Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

George and Faye had a solid marriage. She appreciated this. Her own parents had been miserable together, and perverse in their misery. All she ever wanted was for them to be normal, to wake up one day and realize they loved each other after all.

Elisabeth spent her childhood playing referee. She could walk into a room and assess in an instant whether her parents were fighting, and what about. When her father was cheating, her mother confided in her like she was a friend. She spared Elisabeth none of the details.

She was obsessed with being thin and beautiful and, most important, young. She had her daughters using antiaging cream when they were in middle school. She went on fad diets and made them join her. She fasted and encouraged them to do the same. She praised them for being skinny and chastised them when they didn’t look their best. She made a game out of the three of them looking in a mirror, taking turns pointing out their imperfections.

“No one is going to tell you when you look like shit,” their mother said. “A woman has to be her own worst critic.”

Any talk of bodies now made Elisabeth uncomfortable. But in this respect, she thought the damage done to her had been minimal, considering. She had been lucky enough to have teachers who told her she was smart, who encouraged her intellect. Her godfather was a journalist. He saw in her the hallmarks of a writer.

Charlotte, on the other hand, emerged from their mother’s care an almost entirely superficial creature. She was naturally thin and pretty, but on top of that she spent hours each morning doing her hair and applying makeup. It surprised no one when she gained a following on Instagram as a self-described “influencer,” which involved posting photos of herself in bathing suits on various Caribbean islands.

Their parents divorced when Elisabeth was eight and Charlotte was five. Their mother ran off the day the papers were signed, leaving her daughters in the care of a nanny—and their father, though they rarely saw him. When their mother returned six months later, she and their father had somehow gotten back together. They never explained how or why. They got along almost too well for a while, before things returned to the way they’d always been.

When Elisabeth was a junior in high school, they lived apart for a year. One day, toward the end of that period, she said something to her mother about the two of them having separated, and her mother said, “What gives you the idea that we’re separated?”

“Dad living in the beach house was one indication,” Elisabeth said, angry, confused.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” her mother said, an oft-repeated statement that irked Elisabeth because she sensed it wasn’t true, yet by definition could not refute it.

Her parents were together again by the time she graduated, holding hands as they watched her accept her diploma.

Almost two decades passed, time enough for her to stop worrying whether their marriage would survive. They had not grown happier or less truculent with age, but they were old now. She figured they had gotten breaking up out of their systems. Then, two years ago, her parents split again. Her father found someone almost immediately on a business trip to Arizona, and moved to Tucson to be with her. He went to some lengths to expedite the divorce, making Elisabeth and Charlotte wonder if he planned to marry this new woman, whom neither of them had met.

The news of her parents’ latest breakup still hadn’t sunk in. They told her, and Elisabeth put the information away in a box, determined not to let it derail her. She was trying to get pregnant at the time, which consumed so much emotional energy.

Finally, it worked. Then came the bomb drop of a new baby.

In Brooklyn, they lived in an old Italian neighborhood. Every year on the Fourth of July, men set off fireworks on their corner. The noise shook the building; rockets ricocheted off their bedroom windows and twice cracked them down the middle. They never wanted to be the annoying gentrifiers who complained about tradition, so for years, they said nothing.

When Gil was around six weeks old, the fireworks began, and for the first time in his life he seemed scared. His face scrunched up. He sobbed into Elisabeth’s shirt. Her protector instincts kicked in. She called the police, even though the cops in their precinct were the brothers and cousins of the guys outside the window. When the officer asked for her name and number, she provided them without thinking.

“You gave them your name?” Andrew said when she hung up.

Two days later, late to the pediatrician, they hustled up the block to the car they had purchased hours before she went into labor.

Andrew pressed the automatic-lock fob, but the doors didn’t open.

He tried to unlock the driver’s side with the key, but it wouldn’t work either.

“Holy shit,” he said. “They did that thing where they fill the locks so you can’t get in.”

“That’s a thing?” she said.

Andrew rattled the door handles.

Elisabeth pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Googling to see if that’s a thing.”

“It’s a thing,” he said.

“Retribution,” she said. “For calling the police on them.”

“I told you you shouldn’t have given your name,” he said, shaking his head. Then, “Oh.”

“Oh what?”

Andrew blinked. “This isn’t our car.”

As soon as they had established a hint of a routine, a bit of normalcy, they moved here, a whole new kind of discord.

“Who wants to try some homemade lager?” George said.

It wasn’t a question. He was already pulling a brown growler from the fridge.

He filled the glasses preset at the dinner table.

“Those were for water,” Faye said, her voice tinged with irritation.

“The Pilgrims never drank water,” George said. “Did you know that? Only beer. Even the kids.”

“Yes, and most of them were dead by thirty-five.” Faye looked at Andrew. “Your father makes beer now. He got a kit in the mail, and he thinks he’s Sam Adams.”

Elisabeth took a seat at the table, gave the beer a try. She couldn’t tell if it was good or disgusting. She took another sip. Faye started talking about coupons. Elisabeth drank until the glass was empty.

“Delicious, right?” George said, refilling it.

She nodded. Already, she felt that lovely blurring of edges, the slight disassociation of self from everyone else in the room. When she was young and got tipsy, all she wanted to do was kiss someone. Now she wanted to take a nap.

“How’s the venture going, son?” George asked.

The venture.

That’s how he referred to it, every time.

George was a devoted father. If he thought Andrew’s idea was a bad one, he didn’t let on. But he never called it what it was, which made her wonder.

What it was, was a grill. A solar-powered grill.

Elisabeth had been there when Andrew came up with the idea a decade ago. It was early in their relationship, their first weekend away. They’d gone to Florida for the wedding of his college friend. At the rehearsal dinner, a beach barbecue, everyone stood around admiring the sunset, eating steak and burgers, guzzling the bride’s signature cocktail, which tasted like fruit punch but was about eighty percent rum.

That’s when Andrew said, “Why are there no solar-powered grills?”

When no one responded, he went on, “Think about it. It’s genius. Nobody barbecues in the rain. And with solar you’d avoid that gross charcoal taste, which is, of course, the taste of cancer.”

“Eww,” said Charlie, the groom. He looked down at his plate.

The burgers were slightly burnt. Elisabeth hoped no one thought that was what had inspired Andrew’s comment.