Chapter 4 #4
As Mae walks away Natalie can see that there are new tattoos on the back of one of her calves too. Natalie thinks her mother
might turn over in her grave if she saw Mae now. Of course she would never use that phrase. It’s a ridiculous phrase, it defies
logic (anyway, Theresa’s body had been cremated), and Natalie is a logical person. She’d been captain of the speech and debate
team in high school. They’d gone to nationals twice. She’d been told throughout her education that she should drop data science
and go to law school; she’d even gone so far as to take the LSAT. She’d scored really high, especially on the logical reasoning
section.
“Let’s go find your brother and sister,” she says to Scarlett. “Then we can bring our things upstairs and unpack.”
Mae and Leo are back before she’s made her way upstairs—packing three children for six days is not that different from packing
an entire household to move across the country forever. Mae is carrying a folded-up dog crate with one hand and using her
other hand to keep Leo at her side. If Natalie weren’t so peeved about the whole situation, she might have been impressed.
“I just don’t know why you brought a weird dog on a family bonding week, Mae,” she says. “It’s going to become a whole thing.”
Mae unfolds the crate—she’s like a magician with that thing—and scatters a handful of treats on the crate’s padded floor.
She whisks the dog inside, fastens the door, and turns to face Natalie.
“It won’t become a thing,” says Mae. “I have it under control. And he’s not weird. He’s just struggling with a few things.
Who isn’t, right?” Her voice starts to wobble and then her eyes fill. “Also, I didn’t have a choice, okay?”
“Hello, sunshine!” their mother used to say when Mae toddled into the kitchen as a little girl, as an eight-year-old, at sixteen (not toddling, obviously, by that age).
And Mae would smile her beautiful, sunny smile.
They’d all babied her; it was impossible not to.
Her terrible twos had been un-terrible; what was supposed to be her teenage angsty years were remarkably calm.
Maybe she’d been saving up and was going to have all of her bad years now, in her late twenties, with no mother to help her through.
“Aw, Mayday,” she says. She opens her arms and Mae steps into them; she’s enough shorter that Natalie can rest her chin on
top of Mae’s head, right in her thick, glossy hair. Natalie is the tallest of the Shipman girls. Take that, birth order, she
used to think during her own angsty teenage years, when she thought the world was against her (it wasn’t) and that being the
middle child meant she’d always be forgotten one way or another (it didn’t). “I’m sorry,” Natalie goes on. “I don’t mean to
be so cranky. I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s just a few days. We can all pitch in to make it work. Dad and Jordan will be here
soon, and unless there’s something I don’t know, they’re not bringing any dogs!”
Jordan will fix everything, right? That’s what she does for a living. She’s a professional mess-cleaner-upper.
All they need is Jordan.
“Phones down, please. I want your full attention,” says Calvin Shipman.
It’s six thirty, and Jordan arrived at Ruby on Rye almost two hours ago. Weekend traffic had been brutal. One hour and forty-five
minutes ago she made her first cocktail, just before her father pulled in. Now she’s on her second.
Calvin is using his I’m-giving-a-lecture voice, and Jordan feels Natalie snap to attention next to her.
They are sitting in the living room, lined up in a row on the couch like little girls waiting for their bedtime story.
It’s the sofa that, right before she was diagnosed five years ago, their mother refashioned with a plush vanilla-cream cover rather than replace.
Their father is in the easy chair, his back to the wall of windows. He has moved it to face them. The usual setup in this
room is that every seat has a water view. The house is decorated in what might optimistically be called “cozy chic” but more
accurately “jury-rigged haute.” Rattan baskets hold magazines, throw blankets, the odd doll or toy left from Natalie’s children’s
last visit, when Scarlett was only one. The kitchen, redone fifteen years ago, has the white cabinets and black granite countertops
of the time, after white became the new brown but before gray became the new white.
