Modern Lovers

THE DITMAS PARK LOCAL BEAT

Yoga Evolves on Stratford

EVOLVEment owner David Goldsmith hadn’t spent much time in Ditmas Park before opening his brand-new yoga and health center on Stratford Road. “I’d been looking around Brooklyn — mostly in Williamsburg and Bushwick — when a friend tipped me off about this place,” he told us. “Like a lot of people, my first thought was, whoa!” EVOLVEment offers yoga classes, massage services, and serves juice and other beverages. Goldsmith says that he’s interested in getting involved in the neighborhood, so stop by and check them out! Drop-in classes are $11, cheaper with a class card. We tried a ginger-kale-apple juice, and it was delicious!

Twenty-four

It was more fun than he’d had in years, though “fun” wasn’t precisely the right word. Salome called the dance parties “cosmic trances,” and they were fucking cosmic, absolutely. Andrew had never been a dancer — in high school he had occasionally pogoed into his friends in the pit at shows, and at Oberlin he had grinded his body against beautiful girls with short hair and nose rings when he was fall-down drunk, but he had never really liked to dance. He was far too self-conscious. Zoe was in the dance department, always flinging her body against the wooden floor and calling it choreography. That was how she got all the girls. Elizabeth was more like him, happier to stand against a wall and bob her head, preferably holding a red plastic cup in front of her face so that she could whisper things to whoever was standing next to her. Andrew hadn’t realized he was so tired of whispering.

At first, when Salome had started playing music, they were all sitting down or giving each other little back massages. Andrew closed his eyes and sat on a pillow in the corner of the room. He wanted to let go of his body, to let go of his mind. He’d tried talk therapy, but it wasn’t for him. You couldn’t change anything by sitting in a room with a stranger and telling him your side of the story. Andrew liked interaction, and healing from the outside in. The music was interesting, rhythmic and wobbly. He couldn’t tell if he was listening to guitars or synths or nothing at all, just some computer-generated tracks made by a kid in his basement. Probably the latter. Did anyone even learn how to play an instrument anymore? No, he wasn’t going to think about that, he wasn’t going to be Clint Eastwood telling kids to get off his lawn. And so Andrew relaxed, and waited.

It was three a.m. when he finally walked out the door. He was soaked with sweat — his own and everyone else’s. EVOLVEment had turned into a greenhouse, all of them their own individual hothouse flower. The air on Stratford Road felt cool and refreshing, just like the glasses of cucumber water that the EVOLVErs had been passing around and then pouring over one another’s heads.

Elizabeth was going to be pissed, if not worried. Andrew didn’t know which was worse. Worry could remove some of the sting of anger, if she was happy to know that he was all right. Of course, he wasn’t her child — why would she assume that something had befallen him? Andrew thought about explaining why he liked EVOLVEment but couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound like he was about to start sleeping with a nineteen-year-old.

It wasn’t that. Andrew had no interest in having sex with the beautiful young things. There were unbelievable-looking girls everywhere in the house, making juice and dancing and kicking up into handstands, giving you a peek of their stomachs and underwear all over the place, and it only made Andrew feel like a latter-day Humbert Humbert, or like a more Jewish version of Sting. Andrew didn’t care. The only nineteen-year-old he wanted to have sex with was himself. He wanted to go back in time and watch himself take off his clothes, so terrified of the world that he couldn’t stop snarling, even when he was about to make love to someone for the first time.

He and Elizabeth had known each other from the dorms. They’d had a few classes together — an intro creative-writing class, plus The Story of the Dinosaurs, the science class that all the humanities kids took — and they were friends, a bit. If they saw each other outside the library, they would sit on a bench and smoke cigarettes. Elizabeth was so sweet, so suburban — Andrew had liked her from the start, even before they were in the band together and he saw what she could really do. She had none of the jaded bullshit that his friends from home had. She wasn’t spoiled. She could knit. They went bowling, and Elizabeth got strike after strike — it turned out she’d been on her high school’s bowling team. What kind of high school had a bowling team? Andrew thought it was possible that Elizabeth had grown up in the 1950s and been teleported to Oberlin through space and time. Lydia, on the other hand, had been as familiar as a sibling. She was from Scarsdale, which wasn’t so far from the Upper East Side. She had rich parents and her own car and a credit card that she wasn’t afraid to use. Just like all of his high-school friends, Lydia was mean as a snake, something she’d no doubt learned from her parents. She would have been the easy choice. His mother would have loved her.

Andrew hadn’t been outside at three in the morning since Harry was a baby, and they would take walks around the block to try to coax him back to sleep, the three of them like a tribe of zombies, he and Elizabeth making shushing noises and bouncing in unison, no matter which one of them was wearing the baby in the Björn. Ditmas Park was always quiet, but this close to Coney Island Avenue there were more trucks and horns, even in the middle of the night. It was true what they said about New York and sleeping — Andrew had forgotten that. He turned right on Beverly and started walking back toward Argyle. A breeze made the sweat on his forehead feel cool. Summer was the only season that mattered — the only reason for winter to exist was to increase the gratitude that Andrew felt for the month of June at this exact moment in time.

He unlocked the door to his house quietly and slipped his shoes off next to the front door. Iggy Pop was asleep on the sofa, and Andrew scooped him up and carried him up the stairs. The cat arched his back into Andrew’s shoulder, still mostly asleep. The bedroom door was open a crack, and Andrew could see from the hallway that Elizabeth had left her bedside lamp on. He nudged the door open a few more inches with his toe, and gently set the cat down on the bed.

Elizabeth stirred. She’d never been a hardy sleeper, but in the years since Harry was born — even well after he stopped waking in the middle of the night — she’d been prone to waking when cars drove past, at distant sirens, at barking dogs. He knew this only because she told him in the morning — Andrew himself was always fast asleep. It was something they fought about, in a low-level way, that she was awake and he was asleep and he had missed whatever it was that had annoyed her. Andrew slid off his shirt and his shorts. His sweat had dried to a thin film of salt — he smelled a little bit, but Elizabeth had never minded that.

“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice low. She rolled over to face him.

“At the yoga place. They were having a party.” Andrew sat down on his side of the bed. Elizabeth’s foot peeked out from under the sheet, and he put his hand on her arch.

“A party.” She narrowed her eyes at him, and Andrew tried to decide if it looked more like sleepiness or contempt. He clicked off the light.

“A party.” Andrew pulled back the sheet and slid underneath. He inched closer to his wife in the darkness. Elizabeth’s body felt like the ocean, vast and cool. First he kissed her arm, and when she didn’t shove him away, he kissed her shoulder, and then her cheek. By the time Andrew kissed his wife’s mouth, she was moving her body back and forth like a snake about to strike, and he knew that whatever happened next, it would be good. This is what it was like when they were kids: playful, nibbling. Elizabeth had been an eager lover, like the student athlete she’d been in high school, cheeks flushed and full of energy. They rolled and stretched like two lion cubs, biting and pawing at each other’s body parts. After a few minutes, they settled into a familiar position — they knew what worked. His ears were still vibrating from the party, and the room sounded like a subway platform. “Am I being too loud?” he asked Elizabeth, now flat on her back, his hands wedged under her hips with his face between her legs.

“Harry’s at a friend’s house,” she said. “Get to work,” shoving his face back against her body.

Twenty-five

It was almost two when their feet actually touched the sand. Harry dropped the umbrella and his two enormous bags with a satisfying thud. Ruby leaned down to grab one of the beach towels, but Harry put out his arm to block her. “Please,” he said. “Allow me.” He stretched out two towels, stuck the umbrella in the sand between them, and then gestured for Ruby to sit. The sand was grimy, with candy wrappers and cigarette butts poking up here and there, but the water looked clear, and people were swimming. Harry’s mother had always told him that New York City beaches were toxic-waste zones and to be avoided at all costs, and he was glad he hadn’t listened. What other things were out there, just waiting to be enjoyed? Elizabeth didn’t like bacon, and so they never ate it, never. Harry was going to order a BLT with extra bacon — a BBLT — at the next possible moment.

“What else is in those bags?”

Harry dug around in one and pulled out a plastic pail and shovel.

“Okay,” Ruby said, giggling. “What else?”

Harry reached back down and pulled out a little insulated cooler. Inside were two tiny cans of champagne. It had taken Harry an hour and forty dollars to convince some young woman walking down Cortelyou to buy them for him. “Cheers,” he said, popping one open and handing it to Ruby, who took such a small sip that Harry knew she was impressed.

The beach was filled with old Russian ladies holding hand weights as they walked up and down the boardwalk, avoiding the packs of guys with beards and dark sunglasses and girls wearing tiny shorts and cutoff T-shirts.

“It’s like an American Apparel billboard,” Ruby said. “But with beer and sand.”

Harry couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or not, but Ruby seemed to be enjoying herself, and so he didn’t respond other than to nod and say, “Yeah.”

They took half naps, they splashed in the water. Neither of them had a bathing suit, but it didn’t matter. Ruby peeled off her dress. Her stomach was a soft, creamy brown, just like the rest of her, of course, though every inch gave Harry a new thrill. She had a perfect little outie belly button right in the middle! He could see more than the outline of her breasts through her thin, lacy bra, and when she walked away from him, toward the water, wearing nothing but her bra and underwear, Harry tried not to have a heart attack. He took off his shirt and his jeans and went in in his boxers, praying the flap stayed closed. There was a burger place just on the other side of the boardwalk, and Ruby waited on their towels while Harry got them food. She licked a spot of ketchup off her hand. It was the most beautiful beach anyone had ever seen, ever, even with the planes going overhead to JFK and all the seagulls and the noise and the people. There were towels everywhere, and Dominican families, and hipsters with ironic mustaches, and old men wearing Speedos, and fat women in bikinis. Harry thanked God that his parents had never moved to the suburbs, or to France, or anywhere else in the world. Ruby got the giggles after the champagne, and she let him put sunscreen on her shoulders. Harry took as long as possible, painting little designs and taking pictures with his phone before rubbing them in.

The burger place was getting rowdy. On their walk back to the train, Harry and Ruby stood outside for a few minutes and watched people dance and chug beers.

“I feel like I’m watching a movie,” Harry said. “About people who kill a hobo while they’re drunk-driving.”

“Yeah, and this is part of the montage that we keep seeing in flashback,” Ruby said. “Totally.”

Harry let Ruby carry the smaller tote bag, which was less heavy now that there were no drinks and snacks in it, and he had lost a few of the beach toys, which he was fine with. They were more of a joke anyway, even though he really had liked watching Ruby build a sand castle. It was the kind of thing he wouldn’t have done for fear of looking too babyish, but Ruby obviously never worried about that. They got on the train and sat in a two-seater facing the direction they were going, with Harry against the window and Ruby on the aisle. As soon as they sat down, she let her head drop against his shoulder and put her arm around his waist.

“I had a good time,” Ruby said. “Almost good enough to stop being mad at you for ditching our stupid SAT class this morning.”

“Me, too,” Harry said. He sat as upright as possible and tried not to move, just in case Ruby took his fidgeting as a sign that he didn’t want her there. At the next stop, someone started to sit in the seat next to them, which would’ve crushed Ruby’s knees and made her have to shift positions, so Harry gave the best death stare of his entire life, and the guy moved away.

“I feel like we must smell bad,” Ruby said. “No one wants to sit near us.”

“You do smell bad,” Harry said, softly, into her ear. “You smell like toasted garbage.” He paused, afraid he was taking the joke too far. Everything still seemed precarious, as if Ruby might just sit up and look at him and see the truth, that he was still Harry, just Harry, no one she wanted to cuddle with on the subway.

But Ruby said, “Mmmm,” and snuggled closer. “My favorite kind.” She was asleep in a few minutes and slept all the way until they had to change trains to get the Q home. When they finally got off at the Cortelyou stop, Harry was nervous. Ruby seemed rested and happy after her siesta, and the bridge of her nose was a bit burned, despite Harry’s artistic efforts with the sunscreen. She bounded up the stairs and started walking toward Argyle. Harry stopped.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was quiet — his mother’s office was a few doors away, and he didn’t want to cross in front of it, just in case she happened to be sitting at her desk.

“What?” Ruby said.

“This way,” Harry said, using his head to point behind them.

“Okaaaaay,” she said. “You do know that our houses are both the other direction, right? Did you have some kind of brain injury while I wasn’t paying attention?”

“Just trust me,” he said, and started walking.

Convincing someone to buy him champagne was easy — part B of the plan had been much, much trickier. Elizabeth kept the keys to all her properties at the office, except on weekends when she was having a few open houses — then they lived in a zippered pouch that hung from a hook above her desk. The summer was always busy, and she was running from one place to another every day — right now there were a few houses a bit farther south, closer to Brooklyn College, and one on East Sixteenth Street, a really big house that backed up onto the train tracks. She was showing the two houses on Sunday, and had shown the subway one that afternoon. Harry knew it was a risk to take the key, but he had, and the hardware store made him a copy in five minutes. The house’s owners had moved to Florida. It was just sitting there, with their enormous old-people furniture, all dark, heavy wood and formal dining chairs. One of the smaller bedrooms had had a doll collection, which Elizabeth had shoved into a box and hidden in the basement. The subway running through the yard was enough of a handicap — they didn’t need to give people nightmares, too.

The porch was dark, and Ruby hesitated before following Harry up the stairs.

“Whose house is this?” She was whispering.

“Ours,” Harry said. He knew there wasn’t an alarm, even though there were stickers on the windows and a sign in the lawn saying that there was. According to his mother, that was true for 70 percent of the houses in their neighborhood. Ruby hurried up behind him.

“Are you serious?” she asked, but Harry had already opened the door. He pulled her in and shut the door behind them. “Whose house is this?” she asked again. “You’re fucking crazy!” It was crazy, a little, and he knew that they could get into massive amounts of trouble, and his mom, too.

“I told you. It’s ours.” Harry wasn’t sure if he could pull off mysterious, but he was having fun trying. Ruby was an inch taller than he was, maybe more. She sucked in her lower lip and looked around. “Come here,” Harry said.

“Where?” Ruby asked. She peeked around the corner, into a dark kitchen.

“Here,” Harry said. He took a step forward, closing the gap between them, and kissed her. Ruby was good at it, of course. They stopped and started and stopped and started and stared at each other. Her mouth opened and closed, and she flicked her tongue against his, and Harry let out a moan that sounded like Chewbacca, and he didn’t care. A SWAT team with machine guns could have broken down the door and taken him to a federal prison and he wouldn’t have cared — it was a hundred percent worth it. Ruby pulled away, took his hand, and started walking farther into the dark house.

“Let’s go explore,” she said. All day long, Harry had been trying to convince his penis to stay down, to be quiet, but now it was a lost cause. His erection pressed against his jeans, and when Ruby’s wrist accidentally brushed past it, she said, “Oh, hello there,” which made it even bigger. If this was what came from a life of crime, Harry was ready to sign up.

Twenty-six

The house on East Nineteenth Street was going to sell fast — there were three bids after the open house, and now it was a matter of who was willing to pay. Elizabeth loved the rush of multiple bids — they were all under ask, but once buyers knew there was competition, they’d come up, and pretty soon, they’d be sailing over the $2 million mark. The sellers were going to be thrilled. Their condo in Boca had probably cost under a million. This was the kind of money that paid for grandchildren’s college educations. It wasn’t all greed. She leafed through the offers on her desk at work. Deirdre looked over Elizabeth’s shoulder.

“Not bad,” she said. Deirdre had chopped off her hair, so that people would confuse her with Halle Berry, she said. Deirdre was a gorgeous size fourteen, and Elizabeth thought she actually did look like a movie star. She always wore tight sweaters the colors of emeralds and rubies. The O’Connells were dazzled by Deirdre, and Elizabeth didn’t blame them. Mary Ann and her kids were pasty, with freckles all over, even on their arms and legs. Every one of them always looked like they had a very mild case of the chicken pox.

“It’s great!” Elizabeth said, holding up one of the offer sheets. “I really like this couple. Young, friendly. Totally book-club potential.”

“Do your clients know that you’re just scouting for your personal friends?” Deirdre raised an eyebrow and then laughed. “It only works if your friends have big checkbooks! I’d sell a house to an asshole if the check wouldn’t bounce. I like ’em rich and heartless.”

“You do not,” Elizabeth said. Before Deirdre could respond, Elizabeth’s phone rang.

“Holding for Naomi Vandenhoovel,” someone said.

“Oh, shit,” Elizabeth said. “Not again.”

“Lizzzz-eeeeeeee,” Naomi said. “I’m in New York! Come and have coffee with me! Come to the office! I want to show you what we’ve got put together so far. I think you’ll go craaaaaaaazy for it.”

“Hi, Naomi,” Elizabeth said. “How are you?” She rolled her eyes at Deirdre. It’s nothing, she mouthed.

“I’m freezing my ass off because the air-conditioning in the office is on autopilot, but other than that I’m perfect,” Naomi said. “I’ll e-mail you the address. Come today, my afternoon is totally clear. You need to see our Lydia. Ciao-ciao!” She hung up.

Elizabeth set the phone back in its dock and looked at the pile of paper on her desk. She’d already done her work for the day — she’d responded to all the agents and all the clients. Everyone had their marching orders. There was more to do in the office, of course — there always was. But no one would mind if she took a few hours to go into the city.

