The trash can is overflowing, and the window has streaks of dust. The sink is filled with soup cans and spoons and a cardboard coffee cup that has something green floating in it. I was studying it earlier, that green mold. Mold is life, after all. And now that I look around, seeing the place through their eyes, I also notice that there’s a red high heel in the middle of the floor and the picture of Noah and me at Lake Tahoe smashed on the floor by the heater. (Yes, I smashed the picture with the high heel, so what? It was a satisfying symbolic moment.)
I go over and try to scoop up as much as possible of the detritus of my life, to hide it from them. But I can’t hide it at all, and now that Natalie has told them that I’ve lost my job, they also can see that I haven’t gone out and replaced it. Soon they’ll point out to me that when MacGraws lose jobs, that’s when they double down; they start making calls, sending out flurries of résumés and curricula vitae. That’s when a MacGraw gets into gear.
“So what happened to your phone?” my mother wants to know.
I look around. Where is my phone, anyway? How could I have neglected it? Oh, yes. The phone. Well, the truth is I must have forgotten the charger at work the day I left, and I honestly have never thought of it again until this moment. No wonder nobody has called me. I talked to Sylvie and Natalie last week, and then never bothered to recharge it. I have been so—so lame. Maybe I am having what they used to call a nervous breakdown. I don’t really know what one of those is, but that does not mean that I’m not having one.
“Oh, honey,” my mother says. I expect her to say the things she wouldn’t have been able to avoid saying back when I was in junior high: stand up straight, comb your hair, and why didn’t you do these dishes? It’s even scarier that she says none of that. Instead, she tightens the purse strings of her lips and sets herself to work making things conform to the standards set by civilization.
My father, clearly the designated hugger, comes over once again and holds on to me, and says, “You need some care.” They must be really worried if he’s not going to ask why I didn’t get another job yet, or why I was so awful as to get myself fired, or what I think I’m going to do next.
Nobody says anything that would be upsetting.
I close my eyes in gratitude. My parents are here, and I can stop running from whatever has me, because they are going to take care of me now so I don’t have to adult myself anymore.
They pack up my things, donate the furniture, clean the apartment, make the necessary phone calls, sell my old car to a guy down the street.
And just like that, it’s over.
They are going to take me back home, back to the mother ship, for repairs.
TEN
MARNIE
When you fall apart and move back home, nursing a big heartbreak, everyone tiptoes around you, until one day they bombard you with all the opinions they’ve been keeping to themselves.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I actually don’t mind their opinions. I am back in suburban Jacksonville where I belong, back in the 1960s pastel-yellow ranch house on the cul-de-sac where I grew up, two blocks from a black-water creek in one direction and the low-slung pink brick elementary school in the other. Old oak trees, dripping with Spanish moss, stand guard among the palm trees, the same as they always did. Nothing truly bad could ever happen to you here—that is, if you have the good sense to come in during the daily thunderstorm that arrives around 5:00 p.m.
My father is sure that I need to find another job, but he is patient and willing to help me. He says I need something with security! Health benefits! A pension! He talks to Rand Carson, my old boss at the Crab & Clam House when I was a teenager (I was chief clam girl, I’ll have you know)—and when I make a face and tell my dad, “Not the fried clams again!” he says I am in line for a much more senior position: dining room manager. I can boss the clam kids around while somebody else pays my health insurance premiums.
My mother has another life in mind for me altogether, as her sidekick. She declares happily that we are “joined at the hip” as we make the rounds of her social life and errands: to the pool, to the store, to the library, to the gym, to lunch with her friends, and then we do the whole circuit all over again the next day. I am the prodigal daughter, welcomed back into the neighborhood, complimented for how I’ve grown up, for my nice smile. And it’s true; I smile brightly at all the people my mother knows, which is nearly everyone in town. The neighbors who are outside watering their lawns need to run over just to get a look at me, as does Rita, the cashier at the Winn-Dixie, and Drena, who has styled my mother’s hair since forever at the Do or Dye Salon on Hyde Park Avenue. They all look at me with slightly pitying expressions on their faces. So they know the whole story. Of course they do, but they understand.
And then there’s my sister, who lives only a half mile from my parents, in a new subdivision that features the kind of dream house that two full-time professional incomes can provide. She is just about to begin her maternity leave when I arrive, and she is the perfect example of how a perfect person can make a perfect life. I know, I know: I am using the word perfect too many times, and no life is perfect, but when I am with Brian and Natalie in their cozy house, with her cozy big belly, and the furniture all overstuffed and comfortable, and the walls painted muted shades of gray and beige with white trim, and the windows all clean and everything looking peaceful and restful, I think that this—this!—is what everybody had been hoping would magically fall into my lap, too. I, myself, did not see it, frankly; given a house like this, I’d be painting the walls real colors, colors from the red family or the turquoise family, and hanging modern art on the walls.
One morning I’m having breakfast with my father out on the patio, just us, when he asks me what I see myself doing in my life, so I tell him the truth.
“Well, I have a lot of plans actually. I’m really into that idea of baking cupcakes with little sayings in them—like fortune cookies, you know, but with cupcakes. And also I’d like to write love letters for people who can’t think of the right words. Oh! And I also would love to make costumes. Maybe do a stop-action film with figurines in costumes. I could write the scripts. Or, say, I could be happy, um, working in a bookstore because I could help people find the novels they need to read for whatever is bothering them.”
He folds his newspaper and smiles at me. “We should try to narrow this down and see how any of it could be monetized,” he says. “When you’re thinking of what to do with your life, whatever your occupation is, it would help to think money.”
“Also, you’re going to think this sounds crazy,” I tell him, “but it’s possible that I could turn out to be a matchmaker. I mean, I’ve had a few successes at it, so it’s something maybe I could pursue.”
He gets up and ruffles my hair on his way to leave for work. “Ducky, I’m gonna say it again. You’re a fascinating human, but that’s not what life’s about. You gotta make some money.”
It is not lost on me that this—Natalie and Brian’s dream house—this is the reward for going to school and really applying yourself to a skill that people want and will pay for. You get to meet a nice person, and so what that he is maybe not the most zany, creative, handsome person you ever met, a guy who wants to play guitar all night long and write you love songs, and then cook omelets at three in the morning, like the guy I married by mistake—but he is instead that other kind of man: a provider, an ethical, strong, good man with an eye to the future. Your future.