Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

The great man’s battle cry: “None of it would have been possible without her. ”

Elisabeth wondered about the failed men, the ones no one talked about. Did their failures have to do with a lack of belief on their wives’ parts, or were success stories written after the fact? Did Steve Jobs’s wife secretly get furious at all that tinkering in the garage and wish he’d go sell insurance with her brother until, poof, he struck gold, and then she could say she knew it, she knew it, she had always known.

“Are you making much progress, sweetheart?” Faye asked Andrew now.

Elisabeth looked at her husband.

“It’s coming together,” he said.

He took a bite of the stroganoff to discourage further questions.

In the early days after they moved, Andrew never stopped talking about his work. One night he came home and announced that a student on his team had calculated that the solar-powered grill had the potential to cook meat three times faster than a charcoal grill. Another night, he had a child’s Christmas-morning grin on his face because he had learned there would be focus groups.

But lately, Andrew had no updates. Maybe he went to work and stared at the Internet all day, which Elisabeth figured was what most people did, and which would be fine with her if he had any sort of job security.

“How about you, Lizzy?” George said. “Has a new book idea come to you yet?”

“Not quite,” she said.

She regretted telling him that she couldn’t figure out what to write about next. George now saw it as yet another way into talking about his favorite subject.

Elisabeth knew what would follow.

“The Hollow Tree,” George said. “I’m telling you. It’s bestseller material. You’d win a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Dad, stop,” Andrew said. “I beg of you.”

In most respects, he had endless tolerance for his parents. At present, the Hollow Tree was the one exception. It wasn’t that anything George said was untrue, but they all recoiled from it because, Elisabeth thought, of the intensity of his delivery. It seemed unhealthy. Not something to be encouraged. Faye said he’d take any excuse to talk about it, no matter whose company he was in. She preferred for Elisabeth and Andrew to change the subject whenever it came up, which it did, every time they saw him.

Last weekend, George had rambled on for half an hour about the importance of subscribing to the local newspaper. He said they needed to get the Gazette if they cared about supporting journalism.

“Elisabeth is a journalist,” Andrew said.

“Yes,” George said. “And?”

“We’ll subscribe to the Gazette eventually,” Andrew said. “It’s not exactly top of mind, Dad. We pay for the Times online and I can barely manage to read that every day.”

Actually, they didn’t pay for the Times. Of course, they saw themselves as the kind of people who would and should and did, but in reality they still used the free login she’d always used at work, out of laziness more than anything.

Elisabeth felt guilty enough without the reminders from George. When they still lived in the city, they got food delivered almost every night for dinner, even after she read an article about how the website they ordered from was killing restaurants. She always meant to tip in cash, because the article said it was the only way to be sure the delivery guy got the money. But many nights, she didn’t have any small bills, so she just added the tip online and hoped for the best, giving the man who arrived at her door an extra-wide smile as she took the warm paper bag from his hands.

Lately, she bought Gil’s clothes and toys online, because there were no good stores nearby, and the few places selling organic baby items downtown were too expensive. Elisabeth justified this by reminding herself that she rarely got food delivered anymore, since the only delivery options here were pizza and Chinese.

She could think of plenty of other things they did right. They didn’t drive an SUV or eat red meat very often. They recycled. They tried their best to be good. If they didn’t have the time to attend protests with George, or sit around chronicling the ills of the world, well, that was normal. George, in his newfound zeal, was fond of saying, “People should be doing something and most of them aren’t.” It was impossible not to feel like he was referring, at least in part, to them.

Now George repeated himself. “How about it, Lizzy? The Hollow Tree: An Exposé of American Greed —it sounds big to me.”

“Maybe you’re right, George,” she said. “It could be a big book.”

“She’s humoring me, but I’ll take it,” George said.

“I think you should write it,” Elisabeth said. “It’s your idea.”

“I’m not a writer,” he said. “You are. Here’s a whole chapter for you. ‘Commerce: The End of the Mom-and-Pop Shop.’ You know the Dead Mall over in Dexter?”

Elisabeth shook her head.

“It’s this enormous shopping center, maybe what, fifteen minutes from here? Andrew and his buddies hung out there all the time in high school. It’s officially called the Shops at Evergreen Plaza. Years ago, that place was considered the height of sophistication. Now it’s mostly empty.”

No one replied, but George went on, undeterred.

“I got to thinking about that because, at my discussion group on Sunday, we had a presentation from Hal Donahue, who owns the shoe store downtown. They’re going out of business after sixty years. He told us that a while back, customers started coming in, having him get three or four pairs of shoes for them, or their kids, to try on. Then right in front of Hal, they’d go on their phones to see if they could find them cheaper online. You know what Hal said? He said, ‘Good luck to them. Is Amazon going to sponsor a Little League team and a parade float on the Fourth of July?’ Great question, I thought. People can’t live without all that.”

“We couldn’t live without Amazon,” Andrew said.

Elisabeth shot him a look. Why?

Andrew never would have admitted it to any of their friends back in Brooklyn. Everyone claimed to be done with Amazon; you had to. Though Elisabeth had seen the packages on doorsteps all over their old neighborhood every evening when she arrived home from work.

“What do you buy there?” George said now.

“Everything,” Andrew said. “Mostly stuff for the baby. We have a recurring order set up for diapers, wipes, formula. Free delivery. You should try it. It’s so much more convenient than driving to the store, only to find that half the time they don’t even have what you need.”

“You choose convenience at the expense of humanity,” George said.

Faye clucked her tongue at him.

Andrew shrugged. “I’ll worry about humanity once my kid starts sleeping through the night.”

A low blow, Elisabeth thought, especially considering Andrew never got up in the middle of the night. She gave George an encouraging smile.

“Tell Lizzy about the toaster,” he said to Faye.

“What about it?”

“This morning, our new toaster crapped out for no reason,” George said. “We bought it a month ago. The one we got rid of was a wedding gift. It still worked fine. But there’s no one we can complain to. The store says it’s the manufacturer’s problem. The manufacturer doesn’t answer the phone. You go around in circles until you give up.” He smacked his hand against the table for emphasis. “Boom. The Hollow Tree . ”

“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” Andrew said.

“I know you’re making fun of me, but that statement is one hundred percent correct. The world has gone to shit,” George said. “And yet most people are too comfortable to care. We used to think Big Brother would come along and steal everything from us against our will. But now we just hand it to him with a smile.”