Chapter Eight
The Last of the Oppenheimers
In which Johanna Oppenheimer makes a purchase and pays a bill
When the kids began ninth grade, Harrison joined the swim team, mainly because he liked the fact that when he had his head underwater people didn’t talk to him. Lewyn retreated to his room, where he indulged in his hopeless crush on the movie star a year behind them at Walden. Sally, who declined to share her secrets with either of her brothers, of course, was the only one with a seminormal social life, and this she weaponized to keep herself out of the house and away from the other Oppenheimers, as much as possible.
What that meant, in practical terms, was away from her mother. Salo had always been thin on the ground when it came to family time, but he had made himself even more scarce, arriving home on a typical weeknight later than ever, and nearly always after the kids had bolted themselves inside their rooms. He could still be seen in the morning, cooking his own eggs, making coffee for his wife and even his children, asking the kind of terribly interested questions all three of them had come to know and deflect. As for the triplets themselves, fourteen years of honest and even benign lack of affinity had naturally solidified into unmistakable avoidance. Truly, all three of them were, in the idiom of the day and of their generation, not just over it but SO over it.
Still, Johanna soldiered on, hopeless forays across the dinner table.
“So, anything interesting happen today?”
Grunts and downcast eyes.
“Anything not interesting?”
Silence again, this time with rolling of the eyes.
“You have a lot of homework?”
Nods, at least. But nods unaccompanied by noncompulsory speech.
“I went to see Grandpa Hermann today. He asked if you’re going back to camp next summer.”
She meant Harrison. Harrison did not bother to answer. His mother knew that he would not be returning to Androscoggin.
“I told him about the program at Hopkins. I don’t think he understood why you’d give up Maine for Baltimore.”
“Gotta go,” said Harrison. “History paper.”
That was hard, but ordinary. Harrison had been holding her at bay for years.
“Me, too,” said his sister.
That was harder. She could still remember snuggling in bed with Sally on weekend mornings, reading books and watching TV.
“Me, too,” said Lewyn.
That was when she knew it was over.
Her family. The salve to her husband’s mortal wound and the great work of her own life; the art of her life, she might even have said. Those birthday photographs running up the staircase wall: three babies, three toddlers, three children, three young people. Three young people wild to leave.
Johanna spent a lot of energy trying not to think about this. Thinking about this made her take to her bed for long, agonizing days during which she sometimes tried to trick herself into being happy. It was a fine, fine thing that her children were growing up! Children were supposed to grow up, and then they were supposed to go away! It’s what you wanted them to do.
Except that her departing children would leave nothing behind.
And she did mean nothing.
She was not, of course, the first woman to forgo the satisfactions of work “outside the home,” and she would not be the first mother to feel the sharp emptiness of abandonment, the fog of purposelessness, when her children departed for their own lives. Probably, there were support groups out there, full of people feeling precisely what she was feeling and fording the exact same dangerous waters, but Johanna had never been much of a group person. Actually, now that she was really considering her situation, she hadn’t been all that much of a one-on-one person, either.