Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

“Hon. You okay in there?”

His polite yet passive-aggressive way of asking why the hell she had been in the bathroom so long.

She stood and flushed the toilet.

“People are monsters,” she said when she emerged.

“Hmm?”

“Something I read online. You don’t want to know.”

“Okay. We should get going, huh?”

“One time years ago, your belt was on the bed, so I hit myself with it to see how it felt, and Jesus Christ, it’s barbaric. How could anyone do that to a child? I didn’t even hit myself very hard and it hurt so much.”

“Well, you have a low pain threshold,” he said.

“I do? How do you know?”

“You think a cricket landing on you feels like getting punched in the arm.”

—

On the way to his parents’ house, he told her they didn’t have to stay for long. His mother had said it would do his father good to see the baby. She was worried about him again.

“He’s been holed up with those files for the past three nights,” Andrew said. “She says he needs a distraction.”

“Or she does,” Elisabeth said.

For some time now, her father-in-law, George, had been consumed by an idea. Months ago, he told Elisabeth how it came to him when he overheard a stranger yelling into a cell phone about how America was no longer a global superpower.

“He said, ‘This hasn’t been the greatest nation in the world for sixty years. That’s just something we tell ourselves,’ ” George recalled. “It pissed me off. For the rest of the day, I wondered why. Was it a feeling left over from grammar school, where each morning we pledged allegiance to the flag and meant it?”

After that, George started to notice a pattern. More and more, the conversations he had came back around to the sorry state of things, how life was getting worse instead of better.

“There’s no protection for the little guy anymore. No accountability from higher up,” he explained to Elisabeth. “We’re on our own. It’s like a hollow tree. That’s how I think of it. On the surface, this country looks more or less like it always did. But there’s nothing inside holding it up. No integrity, no support. Doesn’t matter if the leaves are green and the trunk is tall. A hollow tree can’t stand for long.”

In the downstairs guest room that also served as George’s home office were toppling stacks of newspaper clippings and printouts meant to back up his theory, as if someone might arrive at any moment and ask him to prove it. Dozens of handwritten notes, scrawled on Post-its, were stuck to the wall.

Her mother-in-law grimaced whenever she walked in there, like she had stumbled upon a serial killer’s lair.

“What is the point of this, George?” Elisabeth heard her say once.

“The point is people blame themselves when it’s systemic. The citizens of this country should be taking to the streets, not popping antidepressants.”

“And what exactly are you going to do about it?” Faye said.

Since Andrew was in kindergarten, George had made a good living with a small fleet of Town Cars he owned. He and a handful of employees shuttled people to and from the airport and around the valley. Three years ago, George decided to reinvest in the business. He used some of his and Faye’s retirement savings to buy three brand-new Lincolns. The timing could not have been worse. Six months later, Uber came to the area, offering cheaper fares and immediate bookings, and wiped out his company.

Eventually, George started driving for Uber himself. Faye told Elisabeth it was awful, diminishing. The pay was an insult. Half the passengers were drunk college kids. George could lug three heavy suitcases through the airport and up someone’s front stairs, and still get just a thank-you in return, if he was lucky.

“The app says customers don’t have to tip,” Faye said, disgusted. Elisabeth was astonished to hear her say the word app.

For a while, Faye reported that George was in bed by seven most nights, that he had no appetite, that he wouldn’t talk much, which wasn’t like him.

Then, instead of being depressed, George became obsessed—with the Hollow Tree, with the plight of the common man. Andrew was annoyed that instead of getting a new job, and facing what had happened, George now spent all his free time on this pointless endeavor. Elisabeth thought the whole exercise was a kind of therapy, a means of exploring what had happened to him, without having to make it personal, which wasn’t George’s way.

“If you still hate it here in a year, we’ll go back,” Andrew said now, in the car.

“I don’t hate it, exactly,” she said. “Besides, I’ve seen Bridges of Madison County. Once the wife moves to her husband’s hometown, she never leaves. All she gets is one weekend of passionate infidelity with Clint Eastwood.”

“At least you have that to look forward to.”

They didn’t actually live in his hometown, which was run-down and somehow perpetually gray no matter the weather. Their house was twenty minutes away in the nearest college town, a place where Elisabeth had imagined attending lectures and eating Ethiopian food, and availing herself of all the best parts of an intellectual-adjacent life.

In reality, it felt strange to live in a place that revolved around a college campus when you yourself had nothing to do with it. Everyone in town referred to it as the college, just as in their world, New York was the city and Gilbert was the baby—you knew there were others, but they didn’t matter.

So far, Elisabeth had gone to exactly one reading, given by a poet she liked. She expected the room to be full of older women in long cashmere cardigans, but everyone in attendance was a student. They swiveled their heads as one when she entered, taking her in as you might a space alien.

There were three colleges within fifteen miles of their house. The women’s college around the block; a state university that was so large she had mistaken it for a city the first time she saw it; and the hippie college where Andrew spent his days, a place where they didn’t believe in grades or even desks. During class, students sat on mats on the floor.

After spending so many years in Brooklyn, they had believed themselves to be as progressive as was humanly possible. But they were learning now that they’d been mistaken.

“This kid in my lab told me today that he’s pansexual,” Andrew said over dinner one night.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“It means he’s attracted to all genders.”

“So he’s bi.”

“No.”

“How is he not bi?”

“He doesn’t see gender. Or maybe he sees it, but it’s not part of what attracts him to a person.”

“Okay. But he’s attracted to both genders, so basically—bi. Right?”

“No, because gender is a spectrum, not a binary. He said the only reason babies are assigned one gender or the other at birth is because the American medical establishment is stuck in a heteropatriarchal view of said binary. So really, we shouldn’t force Gil to subscribe to these norms. We should let him make up his own mind.”

“Huh,” she said, considering this.

It felt to her like humanity was on the cusp of something. Maybe the world was becoming a more tolerant place, and their child would grow up with entirely different boundaries than the ones they’d known. Gender-neutral toys were all the rage. Her friends would sooner give their daughters hard drugs than Barbies. She wanted to know how this would shape them as they grew, how Gil’s generation would come to think about their own bodies, and one another’s.

For a moment, Elisabeth glimpsed her former self—the curiosity, the thrill, that came from asking questions of people whose lives were nothing like her own. It had always amazed her how willing strangers were to open up to a journalist, even on the worst days of their lives. Maybe especially then.