• • •

Naomi was set up in a conference room in the Fifties, on Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth had had to give her name to three different people sitting at desks, each of whom whispered into a phone and looked her name up on a computer. The last gatekeeper, an effete young man wearing a bow tie, told her to wait and that Naomi’s assistant would be right out. A girl with a small, neat Afro and bright red lipstick came swanning out a few minutes later.

“Elizabeth?” she said, sounding bored. “Follow me.”

They walked past stainless-steel half walls and glass-enclosed offices. Elizabeth peeked into each of them, just in case there were any visiting movie stars. The studio released prestige movies, award winners. Naomi was no slouch. Finally they reached a door. Elizabeth saw Naomi inside, talking to another young woman, whose back was turned. Elizabeth stopped — even from behind she could see it — this woman, whoever she was, was their Lydia. And if Elizabeth didn’t know better, she would think that it was her Lydia, too. The hair was just right — thick and dark and wild, as if it had never been brushed. It wasn’t just fashion — Lydia didn’t own a brush, or a comb, or a blow-dryer. She’d practically set those things on fire when she moved to Oberlin for school. Scarsdale was in her rearview mirror, and she was never going back.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” Naomi said, opening her arms wide. “It’s the genius!” She was taller than Elizabeth expected, with thick-framed glasses and perfectly straight California-blond hair down to the middle of her back.

“Who, me?” Elizabeth asked. She let Naomi embrace her, inhaling a cloud of sweet perfume.

“Yes, you!” Naomi pulled back, holding Elizabeth’s arms out. “Darcey, this is Elizabeth Marx, who wrote ‘Mistress of Myself.’ She fucking wrote it. Can you believe that? Like, it didn’t exist, and then Elizabeth wrote down the words, and it was a fucking song.”

Darcey stood up and turned around. It wasn’t just her hair that looked like Lydia’s — it was her eyes, her cheeks, her chin. Elizabeth understood immediately why Naomi had wanted her to come.

“Oh, my God,” Elizabeth said.

Darcey did whatever actresses do in place of blushing. She smiled, and turned her face from side to side. “I know,” she said. “I was literally born to do this. If I had a dollar for every person who ever told me I looked like Lydia…”

“You wouldn’t even have half your salary for this movie! Ha!” Naomi pulled Elizabeth closer, and then pushed her toward a white leather office chair.

Darcey sat back down in a chair opposite Elizabeth. Elizabeth tried to look away but couldn’t, which Darcey seemed to enjoy, smiling widely every time she caught Elizabeth staring.

“I also found this,” Naomi said. “You’ve seen it, of course, but we did a little work. Check it out.” She grabbed a remote control and aimed it at the ceiling. Curtains slowly lowered, making the whole room dark. A screen illuminated on the far wall, and with another button push, a familiar song started to play.

Kitty’s Mustache had made three music videos. They were all shot by an Oberlin kid named Lefty, whose real name was Lawrence Thompson III. He had a good camera and was in love with Zoe. She’d slept with him once or twice, Elizabeth suspected, just to keep him in the band’s employ, or maybe she just let him see her naked. The first two videos, for “Frankie’s Lament,” a song Elizabeth had written about their landlord, and “Magic Lasso,” a song about Wonder Woman, were both okay, shot in and around campus, mostly in their grimy apartments and in empty classrooms and in the arboretum, but for the “Mistress of Myself” video, they’d spent the day on a cold beach on the banks of Lake Erie.

There they were — in full goth mode, all of them dressed entirely in black, standing side by side on the beach. Small snowbanks were in the foreground. It was Lefty’s masterpiece, his Swedish art film. “How did you get a copy of this?” Elizabeth asked. Lydia’s hair whipped around her face. They’d brought out some of their instruments, but Lefty decided they should leave them in the car. It was like “Wicked Game,” except instead of Chris Isaak and Helena Christensen, it was all Elizabeth’s screaming mouth. At one point, Zoe lay down in the sand and rolled around. Lydia scowled. Andrew spent half the video with his back to the camera, which he claimed was his silent protest of his own role in the patriarchy.

Elizabeth leaned forward. It was a close-up of Lydia’s face — only it wasn’t Lydia. It was Darcey. “Wait,” she said. “How did you…?”

“I know, it’s seamless,” Naomi said. “Our guys are fucking great. Once they retouched a birthmark on Angelina Jolie’s boob for a three-hour movie. They added a birthmark! She refused to do makeup, said it was something to do with child labor, or maybe with her children, needing more time or something. Makeup can seriously take hours every day, so it was worth it to let her sleep in with all her kids and then just spend an extra million on Photoshop or whatever. It’s amazing, right?”

“How did you get this? The original, I mean?” Elizabeth had a copy on VHS, but she’d heard through friends that Lefty had burned all his films after he decided to go into the family investment-banking business, so as to set himself free from his artistic dreams. As far as she knew, hers was the only copy.

“Not for nothing, Lydia’s archives are in surprisingly good shape for someone who died of a heroin overdose,” Naomi said. “She kept everything. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that she was a librarian. Seriously. Color-coded, in chronological order, the whole nine.”

“That is so strange,” Elizabeth said. “The Lydia I knew was a mess. She didn’t even know how to balance her checkbook.”

Naomi’s assistant laughed. “Checkbooks. That’s like a flip phone, right? But for money?”

“I’m serious,” Elizabeth said.

Naomi nodded. “I think this is something you’re really going to sink your teeth into, Darce — on the outside, she was this wild child, you know, this fuckup, but on the inside, she was always plotting for her historical legacy.”

“I totally get that,” Darcey said.

Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap. Her Lydia wasn’t a wild child or a fuckup. Her Lydia was self-centered, and unreliable, and kind of a jerk. Her Lydia had never been interested in having female friends, at least until pretty famous actresses started coming to her shows, and then she seemed to be one of the gals. But Elizabeth knew that those pictures — or her Buddhism, or whatever she called it — didn’t really mean that she had changed. Elizabeth had tried with Lydia; they all had, especially Andrew. At first, it had made Elizabeth jealous, all the nights that Lydia would just happen to be curled up with Andrew on his couch, her socked feet tucked under his legs. This was after Elizabeth and Andrew had made it clear to the band and everyone that they were a real couple, and still, there Lydia would be, batting her eyelashes and asking Andrew for help putting air in her bicycle tires, as if she were ever going to ride that stupid fucking bicycle.

“I want to see this movie,” Elizabeth said. It would only be part of the story, of course, but maybe there was more to Lydia than she knew. If Lydia had been hoarding Kitty’s Mustache ephemera, than maybe she was also taking notes. “Did she have diaries?”

“For every day of her life, starting at fifteen.” Naomi smiled. “She did all the work for us, you know?” Naomi uncapped a pen and handed it to Elizabeth. “Need another copy of the form? Ashley?” The assistant was at her side in less than a second.

Elizabeth didn’t think about Zoe, who she knew would be happy enough either way. For the first time in a long time, she really thought about Lydia, her long-lost, faraway friend. Twenty-seven was such a dumb time to die. But more than Lydia, she thought about Andrew, and herself. The imaginary girl that Naomi had talked about, that was her — both then and now. She wanted to see herself pick up the guitar and write that song. She wanted to watch Andrew fall in love with her on the spot, once he knew what she was capable of. She wanted it for both of them, and signed her name. “Give me one for Andrew, too,” she said. When Elizabeth left Naomi’s office, she went into the bathroom, dried off the countertop with a paper towel, and forged Andrew’s messy signature, just as she’d done a thousand times on school permission forms and credit-card receipts. In their family, she was in charge of the paperwork, and so that’s all she was doing, taking care of their joint business. It wasn’t a big deal — just two seconds of ink on a sheet of paper. In another two seconds, she’d be in the elevator, and then she’d be in the subway, and then she’d be back in the office, and she’d fax it in, just like she faxed a thousand other forms all day long. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.

Twenty-seven

At home, Zoe’s piles of stuff migrated from surface to surface, stacks of unread magazines and bobby pins, but at Hyacinth, all the counters belonged to Jane. Everything was labeled with masking tape, everything was face out. All the salts were next to one another, fine to coarse to flakes.

What people didn’t understand about chefs was that it was only partially about cooking. It was about having a vision, a voice, a set of personal beliefs that were so strong that you needed to build something around them. There was literally no reason to open a restaurant if you felt like someone else was doing it better than you could. After twenty-five years of working in kitchens and ten years in her own place, Jane was still sure that no one else was doing Hyacinth better than she was. The restaurant was a glorious machine, and she was its engine — the mastermind. And all she wanted was to be the mastermind of the rest of her life, too.

Jane had a headache, and the headache’s name was Ruby. Zoe had it worse in terms of direct combat, that was true, but they could also cuddle up and go play dress-up in Zoe’s closet and talk about obscure bands that no one else had ever heard of, and it was all fine. Jane was the baddie. She was always the one who had to tell Ruby she couldn’t have another ice cream, or that she couldn’t force all of her preschool friends to call her the Queen and do her bidding. Jane was the boss, and the boss never got to cuddle.

Her own teenage years had been remarkably easy. Massapequa was a fine place to grow up. She played on all the teams, and went out for pizza with her friends, and had crushes on movie stars, just like everyone else. Everyone was a virgin, so it didn’t matter that she was a lesbian virgin. What was the difference? They all had bad haircuts and listened to Z100. The summer before she left for the NYU dorms, Jane had spent every day in the local pool, avoiding little kids because they were obviously peeing at all times. She had freckles everywhere, even between her toes.

All summer, her parents treated her like she was made of glass, and she didn’t understand why until it was over and they were packing the car full of pillows and boxes and books. Unlike Ruby, Jane had siblings — two brothers and a sister, all younger than she was. Like Ruby, Jane had had no idea what it meant for her parents to have their oldest child get ready to leave home. Leave home! It sounded so final. At the time, Jane had thought her mother was experiencing some very prolonged kind of stroke, where she was always blinking back tears and staring at Jane like she was the new episode of Dallas. But she understood it now. Children wanted to go. Children knew that they were old enough — it was prehistoric, baked-in knowledge. Only the parents still thought they were kids. Everyone else — tobacco, the voting booth, porn shops — said otherwise.

Jane moved through the kitchen slowly. She rotated jars so that they were facing the right way. The bell rang over the door, and Jane looked up to see her sous-chef, Clara, striding in. Clara was good — as solid as they came. Someday she’d want her own place, too. There were always more children to leave. Jane could feel herself drifting into the danger zone, and cleared some space on the counter. She grabbed the bread flour and the salt and the yeast, and when Clara walked in, Jane nodded hello. Baking bread for no reason had always been Jane’s favorite form of stress relief, and Clara knew well enough to go about her own work instead of asking questions.

Twenty-eight

Andrew was happiest when he was busy. Ever since the night of the party, he and Elizabeth had been great. It was as if she understood that he needed her to just be on his side, to support him, and he understood that she needed him to be present and supportive like always, and so they were. It didn’t hurt that they were having sex more often — it wasn’t quite back up to trying-to-conceive levels, which had been exhausting for both of them in the several years after Harry was born, when they were so intent on giving him a sibling, but it was good, really good for people who had been together for two decades. It was a part of their relationship that had always been satisfying, a gentle reminder that they still knew how to do things right. Not that Andrew actually knew how often anyone else had sex. He assumed that Elizabeth knew whenever Zoe or any of her close friends had an orgasm, that she got a text message automatically, but guys weren’t like that, even guys like him.

Tuesday mornings were the guided-meditation group, Wednesdays were yoga, Thursdays were dharma talks, and Fridays were the cosmic trances. Andrew knew he probably wouldn’t be able to go every week, not without giving Elizabeth some big, drawn-out explanation. He could invite her, maybe, but she might hate it or poke fun, and then he’d have to explain to Dave how his wife wasn’t into getting transcendental. Elizabeth had always been supportive of his various endeavors, but for now, he wanted to keep it to himself.

Most days, Andrew walked over after Elizabeth left for work. They’d set up a woodshop in the garage, and Andrew was building some bookshelves for the rooms upstairs. Dave would wander in and out, half dressed. Sometimes he looked like he’d just woken up, with tiny clusters of sleep still in the corners of his eyes, and sometimes he looked like he’d been up all night. They’d talk a bit, just one rung up from basic office watercooler chitchat. Lately Dave had been talking about a boat — a floating EVOLVEment.

“In the summer, it could be here in Brooklyn. Maybe docked next to the Brooklyn Bridge, where Bargemusic is, all decked out so the tourists want to know what’s going on. And then in the winter, we sail south — Vieques, Saint Maarten, maybe.” Dave had his arms crossed over his bare chest. He had a patch of hair in between his pecs, a fleur-de-lis of brown curls.

“Do you sail?” Andrew asked. He was sanding a giant piece of wood, a shelf that would run the length of the main yoga room. He knew enough to do that — he was good with his hands. Dave had never asked if he was an expert craftsman. That wasn’t the vibe — if you thought you could do it, you could do it. One of the young guys with short dreadlocks and a wide smile popped into the garage and said he had some tools in the trunk of his car, and he could help Andrew put the shelf up when he was done.

“When I was a kid,” Dave said. “Here and there. It’s all muscle memory, though.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “It’s all still here.”

“Me, too,” Andrew said. He didn’t like to talk about his family, but it just came out. “I took sailing lessons every summer, near my parents’ house on Long Island. We spent three days on land just tying and untying knots, before they even let us get our feet wet. I tried to teach my son, and he could not have been less interested.”

Dave laughed. “You’re a real polymath, man, I love it.”

“I don’t know about that,” Andrew said, “but I guess I’ve been able to do a lot of different things.”

“Did you do any racing?”

“Sailing races, you mean? No. In my father’s fantasies, yes. He would have loved a good regatta trophy or two around the house, but I was never that kind of kid, not really. It was always a great disappointment to my parents that I was more interested in Buddhism than in country clubs.”

Dave made a sympathetic mmm. “You ever go to India?”

“Once, yeah, when I was nineteen.” Andrew put the sander down. He’d licked out a small groove by mistake, and the wood looked like a cresting wave. Dave didn’t seem to notice. “I spent some time traveling around. Jaipur, Kerala.”

“Nice,” Dave said. “That’s what I’m picturing — totally different vibe than the house. I want it to be pink, you know? Bright. Colorful. Like nothing else. And people could stay for a night, or maybe for a week, as it sailed around, doing treatments, working with our people. Like a floating retreat. EVOLVEBoat. BoatMENT? Not sure what it’d be called yet.”

“That sounds amazing,” Andrew said.

“I’m glad you’re into it,” Dave said. “We should talk more about it later.” He clapped Andrew on the shoulder. “This is beautiful, man. Wabi-sabi, right?” He nodded at the piece of wood and turned back toward the main house.

“Right,” Andrew said. The garage was cool and quiet. There was some faint music coming from inside — he couldn’t quite make out what it was. The Kinks? Big Star? A young couple came out of the back door with plates full of rinds and peels for the compost bin. Andrew gave a friendly salute, and they waved.

What did he look like, their dad? Their cool older brother? He really didn’t know. When he and Elizabeth were in their garage, sitting on their rickety wooden chairs, Andrew sometimes felt like a toothless old man in some Appalachian folk song. Elizabeth closed her eyes when she sang, and sometimes it made her look just like her mother, half-cocked on two glasses of chardonnay. Which was better than looking like his mother, whose face had been pulled back toward her ears so many times that it was a wonder she still had cheeks.

There were probably guides on the Internet for building a boat. Andrew could see it, the giant whalebones of the hull coming together beneath his hands. He wanted to make something that could take on the open water, something buoyant and beautiful.

Twenty-nine

Weekday lunches were so boring that Ruby had started drawing a graphic novel about Bingo’s secret life as a hairdresser in New Jersey. Eventually she stopped laughing at any of Jorge’s jokes, and so he would just stare at her mournfully from behind the bar while muddling mint and squeezing oranges. Every time someone came in and wanted a table, Ruby would pretend to be from a different country. She was French, she was Japanese, she was Mexican. She thought at least one person would be offended and/or amused, but no one seemed to notice. Most of the customers were women in their thirties wearing clogs for no good reason, and so they were obviously not the most sophisticated audience for Ruby’s performance art.

Her mum was in and out, bringing in flowers for the tables and boxes of dish soap from the trunk of the car. They were acting literally ridiculous, her parents. Ruby sometimes thought about sitting them down and explaining that all they had to do was act normal and that everything would be fine. Zoe was behaving like she was on Rumspringa on steroids, all cute outfits and glasses of rosé in the middle of the afternoon, and Jane was groaning like the Abominable Snowman. Ruby wouldn’t want to be married to either of them, but that was their problem, not hers. At this point, what was the difference between being married and divorced? They still went over all the Hyacinth stuff together. The only reason that the restaurant looked half decent was that Zoe had picked out every tile, every paint chip, every chair, every salt shaker. Running a marriage really couldn’t be that different from running a restaurant. Whatever. Plus, being someone’s parents meant that they would be linked for the rest of their lives anyway. There was no getting out, not really, and plus it didn’t even seem like it was really that bad. Ruby had it much worse than they did. She was probably going to have to become an organic farmer or an exotic dancer, or something else that you only needed hands-on experience for, but hey, if they wanted to ignore her to focus on their own stupid problems, fine. She drew a hideous, glitzy ball gown like someone on The Bachelor would wear to get out of the limo and then added Bingo’s head on top.

