Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Karen Neulander, a successful New York political consultant, has always been fiercely protective of her son, Jacob, now six. She's had to be: when Jacob's father, Dave, found out Karen was pregnant and made it clear that fatherhood wasn't in his plans, Karen walked out of the relationship, never telling Dave her intention was to raise their child alone.

But now Jake is asking to meet his dad, and with good reason: Karen is dying. Worried that he'll break Jake's heart, Karen finally makes the call, and is shocked to find Dave ecstatic about the news. First, he can't meet Jake fast enough, and then, he can't seem to leave him alone. As she tries to play out her last days in the "right" way, Karen struggles with knowing that the only thing she cannot bring herself to do for her son—let his father become a permanent part of his life—is the thing he needs from her the most.

With heart-wrenching poignancy, unexpected wit, and mordant humor, Lauren Grodstein has created an unforgettable story about parenthood, sacrifice, and life itself.

Release date: March 21, 2017

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

When I was a kid, not much older than you, I was certain I’d grow up to be a writer. I had a portable typewriter—my dad bought it for me at a garage sale—and late at night, when everyone else was asleep, I’d sit in the kitchen and painstakingly type out little scenes and scraps of fiction. I liked mystery stories a lot, suspense, moments of horror, and surprising redemption. I hoped one day to write something about the Holocaust, but give it a happy ending. This was when I was a teenager and thought I could rewrite any script.

Now I’m grown and know that very few of us get to become the people we thought we’d be when we were kids. I never did write a novel, is what I’m saying, or even a decent short story, although I found other successes and pleasures in life and don’t regret most of the things I haven’t done. That said, I still have time, Jake, and I still like putting down words on paper. So I’ve decided to write a book for you, with chapters, a title, maybe even an appendix of photographs. It seems like the right way to tell you everything I want you to know. And this island, my sister’s guesthouse, the cloudy Northwest: it’s all very conducive to writing. I have a comfortable chair here and a shiny new laptop. And there’s so much I want to tell you.

As of course you know, this island where my sister lives with her family—Mercer Island—is all pine trees and lacrosse fields and half-caff americanos. You can see the churning waters of Lake Washington from every direction, usually iron gray but sometimes unaccountably blue. Seattle lies a few miles to the west. I’ve always thought it was peaceful here, and good for us, although I do miss our home in Manhattan. (Remember how you used to ask if we could build a tunnel from West Seventy-Fourth Street to Mercer Island? And because I thought I had all the time in the world, I used to say, maybe later?)

This will be a wonderful place for you to do the bulk of your growing up, after you’ve moved here for good. You’ll have your cousins to hang out with, and your aunt Allie to make sure you eat your vegetables. And your uncle Bruce is one of the most senior people at Starbucks, which means that living here you’ll be very nicely provided for. You’ll ski at Whistler and spend Christmas in Hawaii and pass long summer weekends at the family estate in Friday Harbor. You’ll learn to drive and then you’ll get a car.

That said, I’ve instructed Allison to send you to one of the public schools on the island instead of the private cloister where she sends her own kids. Public school matters to me; I want you to know how the real world lives, or what passes for the real world here on Mercer Island. I can’t bear the idea of you growing up amid all this privilege without some awareness that there are people who grow up on free lunch. Remember, Jacob, I spent my own childhood in a Long Island duplex, my father’s parents in the apartment upstairs. As I’ve told you a million times—as I hope you still remember—my mother was the fifth daughter of a Bronx postman. My father was the only child of Hungarian immigrants who barely survived World War II. Neither one of them grew up with anything like luxury, and neither did my sister or I.

Allison and I frequently discuss issues of privilege and economy. She says it doesn’t mean we have to raise our kids broke just because that’s how we grew up. She thinks that insecurity about money doesn’t necessarily make a person more empathetic or kind: sometimes it just makes a person nervous her whole life. And she’s right, I know she’s right, but still it irks me to think you’ll never understand that you are, in so many ways, so very lucky. Allison says, But in at least one way you aren’t lucky at all. None of us are. And money is no compensation.

There is no compensation. I am your only parent; I am forty-three years old; I have stage IV ovarian cancer. I have perhaps two or three years left in my life, and once I am gone you will move here, to Mercer Island, to live with my sister, Allison, and her family. You can bring your hamster and all your toys. You can bring anything you want. You know this, Jake. You know that if it were up to me, I would live forever with you in my arms.

