Throughout my adulthood, I’d tried to keep in touch with Kelly and David Ruth, the closest folks I had to parents. But with three children and a career hanging on by the fingernails, I easily got caught up in immediate family and work. As their de facto adoptive daughter, I hadn’t been as attentive as I should have been, considering how much I owed them for taking me in, teaching me the rudiments of how to negotiate the sane secular world—or previously sane—and helping me to apply to colleges. So when they reached out and asked Wade and me to dinner in early December, I begged off on Wade’s account (he hated socializing, and during our previous visits as a couple it was painfully obvious that a contract lawyer and history professor had no idea what to talk about with a tree surgeon), but I happily agreed to come.
I calculated we hadn’t seen one another in a couple of years, though not much more than that, so I was taken aback by how much older they both seemed to have grown in such a short time. Though David had always kept himself in good trim, he’d fleshed out, and his previously animated face had dropped, as if all that former vitality and joie de vivre had been an act. Kelly hadn’t put on weight, but her posture recapitulated the new droop in her husband’s face. When she greeted me, her pleasure in seeing me again appeared genuine enough, but giving expression to that gladness seemed to cost her too much effort, and her manner was a trace forlorn. The phenomenon shouldn’t have been as rare as it was, but they’d always been one of those couples whom you could tell at a glance had been young once. That is, you could immediately see through the wear and tear to the energetic, attractive people they used to be, because they carried that energy and attractiveness into the present. I’d always held them up as examples of aging with grace who gave me hope for my future, so my disappointment over how spent they looked had a selfish side.
The Ruths had downsized to a narrow upscale townhouse whose interior was paneled in dark wood and padded with Oriental rugs. Any sections of wall that weren’t dotted with classy original art were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The library was mostly hardbacks, the fiction alphabetized by author, the nonfiction organized by topic. Surfaces of antique furniture sponsored single striking objects from extensive international travel. This variety of learned decor was beyond out of fashion; it was so frowned upon that most people would have ripped out those bookcases years before. Indeed, there was such a glut of used books on the market that they were being pulped and compressed into logs for woodstoves.
“Hey, hey!” I gave Emory a hug and the full European two-cheeker. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”
“Well, I was in Dublin over Thanksgiving,” she said, “and I’m lined up to do a tour of Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide over the Christmas period. So it made sense to get together in between the red-letter days. Sorry about the lousy sense of occasion. I know you love holidays.”
“Right,” said the younger woman on the couch. “And I was also able to wedge this dinner into my demanding schedule of shopping for paper towels and watering Mom’s geraniums.”
“Felicity, great to see you.” I gave a quick, awkward hug to Emory’s younger sister. With a wary, combative affect that made her less immediately likable than her sibling, she was one of those people capable of taking “hello” the wrong way. Something about touchy people makes me compulsively bring up the worst possible subject. “Listen, I was sorry to hear that you and Selwin parted ways.”
She shrugged. “We had a fatal philosophical disagreement.”
“About what?”
“What do you think?”
I didn’t pursue it, though I could guess. I should have expected Felicity to be here. Emory had mentioned not only the divorce but her sister’s abrupt termination as a biomedical engineer. For now, she was back living with her parents. But her aura of resentment didn’t hail solely from this recent hard luck. She’d always seemed a bit cheated, her shoulder-length auburn hair and faintly freckled complexion so much less dramatic than her sister’s luminously pale skin and jet-black pixie. She’d none of Emory’s easy self-confidence, blithe sense of preeminence, or air of generosity. Felicity wasn’t bad-looking, but she was tight. Still, in not especially wanting to talk to her I felt obliged to disguise my not wanting to talk to her, which meant continuing to talk to her.
“So I gather you’re between jobs?”
“On the far side of one of them, anyway. ‘Between’ may be optimistic.”
“Did you have another . . . fatal philosophical disagreement?”
“You could say that,” she said out of one side of her mouth. “There’s been a big shake-up at Pfizer. Like the sort of ‘shake-up’ where you mix a bottle of barbecue sauce but forget to screw on the top.”
Felicity had been a fun, quirky kid. I might not have responded to her in adulthood, but until this last year she’d had an impressive come-from-behind career. She could never compete with her sister in the charm department. Yet she was a hard worker who’d gotten into MIT back in the day when that meant something. Majoring in chemistry, she’d applied herself to just the kind of demanding degree that had become an anachronism, and female students in STEM subjects were then thin on the ground. She exhibited the same mastery of the physical world that appealed to me in Wade. So while Emory was stalling out at WVPA, Felicity went from strength to strength in the pharmaceutical industry. She made scads more money than her more charismatic sibling, or she had until the music stopped. She must have been too glaringly gifted to survive in our current Year Zero. Reverse discrimination was ensuring that droves of highly skilled employees were out on their ears. As folks who knew what they were doing were replaced wholesale by folks who didn’t, social justice seemed to intermingle with an unfocused revenge—though what exactly the competent had ever done to the clueless was hard to pinpoint. I couldn’t blame Felicity for feeling jaded.
“I sometimes worry that my having held on to my own job doesn’t reflect well on me,” I said, trying to lighten things up. “Maybe I’m not smart enough to be fired.”
“Au contraire,” David said, handing me a glass of white. “Hanging on to employment in academia right now at the least requires canniness.” He cut a barely perceptible side glance at his older daughter. “You must have developed your political sea legs.”
