Forty-Two
Finn discovered Fern’s amphetamine drops during her senior year of high school and took her straight to the family pediatrician, who, after lecturing her about the dangers of speed, poured the remainder of the bottle down the drain and made her promise never to use them again.
The following week, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Democrat she was furious that Fern had been careless enough to get caught.
“I mean,” Honey said, handing Fern a Tab from the refrigerator, “there’s no denying you look terrific. ”
The weight had come back on slowly but surely.
“I thought it was the freshman ten, not the freshman twenty,” Honey said sourly when Fern came home for the college winter break.
But by then, Fern didn’t care. While at nursing school she’d started volunteering at a local home for the elderly for extra credit.
She discovered a thrilling authority within herself when dealing with the patients.
So many of them were lonely and confused, and if some of her peers avoided spending time with older patients, Fern gravitated to them.
Her stutter wasn’t gone, but every time she made a move away from childhood and toward adulthood, her speech improved.
Most of the residents of Maplewood Manor were hard of hearing or had mild dementia, and if they noticed her stutter they never said a thing. This made her brave.
One night, as she helped calm a distressed resident after supper, speaking to her soothingly and telling her made up stories about a baker in town called Mr. Cannoli, the nurse on duty praised her.
“You’re very good at this, Fern. Not everyone at your age—at any age!
—has that kind of patience with older people. ”
By the time she graduated from nursing school, she knew she wanted to go on to a graduate program in hospice care. “But it’s so depressing,” Honey groaned. “My god, Fern, dying people all day. Why not work in the nursery with all the new babies. Life-affirming!”
How to explain to Honey that helping people face the end of their lives was the most life-affirming thing she could possibly think to do. It fulfilled her. It calmed her.
Fern was the only person in the two families not blindsided by Dune and Bridie’s romance.
After that early morning in the driveway, when she watched her father and Nina drive away, the irreparable rupture in her life seemed to grant her a kind of superpower.
How, Finn and Nina’s children asked themselves over and over in the weeks and months following the elopement, had they not seen what had to have been right in front of them? How were they so easily fooled?
As she got older, she developed an eerie intuition about which couples would last and which ones wouldn’t.
So many times on the way home from a party or a dinner with a group of friends Fern would say to Naomi, “Elizabeth and Rashid aren’t doing well.
” Or, “Boy, Manuel is not into George,” or, “I think Mona is seeing someone behind Richard’s back,” and Naomi would say, “You’re nuts. ”
Naomi eventually stopped saying it because Fern was nearly always right.
Sometimes it would take months, sometimes years, but Fern’s second sense about who was happy and who was not was nearly flawless.
Two couples had outlasted her predictions, and she still felt it was only a matter of time.
“It’s kind of remarkable,” Naomi said repeatedly.
“And totally useless,” Fern would always reply.
What good was having a superpower that was unwelcome or downright bad news?
It wasn’t like anyone would be excited to hear her project or, even worse, confirm that she’d seen the dissolution of a relationship even before the parties involved admitted it to themselves. It was a useless trick.
But she was also quite good at spotting coupledom before it happened.
Like at the fundraiser where Bridie and Dune ended up sitting next to each other and she’d watched their body language over the course of a few hours go from awkward to curious.
If Dune hadn’t embarrassed himself, she figured they were an hour away from making out in his car.
Even so, she was surprised by the buffeting waves of anger and confusion when they confirmed her suspicions.
“Be happy for them,” Naomi said to her the next morning, after endless rounds of conversation the previous night. “If they have feelings for each other and it works out, why not be happy?”
“Because it’s déjà vu all over again.”
“What?”
“Yogi Berra.”
“Yogi Bear?”
“Never mind.” Fern had to stop using sports references. Naomi was a violinist in the philharmonic and thought Reggie Jackson was an abstract painter.
“They’ll dredge it all up again. Our parents.”
“You all talk about Nina and Finn as if they weren’t just another older couple, coasting into retirement. Doing their cruise ship thing. They’re not that interesting!”
Fern didn’t know what to say. She’d thought a lot of things about their family, families, but not interesting? Not in a million years.
“As an outsider, would you like to know what I see?” Naomi asked.
“Not particularly,” Fern said.
Naomi barreled ahead. “I see two middle-aged people who have a decent relationship but still end up bickering over how best to drive a mile and a half to the store. I see a woman who complains about her spouse snoring and a man who thinks his wife should cook more. I see two people who seem to have a fine relationship, but who are also mortal beings you all invest with some kind of unearned superpower. Honestly? The most interesting thing they ever did was run away and get married.”
Fern turned and walked into the kitchen, dumped the cold coffee from her mug into the sink—her hand was trembling from too much coffee, or too much of something.
Naomi followed and Fern waited for her to apologize.
But she just stood there. “I love you,” Naomi finally said.
“But maybe it’s time to let some stuff go. ”
“My mother is going to lose her shit, and I’m going to have to pick up the pieces all over again. Why didn’t I leave this town when I had the chance?” She turned to see Naomi’s stricken face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry. I just meant—”
“I give up,” Naomi said, holding up her hands to stop Fern’s apology. “I need to practice.”
She stormed upstairs to the guest room, which was also her music studio.
Fern sighed. She could hear Naomi furiously tuning the violin, shrieks where there were usually gentle moans.