It was two forty-five p.m. They stopped seating for lunch at three. With only fifteen minutes left, Jorge would turn people away, and she could go home. Harry said he was going to pick her up, though, and so she was going to wait until he showed.

They’d hung out three times since the night at the house, twice just at night, on walks with Bingo, and once in the afternoon when Ruby’s mothers were out. Harry was a quick learner. He seemed to know that the clitoris existed, even if he didn’t know precisely where to look, and unlike some guys, he took instruction well, and wasn’t offended when Ruby offered some tips. That was the one piece of sex advice her mum had given her — that it should feel good for her, too — and thank God.

It was easier in the relative dark, always. That way you could fumble around and touch a new body part without fully admitting that you wanted to. Oh, was that me? Oh, is that you? Ruby liked to take off her clothes and watch Harry’s eyes get enormous. No matter how dark it was, she could still see those giant circles, like in a cartoon. It was extremely gratifying. She drew a picture of him with flying saucers instead of eyeballs. The bell over the door rang, and Ruby looked up, expecting to see Harry.

Dust held his skateboard against his chest like a shield. Over his shoulder, on the sidewalk, Ruby could see Sarah Dinnerstein, her Whitman classmate and a fellow devotee of Dust and his army of church-step kids. Sarah had been pretty straitlaced until senior year, when she got her nose pierced and the inside of her lower lip tattooed with the word LOVE. People said she was on heroin, but mostly it seemed like she was on Nico, who, like Dust, had no real school affiliation and might have been twenty-five. No one knew for sure. In the fall, Sarah was going to Bennington. Ruby couldn’t actually believe that Sarah Dinnerstein, who had four brain cells in her entire head, had gotten into college and she hadn’t. The world wasn’t fair. Sarah Dinnerstein had probably never had an orgasm. She probably thought female orgasms were a myth, like the Loch Ness Monster.

“What do you want?” Ruby asked.

“I come in peace,” Dust said. He leaned against the hostess stand. “Nico is having a thing today. All day, all night. We just came out to get some more drinks. Sarah wanted a Gatorade.”

Outside, Sarah was twirling around in the sunlight. She had heavy, babyish cheeks and a dress that was too short. “Jesus,” Ruby said. “Is she tripping?”

Dust licked his teeth. “Molly. You want some?”

The bell rang again. Harry did a double take at the sight of Dust but kept his head high, which made Ruby happy. “Hey,” Harry said, nodding at her.

“Hey,” Ruby said. She held out her fingers like a crab. Harry turned sideways to slide past Dust and let himself be pinched. Ruby slung her arm over Harry’s shoulder, pulling him close. “So, maybe we’ll come by, Dust.”

Dust raised an eyebrow. “Okay, man. You know where I’ll be.” He dropped the board to the floor with a clatter, making Jorge jump. “Later.” He nudged the board out the door and did an ollie on the sidewalk, to Sarah Dinnerstein’s great delight.

“We’re not really going to a party with Dust, are we?” Harry asked.

Ruby shrugged. “I don’t know. My friend Sarah is going. And Nico is cool.”

“Okay,” Harry said. “If you want to go, I’ll go.”

Ruby slid off the stool. “Let’s blow this pop stand.” She wanted to see if Harry’s cheeks turned pink when she said the word “blow,” and they did.

• • •

Despite having dated him for six months, Ruby had no idea where Dust lived, not really. His mom lived in Sunset Park, maybe, and his dad lived somewhere in Queens, but it was all sort of fuzzy. Nico, on the other hand, lived in a big house around the corner from Hyacinth, and she’d been there a hundred times. Nico’s house was a semi-mythical place. His parents didn’t exist. There weren’t bags of lentils in the cupboard or eggs in the fridge. There weren’t any photographs on the walls. The curtains were always closed. Harry was walking slowly, his hair falling in his eyes. Ruby brushed her hand against his arm.

“These dudes are not my friends,” Harry said. “I mean that specifically and also generally, you know, like in a philosophical sense.”

“They’re not that bad,” Ruby said, even though they were actually worse than Harry could imagine. Ruby wasn’t sure why she wanted to go to the party — it certainly wasn’t to hang out with Sarah, whom she had never liked, and it also wasn’t to make out with Dust, which is the only reason she would have gone before. It was definitely the most racially diverse social group she was a part of, which she liked. Everyone at Whitman was whiter shades of pale, as if all of them were in a competition to see who could be the most clueless about their own white privilege. The church-step kids were fuckups, but at least they weren’t as bad as that. And she did enjoy the idea of making Dust jealous, and she enjoyed the idea of showing Harry what her life was like, or at least what it had been like before. Now that she had graduated, everything seemed different — she wasn’t a cool fuckup, she was maybe just a fuckup. Maybe she wanted to go because she was afraid that she and Dust were more similar than she thought. Maybe she wanted to go because she was afraid that Harry would get scared off and then she’d be left with Dust and Nico and Sarah, which is all she really deserved anyway.

There were a few kids smoking on the porch — Ruby knew them and waved. She reached for Harry’s hand and entwined their fingers, even though holding hands in public was not something they’d done before. She looked back at him, and Harry smiled the way you smile at a YouTube video of a baby lion making friends with a baby porcupine, like you just can’t believe how good the world can be. Ruby felt instantly guilty, but it was too late, and so they walked in.

Thirty

Dr. Amelia was on vacation. Every other shrink in the world went away in August, but Dr. Amelia went away in July. Zoe had called three times and left messages, and finally Dr. Amelia called her back.

“Zoe,” she said. There were seagulls in the background. “I’m in Cape Cod. It’s as pretty as a picture. It’s the picture of health! What’s up?”

Zoe was under the covers. Jane was at the restaurant, and Ruby was wherever Ruby went. She’d stopped trying to keep track when Ruby was fifteen and came home with a tattoo. She was a good girl, mostly, and Zoe trusted her. It was smart to give kids a little rope — that’s what Oprah said. Of course, Oprah didn’t have any children. Maybe she’d been talking about puppies. “Oh, nothing,” Zoe said. She felt her voice begin to waver.

“Jane called, too,” Dr. Amelia said. “I’ll be home in three weeks, so why don’t you guys come and see me then?”

“Okay,” Zoe said. She crawled downward, so that her head was closer to the foot of the bed, and collided with Bingo. “I was just hoping to talk for a minute, if that’s okay.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“How do you know when you should get a divorce? Do you have some sort of chart? I thought I was sure, but I don’t really know. You’ve seen us — what do you think?”

“You know I can’t tell you whether to stay married or not, Zoe.” More seagulls.

Zoe closed her eyes and pictured Dr. Amelia in a bathing suit. It would be a colorful one-piece, maybe with a little skirt, the kind her grandmother used to wear. Dr. Amelia was probably wearing prescription sunglasses and a straw hat. Why couldn’t she tell Zoe that? Everyone else was full of advice — Zoe’s mother in Los Angeles, Zoe’s aunts back in Michigan, people on the street. Why couldn’t a therapist just give you a simple yes or no? Maybe Zoe needed a psychic instead, or one of those little paper fortune-tellers. Cootie-catchers. Yes or no.

“Are you renting, or with friends, or what?”

“You know I’m not going to tell you that, either.”

“How are the oysters?”

“Delicious.” Dr. Amelia exhaled heavily. “What’s up, Zoe?”

“I think I’m good at my job,” Zoe said. She was trying not to cry. “And, you know, if we get divorced, will I have to find something else to do? I’m almost fifty.” The number scared her. Jane had turned fifty five years ago, and they’d had a giant party, and everyone had stayed up too late dancing. Ruby had fallen asleep on the bar, like a proper street urchin, little Brooklyn food-service Eloise. But when Zoe thought about her own birthday, which was still two years away, she wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Fifty was fine, but not if you were suddenly adrift. Fifty was fine only if you were in great shape and still got kissed at least once a day.

“You guys can sort out the business stuff after you sort out the marriage stuff. It doesn’t have to all happen at once. No one is going to get excommunicated. One thing at a time. When was the last time you signed a really complicated contract? Divorce is a business, too.”

“But how do I know if that’s really what I want?” Zoe was whispering. She wanted to ask Elizabeth if she ever felt this way around Andrew, but saying the words out loud seemed cursed, like if you’d ever even thought them, if you’d let them pass through your brain and then lips, then your marriage was doomed. She didn’t want to be doomed, and she didn’t want to admit to Elizabeth that she was doomed.

“Do you love your wife?”

Zoe’s ear and cheek were slick with sweat from the phone. “Of course I do. We have a daughter, we have a life. We just never have fun, you know? I feel like I have a roommate and I have to do her laundry. Sometimes when Jane kisses me, I forget that she’s allowed to do that, like she’s a homeless person on the bus or something.”

“Maybe you should try having some fun,” Dr. Amelia said.

Zoe wiped the sweat off her face. “Yeah,” she said. “Any suggestions?” She poked her head out of the covers, knocking Bingo onto the floor.

“When was the last time you went on a date?” Dr. Amelia said. “Maybe you need to kick the snow off your boots. Kick the tires. See if you can pump a little air into the bicycle.”

“I gotcha,” Zoe said. “We’ll book an appointment when you’re back. Thanks for calling. I’m sorry to bug you on your vacation.”

“That’s what telephones are for. It’s fine. You take care.” And then Dr. Amelia was gone, and Zoe and Bingo were alone in the house again. There was a thump downstairs, and Zoe called out “Hello?” but no one answered. The house had its own problems.

Thirty-one

Elizabeth hadn’t seen Iggy Pop all afternoon. She’d been in and out — into the office, to the grocery store, to the coffee shop — but Iggy usually rotated through his sleeping spots throughout the day, and so it didn’t seem strange until she realized that it had been nearly all day. Harry was playing a video game in the living room, an SAT book splayed open on the coffee table. “Igs?” she said. “Iggo Piggo? Pop Pop?” Elizabeth walked in circles around the kitchen.

“Have you seen the cat?” she asked.

Harry shook his head without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Hmm,” Elizabeth said. She checked all the beds and the bathroom sinks. Sometimes when it was hot, Iggy went from sink to sink, trying to stay cool by pressing his body against the porcelain. Andrew was at EVOLVEment again.

Elizabeth wasn’t interested in being a nag. She loved that Andrew was in touch with his feelings. She never wanted a husband like her father, who could have been on fire and wouldn’t have called for help. But she didn’t love that Andrew seemed to have chosen to be an intern at a yoga studio instead of finding an actual job, even if that actual job had been an internship as a woodworker. Andrew had never cared about money — he’d never had to — but for most of their adult lives, he had at least respected the appearance of having a job.

There were tons of kids at Whitman in similar situations — the children of actors and hedge-funders, the grandchildren of people whose names were on the sides of public buildings. Brooklyn wasn’t the same as it had been when they’d moved, a city next door, with its own rhythms and heartbeats. Now it was all Manhattan spillover — the Russian oligarchs were buying up Tribeca and the West Village, and so Brooklyn was the next-best thing. It was her job to support this, but Elizabeth didn’t like it. She would have been happier making smaller commissions and keeping the borough full of middle-class families. She’d sold so many houses to public-school teachers — Center Slope town houses — and those houses were now worth absolutely stupid amounts of money. Sometimes she thought about moving upstate, somewhere pretty along the Hudson. Maybe when Harry graduated, she and Andrew could cash out for good. Sell the house, sell the life. If they weren’t in the city, then maybe Andrew wouldn’t ever have to pretend to have a job again. He could just go on meditation retreats and build sculptures or throw pottery or take tae kwon do classes. She could sell country houses to the rich people who were buying $2 million houses in Brooklyn — she’d ask the O’Connells to let her open a branch office in Rhinebeck. Harry could spend summers at home, living in the apartment over the garage. What did it mean about their self-worth if they needed to be in the city for no reason? Was she that afraid of what her friends would think of her, if they’d say she was a quitter? Was she a quitter?

“Mom?”

“Sorry, what?” Elizabeth blinked. Harry was staring at her, the scene on the screen paused with his detective frog in mid-jump.

“Do you want help looking for the cat? It’s going to get dark soon.”

Elizabeth rubbed her hands together. “Yes, oh, sweetie, yes, let’s do that. Can you check the basement? I’ll do one more search down here, and then maybe we’ll walk around the block?” Iggy Pop wasn’t supposed to go outside — there were feral cats in the neighborhood, and he was no fighter — but the back screen door was easy enough to shove, even for a cat. He’d gotten out a few times before, and they’d always found him stalking around the flower beds in the yard, a determined look on his face.

Elizabeth opened and shut cupboards in the kitchen and peeked under the dining-room table.

“Not in the basement,” Harry said, coming up the stairs.

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t think so.”

They started in the garden, Elizabeth walking clockwise and Harry counterclockwise. No sign of Iggy.

“Let’s walk around the block,” Elizabeth said. They walked down the driveway to the sidewalk and turned right, checking under the parked cars and in the flower beds.

Harry needed a haircut. His curls were starting to creep down his neck the way they had when he was a baby. Elizabeth resisted the urge to reach out and put her finger inside one of the ringlets.

“So, are you spending time with Ruby?” Since the eBay incident, Harry hadn’t mentioned her, but Elizabeth saw his phone light up more than usual, and then his whole face, and so she knew that Ruby was still hovering around. She wasn’t against it, not really — she loved Ruby. She loved Zoe. She loved that Harry was spending time with a girl, whether what they were doing was romantic or platonic or, most likely, somewhere in that giant, hazy, in-between zone.

“I guess,” Harry said. “Yeah, we hang out. I mean, after our SAT class, and stuff. Sometimes.”

“That’s nice,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t want to press. She had never once talked to either of her parents about her love life as a teenager, or as an adult. When she and Andrew had decided to get married, her father had made a joke about the marital bed, and Elizabeth had felt nauseous for days. It was Harry’s business. Ruby was a little bit wild, but Elizabeth very much doubted that her sweet son was up to Ruby’s romantic standards. Zoe had been like that — happy to flirt with anyone who looked her way, but much harder to pin down. It was funny to see how things repeated. Not funny ha-ha.

When Zoe and Jane had started talking about having a baby, it wasn’t clear how they’d do it. Zoe was younger, but also more squeamish. Jane’s mother had had four kids at home with a midwife and no drugs; her genes seemed promising. It was a logistical conundrum — they would both be mothers, of course, but who was going to carry the child, who was going to breast-feed, who was going to have her hormones and pelvis put through hell? They were both open to it. If they were going to have more, then maybe Jane should go first? But how could they know if they were going to have more? Neither Zoe nor Jane had elaborate fantasies about big families. And then, of course, they had to figure out the sperm.

It was what people always wanted to know — and what Elizabeth had been afraid to ask too many questions about, even as close as she was. Were they going to get it from a friend or a sperm bank? If it was from a friend, would they actually have sex, or go for the turkey baster? Elizabeth hated to think about how Ruby probably got asked all those questions — at school, at summer camp, by bigots and friends alike. Before Zoe had Ruby, Elizabeth had never thought about how easy it was for a heterosexual couple — even though she and Andrew had had a horrible time getting pregnant, both before Harry and after, it was their private trauma and heartbreak and no one else’s. No one ever asked how they were planning on having a baby, what elaborate measures they would have to take.

It was amazing to think that that sperm — Jane’s younger brother’s, if you must know — had eventually turned into Ruby, who had been a full-cheeked baby, who had been a mermaid child, who had been a sullen tween, who had graduated from high school. Elizabeth had wiped her bottom dozens of times, had bathed her in the sink. And now Harry blushed at the sound of her name.

“She doesn’t know what she’s going to do next year,” Harry said, unprompted. They’d made it to the corner and turned right, still with no sign of Iggy.

“No? Zoe told me she was going to take a year off. In Europe, practically everyone does. I think it’s a great idea.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t even know what she wants to do, like, at all.”

Elizabeth looked at her son. “Next year, you mean? Or for the rest of her life?”

“Either. Both.”

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life when I was eighteen.” Elizabeth waved to an elderly neighbor across the street. “I still don’t. And your father certainly doesn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Harry looked stricken.

“I mean, it’s never too late to decide to do something else. Becoming an adult doesn’t mean that you suddenly have all the answers.” Elizabeth stepped over a large crack in the sidewalk and then stooped down to check under a few more cars.

“I know,” Harry said. “I wasn’t raised in an igloo. But what do you mean that Dad certainly doesn’t?”

“Oh,” Elizabeth said. “That. I just mean that he has a lot of interests, and that he hasn’t had a conventional career path, you know, moving up the corporate ladder.”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry said. He seemed satisfied. They got to the next corner and turned right again. “Maybe we should make signs.”

“For your dad?”

“For the cat.”

“Right.” Elizabeth put her hands on her hips. The sun was setting. The neighborhood looked prettiest at dusk, as did the rest of the world. Sometimes she wished she could take all the photos for all the houses just before sunset, when every room looked alive with beauty and possibility. Harry’s curls were outlined with gold. She wanted to kiss her son on the mouth the way she had when he was a baby, and to remember every second of their lives together, like some sort of robot. Andrew was better at that, at remembering all the tiny moments of Harry’s development, what day of the week it was when he first smiled, and when he learned how to ride his bike without training wheels. There wasn’t enough time in the world, not for the things that mattered most, even counting all the endless days when Harry had a fever and was home from school and they didn’t move from the sofa. Even counting the days the three of them had spent marooned indoors during blizzards. Even counting the days before he was conceived and she and Andrew wanted nothing, nothing, nothing more than a wick to light and hold.

