Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

There was one from Zoe, but the whole e-mail thread was just about apartments. He copied down some of the links so he could show them to Ruby, but there wasn’t anything juicy. It was sad, the idea of one of her mothers moving out — which one would go? Would Ruby get to stay? Or would they both move? Even so, Harry pictured Ruby rolling her eyes at the notion of real estate as juicy information. A truly cutting-edge wooing tactic for a teenage boy. He kept scrolling.

About halfway through her in-box, there were a few flagged e-mails from someone named Naomi Vandenhoovel. The first one had the subject “MY TATTOO MISSES YOU,” which made it look like it was written by some weird bot, but she’d written again and again — subjects “MISTRESS OF MYSELF FILM VIP VIP VIP,” “HI AGAIN, CONTRACT DEADLINE FOR KITTY’S MUSTACHE,” “HI HI HI HI HI IT’S ME NAOMI.” The last one seemed to be dictated via Siri.

Harry read them all, one after the other.

This is what he put together: A crazy woman named Naomi was trying to get his mother and father to agree to sell the rights to “Mistress of Myself” for a movie about Lydia. A biopic. Like Ray , or Walk the Line . The kind of movie that would win someone an Oscar, especially if they really sang. And it wasn’t even like they’d have to actually be a good singer, to sing like Lydia. Harry had never liked the way Lydia sounded. His mom was a much better singer, technically. Anyone who had ever watched American Idol or The Voice knew when someone was singing out of tune, and that was Lydia’s specialty, sliding in and out of tune and screeching like she’d just dropped a toaster into her bathtub. So far, Elizabeth had been putting her off, but crazy Naomi (he couldn’t lie, the tattoo picture was kind of hot) was persistent as hell. No wonder his mom had been going through the Kitty’s Mustache stuff.

Most of the time, Harry didn’t think much about how his parents had been cool. It mattered to his daily life significantly less than English muffins, slightly more than the existence of remote-control helicopters. He was glad that they were interesting and interested, that they read books and went to the movies, which wasn’t true for all of his friends’ parents. His friend Arpad’s father was a surgeon, and no one ever saw him. It was like he was a ghost who left expensive things lying around the house in an attempt to get you to solve his murder. Harry’s parents were present; they were nice to him. It was boring, in a good way. And so Harry wasted very little time thinking about how, when they were his age, they had actually been cool. It sucked to feel as if your parents — your embarrassing, dorky parents — had been invited to parties that you would never get invited to, had done drugs no one had ever offered you, had stayed up all night talking to other cool people just because they wanted to. Harry wanted to stay up all night. He wanted to out-Dust Dust. He wanted to take Ruby’s hand and lead her somewhere she’d never been, and to do it with such confidence that she never once questioned that he knew where he was going. The past was the past. Harry was ready to be someone new. What was the masculine form of “mistress”? The “mister.” He was going to be the mister of himself, starting now. He wrote his parents a text that he was going to spend Saturday night at Arpad’s, that he was going there right after his SAT class. His mother texted back some smiley faces and some kisses. He had a day to change the entire trajectory of his life. Simple as that.

Elizabeth was in the mood for chicken. It was also the only thing they had in the fridge, so it was what they were having for dinner. She’d often thought that being as close as they were to Jane and Zoe should yield some high-level kitchen skills, but so far, it hadn’t. Elizabeth could appreciate good food — she’d been to most of the city’s best restaurants with her in-laws, Andrew always pulling at his shirt collar like an awkward bar-mitzvah boy — but she could never figure out how to replicate those beautiful meals using her own two hands. There were only so many ways to cook things — boiling water, pans, oven — and yet other people seemed to do it so naturally. Whenever she dropped by Zoe’s house for lunch, one of the three of them would be eating some bowlful of brown rice and hard-boiled egg and sautéed kale, with an avocado-miso dressing that they’d just whipped up. Leftovers, they’d say, sheepish, as if it weren’t something that could easily be on the menu at Hyacinth. When Elizabeth felt sheepish about her food, it was because she was an adult with a teenage son and she still counted frozen pizzas among her chief food groups.

It wasn’t easy to have a best friend who seemed so much better at so many of life’s important skills. Maybe it was that she and Andrew had been together so long, or gotten together when they were still so young, or that they’d started out as friends, but Elizabeth couldn’t remember ever experiencing the all-consuming, life-eating early love that Zoe had found with Jane. They’d disappear into Zoe’s bedroom for days, they’d play cutesy and irritating games of footsie at restaurants, they’d go away for long weekends without a moment’s notice. Not to mention the kissing. Elizabeth had never seen so much kissing. In taxicabs, in their kitchen, on the sofa — never mind if there were other people present. Next to their romance, Elizabeth felt like she and Andrew were an incestuous brother and sister, or maybe close first cousins. They had always enjoyed sex, but even Andrew had never seemed to need her body the way that Jane needed Zoe and vice versa. On the one hand, it had made the slide into long-term marriage easier, because they were already comfortable with a lower level of intensity, but Elizabeth had sometimes wondered what it was like to feel that kind of desire and to send it back, gulping, even if it meant for a sharp letdown in the years to follow. Because no one could keep that up, not even Zoe.

• • •

Harry zipped through the kitchen, head down, hurrying toward his backpack, which was in its usual slump by the coatrack.

“Hey,” Elizabeth said. “Where are you going? Hungry?”

“Not right now,” Harry said. He grabbed his bag and ran back up the stairs.

Elizabeth rinsed off the chicken breasts in the sink and put them on a plate. Even before she’d married Jane, Zoe had been good in the kitchen. When they’d lived together at Oberlin, Elizabeth had once washed Zoe’s cast-iron pan with a sinkful of dishes, scrubbed it for hours with a soapy sponge, and when she realized what Elizabeth was doing, Zoe had given her a look like she’d just shaved off her eyebrows while she was sleeping. The Bennetts were California gourmets, all farm-raised and organic before it was cool. Elizabeth thought about her childhood diet of Oreo cookies and jars of Skippy peanut butter and felt embarrassed all over again. Her parents were fine — they were good enough people and she loved them, but her mother had always liked gin more than vegetables. Her father cooked a bloody steak on the grill every Sunday, and that was it. He took pills to make the bad cholesterol go down and the good cholesterol go up, and he had never told her that he loved her, not directly. They never listened to music. Her mother read novels, but only love stories starring beautiful blind girls or war widows. There was so much that Elizabeth had had to figure out on her own.

Andrew came quietly down the stairs and hugged her from behind.

“Hi,” he said, and laid his head against her shoulder.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you okay? I feel like you’ve been MIA.”

“I actually feel great,” Andrew said. He slid one hand into Elizabeth’s waistband, and she wriggled away.