“Don’t take it out on the instrument!” she yelled up the stairs.
Silence and then a quick run of notes, the opening chords of the theme from Love Story.
Not quite forgiveness, but an offering. Fern would take it.
She could not screw this up, the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Naomi had walked into the ER one night during Fern’s nursing rotation with a nasty cut on her inner arm, just above the elbow.
She was in a state, she explained to Fern, she’d cut her arm clearing an old fence from her yard, which was so dumb because she was a violinist and couldn’t possibly have limited use of an arm.
After a quick look, Fern knew Naomi would be okay.
In spite of an impressive amount of blood, the laceration was superficial.
“There’s no tendon or muscle damage,” Fern reassured her.
“You need a few stitches and it will be sore for forty-eight hours, but your arm will be fine.”
As Fern cleaned the arm and assembled a suturing kit, she and Naomi chatted. Naomi had just moved to Rochester and had a lot of questions about neighborhoods and restaurants and where to shop. “You’re very good at this,” Naomi said as Fern gently stitched the wound closed. “I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s the lidocaine,” Fern said. “But I do try to be gentle.” As she was signing the discharge papers for Naomi and explaining where to go to fill the antibiotic prescription, Naomi stared at Fern, both intent and amused.
Fern squirmed a little. “Would you be interested in having coffee one of these days?” Naomi asked.
Fern understood exactly what Naomi was asking. Fern rarely dated. She didn’t click with men, and she’d never seriously considered that she might click with women, but the way her heart was racing under Naomi’s very direct gaze made her think again. “I’d love that,” she said.
Fern tried not to indulge (she knew it was indulgent) her ongoing anger as unwitting observer of Finn and Nina’s leaving that morning.
She knew all the clichés—the past was past, they’d all survived, nobody was dead, nobody was dying (or, they were all dying, some more slowly than others). They were fine.
“You saw them leave?” Naomi asked when Fern told her about the infamous night at her bathroom window. “Do they know you saw them?”
“Nina knows,” Fern said. “I never told anyone else.”
“But that’s crazy. Not even your father? Your mother? Why not? I don’t understand.”
And that was the problem. For all her intelligence and empathy and insight, Naomi couldn’t really understand.
Naomi’s family was like a Life magazine feature about WASPs in New England: How they live now!
She had two parents who had been together for thirty-three years.
She had a brother who was an attorney in Boston.
Both Naomi and her brother had gone to fancy boarding schools and fancy colleges.
After Juilliard, Naomi ended up at the Rochester Philharmonic.
She talked to her father and mother every day, about silly everyday things.
Nobody cried. Nobody yelled. Her parents’ lefty politics left room for everyone.
Her pediatrician father had opened a clinic in Roxbury when nobody in Roxbury had the money for regular health care.
Her attorney mother had been a school desegregation activist, a vocal supporter of the ERA, and when Naomi was thirteen had casually said to her, “If you’re interested in girls don’t be afraid to tell us. ”
It was all confounding to Fern. The idea that a family unit could live so convivially and peacefully, supporting one another and enjoying one another’s company.
“It’s not all as rosy as you picture it,” Naomi tried to tell her.
“A lot of stuff gets pushed down and none of us dig too deep in what I’m sure is an unhealthy way. But it is pleasant.”
Pleasant, that was the word. Naomi’s family was pleasant and peaceful and comforting, while her family always seemed to be standing on shaky ground.
Fern supposed she shouldn’t be surprised since all had been relatively calm for years—so, of course.
Of course. Bridie and Dune. Goddamn. But maybe Naomi was right.
Maybe nobody even talked, much less thought, about the Finnegans and the Larkins.
And in some perverted way, she was grateful that the families had depleted their reserves of shock back in 1977.
Like when she came out to her family a few years ago.
What were they all supposed to say? How dare you?
Finn was excessively supportive. Dune appropriately blasé.
Bridie offered to orchestrate a meal or conversation with her father, and Fern gently and deftly dissuaded her.
Even Honey, God bless her, had stifled her obvious shock and patted Fern’s shoulder reassuringly.
“I love you no matter what,” she’d said, surprising Fern who’d been braced for disdain, refusal, objections about lesbians not shaving their legs.
That Naomi was so talented and credentialed and composed, regal even, helped because she intimidated Honey.
“I have something to tell you,” Honey said shyly shortly after that afternoon.
“Maybe I’m not the only one to have a—a—special friend. ”
“Mom!” Fern said, genuinely thrilled. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Oh, don’t call him that. I’m far too old for that word.”
His name was Hank. Hank! Fern didn’t know why she was so thrilled by his name except that it felt like anyone named Hank would be a solid human, and Honey’s Hank didn’t disappoint. Stocky. Cheerful. Strong. And he doted on Honey as she feigned annoyance.
But now what? While they were all still living on Cambridge Road, Fern and Clara and Bridie had made feeble gestures toward staying friends, but whenever they got together it turned into a self-pitying game of What They Hadn’t Known and then into a tortuous standoff over which parent was most at fault.
Too many conversations ended in tears or shouting for them to have the will to continue.
And now Bridie was going to be her sister-in-law.
“Ridiculous,” she said to her empty kitchen. “Totally ridiculous.”