Annette Feldman hated that when she had to make the calls, she was nervous. She’d birthed, raised, and loved those children to within an inch of her life and yet she had heart palpitations just thinking how much Elise and Freddy wouldn’t want to go on a trip with her and David.
Things with the children, well, really with her entire life, had been better when David was working. She was his office manager for nearly forty years, dealing with the insurance companies, maintaining the schedules, keeping the nurses and support staff happy. She fielded the calls from the pharmaceutical reps and managed the equipment servicing. She foisted lunch on David when he was too busy to take a break and remembered everybody’s birthday and their favorite kind of cake, including the building janitor and the UPS guy. So busy were her days that by the time she came home from work, prepared dinner, and watched one TV show to unwind, she was too exhausted to do any thinking beyond how many syringes and plastic pee cups to reorder. But two years ago, David scrubbed in for the last time, brought the last life into the world that he would, and drank his last cup of coffee outside the operating room.
Now the two of them were home all day, looking at each other like strangers, doing that dangerous thing older people were prone to do: taking stock of their lives. This feeling of utter uselessness, a void that snowballed daily, it was the real reason she sided with David’s disappointment about Elise not having a career. It wasn’t that she cared about the expense of the Ivy League schooling or what she said to her friends in the card room at Fresh Meadow Country Club after listening to them brag endlessly about their progeny’s successes. Ruthie bought a country house . . . Peter made partner . . . Daniel’s hedge fund had a banner year. All that gloating made her want to vomit. What got her in the gut was that her daughter had nothing of her own, no slice of the world—however infinitesimal—that would nourish her and fulfill her when her children grew up and Mitch turned into a roommate instead of a lover, if he hadn’t already. She’d had it until recently, a territory she ruled, a place where she was needed. Even if her job was at David’s office, she controlled every inch of that twenty-square-foot space behind the reception desk. Now she was a seventy-year-old woman with children and grandchildren who lived nowhere near her and her office job had been filled by a twenty-three-year-old graduate of some internet university.
Elise and Freddy both had their reasons for moving away, she knew that, but it still hurt when she saw her neighbors’ driveways filled with SUVs every weekend and her friends had to cut short lunches because of grandparent responsibilities. Once or twice on the phone she’d hinted as much to Elise, who’d said something like, “Oh, please, you’re saying you want to watch Darius play video games or listen to Rachel be a total bitch?” It was true she had no more desire to stand in the heat watching teenagers play baseball than she had had to sit on the floor at a baby class while a bunch of toddlers shook maracas mindlessly. But now her grandchildren were older—a spontaneous matriculation into adulthood—and she was ready to get to know them.
Annette had David, for now, but what were the two of them to each other at this point in their lives? Wrinkled, arthritic has-beens. David was stooped over so that he no longer topped six feet and she was wider and dimpled despite eating the same number of Weight Watchers points for the past thirty years. They were half-people without their children. Everything they had done, every decision they had made, was for what they hoped had been in their children’s best interests. The working nonstop, David rising before the sun and seeing more patients than his throbbing lower back could handle, was so that Elise had the best piano teacher and could travel to France for a tennis program and Freddy could have SAT tutors and the name-brand sneakers. Even the moms’ nights out to the movies that Annette went to were in service of being a better, more patient parent the next day (the parenting books actually said so!). She volunteered at the school so that the principal would look more favorably on Freddy. She and David piled into the car with Elise and Freddy to visit the grandparents often enough so their children learned the meaning of respecting their elders. They took them to museums and watched documentaries with them so they would be well-rounded citizens of the world. Annette cooked for them every night so their bones would grow and their tissue would be nourished with herb-crusted chicken and energy-boosting rice pilaf when so many of her friends were popping TV dinners into the microwave. And yet. What had she sowed?
Her kids barely called. Everyone told her when she had Elise how lucky she was to have a daughter, chanting that saying: A son is a son until he takes a wife; a daughter’s a daughter for the rest of your life. Well, her daughter looked at her like she was nothing more than a silly woman with silly concerns, because caring about one’s appearance was somehow a crime. Lately Annette felt herself taking on a burdensome quality vis-à-vis Elise, like she was a houseplant that just wouldn’t die. Well, she never asked anything of Elise. They lived on opposite coasts, the give-and-take between them embodied in that very fact of geography. And her son, going back to that little ditty, well, he hadn’t yet taken a wife, but he’d never been the devoted boy to begin with. She and David had given these children everything, so why did they hate her? She cringed thinking of that word. They didn’t hate her. She chastised herself for even thinking it. They loved her, in that biological torrent that eclipses anything environmental. But did they like her? No, they probably did not.
