Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“Zo?” Jane said. She stood up slowly, her knees creaking. “Rube?” She walked with stiff legs into the hall and peered into the other bedrooms. There was no sign of either her wife or her daughter. “Guys?” she called, her voice loud and clear. The house was empty. This is what it would be like for the rest of her life — calling into empty rooms and waiting for responses that weren’t coming. Getting married was the easy part, even though they’d had to wait until Ruby was twelve to do it legally. When they got together, it was all balloons, all hope. Now that they knew what the future held — what the future looked like — it was much harder. Why couldn’t everyone stay young forever? If not on the outside, then just on the inside, where no one ever got too old to be optimistic. Zoe would have laughed at her, standing like a mope in the middle of the hallway in her pajamas. Jane had no idea what time it was. Was it too late? She rested her forehead against the wall.

The SAT prep course was held on Saturday mornings in a karate school on Church Avenue, the northernmost thoroughfare in the neighborhood, populated by laundromats, bodegas, and the occasional coffee shop that sold freshly baked scones and croissants to the laptop crowd. The class was two hours long, every week for eight weeks — two whole months. Harry didn’t mind much. He didn’t have anything better to do, and it was nice to get out of the house, almost healthy. Taking tests didn’t scare him, and he was pretty sure that he didn’t have to get a perfect score in order to get into the schools he wanted to go to — maybe Bard or Bennington, somewhere small like Whitman but without any of the people. Reed sounded good. A little crunchy, but good. Being far away was a bonus.

Harry pulled open the door to the studio. There were folding chairs set up facing a dry-erase board along the back wall, and a projector screen was already showing off the crowded desktop of somebody’s laptop. A few other kids were milling around, and about half the chairs were occupied. Harry ambled over to the back row and sank into a chair. He recognized two girls from his grade sitting in the front row and pulled his hood down over his eyes.

“Hey,” someone said, smacking him in the back of the head.

Harry put his hand up to protect himself, spinning around as quickly as he could. Ruby stood behind him, smiling.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Hey.”

They hadn’t spoken since graduation. After the Dust incident (girls like Eliza and Thayer, now four rows ahead of him, had christened the event “#dustup” on Instagram, which they thought was hilarious until Ruby threatened to kill their parents), Ruby and Harry hadn’t even been in the same room. Harry had walked by Ruby twice, once when she was sitting on her front porch with her dog, and the other when she was standing on line at the grocery store on Cortelyou, buying milk and the same hippie deodorant that his mother used. He hadn’t said hello either time, because it was much easier to stare at the ground than it was to figure out what to say, but he had spent a lot of time smelling his mother’s deodorant.

Ruby picked up someone’s backpack that had been sitting in the chair next to Harry and moved it over one. “Mind if I join you? I hear the shrimp cocktail is out of this world.”

“And the martinis,” Harry said. “Very good olives.” He had a momentary panic that martinis didn’t have olives, and that he sounded like an idiot.

Ruby let her bag drop to the floor with a thud and then slid into the folding chair. “Are they going to dim the lights? It is definitely my nap time.”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. Ruby was six inches away. Her breath was toothpaste-minty. “I’m sorry about the other day.”

She looked surprised. “Why? That was fucking awesome.”

“No, I mean, I’m glad and everything. I’m just sorry that that guy was being such an asshole. At your graduation. That sucks. And I’m sorry that I had to tell your moms about him. I just hope… you know, that I didn’t get you into trouble.” Harry was sweating. The plastic folding chair was digging into his back. He pushed his hood off and then pulled it on again.

“It’s cool, man,” Ruby said.

A woman with glasses and a large Starbucks iced coffee walked to the far side of the room, the direction they were all facing, clapping her hands like they were a roomful of kindergartners. She waved a stack of paper. “Hey, guys, I’m Rebecca, and I’ll be your SAT prep tutor for the next eight beautiful Saturdays! I went to Harvard, and you can too! Let’s get started! Who’s down with some vocab quizzes?”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Ruby said.

“Want me to tackle her too?” Harry said. Ruby laughed so loudly that Eliza and Thayer both turned around, saw who it was, and quickly snapped to attention.

“I like your energy!” said Rebecca, flashing a double thumbs-up.

Ruby let her head loll back and pretended to hang herself.

It wasn’t a kind first thought, and it wasn’t a very hopeful one, but it drove Elizabeth slightly bonkers to think that Jane was going to profit from Zoe’s foresight and investment and commitment. That was marriage, agreeing to share bank accounts and bookshelves, even when you didn’t want to, even when it made things messier in the case of an eventual split. In her years as a real-estate agent, Elizabeth had come across several couples with separate checkbooks, which seemed like a red flag. Too cold-blooded, too pragmatic. It was like announcing that you hadn’t decided if you were going to stay married or not. Take me, take my overdraft charges! Take me, take my embarrassing number of books with teenage vampire protagonists! Elizabeth had never considered the alternative — it was as bad as signing a prenup. Why bother getting married, going through with all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn’t think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.

She knocked on the door — Zoe was on the sofa reading a magazine and waved her in through the window. Elizabeth opened the door and glanced up — the ceiling in the vestibule was cracked and needed a new coat of paint. Looking at the house was easier than looking at Zoe and telling her what was broken and needed fixing. They had always been close — in college and even more so in the years after, when they’d lived together inside these very walls — but after marriage and crawling children there wasn’t an easy way back. Like many, their friendship had slipped a disc somewhere along the way. Yes, sure, they would sometimes have dinner, just the two of them, and then they’d have a Big Talk about everything in their lives, but that was only once every three or four months. Their friendship was still there, but it also felt like it was a million miles away, viewable only through a time machine and a telescope.

“Do you want to talk?” Elizabeth asked. It had been her idea to come over. Zoe had expressed some interest in knowing what the house was worth, just in case. “Do you have a piece of paper? I want you to write it all down so that you can talk to Jane about it, about what needs to be done, okay?” Elizabeth had been in the house a thousand times — more, maybe — had lived here, had slept on the couch, had thrown up in the toilet. She had a good idea of what needed to be done, but she needed to show it all to Zoe. It was impossible to really see a space when you’d lived there for so long. All the eccentricities began to seem normal — the way you’d never properly rewired the doorbell, and so you had to push it extra hard to the left; the way the guest bedroom was two different shades of cream, because… well, why was it? It was a mistake, just a part of life, but now someone else was going to buy that mistake, and that someone was going to offer a hundred thousand dollars less because of it.