Andrea Chapin

Her mother was a no show.  She’d called around eleven that morning with not one excuse but two: vertigo and inclement weather—she actually used those words.  The room was spinning when she woke up, she said, and the forecast was for snow turning to rain turning to snow again.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” her mother said, sighing.  “I’m flat on my back.”

“It’s fine,” said Elle. 

It was Elle’s twenty-fifth birthday.  She had prepared herself for her mother’s cancelation call.  Of course, she wasn’t going to be able to make it.  Elle couldn’t remember the last time her mother had ventured to New York or, for that matter, left East Hampton to go anywhere.  Maybe a year-and-a-half ago.  Maybe even two.  Elle went on a trip to Miami with her sister Sophie for her birthday last year, so her mother had been saved from having to concoct a story as to why she couldn’t come. 

No big deal, Elle thought as she read over her copy for “25 Under 25.”  She’d spent the last month compiling a long list of over a hundred visual artists, and it was finally—after much editing and revising and a few disagreements among the editors—whittled down to twenty-five.  Elle worked for an online culture magazine called Palimpsest, a word she had to Google before she had for her first Skype interview.

Elle sent the list to her boss and looked out her cubicle window.  At least she had a window.  The sky was a flat winter gray.  Another building was going up, high into the heavens.  A bundle of I-beams swung from an enormous crane with such abandon that even though it was not even close to Elle’s window she ducked.

She’d noticed lately that there were hardly any pigeons anymore, and that troubled her.  She’d hated pigeons when she was growing up in the city.  They seemed dirty and gross and menacing when they charged and fought over every scrap of food—more like rodents than birds.  But strangely she missed the stampeding flocks, and in the last year found herself sitting in McCarren Park, scattering shards of gluten-free bread in front of her, waiting for them.  Maybe it was the bread, not climate change, that kept them away.  Maybe they preferred gluten.  She didn’t blame them.

Elle arrived at the restaurant before anyone else.  Sophie had made the reservation, and the maître d’ greeted Elle with familiarity and showed her to a table in the front, facing the street.  It wasn’t their usual table.  Their usual table was one of the red vinyl banquets deeper into the restaurant.  Elle sat with her back to the window.  A chill from the “inclement weather” seeped through the glass.  She wondered if she should ask the maître d’ if they could move to one of the red vinyl banquets.

They had been coming to this bistro in the theater district ever since Elle and Sophie were kids.  The white tablecloths.  The mirrors that amplified the flickering candlelight.  The old smooth-surfaced mahogany bar to one side.  It was, Elle was sure, one of the last of its kind still left in Manhattan. A few of the waiters had been there forever, which was sad, because Elle remembered when she was younger and they were younger how hopeful they were, how eager to please in a restaurant job they thought was only temporary, a wage steppingstone that would take them to stardom and beyond. 

The pre-theater crowd was wandering in.  Some tables were still open.  But by the time the waiter brought Elle a Grey Goose martini, she had swaddled herself against the cold in her garnet-colored shawl and pushed herself into a comfortable corner where the wall met the window.  It was almost cozy, and she decided not to ask for a table change.

Sophie arrived with Peter, her copper headed and bearded Viking of a boyfriend.  Unlike Elle and her sister, who through their father had Mediterranean coloring—skin that tanned easily and well—Peter looked like he had sailed over on a longship from the North Sea.  Peter brushed the snow from his coat before he took it off and slung it over the back of a chair.  He was wearing a brownish-gold corduroy blazer with leather patches on the sleeves.  Leather patches!  He looked more like a young college professor than an actor.  Elle half expected him to pull out a pipe.  She liked to call him Peiter with a long i.

Sophie couldn’t easily reach across the table and hug Elle, because Elle had, by the first half of her martini, slunk further into her comfortable corner, so Sophie gallantly reached across the table, grabbed both of Elle’s hands and kissed them.  Then Sophie took off her parka and sat across from Elle, and Peter sat next to Sophie, leaving the chair next to Elle open for their father.

“Thank you for my birthday posts, Soph,” said Elle, smiling at her sister.

Earlier, on Instagram, Sophie had posted old photos of the two of them—on the beach as toddlers, in front of the Eiffel Tower when there were eight and nine, peeking out of corn stalks at the corn maze in Watermill a year or so later, in high school hanging out with friends, beer cans and cigarettes in hand, photos when Sophie visited Elle for parents’ weekend at college, and a photo of her birthday last year, when they were in bikinis in South Beach, sun-drenched and smiling and drinking mojitos.  People always thought they were twins, but they were a little over a year apart.  Even now they looked like the mirror images of each other—with shiny long brown hair glinting with salon highlights of copper and gold and natural full lips—though Sophie’s eyes were green and Elle’s were brown.  They were both five feet eight and still traded clothes. Tonight, they were wearing high-waisted, wide, cropped blue jeans with frayed hems and square-toed ankle boots: Elle’s were black patent leather, Sophie’s were gray suede.