This will be a strange exercise, this book, I can tell. As I type, I feel like I’m writing about someone else. Like this couldn’t be happening to me, or to us. And then—there—I feel the port above my ribs, and there it is again, the staggering truth.

I still haven’t decided how often I want you to think of me in the future, Jake, or what kind of memory I want to be. I mean, of course I want you to remember me—I want you to remember that I existed, and that I loved you, and that generally speaking we were pretty happy. But I don’t know if I want you to remember every single specific about our life together, so that your life on Mercer Island always feels like your “new” life, as though you’re comparing it to something that came before that was somehow truer. I want this to be your true life, and I want Allison and Bruce to be like your mother and father, and your cousins to be like your siblings, and for you to consider yourself one of theirs. I want them to be your soft place to land. This is, I think, the best thing a family can be.

But I also want you to remember days like last Monday, when I took you to the Woodland Park Zoo and we paid five dollars to feed a leaf to that giraffe and instead of eating the leaf the giraffe licked your hand with its prehensile tongue and you were so surprised you froze and she did it again. This time you shrieked and I shrieked too and then we laughed until we got the hiccups. The zookeeper said, I’ve never seen her do that before! You must be delicious. You blushed a bit and said, That’s what my mom thinks. That I’m delicious. And oh, how you are, Jacob. You, with your soft longish hair and your feathery eyelashes, you have no idea.

Sometimes I find myself daydreaming—sometimes in the middle of a conversation, even—and I realize I’m imagining what you’ll look like in a few years. Will your hair still curl around the edges? Will you still wear Derek Jeter T-shirts every day? Since you were a toddler you’ve been a New York Yankees fanatic, but then the other day I caught you in your cousin Dustin’s old Mariners jersey—I hadn’t done laundry in a while—and I thought, There it is, the beginning of a kid I’ll never know. The thought made me more curious than melancholy; I was like an anthropologist studying the future you. Your cousin Dustin was chasing you around the lawn while Allie yelled at both of you to come in for dinner, and I was just sitting on the dock, witnessing. Your life without me. Dr. Susan says this sort of witnessing is normal. This sort of floating away. You had a scrape on your shin I’d never noticed before.

“What time is it in New York, anyway, Mom?” you asked me at breakfast. I told you it was eleven, and you said that’s what you thought. You said, “In New York, it’s already the future.”

Jacob, I promise, if I do nothing else with the time I have left, I will write this book. I’m not sure of its title yet—do titles matter if you have only one reader?—but I know what I’m going to include: whatever wisdom I have, whatever lessons I’d pass on to you later, if I were going to be here later, when you were old enough to need them. My hope is that whenever you miss me or whenever you just want to know more about the person I was, you’ll be able to open this book and read these pages and remember me. Learn more about me. And that way, even though you won’t always be with me, I will always, at least a little, be with you.

I plan to be honest here. I plan to be excruciatingly, extraordinarily honest. I will not edit out the truth; I will not try to make myself look better than I really was. Than I really am. If I can’t tell you the truth, why should I tell you anything at all?

SO I GUESS I’ll start with this morning, which was a beautiful morning, the sunniest since we arrived a week and a half ago. June 18, 2013. A meteorological surprise.

You and I were living in my sister’s guesthouse with the view of Lake Washington and all those boats tied to all those docks. Across a broad, sloped lawn stood my sister’s five-thousand-square-foot pile, cedar-shingled, multichimneyed. From the desk where I wrote, I could see you playing on the lawn between the houses, hiding in plain sight from your cousin Dustin, who didn’t mind that you were terrible at hide-and-seek.

Dustin isn’t the sharpest of my sister’s three children, but he is, by far, the sweetest. (Is that still true, Jake?) Then there is brassy Camilla, with her nose ring and dyed hair, and gorgeous Ross, who at that moment was off doing charity tourism in Guatemala. Dustin, the baby, was almost eleven then, chubby and scared of loud noises and therefore the perfect buddy for a precocious six-year-old such as yourself. “Dusty!” you screamed, then dashed away to a new hiding spot by the hemlock tree. Poor Dustin whirled around but you were gone.

I knew I should stop spying on you and get back to work; I was a campaign consultant with my own shop and this was the start of our busy season. In previous years, when you were in preschool, I was able to consult on four campaigns at once, had assistants and pollsters and speechwriters on the clock January through November. But that was before the persistent bloat, the achy back I thought was stress. So for this round I had only Jimmy “Ace” Reynolds, New York City Council majority leader, to whom I was grateful for sticking by me, even though I tried to never let him know it.

