The Red Book (31 page)

“Oh my God, no, Dad. No! Ugh, TMI!”

“TMI?” says Jane, stepping back into the living room. Argot changes so fast, she thinks. It’s impossible to keep up in one language, let alone two. Which was it again,
I know, right
, or
I know, all right
? Funny how slipping up on that one had led to Ellen’s much more revelatory slipup. A gift, that knowledge, as painful as it still feels to process.

“Too much information,” says Mia, noticing her infant in Jane’s arms. Her sleeping, quiet infant, who should have been in the Pack ’n Play downstairs. “Why do you have Zoe?”

“Sophie was using her as a transitional object, but otherwise she’s fine. Although you might want to check her diaper.”

“Jesus, Eli! How could you let this happen?” says Jonathan as Mia takes the baby in her arms, sniffs her rear end, and smells the crusted feces in which she’s been marinating for God knows how long. “And what sex were you referring to before when you said . . . ?” Jonathan suddenly notices the absence of both Max and Trilby and, duh, finally puts two and two together. Oh, God, he thinks. Please let Mia not have come to the same conclusion. She won’t handle it well in her lactating, pissed-off, hormonally altered state.

“Eli, where are Max and Trilby?” says Mia. Her voice has a sharp bite to it.

Too late, thinks Jonathan. She’s too smart. Always has been, sometimes to her detriment. There is no way for this to end well. He’d seen Max eyeing Trilby when they first walked into Jane’s house on Friday night. He’d mentioned their son’s painfully obvious crush to Mia, after she came home from the police station, but she’d been so tired and bedraggled and angry at Gunner for the “Those fucking Jews” comment, she said, “Trilby? Are you kidding me? That girl is trouble with a capital
T
. And besides, Max is so not there yet, emotionally.” Jonathan disagreed with both of her assertions, but for the sake of marital accord, he kept his mouth shut, a talent he credits with the longevity and harmony of their union. Although now that she’s asking all sorts of questions about their finances (which are in such a shambles right now, he’s missed two mortgage payments on the house in Antibes), he’s not sure how much longer he can keep up the cheery facade. He’ll level with her tomorrow, he thinks. Before the memorial service. No, after. She’s always in a more forgiving state after a good cry over untimely deaths.

Addison starts to laugh, nervously. “Oh my God, Max and Trilby? I didn’t see
that
one coming.” Oops, she thinks. Indelicate word choice again. But wait, fourteen? Isn’t that a little young to be messing around? Actually no, she reckons, remembering the first time she and Gunner had sex in his room at Foster, when his roommate was off in Concord having dinner with his parents. Addison’s and Gunner’s folks both claimed some last-minute illnesses meant to mask the fact that they were actually too drunk to show up, so the two of them decided to take advantage of the nearly empty campus to soothe their feelings of abandonment and loneliness together: a terrible premise for a relationship, in retrospect. She and her future husband were only a few months older than Trilby is now, if that, since Trilby is one of the oldest in her class. Jesus. How does that even happen? One day, she’s a baby sucking milk from her mother’s breasts, the next she’s a young woman stuffing her own breasts into—and now out of, in all likelihood—a push-up bra. Nothing like a daughter’s budding sexuality to make one feel like a dried-up crone. Where did the years go?

“Where are they?” says Mia.

“Nowhere,” says Eli.

“Eli Zane, that’s enough,” says Mia. “I demand to know where your brother and Trilby are right now.” Zoe, sensing her mother’s stress, wakes up, alarmed, and begins to pout.

“Give me the baby,” says Jonathan, knowing Mia’s inclination for going from zero to sixty in a baby-dropping instant. “I’ll deal with her.” He takes Zoe from his wife and heads to the door leading down to the basement, only to be blocked by Eli, who jumps in front of him.

“Don’t go down there!” says Eli, standing in front of the door and startling Zoe with the panicked timber of his voice to the point where her pout turns into a full-throttled wail.

“I have to,” says Jonathan. “Her diapers are down there.”

“Actually, I moved them up here,” says Mia, picking the diaper bag up off the floor. “
So the boys could change her if she shat herself
.”

Zoe hears the seething rage in her mother’s voice and goes straight from crying to DEFCON 1.

