Alternate Side Read online

  “I wish I had a sister,” sighed Rachel, who hated being told how lucky she was. “I love Aunt Christine.”

  Nora believed that her sister was a better mother than she was, or at least a more natural one, and she knew why this was so. When Nora was ten but her sister only six, their mother had died. She had done that in the same halfhearted way that she had been a mother, fading out over the space of a few winter months, propped in bed in a lilac-colored housecoat surrounded by magazines. “She should be in the hospital,” Mary said, and for the final weeks she was, so that she disappeared from both their lives overnight, and then, after Mary had cleaned out her closets, almost completely. There remained the hand-tinted wedding portrait hanging at the end of the upstairs hall, in which both of their parents looked stiff, a little uncomfortable, almost as though they had not yet been introduced.

  Nora always thought that her story was the opposite of every other dead-mother story she’d heard since. A year later their father had gone to Christine’s parent-teacher conference; six months later, when school was out for summer, he had married the second grade teacher. Of course everyone talked about how, in what seemed like an instant, the universally liked Miss Patton had become the second Mrs. Benson. When Nora and her friends would go into the game room at the tennis club for sodas it would sometimes fall silent, like a thud, and she would know that’s what people had been discussing at the card tables. And naturally, since she was eleven, the beginning of a time when, Nora now knew from experience, girls are as mean as sleet and should be cryogenically frozen and then reconstituted later, Nora had done her best to torture her stepmother: to begin with, she insisted for months on calling her Miss Patton.

  She had refused to let herself be persuaded of the reality until one day when she had come home late from field hockey practice. The house had a rich brown smell that turned out to be pot roast, and in the den her sister and her sister’s former teacher were sitting close together on the leather chesterfield, reading Anne of Green Gables. On the coffee table was a plate of brownie crumbs and two mugs that had held cocoa. Cocoa with marshmallows—not the big ones that made an unwieldy lump in the cup, but the tiny ones that melted into soft, little, elevated puffs of sugar. Mary worked only part-time now, so the pot roast, the brownies, and the cocoa had all been produced by Miss Patton, whose name was Carol. “You can call me Carol,” she had said when her father had suggested “Mother.” But Christine already called her Mommy. Carol was more of a mother than their own mother had ever been. When Nora was in high school she had heard Carol and her father talking in the living room one night when she came downstairs to get herself a banana from the bowl of fruit that always stood now on the kitchen counter. “Did that honestly never occur to you?” Nora heard Carol say, and her father said, “I think it’s a coincidence. Stella wasn’t literary enough for something like that.” The sentence hadn’t meant anything to her until college, when one of Nora’s suite-mates, a drama major, had said to her, “How weird—you and your sister have the same names as the two main characters in A Doll’s House.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that our mother named us after characters in an Ibsen play?” she’d asked her sister during semester break.

  “You knew her a lot better than I did,” Christine said apologetically. She always said that. Christine worried that Nora resented her closeness to Carol, the notion that, in a way, they had had different mothers.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Nora said.

  She supposed it had shaped her view of marriage as well as motherhood. In the way that children always did unless there was screaming and hitting involved, she had thought her parents were perfectly happy, watching her father drape a mink stole over her mother’s narrow shoulders, seeing her mother tap her father on the arm when she thought he was going on too long about work. But then her father had married Carol, and she had seen what happiness really was. When she was a little girl Nora had gotten a party favor that was a tiny, undifferentiated nugget of sponge. The instructions said to put it in a bottle and add water, and sure enough, it grew, swelled, became identifiably a bear. That was what had happened to her father. Carol was the water. At their twenty-fifth-anniversary party, when Nora’s father had stood to give a toast, his daughters had seen him cry for the very first time.

  Now, while her friends discussed nursing homes and dementia, Nora kept quiet. No one wanted to hear that her father and his wife, just turned seventy-five, almost sixty-five, were on a river cruise up the Danube, sending texts to Rachel and Oliver: Vienna is amazing! and Love from Budapest! Twice a year they spent a long weekend in the city, always staying at a hotel but taking Charlie and Nora and, if available, the twins out to dinner and brunch. Nora remembered walking through Central Park with them after sundaes at Serendipity when the twins were small and still easily co-opted by hot fudge and free balloons, watching as Carol slipped her hand into her husband’s and swung it slightly. Nora had felt such a spasm of envy that it almost made her faint.

  It was one of the only marriages she’d ever encountered that wasn’t a mystery to her. Even her own. When people divorced, she was often surprised, and when they stayed together, sometimes more so. She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn’t try at all. In the beginning they all spent so much time trying to know the other person, asking questions, telling stories, wanting to burrow beneath the skin. But then you married and naturally were supposed to know one another down to the ground, and so stopped asking, answering, listening. It seemed foolish, fifteen years in, to lean across the breakfast table and say, By the way, are you happy? Do you like this life? Familiarity bred contempt, she’d read somewhere, or at least inattention, but sometimes it seemed more like a truce without a war first: these are the terms of engagement, this is what is, let’s not dwell on what’s not. “Want what you have,” it said inside the waistband of one of Christine’s bestsellers, some patterned capri pants, and it sounded so life-affirming until you really thought about it, and then it just sounded like capitulation.

