about it at all? About the Lydia thing?” She turned toward her husband. He’d always been weird about Lydia — they were buddies, but as soon as she left school, Andrew never mentioned her again. It was as if she’d died, and then when she did die, he’d bristle at the sound of her name. Lydia’s death had made Elizabeth feel softer toward her, weirdly — as if there were nothing she could have done, as if it weren’t just that Lydia had never liked her, it was that she had much bigger problems. It wasn’t exactly nice, but it was comforting. Maybe if he saw the movie, he’d understand — he’d see how young they all were, how beautiful and ridiculous.

Andrew leaned against the stove. She watched his face cloud over, as quickly as a thunderstorm in July. “I really don’t want to do it,” he said, finally. “I really don’t. I know you think it’s stupid, but it means something to me.”

“But I wrote the song.” Elizabeth was usually careful not to phrase things this way: bands were about equality, marriages too. It rarely did any good to claim complete ownership. Feelings were hurt and resentment so easily built. In this case the division of labor was clear: Elizabeth Johnson, lyrics; Andrew Marx, Lydia Greenbaum, Zoe Bennett, and Elizabeth Johnson, music. She owned more of the song than anyone else did.

“You wrote the words, yes.” Andrew shook his head. “But you don’t get to decide for the rest of us.”

“They have Lydia’s permission — her mother said yes. They have Zoe. And they have me. I think it’ll be exciting. And weird, yes, probably really weird. But I think we should do it. I want to do it.”

“Why? So you can watch some skinny teenage movie star scream ‘Mistress of Myself’ a hundred times? Are you that much of a narcissist?” Andrew’s cheeks were starting to flush.

“A narcissist? Because I don’t want to stand in the way of someone making a movie about someone else? What are you talking about?”

Andrew pursed his lips and closed his eyes. “You’re really not thinking about the big picture, Lizzy.”

“I’m pretty sure I am, actually,” Elizabeth said. She turned back around to her chicken. The idea was to rub it with garlic and ginger and to stir-fry it, or something. She’d lost her train of thought. Elizabeth heard the front door shut and realized that Andrew had walked out.

There were two choices: make dinner or not. Who knew what Harry would eat if she didn’t cook? And so Elizabeth kept cooking, her blood pressure making her a little fast and loose with the spices. Dried parsley? Why not. Black pepper? Sure. The chicken breasts looked like little Jackson Pollocks as she slid them into the hot pan. She watched the chicken turn from pink to opaque, checking the door every so often to see if Andrew was going to walk back in. She stepped out onto the porch, in case he might just be sitting on the front steps, but he wasn’t. Debbie from across the street waved, and Elizabeth waved back. Being the neighborhood real-estate agent meant never being in a bad mood, never arguing in public. It was like being a very low-level celebrity, where you knew your actions would have repercussions, that people would be watching. Elizabeth retreated back into the house and shut the door.

Half an hour later, dinner was done and Andrew still wasn’t home.

“Harry! Dinner!” Elizabeth called. She set the table for three, as usual, even though she seemed to be the only one eating. She wasn’t even hungry.

After a few minutes, Harry clomped down the stairs, his eyes wide. “Whoa,” he said, looking at his dinner plate. He slid into his chair, and Elizabeth into hers, across from him. There were the expressive chicken breasts, plus a shredded-carrot and couscous salad. “This looks weird, Mom.”

“Eat it, Harry,” Elizabeth said. She picked up her fork and knife and started shoveling food into her mouth. As she chewed, she felt hungrier and hungrier, as if each bite emptied out her stomach. Harry watched, and eventually followed suit.

“It’s good,” he said. “Where’s Dad?”

Elizabeth spoke with her mouth full. “Yoga class.”

“Oh,” Harry said, satisfied.

They ate the rest of their meal in silence, both deeply engrossed by their own thoughts. Harry carried his plate over to the garbage and scraped it clean. He put the plate in the sink and ran back upstairs.

“I have to pick something up at the grocery store, sweetie,” Elizabeth said, before he’d completely disappeared. “I’ll be back in ten minutes, okay?” She put her plate on top of Harry’s in the sink and slipped her feet into her flip-flops. Andrew had said Stratford Road.

It was a perfect night — the end of June, when even Brooklyn had to admit that nothing was the matter. It was past seven and still not yet quite dark. Elizabeth was wearing a T-shirt and the stretchy yoga pants that she wore to bed. She tucked her hair behind her ears as she walked. She hated fighting with her husband. Even now, after so many years together, she sometimes had the thought — abrupt and sharp, like a bolt of lightning — that she’d made the wrong decision, all those years ago, and ruined her entire life. Andrew was smart and serious and handsome. His family money drove him crazy, but it also meant that they never really had to worry, especially about Harry. The Marx money was stretched under Harry’s crib like a fireman’s net, ready to catch him if necessary. All their friends, if asked, would say that Elizabeth and Andrew were a great couple. They were seamless; they were united. They alley-ooped each other’s punch lines at dinner parties. But sometimes, she wondered. Probably everyone did. Probably that was marriage. But on the nights when they fought and he walked out the door, which had happened maybe four times in their entire relationship, including college, when walking out the door was a much easier feat and wouldn’t have required an attorney, Elizabeth was sure that it was over, and that no matter how much she loved her husband, he was lost to her forever.