“Let me have the baby,” says Clover, who’s never changed or soothed a screaming infant in her life but figures she should probably start somewhere. Despite Mia’s and Jonathan’s protestations, she grabs the diaper bag from the former, the baby from the latter, and carries an apoplectic Zoe into the back of the house, in search of quiet and dark.

“Just use my mom’s bed,” says Jane, remembering the first Christmas when she brought infant Sophie home to Boston, and Claire insisted on changing her grandchild’s diapers on a purple towel she’d set up at the foot of her bed.

Eli, feeling guilty for outing Max and Trilby, opens the door to the basement and shouts down the stairs. “Max! Mom and Dad are here!”

Trilby wakes up first, with a start. “Shit,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “Wasn’t he supposed to text us?”

Max, who’s still unraveling the threads of consciousness, stares into the face of his cell phone, as if searching for the answers to the universe: nothing. No text, no note,
nothing
. “I’m going to fucking kill him,” he says.

“Dress first, kill later,” says Trilby, tossing him his boxer shorts and quickly donning her own undies and pulling up the left strap of her bra just as Mia storms down the stairs, followed closely on the heels by Addison and Jonathan, both of whom tried but failed to convince Mia to give the kids a few minutes to pull themselves together before confronting them with their real crime, leaving children unattended.

Jane stands at the top of the basement stairs, half in, half out, wondering whether to intervene, thinking she should probably get Mia and Jonathan a new set of sheets. Best to stand up here for now, she thinks, unless it gets all Capulet and Montaguey, which it could, knowing those two. Back when they were roommates, Mia and Addison had the most volatile of all of their individual relationships, starting from that time sophomore year when Mia found out that Addison had kept her from joining the Signet with her one-word description of Jane and Mia as
suburbanites
. Jane couldn’t have cared less, but Mia had been crushed to the point where she still mentions it, on occasion, albeit in an ostensibly self-deprecating way.

“Max Zane, you are
grounded for life
!” Mia yells, momentarily shocked into silence at the sight of Trilby’s right breast. “And you, young lady,” she says curtly, after the pause, “put on some clothes.” She picks up off the ground and tosses to Trilby the Vaginal Discharge T-shirt containing Max’s used condom, the latter which lands with a messy splat on Mia’s open-toed sandal.

A week later, IMing over Facebook, Trilby and Max will refer to this moment as the “splat heard ’round the world.” But for now, everyone in the room—at least for the next few seconds—has chosen to ignore it.

“Excuse me, Mia,” Addison says, “but what gives you the right to speak to my daughter that way?”

Trilby pulls up her right bra strap and puts on the T-shirt, which thankfully is a men’s large and reaches all the way down to her knees.

“I have every right to speak to your daughter that way,” says Mia, picking the condom up off her shoe and holding it aloft. “She
seduced my son
!”

Max’s face turns bright crimson. “Oh my God, Mom, please!”

Mia checks to make sure the nearby trash can is lined before tossing the condom in.

At this point, Trilby is keeping her eyes firmly fixed on her toes while Max, Jonathan, and Addison all yell at once.

Max: “She didn’t seduce me! It was totally mutual!”

Jonathan: “Oh, come on, Mia, lay off the poor kids, this is embarrassing enough as is!”

Addison: “For Christ’s sake, Mia, she’s
fourteen
!”

The
fourteen
rises above the chorus of anger and hangs there, midair.

“You’re fourteen?” says Max.

“I thought you knew,” says Trilby.

“She was also a virgin before tonight,” says Addison. “Not that a girl’s past sexual experience should even figure in the realm of finger-pointing, but—”

“Mom! Oh my God!” Trilby is mortified. “I told you that in confidence!”

“You were a virgin?” Max takes Trilby’s hand tenderly in his.

“Yes,” she says, feeling on the verge of tears for the second time tonight, not because she’s sad but because of all the reactions a teenage boy could have had to this revelation under trying circumstances, Max’s grabbing her hand with such compassion and—dare she even imagine it—
love
would have been the last response she would have ever expected. She was right this morning, watching him stir the pancake batter with Sophie. Max truly is special. With him, she could do
anything
. Or at least be the best version of herself possible. She vows to earn enough money babysitting this fall to return the cash she stole from Jonathan’s wallet.