“Happy birthday, birthday girl,” said Peter.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Peiter,” said Elle, blowing him a kiss and looking at her phone.  “Dad’s held up.”

Her father was late.  He was always late.

“How’s the play going?” Elle asked Peter.

In keeping with the Nordic theme, Peter had just landed the role of the young draftsman Ragnar Brovik in a Broadway production of Ibsen’s The Master Builder.  Sophie had also auditioned, wanting the role of the ingénue Hilde Wangel, willing to take the sad-sack, lovelorn bookkeeper Kaja Fosli, but she hadn’t been cast.

Peter’s landing Brovik was a bit of a triumph, because the year before he’d been up for a role in their father’s new play—it would have been Peter’s Broadway debut—and after dangling the possibility in front of Peter, even saying that he had written the play with Peter in mind, when the time came to cast the play their father made it clear that he thought Peter wasn’t “right” enough—Peter hadn’t even gotten a callback.  Their father and the casting director had plucked a recent Julliard graduate.  Peter had been acting in New York for almost a decade. 

The Ragnar role was something Peter could gloat about.  Not only was it his first Broadway play, but the director was British and all the rage right now, and Daniel Day-Lewis had come out of early retirement to play the lecherous, narcissistic lead Halvard Solness.  And, in the end, further gloatability: Elle’s father’s play had been panned and closed sooner than anyone expected.  

“It’s awesome,” said Peter.  “Previews start in two weeks.  You’re coming opening night, right?”

“Of course!” said Elle.  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

The waiter brought Sophie a white wine and Peter a draft beer.  Peter was unlike anyone Sophie had gone out with before.  That is to say, she’d gone out with a lot of entitled losers.  Peter was more focused and more hard-working than her other boyfriends. 

Their father still hadn’t come, so they ordered a dozen oysters, and then another.  Elle was on her second martini, when their father finally pushed through the front door.  Two scarves were wrapped around his neck, an Italian silk scarf and a wool cashmere scarf—he often complained of the cold—and his head was down as he came up to the table.  He was texting.

Their father was a very busy man.  He made sure everyone always knew that.  He was balding but still handsome.  He wore smallish black round glasses that mimicked Trotsky.  He had gained quite a few pounds over the years and refused to do anything other than walk, but he spent a fortune on clothes and shoes and watches, so even though his girth was not as trim as it once was, when he entered a room, or a restaurant, with his intense and determined flare, people tended to stare.

Tonight, he briefly looked up to locate the empty seat, then dropped his face to his phone screen again, and continued texting as he sat next to Elle.  The three of them, Elle, Sophie, and Peter, stopped their conversation and waited for him to finish.  Peter looked at Sophie with a what-the-fuck look, and she rolled her eyes. 

Finally, Elle, not waiting for her father to stop texting or to wish her a happy birthday, said, “Want a drink, Dad?”

“Ah, yes.”  He peered at them, over the round black frames of his glasses.  “One minute.”  He typed a few more lines on his phone, put it down on the table and still looking at it, started exfoliating layers of scarves.  Then he unbuttoned a cardigan and took off other materials he had tiered onto his body.  It was embarrassing to watch.  While the colors of charcoals and grays and blacks were tasteful, the way he took them off resembled an archeologist on a dig.  He examined every piece before he laid it on the back of his chair.  This careful but excruciating peeling off of his fabric epidermis resembled what Elle imagined a lizard might look like when he lost his skin.

Nothing had changed, really.  When her parents were still married, her father was always on his phone, and he was always late to family events, whether it was Elle’s piano recitals or Sophie’s plays—that is if he got there at all. 

Tonight, after the sloughing, their father looked at both girls and smiled.

“Happy birthday, dear Elle,” he said at last, leaning over and kissing her forehead.

Elle smiled but felt an icicle stabbing her insides.  She drew her shoulders together and up around her ears for a moment, a shield.  Then she took a deep breath and let her shoulders drop, remembering what her yoga teacher always said at the beginning of savasana: Let your eyeballs float into the back of your head. Let the earth support your body completely.

