The Awkward Age Read online

  Not rude, Julia noted, just conversational. Progress.

  James led them toward a small ice cream shop. In the doorway Saskia paused, and she now gently poked her father’s shoulder.

  “I’m leaving, Dad. I’m meeting people for lunch.”

  “We’re people. We’re people right here. Three people, who all live in England and who pine for you across the ocean . . .”

  She patted his head mildly. “Bye, Dad.”

  “Have you got cash? Scarf? Batphone? Call me if you need a ride from anywhere.”

  “You don’t have a car in this country, but thanks.” Saskia turned to Gwen. “When you go into Harvard Yard, don’t let him or Nathan tell you to rub John Harvard’s toe; the students pee on it. Kay, bye. Get the black raspberry.”

  • • •

  NATHAN WAS LATE, and they ordered without him. Gwen held out her cone of black raspberry to James, tentative, casual. James took it, tasted, considered with head cocked to one side, reviewed it favorably, returned it. He offered Gwen his own malted white chocolate. They agreed to swap and Julia watched in a state of rigid disbelief and fascination, breath held, as if willing a paused and watchful wild animal to approach a tidbit held on offered palm. This would have been unthinkable in London. It was Nathan’s absence, surely, or it was Boston, or it was the alignment of the planets. In her pocket her phone vibrated, and she excused herself from the table, handing Gwen her untouched frozen yogurt and stepping out into the noise and chill of Massachusetts Avenue.

  “I’m so sorry, maidele,” Philip said, when Julia answered. She stood in the cold, numbed. “It wasn’t right. We couldn’t let him suffer.”

  A hope extinguished. Each change had come like this. Gwen’s first day at secondary school. The rapid and murderous blight that afflicted the blowsy, salmon-pink roses that had always climbed their garden wall, flourishing over the years despite total ignorance and neglect. The transformation of their family’s beloved local curry house into a fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored nail bar. Each wave swept Daniel further from his little girl, a stronger tide even than the accumulated minutes since she had last seen his face. And Julia could do nothing but stand on the shore and watch, hopelessly, as he receded, alone with the wounded little girl he left behind. Gwen’s longing for her father was why Julia would not get a new car, nor replace—of all the things about which to be sentimental—the unreliable microwave. Gwen had asked her not to. Through the glass she watched Gwen talking, gesticulating, eating the ice cream James had given her, opening up to him, possibly for the first time. And now she would have to be told and would suffer. It was on this duty that Julia fixed as she turned her face away from her family and into the biting wind, permitting herself only a short, silent weep before she returned to the café.

  7.

  James was an optimist. He was determined that eventually Gwen would love him and, though at present it was challenging to imagine, that one day he would also love Gwen. There was no question that Gwendolen could be extremely trying and that Julia’s guilty permissiveness had not helped. She would be a less demanding child and, more important, would show greater fortitude, he thought, had she not been raised in such a spirit of compensatory contrition and apology. But they were family now and the only way to proceed was with positivity. Falling for her mother did not entitle him to a role in Gwen’s upbringing, and he would keep his opinions to himself. Primum non nocere. And one did not need to be her parent to see that she was absolutely devastated about the dog. Julia had led her gently to the bathroom for privacy. They had been gone some time.

  When they returned Gwen was even more hunched than usual, folded in upon herself as if she carried something fragile clutched to her chest. Her eyes were red-rimmed but she was composed, and she pulled her jacket tighter and huddled into the cocooning woolen mask of her scarf. Julia put her arm around her daughter and kissed her forehead, stroking back her red hair. At the last minute James decided to offer no eulogy, wagering—correctly—that Gwen would not like him to besmirch Mole’s memory. Instead he squeezed her shoulder and she’d given him a brief, wan smile. They gathered up their belongings to go.

  As they were pushing back their chairs Nathan loped up, drinking from a stainless steel travel mug that James immediately identified as Pamela’s. The ghosts of a dozen arguments rose from that mug like unwelcome genies—disputes about paper coffee cups “choking our landfills,” about disposable nappies and the reuse of plastic bags, and a particularly hysterical exchange about the “poisonous and inhumane” chicken nuggets James had bought for Saskia on a visit to Sea World that had really been, he was convinced, about the fact that at that stage they had not had sex for almost three months. All their disagreements echoed in that mug; the petty, ludicrous, deathly serious battlegrounds of discordant—and subsequently divorced—parenting. He considered they were mature and cordial, and yet he knew she would be working hard to undermine many of his choices this weekend. He couldn’t blame her—he would begin his own exorcism at the airport by treating everyone to McDonald’s.