Thirty-two

The house was a mess, with Ruby’s clothing everywhere, and dog hair, and half-empty abandoned glasses of water. Zoe knew how it must look to Elizabeth; like she wasn’t sure what to do next, as if the likeliest result would be for her to end up like the Collyer brothers, buried under mountains of her own junk. That morning, she’d weeded out the bookshelf next to her bed and her underwear drawer. She wasn’t sure if she was clearing things out in order to begin to think about maybe selling the house (she couldn’t even think about it declaratively) or whether clearing things out was a way of procrastinating even doing that much.

It was her favorite time of day, the window of time between lunch and dinner. All was quiet at home, and Hyacinth was recharging its batteries, the cooks readying everything for the evening rush and making staff meal, something large and comforting to feed everyone from the cooks to the waiters and the runners and the busboys. Zoe had always preferred staff meal to anything on the menu. She’d had everything so many times over the years — a bite here, a bite there, spoonfuls of everything at home — that even with the changing of the seasons, she couldn’t stomach another plate of Hyacinth’s polenta and mushrooms or shaved asparagus with pecorino. Staff meal could be anything — fried chicken, moo shu, burgers smothered in blue cheese. She wasn’t always around Hyacinth to eat, but Jane was cooking tonight — she’d been inspired and signed herself up — and Ruby was working, and so she went. All she was doing at home was moving things from one room to another, and she was happy enough to get away from it for a little while.

It took six minutes to walk to the restaurant. Ruby was sitting at the table in front of the window, her legs crossed underneath her and her long purple hair falling in her face. Zoe knocked gently on the window to get her attention, and Ruby stuck out her tongue.

Inside, Hyacinth smelled like basil and peaches and brown sugar. Zoe folded herself into the chair next to Ruby, and waved hello to the servers setting the tables.

“Hi, sweets,” she said, and tucked Ruby’s hair behind her ear.

“Mum,” Ruby said. “Please.” She untucked it.

There was a bowl of sugar snap peas in front of her, and Zoe popped one into her mouth.

“Hey,” Jane said, coming up from behind them. She was in her kitchen clothes, a stiff white jacket unbuttoned at the collar. Zoe loved seeing Jane in her chef coat — it had always been a turn-on. It was her formal wear, her version of a ball gown, when she looked most like herself, and most in charge. Jane had always seemed like an adult, even when they met, when Zoe was twenty-three and Jane was thirty. Unlike Zoe, who’d never had to work a job, who paid her rent late because she was disorganized but not because she didn’t have the money, Jane was already a grown-up. When she’d told Zoe that she wanted to open a restaurant, Zoe knew that she would make it happen. There was nothing adolescent about her, nothing wishy-washy. Jane put her hands on Ruby’s shoulders and squeezed.

“Hi,” Zoe said. “What’s for dinner?”

“Carnitas, baby. So rich, it tastes like chocolate. Watermelon salad. So good.”

“Sounds delicious.” Zoe loved it when Jane talked about food. She wasn’t one of those chatty chefs who killed a whole meal by telling you where every grain of rice was born. Jane cared about that, of course, but she’d rather just sit across from you and nod at your happy moans. She was more den mother than sommelier — she didn’t care whether or not you could identify the sage or the saffron, she just wanted to know that you liked what she’d given you. She’d cooked for Zoe early and often in their courtship — when Zoe thought about falling in love with Jane, she thought of the two of them sitting naked at Jane’s kitchen table, dragging their fingers through brownie batter and twisting their forks into perfect orange yolks, sending tendrils of richness down over handmade pasta. Jane was fresh out of the CIA and liked to practice her techniques. Fresh croissants, sometimes stuffed with almond paste. Zoe licked her fingers every day. She gained ten pounds in the first six months they were together. Whenever she’d lost weight in the intervening years, Jane would take it as a personal slight. It was a good quality in a wife.

Jorge waved from behind the bar. “You want a glass of something?”

Zoe shook her head, but Jane ducked back around the bar and returned with two glasses of cava. “Come on,” she said to Zoe. “Live a little.” Jane handed her own glass to Ruby. “Not the whole thing — I’ll get arrested. You’re sitting in the window.” Ruby slurped a little off the top. Zoe pursed her lips and then smiled.

“How’s your SAT class going? I haven’t really heard that much about it,” Zoe said. Behind Ruby, Jane rolled her eyes — but it was never a good time to have a conversation that a teenager didn’t want to have, so Zoe forged ahead. “You think you’ll be able to take the test again?”

“As I’ve already told you, Mothers, the score was not the problem.” Ruby gritted her teeth. “My scores were fine. Like, better than half of my stupid friends’.”

“But not as good as the other half of your stupid friends’?” Jane sat down.

“They’re not actually stupid. My friends are smart. I’m just calling them stupid because I hate them.” Ruby closed the book in front of her.

“Gotcha,” Zoe said.

“And yes, I can take the test again, if you want. I really don’t think it matters, though. Mom didn’t go to college, and she’s fine.” Ruby turned toward Jane. “Right? Are you fine?”

“I went to cooking school,” Jane said. “If you want to go to a trade school, that counts.”

“And what did you do in college, Mum, except smoke cigarettes and play in a band?”

Zoe laughed. “Hey, I was an art major! I also made prints!”

“You guys are really not selling this idea.” Ruby shook her head. “No wonder neither of you gave a shit about my applications. It’s a waste of time and money, and you know it! Come on, admit it, part of you is relieved that you’re not going to have to spend like fifty grand a year for me to learn how to weave baskets, or whatever you did at Oberlin, or make a soufflé.”

“You already know how to make a soufflé,” Jane said proudly.

“Again, not the point.” Ruby swiveled in her chair and looked back toward the kitchen. “Are the tacos ready? I’m starving. It was a long day of doing absolutely nothing in here.” She pushed back her chair and walked into the kitchen.

Jane slid over into the empty chair. “Did we do everything right, or did we do everything wrong? Sometimes I can’t tell.”

Zoe let herself fold against Jane’s shoulder. “If you figure it out, let me know.” She smelled like pork and garlic and chocolate, and Zoe breathed it all in. If things were always this easy, they’d just be together. If the restaurant weren’t a tug-of-war, if Ruby weren’t a gorgeous ball of anxiety that grew in the pit of her stomach every day. Zoe wished that marriage were just the good parts, just the parts that made you happy, but it wasn’t. Even she knew that.

Thirty-three

It was an official date, as far as Harry could tell. The singer from the Aeroplanes lived in the neighborhood and ate lunch at Hyacinth every day, and so he was friendly with Ruby’s moms. The guy put them on the list for the show at the Barclays Center, good seats, too. Ruby asked via text, like it wasn’t a big deal, but Harry knew it was. He would have to tell his parents, and she would have to tell her parents, and one of them would probably pick the other one up at the door and sit in the living room for two minutes and make small talk. Harry really, really hoped that his parents would let him go over to Ruby’s, but he wasn’t surprised when they were both sitting in the living room, waiting for her to arrive. They said they were just making signs with pictures of Iggy Pop to put up around the neighborhood, but Harry didn’t believe them. They were lingering.

“What?” said Elizabeth. “I just want to see her! It’s just Ruby!”

Harry was pacing back and forth, stopping every time he heard a noise on the sidewalk. Andrew watched, amused, which was the worst. He leaned back and peeked out the window. “She’s coming,” he said.

Harry zipped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He needed the cool air, and also not to be staring at the door as Ruby walked in. The party at Dust’s friend’s house had been pretty dumb, not that Harry had much to compare it to. There were lots of kids sitting around smoking, and he’d followed Ruby from room to room. Every now and then, they’d stop to say hi to someone, and when they moved on, Ruby would tell him how she didn’t really like that person, no matter what she’d said to their face. Eventually they’d found an empty corner and just sat on the floor, Ruby ashing her cigarette into a discarded Snapple cap by their feet. Dust ignored them, and Harry was relieved. Parties were way less eventful than in the movies. No one was dancing, no one was barfing, at least not until the end, when Ruby’s friend Sarah ducked into the bathroom and some pretty gross sounds came from the other side of the door. The only exciting thing that happened was that Ruby held his hand, even if their hands were tucked behind their knees, out of view of passersby. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that after they got home, she sent him a text asking him to go on an actual date.

“Hey, Ruby, how are you?” Harry heard his father greet her. He closed the fridge door and wiped his hair out of his eyes. Ruby was hugging his father, then his mother. She’d done something different to her hair — it was all braided tight against her scalp for a few inches, when it exploded into curls.

“Whoa,” Harry said. “When did you do that?”

Ruby twirled a curl around her middle finger. “An hour ago.”

“I love it,” Elizabeth said. She scrunched a handful of Ruby’s hair. “You look like your grandmother. For most people, that’s a weird compliment, but you really do.”

“I was going for post-apocalyptic sun goddess, but I’ll take grandmother, I guess.” Ruby smiled. “Thanks.”

“We should go,” Harry said. “We don’t want to miss anything.”

“Right,” said Elizabeth. “You guys have fun. Tell the boys we say hi!”

Harry stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “Mom, I am not telling anyone that you say hi.”

“Fair enough.” Elizabeth blew a kiss, which Harry waved away, as if he could push it back through the air onto his mother’s lips. They were out the door before she could say anything else. Ruby didn’t take his hand on the walk to the train, but she did once they were on the Q heading toward the concert.

• • •

The Barclays Center was enormous. Harry didn’t care about basketball, and so he hadn’t been before. From the outside, the arena looked like a spaceship had just landed on Flatbush Avenue, and on the inside it was all gleaming black floors, like being inside an evil crystal ball. Ruby had been to a couple of concerts with her mum, and she pulled him through the crowd toward the will-call windows. Most of the concertgoers were in their thirties, with unseasonable beards and knit caps, which made Harry rethink his plain white V-neck. Ruby was dressed, as she’d said, as some kind of goddess, with her new hair surrounding the back of her head like a halo, and a flowy little dress over some giant heavy black boots. She scowled at everyone who came within three feet of her, which was about a hundred people a minute. They finally found their seats, which were in a roped-off section of the floor, only a few feet from the left-hand side of the stage.

“Um,” Harry said. “This is close. These guys must really like your mom’s food.”

“My mom did the food for the singer’s wedding,” Ruby said. “It’s cool. They’re like, whatever. They’re not that famous.”

Harry gestured to the rest of the arena. “I’d say they’re pretty much famous, not that that means anything in any real sense, but it does mean that they sold a lot of tickets to this concert.”

“Fair enough,” Ruby said. She snuggled her nose against Harry’s neck. “I don’t really like their music. It’s for sad boys and dads.”

Harry could almost picture a day when Ruby’s touching his neck wouldn’t give him an instant boner, but today was not that day. “I may or may not fall into that category,” he said.

“I know, that’s why I invited you,” Ruby said. “That and the fact that I wanted to make out with you in public in front of ten thousand strangers.”

“I accept,” Harry said, but before he could say more, Ruby’s tongue was pressing against his lips and her hands were on his face. The Aeroplanes walked out onto the stage, and everyone in the crowd screamed, and Harry felt the entire wall of sound inside his body. For the rest of his life, no matter where he was or what he was doing, hearing the first few chords of that one song would bring him back to Ruby’s tongue and to feeling like the luckiest boy in Brooklyn.

The band played. All the people around them stood up and swayed or bopped around in their seats, and when they felt like participating, so did Harry and Ruby. Harry found that Ruby would just make fun of the people around them and/or the band if he wasn’t kissing her, and so he felt like it was his civic duty to do that as much as possible. About halfway through the show, the singer in the band, a tall, scrawny-looking guy with greasy black hair that hung down to his ears, said, “This next song isn’t one of ours, but I think you’ll know the words anyway,” and then the guitar player launched into the opening lick of “Mistress of Myself.” Ruby and Harry pulled away from each other and started laughing. The entire crowd — thousands upon thousands of people — sang along.

“This is so weird!” Harry said, shouting over the noise of the crowd.

“I know,” Ruby said. She bobbed her head and mouthed the words. “I think the singer has a crush on Zoe.”

Harry shrugged. A lot of people did. It was sort of a joke in their family, Zoe’s sex appeal. When Harry was young, before he understood about lesbians, he’d once asked his father if he’d ever had an affair with Zoe. She was so beautiful, and she was always around. Maybe it was like bumper cars, being a grown-up, just crashing into whoever was closest. He didn’t know. Andrew had laughed, and Harry had felt instantly ashamed, having clearly misunderstood something important.

The singer writhed around, bending in half and jerking back up. It was like watching someone be electrocuted over and over again. Ruby threw her hands in the air and danced. “Don’t tell my mum,” she said, bouncing up and down.

Harry shook his head. “Not in a million years.” They didn’t kiss or even touch again until the song was over, because otherwise it would have felt like their parents were watching them, like the song was a radio transmitter and something in both of their houses would start beeping and show their parents what they were doing. Like incest, almost. It wasn’t like that — sure, they’d grown up in tandem, Harry in his house and Ruby in hers, on the same block, and sure, there were those old photos of them standing naked together, but that was before life was real, before Harry could actually remember. What Harry could remember was feeling nervous when Ruby walked by, and her not paying attention to him once they were in middle school. Their families didn’t all hang out like they used to, in and out of each other’s houses. Everyone was too busy now. That was when they were someone else, some babies who looked like them. They weren’t kids anymore, they were actual people. Harry worried that his parents would never notice that he’d stopped leaving his dirty underwear on the floor, or that he’d started eating avocados. Almost everything about him had changed, or was changing, and they had no idea. Harry had watched porn, he’d smoked weed, he’d jerked off a thousand times. In their house! Sometimes he felt like he could build a robot out of old pictures of himself and his parents would never know the difference.

All Harry wanted was to have sex with Ruby, preferably all day long, for at least a week. They’d gotten close — or at least he thought so. In the house, she’d given him a blow job, his first, and since then it had been mostly hands-over-the-pants-type stuff, which was obviously a huge improvement from staring at her surreptitiously down the hallway at school, but after her actual mouth had been (he could hardly believe it) on his actual dick, there was no going back. Ruby had invited him to her house, but Zoe was always around, and she didn’t seem to knock, and Harry wasn’t ready for his very first coitus to be interruptus, too. His mom had more open houses coming up. Or it didn’t have to be like in some high-school movie, the deed taking place underneath a fluffy pink duvet, the guy all cautious and serious and asking “Is this okay? Is this okay?” every two seconds. It could be anywhere. Even just being around Ruby made him feel braver than he’d been before — like with Dust, at graduation. Harry had never dreamed of hitting anyone before, ever — but it was for Ruby, and so he could do it. He could do this, too.

“Let’s go,” Harry whispered in Ruby’s ear.

“What?” she asked, still dancing. He put out his hand, and she took it, and this time he was the one leading her through the crowd.

The arena was enormous, and the Aeroplanes had been on for only an hour, so when they made it out into the halls, it was mostly empty except for vendors selling beer and T-shirt stands.

“This is your new thing, huh, like, International Man of Mystery?” Ruby said.

Harry looked around until he saw the exit. “Maybe it is,” he said.

“Maybe I like it,” Ruby said.

Thirty-four

There was a playground tucked just underneath the bottom of the park. Ruby had always preferred it to the tiny one on Cortelyou, because the one in the park was big enough to get lost in. Someone’s parent was always wandering through, calling a kid’s name. Ruby and Harry opened the little metal gate and hurried inside. Unlike the rest of the park, which was “open” until midnight, playgrounds were technically closed after dark, but that still didn’t mean they were actually locked. There was a row of swings running along the right-hand side, closer to the street, and then there were big fiberglass cutouts of animals on a squishy floor, soft enough that little kids could fall and not actually hurt themselves. The playground was empty, except for the two of them.

Harry walked around a large purple elephant, running his hand along the elephant’s back. “Would you do that to my hair?” Harry said, without looking up.

“You want to look like a disco goddess?”

Harry ruffled his hair and fluttered his eyelashes. “Yeah. And maybe cut it shorter?” He pulled up a curl, stretching it out straight from the top of his head.

“I’ll cut it, I’ll bleach it, whatever you want. Full service.” Ruby walked around to Harry. They’d probably played together, right here. She just hadn’t seen him recently. She’d seen him, sure, on the block and at school, but that was just his familiar face, like his father and mother shrunk down in some sort of machine. The machine of procreation. They were robots, all of them, built with eggs and sperms and covered in goo. Ruby had seen the photos of herself coming out of Zoe’s vag — some friend of her moms who’d been in the room for that exact purpose, to snap pictures of Zoe’s vagina and Ruby’s hairy little head and all the blood and the goop and the whatever. And then there you were, this tiny person, a doll that would grow and grow and grow until you were standing in a playground at ten o’clock on a Wednesday in the middle of the summer and you were about to slide your undies off and kick them to your old friend, your new boyfriend, whatever he was.

Cars drove past, but Harry and Ruby didn’t once stop looking at each other. Harry held her underwear in his hand, his fingers loose around the cotton. Ruby walked up to him, waiting until their lips were touching, and then she pushed him lightly backward until they were both lying on the ground. She reached down for his zipper and took him out of his pants.