“Well, that makes two of us,” says Max. He now has his entire arm around Trilby, a united postvirginal front against the adults. The Post-Virgins, he thinks. An excellent name for a band. Or at least a hell of a lot better than Vaginal Discharge, two truly unfortunate words to be abutted together and plastered in gigantic scarlet letters across Trilby’s chest at this particular juncture.

“Max, for heaven’s sake,” says Mia. “You’re applying to college this year! You can’t afford to screw up like this!”

“Screw up like what?” says Max. His mother saw the condom. Clearly she realizes they were being smart about protection.

“My question exactly,” says Addison. “How does what went on in this room have anything to do with Max’s chances of getting into college?”

“Addison, let’s not forget you were in
jail
last night! Okay?
Jail!
”

Jane starts walking down the basement stairs, quickly.

“For parking tickets, Mia! That I didn’t pay twenty years ago! Who knew they even kept records of such things, and besides, what does my being in jail have to do with my daughter? Or Max’s college applications? What’s gotten into you, Mia? Why do you always have to be so fucking judgmental?”

“Oh, please. You’ve been judging me ever since the day you met me. ‘
Suburbanite
’? Remember that?”

“Mia, you’re not in your right mind,” says Jonathan, trying to calm his wife down.

“Come on, guys,” says Clover, heading down the stairs. She lays a clean, changed, blissfully sleeping Zoe into the Pack ’n Play. It took her a ton of wipes and elbow grease, but in the end, when the baby was finally free of the crusted-on poop, Clover started making funny faces, really meeting Zoe’s gaze, and Zoe started to giggle, and then Clover sang “Amazing Grace” into the baby’s ear, the song her mother used to sing into her ear, and Zoe collapsed into a fragrant heap in Clover’s arms. Magical, she thought, that moment when the baby goes from being a wriggly mass of sound and sinew to silent dead weight. She silently prays to whichever fertility gods happen to be on weekend duty to bless her with her own. “What’s going on here?”

“Oh, same old, same old,” says Jane. “Addison and Mia are having a tiff.”

“Oh boy,” says Clover.

Addison looks as if she might explode, but the presence of a sleeping baby tempers her volume. “Oh my God, Mia!” she shout-whispers. “I said I was sorry about that stupid suburbanite thing
years
ago! Yes, okay, I was a haughty, entitled twit in college. We were all twits in college. Clover with her inferiority complex—”

“Gee, thanks,” says Clover.

“Jane with her inability to let loose and have fun—”

“I let loose and have fun,” says Jane, trying and failing to disinter from memory a single example.

“And you with your provinciality, your constant need for adulation—”

“Hey, that’s not fair—”

“I’m not saying it’s fair, and it’s certainly not an accurate description of you now, but that was my impression of you back then. Look, none of us was perfect, and for heaven’s sake, none of us is perfect now. Why do you keep bringing up the same shit, over and over again? It’s done, Mia. It’s in the past. Let’s move on already. And I will ask you once again: What does any of this have to do with my daughter and your son?”

Max and Trilby, who will soon discover over the course of their Skype-enabled relationship that they share a love of all things Harry Potter, are staring down at their toes, wishing for an invisibility cloak.

“It’s just . . . I don’t want Max to have any unnecessary distractions this year, okay? He has to stay focused on getting into a good college.”

“Mom!” Max clenches his fist and is about to speak up when Addison lets loose.

“Jesus Christ, Mia,” says Addison, “you’ve got to be kidding me! What, so he can get into Harvard? For all the good it’s done both of us, you’d think you’d be a little more dubious about the Ivy League arms race. It means nothing, Mia. Nothing! Some of the most successful people I know never even went to college!”

Jane physically places herself between Addison and Mia, as if twenty years haven’t passed and they’re all back in the womb of the Adams House dining hall, their aggrieved gestures trailing sunlit swirls of cigarette smoke across the arched windows along Bow Street. “Come on, you two, this is crazy. Addison, she’s allowed to worry about Max getting into college. Her worry is misplaced in this particular instance, as it has nothing to do with poor Max and Trilby here, but for argument’s sake, you can’t actually claim that having Harvard on a résumé isn’t an asset, especially in this crap economy.”

“It was life altering for me,” says Clover.

“I wouldn’t say it was life altering for me,” says Jane, “but it definitely helped me land my first job, which is not insignificant. On the other hand, I might have actually learned more about journalism in a school where it was a concentration rather than an extracurricular, but that’s beside the—”