Chapter Five
Her story starts further back, but not that much further, in the grand scheme of things.
Marcella Steiner never changed her name, not that it matters.
Everyone still calls her Marcella Novak, or honey, or, more to the point, Mom.
But this is not a story about a woman put upon by motherhood—at least, no more so than any story about a mother is about a woman who is put upon by motherhood.
Marcella likes having a house that is her own and a family that is her own.
It gives her a sense of peace and purpose in a disjointed and surprisingly barbaric world.
She got married when she was twenty-four, an age her mother thought ridiculous but society deemed accomplished.
It was the eighties. She was bathed in attention and warmth and praise.
How wonderful to have met a lawyer! How wonderful to be living in her childhood home as a young bride!
Marcella reveled in this rightness. Finally, finally, she felt she was where she belonged.
She got married not at the beach but inside Sinai on Wilshire, the same temple to which she has belonged the entirety of her marriage, even though her husband and daughter do not find conservative Judaism as rewarding as she does (once they called it “conformist,” she stopped asking them to come to services with her).
This bothers her more than she’d admit, but her rabbi tells her that faith cannot be forced, and for the most part, she agrees.
She loves her husband. David is a good man and a kind father and a great partner, and she knows how rare it is to find all three.
He calls to ask if there’s anything she needs him to pick up on his way home from work, and he puts his shoes away from the door, and he makes sure sex is fulfilling.
She does not mean to make their marriage seem robotic, convenient, or even equitable; it is none of those things.
Dave never remembers to close doors or put away socks or make doctor’s appointments.
He’d never prepared a meal for himself, not even toast. Marcella’s marriage is remarkable and unfair, as many marriages are.
Today Marcella is in an argument with Sylvia—the same one she has had countless times before.
Marcella does not know why Sylvia insists on leaving the gate open at night, or forgetting to lock it, as the case may be.
Her mother is nearing ninety-two, but that is no excuse, because her memory fails her nowhere else but this one, singular thing. Their safety.
“You’re so uptight,” Sylvia tells her, a familiar refrain. It frustrates Marcella—that she has been cast as the tightly wound coil to Sylvia’s free-flowing silk. It isn’t fair that women are chastised for freedom while young and condemned for order later.
“I just want to make sure no criminals come up off the beach and into our home while we are sleeping,” Marcella says. “Is that really too much to ask?”
“When has that happened even once in the decades we’ve lived here?” Sylvia says.
It only takes one, Marcella thinks, and she knows her mother can sense the words, even if she doesn’t say them out loud.
Sometimes Marcella wonders how she would have turned out if she had had a mother who loved rules.
Would she have been a free spirit? Worn long dresses?
Traded her name into Sanskrit? If she hadn’t had to keep the rails on, might her daughter see her differently?
Might she see her as someone sparkly, too?
Someone who she’d want to drink wine at night with and tell her secrets to?
Lauren has always been closer to Sylvia than she is to Marcella.
Are we all just the antithesis of where we come from?
The phone rings, startling her away from this repetitive argument. Lauren is calling.
“Hi, Laur.”
Marcella picks up on the first ring, aware that this seems slightly desperate, and then annoyed that she is able to clock such things, that she still wants to seem cool and busy to her daughter—is still trying to convince Lauren that she has her own life, her own priorities.
Anything that might remind her daughter that she is more than her mother and Dave’s wife.
“I’m going to come out tonight,” Lauren says.
She doesn’t ask, which bothers Marcella, but not for the reasons you’d think.
It bothers her because she sees the house as the ocean, not as home, and Marcella wants her to feel this is her home, still.
To not just visit Broad Beach for the waves—a weekend, stay over and surf on Saturday—but for her, for their family.
“Great,” Marcella says. “Sylvia is cooking.”
“It’s Friday,” Lauren says, when she might as well say, Obviously.
Marcella can hear Lauren rattling around with some papers and assumes she is busy, so she pretends she is. “I have to run. I’m setting up for cards.”
“Have fun. See you later.”
In another moment, silence.
Her card game hasn’t met in almost two months because Cindy Miller got Covid and then no one wanted to get together, even after the five days had passed, and then schedules were conflicting, and now she wonders if she has a weekly game at all.
The front door opens, and Dave comes through.
“Sweetheart,” he says. “How about some breakfast?”
It’s past nine in the morning, and she knows he has been up for hours.
She assumes he went surfing, and then to coffee, because that’s his usual, although sometimes it’s the other way around.
She does not think about the possibility that he has been to Lauren’s, that they have shared their version of family before Marcella even awakens.
“Sure!” she says. She goes upstairs to get her sun hat. When she comes back down he’s asleep on the couch. She covers him with a blanket, noting the oatmeal stain on his shirt.