“Aw, thanks. There’s this adorable little jewelry place I went to when Nick and I were visiting Beantown. I thought of you the whole time. What a kick it must have been to grow up there. All the shows!”
“It was nice.”
“Do you get back there often?”
“Not that much. The last time I was there—God, I don’t think I’ve been there since my last Harvard reunion.”
Never misses a chance, Emily thought.
“Ooooh, Harvard! I forgot you went there!”
“Oh, let’s not get into Harvard,” Marla said, waving it off, a few bangles clinking against her narrow wrist.
“You know who you’re like? JFK! Funny factoid, but he went there too.”
Marla smiled weakly, and Emily could already see beads of sweat forming on her mother’s freshly waxed upper lip. “Well, I don’t think I’m that much like JFK, but I’ll take the compliment.” Marla had a distaste for Catholics that made little sense. It was an attitude more typical of lapsed Catholics with nightmarish memories of parochial school. Marla said her anger came from perfectly justifiable outrage over anti-Semitism, but Emily thought it seemed odd to single out Catholics for that. She was fairly certain that Marla’s prejudice had more to do with a girl from her high school in Boston named Colleen Sweeney—a transfer from a Catholic girls’ school—who in 1973 had won both the Latin award and the science award, two awards Marla believed she deserved. The Colleen story had been told to Emily various times over the course of her childhood, with a different moral each time. Once, the takeaway was that even if you fail at something when you are younger, you can always grow up to prove your critics wrong. (At the end of the story, Marla gleefully revealed that Colleen later turned out to be a stay-at-home mom.) Another time, she ended the story with the assertion that even if you are brilliant, if you don’t work hard enough, some “idiot” with a better work ethic could beat you.
“So how is the psychiatry racket going?” Susan asked.
“Psychology, actually.” It was a distinction that Marla wasn’t proud of, and Emily was surprised she even owned up to it.
Susan turned to Emily. “What a kick, growing up with a mom who’s a therapist! Did she ever diagnose you with anything?”
“Um, yes.” Emily dug her heel into the lawn. “I mean, she diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder. And some other stuff that she later revised.”
She regretted saying it as soon as the words left her mouth. Susan placed one hand over her freckled chest, another over her mouth, her eyes widening as if she’d just found out that Emily had a terminal illness.
“It’s not a big deal,” Emily said. “Honestly.”
“Marla,” Susan gasped. “I had no idea! I am so sorry.”
“It’s nothing to feel bad about,” Marla said. “Emily has had her fair share of challenges, but it’s very important to us that we strive to help her function as well as she possibly can.”
“Mom, I’m literally right here.”
“Well, this is nothing you don’t know. I never wanted you to be treated differently because you struggle with anxiety. It was hard enough that you were profoundly gifted. Trying to help you assimilate socially proved challenging for me.”
“Okay, I’m getting some food now.” Emily took David’s arm and waved goodbye to the four parents. She panicked for a moment, worrying that in her absence Marla would unleash embarrassing stories about her worst anxiety attacks—like the time when she was fourteen and she cried in a restaurant because she suspected a waiter had not washed his hands after using the bathroom and her parents made her eat her baked ziti anyway. But knowing Marla, she would try to keep her conversation with Susan as mercifully brief as possible.
“They’ll be fine,” David said, squeezing her hand.
Nick went to man the grill, donning an apron with a corny Mr. Good Lookin’ is Cookin’ slogan next to a cartoon of a goofy, big-eared and big-nosed barbecuing man with a head two times bigger than his body. Nick sometimes made Emily wistful; she couldn’t help comparing him to her own father, who spent family dinners deriding other faculty members he was convinced were trying to sabotage his chances at tenure.
“My dad has already texted me since I’ve gotten here,” David said, looking at his phone. “Why does he do this? This one just says, Dave, so proud of you! You have really become a man!”
“It’s cute. He cares about you, and he still thinks texting is new and fun.”
“Yeah, but I’m like ten feet away from him.”
“I can’t really blame him. When you come home it...well, I think it reminds him of your mom.” Emily still felt uncomfortable approaching the topic of David’s mother. No matter how angry she got with Marla, she didn’t think she’d be able to go on if Marla died. She didn’t understand how David didn’t break down crying now and again. She liked to think he showed that people could bounce back from tragedy, but instead his calm attitude signified that she was just far too emotional compared to normal people, and that if and when her mother did die, she’d suddenly collapse and die too.
“I just don’t need to hear how proud he is of me every time I eat a Hot Pocket,” David said.
“At least he’s proud of you.”
“Yeah, well.” He took a swig of beer. “I guess when my brother is the only other child he has to compare me to, I seem like Richard Branson meets Nelson Mandela.”
She wondered if David ever felt that her praise and affection was too smothering. He never said so, but if he found it so irritating coming from Nick, he must occasionally feel the same way about her staring at him while he watched basketball, putting cute little notes on the bathroom mirror for him, and sending him heart emoji for no reason during the workday. She had tried to play hard-to-get when they were first dating, but it was so difficult not to fall off the wagon and start inundating him with kisses and compliments.
Emily looked over at the barbecue guests through the haze of smoke and flies. There was Jason, T-shirt slightly too small and revealing his belly, raising his arms in the air in what appeared to be a low-effort version of the Macarena. He was drunk.
“We are going to have an epic wedding week!” he cheered, raising his Heineken. He had finally stopped sulking about Christina’s presence. It helped that she avoided him as much as possible. She had taken a liking to Joss, one of Susan’s fiftysomething granola-ish friends from the cat shelter where she volunteered, and the two of them were huddled in the corner having girl talk.
“You do you” Emily heard Christina say.
“Your brother is getting drunk,” David said.
“No shit.” Emily laughed. “Hey, where’s your brother?”
“Hmm, I don’t know. I assumed he’d be out of his cave by now.” He looked for Nathan, and finally spotted him at the back door, half-hidden by a wooden column. He called out to him. “Nathan! Aren’t you going to say hi?”
Nathan trudged over. He was only a few years younger than David, but Emily often thought of him as if he were a teenager because it was hard to remember he wasn’t. He lived at home with Nick and Susan, and although he was usually eager to boast about his superior intelligence, he didn’t have any work history or accomplishments to show for his self-evaluated IQ of 170. He was rotund, with flappy triangular man boobs outlined in sweat on his black T-shirt. His shoulder-length brown hair was gathered into a greasy ponytail. Growing along the underside of his double chin was an untrimmed beard with the texture of pubic hair. He was wearing his uniform: a faux leather trench coat, cargo shorts, white Nike sneakers, and a gray tweed dollar-store fedora.
“Salutations, David,” he said. “Susan suggested I wear