Penny tells Wendy that being a single mom is hard, which is why it’s lucky her sister lives nearby and can babysit while she bartends nights. But anyway, sorry she’s said so much about herself, when of course Wendy must be in a serious state.
“Yes,” Wendy says.
Penny pours them tequila shots. Wendy hasn’t drunk tequila since the last time she was at this bar, but she can’t say no without seeming snobbish and above it, so she toasts with Penny and downs her shot. Ten seconds later she’s drunk.
Penny’s drunk too—she’s been drinking since six with the guys watching the game—and because of this, and because Wendy looks so sad, Penny leans in and says something deeply sentimental, a line she’s heard in movies a million times but never once had occasion to use, though now it seems fitting, so right for the moment, she says, “He always loved you, you know.”
Wendy bursts into tears. Normally she can’t cry in front of other people—she’s too stiffly self-conscious—but the last few days have found her freely sobbing. Wendy wonders if, maybe, a barrier’s been broken, allowing access to a long-stored well of sadness, so that she’s not just crying for what’s happened this week, but for all the old things she would have cried for as well had the floodgates been open. Penny pours them each another round.
17.
Broder has emptied the wallet, traded its tender for powder. He closes his eyes. Blurry Broder with his slideshow brain. Everything’s bright: white walls coated in eggshell varnish, lemon-scented kitchen shine. The toaster was a silver mirror, floor a skating rink for socks. He remembers playing hockey with a duct-tape puck. Each year for his birthday, he asked for a brother.
Broder got a silver Torah pointer for his bar mitzvah, wore a silver silk shirt. They did the hora in the stammering strobe and they lifted his chair toward the crystal chandelier. His cousin’s gift was weed stems in an Altoids tin. They smoked from a pipe made from a dry-erase marker and the smoke smelled like marker. Broder’s magic mushroom poster glowed pink under black light. His bedroom ceiling was stickered with stars.
Girls were easy if you styled correctly: Abercrombie cargos, diamond stud, frosted tips. Broder’s mom mixed the bleach in a plastic beach pail. It was an intimate thing, her hands in his hair, the way she so delicately crimped the foil. Mom wore sweatpants but only ever vacuumed. She wore makeup but never left the house. He never knew how to answer when she asked about his day.
His grandma had what the home’s brochure called a junior suite: bathroom, sofa, sad twin bed. Broder brought Munchkins from Dunkin’. His grandma crushed the crumbs into the carpet with her stockinged heels, and he painted her nails: fuchsia or magenta or the kind called Party Shimmer. He loved the birdlike bones in her elegant hands. He brought flowers and he opened the windows, but it still smelled like urine. Broder only ever took a couple of her Oxys. Sometimes she called him by her dead husband’s name.
There was a greening in spring, honeyed summers. The glittered tar of his parents’ paved drive. Broder spun circles, whippit-high, a human helicopter crossing the lawn. Fall was burnt and russet brown. Winter was ice white with open heat grates. It was ice on the windshield, the sound of the scraper. Broder always had a bad winter cough. His phlegm was Adderall blue, Ritalin orange. School came easily to Broder; he got As.
College was cocaine and Napster. You just needed money and an Ethernet cable. You needed Winamp. Broder wore hoodies low over his eyes, stumbled down Broadway back to the dorms. There were hand jobs, blow jobs, the rare case of intercourse. He kissed a guy just to see if he liked it. Consensus: neutral. He let a guy jerk off on his leg.
There was no time for class. During daylight, he slept, or smoked on the steps of Dodge Hall in a trench coat and shades, or hunted for vinyl in mildewed storefronts on East Village side streets. Broder loved those rooms, their rising dust. Nothing in his parents’ house was old.
Broder had turntables and he had taste. He had very little talent. Michael didn’t mind. Michael had very little money; Broder bought. They ate chicken parm from Milano’s, or Amir’s falafel, or eggs Florentine from West End or Deluxe. They didn’t have girlfriends.
Broder wanted a girlfriend. He wasn’t sure how it worked. Girls were always gone by the time Broder woke. He’d sometimes catch one in the doorway, in the phantom disco shimmer of last night’s sequins, holding her heels. He wrote their numbers on loose scraps of paper or the back of his hand, but by the time he thought to call, he’d lost the scrap, or the marker had smudged, or he was scared of rejection and put down the phone. He envied those couples conjoined in the quad, sharing salads, passing the fork back and forth. To bring a girl home for Thanksgiving break, that was the dream. To show her off at the neighborhood bar, or cruise the midnight-still suburb