There are absences now, for sure. The kitchen windowsill shell collections that had been there since time began, along with
the wafers of old soap in the bathroom cabinets, always kept there “just in case,” even though most of the world had transitioned
to bodywash, are gone. Jordan, when she carried her Away suitcase in “coast blue” up the stairs to her bedroom, had been dismayed
to find on her dresser a white sign with navy blue writing exhorting her to SEAS THE DAY. Definite HomeGoods vibes. Jordan had put it in one of the dresser drawers.
“Family bonding week has begun,” says Calvin. “One, two, three . . . bond!”
Jordan laughs charitably. In his job as a professor of sociology at Williams, Calvin is known for his dry sense of humor, his specialty in social science theory, and his tie-under-sweater-vest professor look, though right now he’s wearing a Red Sox T-shirt and a beleaguered hat from the local shop Summer Sessions.
Calvin in summer casual. In a limited television series he might be played by a Harrison Ford of ten or fifteen years ago, handsomely lined, still mostly thick-haired.
You loved him, and you knew he loved you, but he was not the one you were hoping to run into when you were trying to sneak in, tipsy, eight minutes past curfew, after a party in Nicholas Murphy’s basement.
Calvin, in the last year of his seventh decade, is not looking his age.
He went gray in his late forties, so that’s nothing new, and in his early sixties the gray began to turn to white, but his hair is as thick as it ever was, his biceps as strong, his eyes still sharp even if the skin around them has acquired lines over the years.
“Jordan has her phone,” says Natalie.
Jordan’s phone had been buzzing incessantly, so she put it on Do Not Disturb and is just keeping it handy. Jordan almost calls
Natalie a tattletale but even here, in this familiar childhood locale, which is where people are known to revert to old habits
and patterns, that’s a bridge too far. Or too close, maybe, to their girlhood squabbles. She settles for a pointed glare,
but Natalie is looking straight ahead, at their father. The Shipman girls are recognizable as sisters, with the small differences
generated by luck and genetics. Natalie has the best profile, and Jordan the longest legs, though Natalie is half an inch
taller. Mae has the thickest hair, with a natural wave, in a shade lighter than Jordan’s (the shiniest) and darker than Natalie’s
(the closest to their mother’s dark blond). They all have blue eyes, also their mother’s, with some variation in shade and
shape, from round (Mae) to almond (Natalie). It all evens out, except when it doesn’t.
“No, I don’t,” says Jordan, sliding the phone under her leg, feeling, at age thirty-six, reluctant to get in trouble with
her father. When they were growing up Calvin did the disciplining; Theresa was in charge of making you feel better after.
She always said that as a second-grade teacher at Morris Elementary she did enough disciplining during the day.
“Do too,” says Natalie.
“Come on Natalie, how old are you?” asks Mae.
Surprisingly, Natalie’s phone is nowhere in sight.
Jordan assumed she had been posting continuously throughout the day.
Sometimes in her office Jordan will pull up Natalie’s Instagram or TikTok account and watch her videos.
There are videos of Natalie making biscuits in a cast-iron skillet, of her wearing overalls and milking a cow, of her cuddling with the children on an elaborately pillowed couch with a Christmas tree visible in the background, reading a picture book.
When she watches the videos, Jordan can’t help but think, Who is this person?
She’s so familiar, but she’s also a stranger.
Sometimes she reads Natalie’s Substack (the free version, she’s not a subscriber) and thinks, What?
Are there actually people who depend on her sister—the girl who failed her driver’s license test twice, who had a crush on her high school physics teacher so severe that her friends had to hold her back from delivering a letter she had written him, whose dwarf hamster had died from overfeeding—to tell them how to parent?
There are quite a lot of people who do, it turns out. Nearly one and a half million of them.
Mae has a dog attached to her; she’s had a dog attached to her since Jordan arrived. Leo. The dog is lying down next to Mae,
and every thirty seconds or so Mae delivers a tiny treat to him, right between his two front paws. In between treats he fixes
Mae with an unswervingly devoted gaze.