1. THE SHOPPING PROBLEMGeorge, 12–18
To George’s D.A.R.E. graduation in the Cochran Gym, his father wore a suit. The suit hadn’t registered as embarrassing to George, who couldn’t even remember what it looked like when he overheard his mother mention it to a friend on the phone later that week, but from her derisive tone in describing it—custom-made, seersucker, J. Press—he understood that there was something inherently foolish about it. Or perhaps it was his father’s wearing it to such a silly occasion: George and his classmates on the bleachers singing a song about abstaining from drugs and alcohol, the culmination of the substance-abuse unit of their seventh-grade health class.
George struggled to grasp the nuances of his mother’s contempt, but it was the beginning of his awareness of a problem in his parents’ marriage that had to do with his father’s love of expensive clothes.
Ellen didn’t discuss it with her kids, but she wasn’t exactly sotto voce when venting to her friends on the phone, and there were certain cutting remarks that George wished he hadn’t heard. Not normal. Shopping the way a woman shops—a woman with a shopping problem.
It was hard for George to imagine his mother having any vices. Ellen, who wore very little makeup and had let her hair go gray, rolled her eyes when people referred to her as beautiful, but she maintained the body of the ballet dancer she’d been in her youth and there was an awareness of her own grace in the way she moved. Her posture could be forbidding. She had a way of silently materializing at the threshold of her children’s rooms at incriminating moments, though she rarely intervened beyond expressing her opinion.
“It’s just not very attractive,” she’d told Cressida the first time she’d caught her smoking.
George recalled, as a young child, a tender, involved mother, but as he got older she withdrew. By the time he and Cressida were teenagers, Ellen seemed to view them as fully formed people who were going to do what they were going to do. She supported their endeavors and applauded their successes, but their accomplishments were not a particular source of pride for her. Nor was she inclined to interpret their struggles as a referendum on her mothering.
Denis had always been the more parental of the two, though between working and commuting, he was not around as much.
* * *
“Do you ever think how random it is, that Mom and Dad are married?” Cressida asked George as they rifled through a gift basket someone had sent their parents, who’d just left for JFK. It was their twentieth wedding anniversary, and they would be spending a week in London. Cressida, who was living with friends in a house upstate after finishing her first year at Bard, had come home so that George, who had just turned fourteen, wouldn’t be in the house alone.
George shook his head as he examined a furry brown specimen that turned out to be a dried apricot.
“It’s pretty random.” Cressida used her teeth to uncork a bottle of champagne.
The sun was setting, and the kitchen was slathered in electric orange. For the third day in a row the temperature had been over ninety, and the house was ripe with the musk of heat-saturated materials, old rugs and cedar closets, Ellen’s acrylics. The upholstered window seat was still warm, almost hot to the touch.
“We should go swimming in Sugar Pond,” George said.
Cressida rejected the proposal with a flared nostril.
“That’s disgusting,” she said as he dipped a prune into a jar of olive tapenade, mistaking it for chocolate.
“It’s good,” George claimed, too proud to admit otherwise.
* * *
That evening, Cressida had some college friends over. Like her high school crowd, they were not friendly and dressed in mostly black. They slept over, and the following afternoon more arrived. They kept trickling in, an unsavory cast of characters who regarded George with sardonic amusement—hey, little brother—on the rare occasion they acknowledged him at all.
George did his best to avoid them as they colonized various rooms of the house, eating and drinking and smoking.
The second night, as George was reading in bed, his bedroom door creaked open and one of them entered. She was shockingly skinny, with a shaved head and septum ring, but her most arresting feature was her eyes: a metallic gleam in her irises that must have been colored contacts. There was something fantastically sinister about the effect. Demonic. Earlier that day, George had caught himself staring at her as he ate a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter.
Perhaps she’d taken it the wrong way.
George said nothing as she stripped down to her underpants and climbed into his bed. Her primitively angular breasts and hips that jutted out like spears were the first he’d encountered. They kept their underwear on, but the experience left George unsettled, and even a little depressed.
“How was your night?” Cressida asked with a knowing smile when he came downstairs the next morning.
* * *
George spent the next few nights at his friend Pete’s. On Thursday he returned to change his clothes. He was surprised to discover the driveway, which had been jammed with cars belonging to Cressida’s friends, was now clear. The house was still a mess, but quiet. His mother’s suitcase was at the bottom of the stairs.
Ellen was in the kitchen, leaning over the sink, drinking straight from the faucet.
The countertops were covered with dishes, takeout containers, liquor bottles, things that were not ashtrays but were filled with cigarette butts. Open cabinets revealed bare shelves. The gift basket remained in the center of the kitchen table like a disemboweled carcass, its wicker skeleton surrounded by empty tins, tufts of paper confetti, pistachio shells, and husks of cellophane.
The late afternoon sun embalmed the tableau in a listless copper glaze.
