Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“Do you sail?” Andrew asked. He was sanding a giant piece of wood, a shelf that would run the length of the main yoga room. He knew enough to do that — he was good with his hands. Dave had never asked if he was an expert craftsman. That wasn’t the vibe — if you thought you could do it, you could do it. One of the young guys with short dreadlocks and a wide smile popped into the garage and said he had some tools in the trunk of his car, and he could help Andrew put the shelf up when he was done.

“When I was a kid,” Dave said. “Here and there. It’s all muscle memory, though.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “It’s all still here.”

“Me, too,” Andrew said. He didn’t like to talk about his family, but it just came out. “I took sailing lessons every summer, near my parents’ house on Long Island. We spent three days on land just tying and untying knots, before they even let us get our feet wet. I tried to teach my son, and he could not have been less interested.”

Dave laughed. “You’re a real polymath, man, I love it.”

“I don’t know about that,” Andrew said, “but I guess I’ve been able to do a lot of different things.”

“Did you do any racing?”

“Sailing races, you mean? No. In my father’s fantasies, yes. He would have loved a good regatta trophy or two around the house, but I was never that kind of kid, not really. It was always a great disappointment to my parents that I was more interested in Buddhism than in country clubs.”

Dave made a sympathetic mmm . “You ever go to India?”

“Once, yeah, when I was nineteen.” Andrew put the sander down. He’d licked out a small groove by mistake, and the wood looked like a cresting wave. Dave didn’t seem to notice. “I spent some time traveling around. Jaipur, Kerala.”

“Nice,” Dave said. “That’s what I’m picturing — totally different vibe than the house. I want it to be pink , you know? Bright. Colorful. Like nothing else. And people could stay for a night, or maybe for a week, as it sailed around, doing treatments, working with our people. Like a floating retreat. EVOLVEBoat. BoatMENT? Not sure what it’d be called yet.”

“That sounds amazing,” Andrew said.

“I’m glad you’re into it,” Dave said. “We should talk more about it later.” He clapped Andrew on the shoulder. “This is beautiful, man. Wabi-sabi, right?” He nodded at the piece of wood and turned back toward the main house.

“Right,” Andrew said. The garage was cool and quiet. There was some faint music coming from inside — he couldn’t quite make out what it was. The Kinks? Big Star? A young couple came out of the back door with plates full of rinds and peels for the compost bin. Andrew gave a friendly salute, and they waved.

What did he look like, their dad? Their cool older brother? He really didn’t know. When he and Elizabeth were in their garage, sitting on their rickety wooden chairs, Andrew sometimes felt like a toothless old man in some Appalachian folk song. Elizabeth closed her eyes when she sang, and sometimes it made her look just like her mother, half-cocked on two glasses of chardonnay. Which was better than looking like his mother, whose face had been pulled back toward her ears so many times that it was a wonder she still had cheeks.

There were probably guides on the Internet for building a boat. Andrew could see it, the giant whalebones of the hull coming together beneath his hands. He wanted to make something that could take on the open water, something buoyant and beautiful.

Weekday lunches were so boring that Ruby had started drawing a graphic novel about Bingo’s secret life as a hairdresser in New Jersey. Eventually she stopped laughing at any of Jorge’s jokes, and so he would just stare at her mournfully from behind the bar while muddling mint and squeezing oranges. Every time someone came in and wanted a table, Ruby would pretend to be from a different country. She was French, she was Japanese, she was Mexican. She thought at least one person would be offended and/or amused, but no one seemed to notice. Most of the customers were women in their thirties wearing clogs for no good reason, and so they were obviously not the most sophisticated audience for Ruby’s performance art.

Her mum was in and out, bringing in flowers for the tables and boxes of dish soap from the trunk of the car. They were acting literally ridiculous, her parents. Ruby sometimes thought about sitting them down and explaining that all they had to do was act normal and that everything would be fine. Zoe was behaving like she was on Rumspringa on steroids, all cute outfits and glasses of rosé in the middle of the afternoon, and Jane was groaning like the Abominable Snowman. Ruby wouldn’t want to be married to either of them, but that was their problem, not hers. At this point, what was the difference between being married and divorced? They still went over all the Hyacinth stuff together. The only reason that the restaurant looked half decent was that Zoe had picked out every tile, every paint chip, every chair, every salt shaker. Running a marriage really couldn’t be that different from running a restaurant. Whatever. Plus, being someone’s parents meant that they would be linked for the rest of their lives anyway. There was no getting out, not really, and plus it didn’t even seem like it was really that bad. Ruby had it much worse than they did. She was probably going to have to become an organic farmer or an exotic dancer, or something else that you only needed hands-on experience for, but hey, if they wanted to ignore her to focus on their own stupid problems, fine. She drew a hideous, glitzy ball gown like someone on The Bachelor would wear to get out of the limo and then added Bingo’s head on top.

It was two forty-five p.m. They stopped seating for lunch at three. With only fifteen minutes left, Jorge would turn people away, and she could go home. Harry said he was going to pick her up, though, and so she was going to wait until he showed.

They’d hung out three times since the night at the house, twice just at night, on walks with Bingo, and once in the afternoon when Ruby’s mothers were out. Harry was a quick learner. He seemed to know that the clitoris existed, even if he didn’t know precisely where to look, and unlike some guys, he took instruction well, and wasn’t offended when Ruby offered some tips. That was the one piece of sex advice her mum had given her — that it should feel good for her, too — and thank God.

It was easier in the relative dark, always. That way you could fumble around and touch a new body part without fully admitting that you wanted to. Oh, was that me? Oh, is that you? Ruby liked to take off her clothes and watch Harry’s eyes get enormous. No matter how dark it was, she could still see those giant circles, like in a cartoon. It was extremely gratifying. She drew a picture of him with flying saucers instead of eyeballs. The bell over the door rang, and Ruby looked up, expecting to see Harry.

Dust held his skateboard against his chest like a shield. Over his shoulder, on the sidewalk, Ruby could see Sarah Dinnerstein, her Whitman classmate and a fellow devotee of Dust and his army of church-step kids. Sarah had been pretty straitlaced until senior year, when she got her nose pierced and the inside of her lower lip tattooed with the word LOVE. People said she was on heroin, but mostly it seemed like she was on Nico, who, like Dust, had no real school affiliation and might have been twenty-five. No one knew for sure. In the fall, Sarah was going to Bennington. Ruby couldn’t actually believe that Sarah Dinnerstein, who had four brain cells in her entire head, had gotten into college and she hadn’t. The world wasn’t fair. Sarah Dinnerstein had probably never had an orgasm. She probably thought female orgasms were a myth, like the Loch Ness Monster.