Chapter One

Sarah Thrived on other People’s Problems

There were many things I have never understood because they seemed boring or useless or possibly beyond my intelligence although I am very smart, almost a genius according to one childhood tester but then again, I had talked nonstop and managed to persuade the nice lady to skip most of the math. I don’t understand math, especially algebra, and things that fit into each other, which way the pulleys moved if they were tugged, and how to measure anything. I don’t understand football or cars or war, but I understand refugees and I would count most men in that category, forced to suppress their feelings, their love for male friends and their fear. I am excellent in a crisis, calm and kind and efficient.

So when my daughter, my only child, came into my room that morning as the sun rose over the distant New Hampshire mountains, climbed into bed and woke me up as usual by putting her freezing feet against my warm shins and whispered, “I can’t get married,” I rolled over and without anger or fear faced this person, this woman who was about to cause massive social distress and financial loss after nearly two years of the same thing had blighted the globe. She had not put on her wedding makeup and her hair looked slept in. Strangely, she had attached her veil, a stupid thing in my opinion, into that messy hair.

“What?” my tone was slightly sharp.
“I don’t love him. “
“Isn’t this something you might have said to that nice priest?”
“He wasn’t nice. He pretended to be all New Catholic, but he wasn’t.”
“Or your betrothed, Emily? Could you have had this conversation with Sam, maybe right after he proposed?” Emily had her face buried in the hotel’s genuine down pillows, so it was hard to hear her response. “Emily?
“What? He’s not a nice person, Mom. He’s a bad tipper. He quotes Ayn Rand.”
“Emily,”
She lifted her face off the pillow. God, I loved that face, all cheekbones and softness and beautiful eyes and a chin exactly like her father’s, her father who had died eighteen months earlier, an act of bad timing and misery I might never forgive him for.
“What?”
“Are you planning to cancel this wedding?”
She inhaled, exhaled, and a line appeared across her forehead, a line that suggested deep thought accompanied by a reluctance to articulate those thoughts. “What if I did?”
I sat up. This whole thing had been painless so far despite my dislike for his mother and my sense that his father might be a racist after he asked Emily’s best friend, Grace, to get him a refill on his wine. He gestured towards the kitchen.
“I don’t work here,” she told him. “I’m a guest.”
He didn’t apologize. He gave her a long look and then turned his back. It was awful. I was close enough to quickly move next to her.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“That’s the fuck.”
“I’ll make him apologize,” I said.
“No,“ she looked me in my eyes. “Fight your own battles, Aisling.”
“I’ll poison him.”
“Okay,” Grace said. “By the way, it runs in that family.”

So, there was that. Jasper would never have let things go this far. If he had been present at that first meal when Sam’s father had made a strong case for Trump’s fiscal policies, Sam and Sam’s mother nodding in agreement, Emily doing something on her phone, he would have stood and said, “My daughter marries into this family over my dead body.” Which turned out to nearly be the case.

I, on the other hand was so shocked by the idea I would be related to people who supported  a man who encouraged rape, murder, and ate nothing but fast food, who committed genocide with his handling of the pandemic, who refused to concede an election and inspired his followers to storm the capital wearing dead animals on their heads, kicked Emily under the table and when she refused to stop counting her followers on Instagram, murmured that he was the worst president in the history of the United States. I was ignored by everyone but our waiter who poured me more wine and winked, touching my shoulder lightly as a way to show we were compadres. How I missed Jasper at that moment.

I’m a coward and I will regret my silence for a long time. Now my daughter stands up to reveal she is wearing her wedding dress. She has slept in it, the wrinkles in the linen and satin make that abundantly clear, yet she is still a beautiful bride. Her veil poufs out like a lacy marshmallow cloud around her head. I see her briefly as a child who has just dipped herself in tar, an event marking her seventh birthday. The expression on her face is so similar, anxious but also pleased with herself and the havoc she was causing.