The waiter came to take their orders.  Sophie had French onion soup and a salad frisée; Peter, escargot and steak frites; Elle, a pear, blue cheese, walnut salad and their father a warm goat cheese and caramelized onion tart to start.  Elle and her father both opted for bouillabaisse as their entrees.  Their father, who was not a white wine drinker, ordered a Barolo, but both sisters chimed in that they wanted white, so he told the waiter to bring a white Burgundy as well.  Then he tapped his phone and put it to his ear, while the waiter opened the red and poured him a taste.  Her father took a sip.

They all waited.  It was hard to know whether the time passing was because the wine wasn’t up to their father’s standards or because he was concentrating on a phone message.  Elle closed her eyes, concentrating on the lines from her mediation tape: Grind your seat, lift your spine, soften your face, watch your breath go in and out.  If your mind wanders note what it was that distracted you and without attachment or judgment let it float away and bring yourself back to your focus.

Elle’s breathing was interrupted by Sophie’s chirp, “Dad?”

“Oh,” he said and finally nodded.

When the waiter poured Elle a taste of the white Burgundy, she swiftly sipped it and said, “Yes, good. Thank you.”

“How is Pamplona?” asked Peter, popping a buttery escargot into his mouth.

Elle could smell the garlic from where she was sitting.

“I wish,” said Elle. “I wouldn’t mind being there right now.  I bet it would be sunny at least.”

Since Elle had her joke about pronouncing the Danish version of Peter’s name, Peiter, he liked to call the online magazine she worked for Pamplona, instead of Palimpsest.

“I’ve been tasked with writing about the so-called top twenty-five visual artists who are under twenty-five years old,” she said.

“World-wide?” asked Peter.

“They can have been born in a different country, but they have to have moved to the U.S. at some point in their lives and basically live here now.”

 “Anyone you really like?” said Sophie.

“My roommate from Wesleyan,” said Elle.

After doing a double major in English and studio art at college, and after a few years of working at a woman’s magazine, Elle had gotten the job at Palimpsest.  She’d thought she would make art at night and on the weekends.  She’d thought wrong.  The apartment she shared with three roommates was cramped, and she often worked until nine or ten at night.  The weekends, well, they flew by, and now so had the years.

“That sounds like a ton of work,” said Sophie. 

“It has been,” said Elle. “I started with about 150 and had to track their careers online, at all the big art fairs, and with their galleries, their Instagram accounts...”

“That’s bullshit,” announced their father.  He put his phone down on the table.  “At twenty-five, you know nothing.  You might show promise, you might have a brilliant career ahead of you, but to be chosen by another twenty-five-year-old...”

Oh, the chilling echo of this moment, thought Elle.  The bullets of his words striking her again and reminding her of her senior show at college.  The day was coming to an end, and when most of the students had already left, their father swept into the art department hall with the air of an important collector.  Sophie was still there, and one of Elle’s good friends, and the three of them were finishing the wine Elle had brought.  The cheese and crackers were long gone.  Their mother was long gone.  Their father inspected Elle’s pieces, from afar and up close.  Walking from installation to installation with his hands clasped behind his back.  In that first year, Elle had moved into a sort of multi-media zone, combining text, textiles, photos, and in one she played a recording of Sophie reading Lady Anne’s lines from Richard III: “Even in so short a space, my woman's heart/Grossly grew captive to his honey words/And proved the subject of my own soul's curse...”

When her father finished his examination, he stood in front of the north facing windows, texting, his face lit up like a Vermeer in the afternoon light.  Elle waited.  And waited. 

“Well, what do you think?” Sophie finally blurted out.

Their father looked up.  “About what?” he said.

“About Elle’s pieces!” said Sophie.  “Aren’t they fabulous!”

“This is bullshit,” he’d said, standing up straighter, squaring his shoulders, regal almost, a prince cloaked in oyster light.  “A regurgitation of conceptual feminist artists from the seventies and eighties.  The paintings you did in high school were much better.”

Now, in the bistro, Sophia was raising her glass.  “Happy birthday, my beautiful and talented and smart sister!” she said.  “That magazine is lucky to have you.”

Elle wanted to hug her sister.  She knew the only reason they had graduated from high school and gotten into college was because they had parented each other.  She knew she should ignore her father, not rise to his bait.

“All the editors have been going through the research.  It’s not just me,” said Elle. 

“When Elegy was nominated for the Tony and the Pulitzer...”