“I thought you weren’t getting back till Saturday,” George said.
“Five nights was enough,” Ellen said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand as she turned off the water.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s still there.”
George was confused. “In London? By himself?”
Ellen nodded. “He’s fine. He’s having a good time, doing what he likes to do.” She smiled wanly. “He really likes to shop.”
To hear her put it like this, without the snideness she adopted on the phone with her friends, was disconcerting.
“Sounds like a midlife crisis,” George said with chipper authority.
He associated the term with New Yorker cartoons and sitcoms. He’d hoped the comment would inject the mood with a little levity.
But Ellen seemed to give it earnest consideration.
She started talking about how Denis never made partner at his law firm. He had gone through life feeling in the shadow of taller, more charismatic men. Men who weren’t necessarily as smart, hardworking, or loyal as he was, but who had a certain swagger that earned them respect and credibility, resulting in opportunities that Denis felt he’d been denied.
“He doesn’t feel very good about himself,” she concluded, “and there’s no question that the shopping has to do with that.”
* * *
Ellen, whose family had money, had a small trust, to which Denis had access. That fall she discovered that he had secretly been dipping into it to pay off credit card debt he had amassed shopping for clothes. George made a point of being out of the house the Sunday his father moved out. When he returned that evening, George was relieved to find that Denis hadn’t taken much; the house didn’t feel very different.
Ellen set the table for two and defrosted a lasagna for dinner. Just as they sat down to eat, the doorbell rang.
“It’s probably just a Seventh-day Adventist,” Ellen said as George got up to answer it.
It was Denis.
The two hadn’t exchanged a word about his moving out, or any of it. George hoped he wasn’t about to initiate some kind of conversation now.
“I forgot to buy silverware, and everything’s closed,” Denis said.
George had recently surpassed Denis in height, and the difference was exaggerated by his standing in the house, which was higher than the stoop, where it appeared Denis planned to remain.
He waited outside while George went to the kitchen, opened the silverware drawer, and plucked out a fork, a knife, and a spoon.
“You can give him more than that,” Ellen said. George took out another fork, spoon, knife, and then whatever they had duplicates of: garlic press, carrot peeler, corkscrew.
“What’s this?” George held up an instrument.
“Lemon zester,” Ellen said. “He can have that.”
George put everything in a ziplock bag and returned to the front door.
“This is more than I need,” Denis said as George passed him the bounty. “I was thinking just a fork and spoon to hold me over.”
“Mom said to give you more,” George said.
“Oh. Okay. Well, thank you. I’ll bring it back.”
“Just keep it,” George told him. “We don’t need it.”
Denis looked as if he were about to protest.
“It’s fine,” George said. “But I should go back in. We’re in the middle of dinner.”
George hadn’t meant to sound cold.
“Thanks,” Denis said, holding up the bag like a prize.
“Enjoy,” George responded, and shut the door.
Enjoy.
* * *
When George heard himself say something that was not natural, that sounded like something someone else would say, it troubled him. His goal in life was to be authentic, no matter the consequences. It was the subject of his college essay. After procrastinating, he wrote the whole thing in a single sitting two nights before applications were due to be postmarked.
When he was done, he didn’t let anyone read it over, lest he be susceptible to their opinions and suggestions. To alter what he’d written seemed disingenuous, at odds with the spirit of his essay.
George didn’t get into either of his top-choice colleges.
“It used to be anyone could get into Harvard or Yale,” Ellen told him. “Things are different now. Much more competitive.”
George knew he shouldn’t be surprised—in the middle of tenth grade he’d pretty much stopped doing homework—but still, it felt like a slight when he wasn’t accepted to a single Ivy.
* * *
Later that month, Ellen took the kids to Bermuda, their first trip without Denis. The weather was terrible, and they spent most of the time inside their cottage. Mostly they read books, but sometimes George and Cressida watched TV in one of their rooms.
One afternoon they watched the show Jackass. In one sketch a guy goes to a restaurant and orders a vegetarian platter. After being served he furtively procures a log of human feces he’d brought with him, deposits it on his food, and then summons the waiter to complain that there’s something on his plate that looks like a sausage. George noticed Ellen standing in the doorway, looking bewildered.
“What happened to this country?” she asked.
Cressida laughed, but George was embarrassed. He’d always felt implicated in his mother’s disgust with lowbrow contemporary culture, as though he were somehow responsible for it by being a member of the generation it was directed toward.
“I’m going for a walk,” Ellen told her kids. “In case either of you wants to come…”
She lingered.
“Well, okay,” she said, and turned to go.
“I’ll come,” George said, getting up.
The rain had stopped, but the sky remained bleak.
At the bottom of the path that led to the water, Ellen removed her sandals and placed them neatly beside each other. George kept his sneakers on as he followed her down the beach.
Copyright © 2024 by Kate Greathead