“I don’t have anything,” Harry said, stammering. “If I wasn’t afraid to walk through the park by myself right now, I would run to a Duane Reade and buy every condom in the store just so that I would never, ever be in this particular situation again.”

“I do,” Ruby said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a condom. “In fact, I have more than one, in case this goes well. Or fast.”

Harry coughed. “Ruby,” he said. His cheeks were pink — even in the dark she could see it. That was one thing she loved about boys as pale as Harry — it was so easy to make them turn color, like a chameleon trying to blend itself into a tree.

“I know,” she said. Ruby unrolled the condom onto Harry gently. He was already convulsing when she climbed back onto him and slid him into her body.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. Harry pulled her torso down to his and kissed her. Ruby rocked back and forth, enjoying Harry’s little spasms of delight. “Oh, fuck,” he said again, and Ruby felt him come. She kissed him and gave her Kegels a squeeze, which elicited another great big moan.

“Oh, my God,” Harry said. “Did that just happen?”

Ruby laughed, and kissed him. “Um, yes. That’s why I brought more than one.”

“No,” Harry said. “I don’t mean. Well, yeah, I guess that is what I mean. But I also mean, wow.” He looked up at her with astonishment.

Ruby had slept with four people, including Harry and Dust. That was only counting actual sex. If you counted other stuff, the list was longer. But out of the four guys, only Harry had ever looked at her like this. Even with Mikhail, who she’d lost her virginity to when she was fourteen, Ruby had never felt like she was doing anything that really mattered to anyone. Jamal, who had been her second, had been an RA at her summer program, and she was pretty sure that having sex with the campers was exactly what he was not supposed to do, which didn’t seem like a great sign. Not that the boys she’d slept with hadn’t enjoyed it, or hadn’t wanted her — and she had wanted them, always, she wouldn’t have done it otherwise — but Ruby had never, until this second, felt like she was watching herself become a part of someone else’s story. She could see the whole thing: no matter what happened with Harry, even if they never slept together again, even if she got hit by a bus when they walked home, even if she moved to the North Pole and they only communicated via Santa Claus, Harry would always remember this playground, and her face, and the fact that she had agreed to be his first.

There weren’t very many differences to having gay parents, or parents of two races. It wasn’t like being raised a pagan or a Wiccan or whatever conservatives wanted their constituents to believe. No one was being indoctrinated. In fact, it was the opposite. Most of Ruby’s friends with straight parents grew up assuming they’d be straight, too, and that they’d marry someone who looked pretty much the same way they did. If you had two moms, though, or two dads, or your parents weren’t the same color, then you were born knowing that there wasn’t actually a default setting. Ruby was open to being attracted to anybody. She’d thought a lot about being a lesbian, even though she knew she was attracted to boys. Sometimes she wondered if that was just her wanting to be different from her parents, or buying into the societal pressure pushed on her by Barbie dolls or whatever. There were a few out girls at Whitman, two little baby dykes who wore bow ties and dress shoes and one pretty junior who had a girlfriend already in college, which Ruby found creepy from a purely statutory standpoint. There was one other family she knew at school with gay parents, but those kids were still in middle school, and so Ruby wasn’t about to ask them what they thought about the whole thing. She was pretty sure that she was straight, but maybe not. Maybe she’d change her mind later, who knew? Her mum had been with guys when she was a teenager, too. Her mom wouldn’t have had sex with a guy in one trillion years. Everyone was different.

Sex wasn’t a big deal. Sex was the biggest deal. “Wow yourself,” Ruby was about to say, but then there were flashlights and a voice coming through a megaphone, and she and Harry were scrambling away from each other like cockroaches when you turned on the light.

Thirty-five

Wednesday nights were slow at Hyacinth, and so Jane and Zoe were home early. Jane was on the couch, watching something dumb, and Zoe was upstairs in bed. They were both pretending that they weren’t waiting up for Ruby to come home. Jane’s phone began to vibrate on the coffee table, and when she didn’t recognize the number, she ignored it, reaching for the remote instead. A minute later, she heard Zoe’s phone ring upstairs, and Zoe said, “What?” Her feet thumped to the floor. Jane sat up straight, suddenly at attention. She debated checking upstairs to find out what was going on, but Zoe was hurrying down before she had the chance.

“We have to go to the fucking police station,” Zoe said. She had a scarf wrapped around her hair, and it looked like she’d dozed off, with a pillow line running across her left cheek. “Ruby and Harry were fucking fucking in the fucking park. In the fucking playground!”

Jane slipped into her clogs and patted her pockets. “I have my keys. Let’s go.”

The 67th Precinct was not one of the glittering bastions of justice like on Law & Order: SVU, with computerized screens everywhere and cops with good haircuts. The floor was dirty, and the desks were messy. Jane had been there a number of times before, in the early days of Hyacinth, when they couldn’t seem to go a month without an incident of one kind or another — a stolen credit card, a break-in, a shattered window. The cops were overworked and exhausted. She nodded hello to Officer Vernon, whom she knew from his work with the neighborhood watch. Zoe was hysterical, her silver bracelets jangling like a thousand bells. Jane took her hand. “It’s going to be fine,” Jane said.

“I’m going to murder her,” Zoe said. “As soon as I know she’s okay. If Harry had been rolling around with some white girl, they would have sent him home. I am going to murder everyone.”

They stopped at the desk, and Jane peeked around the side — she could see Ruby’s legs through an open office door in the back.

“We’re here to pick up our daughter,” Jane said, pointing. “Ruby Kahn-Bennett?”

The woman at the desk nodded, and reached for the phone. They stood there for another minute, and then another female officer came clomping down the hall to get them.

“I’m Officer Claiborne Ray,” she said. “Come on back. The other parents are already here.” She beckoned for them to follow. Zoe hurried in front, as if they were walking into a Cambodian prison and she might never see Ruby again.

• • •

The office was small, and seemed even smaller, because in addition to Ruby, Harry, Elizabeth, and Andrew, there was another police officer sitting behind a desk. The guy was young, maybe twenty-five, with a smug look on his face. He was, no doubt, the one who had caught them. Jane wanted to slap him. As if he’d caught actual criminals. He’d probably been promoted from animal control and had just stopped rescuing cats from hoarders’ apartments.

Andrew was rocking back and forth in the chair, which made an irritating squeak. Elizabeth had an arm wrapped around Harry’s shoulders. Ruby was picking at her nails. They all looked up when Jane and Zoe walked in. Ruby waved, unable to force even a fake smile. Andrew shook his head and clenched his jaw.

“Come in,” Officer Ray said.

Zoe dropped quickly into the chair next to Ruby and squeezed her knee. There were no more seats, and so Jane leaned against the wall. She felt Andrew’s and Elizabeth’s angry stares boring into the side of her face so acutely that she put her hand on her cheek.

“What exactly happened?” Jane asked.

The young male officer cleared his throat. “These two were having sexual relations in the playground.”

“Sexual relations? Who are you, Bill Clinton? You mean you actually saw them?” Zoe’s voice was high and loud. Zoe got angry so rarely that when it came out, it was like a volcano after a hundred years at rest. “I really doubt that. Ruby, please. Can you tell us what actually happened? I very much doubt that you caught them doing anything. So they were in a playground after dark. Fine. Fine! Please.” She was breathing out of her nose like a bull about to charge.

The officer cleared his throat again. “The young lady was on top of the young man. Her underwear was on the ground. There was a used condom. I’m not making this up, ma’am.” The little prick was practically smiling. “This is a serious offense.”

“A used condom?” In comparison to Zoe’s, Elizabeth’s voice was tiny, as if her lips didn’t want to let the words out. She took her arm off Harry’s shoulders and leaned back.

“That’s right, ma’am.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “And Ms. Kahn-Bennett is over eighteen, which makes this much more serious.”

“Oh, come on,” Harry said.

Elizabeth covered her face with her hands.

“Ruby, is he telling the truth?” Zoe leaned in, offering her daughter her ear.

Ruby shrugged. “I mean, I guess so. Mr. Marx and I were not having sex when we were so rudely interrupted by these fine officers, but we could have been, and it is humanly possible that we very recently had been, so I guess I can’t really say anything other than I deeply apologize for so rudely using the park after dark for my own purposes.”

Harry stifled a laugh, and his mother put her finger in his face. “Do not.” Elizabeth shook her head. “I just can’t believe this,” she said.

“Well, I think we all know whose fault this is,” Andrew said. He raised his palms. “Harry has never been in any kind of trouble before, Officer, not once. Whereas Ruby…”

“Oh!” Zoe said. “Oh! I see how this is!”

“Am I making this up?” Andrew turned to Elizabeth for confirmation. She looked queasy.

“It doesn’t really matter whose idea it was,” the female officer said. “Let’s not get bogged down. This is the first time that either of them have ever been in here, and seeing as both Ms. Marx and Ms. Kahn are leading members of the local community, we are willing to let this go with a warning and a fine. But I do want written apologies from both of you kids on my desk tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Jane said, extending her hand to the officer. “We really appreciate that.” She clamped her other hand on Ruby’s shoulder. “This will never happen again, I promise you that.”

They gathered their things and stood up. Jane watched as Elizabeth mouthed I’m sorry to Zoe. Then they made their way back out onto the street in single file, the Kahn-Bennetts first with the Marxes behind.

When they were all on the sidewalk in front of the station, Zoe was starting to usher Ruby toward their car, as if shielding her from paparazzi. “Hang on,” Jane said. She stopped and turned to Elizabeth. “What exactly are you sorry for?”

“What?” Elizabeth put on her best naïve face, the face of a choir girl.

“Inside, you just told Zoe that you were sorry. I want to know what you’re sorry for. Are you sorry for the fact that my daughter had sex with your son? Because I have really had it with this bullshit. You think that you guys have this perfect kid and this perfect shit, but you’re just as messed up as the rest of us, I promise you.” Jane felt her heart beating faster. She wanted to wrestle Elizabeth to the ground, to fold her skinny limbs up and throw her away.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Jane,” Elizabeth said. The night air was cool, and there was a wind picking up, blowing trash at their feet. “I never said we were perfect.” They had never been perfect, not she and Andrew nor she and Zoe. Lydia popped into her head, Lydia, who had been arrested half a dozen times before she died. She would have laughed hysterically at all of this. How bourgeois! How parental! They couldn’t even commit their own crimes.

“Oh, right.” Jane cracked her knuckles. She didn’t mean to be threatening, it was just a habit, but she saw Elizabeth jump back a bit at the sound and wasn’t sorry about it. “You think I can’t see the way you look at Zoe, and me, and Ruby? Like you’re above it all and looking down on us from your little throne?”

“Mom,” said Ruby. “Whoa.”

“Jane,” said Zoe. “First of all, please relax. Second of all, this is totally crazy and not at all true. Third of all, can we please not have this conversation in front of a police station? This is turning into an episode of the Maury Povich show.”

“I was apologizing for Andrew implying that this was Ruby’s fault,” Elizabeth said. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. “As for the rest of it, I’m really sorry that this is all happening at once, with you guys, and everything that you’re dealing with, and I’m sorry! I’m just sorry, okay? I love you guys! Come on! You know that.”

“You’re apologizing to her about me?” Andrew asked, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

“Fine,” Jane said, raising her hands in surrender. “Fine.” She stalked back toward the car, kicking a newspaper off her leg and into the street, cursing under her breath, happy at least to know that they were not the only ones going home to have a fight.

Thirty-six

Oberlin College (population: 3,000) had more lesbians than all of Wellesley, Massachusetts (population: 27,982), if you weren’t counting the all-women’s college, which Elizabeth wasn’t going to apply to because it would mean that she could never leave home. Lesbianism was one of the things she always assumed she’d try in college, like a tofu scramble, or a cappella. She’d kissed a girl once, during a particularly good session of Truth or Dare at a party her senior year of high school, but the girl was just some random drunk sophomore who had dissolved into giggles immediately, and so it didn’t really count.

Then there was Zoe Bennett. Elizabeth sometimes thought about the improbability of her life, starting the way it did, all in a dormitory that looked like a cellblock. What if Andrew hadn’t lived on her hall? What if Zoe hadn’t lived downstairs? Oberlin was a small school, but there were certainly people whose paths she’d never crossed, and people she met years later. She and Andrew had met during their freshman orientation, and she’d met Zoe that first week, when she was sitting in front of the dorm smoking. Lots of people had bleached-out hair, but not many of them were black girls in enormous goth platform boots. Elizabeth had lost her key to the building and was waiting for someone to come out so that she could get back inside. It was the first day of September, and Ohio was beautiful, flat and sunny and full of flowers. Zoe sprang up and opened the door, and then walked Elizabeth all the way to her dorm room, as if she were the resident bellhop. They became friends so quickly that Elizabeth sometimes thought that Zoe must have confused her for someone else, someone prettier and funnier, someone with better stories and a higher tolerance for alcohol.

They hadn’t had sex.

They hadn’t done anything at all.

It was almost true. Elizabeth and Andrew were already together, more or less, kissing at the end of the night and never talking about it during the day. Kitty’s Mustache was playing shows at house parties once or twice a week, their flyers up all over campus. “MEOW,” they’d say, and then the address. Two dollars for the keg. Everyone knew who they were. Both Zoe and Andrew were living off campus now that they were allowed to, Zoe in a one-bedroom apartment next door to Oberlin’s crumbling movie theater, the Apollo, which meant that the neon marquee lit up her living room every night after dark until about ten o’clock. They were a funny match — even once they were in the band together, Elizabeth still felt like an amateur next to Zoe — an amateur woman, an amateur college student, an amateur cool kid. Even so, they had more fun together than seemed possible. They went to the Salvation Army and bought bags of clothes for ten dollars, they went bowling and came out reeking of cigarette smoke and french fries, they went to the movies and got drunk and laughed all night long. Elizabeth wanted to be Zoe’s best friend, to wear matching necklaces and everything. They were almost there, maybe, but Zoe had so many friends already, from so many corners of the campus, that it was hard for Elizabeth to know where she stood.

Elizabeth was embarrassed at how well she remembered it — Zoe probably had forgotten it by the time she went to sleep that night. She and Elizabeth were lying on the couch in Zoe’s apartment, watching a movie—Bonnie and Clyde, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Zoe was waxing rhapsodic about Faye’s clothes. They were head to foot, overlapping at their stomachs, but then, near the middle of the movie, Zoe said she was getting tired and did a half somersault, half flop, so that she was lying right behind Elizabeth, both of them facing the small television. Zoe looped her arms around Elizabeth’s middle and snuggled up against her back.

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. “Wake me up if Bonnie’s going to die.”

But she didn’t go to sleep — at least Elizabeth didn’t think so.

On-screen, Faye Dunaway was leaning against a car, smoking. Zoe’s nose rubbed against Elizabeth’s spine. The sky was vast and cloudy, flat and endless. The room glowed green. Zoe’s hand moved flat against Elizabeth’s stomach.

Despite her open mind and abstract curiosity, Elizabeth still hadn’t found a girl to kiss. She thought it would just happen eventually, the way it happened with boys, that someone would flirt with her at a party and then they’d find themselves tumbling against a wall and maybe going back to one dorm room or the other, hands over the clothes, hands under the clothes, mouths on skin. But it hadn’t. There were a few other boys, and then there was Andrew, but that was it.

Elizabeth didn’t think she was a lesbian. She just thought that it was a possibility, like a groundhog seeing its shadow. Despite the fact that she’d slept with several guys, Zoe said that she’d always known, since she was a child. She said it was like knowing whether you were right- or left-handed. Obviously you didn’t get to choose — Elizabeth knew that much — but she wasn’t sure about anything, not even what she wanted to have for lunch, so how could she be so sure about this?

Zoe’s right hand, the hand that was slung over Elizabeth’s shoulder. Zoe’s mouth, now on the back of her neck. Elizabeth didn’t move — if she moved, Zoe might stop. If she moved, she might wake Zoe up. Zoe was probably dreaming about someone else, one of the girls from the co-op down the block, the ones with nose rings and sourdough starters and special woven baggies for their Ecstasy that they wore around their necks. The room was getting warmer. Downstairs, the movie theater was showing The Bodyguard, and there were probably beer bottles rolling down the sloped floor under everyone’s feet. She and Zoe had gone to see it the night before, everyone laughing at Whitney Houston until she opened her mouth and sang, and then they all got quiet and just listened. That’s what Elizabeth wanted to do now, to lie still and listen. If she tried hard enough, she thought she could hear the squirrels in the park across the street, or the airplanes flying overhead. It was kissing, what was happening to her neck. Zoe was kissing her, and Elizabeth felt it all over her body, like a hundred electrical sockets all licked at once.

Someone knocked at the door — this happened a lot when you lived across the street from the only bar in an otherwise dry town. Zoe stopped what she was doing, and they both waited for a moment. Whoever it was knocked again, more insistently.

“Hmm,” Zoe said.

Elizabeth sat up and turned her face away from the door. “I should go home anyway,” she said.

“Just let me see who it is,” Zoe said. She crawled over the edge of the couch to the door and reached for the knob. Elizabeth pulled on her shoes.

“Zoeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, open the door!” The door swung wide, knocking Zoe over. It was Zoe’s friend TJ, a girl with enormous tattoos up and down both arms. She was a senior, older than both of them, and rough in a way that Elizabeth didn’t like. Zoe crawled clear of the door, and TJ stepped over her. “Do you have any cigarettes? Gibson’s is closed.”