“Emily, is this a joke?”
“No. I wanted to try it on again.”
“Why don’t you just get married?”
She looked exquisite even without makeup, her hair a wavy mess, the dress was perfect, vintage yet stylish, “Mom! I want to go! Now!”
“We need to speak with Sam and his parents.”
“Let’s just leave. We paid for nearly everything and they can figure out what to do.”
“What about the guests?”
“I’ll send out an email blast. Cancelling is like a Covid bonus. No one’s coming from far away.”
No, no one is coming from far away.

Jasper’s memorial service was a Zoom meeting attended electronically from places like Ireland and the west coast. Black boxes left empty by those who preferred to remain off-camera or were too old to understand which button to push were the majority. Many of the attendees did not mute their microphones and so the cacophony of noise, children, dogs, traffic, muttered asides, never ceased. Finally, when the rooster crowed, most of us started to giggle. His sister spoke for ten minutes about their “special bond” and then his brother interrupted her and said he’d like to hear from the “bereaved widow.”
I was distracted at that moment, my microphone on, and was caught saying, “Oh my god will she ever shut the fuck up?” with everyone staring at me. There was a shocked silence and then Emily, my perfect child, read her father’s favorite poem, and it was finally over.
“That was dope, Mom,” she said, descending from upstairs, carrying her laptop.
“What was dope?”
“What you said about Aunt Julie.”
“You heard that?”
“Everyone heard it. Your sound was on. It was the best part. Dad would have loved it.”
Jasper’s sister Julie was a pain in the ass, but I never meant to publicly shame her. Still, stuff happens.

Emily was unzipping her wedding dress and pulling on a pair of jeans. ”C’mon,” she said, “get in the car. Let’s go.”
“I’m in my pajamas.” I wore yoga pants and a t-shirt to bed. Jasper slept naked as did Emily.
“You look dressed.”
“Well, I’m not. And I need coffee.”
“Mom!” Emily was rummaging in my suitcase, “Here!” She threw leggings, underwear, a sports bra and a t-shirt on the bed. “We need to go. I’ll order something from Starbucks.”
“I didn’t agree to this yet, Em. What about Sam?”
“Last night before he went to his parents, he said I should be less mouthy in front of his father and that it wasn’t racist to tell Grace to get him more wine, that he wants me to quit my job and move to Florida.” Sam’s parents lived in a gated community on a private road in south Florida.
“Let’s get out of here.”

By the time we stopped for coffee, Emily had sent out an email blast stating that the wedding was cancelled. Grace called and Emily put her on speaker phone.
“What are you playing at, Emily? This runaway bride shit is so dated!”
“I should have told you last night. My mom’s here.”
“Jesus, Aisling!” Grace sounded flummoxed.
“She doesn’t love him,” I said. “His family are the worst.”
“No shit but seriously, they are putting up the tent. I need to get out of here before Sam’s father tells me to bring him coffee. And why doesn’t that motherfucker wear a mask?”
“Go, Grace. They might think we conspired or something.”
“New Hampshire is not filled with my people. I feel like a target.”
“I’ll pay for your dress,” Emily said.
“It doesn’t matter, Em. You should dye yours. Maybe dusty rose.”
“That sounds so pretty!”
“Grace, can she be sued for doing this? Breach of contract? Alienation of affection?”
“No. Just pay the bills. Wasn’t this more or less a do-it-yourself or, better, force-your-friends-to-spend-weeks-filling-goodie-bags-with-shit?”
“Yes,” Emily said. “And nobody held a gun to your head.”
“I don’t usually spend weekends putting Jordan almonds into mesh baggies.”
Emily had designed a wedding that cost next to nothing with donated mason jars, flowers from friend’s gardens or found on the road, cases of wine and beer instead of an open bar, a caterer friend and another friend’s band. Most of them gave their labor as wedding presents. My daughter was no fool. But she was a romantic and after we stopped at Starbucks she said, “Mom, can we go to the cottage?”

