After an embarrassed silence, Kelly began, “Sweetheart—”
“Look, she’s unhappy and taking it out on me,” Emory said. “I get enough hate mail—always anonymous—to have developed a pretty thick skin. So I take on the sins of the world at a family dinner. There’s my public service dispatched for the day.”
“That’s very grown up of you, honey.”
“Yes, at forty-three I may have finally graduated to adulthood.” Emory’s tone had a bite.
“Pearson, how are Darwin and Zanzibar doing?” Kelly asked, no doubt hoping to move on to safe topical territory. Good luck with that.
“Well, speaking of unhappy,” I said. “In the deep dark past, I’d have expected Darwin to be gearing up for a host of AP classes and organizing to skip his senior year, if not his junior year, too. He had an eye on a PhD in physics or math by the time he was ten. But there are no more advanced placement classes. With the quality of college education nowadays—apologies, David—leapfrogging to Yale would only secure him the equivalent of more high school. So back here in reality? He’s planning to drop out when he turns sixteen this spring. I wouldn’t say this within his hearing, but I don’t blame him. He gets nothing out of school, which, when a few words finally escape his lips, he describes as a cross between a rowdy basketball game and an institution-wide food fight. He’s angry and unmotivated. I don’t know what will become of him.”
Kelly might have preferred a shorter answer. Like, “Fine.”
“You’re too dark on the kid, Pearson,” Emory said. “Up against it, I’m not convinced he’ll drop out. He’s a teenager in the usual turmoil. But he’s resilient. Resourceful.” I inferred these were among the few distinguishing adjectives that remained acceptable at the dinner table.
“But Darwin used to be so curious,” I said. “Now nothing interests him, and he’s churning in a vortex of misanthropic nihilism. The only news stories that have captured his imagination in the last few years were that grotesque Adam Lanza spectacle and the gruesome terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris last month. I sometimes worry I’m living with tomorrow’s headline.”
Kelly followed up with understandable apprehension, “And Zanzibar?”
“She’s always been social, even something of a kingpin,” I said. “But recently, she’s been ostracized. Of course, thirteen-year-olds are like that. Still, to the extent that she’s explained it to me—not much—I think she’s being shunned for being good at things. She’s such a talented artist, but when she, like, produced an anatomically accurate pencil drawing of a human hand—they’re hard to draw—it seemed to make her teacher mad. It definitely made her classmates mad. When Zanzibar’s back was turned, one of them scrawled green marker all over that sketch. Or on the flute—her tone is clear, and she can fly through fast, complex passages without missing a note. But the other day, when she was at band practice—ordinarily a hopeless cacophony, because none of these kids is taught to play the instruments properly; no one dares correct them, so they play in their own way. Anyway, during a slight lull in the racket, Zanzibar lit into a Bach sonata—the one in B minor, I’ve heard her play it before—and maybe because it was so arrestingly beautiful, the other kids went silent. Well, she says the band leader made her stop! He was cross, too, just like her art teacher. I guess he regarded the impromptu recital as showing off, and you know how strongly that’s discouraged. Then there’s the added problem of her having become arresting in another sense.” I pulled up a photo on my phone and extended it to Kelly.
“Good lord, she’s gorgeous,” Kelly exclaimed, handing the phone to David.
“Not merely pretty,” he said. “Turn-your-head-and-stare.”
“But why is a face like that a problem?” Kelly asked. “Emory sure didn’t find smashing good looks a disadvantage.” She’d never have said such a thing with Felicity there.
“No, we all wanted to be around her,” I said. “Hoping for some of the magic to rub off. But something’s changed. Being attractive isn’t—well, it doesn’t actually attract people. It stirs outright rancor instead. Our minds are the same, so our bodies should be, too. In fact . . . Emory, didn’t you make a joke, way back when? About how we might as well declare that everyone is equally beautiful?”
“Mmm, I don’t remember.”
I think she did. “It’s not funny now.”
She laughed uncomfortably. “You say that like an accusation.”
Maybe it was.
Did I blame Emory for Darwin and Zanzibar’s travails in the same way that Felicity blamed her for Selwin and Pfizer? The inclination would be irrational. Emory didn’t invent Mental Parity. She’d jumped on the bandwagon to advance her career, but had she not, someone else would have clambered onto the cart in her place. If instead she’d risked throwing in her lot with MP’s opposition, well—what opposition? She’d simply have lost even the sorry platform she had to begin with at WVPA. For you could always take your place at the end of the unemployment line, but there was no rearguard resistance to join. Fringy “extremist” holdouts nostalgic for standards said their piece at best once and were subsequently erased from the landscape; no one would ever hear from them again. Besides, how much real influence did Emory exert? Wasn’t she just humming along with a chorus, putting out the same message—a message not of her concoction—on a repeating loop? I even questioned whether Felicity’s ex had been genuinely “converted” to what had long before become mainstream cant. Wasn’t that the problem with comment journalism in general? Who had ever been persuaded by broadcast editorials? Audience members who disagreed tuned them out or turned them off. The function of comment journalism was purely confirmatory. Arguably, my best friend had never changed anyone’s mind about anything. She was simply good at putting into words what her viewers thought already, thereby providing them a cozy but inert glow of self-congratulation that was relatively harmless.
