He doesn’t miss a beat. “Shore thang, Maw.”
Quentin grabs the check.
“No, you did that last time.”
“I’m an architect, you’re an actor.”
“I’m doing fine.”
“Next time.”
“Quentin, I’m serious. It doesn’t make me feel good.” She doesn’t add, You’re being Male.
He gazes at her for a second, then hands her the check. “OK.”
When they hug goodbye out on the sidewalk, he says, “I’m just trying to repay you for taking care of me for so many years.”
“Oh, Quentin.” She squeezes him. “You’re the only reason I survived adolescence.”
He lets go, smiles questioningly.
“I have to go,” she says. “Mette . . .”
“Of course.”
She heads up the avenue, toward the L.
She regrets that last exchange. Mette is almost twenty-one, but the mere mention of her name is accepted as a reason that Saskia must get home. She didn’t mean it that way, she was thinking only that she hadn’t heard from her, wanted to check in, leave time to go out for the groceries in case Mette had forgotten. Did other people, even Quentin, think that her daughter needed, what?—supervision?
A score of human bundles are scattered along the subway platform. Freezing, drafty, damp. Saskia hugs herself.
The family . . . Seeing Quentin always brings it back. Her “childhood.” From the age of ten, wasn’t she the only adult in the house? Well, no, that isn’t fair. She was no more adult than her mother. The two of them tried to raise the Lost Kids like a pair of Lost Girls who kept pointing at each other: You be Wendy! No, you be Wendy!
Saskia detests movies that culminate in the idea that, hey, we’re untraditional, but we’re a family. (She was even in one once, as a harried receptionist at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The totality of her lines, post–cutting room: “Next!”) They hide the hard issue behind the easy one. The question isn’t whether Dad is married to another Dad, or if Sis has accomplished a virgin birth, or if the contra-colored urchin from down alleyway is always at the dinner table. The pesky question in most families is, Does anyone really care about anyone else?
Whenever Saskia starts a new relationship, she dreads this topic. The supposedly innocent icebreaker, “So what about your family?” Every answer she gives leads to another question. “Wait—what?” The men pursue it because it’s a puzzle; the women, because they mainline this stuff.
When she was four, her Danish father tried to commit hara-kiri and subsequently disappeared in an ambulance. Being dead would have been an adequate excuse for never coming back, but he healed up just fine and went on to wander the world, pursuing a series of interests that absorbed him way more than Saskia ever did. Meanwhile, her mother, Lauren, climbed into Space Shuttle Denial and lifted off into orbit (don’t worry, Earth lovers, it ran on vegetable oil). There were five kids on the property, a former whacked-out commune drowning in wild grape along Cayuga Lake north of Ithaca, New York. (Mr. Gets-a-D-in-Suicide had been the guru.) Saskia, Lauren, and the other children lived in the old house. Lauren’s series of pot-smoking boyfriends lived successively in one of the two trailers until ineffectual Bill moved in and stayed. In the other trailer was thin, raspy Jo, devotée of that older sacred American drug, tobacco, and abandoned mother of the four kids who weren’t Saskia. This is where Hallmark can clap the clapstick: all eight human bundles gathered nightly ’round the groaning board. Jo’s four children were cuddly Melanie (one year younger than Saskia), the proto-delinquent twins Austin and Shannon (three years younger), and the underwatered houseplant known as Quinnie (five years younger). Of the many family secrets Lauren never got around to telling Saskia, one of them was that Quinnie’s facial resemblance to Saskia’s wasn’t a Lamarckian consequence of her years of singlehandedly nurturing him, but because Dad had fucked Jo shortly before decamping.
Saskia’s pillow talk with new partners was terse on this dialogue thread, no matter what options the player chose. She wasn’t trying to be enigmatic, she was just sick of the subject. Also, aware of her propensity for fanciful elaboration—not to mention occasional substitution of entirely different narratives of ad hoc inspiration—she did not want to start a new relationship dishonestly.
Back to the Afternoon TV Special: yes, they passed the string beans to each other, and even laughed on occasion—where’s the freeze frame when you need it?—but who would be in the sequel? She had grown to like boyfriend Bill, his hopeless writer’s dreams, his decent loyalty to Lauren, but when Lauren died he wandered off and stopped answering Saskia’s emails after a year. It’s possible he was heartbroken, but weren’t he and Saskia “family” by then? How many fucking string beans does it take? Jo died of throat cancer five years ago, so she gets a pass. Melanie, a stay-at-home mom in San Jose, sends Saskia Christmas greetings, but that’s it. When they were children, Saskia adored the younger girl, but when Melanie was eighteen, the thirty-four-year-old minister of a local evangelical church led her to Jesus, his bed, and the altar in an order Saskia would be very curious to know, and since then Saskia’s bisexuality has been a bit of a sore subject. Austin and Shannon grew up most like Jo, a couple of wisecracking, school-skipping, drug-loving troublemakers. They’re both somewhere in northern Maine, and don’t return calls.
And then there’s Thomas. (That would be “Dad.”) He will live forever. Failing to kill himself with a ceremonial Japanese tantō was the fairy-tale proof of his immortality. The last Saskia heard, he’s been incarnating a holy hermit perched atop a windmill on some remote Danish island. She kids not. Anyway, the point is, when this flamboyant three-masted schooner with its tangled rigging went gurgling to the bottom, the only thing that bobbed to the surface in Saskia’s vicinity was Quentin. I’ll be flotsam, you be jetsam.
Speaking of which, she’s emerging from the
