Eligible

  LIZ AND JANE went for their usual run the next morning, and they had just passed Edwards Road when Jane said, “So Chip texted after we went to bed to see if I want to get dinner tomorrow night.”

  “He already texted? For dinner? On a Saturday night? Jane, he’s smitten with you.”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said.

  “What do you not know? You guys practically had to be pried apart when we left the Lucases’.”

  “He’s really nice,” Jane said. “And attractive, obviously. But the situation is so contrived—his having been on TV, Mom scheming to get us introduced. Doesn’t that make it seem ridiculous?”

  “There’s not the tiniest shred of doubt in my mind that you’ll find your dream man sooner or later. If it happens to be someone Mom pushed you toward, well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

  “It’s made life simpler that since I started the IUI, I haven’t met anyone I’ve wanted to go out with,” Jane said. “Because what would I say on a date? ‘I like you, but by the way, once a month I get anonymous sperm shot into my uterus? Hope that won’t put a damper on things!’ ”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Liz said. “Just go out to dinner with him.”

  Jane was quiet, and Liz said, “I can hear you ruminating. What?”

  “I know I shouldn’t make a big deal out of one date,” Jane said slowly. “But I can’t help doing the math. What if we start dating, we go out for three months or six months or eighteen months, and then we break up? By that point, I’m forty or forty-one.”

  “You’re not having IUI while you’re here, right?” Liz looked at Jane, who nodded.

  “Starting the process again at a new clinic is too complicated,” Jane said.

  “In that case, give Chip a chance while we’re in Cincinnati. Have a summer fling. You did like him.”

  They were passing Corbin Drive, and Jane said softly, almost so softly Liz couldn’t hear, “That’s true. I liked him a lot.”

  “THE THING I’M confused about,” Liz said to Mary, “is what day does Mervetta come? Because the house is getting gross.” A twice-monthly fixture at the Tudor since Liz’s childhood, Mervetta cleaned the Bennets’ toilets, vacuumed their rugs, and changed their sheets; once, when Liz was ten, Mervetta had told her that the Bennets were the only white people she’d ever known who ate grits.

  Mary’s expression was both uncomfortable and amused, as if Liz had made an offensive joke that Mary wished she didn’t find funny. She said, “Mervetta died.”

  “Oh, God,” Liz said. “No one told me.”

  “Maybe because before that, Mom fired her. She caught her sitting on Lydia’s bed watching TV.”

  Liz winced. “So who cleans the house now?”

  Mary shrugged. “Nobody.”

  The two sisters were standing in the kitchen; Liz had just returned from lunch with Charlotte Lucas.

  Liz said, “Did anyone go to Mervetta’s funeral?”

  Mary shrugged again. “I didn’t.”

  “YOUR MOTHER HAS shared a tragic piece of news about Cousin Willie with me,” Mr. Bennet said when the family was assembled for dinner. “He’s coming to visit.”

  “Really, Fred,” Mrs. Bennet said, and Jane said, “Dad, that’s an awful way to set us up.”

  Mr. Bennet smiled as if he’d been doubly complimented. “As you all know, my sister is flying out next week, to check if I still have a pulse and, in the event that I don’t, to take possession of our mother’s silver. For reasons that elude me, her stepson has decided to accompany her.”

  Liz swallowed a spoonful of the gazpacho Jane had prepared and said, “I know you all find this hard to believe, but Cousin Willie is kind of a big deal.”

  “And if I were an insomniac,” Mr. Bennet replied, “I’d like nothing better than to hear him explain why.”

  “Maybe he can tell us why the Internet in this house is so slow,” Kitty said.

  “Or teach Mom to use her cellphone,” Lydia suggested.

  “His start-ups have made millions of dollars,” Liz said, and Mr. Bennet said, “Yet he doesn’t know how to put on a pair of trousers.”

  “That was 1986,” Jane said.