Do you remember Ace? I first met the guy four years ago, back when I was so busy with you and growing our business that a city council race seemed like small potatoes. But Ace had been in the middle of an appealing scandal: the tabloids had exposed an affair with a college-aged staffer (“Ace Boffs Pace Soph,” “Ace Faces Pace Disgrace,” and my favorite, “Ace in the Hole”). Within two days of my hiring, I had assembled the necessary pieces, repentant Ace, supportive wife, forgiving children, adoring constituents (“I don’t care what he does in his personal life as long as he does right by my neighborhood.”) We went on a local media blitz, using, as surrogates, the 9/11 widows in Ace’s district and the kids whose asthma the local hospitals were treating for free. They all stood by Ace. And, after all, it was a local race in an off year: we had 31 percent voter participation. In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Since then, Ace’s marital troubles had been long forgotten, but he still had reasons to keep me around: by 2017, he aimed to be the first Bronx-born mayor of New York City since Ed Koch. My job was to lay the groundwork with a big city council win, for of course Ace could not be mayor if he couldn’t even keep his council seat. This campaign was his launch, and at this particular moment it was a good assignment: challenging but not too challenging, geographically limited, plausible. I’d help him win. I’d make him think he couldn’t do it without me.

(By the way, I’d met the wife—her name was Jill—on several occasions, and she’d always struck me as smart, self-assured, funny. She was attractive. I had no idea why she stuck with Ace all those years, all those betrayals, but those were not my questions to ask. Maybe she wanted, one day, to be the mayor’s wife? It was her devotion that kept Ace in office, and her money that paid my bills.)

“Mom!” I couldn’t see you, but I could hear you; out here, I kept the windows open whenever the sun shined. “Mom! Where are you?”

I shut off my computer, bustled down the guesthouse stairs. You were standing with Dustin, rackets under each arm. “We’re going to play tennis,” you said. “We’ll be back for dinner.”

“Since when do you play tennis?”

Your hazel eyes narrowed. “I’ve been practicing since we got here.”

“Jake’s got a pretty strong serve,” Dustin said with a flat tone of authority. “I mean, for such a little kid.”

“You do?”

“You want to see?”

Of course I wanted to see. Ace could wait.

We marched out of the cul-de-sac and down the road to the park, where, sure enough, you displayed a pretty strong serve for such a little kid. Dustin lobbed the ball back at you, and you and he went back and forth five times before you finally missed a shot. I couldn’t believe it—I had no idea you’d been playing tennis. I was shouting from the sidelines like Serena Williams’s father. I was a nut. “Jakey!” I said, picking sweaty you up despite your weight and the lingering weakness in my arms. “How come I didn’t know you could play tennis?”

You shrugged, but you were smiling, bashful. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“I’m stunned,” I said.

“Can we keep going now? You’re squishing me.”

I planted myself down and watched you and Dustin practice for an hour, and even though Dustin was going easy on you—I think he was going easy on you—you raced around the court with your lithe little body, the last trace of your toddler’s potbelly gone like a dream, and I saw something athletic in you I’d never seen in myself. You looked like a child, an honest-to-God child—you were not a baby anymore in any way. You were a child and you were learning how to play tennis, and one day, I thought, you were going to be really good at it. And if I wanted to it would be easy to think about how I wouldn’t be there to see you win your trophies, but I didn’t indulge myself. Instead, I stretched out in the priceless Seattle sunshine—there is nothing as luxurious as a stretch of Seattle sunshine—on the side of the red clay court and watched you and Dustin smack that ball back and forth with a grit all the more dramatic for its pointlessness. I was witnessing you; I needed to do nothing but witness.

When it was time to go home, you were sweaty and your knees were scraped from a half-assed dive you took toward the end. We walked up the road, the distant hum of I-90 traffic like electricity in my ears. You swung the racket back and forth between your hands.

“That was awesome, Jakey,” I said.

“I told you he was good,” said Dustin.

Characteristically, you said nothing.

“Should we sign you up for tennis lessons, honey?” I asked.

Someone was walking a huge slobbery dog toward us, more bear than canine. We paused to pet it, have some friendly Mercer Island chitchat with its owner. After a smiley five minutes, we went our separate ways. Under an alley of willows, covered in dog slobber, you said, “I don’t know if I can handle one more thing.”

