“Well, I won’t even eat anything, so I don’t think anyone would even notice me. What day is it again?”
“Next Saturday.”
“Oh,” Stephanie looked down at her hands, as if discovering them for the first time. She shrugged. “Saturday is actually no good for me. I’m going to a reconstructed Druid bonfire that day. Poop! This totally sucks! There’s no way we can do another day?”
“What, like, reschedule my wedding?”
“Oh, of course not! What was I thinking? You probably already paid all the fancy caterers and whatnot. Can we hang out a different day?”
“Let’s totally do that next time I’m in town,” she said with no intention of returning to New York for at least a year. Next holiday season, she would definitely try to go on vacation with David alone, to somewhere warm and peaceful where she could wear a bikini and a breezy cotton kimono. Slighting both sets of parents for the holidays seemed easier than slighting only one—at least they couldn’t be accused of favoritism. The previous year, they had visited his parents, because they had seen her parents the year before that. With her parents in Westchester and his in Fairfield, Connecticut, they could easily visit both in one trip, but whichever family paid for the ticket seemed to feel horribly insulted if they spent even a few minutes seeing the other family. Emily learned that the hard way when she visited her own family for the holidays and made the mistake of seeing David’s parents for lunch one day. For the rest of the week, her mother lamented that they were “stealing” her and deliberately trying to destroy what little Emily’s parents had left of a family. This somehow devolved into the accusation that David’s Catholic father was trying to steal her away and convert her to Catholicism because “for them it’s not enough for Jews to be only two percent of the population, they want us at zero percent.” The holidays had gone from something Emily enjoyed celebrating as a child—in a secular, Claymation-movie-based sort of way—to something she dreaded each year.
“What about Friday?” Stephanie asked. “Are you free to chill at my place?”
“Your place in Brooklyn?”
“Yeah, it’ll be low-key. We can just chill for an hour or so.”
“I mean, I’m staying with my parents in Westchester. Also, that’s the day of the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, you know...it’s kind of a busy day.”
“I’m sure you have an hour free. Come see me! I never see you anymore!” She jutted out her lower lip like a kid begging for a rainbow slushy.
“Well, actually it would be like, three or four hours if you include the commute.”
“Figure it out! Don’t be a party pooper! We can smoke a little weed, drink the home brew that my neighbor made and watch Nosferatu. It’ll be rad.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” She squeezed David’s hand, as if to send a distress signal, but he already knew she was distressed and seemed to have no intention of intervening.
“Sweet, let’s totally do that!” She tried to high-five Emily. “Shit, my Uber is here. I have to go.”
“No worries, I’ll see you later.”
Emily waited until she was gone and turned to David.
“Why does she even like me? What about me is even likable to a person like that?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but her interest in you is just as confusing to me as it is to you.”
“We’re talking about someone who uses her emergency allowance money to go to Burning Man. What does she want with me? My organs?”
“Possibly,” David said with a grin. “Since you went grain-free, your digestive system is probably top-notch.”
* * *
Emily got chills when she saw her father, Steven, behind the wheel of his gray Volvo waiting to pick them up at the airport. This sight brought her back to the terrifying days when Steven attempted to teach her how to drive, shouting “Ah!” and “Ooh!” every time the car went above two miles per hour. Now, at twenty-eight, she was still afraid of actually taking her road test. Fortunately, in San Francisco everyone just took Uber.
Steven looked older to her, even though he and Emily’s mother, Marla, had visited her in San Francisco the year before. He had gained some weight that had settled in his lower face. He had slightly less hair and a slightly longer beard with more gray in both. He was only sixty-three, which she knew wasn’t really that old, but she often felt ripped off when she considered that her older siblings would wind up with more years of living parents than she would. Then again, he was only thirty-five when he had her. Having a child at thirty-five was no longer old by current standards. If anything it seemed recklessly young compared to what people attempted in San Francisco. Emily always dreamed of having her first child at thirty, but now that she was in her late twenties, such an act seemed outrageously premature. People who had children before thirty were part of the multitudes who occupied the land mass between New York and California, watching game shows, trampling each other in Walmart on Black Friday and remaining shockingly unaware of gluten. She knew it was classist to think that way, but she couldn’t help it. She blamed Linda.
Emily’s boss was an overachieving blonde Amazon who firmly believed that a person was incapable of committing to another person properly until they were both forty and had a net worth of over a million dollars (each). Linda proudly regaled her with stories about how she had the foresight to freeze her eggs at the age of thirty-seven, only to fertilize them at the age of forty-eight when she met her sixty-year-old husband. “In this technologically advanced day and age,” Linda said, in her usual chipper but abrasive tone, “women no longer need to get married. My little Harper won’t get married until I’m dead. That’s the rule.” Then she laughed and added, “Not literally, of course. But she better not be under forty, or I’m not paying for that wedding! Unless she’s already at C-level. She’s gifted, so it’s not a totally crazy idea!”
Whenever Emily thought about how difficult her own mother was, she contemplated little three-year-old Harper, only allowed to watch PBS and forbidden from playing with dolls or anything that would discourage her from a career in science or engineering, the only acceptable fields for a woman in Linda’s world, despite the fact that Linda worked in PR. Linda didn’t want Harper wearing makeup or pink frilly dresses, but Linda got her roots touched up every few weeks, wore fitted, surprisingly sexy sheath dresses to work and never left the house without her fuchsia lipstick and heavy mascara. Eventually, Harper would start asking questions, especially if she was really so gifted, and the result wouldn’t be pretty. Emily still recalled Linda’s chilly, thin-lipped response when she had told her about the possibility of an American Girl Place opening up in Union Square and how much fun Harper would have there. Poor Harper was a science experiment from day one, as if Linda were playing The Sims and wanted to build the perfect Sim from the beginning—complete with the right genetics, the right skills, the right interests. But wait! Screw Harper! Harper only saw her mother for two hours a day, but Emily had to work with her and suffer her unsolicited pseudo-maternal advice for nine hours a day. Every time Linda opened her mouth to dispense some pointless aphorism, usually along the lines of “dump your fiancé and focus more on your career, but of course you can have it all, just not in your twenties,” Emily cringed as she realized she was literally growing older with every second that she spent with her. Emily deserved far more sympathy than stupid Harper. Harper was naturally blonde anyway—life would come easily for her.
“Emily!” her dad called out. She ran toward the car. The sweatpants were too hot now that she was being hit with the humid air of New York in June, not to mention that her legs were double-insulated with both sweatpants and blood-clot-preventing socks. Sometimes she felt she should be compensated just for living with anxiety and all the inconveniences that came with being a hypochondriac. Could she possibly enroll herself in some kind of medical study? It would certainly