Elle prayed her father wouldn’t continue with the sentence.  His play Elegy for a Family was his only hit.  It was his most autobiographical work.  The father dies early on—Elle’s father’s father had died when he was four—and a brutal stepfather moves in.  Elle was ten when Elegy created a splash on Broadway.  It was made into a hugely successful movie and to this day constantly revived in regional theaters across the country.  But every play he’d written since had been a flop with ill-conceived scenes of absurd comedy, even slapstick, that obstructed the heart of what might have been true feeling.  That was before he started putting animals and ghosts in his plays.

“I’m sure you were on a lot of lists back in the day,” said Peter.

Their father had barely acknowledged Peter and now sipped his large glass of red wine and focused his Trotsky eyes on his daughter’s boyfriend.

“I was on a lot of lists. And they were then as they are now.”

“Good PR?” said Peter.

“Bullshit,” said their father.

When Elle and Sophie were in high school their parents divorced.  Their parents had lived in a loft on Broome Street since before the sisters were born.  But before the divorce was finalized their mother removed herself from the city and lived at their house on the beach, and their father rented a strange little house behind an old townhouse in the west village.  The strange little house was owned by an ancient potter who had moved to the Berkshires.  The sisters were flabbergasted their father had picked that place because it was so small.  It did have a wood-burning fireplace, but it was truly tiny, with no room for them.  They had stayed on in the loft on Broome Street with no parents during much of their high school years.  In a way it was great.  They had tons of parties and at different times their boyfriends moved in with them.  Sophie had gone to Sarah Lawrence when Elle was a senior, and though their parents paid for her room and board, she basically lived in the loft on Broome Street and took care of Elle.  They sold that loft when Elle was at Wesleyan. 

Elle noticed her father did not ask Peter how The Master Builder was going, but he did ask Sophie if she’d auditioned for anything lately.

“I always audition,” she said, “not just lately.  But I’m thinking of taking a full-time job.”

“Nooooooo!” said Elle.  The martinis and wine were making her loud, so when she said that, or rather shouted it, several people in the restaurant turned and looked at her. 

Sophie had stuck with acting, and even though she hadn’t landed anything big yet she was always taking classes and acting in off-off Broadway productions, student films and had recently had a part in friend’s web series. 

“I’m going on my second interview with a branding company that hires influencers at colleges and universities for companies like Amazon and Pepsi.  I’ll be sort of like a talent scout, scoping YouTube and Instagram for attractive witty kids who have a lot of followers and the potential for a lot more.  I mean, I did work as an assistant at that talent agency for a while.  I think I might be good at this.”

“But you’re a good actress,” said Elle.

“I’m just tired of not having the right face or shape or height or voice or whatever,” said Sophie.

Their mother had been an actress when she met their father, but she had dropped out after she got pregnant with Sophie.  When they were younger, she regaled them with all the roles she’d had: Antigone, Christina in Mourning Becomes Electra, the maid Cathleen in Long Day’s Journey into Night because she was too young to play Mary Tyrone, Celimene in The Misanthrope, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Hilde in The Master Builder, though now she certainly would be better cast at the architect’s crazy reclusive wife, Aline Solness.  Their mother had never acted in one of their father’s plays.

The idea of Sophie not pursuing her acting career made Elle want to burst into tears.  “You’re a natural.  You can’t leave it.  Just like that.  After all these years,” she said.  “Your break is right around the corner.  I know it.”

Sophie looked at her and started to shake her head.  Peter put his arm around Sophie. 

A fury rose in Elle.  She wanted to reach across the table, grab Peter by his corduroy lapels and shake him.  He should have said something, agreed with Elle, begged Sophie to forget her ridiculous idea of leaving the theater.  But he just pulled Soph closer to him.  He was like Hilde now, in the play he was in, when Hilde quietly watches the master builder climb to the top of the tower—to his certain death.

Her father said nothing, also.

When the waiter poured the last of the white wine into Elle’s glass, she ordered another bottle. 

 “Hello,” said Elle, again too loudly.  “Hello?

“Shhhh,” said Peter.

“Don’t shhhhsh me,” Elle said. 

Peter glared at her.  For the first time she noticed an iciness in his pale eyes, as if she were looking down into the blue crevasse of a glacier.

“Soph, you can’t just not act anymore.  You’re just hitting your stride.  I’ve seen it, how you’ve deepened and matured these last years.  Please stay with it.  Please,” pleaded Elle. 