“Hardly,” I said. “I didn’t tell you guys about it at the time, because I didn’t want you to worry, and I was hoping it might just blow over. But I had a wickedly close call with the Dean of CE in 2013.”
“Ah, yes, Ms. Poot,” David said. “They keep giving her a larger and larger staff. Her offices now command a whole wing of the Administration Building’s ground floor.”
“With nicely framed abstracts,” I said, “humiliatingly low chairs, and thick white carpet.”
“The better to accentuate the bloodstains,” David muttered. “And what was your original sin, if I may ask?”
“In my Int Lit survey class, I assigned them The Idiot.”
David guffawed. “Are you suicidal?”
“I’m the same as I’ve always been,” I said. “Which is the problem. Ultimately, I was just making a joke, but the last thing you can count on these days is a mutual sense of humor. I scraped by with my job, but ever since I’ve been marked as unsavory. I can’t put a foot wrong.”
“You sure put a foot wrong with Lucy,” Emory noted.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Last year, our youngest turned me in to social services.”
“Her own mother?” Kelly exclaimed, bringing in crisp breads and herring.
“She overheard me saying something about her not being as smart as her siblings. I’m really sorry, too, because I hated hurting her feelings. Still, you know Darwin and Zanzibar. I’m not as smart as those two, either. Jesus, hardly anybody is. But Lucy was only four when MP exploded, and it’s all she’s ever known. She’s never taken a test in her life. So she accepts the whole shebang at face value. It would never occur to her there’s anything questionable about cognitive equality. It’s just a fact.”
“I suppose that means she’s been raised in a state of purity,” Kelly said, shooting a swift side glance at Emory identical to her husband’s. “She’s uncontaminated by the prejudices of the past. A member of a whole new generation whose minds are—clean.”
I studied my ersatz stepmother for a moment. Her tone was impenetrable. Sardonic, or sincere?
“In a way . . .” I said with a returning ambiguity. “For Lucy, the world is black-and-white. Bad people use bad words and think bad thoughts, and good people don’t. So if her mother talks in comparative terms about intelligence, she’s speaking atrocities. I have to be corrected or fixed. Or punished. And it’s no joke. Child Protective Services threatened not only to take Lucy away but to put all three of our kids in foster care.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Kelly said, clutching my arm. “That must be terrifying.”
“Pearson, it’s not that hard to learn to talk the talk, and you know it,” Emory said.
“Yeah,” Felicity said with more than a touch of snideness. “But getting with the program comes more easily to some than others.”
“Pearson herself is better at toeing the line than she’d have you believe,” Emory said. “Little Miss Maverick, the brave heretic, sticking her neck out while the rest of us pull back in our shells like turtles, is just as politically obliging in public as everyone else.”
“That’s because I don’t want to lose my children or my job,” I snapped.
“Since when can you not take a little razzing?” Emory said. “Jeez. And you think it’s other people who have no sense of humor.”
I followed Kelly into the kitchen to see if I could help. So far this evening had a funny edge on it that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Their larder had open shelving, and it took me a minute to put together what about the generous lineup of condiments and foodstuffs was peculiar. The ketchup wasn’t Heinz but an off brand from Poland. The label on the mayonnaise looked like Dutch, and on inspection the product was packaged in South Africa. Naturally the rice vinegar was from Japan, but the olive oil was from Turkey, the lentils from Jordan. They didn’t have just the usual mushroom soy and water chestnuts from China; the cans of kidney beans and evaporated milk were from China, too. The writing on the bags of flour was Cyrillic.
“Wow,” I said after my survey. “Quite an international lineup. I guess you’re not that into ‘buy American.’”
“No,” Kelly said quietly. “It’s a policy. The last time I bought sugar produced in this country, it was full of weevils. A container of hummus last year from Weis Markets made David sick for days. After a long string of contaminated, spoiled, or downright inedible American products, that was the limit. Now I make my own hummus.”
Sure enough, our marinated flank steak was imported from Argentina. Kelly’s multicolored roasted peppers had been trucked from Nicaragua rather than the Midwest or California—which also grew plenty of rice—but no, I checked the bag; the rice was from Malaysia.
“Are you and Emory having a problem?” Kelly asked sotto voce as she sliced the steak and I spooned the peppers onto a serving platter. “I sense a certain tension.”
I could have said the same of this whole household. I kept my voice down, too. “I’m not on board with the views she’s promoting. We’re managing. And it’s not as if I have to endorse her every public position. But she senses my disapproval even when I don’t say anything. Now that she’s getting so famous, I’m supposed to be proud of her. I’m sorry to say this, but I’m not.”
“You should be careful,” Kelly said.
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “I’m careful every day of the week to the point of exhaustion. Now that we all operate under Lucy’s eagle eye, we can’t even kick back and relax at home. I’d hoped this house would be the one place left in the world where I can let fly.”
“For our part,” Kelly said full voice, “David and I are very proud of Emory. All those speeches and appearances! I don’t know where she gets the energy. Our neighbors and colleagues are amazed. Always sending us links to the latest.” But as she said this, she didn’t look me in the eye.
Not that I didn’t feel welcome, but I considered then whether I might have been invited to this dinner partly as a buffer between Emory and her parents. I wasn’t quite family-family, and my presence might help keep the occasion a measure more formal and better behaved. It arrived with an internal ping, like a text message: Emory’s parents were afraid of her. And that made me wonder whether I should be afraid of her, too.