And then, Elizabeth came. One evening her first week home, carrying a tasteful but clearly expensive flower arrangement that Maribeth recognized as coming from the florist they used for visiting celebrities.
“Elizabeth!” Maribeth’s mother exclaimed. “How wonderful of you to come. And those flowers. Are those peonies? In October? They must have cost a fortune.”
“Hello, Mrs. Klein.”
“It’s Evelyn,” Maribeth’s mother corrected, as she had done for more than twenty years now. “You look gorgeous! That coat is beautiful. Is it wool? Maribeth, Elizabeth is here.”
“I see that,” Maribeth said.
Elizabeth slipped off her boots, a habit also decades old. Before he had complained about the noise of Maribeth’s children, Earl Jablonski had complained about the sound of her and Elizabeth’s heels clicking across the wood floors. “How is Earl?” she asked.
“Frustrated as ever.”
“And how are you?”
She was tired. The twins were getting angry at her for not healing fast enough, for not doing bedtime often enough, for not walking them to school. She could feel Jason’s impatience, too, in every which way. He’d been spooning her tight in the mornings, so she could feel his hard-on pressed right into the small of her back. It reminded her of after her C-section, when he’d been so full of pent-up desire it had felt like a threat.
Jason was out with the children now, taking them shopping for Halloween costumes, a task he seemed daunted by. Liv, meanwhile, had pitched a fit when Maribeth said she wouldn’t be going. “You promised!” she’d cried. She had not promised, or if she had, it was before all this. Maribeth had been tempted to rip open her pajama top, to point at the scar on her chest. To tell Liv (and Jason, too) that her heart had stopped. Did they understand what that meant?
But she hadn’t. She wasn’t a crazy person. And besides, she’d gone to great pains to shield her children from her illness, not rub their faces in it.
“I’m doing great,” she told Elizabeth.
“Would you like some coffee or tea?” her mother asked. “Or we could have wine. It’s almost six o’clock.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need anything.” She put the flowers down on the dining room table and made her way toward the living room area.
“New couches?” Elizabeth asked, pointing to the leather sofas they’d bought after Oscar had scribbled in Sharpie all over the upholstered ones.
“Not that new. We got them about two years ago.” Had it been that long since Elizabeth had been over?
“From IKEA, can you believe it?” her mother chimed in. “Guess how much they cost? Less than a thousand dollars a piece.”
Why did her mother have to announce that? To Elizabeth? Who had a five-thousand-dollar leather Barcelona sofa in her office at work. It wasn’t that Maribeth cared about high design furniture, but the disparity just seemed to emphasize how far they’d drifted for reasons that Maribeth didn’t fully understand.
And then to highlight it even further, Elizabeth asked: “Remember our trip to IKEA? When the bus broke down?”
It was not long after they’d moved into the loft, which Elizabeth had found because she had a nose for things like that—whispered-about sample sales, ten-table restaurants about to get their first Michelin star, rent-stabilized eighteen-hundred-square-foot lofts in Tribeca.
The space was pretty raw back then, no walls, barely a kitchen. Right after they’d signed the lease, they’d taken the bus to the IKEA in New Jersey to buy more kitchen cabinets. It had felt a little like being newlyweds, the two of them zooming down the aisles, bouncing on the display beds, pretending to drink coffees in the kitchens as they fantasized about the life they were embarking on together. It was the same way that they would sometimes meet after work for happy-hour cosmos and burgers and imagine a life of running friendly competing magazines, Newsweek and Time, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. (That was back in the days before magazines started dropping like flies, taking with them any notion of sporting competition.) The lives they were conjuring may have been fantasy, but the joy they got from this shared daydream, that was real. Giddily, palpably real.
On the way back into the city, the bus had stalled on the New Jersey turnpike. People were complaining, barking at the beleaguered driver. But she and Elizabeth had remained under their halo, munching on cinnamon buns, painting their Technicolor future.
Suddenly Maribeth was embarrassed by the IKEA couches. Elizabeth now was an editor-in-chief. She lived in an Upper East Side brownstone with Tom Bishop, her hedge-fund-manager husband, and, when they were home from boarding school, his teenage children. Maribeth still rented the loft she and Elizabeth had first lived in twenty years ago. She wanted to move, to buy a house somewhere in Brooklyn, but New York real estate was a runaway train she had long since missed. She wished she’d had more foresight, like Elizabeth, who when Maribeth decided to move in with Jason, had offered to move out, buying a dirt-cheap condo in the Meatpacking District, which had quadrupled in value by the time she sold it to move in with Tom.
“Mommy! Wait till you see my costume.”
Liv and Oscar burst into the loft, trailed by a defeated-looking Jason. When they saw Elizabeth, they stopped, recognizing her from computer slideshows more than anything else.
“What are you going to be?” Elizabeth asked Liv.
“A pretty witch,” Liv replied.
“What’s a pretty witch?” Maribeth asked.
“Wait. I’ll show you.” Liv raced back toward her room.