  “Well, hello to all of you,” said Nathan, looking between them, perplexed. “What an overwhelmingly enthusiastic welcome.”

  “We’re a bit sad, that’s all,” said Julia, squeezing Gwen’s arm. “Gwen’s grandpa phoned this morning and we heard the news that Mole died.”

  Nathan exhaled through his teeth. “Christ, you scared me, I thought something awful had happened. Well, look on the bright side”—he grinned and raised his coffee to Gwen in a partial toast—“at least you won’t have to clear up shit in the kitchen anymore.”

  James had sensed this comment long before Nathan’s arrival, he realized, had felt it in the air like coming rainfall, yet nonetheless he was momentarily floored by his son’s misjudgment. He turned, but before he could address Gwen she was already outside and crossing back through the speeding traffic of Massachusetts Avenue. The lights were not with her and for one heart-stopping moment she had looked—he hoped Julia hadn’t seen—the wrong way to check for oncoming cars. Julia stood and went after her daughter. With a hand on the doorframe she paused and looked back, addressing Nathan. “That was utterly uncalled for. That was crass and unkind.” She then departed, breaking into a run.

  And now Gwen would need to be pieced back together all over again, James thought, frustrated. Why couldn’t Nathan keep his mouth shut? Why was Gwen so maddeningly thin-skinned?

  Nathan began to stir Julia’s tub of melting frozen yogurt, looking sullen. “She’s so hypersensitive.”

  “Well, there’s no concerns about sensitivity with you.”

  “I was only joking, she’s like a three-year-old, running off all the time and throwing tantrums.”

  James had been about to protest this accusation, but then conceded: “I know, she does. But can I explain something? I don’t entirely blame you because I know you were trying to be funny and probably wanted to make everyone feel better. But we’ve come into a family that’s very different from ours—”

  “—too right.”

  “Right,” insisted James, earnestly, refusing to be drawn at this moment by the temptation of disparaging collusion, “but you’ve also got to understand that this is about her father. I don’t want to ask you to imagine but can you just for a moment, imagine what that must be like to lose your dad? She misses him all the time. And it’s been just the two of them for all those years, and it absolutely does not excuse her behavior in other circumstances, I agree, and Gwen can be difficult, but that dog was her father’s. He bought that dog and trained that dog, and probably spent a lot of time with Gwen and the dog, and she’s probably thinking about her father today and feeling like she’s lost a connection to him. She’s really hurting. You have to think of things in context.”

  “I’m sorry. I was kidding.”

  James paused. His son had been, he felt, consistently mature and accommodating in the face of seismic f
amily change. The divorce had been hard on both children, and Pamela moving back the following year had been a second loss. Now their little threesome had been disrupted: Saskia was back in America, they’d sold their flat in Kilburn, and moved in with two relative strangers. His own low-level guilt reminded him that his kids had not had it easy, either. They were beautifully mannered, which hid their sadness, but the squeaky wheel shouldn’t always get the grease.

  “I think you’re doing a fantastic job. I’m so proud of you and your sister. This hasn’t been straightforward, and you’ve both made it so easy for me.”

  “Unlike some people?” Nathan prompted.

  “It’s not a competition.”

  “But if it was,” said Nathan, putting Pamela’s thermos cup on the floor between his feet where James resisted the urge to kick it, “we would win, right?”

  There was no one to hear him; it was a relief, in that moment, to admit aloud that he preferred his own children. Of course he did, who wouldn’t? It was tiring to pretend otherwise, the only lie he’d told or would ever tell Julia. She was the first woman with whom he could be entirely honest and with whom he felt entirely himself. Yet it had not been honest to say—your daughter is a bonus! He wanted it to be true and tried to make it true by saying it, but Nathan, too, deserved some rare time alone with his father. “I mean it, though. No one asks for a new sibling and a stepmother at seventeen. Let’s walk, I can’t sit here anymore. We were meant to be doing all the Cambridge sights this morning; will you come with your old dad for a nostalgic walk around Harvard Yard? And then let’s go down to Eliot House, I’ll give you the James Fuller undergrad tour. First, I’ll show you where I never managed to make out with girls in the stacks.”

