Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"He just wanted to stay in touch. You know, with the divorce. He said he didn't want to lose us, me and Nick. I didn't mention it in front of Grandma. Because, well, obviously I didn't. He called Nick, too. Is that okay, Mom? I mean, it seemed to be really important to him. He said how much he missed us and… everyone. He sent me a check for my birthday, too, which I actually thought was really nice."

Annie looked out at the dark water and the north shore of Long Island, a darker strip just visible below the gray horizon. The air was cold and clean. No! she wanted to cry out. It was not really nice for Josie to call you and make you feel sorry for him and give you money and buy more sympathy when Betty has no money at all. Your sympathies and loyalty lie elsewhere, Charlie, she wanted to say, shaking him by the shoulders.

"I used the money for my ticket home. To see you and Grandma," he added.

"That seems only fair," she said at last. Protect your child, Annie. Protect him from vanity and greed, from reality-the reality of his grandfather. Nevertheless, she blurted out, "He's a bastard."

"I know," Charlie said softly. "I know, Mom."

"I'm glad he feels responsible to someone," Annie said. "Do I sound bitter? I am. But it's hard to be bitter about someone you love. So you don't have to be bitter. That will be my job."

"Mixed message, Mom."

"You bet."

"What about you?" he asked after a while. "Are you doing okay? Living here and everything?"

He had stopped and taken both her hands, and now gazed at her earnestly. She thought how handsome he was, how kind his expression was, how lucky she was. "Well," she said, in a rush of gratitude-someone to confide in!-"it's pretty hard sometimes…" But even as she spoke she noticed that though Charlie had asked because he was concerned, he expected her, as his mother, to make that concern go away, the way she had soothed him after a nightmare. "But we're doing great," she quickly said.

He looked relieved.

"We haven't all been together since Miranda and I were children." Then she remembered that in those days there had been another person present. Perhaps she could expunge Josie from her memories the way her grandmother had scratched out all the dates scrawled by a younger incarnation of herself on the corners of her snapshots. "And I really do like the commute. Gives me a moment of repose."

His face cleared of any worry now, Charlie began to give her an animated description of his latest run-in with one of his professors, a tyrant, a bully, an incompetent, and an hysteric. Annie listened to the soft breeze of his complaints and felt refreshed. Her children were home. They slept for five nights on AeroBeds in the living room. She could hear them whispering to each other at night, laughing their deep laughs. Their beard hairs clogged up the sink downstairs. They had more lotions and creams for their skin than she had. They left the foil packaging of their contact lenses, each one with a tiny pool of liquid in it, on the side of the sink. Their clean clothes lay twisted on the floor with their dirty clothes. Annie wanted to lie down among their stuff and roll like a dog in carrion.

And then, one morning, with a short but ruthless storm of searching and washing and folding and tripping over cavernous bags, they were gone.

That night as the three women sat in the flickering light of the fake fire, Miranda said, "Nobody here but us chickens," and threw her head back dramatically.

Annie made a halfhearted chicken noise.

"Let's sing," Betty said. "That will cheer us up."

Annie laughed. "You haven't tried that one in a while, Mom."

When Nick and Charlie left, the household sank into an even deeper state of misery than it had been in before they showed their young faces. Betty rustled through her papers as if she were preparing a well-padded nest. Miranda had taken to leaving shrill messages on answering machines of former colleagues.

"Aren't you sort of burning your bridges?" Annie said.

"I certainly hope so."

"She's being proactive," Betty said. "That's a sign of self-esteem, you know."

Each day the shower rail separated a little more from the wall of the bathroom. Each night Annie lay in bed and tried not to think of their finances. That was how she began to divide her days: first the aluminum disk pulling away from the dull pink tile, bit by bit, while she showered (she swore she could see it moving), then the rush of panic in the shadowy nighttime room.

"We're running out of money," she ventured at breakfast.

"I was never good at money," Miranda said. "Obviously."

"Joseph always took care of everything," Betty said, shaking her head sadly. "Well, those days are gone."

And so they both, each in her own unassuming way, assumed Annie would somehow take care of the finances.

Her sublet apartment, unlike her current roommates, was rolling up its sleeves, putting its shoulder to the grindstone and earning its keep. But there was still Charlie's medical school and Nick's college tuition, only partly paid for by loans. It didn't leave Annie much. Her mother had even less, with any eventual divorce settlement a long way off. Miranda, meanwhile, saw only an occasional royalty check from her once popular and now disgraced authors, but even her tithe, as she called it, was withheld while the legal cases worked themselves out. She appeared to have otherwise run through every penny she had ever earned.

Sitting at the table trying to make a budget, Annie said, "There's very little coming in and there's way too much going out."

The other two nodded, then continued to read the newspaper.

When Annie said it again, louder, Miranda patiently explained that writing down all their debts did not miraculously supply the family with more money. The point of a budget was not to miraculously conjure up more money, Annie answered. The point was to figure out realistically how much they could afford to spend. Betty said she thought it would be far more practical to have more money, miraculously or otherwise, and Annie gave up, sitting with her pencil and her calculations in lonely, resentful silence.

That night, as every night, the bills rose up in her memory and haunted her. She turned in her bed, twisted in the sheets. The thin moonlight came in through her window. It was cold and white, like a marble tomb. She was hot and flushed and alive with worry.

Her anger and frustration with her mother and sister, however, were just bits of sand caught in the wind of her true rage. That was saved for Josie and, now, Felicity as well. Annie still could not believe that the person behind all their suffering was Frederick Barrow's sister.

"And to think Rosalyn invited that treacherous family to Rosh Hashanah," she said one evening as they sat glumly before the faux fire. "Maybe that's why Frederick was so weird."

"You said he wasn't weird," Miranda muttered.

"Well, he was."

"Listen," Betty said abruptly, "I'll just have to get a job."

"What are you going to do, Mom? Greet people at Walmart?"

Betty leaned toward her, suddenly animated. "Is Walmart as nice as Costco?"

It was therefore with great relief that the three women accepted an invitation to visit Lou and Rosalyn in Palm Springs.

"It's our fiftieth wedding anniversary," Rosalyn said when she called. "Can you believe it?"

Betty congratulated her coldly.

"Against all the odds," Rosalyn said.

"And how is your father?" Betty asked to parry the indelicacy. "How is Mr. Shpuntov?"

"The desert agrees with him."

Betty imagined a towering dune nodding polite assent to Mr. Shpuntov.

"Well," she said more cheerfully, "that's something, then."

"Now, Betty," Rosalyn said in a pedagogical tone that got Betty's back up whenever she heard it. It was Rosalyn's docent voice. "Now, Betty, listen, and don't be stubborn. Lou and I both miss you and the girls."