DURING THE SHORT time we’d been on the island, my days were mostly like this: a little work, a little writing, a little spending time with you. I could have done exactly that forever, but the days felt all the sweeter because I wouldn’t. For dinner, in the main house, your aunt was heating up a pan of my baked ziti for dinner (which you loved, and which I was trying to teach Allie to make the right way, even though I also planned on freezing like ten thousand pans of it before I went so that whenever you missed me there it’d be, something I made for you with my own hands; baked ziti keeps forever). Meanwhile, I was running a bath and drafting a campaign mailer when I heard a knock on the door.

“Mom, it’s me.”

This was around the time you’d started knocking on doors, that we’d stopped being casually naked around each other. I pulled my bathrobe tight. “Come on in.”

You were still wearing your shmutzed-up tennis outfit and you still had dirt on your shins. You sat down on the tight Berber carpet, looking mournful. “Jake?”

You wiped your nose on your wrist, then idly wiped your mouth. If I were my mother, I’d have given you the what-for. “You’re taking a bath?” you asked.

“Just thought I’d relax.”

“Skipping dinner?” You didn’t like it when I skipped meals.

“No,” I said. “I’ll be in, in a little bit.”

You nodded, looked out at the enormous picture window. In the darkening evening, your own small face looked back at you.

“Is everything okay?”

“I still want you to do it.”

“You do?” It took me a second to figure out what you meant. “Oh,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” you said. You tried not to meet my eyes.

I suppose it must have been naive of me, but I was certain that since you were so happy here, since you were settling in so nicely, you wouldn’t have any interest in my finding him. What could you have possibly wanted with a stranger in New Jersey? You’d never even met the guy, didn’t know anything about him, had always shown a laudable lack of interest in him. This was perhaps because a good third of your classmates didn’t have fathers—their moms were lesbians or fifty-year-old single women who went the sperm-bank route. Or maybe it’s because I’d been so dementedly determined to give you everything you’d ever wanted, you never had a chance to think about this one big thing you didn’t have.

“Supersure?” I asked.

You shrugged again. You fiddled a bit with your shoelace, and I remembered that I really needed to teach you how to tie your shoes better. “Supersure,” you said.

Well. I guess I’d always assumed that the topic just wouldn’t come up. The story, as far as it went, was that your father disappeared when I was pregnant, which was fine with me because I was so happy to take care of you all by myself. That happened to be true. But then a few weeks before we left for Mercer Island, I was having a particularly bad night; you found me sobbing and nauseated in the bathroom. That night, you asked if I thought I could find your dad.

I told you I’d think about it and that you should think about it too. I told you it would take me a month to figure out how to look for him. Of course I was just buying time.

I looked at the date on my iPhone. It had been exactly a month.

“Can you find his number?” you asked.

“Probably.”

“Okay,” you said. You looked just like him. The same hazel eyes, the same soft brown hair, the same full lips. He was probably a very good tennis player. “When?”

“Soon,” I said.

“When soon?”

“As soon as I can.”

“Okay,” you said again, and now you looked at me; you looked suspicious.

The boiled-down version of your father: he was a one-term Democratic congressman from New Jersey, swept in by a minor Bush rebellion in 2002, swept out again in 2004. A perpetual bachelor, he was fond of Bud Light, classic rock, and Rangers games. He kept a thousand dollars in cash in his freezer for emergencies. When you were born at Columbia-Presbyterian, I remember nursing you and gazing out across the river, knowing that whatever else he was doing, he wasn’t gazing back.

I knew I could find him. I guessed he’d understand.

“You said you wouldn’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset,” I said.

“You look upset.”

I stood to turn off my bath. “Jake, honey, I told you I would be happy to do it and I am. He’s a nice guy.” I hated lying, but it just slipped out. “I’ll call him this week.”

“Okay,” you said. You were old enough to fake empathy but too young to really know how to feel for someone else. “Thanks.” You skipped out of the room, leaving dirt marks on the carpet and me to my bath. The cell phone buzzed. Allison. The ziti was ready. I ignored it, sank into the water, closed my eyes.

Truthfully, Jacob, I hadn’t seen your father since I told him I was pregnant. For all I knew he was married, had a kid or two of his own. For all I knew he was dead. No, he wasn’t dead. Even a one-term congressman would have scored an obit in the New York Times.