  Which indeed it had been—the summer before Liz had started sixth grade, the Bennets had made a trip to California to visit Mr. Bennet’s sister, Margo, and to meet the man to whom she had just become engaged, a widower with a three-year-old son. Someone (Mr. and Mrs. Bennet each vehemently denied responsibility) had decided it would be a lark to make the journey by car. Thus the Bennet family had set out from Cincinnati in their minivan, driving roughly five hundred miles a day for five days in a row; at the time, Jane was twelve, Liz eleven, Mary three, Kitty in utero, and Lydia not yet conceived. In Liz’s memory, the trip was a blur of rolling hills becoming flattened prairies, flattened prairies becoming sprawling ranchlands, and ranchlands becoming scrubby desert. In Utah, a detour to see the red rock region had been scuttled due to increasing familial tensions; the minivan’s backseats had become a mayhem of hair-pulling, girl farts, and toddler squalls that distracted Liz from her powerful wish to reach the end of the tawdry romance she was reading in which a brooding Cheyenne loner inserted his fingers into the most private cavity of a young British heiress while they rode upon the same horse. Liz’s utter thrall to Colt and Jocelyn’s story compelled her to ignore a building nausea that eventually asserted itself with her crying out, “I’m going to be sick!” and vomiting an Egg McMuffin, hash browns, and ketchup onto Mary fifty miles northeast of Sacramento. Liz did sometimes wonder if their relationship had ever properly recovered, and insofar as it hadn’t, she couldn’t blame her sister.

  By the time the Bennets pulled into the driveway of the home belonging to Aunt Margo’s new fiancé in Sausalito, the minivan was strewn with food wrappers and socks and discarded Mad Libs books, not only reeking of vomit but also making an unaccountable scraping noise on the rear right side of the undercarriage; the Bennets’ antipathy for one another was of such an intimate variety it was almost like affection. They spilled out of the car and walked up the brick path of a well-tended bungalow, but before they could ring the bell, the front door opened and a small red-haired boy stood before them completely naked. “Dad!” the boy yelled. “They’re here!” His limbs were alabaster, his penis minuscule and, particularly to Mary, bewildering. “Look away, girls!” Mrs. Bennet cried, prompting in Liz and Jane a fit of giggles. This was Cousin Willie and also, obviously, Cousin Willie’s willy.

  Over the years, the Bennets and the Collinses saw one another intermittently, and at some point it became apparent that Cousin Willie was a bit of a technology savant. He taught himself to code at thirteen, began advising local businesses on how to bolster their Web presences at fifteen, and dropped out of UCLA during his sophomore year, after selling a company that had developed a proprietary format for transmitting data between servers and Web applications—which was to say, a company no Bennet understood whatsoever—for a rumored $20 million. Now a man of thirty, Willie was running his third or fourth software development start-up. And yet all of the Bennets except Liz and her mother refused to see him as anything other than a naked three-year-old. Mrs. Bennet was clearly intrigued by his money and had once asked Liz a series of probing questions about how he’d received the payment for his first company, questions to which Liz didn’t know the answers. And Liz herself had some years back run into Willie at a technology conference in Las Vegas that she was attending as a journalist and had shared a surprisingly pleasant lunch with him; although the conversation had essentially been a monologue on his part, it had been an interesting monologue, and he was the person who had first told her about Twitter.

  At the dinner table, Mrs. Bennet said, “Jane, I imagine you’ll be busy with Chip Bingley, but Liz can entertain Willie when he’s here.”

  “Why will Jane be busy with Chip Bingley?” Kitty asked.

  With relish, Mrs. Bennet said, “They’re having dinner tomorrow nig
ht at Orchids.”

  Uncertainly, Jane said, “Mom, you haven’t been reading my texts, have you?”

  Merrily, Lydia said, “She doesn’t know how!”

  Mrs. Bennet appeared uncontrite. “Helen Lucas mentioned it.”

  Jane furrowed her eyebrows, which for her reflected genuine pique. “How would Mrs. Lucas know?”

  Liz cleared her throat. “I think I told Charlotte. But just in passing.”

  “Chip and I might never see each other again after Saturday.” Jane’s cheeks were flushed. “So please, can everyone not make a big deal out of this? Mom, I’ll have plenty of time to spend with Cousin Willie.”

