Florence Gordon Read online

  Janine and Daniel were on their third or fourth date before she found out who his mother was. She couldn’t believe it. She tried to tamp down her excitement—she limited herself to saying something like, “Your mother’s Florence Gordon? I’ve heard of her,” and when Daniel seemed surprised, she said, “Yeah. I’ve read some of her stuff. I liked it.” The funny thing about all this was that because she was determined to play it cool when she first found out (it seemed weird and somehow risky to let a new boyfriend know that she had an intellectual crush on his mother), Daniel never understood, and probably still didn’t understand, how important his mother was to her. She’d told him about it since, but she had the feeling that he’d never really revised his first impression.

  “Here she comes,” Emily said, as the lights went down.

  8

  The event was a panel discussion commemorating the revolutions of 1989, on their twentieth anniversary.

  What revolutions of 1989? Emily thought.

  Florence was seated at a table with two men, both much younger than she was. One of them had a gleaming shaved head; the other had luxuriant brown locks that obviously received a lot of tending. Both of them radiated testosteronely confidence. Emily felt almost afraid for her grandmother, a bony, brittle woman in her seventies, flanked by these cocksure boys.

  Emily was there to keep her mother company. She had no interest in listening to people theorize about revolution and social change. She had once heard a psychologist give a long, ponderous talk about why jokes are funny; theorizing about revolution had the same appeal.

  She didn’t mind being here, though. She had her copy of Middlemarch; she had her keychain flashlight. She had everything she needed.

  The gleamingly bald man pulled the mike closer and began to speak.

  Lately Emily had been thinking about writing a novel. She knew she was a little young for it, but a lot of her friends had participated in National Novel Writing Month, and she was thinking that when it came around again this year, she might participate too.

  If I were writing a novel, Emily thought, I wouldn’t want to write a description of a panel discussion. I’d just skip over it.

  9

  After the panel discussion, Emily and her mother joined Florence and two of Florence’s old friends at a restaurant.

  “How’d I do?” Florence said.

  “‘How’d I do?’” one of her friends said. “You sound like Ed Koch.”

  “Do I really?” Florence said. “Jesus.”

  Emily smiled (to look as if she knew who Ed Koch was) and looked down (to avoid being called on).

  Emily had no idea who Ed Koch was. Normally she would have asked, but there was something about her grandmother that made her reluctant. Emily couldn’t remember Florence scolding anyone for not knowing something, yet she felt certain that Florence was the kind of person who would.

  Florence’s old friends were Vanessa, whom Emily had met, and Alexandra, whom she hadn’t. Florence introduced them as “two fifths of my study group.” They’d been in a study group together for thirty years.

  As she ate her salad and listened to the conversation, Emily was feeling very meta. On the one hand, she was just listening to a few older women talk. On the other hand, she was witnessing the miracle of Women’s Friendship.

  One of the few things she’d ever read by Florence was an article about women’s friendships. Florence wrote it in the 1970s, in the early years of her career. Florence had pretty much made the case that the term “women’s friendship” was redundant, because only women really knew what friendship was. Men, from what Emily remembered, were described as being roughly on the level of apes or moose: they could stand around and grunt together, or they could compare antler size, but they could never experience, to the degree that women could, the pleasures of sympathy and compassion and conversation.

  Emily had no idea whether Florence still stood by them, but she couldn’t help but listen to the conversation in the light of the arguments Florence had made back then.

  The grown-ups were on their second pitcher of sangria. Emily, below the drinking age, had ordered a Shirley Temple—partly as a joke, partly because she liked Shirley Temples.

  “Would you put that down?” Florence said.

  Alexandra was looking at her BlackBerry, thumbing the keys rather haplessly.

  “Billy’s coming in tonight, if he . . . He’s bringing Alison.”

  Something about Alexandra’s voice made Emily sure that she was talking about a son and a granddaughter. How do we know these things? Somehow, we know.

  “They should ban texting in restaurants,” Florence said. She tapped Alexandra on the knuckles. “Put it away.”

  “Some restaurants do,” Vanessa said—and they were off. Florence and her friends and Emily’s mother started talking about the Internet, and the conversation grew ever more predictable. Why was it that at every grown-up function, the exact same conversation had to take place? Sometimes Emily felt as if she could hand out scripts, to save everybody the trouble of thinking, except that there would be no point, because they weren’t thinking—they were just saying the same things they’d said the last time. The adults would talk about how silly Twitter was, and then one of them would speak up for it, saying that Twitter had helped people organize protest movements around the world, and then they would talk about Facebook, and some of them would talk about how useless it was, and then most of them would guiltily admit that they were on it. At about this point Emily would usually go to the bathroom, because she knew what was coming, namely that someone was going to turn to her and ask her, as if she were a representative of the Young, if she had any attention span for reading, or if she was on Twitter, or if she was on Facebook (they would actually ask her that), or if she used Gmail—it was enough to make you scream.