  Sometimes Nora would look across the room at Charlie and feel the same way she did when she looked at her old oak rolltop desk and remembered how thrilling it had been to spot it across a dusty plain at an antiques show, even though nowadays she mainly cursed its sticky drawers and splintery edges. That was how most people stayed married, she suspected, nine parts inertia and one part those moments when she spotted her husband sitting across a long table illuminated by a votive candle, bending his head to listen to the blond pianist next to him, bending as though he were deeply interested in her remarks about how terribly Juilliard had changed and how vitamins were really unnecessary if only you ate by the 1/2/3 method. Bending his fair head, as he once had at a table in Montreal, when they were seated side by side and he said, “Don’t ever change a thing, Bunny mine. Not. One. Thing.” Bending it now because he was beginning to lose his hearing a bit. All the men seemed more attentive at dinner parties these days because they needed hearing aids and refused to get them. You could tell them you’d won the Nobel, her friends said, and they wouldn’t react because they hadn’t truly heard.

  “Although how any woman stays married after she wins the Nobel is beyond me,” said Cathleen from her lunch group.

  Charlie was still angry because Bob Harris had discussed a job with his wife, much less a Nobel Prize. Lord knows what he would do if he knew that Bob Harris had called Nora just the other day, left a long message, this time on their home phone: “I’ve been meeting with a mess of lawyers, all trying to hike up their billable hours, about this foundation thing. I think it would be good for us to talk again real soon so we can nail down your terms and title. Come on now—let’s get this party started.”

  An eerie pewter light fought its way past
the sheers into the bedroom, and when Nora went to the bathroom she could see the snow mounded on the pediment of the house next door, a perfect parabola. Downstairs Charlie had not started the coffee. Instead he stood, dripping, in the center of the kitchen, his down jacket on the floor, a pair of old ski pants unsnapped and unzippered at the waist. Nora wondered if this was because he had loosened them or because he hadn’t been able to close them at all. He always gained weight over the holidays, and when he was unhappy.

  “No smart-ass comments, all right?” he said, his cheeks red.

  “About what?” said Nora, sliding past him and flinching as a slick of cold water was passed from the waistband of Charlie’s pants to the back of her nightgown.

  It always took her a few beats in the morning to remember what day it was, to make sense of the headlines in the paper. It had been a nightmare when the twins were small and the hour before they left for school had been full of things that needed attention: permission slips, misplaced homework, snacks that had been promised for a field trip, although not by her. As the coffeemaker began to hiss, Nora realized that Charlie had been digging the car out. The parking lot was still closed, the chain across the entrance secured with a new padlock, but George insisted it would reopen any day, and in the meantime he had persuaded Charlie to join him in parking on the street, as though it would be a defeat to begin to use the enclosed garage again. Charlie was chugging another glass of water as though he’d been running a marathon. “You do understand that you are shoveling snow at seven in the morning because of George?” Nora said.

  “I’m well aware of your opinion,” Charlie said, wiping his face with a dish towel. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get to an off-site in New Jersey.”

  “Seriously? An off-site?” One of the things Nora loved about running her own operation was that she never had to authorize a retreat, a team-building day, or an off-site. At her last job there had been two off-sites a year, at which they had heard endless speeches from management gurus, done stress reduction exercises, and attended breakout sessions that consisted of writing your greatest fears on index cards and listening to them being read aloud in an NPR announcer voice by the facilitator: disappointing others (obviously a woman), not being promoted (obviously a man), death (everyone looked around the circle).

  “Not ours. The old man thinks they’re a waste of time. It’s an invitation from—” Here Charlie mentioned the name of what was obviously a client with whom she was obviously supposed to be familiar, so Nora nodded and began to make oatmeal. Nodding was good. It was attentive, collegial. Charlie dropped client names as though they were celebrities—although he was unfamiliar with most celebrities, so she supposed it all evened out.

  The twins had just returned to college after a Presidents’ Day break. “I want more time off,” Rachel had moaned the day they were due to go back to school, standing in the kitchen eating ice cream from the container.

  “Me, too,” said Oliver, who was dressed almost exactly like his twin sister, something that Nora had vowed, while staring at the sonogram, that she would never do to them herself.

  “Me, three,” Charlie said.

  There had been a long silence. Nora knew that normally Rachel would have responded with a wisecrack, but she had been noticeably cold to her father since the Ricky incident. “If I run into Mr. Fisk, I can’t be held responsible for what I might do,” Rachel had said at dinner.

  “I hope you’ve learned to always be civil to adults,” her father said sternly.

  “Not to adults who attack innocent people,” Rachel replied.

  Charlie blamed Nora for this, too.

  So it was Oliver who finally said, “Dad humor. Lame.”

  Rachel continued to ignore her father and handed her brother the ice cream and the spoon.

  “There’s, like, two spoonfuls left,” Ollie said.