  “It was obvious that Chip found you absolutely charming, Jane,” Mrs. Bennet said. “And so he should have. But you’ll have to ask why he didn’t go into private practice. Working in an emergency room, he must see very unattractive people.”

  Liz, who felt some responsibility for displeasing her sister, said, “I wonder if Willie is interested in visiting the Freedom Center.”

  “Just so you all know, I have a paper due at the end of next week,” Mary said. “I won’t have much time for Willie or Aunt Margo.”

  “That’s so heartbreaking,” Lydia said. “I wonder if they’ll ever recover from the devastation.”

  “Well, I look forward to seeing both of them,” Jane said.

  From the head of the table, Mr. Bennet said, “That makes one of us.”

  AFTER DINNER, LIZ followed the scent of nail polish to its source, which turned out, as was often the case, to be Kitty; she sat on the counter in the bathroom she and Lydia shared, the door open, painting a rather impressive pattern on her toenails of cream-colored polish with sparkly gold dots.

  Liz turned on the overhead fan. “You know how Dad sleeps in his study?” she said. “Is it because of the Jewish thing?”

  Without looking up, Kitty said, “Maybe.”

  “Do you think it is?”

  At last, Kitty met Liz’s eyes. “Ask them.”

  Liz had no intention of doing so. Mr. Bennet’s two great and overlapping interests were genealogy and history—when capable of driving himself, he whiled away many afternoons in the stacks of the Mercantile Library downtown—and at some point about a decade prior, he’d announced with amusement his discovery that Mrs. Bennet’s maternal grandmother had been Jewish; indeed, prior to her marriage, Ida Conner had been Ida Rosenbluth. While not an overt anti-Semite, Mrs. Bennet was prone to making declarations about almost all religious and ethnic minorities that were often uncomfortable for her listeners. “Jews are very fond of dried fruit,” she’d told Liz on more than one occasion, and when Liz had been in fifth grade, Mrs. Bennet had refused to purchase a party dress for her that had a black sequined bodice and a black velvet skirt, on the grounds that it was “Jewish-looking.”

  Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Bennet wasn’t receptive to Mr. Bennet’s pronouncement about her religious ancestry. Adding insult to injury, Lydia and Kitty took to referring to their mother, in and out of her presence, as the Jewess; in fact, Lydia once reduced Mrs. Bennet to tears by recommending that she have a late-in-life bat mitzvah. This teasing had faded over time, possibly replaced with Lydia’s badgering of Mary about her sexual orientation. But perhaps, Liz thought, the consequences of the genealogical discovery lingered still.

  In the bathroom, Liz said to Kitty, “You don’t think Mom and Dad would ever get divorced, do you?” The more pointed question, which Liz didn’t ask, was Do you think they should?

  Kitty made a scoffing sound. “They’re too lazy,” she said.

  ON SATURDAY EVENING, just before being picked up by Chip Bingley, Jane stood in front of the mirror that hung over Liz’s bureau, applying blush. As she glanced at Liz’s reflection, Jane said, “Should I have watched his season of Eligible? Are there things everyone else knows about him that I don’t?”

  Liz sat at her desk, where she planned to spend the next few hours working—her parents were having dinner at the country club with neighbors, Lydia and Kitty were headed out, Mary was in her own room with the door closed—although already, both quite accidentally and quite horribly, Liz had found herself on a webpage featuring cannibal lemurs. Given that she was researching an upcoming Mascara feature on how to ask for a raise, it was difficult to say exactly how this had happened.

  Liz pushed her chair back and set her feet on the edge of her desk in a way her mother had been objecting to for three decades. “Did you tell him at the Lucases’ you’ve never seen the show?” she asked.

  Jane nodded.

  “Then that might be part of your charm,” Liz said. “He came off like a good guy, I promise. He did his share of on-air smooching, but he wasn’t sleazy.”

  “He told me that patients sometimes ask for his autograph.” Jane appeared troubled rather than gratified. “Can you imagine?”