  Emily was a generous person, but it was hard to put up with the fatuousness of older people sometimes.

  “So how’d I do?” Florence said, after they had exhausted the Facebook/Twitter conversation. “No one is answering my question.”

  “You did brilliantly, Florence,” Alexandra said.

  “You did,” Vanessa said. “And did you see how many nose rings there were in that room? You’re a hero to the young.”

  Florence looked like a cat in the sun. It was strange, Emily thought, to see someone who was so old and so supposedly wise fishing for compliments like this. But the fact that she was doing it so openly and cheerfully made it endearing in its way.

  “You surprised me, though. For a minute there you sounded like a cockeyed optimist,” Vanessa said.

  “The doom-and-gloom stuff annoys me,” Florence said. “Have you read The Country and the City?”

  For some reason she was looking at Emily, who had never heard of it.

  “Raymond Williams,” Florence said, as if that meant anything. “Williams quotes a contemporary of his—I think it’s Leavis—saying that life was better thirty years ago, when England was a real community. Then he quotes someone from thirty years earlier, saying that the sense of community in England had died out thirty years before that. He keeps going back, all the way to the Roman Empire, with Pliny or somebody, who’s pining for the way things used to be when he was young.”

  “That’s not really relevant,” Vanessa said, and she said something about Raymond Williams, and Florence countered with something about Joan Scott, and Emily was lost.

  “Would you stop that?” Florence said.

  Alexandra was peering at her BlackBerry again.

  “Just a minute. I need to . . .”

  That seemed to be the end of the sentence. Whatever she was looking at had sucked her in.

  “My God,” Florence said. “What are we coming to?”

  Florence leaned across the table and slapped her friend’s hand—slapped the BlackBerry out of her hand. She picked it up and dropped it in the pitcher of sangria.

  10

  Emily was the quickest person there: she plucked it o
ut of the pitcher, turned it over on her napkin to dry it off, and passed it back to Alexandra.

  “You’re going to have to expect that sort of thing,” Florence said. “Until they extend the anti-texting laws, concerned citizens are going to be taking matters into their own hands.”

  The conversation went on. Somehow Alexandra forgave her, with not much more than an exasperated shake of her head.

  If it were me, Emily thought, I would have just left, but I guess they’ve been friends so long that they can forgive each other for everything.

  Emily wanted to find her grandmother lovable. But it wasn’t easy. Florence seemed proud of herself for vandalizing her friend’s phone, and her friend seemed to accept it. Evidently you tolerated her quirks for the privilege of knowing her. But Emily kept thinking of how excited Alexandra was about her son and granddaughter’s visit. Maybe she was using the thing to check the arrivals at the airport.

  On the street, Florence declined Janine’s offer to share their cab uptown.

  “You look great, both of you,” Florence said. “Emma, I can’t believe how tall you’ve gotten.”

  In the cab, Emily said, “Emma.”

  “She was in the ballpark,” Janine said.

  11

  Getting rid of her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter was a production. Janine kept trying to get her to share their cab, insisting that it wasn’t safe to walk home at that time of night—as if Janine knew anything about New York—but finally Florence was able to peel her off and insert them in the cab and close the door.

  Emily, as usual, had been inquisitive, ironic, and distant. Florence wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anybody hold her cards as close to the vest as her granddaughter, whom she uneasily thought she might have called Emma when they said goodbye.

  It was a joy to be alone. It was fun to play the social role, it was fun to play the old lion at Town Hall, but it was far, far better to be alone again. She walked uptown, twenty-five glorious blocks in the rain-washed streets, feeling like a representative of all the glamour of the city.

  The strain of being with other people was sometimes close to unendurable. The strain of other people’s need. She could feel it radiating off her daughter-in-law, and she didn’t understand why. What do I have to do with her? Doesn’t she have Daniel; doesn’t she have her own parents; doesn’t she have her kids? What does she need me for?

  12

  No matter how hard-boiled you think you are, thought Daniel Gordon, you’re never quite prepared for New York.

  Out of cop’s habit, as he walked toward Grand Central, he assessed everyone for troublemaker potential—after more than twenty years, it wasn’t even conscious anymore—and instantly he was on overload. Everyone in New York seemed like a miscreant. Even the little old ladies—most of them looked as if they were running some scam.

  The bus from Kennedy takes you as far as midtown; Emily had insisted on meeting him when he got in, so they’d arranged to find each other in Grand Central. When he got there, she was already waiting, standing near the information booth in the middle of the great vaulted space. He saw her from fifty feet away, and he had the same feeling he always had when he saw her, that mix of heartlift and worry. The world is never safe enough, if you have a child.

  At nineteen, she was a dark, skinny beauty—at least she was beautiful to him.

  He put his two bags down and they embraced.

  “Did you miss me?” she said.

