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“But don’t you think that’s bizarre?” she said, turning and looking at me—wild-eyed, devastated. “He doesn’t even let her talk, really. He looks at her like she’s crazy when she opens her mouth.”
“What does that have to do with your blankets?”
“I think she wanted one.”
I gave her shoulders a final squeeze and walked around to the other side of the counter, leaning up against it. I kept watching her. I was worried that she was going to ask me how the fireworks were. Knowing, if she did, she would hear too much of the real answer in my voice.
“What’s going on?” she said, looking up. “I feel your eyes.”
“You don’t feel anything,” I said, too quickly, and with a little more force than necessary. What else was I going to say, though? I’m looking at you like this because out of nowhere, actually, Josh told me he might be in love with someone I’d never even heard of before tonight. Interesting turn of events, no?
She looked at me for another second before returning to her cutting,
unconvinced. “I know when I feel eyes,” she said.
I shook my head no, and tried to figure out how to change the subject. The first thing I could think of was my documentary—the entirety of my fishermen’s wives footage, all 107 interviews on thirty mini-DV tapes, sitting in the trunk of my car. I had run back into my house at the last minute that morning—pre-tackle shop—gathering the videotapes up to bring them home with me. This was due to a fleeting fear that the Narragansett house would burn down in my absence, the only copies of all of my research going up in flames. It was a baseless fear. I knew that somewhere inside. Except that I hadn’t not slept in that house for so long that part of me did believe it was actually possible it would self-destruct in my absence.
“You know, I brought the fishermen’s wives footage home with me. To show you guys,” I said quickly, before I could change my mind.
Maybe this wouldn’t be the worst thing—showing the tapes to my family. Maybe when they watched it, they would think the footage was brilliant. And they could explain to me what I was missing.
“Not tonight, Em,” she said. “Dad’s already at the bachelor party.”
“He’s what?”
She shrugged. “He just thought someone needed to be there to welcome everyone,” she said. “And you two didn’t exactly seem to be doing great on timing tonight.”
This was true. But I hadn’t even known my dad was planning on going to the bachelor party in the first place. It was hard to picture him holding down the bachelor party fort, casually ordering drinks and making small talk with Josh’s friends. I pictured him calling home every few minutes to ask my mother what he was supposed to do next.
“You know,” my mom said, keeping her eyes averted, “you did have a visitor earlier this evening. He was very disappointed to have missed you.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I couldn’t imagine who would have come by to see me. I couldn’t even think of anyone I had told that I was coming home. I hadn’t told anybody. I knew I hadn’t. Because I didn’t talk to anybody from home—the entirety of my exchanges with friends from high school were exceedingly limited since I dropped out of a life I thought they could recognize. It wasn’t that they all were becoming doctors and lawyers and bankers—though many of them were. It was more that they were becoming something. And I—one fragmentary interview at a time—wasn’t.
My mom put down her knife in a grand gesture of emphasis. “I’m talking about Justin Silverman,” she said. “Justin Silverman!”
Justin Silverman and I had “gone out” in junior high before either of us was allowed to go out anywhere without our parents. “I don’t understand,” my mother loved saying back then, “how are you going out with someone you never go anywhere with?” If she didn’t dial down her excitement level, I was going to have to remind her of that.
“Justin Silverman came by?” I said. “To see me?”
“Well, Justin Silverman’s mom,” she said. “But the point is, Justin just graduated at the very top of his class from Northwestern Law School, and he’s back in New York now! Is that not so exciting?”
Here we went. This was the first of what I knew would be many attempts by my mother to remind me, over the next couple of days, of the many opportunities in New York—men, jobs, hope—all the things that I was giving up in my makeshift life too far from home.
“It’s so exciting, what he’s doing. All this work with intellectual property. You know who would be totally interested in all the work he’s doing with intellectual property? You. Which is why I told Evelyn to bring him by the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night so the two of you could catch up.”
“What? Mom, why on earth would you do that?”
“Emmy. Because. Justin’s back in New York now.”
“Does he know I’m not back in New York now?”
She put the apple down, looking up at me. “What can it possibly hurt to spend five minutes with an old friend? Evelyn says he’s gotten very handsome.”
“Evelyn is his mother.”
“So shouldn’t she know?”
I crossed my hands over my chest, in amazement at this standoff. There was not—and never had been—a way to argue with my mom. At least not one that I had found. And before I could even not attempt to this time, Josh walked into the kitchen, coming up behind our mom.