Still, the cruise. If her group of friends was any indication, these milestone birthdays warranted some type of fanfare. David probably didn’t even realize how much it was costing. She didn’t care, which was uncharacteristic for her, a woman who reused tea bags until the water barely took the color of the leaves. They’d worked their whole lives, David on call for most holiday weekends, waking up at all hours of the night to bring parents their greatest joy. She put in overtime investigating cheap printing services, negotiating cut-rate leases for the medical equipment, arranging for David to give pharmaceutical talks for extra money. They had a decent nest egg, even if it had taken an unexpected hit, and they could afford to take their children and grandchildren away for the week. If they didn’t pay for everything, there was no chance the trip would ever happen. Mitch made peanuts and Freddy, well, she didn’t quite understand how her son scraped by. He had no wife and children, so his expenses were minimal, but she wondered if he even owned a car or had health insurance. It was true she could ask, but that was patronizing. Her firstborn was nearly half a century in age! Boy, if that didn’t make her feel past her expiration date.
The trip, of course, was really about David. He was sick, though they never talked about it, treating his illness as taboo a topic as an extramarital affair. His hand tremor that put an end to his career had put them in a tizzy for weeks while he got tested for Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and a brain tumor. Everything was negative and they rejoiced upon hearing it was simply a symptom of old age, too many years of overuse as a surgeon, holding his digits perfectly still to stitch a level-four tear or grasping a scalpel tightly to perform a hysterectomy. His muscles had simply given out. But eight months later, totally unrelated to the tremor, David was back at the doctor. He’d been feeling tired, dizzy, short of breath. Annette was sure it was anxiety. They both knew how nerves could be more exhausting than working a full day on your feet, and the transition to retirement had been stressful for both of them.
It was leukemia. Cancer was knocking on the door of too many of their friends, as though getting to seventy was like sending a personalized invitation for abnormal cells to come on over and reproduce in any of your vital organs. Now it was here for them. The doctors said he had a sixty percent chance of survival. David had demanded to know the statistics, but it made Annette ill to think in such cold, hard facts. One day when David was out running errands, she’d actually filled a small candy dish in their home with six red marbles and four black ones. Closing her eyes, she drew marbles for almost an hour, trying to get a feel for the odds by rubbing the stones blindly.
David insisted on not telling the children. He was a practical man and he knew Elise and Freddy wouldn’t be able to help him—not from California and not from Colorado, and not even from up close. What would help him would be sticking strictly to the care plan crafted by his team of doctors at Mount Sinai, eating the right diet, and taking his meds. Annette was in agreement that they shouldn’t tell the kids either, but for different reasons. She honestly didn’t know if they’d be crushed and come running to their father’s side, in which case she’d feel guilty for burdening them, or if they’d gravely disappoint by sending only the perfunctory flowers and calling once every few weeks. Strange that she couldn’t predict how her own children would behave. Even sadder that she was too afraid to find out.
One month ago, Annette was in the waiting room at the hospital while David was receiving one of his weekly radiation treatments. She’d brought along her knitting (she was in the process of making a sweater for the child of one of David’s nurses), but she couldn’t focus. Her stitches were sloppy and she wouldn’t think of handing over a gift that wasn’t perfect, especially to Marie, Annette’s favorite of David’s caretakers. Instead she focused on the TV, trying to follow a soap opera in which a family was at war, this brother suing that brother, this mother in therapy because of her daughter, that grandparent cutting this grandchild out of his will. It was ugly to watch, even though everyone had a pretty face. But then a captivating commercial came on for Paradise cruises, and an alternate world was depicted. Grandparents riding paddleboards with grandchildren, husbands and wives holding hands on the dance floor, families celebrating around large tables filled with towers of seafood and bottles of champagne. And she made up her mind. Both versions of family were absurd, the Days of Our Lives and the Paradise International, but if she were to choose one for inspiration she would go with the latter.
The Feldmans, all seven of them, were going to take a cruise. Everyone would be a captive. Her captives. Nobody could claim they had friends to visit or that they needed to cut the trip short for work. They would be stranded together on the high seas and she, as the one footing the bill, would be in charge of making sure it was all smooth sailing. Life was too short to behave like they were on daytime television. She looked back down at her knitting and took it up with renewed energy, fixing the sloppy stiches, tightening the pattern, admiring the beauty.