The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

  “I don’t have any orange,” Amelia says. “Thank you.”

  “I know. That’s why I picked it.”

  Amy turns the bottle over and reads the bottom: A Good Man-darin Is Hard to Find.

  A.J. had suggested inviting Leon Friedman to the wedding, an idea Amelia rejects. They do agree on a passage from The Late Bloomer to be read at the service by one of Amelia’s college friends.

  “It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”

  None of Amelia’s other college friends recognize the woman who is reading the passage, but none of them find this particularly odd either. Vassar is a small college, though certainly not the kind of place where everyone can know everyone, and Amelia has always had a knack for making friends with people from a variety of social circles.

  The Girls in Their Summer Dresses

  1939 / Irwin Shaw

  Man watches women besides his wife. The wife doesn’t approve. Lovely twist, more like a turn, at the end. You’re a good reader, and you’ll probably see it coming. (Is a twist less satisfying if you know it’s coming? Is a twist that you can’t predict symptomatic of bad construction? These are things to consider when writing.)

  Not particularly apropos of writing but . . . Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.

  —A.J.F.

  Ismay waits in the foyer of her house. Her legs are crossed so that one foot is wrapped around the calf of her other leg. She once saw an anchorwoman sit that way, and it had impressed her. A woman needs skinny legs and flexible knees to accomplish it. She wonders if the dress she’s picked for the day will be too light. The material is silk, and summer is over.

  She looks at her phone. It’s 11 a.m., which means the ceremony will have already begun. Perhaps she should leave without him?

  As she is already late, she decides that there is no point in going alone. If she waits, she can yell at him when he arrives. She finds pleasure where she can.

  Daniel comes through the door at 11:26. “Sorry,” he says. “A few of the kids from my class wanted to go for a drink. One thing led to another, you know how it is.”

  “Yes,” she says. She doesn’t feel like yelling anymore. Silence will be better.

  “I crashed in my office. My back is killing me.” He kisses her on the cheek. “You look fantastic.” He whistles. “You still have great legs, Izzie.”

  “Get changed,” she says. “You smell like a liquor store. Did you drive here yourself?”

  “I’m not drunk. I’m hungover. Be precise, Ismay.”

  “It’s amazing you’re still alive,” she says.

  “Probably so,” he says as he goes up the stairs.

  “Would you grab my wrap when you come back down?” she says, but she isn’t sure if he has heard her.

  THE WEDDING IS, as weddings are, as weddings will always be, Ismay thinks. A.J. looks sloppy in his blue seersucker suit. Couldn’t he have rented a tuxedo? It’s Alice Island, not the Jersey shore. And where had Amelia gotten that awful Renaissance Faire dress? It’s more yellow than white, and she looks hippy in it. She’s always wearing vintage clothes and she doesn’t exactly have the right body type for them. Who’s she kidding with those big gerbera in her hair—she’s not twenty, for God’s sake. When she smiles, she’s all gums.

  When did I get so negative? Ismay wonders. Their happiness is not her unhappiness. Unless it is. What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to unhappiness in the world at any given time? She should be nicer. It’s a well-known fact that hate shows up on your face once you’re forty. Besides, Amelia is attractive, even if she isn’t beautiful like Nic. Look how much Maya is smiling. Lost another tooth. And A.J. is so happy. Watch that lucky bastard try not to cry.

  Ismay is happy for A.J., whatever that means, but the wedding itself is a trial. The event makes her younger sister seem even deader and also leads to unwanted reflection on her sundry disappointments. She is forty-four years old. She is married to a too-handsome man, whom she no longer loves. She has had seven miscarriages in the last dozen years. She is, according to her gynecologist, in perimenopause: So much for that.

  She looks across the venue at Maya. What a pretty girl she is, and she’s smart, too. Ismay waves to her, but Maya has her head in a book and she doesn’t seem to notice. The little girl has never particularly warmed to Ismay, which everyone thinks is odd. In general, Maya prefers adult company, and Ismay, who has been teaching for twenty years, is good with children. Twenty years. Jesus. Without even noticing it, she has gone from the bright new teacher whose legs all the boys stare at to old Mrs. Parish who does the school play. They think it’s silly how much she cares about these productions. Of course, they are overestimating her investment. How many years can she be expected to go on, one mediocre production blending in with the next? Different faces, but none of these kids ever turns out to be Meryl Streep.

  Ismay pulls her wrap tighter around her shoulders and decides to take a walk. She heads down the pier then takes off her kitten heels and walks across the beach, which is empty. It is late September, and the air feels like fall. She tries to remember the name of the book where the woman swims out to sea and kills herself in the end.

  It would be so easy, Ismay thinks. You walk out. You swim for a while. You swim too far. You don’t try to swim back. Your lungs fill up. It hurts for a bit, but then it’s over. Nothing ever hurts again, and your conscience is clear. You don’t leave a mess. Maybe your body washes up some day. Maybe it doesn’t. Daniel wouldn’t even look for her. Maybe he would look for her, but he certainly wouldn’t look very hard.

  Of course! The book is The Awakening by Kate Chopin. How she had loved that novel (novella?) at seventeen.