Throughout my pregnancy (a thoroughly decent one, I should say, not a moment of morning sickness), I thought about him all the time, tried to imagine what he was doing, whether he was thinking about me. I was managing the Griffith senatorial campaign—this was 2006, an open seat—and I was crisscrossing Maryland twice a day, from Frederick to Baltimore, Bethesda to Ocean City, pancake breakfasts and chicken dinners. Standing a step behind and just to the left of my candidate, editing stump speeches, talking to journalists, doing debate prep, renting buses, fighting for more resources from the DNC. A small state like Maryland plus my background in local elections, I ended up running the thing like it was a congressional district, working even harder than I had to. But I couldn’t help it. Work was the only thing that kept me from calling him. And at night—the Hampton Inn in Annapolis, the Courtyard in Chevy Chase—I’d rub my belly and I’d talk to you, Jake, and I’d tell you about everything we’d done that day. I’d take the Amtrak to my OB. Griffith—a nicer guy than the media pretends—would always stop to compliment my ultrasounds. I never called your father, stayed true to my own dumb promise to myself.

The week before the election we were ahead in the polls by eight points and I knew what that would mean—it would mean a bonus. It would mean scads more work down the pike. It would mean I could hire a nanny and take you with me on the road in 2010. Which I would. Which I did.

It would mean I would never have to call him and threaten to sue for child support.

He knew how to find me, Jake, but he never did. You should know that about your father. He was a man who should have known he had a child on this earth and never tried to find him and never called the child’s mother and never looked across the murky sluggish Hudson to see the newborn child nursing peacefully in his mother’s arms or the tears coursing down the mother’s face.

Oh shit, Jake (Sorry! Darn! Shoot!): things are getting way too sentimental here and, worse, self-pitying. I have nothing to feel sad about! I have been blessed with you and you have been blessed with me, and your family is enormous: here on Mercer Island, with Allie and Bruce and the kids, and at home with me and Julisa and your friends and teachers and Kelly the hamster whom I hope to God Julisa is managing to keep alive. And I know as you get older you will create an even bigger family for yourself: more friends; more loves; a partner, one day, of your own. Children.

It’s late, I’m shivering, I missed dinner. I hope you can forgive me for missing dinner, angel. I feel so sorry for myself right that second I couldn’t believe I was even able to type. I hate self-pity—it’s the most putrid of all emotions, literally rots a person’s dignity, a person’s grace. But right now I miss you so much and I am still here in this house, this room. The same square acre as you. How could I have missed dinner with you? That’s an hour we will never have again.

It’s the nature of this project of mine to assess where I’ve been and where we’re all going, and Dr. Susan would say not to beat myself up about the self-pity thing. She disagrees that self-pity is putrid; she says it’s natural and that certain situations, such as this one, even call for it. And she says that I should just ride it like a wave.

Remember, she says, even at the bottom of the wave, there is so much in the world that makes me happy. You are so lucky, Karen, to have had so much that makes you happy. Say it out loud like a prayer.

My work.

My sister, Allison.

My niece and nephews.

The Seattle sunshine. We’re supposed to have yet another day of it tomorrow.

The water slapping at the rocks below this island.

You you you you you.

I press a button on my phone so I can look at your face. Then I turn back to my book, to these pages, this thing I have to finish soon. I hope I have time to write it all for you, Jake.

You are my happy ending.

2

As you might remember, throughout my treatment I tried to work as much as possible, because even more than taking care of you, work felt like taking care of me. It gave me a purpose, a hope that the world might notice me and maybe even remember me after I was gone. Working on campaign politics, I was changing facts on the ground for millions of our fellow citizens. Get the right guy elected and the right changes will happen. I always believed that, Jake. I hope you do too.

Still, lately I’d been too sick to be a strong advocate for my clients, and I was embarrassed about how much I hadn’t been able to do. I was kind of a terrier once upon a time. When I was working on the Wallace campaign, for instance, still in my twenties, I found out that our opponent’s daughter, a teenager in a fancy private school, had had an abortion a week before her junior prom. Listen, far be it from me to saddle a sixteen-year-old with a newborn, but her dad was one of those abstinence-and-Christianity jihadists who wanted abortions to be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. A bridge too far, my friend. I leaked the abortion news to a sympathetic reporter at the Wilmington News Journal and Wallace won by fifteen points.

Of course, I’d become much more temperate at work, when I was able to work at all. Chuck, my partner (remember him?), had been good about picking up the slack, and we’d hired a bunch of twentysomethings to take care of a lot of the detail stuff. And it was an off year—mostly just New York City local elections—so it wasn’t like I was missing that much action, but still. Three. . .