I was about to remind her that her father had been hurt when she refused to come for the final week of August the year before he died, claiming to be too busy, too stressed, too committed to make the seven hour drive to Cape Cod, to Truro where she spent her childhood summers on the beach, in camp, caging crabs and her teenage years at bonfires and parties and always barefoot, sea-tangled hair, her face freckled and open until it wasn’t.

“What does she have to be stressed about?” Jasper yelled stomping out of the cottage in his Costco swim trunks with its ridiculous print of googly-eyed fish. “What does she even do? She curates, she influences, she spends all her time making videos of her smoothies and her lipstick choices. The world is going to hell in a handbasket and our daughter acts like it’s part of some kind of altered reality. She was the valedictorian at NYU! What the hell, Aisling?”

Before I could answer, our neighbor Sarah came out to sit in the Adirondack chair she found at the Wellfleet flea market. She had stopped coloring her gray hair, allowing it to grow, so according to Jasper, she resembled The Madwoman of Chaillot. It was barely four, but she had a wine glass filled to the brim. Sarah maintained a perpetual optimism and a tendency to make even the most minor occasion into an epic story. Sarah’s husband, a surgeon, had left her for his much younger nurse. We had never been close but after she was no longer part of a couple it was difficult to include her in social events although I tried. The usual result was some friend trapped in a corner listening to a story about her terrible divorce, the fight over custody of children, dogs, houses and housekeepers.

Divorce is a hard thing but when you’re very rich certain realities, like retuning to work, don’t apply. I made one feeble attempt at matchmaking several years earlier thinking a nice, seemingly sane tenured professor of anthropology might be a someone with whom Sarah could discuss her collection of pre-Columbian art. However, he was recovering from a broken shoulder and had recently found mass amounts of Percocet made the pain disappear as well as the ongoing issues with his ex-wife and the university. So, that was not a success.

Still, Sarah thrived on other people’s problems. When she heard Jasper’s comment about Emily, she immediately started asking questions, unhelpful questions. Yes, my daughter had minor success as an influencer on Instagram providing her with a small income, a plethora of free gifts, and a following in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, Jasper saw this as a total betrayal of her upbringing which encouraged intellectual rigor and selfless, non-material behavior. I was in the middle and had no desire to discuss the rift between them.

“Sarah lives there full time now. She had the cottage winterized. Actually, her cottage is now a mansion.”
“I don’t like Sarah.” Emily said.
“Really? She seems harmless to me. Boring but harmless.”
“Uh, no, Mom. Didn’t you ever notice how she acted around Daddy? The head dip, the sudden appearance of lip gloss, the need for manly help?”
“Hey, you’re the queen of lip gloss. I don’t know. She seems like she’s waiting for something to happen. The movie to start. It makes me sad in a way.”
“No, no!” Emily shook her head at me. “See? You misunderstand passive aggression for loneliness. She was waiting for you to fuck off so she could bone Daddy.”
“Emily! That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Maybe you spend too much time reading great literature to pay attention to evil.”
“Literature is filled with evil. Hardy wrote about a man selling his wife and daughter for alcoholic porridge, Dickens had Fagin murder Nancy, Macbeth has an entire family slaughtered, Iago talked Othello into strangling Desdemona. I paid attention to Trump. Too much attention. I feel like he ruined the last year with your father. I was so angry.”
“Everyone was angry. That’s why I posted those pictures of lambs and ducks on my Instagram.”
“You think that offset the babies in cages? Here’s a nice, wooly lamb to obliterate your memory of a two-year-old separated from his parents? And a duck to help you feel better about policemen shooting unarmed Black people?”