  Maya’s mother had ended her life in the same fashion, and Ismay wonders, not for the first time, if Marian Wallace had read The Awakening. She has thought a lot about Marian Wallace over the years.

  Ismay walks into the water, which is even colder than she thought it would be. I can do this, she thinks. Just keep walking.

  I may just do this.

  “Ismay!”

  Despite herself, Ismay turns. It’s Lambiase, that annoying cop friend of A.J.’s. He is carrying her shoes.

  “Cold for a swim?”

  “A little,” she replies. “I came out here to clear my head.”

  Lambiase walks over to her. “Sure.”

  Ismay’s teeth are chattering, and Lambiase takes off his suit coat and puts it over her shoulders. “Must be hard,” Lambiase says. “Seeing A.J. married to someone other than your sister.”

  “Yes. Amelia seems lovely, though.” Ismay begins to cry, but the sun has mostly set and she is not sure if Lambiase can see it.

  “The thing about weddings,” he says, “is that they can make a person feel lonely as hell.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope I’m not out of line here and I know we don’t know each other that well. But, well, your husband’s an idiot. If I had a nice-looking professional woman like you—”

  “You are out of line.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lambiase says. “I got no manners.”

  Ismay nods. “I wouldn’t say you have no manners,” she says. “You did lend me your coat. Thank you for that.”

  “Fall comes fast on Alice,” Lambiase says. “We should go back inside.”

  DANIEL IS TALKING up Amelia’s maid of honor by the bar under Pequod’s whale, which has been wrapped with Christmas lights for the occasion. Janine, a Hitchcock blond in glasses, came up through the publishing ranks with Amelia. Daniel doesn’t know this, but Janine has been given the task of making sure the great wr
iter doesn’t get out of line.

  For the wedding, Janine is wearing a yellow gingham dress that Amelia had picked out and paid for. “I know you’ll never wear this again,” Amelia had said.

  “Hard color to pull off,” Daniel says. “But you look great in it. Janine, right?”

  She nods.

  “Janine the maid of honor. Should I ask you what you do?” Daniel says. “Or is that boring party talk?”

  “I’m an editor,” she says.

  “Sexy and smart. What are your books?”

  “A picture book I edited about Harriet Tubman was a Caldecott Honor Book a couple of years ago.”

  “Impressive,” Daniel says, though in fact he is disappointed. He is on the hunt for a new publishing home. His sales aren’t what they once were, and he believes the people at his old publisher aren’t doing enough for him. He’d like to leave them before they leave him. “That’s the top prize, right?”

  “It didn’t win. It got an honor.”

  “I bet you’re a good editor,” he says.

  “Based on what?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t let me think your book won when it was only a runner-up.”

  Janine looks at her watch.

  “Janine looks at her watch,” Daniel says. “She is bored with the old writer.”

  Janine smiles. “Strike the second sentence. Reader will know. Show, don’t tell.”

  “If you’re going to say things like that, I need a drink.” Daniel signals the bartender. “Vodka. Grey Goose, if you have it. And a little seltzer.” He turns to Janine. “For you?”

  “Glass of rosé.”

  “ ‘Show, don’t tell’ is a complete crock of shit, Janine the maid of honor,” Daniel lectures her. “It comes from Syd Field’s screenplay books, but it doesn’t have a thing to do with novel writing. Novels are all tell. The best ones at least. Novels aren’t meant to be imitation screenplays.”

  “I read your book when I was in junior high,” Janine says.

  “Oh, don’t tell me that. It makes me feel ancient.”

  “It was my mom’s favorite.”

  Daniel pantomimes getting shot through the heart. Ismay taps him on the shoulder. “I’m going home,” she whispers in his ear.

  Daniel follows her out to the car. “Ismay, hold up.”

  Ismay drives because Daniel is too drunk to drive. They live in the Cliffs, the most expensive part of Alice Island. All the houses have views, and the road that leads to them is uphill, twisty with many blind spots, poorly lit, and lined with yellow signs imploring caution.

  “You took that turn a little fast, darling,” Daniel says.

  She thinks about driving them both off the road and into the ocean, and the thought makes her happy, happier than she would have been if she’d only killed herself. She realizes in that moment that she doesn’t want to be dead. She wants Daniel to be dead. Or at least gone. Yes, gone. She’d settle for gone.

  “I don’t love you anymore.”

  “Ismay, you’re being absurd. You always get like this at weddings.”

  “You are not a good man,” Ismay says.

  “I’m complex. And maybe I’m not good, but I’m certainly not the worst. It’s no reason to end a perfectly average marriage,” Daniel says.

  “You’re the grasshopper, and I’m the ant. And I’m tired of being the ant.”

  “That’s a rather juvenile reference. I’m sure you can do better.”

  Ismay pulls the car over to the side of the road. Her hands are shaking.

  “You are bad. And what’s worse is, you’ve made me bad,” she says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A car whizzes by them, close enough to rattle the walls of the SUV. “Ismay, this is an insane place to park. If you want to argue, let’s drive home and do it properly.”

  “Every time I see her with A.J. and Amelia, I’m sick. She should be ours.”