  “Dad, no.”

  “No?”

  “Just no.”

  • • •

  THEY ENTERED THE YARD beneath the Porcellian’s carved stone boar head, hoisted blank-eyed and openmouthed above McKean Gate. The freshman dorms on either side seemed empty, with most of their inmates home for the first time since their arrival at Harvard, returned for Thanksgiving to condescend to younger siblings, to have clothes laundered and stomachs filled, to oversleep in crisp new Harvard-branded sweatshirts and pajama bottoms and H-logoed nonslip bed socks, and to be bad-tempered with the parents they instantly resented for behaving as if nothing about them had changed.

  Stripped of undergraduates, only tourists remained in Harvard Yard. The centers of the segmented lawns were still green but their edges were balding and muddied, roped off to recover from heavy rain and heavy footfall. James and Nathan rounded the looming gray flank of Widener, down a path slippery with a mulch of oak and elm leaves and then farther on, around the corner to the statue of a man who was not John Harvard, despite his label, slouched huge and complaisant beneath a vast flag that snapped and wavered in the wind like a mainsail. They waited, watching while a family from Germany took pictures of one another reaching up to rub the statue’s polished bronze toe. Three blonde daughters, small, medium, and large, in matching green-and-pink–flowered anoraks and new Red Sox baseball caps took turns to strain upward for the top of the plinth. James offered to take their photograph together and they thanked him, handed him a huge-lensed camera, and posed, smiling and squinting only slightly in the sharp bright chill. After they’d gone, Nathan put an arm around his father’s waist, tenderly protective.

  “You and Mom are obsessed with talking to randoms.”

  “I know, our existence is excruciating. If you come here to college, I promise not to hang out and talk to students. Go rub his toe, it’s good luck for applying.”

  “Dad. That last worked when I was about eight. So anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Nathan changed the subject, casually, “before, you said ‘stepmother,’ but are you actually going to get married again?” He and Saskia did not agree, neither could they agree whether it mattered. Nathan refused to admit that a legal contract endowed a relationship with permanence, using their own parents’ marriage as an example. But still, he felt, there would be an ineluctable shift. At present, whatever his father might believe, Nathan had neither stepmother nor stepsister.

  “I don’t think so,” James admitted. “Julia doesn’t want to, she’s worried about Gwen. I think we’re fine as we are. Come, let’s walk to Longfellow’s house.”

  “I’ve been a million times.”

  “Just to walk a bit.”

  “But you think of her as our stepmother now in any case.”

  “I can’t think of alternative, unmarried terminology. We’re in it for the long haul, marriage or not.”

  “’Cause you’re happy,” Nathan observed. In Harvard Square, a busker in a Santa hat and mauve-and-yellow-striped fingerless gloves was playing “Feliz Navidad” on the accordion. The wind picked up, and without thinking Nathan handed Pamela’s travel mug to his father and thrust his hands into his pockets, happily unencumbered. James was reminded of his son as a much smaller child, absentmindedly passing him the smeared wrapper of a candy bar or the fuchsia-stained stick of a Popsicle, or even his chewing gum, plopped into an open palm without thought so Nathan could race off ahead. No running with gum had been one of James’s few rules. Pamela, for ecological reasons, had vetoed gum under all circumstances.

  “Yes. I’m happy. Is that okay?”

  “I suppose we can overcome our childish amazement that parents are people and allow you to have, shock horror, a life of your own. You can pay for our therapy later, if you like. Even Mom said you seem good together. She said you need someone unchallenging at this stage in your life.”

  “Did she. Come on,” said James, firmly. “We’re going this way.”

