One afternoon, as she was leaving Walden’s signature Ethical Conflict Resolution class, a girl named Willa fell in with Sally and said the strangest thing. It was so strange that Sally actually had to ask her to repeat it, even though she didn’t know Willa all that well and didn’t much like the parts she did know.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said. I saw. Your dad.”
Okay, Sally nodded dumbly. She was fighting the urge to roll her eyes. She had as little interest in her father as Willa likely had in her own.
“With his girlfriend.”
This, undeniably, hit just as intended, and Sally was temporarily robbed of her breath, her speech, and her wits, roughly in that order. More than anything else, the sentence failed to compute, and then, in a great cumulative clanking of pieces sliding into place, it did.
“So?” Sally managed, desperately trying for nonchalance.
“Well, if it was my dad, I’d want to know.”
Ah, but it wouldn’t be Willa’s dad, would it? Willa’s dad was a surgeon who was always flying off to war zones to fix the damaged hearts of poor children. He was perfect. He probably had his affairs safely on the other side of the world. （It was remarkable, Sally observed, that she had gone from ignorance to snark so quickly.）
She didn’t ask for the rest, but she got it anyway: Willa and her mother and sisters had been coming out of Odeon into a rainstorm, and there were no cabs. Then: there one was, splashing to a stop right in front of the restaurant. Willa’s mother waved at the driver and the girls huddled under one umbrella as they waited for the passengers to get out, which was when Willa had recognized him.
Not for one single second did Sally doubt that what her classmate had said was true, or that Willa had correctly interpreted what she’d seen. Willa and Sally （and, of course, Sally’s brothers） had been classmates since kindergarten. Hadn’t Willa seen Salo Oppenheimer at any number of parents’ nights and play performances and holiday parties and Halloween observances? Hadn’t Salo Oppenheimer picked her up at Willa’s house on Tompkins Place, more than once? There had even, before Sally had decided Willa was a bit of a wuss, been the occasional sleepover at the house on the Esplanade, with her father in the kitchen the following morning. Of course Willa had recognized Sally’s father, getting out of a cab and ducking through the rain into Odeon.
Willa had not, however, recognized the woman whose hand Sally’s father was apparently holding.
“What makes you think I don’t know about it?” she told Willa. Then she went to her last class of the day, fuming.
What really pissed her off, she later decided, was not that Salo had done this—to herself, to “the children,” even to our mother—but the notion that he might actually be making an effort with another person, which was something he hadn’t ever done with any of the aforementioned people, not in Sally’s own opinion. For a technically intact family （and intact families were not the norm at Walden; most people seemed to have steps and halves or a parent who had simply checked out） the Oppenheimers didn’t really operate as a unit, and when they did things together they mainly did them for Johanna’s sake. Yes, all five of them got dressed up to see The Nutcracker every year, because it was a family tradition. Yes, they walked over the bridge to Chinatown on Christmas Day and then went to see a movie, because that was what New York Jews did （if they weren’t actually observing the holiday!）。 Yes, they celebrated the magical anniversary of the （scheduled） birth together on Martha’s Vineyard. These were things the five Oppenheimers undertook together, but it didn’t mean they had tangible intimacy with one another’s lives, or （especially） that they actually liked one another. Sally’s family was not given to warm gestures, reassurances, encouragements, deferrals. They were not one another’s “biggest fans” or “persons.” They didn’t have one another’s backs. They weren’t, you know, close, and despite the tragic efforts of our mother, none of them ever tried to pretend they were.