Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“Okay. All her friends are dying. I think she’s pretty lonely.”

“I’d love to see her,” said Lil. Sadie did not, lately, want to bring Lil round to her family. Lil’s interest in them made all too stark Sadie’s own neglect (it had been months since she’d visited Minnie; she resolved to go that weekend).

“Sure,” she said. “We’ll make a plan.”

Outside, the sun had come out and the wind had picked up, blowing the ends of Sadie’s scarf around her face. Light flakes swirled around them. At Kelley and Ping, they were greeted with a welcome gust of warm air. Steam rose from the grills of the open kitchen, where white-coated cooks tossed noodles in pans. Lil and Sadie sat at a low table by the bar and surveyed the plates in front of them: pad thai, pad see yew, Chinese broccoli, all glistening with oil, the sight of which made Sadie’s stomach lurch. I should have ordered soup , she thought. But all the soup involved meat, which she was definitely off, chicken in particular. She was also, however, off vegetables, particularly strong-tasting vegetables, and so she pushed the broccoli toward Lil and spooned a few noodles onto her plate.

“So are you thinking you want to go into journalism?” she asked Lil. Like Tuck , she almost said. “Is that why you took this job?”

“I don’t know.” Lil shrugged happily. “Maybe. Sort of. They offered it to me and it just seemed like a good opportunity. I’ve never had a job job before.” From the pile of noodles, she plucked a shrimp with her chopsticks and contemplated it. “It’s so easy , compared to grad school. It’s weird. We have these meetings and people argue about, like, what hors d’oeuvres to serve at the Jorie Graham reading.” She bit the top off the shrimp. “And I just go home and I’m done . No papers to grade.”

“Do you think you’ll go back to school?” The previous semester her dissertation proposal had at last been approved, after three revisions. It seemed, to Sadie, such a waste to leave now. Why not just write the thing and be done with it? But she supposed that was easy for her to say. She wouldn’t want to spend three years reading through jargon-heavy essays on Mina Loy.

“I don’t know. I mean, what’s the point? What am I going to do when I finish? Go teach at, like, a junior college in Wyoming? Tuck won’t move to someplace like that. And anyplace he would move, I won’t be able to get a job, because everyone else wants to move there, too.”

“But isn’t it possible you’d find something here? I know it’s a different field”—Lil began shaking her head, an irritated expression taking over her face, for she knew what Sadie was going to say—“but Beth seems to be doing okay…” In the fall, she’d become Slate ’s television critic—which was exciting and much deserved, since she’d been writing for them for a year, making, she said, pretty much nothing (though Sadie wondered if anyone actually read Slate , or if they just talked about reading it)—and had promptly been offered classes at NYU’s J school, which she’d taken, despite having already signed on to teach Television and History, two sections, to undergrads at Steinhardt. They’d barely seen her all fall. And when they did, she looked drawn and tired, eternally curling herself into Will’s arms and yawning. Will, for his part, seemed almost too proud of her. “Did you read her Sopranos piece?” he was always asking. “Did you read that piece she did on Gilmore Girls ?” The Svengali thing, in Beth’s case, had worked, Lil said.

“It’s totally different. English is just impossible.” Her voice began rising. Sadie protested silently. She knew all this, but still, somehow, thought Lil should finish the degree just on principle. She’d come this far. “You have to be so, so good. Or ethnic. I’m, like, this white girl writing on Modernism. No one cares.” She gulped down a slug of water. “And what’s the point? I’d just get a job like this once I was done.”

“Hmmm.” Sadie kept her lips pressed together. She could hear Tuck in this defeatism and it bothered her. It was fine for Tuck to generally fuck everything up—his manuscript was now nearly eight months late, and unless it was brilliant , she mightn’t be able to push it through—but not to bring Lil down with him. She was sure that he was behind all this. Probably, they needed the money. Leave him , Sadie felt a sudden urge to scream. Just go. Now . But how could she, when she’d withheld the major evidence in her case? If she had told Lil about Tuck and Caitlin right away, immediately, before she could think better of it, would Lil have left him, or merely been furious with Sadie? She truly didn’t know. She tried not to think about the more difficult question: whether Tuck and Caitlin were still sleeping together.

“You should eat some of this,” said Lil, sighing, spent. She poked, desultorily, at the remains of the pad thai. “Or I’m going to eat it all. I’m starving .”

“I’m not so hungry,” said Sadie. “I’m a little sick to my stomach.” And then, before she could think better of it, she said those words, relics of so many movies, with the ability to silence a room. “Actually, I’m pregnant.”

Lil swallowed, her chopsticks frozen in the air. “Oh my God. How?”

Sadie smiled. “Well—”

“Was this planned?”

“ No .” Sadie laughed, but Lil just stared at her, stricken. Could she be pregnant, too , Sadie wondered for a moment, and she’s upset that I’ve stolen her thunder? Then, she realized, no, Lil wanted to be pregnant. Of course. And Tuck was probably saying no. He was one of those guys who would say no, no, no, then once the baby arrived go on and on about how perfect it was.

“How far along are you?”

“Ten weeks.”

“Aren’t you supposed to wait until twelve to tell people?” The unmistakable edge of schadenfreude was creeping into Lil’s voice. I was right , thought Sadie. But there was something else, too: like the doctor, Lil just assumed she was happy, she was going to keep it.

“The doctor said it was okay.” She wasn’t sure where to go, what else to tell her. It was all too messy, too embarrassing, to discuss. Why had she told her? Because it was messy, embarrassing, because she didn’t know what to do. “I just went, actually.”

“Oh my God,” said Lil again. “Wow.” She shook her head. “So, what does Michael think?”

“Nothing. I—” Sadie sighed and bit her top lip, a habit her mother was always on her about. “You know I’ve been spending a lot of time with Ed—”

“ Oh my God ,” Lil repeated, her jaw flopping open. “Is it?”

Sadie nodded. “Definitely. Michael’s been in Florida most of the fall.”

“Yeah. What is he doing there again?”

“I don’t know.” It was true. He told her almost nothing about his assignments, though Lil and Dave refused to believe this. Beth had read enough spy novels to know it was true. Sadie took a tentative bite of noodles. Telling Lil was a relief. She was no longer completely alone.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lil, waving a hand in the air. “Oh my God,” she said again. “Ed Slikowski. Have you told him?”

Sadie shook her head.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he be happy?”

“I don’t know.” Sadie ate another bite. Suddenly, the gates had opened. She was ravenous. “I think so. He’s been, you know, saying, ‘Hey, let’s just get married—’”

Lil snorted. “Have you ever dated anyone who hasn’t said that to you?”