  “Not that much.”

  His answer made her smile, because she knew it was his way of saying yes.

  “It’s weird to see you in New York,” she said.

  “Thanks. You too. Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s got a cold. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “I haven’t talked to her since Tuesday.”

  Emily started telling him about Janine’s cold. He couldn’t really pay attention, because he was too happy to see her.

  As they were nearing the exit, a man sprinted past them and out the door. Ten seconds later, four cops bolted by. Emily kept talking.

  “You’ve become a New Yorker,” he said, but since she hadn’t even noticed the incident, she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You wanna take a cab?” he said.

  “Let’s walk awhile. I can pull one.”

  She reached for one of his bags but he wouldn’t let her take it.

  They went out into the bright day. At a corner she took his arm and turned him gently north.

  Even walking was different in New York. The afternoon streets were crowded, and people kept stepping impatiently around him. A woman his mother’s age stepped around him and gave him an irritated look as she passed.

  He’d have time to get used to it all again. Taking off just one week a year, he’d been accruing vacation days for more than two decades, and he had enough to take him from Memorial Day to the end of September.

  “How’s your class?”

  She was taking a literature class through Barnard’s summer general-studies program.

  “It starts next week. It’s gonna be great. Jane Austen. George Eliot. Virginia Woolf. What could be bad about that?”

  “And what have you been eating?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What have you been eating?”

  “The interrogation begins.”

  “I’m just asking what you’ve been eating. Is that such a difficult—”

  “Why are you asking what I’m eating?”

  “I just want to know whether you’ve been eating real food or whether you’ve been eating that birdseed you eat at home. I don’t see why that’s such a difficult—”

  “All right! I admit it! I’ve been eating birdseed.”

  “Seriously. Are you still being a vegan?”

  “Vegan. Yes. I’m still being a vegan.”

  “Why? Vegetarianism I can understand, but why do you have to take it to such an extreme?”

  “You want to know the reason?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “The real reason?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do it because I like to annoy you.”

  He shook his head, supposedly in exasperation, but he was having a good time.

  He had asked her to explain her veganism about a thousand times, and he didn’t really care about it—she was obviously in good health—but he liked to keep asking, because she expected him to.

  She had the same light, easy walk in the middle of Manhattan that she had in Seattle. That was good, because it meant that wherever she was, she was at home. That was bad, because in New York you should be on your guard.

  He worried about her safety; he worried about her happiness; he worried about her resilience. He hadn’t been pleased when she decided to take time off from college; you might even say he’d been panicky. Janine had had to talk him down.

  But somehow all the worries felt like matters of the surface alone. In the deepest places, he was confident—about who she was and who she’d become.

  You expect to love your children; it brings a different kind of joy to realize you admire them. Emily was a young woman of great decency. He remembered an afternoon when she was six or seven; she had a friend over and they were playing in the living room. The two of them were throwing a ball or something, and her friend said, “I’m much more bad at this than you are,” and Emily had said simply, “You’re learning.” That was Emily.

  “Have you been in touch with the eternal wanderer?” he said. Her brother, Mark.

  “Of course.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know. He seems groovy, as you would say.”

  “What’s he up to?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You know. You never miss anything. Is he reading? Is he inventing things on the Internet? Is he dating? What’s he up to?”

  “I don’t really know. He hasn’t changed his status. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s all you’ll say. How’
s Mom?”

  “She hasn’t changed her status either,” Emily said.

  “What’s she been up to?”

  “Reading. Inventing things on the Internet. Dating.”

  “I want facts, damn it. Facts.”

  “I don’t have any facts. I never see her. By the time I get home at night she’s sleeping. By the time I get up in the morning she’s out for her run.”

  Janine was a devoted runner and swimmer. She pursued these pastimes not in a grim effort to battle the aging process, but in a spirit of ebullience, because she had so much energy to burn off.

  At home he liked to swing by the Y and pick her up from swimming. He liked to see her emerging from the water.

  “Have you seen my mom?” he said.

  “We’ve seen her maybe one and a half times.”

  “How’d she seem?”

  “Splendid. We went out to dinner with her the other day. She destroyed somebody’s BlackBerry. She called me Emma.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “She didn’t which?”

  “She didn’t call you Emma.”

  “Of course she did. Last year she called me Amelia.”

  “She’s not that good with names. But she loves you.”

  “She loves me in a very special way,” Emily said.

  “And my dad?”

  “Even less. Half a time.”

  Men, men of all ages, were checking out his daughter as they passed. Daniel wanted to punch them.

  The sublet was on the Upper West Side. It came with the fellowship that had brought Janine to New York. By coincidence, it was just a few blocks from the building where Daniel had grown up.

  The neighborhood had changed, and hadn’t changed. It was weirding him out to be up here, but he didn’t say anything to Emily. He was not in the habit of admitting to being weirded out by anything.