Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“What?!” Zoe grabbed Elizabeth’s elbows. “Are you fucking kidding me? How much do we get paid?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet, but Andrew wants to say no. Technically, they need all of us to sign our life rights, and they need us to agree to have the song in the movie….”

“And they can’t make a movie about Lydia without the song.”

“Nope. I mean, they could, but what would be the point?”

“Hmm,” Zoe said. “Who could play her? Who would play you? Who would play me ? Oh, my God, Ruby, obviously! Oh, my God, it’s too perfect, I love it, yes, give me the forms, I say yes. ”

Elizabeth waved her hands in the air. “Oh, I think that part doesn’t matter as much. I’ll have the woman send you the thing to sign. I’m pretty sure they’ll just make us into one giant composite, like Random College Friends One, Two, and Three. But Andrew’s never going to agree to give them the song. It stirs it all up for him, you know?” For the past ten years, Elizabeth and Andrew had quietly been writing songs again, just the two of them, mostly during the afternoons when Harry was in school if they didn’t have to work. They sat on two chairs in the garage and played. Elizabeth couldn’t tell if their new songs were any good, but she enjoyed singing with her husband, the way intimate bodies could be feet apart and still feel like you were touching. No one else knew. Andrew wanted it that way. “Anyway,” she said, “what was your news?” There was half a pecan pie on the counter, brought over by Josephine, who baked it every month, even though it was totally unseasonable and therefore largely ignored by the book club. Elizabeth picked at it with her fingers.

“Oh,” Zoe said. “We’re talking about getting a divorce again.” She shook her head. “It seems kind of like it might really happen this time, I don’t know.” Bingo, Zoe’s ancient golden retriever, lumbered out of his hiding place under the dining-room table and leaned sympathetically against her shins. Zoe squatted down and hugged him. “I’m hugging a dog,” she said, and started to cry.

“Honey!” Elizabeth said, and dropped to her knees. She threw her arms around Zoe, the dog wedged in between them. There were good questions to ask and bad questions. One was never supposed to ask why, or to appear either surprised or the reverse, which was actually more offensive. “Oh, no! What’s going on? I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Does Ruby know? Are you talking about selling the house?”

Zoe raised her head from Bingo’s back, a dog hair stuck to her wet cheek. “Me, too. Yes. No. Well, maybe. Probably. And I think so? Oh, God.”

Elizabeth petted Zoe’s head and plucked the dog hair from her face. “I’ll help. With any of it. You know that, right?” Zoe nodded, her lower lip puffing out in a pout, its pale pink inside the color of a seashell.

Whitman Academy was a small private school, with only sixty-eight students in the senior class. Ruby was one of twelve students of color in her grade: three African-American, four Latino, five Asian. It was pathetic and depressing, but that was private school in New York City. Zoe felt conflicted about sending Ruby — she wanted her daughter to be surrounded by a diverse student body, but all the private schools were just as bad, the public schools in their zone were appalling, and Whitman was the closest to home. It was what it was.

The graduation ceremony took place after dark, which made the working parents happy, and made the students feel like it was more of a red-carpet affair, as if such measures were to be encouraged. The school was on Prospect Park West, which meant that it was always impossible to find a parking spot, but Ruby had worn heels, and refused to walk from the subway. They should have taken a taxi, but it was raining, and trying to get a cab in the rain in Ditmas Park was like trying to hail a polar bear. It just wasn’t going to happen. Zoe sat in the driver’s seat of their Honda, idling in the driveway. They had twenty minutes to get there. Jane had taken the night off, which meant that she was probably standing in their kitchen instead of the restaurant’s kitchen, on the phone ordering twenty pounds of heirloom tomatoes from a purveyor in New Jersey, chewing on the end of a pen until it looked like the gnarled root of a tree. The radio was tuned to NPR, which Zoe wasn’t in the mood for, and so she hit the button to find the next station, and the next. She stopped when she heard the chorus to “Mistress of Myself” and Lydia’s signature shrieking. It was a good song, sure, but really it had just been the right song at the right time, sung by the right mouth.

At Oberlin, Lydia hadn’t been anything special. She was a little doughy, like most of them, a few new layers of fat added by the cafeteria food, the soft-serve ice cream and Tater Tots they ate at every meal. They’d all been in the same dorm, South, which was across campus from where most of the freshmen lived, but housed lots of conservatory students. When her parents dropped her off, Zoe had watched a girl and her mother maneuver a full-size harp up the staircase. But Zoe and her friends weren’t musicians, not compared to the conservatory kids, all prodigies who’d been chained to their instruments since birth. Zoe could play piano and guitar, and Elizabeth had been taking guitar lessons since she was ten. Andrew was a rudimentary bass player at best. Lydia was supposed to be their drummer, but she didn’t have a drum set, just a pair of sticks that she would bang against whatever was closest. Back then, her hair was brown and wavy, like the rest of the girls’ from Scarsdale. Of course, once Lydia became Lydia, she wasn’t from Scarsdale anymore.

Zoe heard some shouting from the house. She shut the radio off and rolled down the window. Ruby and Jane both hustled out the front door, Ruby in the white fringe dress and Jane in a mask of disbelief.

“Are you kidding me with this?” Jane said, poking her head into the passenger-side window.

“Mom, God, it’s just a dress ,” Ruby said, slumping into the backseat.

“That is definitely not an entire dress.” Jane let herself collapse into the seat, her heavy body rocking the small car as she pulled the door shut and buckled her seat belt. She spoke without turning to face Zoe. “I can’t believe you agreed to let her wear that.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Ruby said.

Jane kept staring straight ahead. “Let’s just go. I can’t even.”

Zoe put the car in reverse. She caught Ruby’s eye in the rearview mirror. “We’re so excited for you, sweetie.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. It was an involuntary gesture, like breathing, an automatic response to whatever her mothers said. “I can tell,” she said. “You could always just drop me off with Chloe’s family, they’re going to the River Café for dinner.”

“The River Café isn’t what it used to be,” Jane said. “Those stupid Brooklyn Bridge chocolate cakes. It’s for tourists.”

“I know,” Ruby said, and turned to look out the window.

• • •

When they got to the school, Jane hopped out and switched places with Zoe — someone was going to have to circle the block to find a parking spot, and they both knew that Ruby would have a meltdown if she had to drive past her school three hundred times before going inside. All the seniors and their families were milling around in front and in the lobby, everyone dressed like they were going to the prom. Whitman didn’t have a prom, of course — that was too square, too suburban. Instead they had a party with the entire faculty in a converted loft space in Dumbo. Zoe was waiting for the e-mail to go out that the students and teachers had been caught having a group orgy in the bathroom. Most of the teachers looked like they could have been students, maybe held back a couple of grades. The young men almost always grew scruffy little beards or goatees, probably just to prove that they could. Ruby had skipped the party, “Because eww,” which Zoe secretly agreed with.