Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

She was thin and pale, and looked very much like someone who had just spent a lot of time throwing up. Like a much more intense version of the hangover Cynthia herself was still fighting down. Her hair was in knots. The great unlikeliness of this moment was actually kind of compelling, but Cynthia tried not to let it show. “So you’re on a 7:32 flight to Pittsburgh,” she said, but Deborah didn’t even break stride, she was in such a hurry to get out of there. Cynthia fell into step alongside her. “They probably won’t even let you on the plane looking like this, though. You can come back to our apartment and clean up and borrow something to wear. Do you have to go back to your place for any reason?”

Deborah licked her lips and said hoarsely, “No.”

“Good. I don’t think there’s time, anyway.”

She sat in the kitchen while Deborah took a shower that lasted a good thirty minutes. Cynthia was torn between irritation — the kids had to be picked up at school at three-fifteen — and nervousness about whatever might be going on in there. Finally Deborah exited in a huge cloud of steam, looking flushed and a little more like herself, though still woefully skinny. Cynthia’s jeans barely stayed on her hips; she had a smaller pair but there was no way she was giving those up. “I can’t believe you live like this,” Deborah said. “That is the nicest shower I’ve ever been in. You should see my place.”

Cynthia looked her over, not listening to what she said. She didn’t trust her. In her state she might do anything, and if it happened here, it would become Cynthia’s problem. “Come on,” she said. “We have to go pick up my kids.”

Dalton’s lower-school building was a double-wide townhouse just a few blocks away; the early-arriving mothers went into the lobby, where there was a fireplace, to keep warm, but Cynthia and Deborah waited outside at the bottom of the steps for April and Jonas to emerge. Deborah seemed to have some awareness of herself as out of place; she stayed a step behind Cynthia’s shoulder and cringed a bit as if trying not to be seen, not just by the kids (whom she wouldn’t have recognized anyway) but by anyone. More than half the women out on the sidewalk were nannies, substantial and mostly dark-skinned and sober-looking, talking to one another with their eyes on the door and occasionally laughing without smiling. When April and Jonas appeared on the landing, wrapped tightly in their coats, and walked smiling down the steps toward their mother, Cynthia heard from behind her, softly but unmistakably, a gasp.

“Kids,” Cynthia said; and then, just because it was the shortest available explanation, “this is your aunt Deborah.”

Their mouths fell open, but they also remembered their manners and held out their hands for Deborah to shake. “I’ve seen pictures of you,” April said, and for a moment Cynthia was surprised. “At Mom and Dad’s wedding. You were one of the bridesmaids.”

“That would be correct,” Deborah said. Cynthia rolled her eyes. Some people had no talent for talking to children at all.

At home the kids watched TV and had a snack, as usual; and Deborah, after sitting silently under the kitchen clock with Cynthia for a few minutes, stood up from the table and went into the living room to join them. Cynthia phoned her mother with Deborah’s flight information. “Yes, Mom, she’s fine,” she said, watching warily through the kitchen doorway. “Perfectly normal. I mean, if a grown woman sitting on the floor eating Goldfish and watching the Disney Channel is normal. Just be there when her flight gets in so she doesn’t go AWOL or whatever.” When Adam walked through the door, Cynthia stood up, kissed him, and grabbed her keys. “They’ve eaten,” she said to him. “Let me just get my coat and we’re out of here.” He went into the TV room, and the kids jumped all over him. “Daddy,” they yelled, “have you met Aunt Deborah?”

Deborah stood up, brushing crumbs off her shirt. She and Adam nodded to each other awkwardly. Jonas, holding both his father’s hands, walked up his thighs and flipped himself over.

“How’s your brother doing?” Deborah said.

Adam’s eyebrows went up. “Good,” he said. “He’s in Los Angeles. I guess I’d forgotten you knew each other. You want me to tell him you said hi?”

“No,” she said, as Cynthia reappeared in the doorway behind him and beckoned with one finger.

They hit traffic getting on the FDR at that hour and again once they were over the Triborough. Cynthia started looking nervously at her watch. No way in hell they were missing this flight. Suddenly she felt a kind of shudder go through the seat beneath her, and when she turned she saw that Deborah was crying, and shaking with the effort not to make any noise while doing it.

“Oh please,” Cynthia said — not to Deborah, exactly, but that was how she took it.

“Please what?” Deborah said angrily, wiping her eyes on her borrowed shirt. “I’m sorry that unhappiness doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle. I know you don’t give a shit about me but I’d think I’d merit the sympathy a total stranger would, at least. Of course maybe the total stranger would get nothing from you either. I’d forgotten how easy everything’s always been for you. I just didn’t expect I’d ever feel so jealous of it.”

“As I understand it,” Cynthia said, “you banged some married professor and what do you know, it turns out he’s a liar. Wow, I’m sure you’re the first person that’s ever happened to. So you forget about it and you move forward. The rest of it is just drama, which should really be your middle name, by the way. You may not respect me but at least I’d respect myself enough not to wind up in the batshit ward.”

“What do you know about it? What do you know about anything? You have never suffered a day in your life. You’ve never not gotten anything you wanted. And now those kids of yours are growing up the same way. Like a little ruling class. It’s terrifying.”

“What did you say to them?” Cynthia said.

“Everything given to them. No idea how fortunate they are. Sweet and content and well bred. Everything as it should be and they have no idea how the other ninety-nine percent lives.”

“Hey, you’re right,” Cynthia said. “I really should try to ennoble them with some early suffering. I really should go back home and take some things away from them. Boy, it’s a mystery to me how someone as smart as you has never had a kid of her own.”

And when she said that, Deborah stiffened as if she’d been hit; she stopped talking and turned to look out the window; and just like that Cynthia had a pretty good idea what had really happened. They rode the rest of the way to LaGuardia in silence.

“Keep the meter running,” Cynthia said to the driver. Deborah, her hand on the door, turned to face her. “I know you only did this because you had to,” she said, “but thank you anyway.”

“I didn’t have to do it,” Cynthia said. “Why would I have to do it?”

“Because we’re quote-unquote family,” Deborah said.

But that’s what’s so fucked up about it, Cynthia thought when she was back in the city-bound traffic on the L.I.E. Everyone thought they could keep playing this family card with her to get her to do what they wanted; the irony was that they had no idea how deeply she bought into the idea they were so cynical about. She believed in it more than any of them. But you didn’t get to screw around with definitions, your own or anyone else’s. Just because Ruth found some rich guy to get old with, it didn’t follow that Cynthia was no longer an only child. And she hadn’t heard from her father in the last three years, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still her father, or that anybody else was. That was how you kept the whole idea meaningful, and powerful. You kept it small.