“I’m going to go,” Elizabeth said. She couldn’t look Zoe in the face, and so instead she inspected the filthy carpet, which had probably never been cleaned, ever.

“Are you sure?” Zoe said, her voice soft. She stood up slowly. Elizabeth squeezed by her and into the hall, being careful not to touch. She heard TJ turn off Bonnie and Clyde and put on music instead.

“I’m sure,” Elizabeth said, even though she wasn’t. She got all the way to the top of the stairs and then down the first few before she looked behind her. Zoe was still standing there, waiting, her head poking out. It would have been so easy to run back up those steps. Elizabeth’s whole body was pumping with blood. She felt like she was in the middle of a relay race, running between places she’d never been. Zoe must have felt it, the elastic cord between their chests. Before the pull got too strong, Elizabeth hurried down the rest of the stairs and out the door, into the clear night.

Thirty-seven

There were no two ways about it — Andrew refused to compromise. Harry was not allowed to see Ruby other than in their SAT class. After the tiniest flicker of pride that his son had made his (likely) sexual debut in a public place, with a (face it) really beautiful girl, Andrew had swiftly moved on to more practical parental feelings. As far as Harry was concerned, Ruby Kahn-Bennett was his invisible neighbor, a ghost girl, a memory. If her parents had been good at any part of their jobs as mothers, Ruby would have been leaving the nest soon, flying off to some second- or third-rate college, where she could terrorize all the local ruffians with her winning combination of insouciance and innate grace. But Ruby was probably going to live at home forever, working at her parents’ restaurant. Andrew didn’t care. Ruby wasn’t his problem — that was what Zoe and Jane got for being distracted and loose. Ruby had slept in their bed, in between them, until she was three. That’s what you got. So many people were wishy-washy with their kids, softer than butter, and all it did was ensure that you were going to have bigger problems down the road.

It was easier to focus on positive things. He and Dave were going over the plans for the boat. Ideas, really. The garage at EVOLVEment had turned into more of a coffee klatch than a workshop, but Andrew didn’t mind. He didn’t know how to build a boat big enough for people to live on. At first, Andrew thought Dave might be annoyed, but he wasn’t — Dave was remarkably cool about the whole thing. It was actually better this way — the kid with the tools had taken over the shelf project, and instead, Dave and Andrew spent afternoons talking and meditating. One afternoon, after a quick juice, Dave asked Andrew to go with him down to the Rockaways. There were some herbalists with a little shop right off the beach, and he needed some supplies. Andrew thought it sounded like he was talking about weed, but he didn’t want to be rude and ask. There was a lot about EVOLVEment that he didn’t understand, and that was okay. Sometimes the whole top floor of the house stank like bong water, but that didn’t mean it was Dave’s finger on the carb. Even if it was, what did it matter?

The communal EVOLVEment car was a truck with paneled wood sides. The air-conditioning was broken, but it didn’t matter, because it was cool enough with the windows rolled down. Andrew tapped the base of the window as they drove down Bedford Avenue toward the water.

“So you and your family have lived in Ditmas a long time, huh,” Dave said. He was wearing aviator sunglasses, a shiny contrast to his dense, dark beard.

“A really long time. Maybe even too long?” Andrew didn’t mean anything by it.

“You thinking about moving?” Dave asked. “We just got here, man.” He smiled.

“Oh, no, no, we’re not going anywhere,” Andrew said. The fact that Zoe and Jane were probably going to get a divorce and move was a silver lining, not that he could admit that to Lizzy. When they were kids, Zoe was fine — smart, funny, sexy, all that. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her — it was that Elizabeth liked her too much. Whenever she came home from a dinner with Zoe, he could feel the prickly edges poking up, the remnants of whatever Zoe had said about him. Elizabeth always denied it, but he knew it was true — Zoe loved talking shit, and she always had, and when you got old and married, what else was there to talk shit about, except your marriage? Jane was fine — she was solid. He liked her food, and he liked that she was chill. Jane was not the problem.

So much made him angry. The traffic, the congestion, the population. Harry had one more year of school. Then things would be different. When Harry was young, when he was a child (which Andrew supposed he wasn’t anymore), they would troop up to the natural-history museum to look at dinosaurs, they would ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth. They had fun. Being the parent of a teenager meant that not only were you no longer having fun, you stood for the opposite of fun. Andrew wondered how long that had been true — God, they were so stupid, he and Elizabeth. How long had Harry been this other person, capable of sex and lies? How long had it been since he was a baby? There was no way to tell. Andrew closed his eyes and stuck his head closer to the window. The breeze felt like cool water on his forehead.

“I see what you’re saying,” Dave said, even though Andrew wasn’t saying much. “A couple of years ago, I was in Joshua Tree with a couple of friends, including a healer, and we took ayahuasca every night for a week. When I went in, I thought, how do I know how my body will react? Maybe I’ll just call a cab and go back to L.A., you know? After the first night, I knew I was in for some real magic. Have you ever done it? It’s like opening your third-eye point for six straight hours. Everything just comes pouring out.” He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “That’s when I knew I had to make EVOLVEment a reality.”

“What were you doing before?” He didn’t mean to be impertinent — it felt a bit like asking your therapist what her problems were, but it was hard to imagine Dave at a desk job, or even at a non-desk job where he had to wear real clothes. As far as Andrew could tell, Dave didn’t own a pair of socks or a single pair of pants with a zipper.

“Some body work, some life coaching. Taught yoga. You know, the circuit.”

“Of course.”

“What about you, Andrew? What circuit are you on?” Dave smiled. He had great teeth, the kind of teeth that orthodontists probably dreamed about — big and white and perfectly straight, with the tiniest gap in between his front two. Preacher teeth. Talk-show-host teeth. Guru teeth. Andrew had always thought that gurus would look sort of like Gandhi or, at the very least, Ben Kingsley. Under the beard, Dave looked like an amiable frat boy, a lacrosse player.

“I guess I’m not really sure,” Andrew said. “I was on the music circuit. Then I was on the documentary circuit. The dad circuit, for sure. I was good at that one. Killed it at the playground. Then the magazine circuit. I think right now I’m in the figuring-shit-out circuit.” He paused, and exhaled through his mouth. “Is there a list I can look at?”

Dave reached over and patted him on the leg. “It’s cool, man. I have a feeling that it’s all going to come together. It’s about being in the right place at the right time, you know? Energy. It’s about preparation, and energy. And you have it — I could feel, like, buzzing around you, like. The second you walked into the house, I just knew.” The car was slowing down. Andrew looked around — they were already in the Rockaways, that funny little toothbrush of Brooklyn (or was it Queens?) that stuck out into the water, parallel to the mainland. Dave pulled over and stopped the car. For a split second, Andrew thought Dave was going to kiss him. That was what gurus did, wasn’t it? Gain followers and then sleep with them all? Andrew wouldn’t have been surprised if Dave had slept with every girl at EVOLVEment and half the boys. They were all so gorgeous, their bodies so strong and toned. Their bodies were meant to be used! Andrew wasn’t sure what his body was for. They were parked in front of a slightly ramshackle house with wood-shingled walls that reminded Andrew of his parents’ summer cottage on the Vineyard, a house he hadn’t visited in almost twenty years. To the left of the house were four smaller identical houses, like little ducklings following their mother down the street.

“This is it,” Dave said. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

“This is where the herbalist lives?”

Dave laughed. “No, the herbalist lives in a shitty apartment near the taco place. This is the next phase.” He held up his hands so that his thumbs almost touched and leaned over so far that he was almost lying across Andrew’s lap. “Do you see it, man?”

“See what?” Andrew scooched over in the leather seat and leaned out the window. “Good breeze. How close are we to the water?”

“One block,” Dave said. “One block to the waves. The Waves! Maybe that’s what we call it.”

“Call what?” The houses were sweet. The windows and doors looked weathered but solid. He liked it out here. Maybe this would be their next act — a beach house in Brooklyn. He could finally learn to surf. Elizabeth could sell condos to the hipsters from Williamsburg. Harry would be off at school, and he’d come back to visit and they’d both be tan, wearing flip-flops.

“Our hotel, man.” Dave reached into the pocket of his T-shirt and pulled out a joint.

Thirty-eight

According to Ruby, all Zoe and Jane did was take turns yelling at her. Jane usually yelled at the restaurant, in the guise of giving Ruby things to do: “Clean the bathroom! Really do it this time!” or “Wipe down Table Six. Get the broom — there are Cheerios everywhere. This is not a Chuck E. Cheese!” Zoe chose to yell at home. Those outbursts were more erratic, but she couldn’t help it: Sometimes she was angriest that Ruby had left the shampoo bottle right side up instead of upside down, which meant that it took longer for the shampoo to come out, and if the cap was open, the bottle would fill with water. Sometimes she was the angriest when she thought about Ruby’s body exposed in public after dark, how anything could have happened to them, to both her and Harry, that they were in danger and they’d put themselves there. Sometimes she was angriest about the college applications, and Ruby’s SAT score, and the fact that it was the middle of July and there was nothing on the horizon except more of the same. It was hardest to yell about that, so that’s when she made popcorn, covered it with some nutritional yeast, and left it in front of Ruby’s bedroom door instead.

What made Zoe feel even worse (and what she wouldn’t admit out loud, not even to Jane) was that she was also relieved. If Ruby had been leaving for school, then she and Jane would be forced to sort through their shit without any breaks, with no pauses for good behavior while Ruby was at the dinner table. Right now, it felt like their marriage talk was on pause, and Zoe was okay with that, for a little while. It wasn’t like she was dying to get divorced. It just seemed inevitable — because how many downgrades could one marriage get? From lovers to friends to roommates to fond acquaintances? Things could always get worse. Elizabeth and Andrew seemed to be hovering somewhere below fond. How many years would it take for her and Jane to start poisoning each other with arsenic, or to “accidentally” run over each other’s toes in the driveway? How many years would it take for them to end up a Lifetime movie, based on real facts? Zoe wasn’t sure how much further down she wanted to go. Jane had always been jealous, of Elizabeth and other friends, and of everyone else she’d ever loved and/or touched. It didn’t matter if the relationship was sexual or platonic or somewhere in the middle — Jane was a fucking gorilla, and she wanted her woman close. At first it had seemed so sweet, almost old-fashioned. Jane held Zoe’s waist when they crossed the street, she carried her over the threshold when they got married, she knew and worshipped every inch of Zoe’s body, every mole, every notch. Now Zoe wasn’t so sure that was a good thing.

When Elizabeth complained about Andrew, it was about him having to go off somewhere, to some hippie-dippie shit, or to climb some mountain with his own special Tibetan Sherpa. Jane never left the neighborhood. All Zoe wanted was some goddamn space. And attention. She wanted Jane to miss her when she was gone, but she never went anywhere except to bed.

“Jane? You here?” Zoe knew she was. She grabbed an orange off the counter and walked up the stairs. It was just before noon, which meant that Ruby was at the restaurant and Jane was probably in her pajamas. She knocked on the door to the guest room and opened it after Jane growled a response.

Someone had once told her that you should never marry anyone you wouldn’t want to divorce, but Zoe had always thought that Jane’s ornery qualities were among her most attractive. She didn’t give a shit about how she looked. She didn’t make small talk. She didn’t pretend to like people she didn’t, which Zoe thought probably saved about a dozen years of wasted time. Bitchy Whitman parents? Jane looked right through them. She was rough, and she was fair. She was a junkyard dog that made popovers for no reason, just because she was in the mood. Zoe poked her head into the room.

“Can we talk?”

Jane rolled over, the futon nearly rolling with her. She scooted backward until she was leaning against the wall. Her head knocked on a low-hanging picture frame, a drawing of Ruby’s from kindergarten. “Sure,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

“Elizabeth is not the problem.”

“I know that.”

“You went straight-up Hulk at the police station.” Zoe sat down on the floor next to the futon.

“I know that, too. But I also know the way she looks at you, like you’re her fucking chocolate ice cream cone and she wants to eat your brains and live inside your body.”

“Are you saying that she wants to lick me, or that she wants to kill me? I’m confused.” Zoe peeled her orange, sending sprays of citrus into the air.

“Maybe both? Both.” Jane paused to consider. “I don’t actually think she wants to kill you. But I do think there’s some weird shit happening over there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she thinks about you when she jerks off.”

“I don’t think Elizabeth jerks off.”

“Exactly my point. There’s some weird shit going on over there. Listen, that was nothing, okay? It was nothing. I was just tense, and worried about Ruby, and then I saw Elizabeth making her stupid Elizabeth faces at you, and I just went crazy. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I know things have been low for a while, but I’ve actually been feeling so much better, haven’t you? Or am I crazy for thinking that, too? How are we doing? Are we okay? Should I stop asking you so many questions?”

Zoe laughed. She offered Jane a section of the orange, her fingers wet and sticky. When they met, Zoe had been in all kinds of relationships: good ones, bad ones, short ones, long ones. But nothing serious, not ever. She thought she’d been in love before — with a girl in high school, with a couple of girls at Oberlin and one after — but as soon as she met Jane, she knew she was wrong. Everything else had been make-believe, practice for the real thing. She’d learned how to say all the romantic words, and how to use her tongue just so, but it had all been pretend. Training wheels. With Jane, the wheels were off, and Zoe was flying.

She’d never thought about getting married: it seemed so square, so boring. But when she met Jane, so determined and purposeful, she understood: it was the acknowledgment of steadiness and trust, the shouted-out claim. Jane was already an adult, whereas Zoe and all her friends were still acting like teenagers. Oh, Zoe had thought. Marriage was something that grown-ups did, and if she grew up, she could do it, too. Jane made her want to stand up straight and stop referring to herself as a girl. When Jane’s fingers reached the orange, their hands touched, Zoe smiled.

Thirty-nine

Harry had been looking forward to the SAT class all week. His mother had been taking his phone whenever he was home, which was like living in pioneer days, but only during mealtimes and when he was playing video games on the Roku in the living room. Elizabeth didn’t quite seem to understand that his computer did everything his phone did except make phone calls, and who wanted to talk on the phone anyway? He’d been playing by their rules, though, and hadn’t been in touch with Ruby since leaving the police station. It all felt very Romeo and Juliet, minus the suicide. Still, he understood. If they’d gotten caught having sex in his bedroom, it would have been one thing, but in public, the police station — that was worth some punishment. His parents had never been strict or unreasonable — his father in particular had always been willing to sit down and have lengthy conversations about why Harry had to wait until Hanukkah for a new Thomas the Tank Engine train or whatever. This seemed fair.

Iggy Pop had been gone a week. They’d put posters up all over the neighborhood, at bus stops and on telephone polls, plus on corkboards at the three different coffee shops on Cortelyou. Iggy had never been gone longer than a day before, and Harry was starting to imagine the more bleak possibilities. He’d told his friend Arpad about both the cat and having sex with Ruby in one phone call, and Arpad had only asked about the cat, assuming the latter was a joke. Harry wasn’t sure what the bigger joke was — that he’d gotten to lose his virginity to the girl of his dreams, or that he was never, ever going to have sex ever again, at least not with Ruby. There were no other prospects. There had been other girls at Whitman whom Harry had stared at across the library, but now that he’d touched Ruby’s body, now that he knew what was possible in the universe, he wasn’t going to settle for just anybody.

His parents had been clear: he was in trouble for the first time in his entire life, and his punishment was not being allowed to sit next to Ruby, or to speak to her unless absolutely necessary. But they also weren’t going to be there. Harry was jittery on the walk to the karate studio. He was running through all the different ways he could say hello — he could saunter in and pretend not to notice her, but sit right next to her as usual and then pass a note. He could kiss her right on the mouth in front of the Queen Dork and Eliza and Thayer and everybody. He could wait to see if she said anything to him first. Maybe she was secretly glad to be rid of him — after all, nobody wanted to have to teach her boyfriend how to have sex. Not that he was her boyfriend. Was he her boyfriend? Or rather, had he been? Harry wanted a neon sign in the sky, anything that would tell him what to do.

Ruby wasn’t there yet — of course not. That was good — that meant that where she sat was up to her. Harry took his regular seat in the last row and pulled his notebook out of his backpack. In a funny way, having Ruby in the class had made him significantly less stressed out about taking the SATs. He did take notes, at least as often as he and Ruby passed notes back and forth, and he did feel like he had learned a few things. College was the light at the end of the tunnel, and Harry wanted that light so badly. He thought he probably wanted to go somewhere small but not small — Amherst, maybe, or Wesleyan. But fuck! Maybe he wanted to go to Deep Springs or whatever it was called and learn how to be a farmer and a gentleman poet. He swiveled around in his chair every time he heard the door open. Everyone else seemed to have made friends with one another — Harry hadn’t noticed. The rest of the class could have been taught in Chinese and he wouldn’t have noticed.

Rebecca opened her computer and projected an image of a geometry problem. An isosceles triangle, the easy kind. Harry tuned out as she started to talk. He knew enough to get by. Class had started, Ruby was late.

He smelled her shampoo before he saw her. Rebecca turned the lights off to make the screen easier to see, and then Ruby slipped into the chair next to him, giving him the quickest, blink-and-you-missed-it kiss on the cheek. Harry turned toward her, smiling with all his teeth. Ruby reached over and into his mouth and gave his tongue a soft pinch. She loudly let her bag drop and rifled though it, like a dog digging for a bone.