  “Here’s my one hesitation about him,” Liz said. “And it’s not huge, but for what it’s worth—there’s this idea that he didn’t want to be on Eligible and his sister talked him into it. I call bullshit on that. People only do reality TV because they want to. I read somewhere that everyone on those shows is trying to make it in Hollywood.”

  Jane set down her blush container and turned to face Liz. “You think?”

  Liz shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Aren’t you the one who encouraged me to go out with him tonight?”

  “It could be that he saw Eligible as a lark and thought, Why not? I didn’t get an egomaniacal vibe when I talked to him. I just don’t totally buy his backstory.”

  “I’m almost afraid to tell you this now,” Jane said, “but you know how his sister Caroline is here for a few weeks from L.A.?”

  “I saw her at the Lucases’, but we hardly talked.”

  “She’s his manager,” Jane said.

  Liz squinted. “Meaning what?”

  “I guess ever since Eligible, he gets approached about product endorsements or doing charity events. She handles all of that for him.”

  Liz struggled not to form an expression of distaste; Caroline Bingley had on the Fourth of July revealed herself to Liz to be almost as unappealing as Fitzwilliam Darcy. As Caroline, her brother, and Darcy had been about to depart together, Caroline had first told Liz that she kept forgetting whether she was in Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Columbus, then she’d lamented the local dearth of decent sushi or yoga. Liz had considered recommending Modo Yoga, which was the studio Jane frequented, but decided instead to withhold the kindness.

  Liz had by that point in the party shared Darcy’s remarks with other attendees, animated as she did so by a giddy and outraged fervor. Charlotte Lucas had laughed, Mrs. Bennet had been deeply insulted, and Jane had speculated that Darcy had known she was eavesdropping and had been joking, which Liz thought gave Darcy far too much credit.

  In her bedroom, Liz said to Jane, “Maybe you and Chip can get paid to show up together at nightclubs. That would be funny.”

  “You’re sending very mixed messages right now, Lizzy.”

  Liz grinned. “I contain multitudes.” She added, “Sorry. Just enjoy yourself tonight, and forget I said anything.”

  LIZ WAS STILL at her desk, though actually doing work—she was reading a commencement speech delivered by Kathy de Bourgh, a famous feminist whom she hoped to interview for her pay-raise article—when Lydia entered the room and said, “Have you seen my phone?”

  Liz shook her head.

  “Fuck,” Lydia said. “I need to text Ham to see what time we’re meeting, but my phone is the only place I have his number.”

  “Who’s Ham?”

  “Ham Ryan.”

  “Am I supposed to know who that is?” Liz asked.

  “He owns the box we go to.”

  Box, to Liz’s annoyance, was the preferred CrossFit term for its gyms. She said, “Is he your boyfriend?”

  Lydia’s expression was disdainful. Sarcastically, she said, “Are we going steady? Do you think he’ll give me
his varsity jacket?”

  “Excuse me for daring to make conversation with you after you came into my room.”

  “There’s a spider on your wall.”

  At first, Liz wondered if this was some coded insult used by millennials, but when she turned, she saw a real spider, brown and quarter-sized. She stood to grab a sandal, and when she whacked the shoe against the wall, a chip of paint flaked off.

  “Gross,” Lydia said. “Tell me if you find my phone.” She hadn’t yet left the room when Liz opened a new window on her Web browser and typed in Ham Ryan CrossFit Cincinnati.

  He was handsome, of course: short light brown hair coaxed by product into a sort of glistening spikiness, as well as blue eyes and a tidy goatee. His real name was Hamilton, apparently, and he was from Seattle.

  Liz cared little about either CrossFit or Lydia’s paramours (their turnover was too frequent to justify investing much attention) while finding Kathy de Bourgh’s commencement address genuinely interesting; yet somehow, she spent the next forty minutes exploring the nooks and crannies of the website for Ham Ryan’s “box,” and even came away half-tempted to try a recipe for Paleo crab cakes, if only doing so wouldn’t please her sisters.

  CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT, as Liz was shutting down her computer, she heard someone ascending the staircase to the third floor; to her surprise, it was Mary rather than Jane. On Mary’s face was an unconcealed smirk. “Look.” She passed her phone to Liz.