As for Emory’s direct effect on my children, the older two had been disconcerted that on the one hand “Auntie Em” was the same warm, mischievous, teasing presence they’d grown up with, and on the other hand she had become a high-profile mouthpiece for an ideology that was wrecking both their present and their prospects. Fair enough. They were learning that other people can espouse views we reject and still be agreeable company. That it’s possible, and often necessary, to keep a distinction between what we think in private and what we say in public. That sometimes in the real world we need to compromise our principles to put bread on the table. And that grown women can take radically different approaches to surviving in a dangerously charged political ecology and still be friends.
So why did I hold what was happening to my children against her?
Uneasy with these thoughts while Kelly brought in her buttermilk pie, I tried to mitigate my woebegone account of my kids.
“D and Z are total savants when it comes to languages,” I said. “They pick them up more readily than their dirty socks. Spanish, obviously, but better than a smattering of Greek and Portuguese. They’ve even mastered a fair bit of Mandarin, and Zanzo has started on Russian. So about a year ago, I heard them nattering away in the usual inscrutable nee-naw-see-sa-tee-soo, and I asked, ‘What is that, Japanese?’ Zanzibar said scornfully, ‘No, Mom, this is Japanese,’ and rattled off a couple of sentences that definitely sounded more like World War Two POW movies. What had they been speaking? They’d made up their own language. Can you believe it? With its own grammar and vocabulary. Strictly speaking, Russian and Mandarin can be understood by millions of other people, so they’re not private enough. Jesus, what a pair.”
“You never talk about Lucy with that much enthusiasm,” Emory said.
“Lucy hasn’t exactly endeared herself to the family,” I said, “having forced us to tippy-toe around her all the time, and she’s turning into an utter hooligan.”
“At ten years old?” Emory scoffed.
“I can’t civilize her all by myself. Wade is a calming influence, but he’s no disciplinarian, much less a math tutor. At this point, I doubt she’ll ever learn to add.”
“Oh, who cares?” Emory said. “Making children learn math in the digital age is pointless. Buy her a calculator.”
I hesitated before observing, “I swear you’d never have said that five or six years ago.”
“Sure, I would have,” Emory said coolly. “I didn’t have a problem with math in school myself, but how much do I use it? Hardly ever.”
Kelly served the pie, whose filling was smooth and pellucid. “I love the lemon,” I said, licking my fork. “And the hit of zest is just right.”
“Your favorite flavors,” Emory said. “Acid and bitterness.” The tease didn’t come out as jocular as she might have intended.
“I admired the zest,” I countered. “As in ‘for life.’”
“Listen, I’m not their mother,” Emory reflected, putting her fork down after three bites. She was strict with herself on calories, and her built-in Geiger counter had detected large quantities of butter. “So why do I stick up for your kids more than you do?”
“I’m not criticizing them. They’ve been victimized by grown-ups who’ve gone off the deep end.”
“But children are robust. They’re naturally adaptable. Have a little faith. They’ll be fine.”
“They could have been better than fine. They could be thriving. They’re not. And on that point, yeah. Absolutely. I’m bitter.”
Kelly and David had watched our interchange with trepidation, and David called time. One daughter storming off in a cloud of profane invective was enough for one night.
“Looks like Biden’s not going to run again,” David said, as if physically turning a page.
“That’s what I’ve read,” I said indifferently. Clearly, I should let this unaccountable friction with Emory go.
“I don’t think the party apparatchiks are giving Biden a choice,” Emory said.
“Still, it’s odd,” Kelly said. “Two one-term Democratic presidents in a row.”
“Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Taiwan?” Emory supposed. “They haven’t helped this administration’s reputation for diplomatic finesse.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. We were both registered Democrats, but even discussing electoral politics Emory and I couldn’t manage to stay on the same side for longer than thirty seconds. “American voters don’t give a flying fig about Eastern Europe or Taiwan. Because all those countries are unashamedly smartist, aren’t they?”
“I think there’s a consensus,” David said carefully. His safe subject was proving more volatile than he’d hoped. “Biden is merely a mediocrity. And that’s not good enough anymore.”
We all knew what he meant.
“The Democrats have seized on an ace in the hole, and that’s why the party higher-ups are coaxing Biden out the exit,” David continued. “They know as well as we do who’d be a shoo-in. The tiny vocabulary? The repetition of the same words over and over? The incomplete sentences? He checks every lowbrow box in the book. He’s crude. He’s crass. He’s a boor. He has garish aesthetic taste. He’s fat. Better still, he routinely wears that slack, brutish expression, and he never reads. It’s also a big plus that he has no foreign policy experience. Ditto his never having been elected to a political position of any sort. The PR people might need to coach him on that arrogance problem, but so long as you’re boasting about how unremarkable you are, you can get away with all the narcissism you like. I’m sorry, Emory, if this seems to you to do a disservice to a reigning ethos you’ve provided such a convincing gloss of decency. Hats off to you, my girl; as a rhetorician, you’re a trapeze artist. But what qualifies a candidate for high office right now is having no ideas and knowing absolutely nothing. Voilà, we get the president we deserve.”