The house on Stratford was easy enough to find — she’d guessed which one it was. Corcoran had sold it, it hadn’t been her listing, but she’d been inside it before. Elizabeth rounded the corner from Beverly and walked south. It had been called a “fixer-upper,” politely. In the office, Deirdre had referred to it as a “crack house.” It hadn’t really been a crack house, at least not officially, but there were boarders and renters and strange locks on all their bedroom doors, with stained carpets. Those were easy fixes, but not everyone could see past them.

Elizabeth put her hands on her hips and stopped walking. She was two houses away. It was on the left, toward Cortelyou, with a nice wide porch that the owners would have to sink about twenty grand into, if they wanted to do it right. What was she going to do, walk in? What if he wasn’t there? What if he was sitting at the bar at Hyacinth, talking to Jane? What if he’d apologized for overreacting and they were clinking small tumblers full of top-shelf whiskey, complaining about their wives? She was just taking a walk, that was all. Elizabeth tucked her hair behind her ears again and walked the rest of the way to the house.

She heard it before she saw anything — loud music, the kind of music that played in the background of dream sequences in bad television shows, with layers of sitar over something more contemporary. It was dance music, what they used to call techno, electronic and repetitive. It was loud enough that she could hear it from the porch. Surely the neighbors were going to complain, once it got late. Ditmas Park was nothing if not swift with a noise complaint.

People were dancing. They all looked like sweaty versions of Ruby, twirling themselves around with their eyes closed. Elizabeth nudged herself closer to one of the large windows. There were shades down, but the shades were gauze and it was lighter inside than out — she could make out everything. The main room was crowded with bodies, all of them smiling and jumping. She saw hands on asses, hands on faces, lips on lips. “My God,” she said, out loud. “It’s a fucking rave.” Elizabeth was just about to turn away and walk toward Hyacinth, so sure now that she would find her husband there, tucking into some beautifully prepared dish, and then she saw him.

Andrew was drenched in sweat. His T-shirt clung to his thin chest. His head was thrown back, lolling a little bit from side to side. He hadn’t danced that way in years. She felt like her very own Ghost of Husbands Past, like she was watching herself and Andrew when they were nineteen and on Ecstasy and licking each other’s faces all night long just because their tongues felt so funny. Only Elizabeth wasn’t in the room, she was standing outside it, and she wasn’t licking her husband’s face. To his credit, no one else was either, but Andrew looked as if any number of the young men and women pressing past him and against him could easily have slipped their little bodies into his mouth and he wouldn’t have objected. This was not the face of propriety. This was not the face of marriage. This was one man, midlife, losing his shit.

Twenty-three

Ruby couldn’t believe it — the SAT class was ten minutes under way, and she was sitting in the back row alone. Harry had ditched the class, and she hadn’t, and faking another stomach flu would have made the Queen Dork call her mothers for sure. She sat with her bag on the seat to her left and her jean jacket on the seat to her right, just in case anyone got any ideas about sitting too close. Rebecca smiled and waved, and Eliza and Thayer made a couple of stinkfaces her direction, and Ruby ignored them all. She flipped over the first handout—“Turn Similes into Smiles!”—and started drawing Bingo with a superhero cape and a cigarette.

The class was interminable. Three hours of practice tests and tricks for how to answer multiple-choice questions when you didn’t know the answer. Ruby had bombed the SAT so efficiently the first time that she thought she could teach the class better than Rebecca, a simple Do the Opposite of Whatever I Say methodology, where you got extra points just for not skipping every third question. Tomorrow it would be July, and the class would be half over. She tried to think of it as meditation. Her body had to be in this room, but her mind did not. She tried astral projecting but found Thayer’s gum chewing too distracting. Ruby filled in bubbles in the shapes of fish eating smaller fish.

It wasn’t that she was against college, per se. Ruby just felt that the world held too many unique experiences for her to be pinned down to doing one thing for so many years, especially when she’d spent her entire life up until this point doing that exact thing. When was her boxcar-jumping period? Her life as a carny? Reality TV and PETA newsletters had spoiled many things, but they couldn’t kill her dreams about being a loose woman in the United States of America. What if she wanted to work as a stripper someday? She didn’t, but what if? What if she wanted to get ill-conceived tattoos with brand-new friends? Ruby had two tattoos already. Her mothers knew and didn’t even pretend to care. One was a small star in the space between her right armpit and her boob, and the other was a B for Bingo on her left big toe. Her mum was so jealous of the B that she got one, too, but only because Ruby made her promise that they would never bare their toes at the same time in front of anyone Ruby knew.

The kids in the row ahead of her stood up, shoving handouts into their bags. “Fabulous,” Ruby said, at full volume, and followed suit. She waved to Rebecca, gave the finger to Eliza and Thayer, and was the first person out the door.

Harry was standing outside, wearing sunglasses. He had a very full tote bag slung on his left shoulder and a beach umbrella leaning against his right. “Ready, mademoiselle?” he said. “Dirty hipster beach in the Rockaways. I found it on the Internet. Taxi’s waiting. And by taxi, I mean the subway. It’s going to take us a hundred years to get there, but I swear to God, it’ll be worth it.”

“For fuck’s sake, yes,” Ruby said. She raised her arms in victory.