Elle’s mother always claimed she’d quit the theater because she wanted to be a full-time mother, but she hadn’t been very good at that role.  When they were children, she’d left them for hours and even days with a string of struggling actresses when she went to meditation retreats or joined their father at out-of-town openings.  When they were older, she’d withdrawn to East Hampton, where she dabbled in painting and had a group of friends who, like Elle’s parents, had all bought their modest houses decades ago.  Now Elle wondered if she’d gotten the narrative wrong all these years, that maybe her mother abandoned acting because their father had demanded it somehow, because he had to be the star.

As if on cue, their father started to rise. “I must go,” he said.  He was reading something on his phone.

Or maybe her mother just didn’t have it in her, didn’t have what it took to continue.  Elle thought of the blank canvases, stretched and framed, leaning against her bedroom wall.

“But we haven’t had dessert yet,” said Sophie.

At that moment their waiter came across the floor with a piece of chocolate cake with a bright red candle in it.  Their father sat back down, they sang happy birthday, and the waiters and customers joined in.  Elle blew the candle out.

“It’s the flourless chocolate cake,” said Sophie, who knew Elle was trying to stay away from gluten because it made her feel bloated.

Peter ordered a crème brûlée, and Sophie said she’d take a bite of everyone else’s. Their father was standing and twining his many layers around him, round and round and round, Elle thought, and for a minute the room began to spin.  She held onto the table when her father kissed her on the top of her head.  Then he was out the door into that night that had turned into freezing rain.  When she caught sight of him getting into an Uber, the tails of his black cashmere coat flapping after him as he dove into the seat, she reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of Xanax, considered splitting one after all the alcohol she’d had, considered popping a whole one in her mouth and washing it down with a sip of wine.  But she put the bottle back in her bag without taking a pill and looked across the table at her sister, looked her directly in the eyes.

“I understand how hard it is,” she said.  “I get it.  I understand it’s easier to have someone else take center stage.  I’m beginning to understand Dad and Mom.  That maybe parenting wasn’t their talent, that maybe they were bad role models in the theater department also, but acting is your talent, you are exceptional.  You are a star.” 

Sophie’s eyes filled with tears.

“Kick other people’s voices out of your head, please.  Remember when we were kids in Maine that one summer?  Remember that mountain or maybe it seemed like a mountain but was a hill above that lake? Remember going there and shouting and hearing the echo of our own voices?  Listen to that echo now.  Listen to your own voice.”  Elle was listening to her own voice, and she could tell she was slurring her words.

Sophie smiled and reached across the table and took Elle’s hands in hers.

Then Peter turned to Sophie.  “There’ve been so many times I’ve wanted to quit.  So many parts I got so close to but didn’t get, so many cruel things said to me, but I just kept on, and that’s what you must do now.  I agree with Elle.”

The blue in his eyes was thawing, more fjord-like now than glacier.

“Thank you, both,” Sophie said, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

“I’m going to art school,” said Elle.  She was so drunk the sentence sounded more like, “I’m going to arse school,” which made her burst into giggles.  And while she was giggling so hard that she started hiccupping, she wondered where that declaration came from.  She hadn’t been thinking about going to art school at all. 

“You should!” said Sophie.

“That’s a great idea,” said Peter.  “You need the time.”

“Arse school!” Elle screamed with staccatoed laughter.  Her hiccups were getting worse.

Several diners at the next table scowled at her. 

“Drink water,” said Sophie.  “We should probably go.  We’ll drop you off.”

As they started to rise and put on their coats, the waiter brought them the check, and it was then they realized that though their father had promised to take them all out for Elle’s birthday, he’d left without paying.

“Douche,” said Peter.

“Yesssssss,” Elle agreed.

“Why are we surprised,” added Sophie.

“I’ve got it,” Elle said, fumbling in her bag.

“But it’s your birthday,” said Sophie.

“Soph and I will split it,” said Peter.

“But it’s way too much money,” said Elle, still hiccupping.  “All the fucking hiccup fancy hiccup wine Dad ordered and our drinks.  Let’s split it three ways.”

And that’s what they did. 

The three of them walked out into the night; their arms linked.  Sophie on one side of Elle and Peter on the other.  Elle decided she didn’t hate Peter, after all.  The rain had turned to snow again, large flakes sailed down lazily from above. 

Elle stuck out her tongue.  “Caught it!” she screamed, the soft flake dissolving in her mouth.  “And my hiccups are gone!”

Partway down the street, they realized they’d forgotten to order a ride, but a yellow cab pulled up, and they got in.  Elle leaned her head on her sister’s shoulder. 

“Happy birthday, dear Elle,” Sophie said, petting her sister’s head like she was a cat.

“Arse school,” Elle muttered happily as the cab pulled out into the slushy street.