Cord was borderline obsessed with his family. He and his father worked side by side every day, his sisters both lived in the neighborhood, and he met them for dinner all the time, and they talked on the phone more than Sasha spoke to anyone. Cord did things for his parents that she couldn’t fathom—he went with his father to get haircuts, whenever he bought new shirts he bought his father the exact same ones, he picked up the French wine his mother liked at Astor Place, and he rubbed her feet in a way that made Sasha leave the room. Who rubbed their own mother’s feet? Whenever she saw it, she thought of that scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta compared it to oral sex, and she got so upset she felt her eye twitch.
Sasha loved her parents, but their lives weren’t intertwined like that. They were casually interested in her work as a graphic designer, they spoke every Sunday and texted a bit in between, and sometimes when she went home to visit she would be surprised to realize they had traded in their car for something new and never mentioned it, and once had even knocked down a wall between the kitchen and the living room.
Sasha’s sisters-in-law were nice to her. They texted on her birthday, they made sure to ask after her family, lent her a racket and whites so she could join in family tennis on vacation. But Sasha still felt that on some level they would prefer she wasn’t around. She would be in the middle of telling Cord’s older sister, Darley, a story, and when Cord walked in the room Darley would simply stop listening and start asking him questions. Georgiana, his younger sister, would ostensibly be talking to everyone, but Sasha noticed her eyes never left her siblings. Their family was a unit, a closed circuit Sasha couldn’t ever seem to penetrate.
* * *
The Stocktons were in real estate. At first, this made it feel even stranger to Sasha that their house was so cluttered. Shouldn’t they be living in some kind of spare, Architectural Digest dreamscape? But it turned out their interest in real estate was less about selling single apartments and more about large-scale investing. Cord’s grandfather, Edward Cordington Stockton, had inherited a modest fortune from his family. In the 1970s, he used that money to buy up property on the Upper East Side as the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. He spent forty-five dollars per square foot. That real estate was now worth twelve hundred per square foot, and the Stocktons were extraordinarily wealthy men. With his son, Cord’s father, Chip, they bought up waterfront in Brooklyn, moving along Dumbo and into Brooklyn Heights. In 2016, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses decided to divest themselves of their Brooklyn Heights properties, they jumped in, joining a group of investors to buy the famous Watchtower building, along with the former Standish Arms Hotel. Edward Cordington had passed away, but Cord now worked alongside his father, the third generation of Stockton men in New York real estate.
Paradoxically, the Stockton family had chosen to live in the fruit streets section of Brooklyn Heights, the three little blocks of Pineapple, Orange, and Cranberry streets situated on the bluff over the waterfront. For all their investment in converting old buildings to new high-end condos, they made their home in a section completely barred from significant change by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. There were little plaques on various homes in the neighborhood, signs that read “1820” or “1824.” There were tiny white clapboard houses. There were leafy gardens hidden behind wrought-iron gates. There were former stables and carriage houses. Even the CVS looked like part of an English hamlet, with walls of ivy-covered stone. Sasha particularly loved a house on the corner of Hicks and Middagh streets, a former pharmacy, where the tilework on the entryway spelled out “DRUGS.”
Cord’s mother’s side of the family was perhaps of even more prestigious pedigree. Tilda Stockton, née Moore, came from a long line of political royalty. Both her father and brother had been governors of New York, and she had been featured in family profiles in Vogue and Vanity Fair. She had married Chip Stockton when she was twenty-one, and though she had never had a proper nine-to-five job, she had earned a reputation as a wildly successful event consultant, mostly by connecting her wealthy socialite friends with her favorite party planners. For Tilda Stockton, no evening was complete without a vision, a theme, a tablescape, and a dress code. It all made Sasha want to hide under a pile of monogrammed cocktail napkins.
* * *
—
Sasha spent the months following her wedding trying to settle into her new Pineapple Street home. She decided that she was an archaeologist, studying the ancient civilization of her in-laws. But instead of Tutankhamen’s tomb, she found an ashtray Darley made in sixth grade that looked like a malformed mushroom. Instead of the Dead Sea Scrolls, she found Cord’s elementary school science paper on types of pinecones. Instead of the Terracotta Army, she found an entire drawer of free toothbrushes from a dentist on Atlantic Avenue.
Of the four bedrooms, Darley’s room was the worst, but none of them was truly vacant. Cord’s old room had been cleaned out when he left for college, but it still housed a silver gilt candelabra, a set of Mandarin floor vases, and dozens of framed paintings, artwork that the family had acquired over the years but had no place to hang. Georgiana’s room still held all her college textbooks and photo albums, along with an entire shelf of tennis trophies; and the primary bedroom, while emptied of clothing and jewelry, still contained the décor and furniture of the previous residents, and it was extremely hard for Sasha to achieve orgasm while the mahogany headboard that probably belonged to a congressman or secretary of transportation banged against the wall.
As she squeezed her empty suitcases into already-crowded closets, she pondered whether she might be allowed to replace the shower curtain. She would wait a few months.
* * *
Chip and Tilda decided to throw a housewarming party at their new apartment on Orange Street and asked that their children and spouses arrive early. It was on a Wednesday evening, because most of their friends spent their weekends at country homes and some liked to go up Thursday night. The Stockton parents’ social life in the city existed only between Monday and Wednesday, before their friends scattered to the far reaches of Long Island and Litchfield County.
“What should I wear?” Sasha asked Cord, standing in front of the closet. She never knew how to dress around his family. It was like there was a mood board everyone else seemed to be consulting, but the vision eluded Sasha every time.
“Wear whatever you want, babe,” Cord replied unhelpfully.
“So I can wear jeans?”
“Well, I wouldn’t wear jeans.” He frowned.
“Okay, so should I wear a dress?” Sasha asked, annoyed.
“I mean, Mom said the theme is ‘upward and onward.’？”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I’m just going to wear what I wore to work. I’m sure most people will do that.”
Cord wore a suit and tie to work, so that was about as relevant to Sasha’s life as if he wore operating room scrubs or firefighter overalls. She was flummoxed, so played it safe and wore a pretty white blouse tucked into navy blue trousers, and the small diamond earrings her mother had given her for college graduation. She put on lipstick, and as she checked herself in the old mirror over the fireplace, she smiled. She felt classic, like Amal Clooney leaving the UN for dinner with George. Upward and onward, indeed.