“Is your bag just full of random loose-leaf paper?” Harry asked.

“Shh,” Ruby said. “Yes.” She found what she was looking for and slapped it on Harry’s desk. It was her mothers’ schedules for the next two weeks, printed off their joint calendar. “Dr. Amelia,” she said. “That’s their sex doctor. And now she’s our sex doctor, too, if you know what I’m saying. Her office is in Park Slope, which means we have at least two hours from the minute they walk out the door. And that’s a meeting with their purveyor in Jersey, which means they’ll be gone for like five hours, sniffing tomato plants or whatever.” She pointed at the name. It was still six days away, but there it was. Their next date. Harry felt his whole body relax. Maybe he’d just go to Brooklyn College. How could he leave? He could rent an apartment, and Ruby could live with him and just hide in the closet when his parents came over. He’d say that he had some other girlfriend, someone who traveled a lot, a Rhodes scholar! He was dating a Rhodes scholar who was in Barcelona for the year, and so he was holding on to her stuff, which was why there were two toothbrushes in the bathroom and purses hanging off the doorknobs. Maybe they would be over it by then and understand that Ruby wasn’t some bad girl in the first place, but the best girl — the only girl. It was all going to be fine. It was all going to be perfect.

“I love you,” Harry said, louder than he meant to. A kid with a stupid haircut in the row in front of them snickered, and Harry kicked the back of his chair. “I mean it, Ruby, I love you.”

“I know you do,” Ruby said. She reached over and pinched him on the arm, and that was enough for now.

Forty

Elizabeth was genuinely worried that Iggy Pop was dead. Either dead or adopted by some stupid kid in the neighborhood who couldn’t read and/or look at signs on telephone poles. It happened a lot — someone puts out a bowl of cream and a cat thinks it’s discovered a higher plane of existence. At least a few times a day, Elizabeth would see something out of the corner of her eye and she would think, Oh, thank God, Iggy’s right there, but then it was always a dust ball or a wadded-up T-shirt. When she walked to and from the office and to her listings in the neighborhood, she kept peering down driveways and onto front porches, even more than she usually did. Deirdre thought cats were disgusting pets and had very little sympathy.

“They’re wild,” she said in between forkfuls of salad at their desk. “Cats were never meant to live with humans. I’ve heard about people who were killed—murdered—by their cats. That’s why we only have fish.” Deirdre plucked a walnut out of the salad with her fingers. “This place is so stingy. There are four walnuts in this entire salad.”

“Iggy Pop isn’t going to murder me,” Elizabeth said. “The worst he does is when he walks across your face in the middle of the night. But I’m usually awake anyway.”

“See, if I had a cat and it walked across my face in the middle of the night, I would take that as a warning sign. I think your cat isn’t missing — he’s out there gathering enough sticks and bones to build an army, I’m telling you.”

“I appreciate your concern.” Elizabeth leaned back in her chair. There was a lot to be done — she had to draw up contract information for the house on East Nineteenth, and for an apartment on Newkirk. She had to get another big house on Ditmas Avenue ready for its first open house, and the dining room still looked like an episode of Hoarders: Beanie Baby Special Edition. “I think right now I’d welcome his tiny army, though. I just want him to come back.”

Deirdre reached over and gave Elizabeth’s knee a quick pat. “I know, sweetheart. We’ll find that mangy little killer.”

The office phone rang, and Deirdre spun around to answer it. Elizabeth rubbed her temples with her fingers.

“It’s for you, I think,” Deirdre said. She had a funny look on her face, which meant only one thing.

Elizabeth picked up her extension. “Hello?” she said.

“Still holding for Naomi Vandenhoovel,” someone said.

“Right,” said Elizabeth.

What the hell? Deirdre mouthed.

“Trust me, I barely understand it myself,” Elizabeth said.

“Helloooooo from Ohio!” rang out Naomi’s voice.

“Are you actually filming at Oberlin?” Elizabeth couldn’t picture Naomi in Ohio. Not even Cleveland. Not even the Ritz-Carlton, Cleveland, where Andrew’s parents had stayed for graduation, despite the fact that it was a solid hour’s drive from school. She hadn’t realized that things were going to happen so fast — she’d sort of forgotten about it, on purpose, since signing their names, assuming that it would be ages before she’d have to tell Andrew. Maybe by then he’d have come around? It wasn’t a great plan, but it was all she had.

Naomi laughed. “No, no, of course not. We’re in Pasadena. But you should see it! We’re shooting so muddy. It’s very 1990.”

“That’s great,” Elizabeth said, though she was feeling flustered. She was still in the office, after all, and couldn’t suddenly have a freak-out with Deirdre and the rest of the O’Connells bearing witness. “What can I do for you?”

“All business! I like it! Hang on,” she said, and then Elizabeth listened while Naomi ordered a coffee with almond milk and three extra shots of espresso. “I was watching you and Lydia write this song, and so I wanted to call you! You look great! Very skinny, really great hair. Kind of a big mouth. Not like Steven Tyler big, but maybe Liv Tyler big. Actually, you know, you look a lot like a blond Liv Tyler. Young you, I mean.”

Elizabeth quickly moved her free hand to her head. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Don’t even worry about it! You look amazing! Just wanted to give you an update! The girls are so cute together. They’re, like, all over each other’s Instagrams already. You should check it out.”

“I will,” Elizabeth said. She thought for a moment, about herself and Lydia. Lydia, who had never liked her. It wasn’t like with Zoe, who was clearly in a class above in terms of sophistication but somehow found Elizabeth amusing anyway. Lydia had practically turned her back when Elizabeth entered a room, like a haughty cat or a sullen teenager. Which she had been, of course. “Wait, Naomi?” Her stomach sank.

“Mm-hmm?”

“It’s so funny that I haven’t thought to ask this before — what’s the time frame of the movie? I assumed it was mostly Lydia at the peak or… you know, up until the end. There isn’t a lot of college stuff in there, is there?” In her mind, her part of the story was a sliver at the beginning, before Lydia became LYDIA, and the movie really began. She’d wanted to see them all larger than life, which is how everything felt right at that moment anyway, but Elizabeth had assumed that the movie would have briskly moved on to the more glamorous stuff. But now she was faced with the sudden, terrifying thought that she had no input whatsoever about how their shared youth was going to be portrayed, and that Andrew was not going to be happy, not one bit, no matter how she tried to spin her misguided hope. She had wanted it for him as much as for herself — Elizabeth knew how much Andrew had loved the band, and Lydia, and her. Yes, that was part of it, too — Elizabeth wanted Andrew to see the movie and to remember how much he had loved her, once upon a time, when they were still kids and life was an endless, open ocean, stretching out at once in all directions.

“You know, I can’t really talk right now,” Naomi said. “But do you want to see the script? I’ll have my assistant send it over. Okay?”

“So is that a yes or a no?”

“Yes, totally.”

“Yes there isn’t a lot of college stuff, or yes there is? And you know that Lydia did not write the song, like, at all, right?” Elizabeth’s neck polka-dotted with big red blotches. “Hello?” But Naomi had hung up. Elizabeth removed the finger from her ear and handed the phone back to Deirdre to hang up. Deirdre was staring at her, her eyebrows so high they looked like part of her hairline.

“I’m ready when you are,” Deirdre said. She crossed her arms expectantly.

• • •

Elizabeth had meant to tell Andrew about the movie, about signing his name. She’d thought about calling Zoe, to practice on her, but she was too ashamed of herself. Elizabeth was always waiting for something, and then, after Harry got in trouble with Ruby, it just felt as if things were too tight, too stressed. Andrew wasn’t good at managing balls in the air unless they were all made of helium. Good news could pile on all day, but if the news was bad, it was best to measure it out slowly, like antibiotics.

“It’s a very long story,” Elizabeth said, “but this is good — I’ll use you as practice.”

Deirdre unwrapped a stick of gum, as excited as if Elizabeth had just agreed to do a striptease.

Forty-one

Andrew was sitting on the porch when Elizabeth got home. It was hot outside, inching toward the part of the summer when Brooklyn was thick and airless. They had air conditioners in the bedrooms and one in the dining room, but they didn’t do much, especially on the first floor, where the rooms were large and open. The dark stone porch was often the coolest place in the house.

“I took the fans out of the basement,” Andrew said. “I put one in the living room and two upstairs.”

“Thanks,” Elizabeth said. “Can I talk to you about something?” She wasn’t good at this part, even after so many years of marriage. It was her parents’ fault, of course. She had never once seen them have an argument — it just wasn’t in their nature. And so Elizabeth had spent her entire life avoiding unpleasant situations as much as humanly possible. It meant a lot of swallowing and smiling and apologizing for things she wasn’t truly sorry for, and it meant never, ever starting conversations she didn’t want to have. But if she didn’t tell Andrew, the movie would come out, and there would be fake Lydia’s face everywhere, and he would see it. She briefly considered suggesting that they go to Italy or somewhere for a year, just because, but things were probably too universal now anyway — his e-mail in-box would light up like the Fourth of July no matter where they were.

“Sure,” Andrew said. He patted the cushion next to him. He was wearing an old T-shirt that had little scalloped holes around the neckline, one that he’d had almost as long as he’d had her. Instead of sitting beside him, Elizabeth leaned against the porch banister.

“You know that movie about Lydia?”

“Yeah,” Andrew said, already wary.

“They’re doing it. I said yes.” Elizabeth watched Andrew’s jaw clench.

“But I never said yes,” he said. His eyes narrowed. Sometimes Andrew reminded Elizabeth of a cat, the way cats’ other secret eyelid closed when they were asleep. With Andrew the secret eyelid closed when he was angry. “They wanted me to sign the form, and I never did.”

“I know that,” Elizabeth said. It was semantics, she knew, but it was all she had. A technicality. “But the lyrics are mine, and I let them have it. I was the manager. I agreed on your behalf.”

“What exactly does that mean, you agreed on my behalf?”

“It means…” Elizabeth paused, considering how best to get the words out of her mouth. “It means that I signed your form. I signed your name.”

Andrew shook his head. “Meaning that you forged my signature? Are you fucking kidding?” He stood up and dusted off his jeans. “This isn’t a credit-card receipt at a restaurant, Lizzy! This is actually serious! I can’t believe you did that. It’s going to be total garbage, you know that? Garbage that doesn’t even tell the whole story.”

“You’re worried about Lydia?” Elizabeth waved to a neighbor across the street, offering a tight smile.

“I’m worried about you, Lizzy, not Lydia. At least Lydia was always up-front about what she wanted. She might have been kind of an asshole, but at least she didn’t pretend to be something else. Everyone else thinks you’re so sweet, so nice.” Andrew rolled his eyes, and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I have to go.”

“Time for another yoga class?” Elizabeth rolled her eyes back at him — it was involuntary, a contest to see who could devolve the fastest.

“You have never understood me,” Andrew said. “And obviously, if this is something that you are capable of, I have never understood you.”

Elizabeth crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side. “That is a crazy thing to say.”

“Crazier than saying yes to something like that without talking to me?” She hated it that he made sense. “Harry’s going to see that movie, and he’s going to think he understands us better, you know? And what is he going to understand? He’s going to think that the version of Lydia on the screen is what she was really like. And what are the odds of that happening? It’s going to be about Lydia the martyr, which is the most bullshit thing ever. Do you remember the last time we saw her?” Andrew turned around so that they were both facing the house, with their backs to the street. Elizabeth remembered.

• • •

They were at Veselka, in the East Village, having an early dinner of pierogies and applesauce. Harry was six months old, asleep in the car seat, which sat on the floor between them. He loved ambient noise — people talking, forks clinking — and so they brought him everywhere.

The rules about celebrities were clear: you were not supposed to notice, and if you did, you were honor-bound to ignore whoever it was. There was a ripple in the room, a game of telephone. Whispers bounced off the walls and the ceiling. Elizabeth, sleep-starved and leaking milk, scooted as far to the right as she could and looked toward the front of the restaurant.

The crowd parted like the Red Sea, into two distinct human walls three feet apart — the only people who didn’t care about Lydia were the Polish waitresses. Everyone else stood still, eyes wide. Elizabeth waved, but Lydia didn’t see her, so focused on making her way across the room. “What’s going on?” Andrew said, swiveling around in his chair. “Oh.”

She was nearly abreast of their table. The room had quieted to a hush. Andrew cleared his throat, which he always did when he was nervous. Why was he nervous? She was their friend, she had been their friend.

“Lydia!” Elizabeth said. She pushed her chair back and stood up. All around them, diners in pseudo-punk garb looked on, appalled at the breach of conduct. They’d already horrified everyone by bringing the baby, but this was a whole new level of misbehavior.

Lydia’s eyes were swimming, murky and red. She turned slowly toward the sound of her own name, clearly half meaning to ignore it the way she probably did most of the time. Her eyes finally settled on Elizabeth, standing, and on Andrew, still sitting across the table, his fork in hand with a pierogi speared on top. Lydia smiled and spread her arms open wide, bypassing Elizabeth and going straight for Andrew, who hugged her awkwardly with his fork still in hand. The punky kids at the table next door were trying not to turn into girls at a Beatles concert — and doing a terrible job. Lydia either didn’t notice them or managed to ignore them entirely without seeming rude. There was a force field of fame around her, thick as Pyrex. She stroked Andrew’s face with her thumb.

“How are you?” Lydia cooed. She turned her gaze toward Elizabeth. “Your cheeks look different.”

“I just had a baby,” Elizabeth said. “We just had a baby.”

“Breeders!” Lydia said, and laughed. Her entourage laughed, too. She patted Andrew on the chest. “Look at you, Daddy.”

“Congratulations on the warehouse movie,” Andrew said. “Or is it about a factory? We haven’t seen it yet, but I hear it’s great.”

Lydia shrugged. “They tell me its good,” she said. “But they tell me everything’s good, so…”

Under the table, Harry began to cry, little hiccupping bursts of sound. Elizabeth bent down to pick him up and quickly jostled him sideways until he latched onto her breast. She was still standing in the middle of the restaurant, and everyone was looking at her. At Lydia and now at the pink cushion of her nipple, which slipped in and out of Harry’s mouth as he fussed.

“God, he’s like a cannibal,” Lydia said, and pretended to gnaw on her own hand. “That is so scary.” She kissed the air. “Good to see you,” she said, looking at Andrew. She made a loud munching noise at Elizabeth and turned away. A waiter pointed her and her friends to a table in the far back corner, and once she was sitting, the noise in the restaurant rose up and swallowed them. Elizabeth sat down again and found herself blinking back tears.

“What’s the matter?” Andrew said.

“Nothing,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s just go. When he’s done, let’s just go.” She looked down at Harry’s sweet face, sucking away. A year and a half later, Lydia was dead.

• • •

I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said. It had all been a mistake. She couldn’t even blame Naomi for talking her into it — Elizabeth could see herself nodding along at the idea, so eager to sign on the dotted line. It was like an O. Henry story, only she’d sabotaged herself. She had been her own sacrifice. “It was for you,” she said, knowing that he wouldn’t see it that way. “I did it for you.”

“Did you?” Andrew said. “The door is unlocked. I’ll be back later. And just so you know, what I’m doing over there isn’t just yoga. It’s self-care. I’m not pretending that it’s a present for you. You should try it sometime.” He slipped his feet into his sandals and flopped down the stairs and onto the sidewalk.

Forty-two

The Waves was going to be gorgeous — it would help revitalize the Rockaway community, it would be an emissary of deep Brooklyn values, it would be less expensive to renovate than a hotel in Manhattan. It turned out that Dave had been planning it for a while — it was all part of the EVOLVEment plan. Dave had taken a couple of meetings with architects, some EVOLVEment yoga practitioners who lived in the neighborhood, just to get a sense of time and money. Now he wanted Andrew to come along — he really “got it,” Dave said. They were meeting at one of the coffee shops on Cortelyou, a few doors past Hyacinth. Dave and Andrew walked down from EVOLVEment.

“I hear that place is good,” Dave said.

“It is. The couple who owns it are our good friends,” Andrew said.

“Should we meet there instead?” Dave stopped.

“No,” Andrew said, and kept walking.

They were in front of the café, and Dave waved to a guy sitting in the window. He held up a finger—One minute—and then turned so that his back was facing their date.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you this,” Dave said. “And there’s no really good way. I don’t want you to feel awkward, or like there’s any pressure coming from me. You know that I am all about comfort and good vibes, and if this is not your thing, man, that is cool. But I think it might be your thing.”

Andrew squinted into the sunlight. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“I want to bring you on as an investor. For the Waves. I think that it would be a really amazing project for us to do together. What do you think? Do you want to be partners?”

“How much are we talking? I mean, in terms of money, how much?” Andrew could see it so easily — himself as a hotelier. Picking lamps and records for the guest rooms, talking to reporters at the New York Times about giving back to Brooklyn, about introducing people to places beyond the bridge, beyond Williamsburg.

“It’s hard to say,” Dave said. “We could probably get the whole thing going for under a million, give or take. The place is on the market for seven hundred thou.” He ran his hands over his beard, giving the whole thing a squeeze. “There are other investors, of course, but they don’t really see it, you know, which makes the whole thing way more of an uphill battle.”