  “And I saved them for you, bro. Because I love you.”

  “None for me?” Charlie said, because he could not leave well enough alone, but Rachel just went upstairs.

  “Women,” Ollie said, ever the peacemaker.

  The house was now still with that terrible stillness that came after raucous habitation. Nora could only imagine what Rachel’s bedroom looked like. There appeared to be a dearth of food in the kitchen, and the cupboards looked as though they had been ransacked. She was sure there had been bags of granola that had found their way into someone’s duffel bag. She wondered if there were still raisins. There were still raisins. God bless Charity.

  “So I will probably be late,” said Charlie, and Nora nodded again. Peanut butter and jelly for dinner, her guilty pleasure. She could scarcely wait.

  She put on her waterproof boots and tucked her indoor shoes into her tote. In an act of insurrection Nora might wear the boots all day, although she knew Bebe hated them. Bebe never needed to wear boots herself since her relationship to the sidewalk consisted of the cleared walkway to the door of the museum, the cleared walkway to the door of her apartment building, and the cleared walkway to the revolving door at Bergdorf’s. Nora would wear her boots because Bebe was in Palm Beach until Easter. “I hear it’s snowing there!” Bebe would bellow jubilantly when she called in later in the day, in that way Florida people always did, as though temperate weather alone were equivalent to Lincoln Center, Broadway theater, endless museums, excellent restaurants, Saks. Although Bebe liked to say that the Saks in Palm Beach was very well curated, which Nora assumed meant it stocked only the really, really pricey things.

  Nora knew that in a matter of hours she would be sick of the snow, sick of wading through enormous gray puddles of slush at the corners, of tracking the grit the plows laid down into the foyer as Charity rolled her eyes and got out the bucket. But when she first left the house with Homer she was struck by how beautiful the block looked, the scrawny street trees filled out by their white furry coats. The block was always near the bottom of the street-cleaning list, which made perfect sense since it was a dead end, although George vowed every winter to address the issue with their council member, and Jack Fisk insisted he could call a deputy mayor who would move them up the list like that: finger snap. Nora assumed that Jack’s finger-snapping days were now over, his phone calls unreturned. Jack Fisk? Barely knew him.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Alma called from across the street as the Fenstermacher poodle, wearing a tartan coat, sniffed at the curb. It occurred often to Nora that they all tended to be much more solicitous of their dogs than of their spouses, and she was not sure whether that was because their dogs loved them unconditionally, did not engage them in conversation, or simply didn’t live as long. Sherry Fisk always said monogamy had worked better when people didn’t live past fifty. It was a huge event on the block when one of the dogs had to be put down. They would always tell one another, as successive animals approached twelve or fifteen or, in the case of George’s loathsome little yappers, eighteen, because the worst dogs lived longest, that they hoped the dogs would die in their sleep. But that never happened, and after that last trip to the vet there was always a moment on the block when a neighbor arrived home dogless. Hugs, murmured condolences. At their age, a parent could die with less ceremony.

  It was while pausing to let their dogs sniff each other that Linda had asked Nora about Charlie’s meeting with a real estate agent. Linda had heard from her husband, Harold, who had heard from George. (Who else?) Nora had not heard about it at all until then. “I just wanted to get a sense of the market,” Charlie said, a bit abashed, but not very. “New York is a young person’s city now.”

  “We’re almost the youngest people on this block,” Nora said.

  “You know what I mean. All the reasons to live here—they don’t make sense for us. How many times have we gone to the theater in the last year? Or a museum?”

  “I run a museum.”

  “I mean a real museum,” Charlie said. “No, no, yo
u know—one of the major museums. No, you know what I mean—a big museum.”

  “You should stop talking,” Nora said. It was as though he had seen her weakness and decided to poke her with a sharp stick, and it made her want to poke him back, to tell him she was ready to get Bob’s party started. Now she would never mention what had happened earlier that day, after she had taken the stairs from her office to the third floor, where there was a new exhibit, Turquoise of the Southwest. It wasn’t particularly popular, but that wasn’t the point; it was one of their habitual attempts to seem serious. Nora had started an education program for children, with a demonstration from their gemologist and a disquisition about gems as an element of geology. She’d instituted a book club with so many women now enrolled that they had had to field three sections; they read a nonfiction account of the Duchess of Windsor’s collection, a novel about a diamond cutter in Amsterdam, that kind of thing. “The Seven Sisters crowd,” Bebe had said dismissively.

  The turquoise exhibit was designed for the curators from other museums, the major museums, the big museums, many of whom had open contempt for the Museum of Jewelry, a contempt that had only grown with the Museum of Jewelry’s attendance figures, which had surpassed the American Folk Art Museum and were now closing in on the Frick. Bebe was obsessed with outdoing the Frick, in a way that suggested she might have wanted to join the board there and had been rebuffed. Sometimes on weekends she would have her driver cruise by what she liked to call her museum on her way to somewhere else, a restaurant downtown, the private airport in New Jersey, and if there was a line of people waiting to get in, she was in a good mood all week long.