Emily was conceived in that cottage on the creaky guest room bed while Jasper’s parents, blessedly hard-of-hearing, snored downstairs. We put pillows over our heads, hands over mouths to muffle moans. Jasper at six-five was much too tall, so we moved the mattress onto the floor and fucked all night. He had asked me to marry him, I said “yes” and at thirty-five felt ready to try and have a child. Try was not the right word. Nine months later I was pregnant with Emily. We felt we were different but really the path, marriage, parenthood, my assuming the household jobs, assuming most of the parenting, was familiar. He went out, I stayed home. He had an outside life while mine shrank to contain play groups, doctor’s visits, cooking, and between the weeks of the cleaning person’s brilliance, light cleaning. We were happy, tired but not exhausted. We had sex often, rarely like the mattress-on-the-floor time but decently modulated, energetic and, at times, transcendent sex. I forgot I was ever a painter and took a class in Excel.

I gradually stopped making art, distracted by life and possibly my own shrinking identity, determined by many people, doctors, waiters, teachers, bus drivers and strangers on the street. As mom, I was accomplished, as an artist I produced little besides an occasional sketch magnetized to the refrigerator door, all of them of Emily with one exception, the cat. It was no one’s fault. Before I had waited tables to pay for classes, rented studio space, attended openings and constantly networked. My website was current and the art, watercolors mainly, frequently changed. I was hungry and afraid of failure, of success, of mediocrity. After Emily was born my drive disappeared along with most of my creativity. Jasper was mildly interested in the decline of my artistic talent but mainly grateful for the shift I made into wife/mother. My parents, rarely impressed by my work, suggested I write a book. The subject of said book was vague. It wasn’t a memoir or a novel. Something about parenting and cooking was on their short list. My parents loved me and my brother, but they were indifferent to our lives once we both left home.

Jasper was very successful. As a software creator he was known in the industry for his problem-solving and his ability to deliver flawless applications. I only know this because he won an award, and this was said by the presenter. And he made lots of money. I got fat. Well, fattish. No one cared. Emily said I had a tummy that felt like bread dough and Jasper was so exhausted the state of my body didn’t interest him. But we still had fun being mom, dad, and kid. On weekends we often took the PATH into downtown Manhattan and walked around, Emily in the stroller until, older, she formed a chain between us. We felt fortunate and grateful until 9/11, when the sky fell, and Emily learned what murder meant.
“Mom, those kids in the plane – were there kids in the plane?”
I wanted to say “no.” I wanted to lie and tell her it was an adult-only flight. “I think so.”
“They didn’t die, right?”

The day had been endless and horrific. We were on the promenade across from lower Manhattan when something happened that made me doubt my own sanity, but when I looked at my neighbors, all of us with our mouths open, staring, shaking, crying, I knew it wasn’t any kind of stunt or hallucination. The World Trade Center was hit by a plane, two planes, two towers, fire, smoke, collapse.

Emily was in our bed wearing one of Jasper’s t-shirts, holding the big-headed cat she had loved as a baby, talking in a babyish voice, trying to go backwards before she witnessed the sky fall, adults screaming at something happening across the Hudson, her own mother unable to stop crying. Someday she’d remember this moment and the fact I had lied to her. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d remember how I failed to keep the truth, the hideous truth away from her.

“If they were in the planes they died, honey. Or in the building but I doubt many children were in the building.”
“Why would anyone kill children?”

And there it was. I had asked my mother the same question when I finished The Diary of Anne Frank. She had sighed and murmured something about atrocities and war. She told me what we had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was not helpful.
As I gazed down at my seven-year-old daughter and attempted to explain hatred and murder I felt enraged that someone had put me in charge of this moment in history, that I could not crawl into a ball of self-pity and sadness but rather had to meet her clear-eyed gaze. The door opened and Jasper called out. Emily’s eyelids had closed. We sat and watched the news with shell-shocked newscasters and people covered in the ashes of four thousand lives try to explain how they felt. 

Jasper went down to Ground Zero a week later and returned to describe walls and fences covered with pictures of missing people, people who had never returned home, their families searching, holding up recent photographs of the lost. I stayed away until an artist friend, a woman whose downtown studio space I had once shared, called me and asked if I would visit. She sounded bonkers.
“II was asleep,” she said, “and then the zombies came.”
“What zombies?”
“The ash people. Out of a cloud of smoke. My mother called and told me to turn on the TV. I walked outside and there they were, out of this ball of smoke. Born from fire.” Hilda was eccentric, she didn’t believe in mainstream medicine, she consumed crazy amounts of spinach, but she wasn’t crazy. Her studio was just north of Ground Zero, once shadowed by the twin towers. “Can you come see my new work?”