“Of course,” Andrew said. It could be his new circuit — he could sit in the back during guided-meditation classes and look over lists of vendors they needed to contact. He could write checks — he could make something new. “I’d love to,” Andrew said. He put out his hand, but Dave dove into his body for a hug instead, giggling.

Forty-three

Elizabeth was forgetting things everywhere — she forgot her dressy shoes at the office, she forgot the keys to her listings at home. She’d texted Zoe to make a dinner date but hadn’t heard back. She and Andrew weren’t talking, and she reluctantly understood why, even though he was obviously the one acting like a crazy person. Signing his name on one piece of paper wasn’t betrayal. Still, she understood: marriage was supposed to be a sacred covenant, and if that wasn’t quite achievable on a daily basis, marriage was about always getting the okay from the other person before doing something major. Want to go bungee jumping, or switch health-insurance policies? Want to pierce the kid’s ear? Want to buy a new sofa, book airline tickets to France? You had to confer. It wasn’t the same as asking permission, nothing so archaic — it was about being on the team, being equal partners. She wanted to blame the fact that she’d said yes on being the kind of woman who wanted to be accommodating to everyone, but that was only part of it. The other, larger reason was that she really did want to see the movie. Elizabeth imagined seeing it by herself, in the middle of the afternoon, and weeping into a bucket of popcorn. That was what she wanted — to celebrate and mourn her youth simultaneously.

• • •

Elizabeth wanted to take some photos of Zoe’s house, mostly for her own reference. They still hadn’t pulled the trigger, and maybe they never would, but she wanted to take a few pictures for herself. The house had never belonged to her, of course, but Lydia had never belonged to her either, and they both had helped to build whatever it was that made up Elizabeth’s life. She wanted to walk around the house without Zoe, for the first time in a hundred years with no actual purpose — not because she’d agreed to walk Bingo or to watch Ruby or to bring in the mail. She just wanted to think about the house, and about Andrew. It was easy enough to convince herself that it was a business visit — no matter how well you knew a house, pictures were important — and that way, eventually, she could talk to Deirdre about the list price, just to get a second opinion.

Zoe hadn’t said anything about moving forward lately — in fact, she’d been a little hard to pin down — but she didn’t hesitate to give her blessing for Elizabeth to pop over and poke around. It was all a part of her figuring out what she wanted to do; that’s how Elizabeth saw it. She didn’t want to feel like an angel of death, hovering over her friends’ marriage — she was just trying to be helpful. If Jane and Zoe could split up, it could happen to anyone. They’d always been stable, and happy enough, happy as anybody. Sure, Zoe sometimes complained about Jane, but no more than Elizabeth complained about Andrew. Having someone close to you decide to quit — or even seriously consider it — was axis-knocking. Why them? Elizabeth found herself wondering. Why now? Zoe didn’t seem clear herself, which was the scariest part.

Elizabeth had always had keys to the Bennetts’. The Kahn-Bennetts’. Would Zoe go back to being just plain Bennett? There were so many things to worry about, enormous and tiny — it was too much to bear. Elizabeth jogged up the steps and unlocked the door. Zoe had told her that they’d all be out — she and Jane doing some restaurant thing and Ruby at Hyacinth. Bingo was asleep on the living-room floor and raised his head and offered a genial sniff.

It was always better to be in someone’s house without them — that’s when you could really look at the cracks in the ceiling, the sticky cabinets, the floors of the closets. No one wanted to spend that much money for someone else’s dirt. If Zoe really went through with it (with the breakup, with the sale — these things were separate and they were together, kissing cousins), Elizabeth would have to bring in a real cleaning crew, at least twice, once for the official photos and once for the first open house. She knew two Salvadoran women who could make any house look like the Vatican — she’d have Zoe call them for sure if the house actually did go on the market.

Mostly, it looked the same as it had a hundred years ago, when she and Andrew had shared the house with Zoe and the other guys from Oberlin. Elizabeth closed her eyes and could see the Indian-print tapestries that had hung on the walls, the full ashtrays on the coffee table. Disco money paid for the house, and there had been traces of it in various spots: records everywhere, some framed on the walls, old hilarious photos of Zoe’s parents with giant Afros and glittering jumpsuits. Those were gone now, replaced with pictures of Ruby as a baby, and the elder Bennetts appeared in their civilian clothes.

Elizabeth snapped the kitchen, which had the best stove in Ditmas Park. People wouldn’t understand how much it cost by looking at it — she’d have to explain in the listing. The living room and its endless piles of magazines, the dining room and its endless supply of chairs. She photographed the staircase from below and the pretty sconces that were original to the house. On the second floor, she flipped on the light switch in the hallway and took pictures in the bathroom. She paused outside Ruby’s room, which Elizabeth had once shared with Andrew. That was the first time she ever really felt like they were a couple, like they were adults who had chosen to be together. He was so good at everything then, so good at building them shelves out of bricks and boards, so good at kissing her shoulders before they went to sleep. He liked showing her his city, the good parts and the bad parts, the museums and the parts of Central Park he had explored alone as a teenager. His hair was still long, and he would tuck it back behind his ears over and over again, a nervous tic, as they sat across from each other in bed, eating take-out Chinese food. He made her laugh. He danced. Elizabeth turned the knob to Ruby’s room and opened the door, flicking the light on.

“Mum, Jesus! Knock much?!” Ruby said. Elizabeth saw a flash of a bare breast. There was some scrambling.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, sweetie, it’s Elizabeth, your mum said that no one would be home,” Elizabeth said, covering her eyes with her hand. “Wait a second,” she said, and slid her hand back down.

“Hi, Mom,” Harry said, and pulled the sheet up to his chin. He and Ruby were sitting side by side, all red cheeks and knotty hair sticking up at odd angles. The room smelled like sweat and dirty clothes and other identifiable things that Elizabeth refused to let herself name.

“Harry,” Elizabeth said. “What are you doing here?” She covered her eyes again. “Can you please get dressed?” There was more scrambling. Elizabeth heard the sound of a belt buckle and couldn’t keep herself from groaning.

“Okay, it’s fine,” Harry said a minute later, sitting on the edge of the bed. Ruby had pulled on a dress and piled her hair on top of her head with a giant clip, the braids from the concert already gone. Harry looked so old, too old — he looked like his father, and Elizabeth felt her nose start to run, which always happened right before she burst into tears. “Shit, Mom, I’m sorry. It’s a messed-up situation, I guess, but it’s really not that bad. We’re using, um, protection and everything, I swear.”

Elizabeth blinked quickly. She felt a bit faint, as if she’d just inhaled a can of paint thinner. “Do you mind if I sit down, Ruby?” She looked around and saw the telltale lump of a beanbag chair underneath a small mountain of clothing. Ruby pointed and nodded. Harry’s cheeks seemed to indicate he would rather his mother leave the room where he had, until very recently, been naked with a girl, but he wasn’t going to say that.

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “So. Here we are.”

“Want a glass of water?” Ruby said. She crawled to the edge of the bed like a puppy, her cleavage amply visible.

“Sure,” Elizabeth said, turning her face toward the ceiling. Ruby padded out the door and down the stairs.

“Mom,” Harry said, “I’m really sorry.”

“Sorry about which part, love? Sorry about not staying away from Ruby or sorry about growing up?” Something was digging into her back — Elizabeth reached behind her, pulled out a chemistry textbook, and tossed it onto the floor.

Ruby pushed the door back open with her elbow and handed glasses of water to both Elizabeth and Harry. “Let’s just be real about all this, okay?” She looked to Harry, who simultaneously nodded and curled his lip, no doubt as afraid of what Ruby was about to say as Elizabeth was. “Harry and I are not trying to be sneaky assholes, Elizabeth. We just like spending time together. It is totally my fault that we got in trouble, but it’s also totally his fault, and that’s okay.”

“I know,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t care anymore.”

“What?” said Harry.

“I don’t care that you two are an item. I’m sure no one says that anymore. I don’t care that you’re hooking up, or on lock, or on the down low. It’s fine with me. It’s healthy! It’s just also really sad, for reasons I can’t quite put into words.”

She looked at Harry. “You’re my baby. I just want to know that you’re safe, and that nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

“Mom, I’m seventeen.” He was blushing.

“And you’ll be my baby when you’re thirty-five and when you’re fifty.” She was sweating. “I think I’m having a hot flash, is that possible?”

Ruby and Harry both looked uncomfortable.

“Listen,” Elizabeth said. “I’m not going to tell your father, Harry, or your mothers, Ruby. But you two have to promise me something.” She was hot, and tired. She felt like she was a hundred years old, like a wrinkled old crone in a fairy tale.

“Anything,” Harry said.

“Depends,” Ruby said.

“Help me figure out what your father is doing, and how to get him out of there. You’ll be my little Nancy Drew and Hardy boy. Will you?” Harry looked startled at her request, but Elizabeth kept talking. “I just need a little help. Can you two give me a little help?”

They nodded, solemn-faced. Elizabeth gulped down her sweating glass of water. “I’ll put this in the sink on my way out. And clean your room, Ruby. It looks like a deranged hobo is squatting in here, okay?”

“Um,” Ruby said.

“See you at home, Harry,” Elizabeth said. She pushed herself up to stand and walked slowly into the hallway. She pulled the door shut behind her and waited for a minute, to make sure there was no laughter. When she was satisfied, Elizabeth stepped gingerly down the stairs and back out onto the street, her head up high, as if she were walking on a balance beam.

Forty-four

Zoe had texted Jane late that afternoon: DINNER TONIGHT? CHINESE, SUNSET PARK? It was what they used to do when they wanted to talk business over a meal. They couldn’t go anywhere in the neighborhood, because they knew every single person who owned every single restaurant (there were only half a dozen, after all), and eventually whoever it was would come over and sit with them, and they’d all be talking about purveyors and farms and about which servers had drug problems. Jane texted back, PICK ME UP AT EIGHT, and at eight o’clock on the dot she was standing in front of Hyacinth, hands in her pockets, waiting for Zoe to appear at the corner and then pull up in front. The car appeared at 8:03 p.m., not bad for her wife. Jane still loved saying “wife.” If that was the Long Island in her, so be it. She had no interest in being transgressive. She loved living in the only neighborhood in New York City that felt like the suburbs, and she loved living there with her wife and her kid and her garage and her walk-in pantry. Zoe slowed to a stop, the windows rolled down.

Jane got into the car and buckled her seat belt. “Hey,” she said.

“Hiya,” said Zoe. She was wearing a dress that Jane liked, a blue swirly thing that tied around her waist. “How are you?” They’d spent the day talking about vegetables and orders and menus, but that wasn’t what she meant.

“Not bad. This is a nice surprise.” Jane rubbed her hands on her knees.

“Yeah, well. I was in the mood for Chinese food.”

“Sounds great.” Jane crossed her arms over her chest, then shifted back to her hands on her knees.

“Relax,” Zoe said. She reached over and cupped her hand over Jane’s. “It’s just dinner.”

“If it were just dinner, we’d be at home.” Jane fiddled with the door lock. They’d turned up Coney Island Avenue.

“Fine, it’s a date,” Zoe said. “Happy?”

Jane let out a little snort. “If you must know, yes.” She slid her phone out of her pocket and plugged it into the car stereo. The night had cooled down, and the air that blew in through the car’s open windows was brisk enough to give her tiny goose bumps on her forearms. Jane scrolled through her music until she found just the right song and then turned up the volume. Zoe’s parents’ biggest hit of 1978, “(My Baby Wants to) Boogie Tonight,” blasted through the speakers, and Zoe laughed. They were having a good time already.

Forty-five

Ruby spent her evenings at Hyacinth pondering the future. It was a slow night, with only a few tables lingering over dessert in the garden. It was almost ten. Neither of her mothers had been around, which was nice, because it meant she could be terrible and lazy at her job. It was a cool night for the end of July, and she wished she’d brought a sweater. She stole Jorge’s hoodie from behind the bar and put it on, knowing that he wouldn’t mind. It didn’t exactly look professional, but it was deep Brooklyn on a Wednesday night, and so who really cared?

The way Ruby saw it, she had a few different choices: she could stay at home and apply for school again in a year; she could go on one of those intense semi-abusive programs where you hike through the desert for three months with no toilet paper; she could move to New Orleans and shuck oysters for tourists. At this point, she could do any of it — it was just a matter of deciding what she wanted. Harry would be in Brooklyn for another year, which was something, but not if they couldn’t be seen together without his parents losing their minds. Ruby wandered over to the door and pressed her nose to the glass.

Her pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone: PARTY @ NICO HOUSE WHEN UR DUN WORKIN.

Dust had no plan, and he seemed fine with it. When they were dating, he had told Ruby that he never wanted to have a job that paid him more than fifteen dollars an hour, and that he never wanted to work more than ten hours a week. His only jobs had been at a skate shop and at a skate park, neither of which he’d done for more than a few months, and so he seemed to be doing a pretty good job of accomplishing his goals thus far.

If Ruby went into the garden to reclean already clean tables, which she sometimes did to try to hurry along customers, she might have been able to hear the party. Nico’s house was only a quarter of the block down, and when it was nice outside and people were in the yard, voices carried. Tonight, though, she wasn’t interested. She’d seen Sarah Dinnerstein traipsing down the street earlier that afternoon, wearing shorts that even Ruby would have thought twice about, and she really didn’t need to see how a few hours of sun and booze had added to the effect.

One of the couples from the back was chatting behind her, drunk on mediocre wine. “Sorry,” they said, squeezing past Ruby to get out the door.

“Come back soon,” she said, as monotone as possible. By the time she walked back to her post, the other couple was finally paying and, after a few long, wet kisses, up on their feet and walking to the door. The server on duty, a tall guy named Leon, rolled his eyes at Ruby as he ran their credit card.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said. “No offense.”

“None remotely taken,” Ruby said. She organized the menus and started piling the chairs on the tables, and Leon grabbed the broom. They got the garden cleaned up, as they’d already done everything else. She could hear the party, or what sounded like it, and the whole garden smelled like weed and Sarah Dinnerstein’s Rastafarian essential-oil perfume that she bought from a guy with a card table set up outside the Union Square subway station. Jorge and Leon closed the two registers while Ruby waited outside with the keys for the roll-down security gate. Once all three of them were outside, Ruby locked the padlocks. She would text Harry when she was closer, check and see if he was still awake. It was kind of cool that Elizabeth hadn’t turned them in, but it was also weird and sort of freaky. Ruby’s parents had always been relaxed, too relaxed, and she had always thought of Elizabeth as the Good Mom, the one who always knew where her kid was, and who had regular food in the fridge, and who knew all the best bedtime songs. Elizabeth was not supposed to be drinking a glass of water on Ruby’s beanbag chair, her eyes all crazy.

In the very back of the restaurant, something flickered. A firefly, probably. Ruby squinted through the gate. There was something red in the corner, along the wooden fence, but she couldn’t quite see what it was. It was probably nothing. It was late, and Ruby was tired. “Okay, guys,” she said to Jorge and Leon, giving each of them a high five. “See you later.” They walked toward the corner together, but instead of turning left, to go home, Ruby turned right and walked toward Nico’s house. When she was a few car lengths away, she crossed the street and slowed down. There were a few people on the porch, but she couldn’t tell who it was. The party seemed to have died down, at least out front.

Ruby squatted down in between two cars and leaned against a bumper. She could see the porch, and the little floating red dots of people’s cigarettes in the air. Chloe had texted her that morning — Paris was in some other time zone, and Ruby had no idea if Chloe knew that she was writing at six a.m., or cared. It just said HIIIIIII I MISS YOU! with a long string of hearts. It was bullshit. Everything was bullshit. All of Ruby’s friends were about to leave her forever. Who was actually friends with people from high school? Everyone loved to say that people who peaked in high school were stupid and lame, and didn’t that mean that by holding on to those people, you were also stupid and lame? Wasn’t everyone trying to trade up? Chloe would join a sorority and live in a house with a gaudy chandelier, and then she’d go to law school, and then she’d get married, and then she’d have three kids, and then she’d move to Connecticut, and then they’d see each other at their twentieth Whitman reunion, and they’d hug and kiss and pretend that one of them was going to get on Metro-North so they could see each other. Paloma was the same but worse — she might be interesting. At least Dust and Nico were going to stay the same forever. It made Ruby feel less pathetic about her own life choices, or lack thereof.

People on the porch were laughing. A few months ago, Ruby would have sauntered up the steps, pulling a cigarette out of someone’s mouth and sticking it in her own, the queen of the goddamn place. Now what was she? She was a hostess. She recommended the crostini and the house-made aioli for the french fries. Her boyfriend was a recent de-virgin who took practice SATs for fun. Ruby imagined crossing the street and getting run over by a truck. Ruby imagined crossing the street and having a giant gate come down right in front of Nico’s front steps. She imagined her friends — her former friends — ignoring her while she walked through the house like she was invisible. Ruby imagined seeing Dust fucking Sarah Dinnerstein on Nico’s invisible parents’ bed. “This is so stupid,” she said. Her knees hurt from pressing against somebody’s bumper. She got up slowly, like an old lady, and stooped over to walk back down the block. The breeze was even smokier than before — it no longer smelled just like weed, or patchouli, or Marlboros — now it truly smelled like fire. “What the shit,” Ruby said. When she got to the corner, there were a few people standing in front of Hyacinth, staring in the windows, all of them on their cell phones. She started to run.