Before Beatrice could figure out whether Diana had actually pulled away from her father, and what it meant, Grandma Judy and Arnold Mishkin arrived. Beatrice received a kiss on the cheek from her grandmother, who was short and plump, with silvery-blonde bobbed hair, and probably looked exactly the way Beatrice’s mother would in forty years. She watched from the foyer as the adults made small talk. “Where are you based?” Arnold asked Diana.
“New York,” Diana said. “But I’m hardly ever there. I have an apartment, but it’s really just a place to unpack my suitcase, and pack it again.”
Arnold nodded. “It’s a hard life, with all that travel.”
“And such an expensive city to live in!” said Grandma Judy. “I hope your clients pay you well.”
“Oh, there are definitely compensations,” Diana said, with a kind of tucked-in, ironic smile that hinted at another meaning to the words. Beatrice wondered what it was. Something about sex, maybe. In her experience, whenever adults hinted, instead of coming out and saying what they meant, sex was usually the reason why. Personally, she thought that Diana was lucky, and that traveling all the time sounded glamorous, and exciting. No home meant no kids, no husband, nobody nagging you or needing you or dragging you down.
She was just about to say something along those lines when the doorbell rang again. Her mom detached herself to greet Beatrice’s Pop-Pop, and Evelyn, his lady friend, whom Beatrice knew her father didn’t like.
“Hello, dear,” said Pop-Pop, giving Beatrice a hug, and a full dose of his denture breath. Her grandfather didn’t have much use for girls. His favorite was Scott, Beatrice’s cousin, her father’s brother Jeremy’s son. Scott was nineteen and in college now. When he was in elementary school and junior high he’d played baseball on some special select team that practiced year-round and traveled all over New Jersey. He’d gotten to skip out on half of the family functions because he had games, or practice, and leave the rest of them early. Beatrice had envied him desperately… just not desperately enough to take up a sport.
“Trixie!” said Evelyn. Beatrice gave her partial credit for at least remembering what Beatrice used to be called and not resorting to “dear” the way Pop-Pop did. Evelyn was slender and elegant, with close-cropped white hair and dramatic, penciled-in eyebrows. She wore lots of rings, with colorful stones, and bright silk scarves that she could tie in all kinds of shapes around her neck. Evelyn loved Broadway and travel, and had been to every big city in Europe, as well as Iceland and Moscow. Pop-Pop hated musicals—“all those people singing instead of talking”—and saw no reason to travel any farther than Augusta, Georgia, where he’d once golfed on the course where the Masters was played. Beatrice could not understand why they were together. It was easy enough to see what Pop-Pop was getting out of their arrangement: three hot meals a day, a well-ventilated garage for his collection of vintage comic books, and an extra-large flat-screen TV on which he could watch the Yankees and the Giants. Evelyn, meanwhile, had gotten a man with a pulse and a driver’s license. Beatrice knew Pop-Pop had been living by himself, in an apartment, before he’d met Evelyn, and had moved into Evelyn’s four-bedroom house in Fort Lee after they’d been dating for six months.
“Evelyn’s generation was raised to believe that a woman needed a man,” Beatrice’s mom had said. Beatrice had wanted to ask her mom what her generation believed, but knew that any conversation that could involve love or marriage was just two or three perilous steps away from a reprise of the dread masturbation talk, so she’d just nodded and gone to her room.
In the foyer, Pop-Pop removed his coat, helped Evelyn off with hers, handed both coats to Beatrice’s mom, and said, “What’s for dinner, dear?”
“Chicken,” her mother said. The one time she’d said coq au vin to her father-in-law, he’d spent the entire night saying every French word he could think of—Croissant! Escargot!—in an exaggerated French accent and demanding to know what was wrong with American food. Now her mom just called it chicken, or chicken stew, or, sometimes, that chicken you like.
“I’ll take a Scotch,” Pop-Pop said, before her mom had even asked what he wanted to drink. Her mom looked to her father for help, but Beatrice’s dad was already talking to his father about the baseball game the night before.
Beatrice saw Diana, standing by the staircase, watching the other guests. Diana’s expression was thoughtful, her dark eyes following her mom on her way to the coat closet. Beatrice wondered what Diana made of it all: their small suburban lives. She couldn’t imagine Diana carrying coats and fetching drinks. Probably, she had people who did that for her. An assistant. Maybe more than one.