  They passed the Coop, where the Harvard insignia crept like a pox across towels and bed linen and cufflinks and jewelry and soft toys and toothbrushes and commemorative pewter and glassware. There were Harvard bottle openers and Ping-Pong balls, baby bibs and pencil cases. They stopped to admire these wares, James offered to buy his son an Ivy League chocolate bar and tried, and failed, to imagine his own father in such a place. “’S’tempting fate,” Nathan told him solemnly. “Buy me one when I get in.”

  “When you get in you can have the engraved champagne flutes.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Smile,” Nathan commanded, leaning backward, inclining his head toward James’s shoulder and extending his arm to take their picture. He seemed pleased with the results, zooming and cropping until it was just the two of them smiling, the burgundy and white VERITAS banner prominent behind them. As they walked on Nathan captured them in various locations: Nathan making bunny ears behind his father outside the freshly painted cream-yellow clapboard of Longfellow’s house. Sipping hot chocolate together outside Peet’s Coffee. Both grinning with shy pride, arm in arm outside the closed gates of Eliot House. James’s children both documented their own lives obsessively. Where did all these photos go? When he asked for copies they laughed at him.

  “You know, you guys aren’t little kids, and you and Gwen will both go to college in the next few years,” said James, returning to the subject so he could conclude and move on to more congenial topics. The thought of Nathan leaving—possibly coming here, across the Atlantic—created a strange sad pressure in his chest. “Let’s cross and walk by the river awhile. I don’t think you should have to pretend you’re siblings. But just—flatmates, maybe, all of us. Friends. It might take the pressure off.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Look, cool picture of us.”

  “Great picture, send it to me. I don’t know why I say that, you never do. Will you make it up with her?”

  “I promise. And with Julia, too. But may I just say, in the privacy of this conversation, that I’m not completely gutted about the future lack of giant elderly dog shit in the kitchen.”

  “Nathan.”

  “Okay, okay.” He grinned at his father, wide-eyed and deliberately, disarmingly, devastatingly
winsome. “Should we buy them another dog? What about a Siberian husky?”

  8.

  It was only ten p.m., but they were all subdued and weary and Gwen, in particular, was longing for the day to end. Mole’s absence was unthinkable, and so she would not think it. In the television’s narcotic company she could stave off the truth, just for tonight, but the fragile membrane of her shield required solitude and so she had refused her mother’s offer to stay with her, dismissing her almost frantically at the door of her hotel room. Until only a few months earlier Julia would not have offered to stay like a polite, concerned acquaintance but would simply have been there, holding her hand while they sat together, absorbed in a flickering, inauthentic reality and safe, warm silence. One being. In this manner they had staved off grief before. Offered, Gwen could not accept. And she did not want James to think her a baby, tempting though it was to separate them and be spared the nauseating and insistent image of their not-quite marital king-size bed.

  There was a rap on Gwen’s door and she opened it to see Nathan, bundled up in his coat, a woolen beanie pulled down low over his eyes. She went to close it, and he thrust his foot out to stop her.

  “Wait,” he whispered, loudly. “Just wait. One second.”

  Her pajama top was an old cotton tank top of her father’s, and was almost certainly see-through. She crossed her arms firmly across her unimpressive chest and stared down at the chipping blue polish on her toenails. She became aware that her pajama bottoms had ridden up, but she could not release her arms to adjust them for fear of exposing a breast. The shorts were puce, printed with a motif of repeating black mustaches and a less regular, overlaid pattern of bright lilac bleach-stains, and were not for public viewing. She hunched, awkwardly, and did not reply. He would not have the satisfaction of seeing her upset.

  “I’m sorry. I mean it. I know you think I’m a dick—” Nathan began. Gwen began to speak and he continued hurriedly, “I know, I know, what I should say is I know I was a dick.” He took a step and she began to protest again, but he did not come farther into the room, merely reached for the door handle and began turning it slowly, back and forth, inspecting the mechanism. “We never even had a goldfish or a hamster or anything, because Pamela thinks that animals shouldn’t be enslaved to human needs, not that I’m saying Mole was enslaved; I’m just saying my mother’s a little eccentric, which I’m guessing hasn’t escaped your notice this weekend, but I just didn’t think. Your mom got mad, which I totally deserved, and my dad said that Mole was your father’s dog, and I didn’t know that, either. I’m not making excuses but—I, I just wanted to say that I can’t imagine how sad it must be for you today.”