It had been weeks since 9/11 and Emily had returned to school. Two of her closest friends had lost their fathers. They had finally started towing away the cars parked by those who were left in the rubble. Other children had lost mothers and older siblings. Death was introduced into the curriculum but, thankfully, a group of parents who proposed daily prayers were shot down. It was a public school and praying was not sanctioned. Three Muslim families in Hoboken and one in Jersey City had their businesses vandalized and the women I knew from the playground who wore niqab or more commonly hijab, disappeared. The air was charged with sadness and anger. Only our children seemed to accept that it was time to move forward and let go.

I took the PATH to 33rd, the only station open since the attack. Walking through the city was a mix of business-as-usual and horrific tragedy. Below 23rd the pictures began to cover all the walls and large parts of windows, men and women, old and young, seemingly successful businesspeople next to workers who clearly handled the service side of this world. The messages were heartbreaking and specific; “My brother, dishwasher at Windows of the World,” “My husband, a trader at Morgan Stanley,” “Our daughter, a florist in Building One,” “My fiancée, a fireman from Jersey City Engine 5.” And so many faces, so young. I felt emotionally savaged by the surroundings, people on benches quietly weeping, a weird, bad smell, an odd quiet because there was no place to be as you descended further downtown but at Ground Zero, digging for non-existent survivors, wandering up to strangers holding out pictures of your missing loved ones, staring into space as a witness to the jumpers. Hilda lived on Day Street off Greenwich. Her studio was a ground floor with windows facing the street. Her windows were boarded up like the other windows on the street.

photo by History in HD

I knocked. “Hello,” I said, “Hilds. It’s Aisling.” There was a long silence followed by the sound of locks being unbolted, a door opened with a chain. “Hilda?”
“Hi,” she said. The room was in semi-darkness. Lamps placed in corners had weak lightbulbs that barely illuminated those corners. Hilda was dressed entirely in black as usual, her hair a torrent down her back with white streaks I did not remember. She was thin, pale and, it seemed, still in shock. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Of course I came.”
“My mother hasn’t come. She told me to go outside and made me see the zombies coming out of that cloud. You know that cloud was people blown to dust?”
“Can I come in?”
Hilda removed the chain. I looked around. There were hundreds of drawings on the wall, rectangles side by side in various states of distress. Square buildings with faces weeping and crumbling. An Eeyore picture with his donkey’s ears as the twin towers, towers and fires and the new skyline with various states of destruction in the section where the World Trade Center once stood. There were so many of these pictures you could not see the walls. A massive ball of ash with zombies emerging. I felt myself filled with both admiration and horror.
“They let me come to Ground Zero.”
“Who does?”
“The cops, the firemen, the construction workers. I sketch there all day. They give me food.”
“These are amazing!” The distortion was what made it impossible to look away, the twisted steel, the windows cracking, bodies falling. A cartoon vision of hell.
“Should we go outside?”
Hilda shrugged. “Okay.”
We sat on a bench that had somehow escaped destruction and smoked cigarettes. I had stopped but it seemed appropriate to join her. I could not think of a single thing to say. Bearing witness was the point, I thought, recognizing what had happened to her, to New York City, to the country. Then there was the response of flags everywhere, the persecution of Muslims, the paranoia and hysteria and simple pain that existed. There was no reason to attempt a summation.
“Do you remember 9/11?” We had stopped for coffee.
“Jessie Nunez’s father died.”
“Yes. But do you remember us?”
“You and dad?”
“Yes.”
“You acted weird. You cried.”

We tried to make another baby that night. Well, we did but I lost him in the middle of the third trimester and together we made the decision not to try again.

—Molly Moynahan