  “What?”

  “Maya,” Ismay says. “If you’d done the right thing, she’d be ours. But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.” She looks steadily at Daniel. “I know that Marian Wallace was your girlfriend.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “Don’t lie! I know that she came here to kill herself in your front yard. I know that she left Maya for you, but you either were too lazy or too much of a coward to claim her.”

  “If you thought that was true, why didn’t you do something?” Daniel asks.

  “Because it isn’t my job! I was pregnant, and it wasn’t my responsibility to clean up after your affairs.”

  Another car speeds past, nearly sideswiping them.

  “But if you’d been brave and come to me, I would have adopted her, Daniel. I would have forgiven you and I would have taken her in. I waited for you to say something, but you never did. I waited for days, then weeks, then years.”

  “Ismay, you can believe what you want, but Marian Wallace was not my girlfriend. She was a fan who came to a reading.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?”

  Daniel shakes his head. “She was a girl who came to a reading, and a girl I slept with once. How could I even be sure the child was mine?” He tries to take Ismay’s hand, but she pulls away.

  “It’s funny,” Ismay says. “Every last bit of love I had for you is gone.”

  “I still love you,” Daniel says. At that moment, headlights catch the rearview mirror.

  The hit comes from behind, knocking the car into the center of the road so that it is crossing both lanes of traffic.

  “I think I’m okay,” Daniel says. “Are you okay?”

  “My leg,” she says. “It might be broken.”

  More headlights, this time from the opposite side of the road. “Ismay, you have to drive.” He turns in time to see the truck. A twist, he thinks.

  In the first chapter of Daniel’s famous first novel, the main character is in a catastrophic car accident. Daniel had struggled with the section, because it occurred to him that everything he knew about horrible car accidents had come from books he’d read and movies he’d seen. The description he finally settled on, after what must have been fifty passes, never much satisfied him. A series of fragments in the style of modernist poets. Apollinaire or Breton, maybe, but not nearly as good as either.

  Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes.

  Horns, flaccid and come too late.

  Metal crumpling like tissue.

  The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere.

  Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn’t been as bad as he had thought.

  PART II

  A Conversation with My Father

  1972 / Grace Paley

  Dying father argues with daughter about the “best” way to tell a story. You’ll love this, Maya, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go downstairs and push it into your hands right now.

  —A.J.F.

  The assignment for Maya’s creative-writing class is to tell a story about someone you wish you knew better. “My biological father is a ghost to me,” she writes. She thinks the first sentence is good, but where to go from there? After 250 words and a whole morning wasted, she concedes defeat. There’s no story because she doesn’t know anything about the man. He truly is a ghost to her. The failure was in the conception.

  A.J. brings her a grilled cheese sandwich. “How’s it going, Hemingway?”

  “Don’t you ever knock?” she says. She accepts the sandwich and shuts the door. She used to love living above the store, but now that she is fourteen and Amelia lives there, too, the apartment feels small. And noisy. She can hear customer downstairs all day. How is a person to write under such conditions?

  Out of desperation, Maya writes about Amelia’s cat.

  Puddleglum never imagined he’d move from Providence to Alice Island.

  She revises, Puddleglum never imagined he’d live in a bookstore.

  Gimmicky, she decides. That?
??s what Mr. Balboni, the creative writing teacher, will say. She has already written a story from the point of view of the rain and the point of view of a very old library book. “Interesting concepts,” Mr. Balboni had written on the library book story, “but you might want to try writing about a human character next time. Do you really want anthropomorphizing to become your thing?”

  She had had to look up “anthropomorphize” before deciding that, no, she didn’t want it to become her thing. She doesn’t want to have a thing. And yet can she be blamed if it kind of is her thing? Her childhood had been spent reading books and imagining lives for customers and sometimes for inanimate objects like the teapot or the bookmark carousel. It had not been a lonely childhood, though many of her intimates had been somewhat less than real.

  A little later, Amelia knocks. “Are you working? Can you take a break?”

  “Come in,” Maya says.

  Amelia flops onto the bed. “What are you writing?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I thought I had an idea, but it didn’t work.”

  “Oh, that is a problem.”

  Maya explains the assignment. “It’s supposed to be about someone important to you. Someone who died, probably, or someone you wish you knew better.”

  “Maybe you could write about your mother?”

  Maya shakes her head. She doesn’t want to hurt Amelia’s feelings, but that seems kind of obvious. “I know as little about her as I do my biological father,” she says.

  “You lived with her for two years. You know her name and some of her backstory. That might be a place to start.”

  “I know as much as I want to know about her. She had chances. She screwed everything up.”

  “That isn’t true,” Amelia says.

  “She gave up, didn’t she?”

  “She probably had reasons. I’m sure she did the best she could.” Amelia’s mother had died two years ago, and though their relationship had been challenging at times, she misses her with an unexpected ferocity. For instance, until her death, her mother had sent her new underwear in the mail every other month. Amelia had not once had to buy underwear her whole life. Recently, she had found herself standing in the lingerie department at TJ Maxx, and as she went through the panty bin, she had begun to cry: No one will ever love me that much again.