French Braid(5)

“Back when I first came to dinner, remember? I told your mother that one of my brothers-in-law came from Baltimore, and she said, ‘Oh, what’s his name?’ and I said, ‘Jacob Rosenbaum, but everyone calls him Jay.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Rosenbaum: he’s probably from Pikesville. That’s where most of the Jewish people live.’?”

“Well, Mom’s a little behind the times,” Serena said.

James gave her a look.

“What?” she asked him. “Are you calling her anti-Semitic?”

“I’m just saying Baltimore can be kind of us-and-them, is all.”

“You’re still going on about Baltimore?”

“Just tossing it out there,” he told her.

“Your brother-in-law’s folks might certainly live in Pikesville,” Serena said. “But they might also live in Cedarcroft, right next door to my parents. It’s not as if our neighborhoods are restricted or anything.”

“Oh, sure, I know that,” James said hastily. “All I meant was, seems to me that Baltimoreans like to…categorize.”

“Human beings like to categorize,” Serena told him.

“Well, okay…”

She said, “How about what your mom said, when we were leaving?”

“Huh?”

“?‘Next time you should come for a weekend,’ she said. ‘Come for Easter weekend! All of us get together then, and you can see what a big family feels like.’?”

Without intending to, Serena adopted a perky, chatty-housewife tone, although in fact that wasn’t at all what Dora had sounded like. And James caught it; he sent her a quick, sharp glance. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked her.

“It was just a little bit judgy, is all,” Serena said. “Like, ‘Poor, poor Serena. We’re the ones with the real family. You’re the poor little pretend family.’?”

“She didn’t say ‘real family.’ You just now told me she said ‘big family.’?”

Serena didn’t argue, but she let the corners of her mouth turn down.

“We’re the ones with the wide-open family; you’re the poor little narrow family”—that was what Dora had actually been saying, although Serena wasn’t going to argue with James about it.

The trouble with wide-open families was, there was something very narrow about their attitude to not-open families.

The train was slowing now. “Wilmington!” the loudspeaker said. “Watch your step, ladies and gentlemen, and be sure to check around for…” Outside Serena’s window, the sunlit platform glided into view, dotted with passengers looking so pleased and anticipatory that it seemed they believed that boarding this train would be all they had ever hoped for.

Serena was remembering the Christmas present her parents had given James. He had come to their house for dinner the day before he went home for the holidays, and when they sat down at the table a slender, flat, gift-wrapped box had been waiting on his empty plate. Serena had cringed, already embarrassed. Please let this not be something too personal, too…presuming! Even James had looked uncomfortable. “For me?” he’d asked. But when he opened it, Serena had been relieved. Inside was a pair of very bright orange socks. A black band ran around the top of each reading baltimore orioles, with a cartoon Orioles mascot at the center.

“Now that you live in Baltimore,” Serena’s father explained, “we thought you should dress the part. But we didn’t want to get you in trouble with folks in Philly, so we chose a pair that hides the evidence as long as you keep your pants cuffs down.”

“Very considerate,” James had said, and he insisted on putting them on then and there and strutting shoeless around the dining room before they started eating.

He’d had no idea that in fact, neither one of Serena’s parents was a sports fan. They probably couldn’t tell you the name of a single Oriole—or Raven, either, for that matter. The sheer effort they must have expended in thinking up this gift for him just about broke Serena’s heart.

Next to her, James said, “Hey.”

She didn’t answer.

“Hey, Reenie.”

“What.”

“Are we going to start fighting about our relatives now?”

“I’m not fighting.”

The train gave a lurch and began rolling forward again. A man with a briefcase walked down the aisle looking lost. In the seat behind them, the woman with the coaxing voice said, “Sweetheart. Honey Pie. We’re going to bring this up with management on Tuesday. Hear what I’m saying?”

“I can’t believe she’s still on the phone,” Serena murmured to James.

It took him a moment, but then he answered. “I can’t believe it’s a business call,” he murmured back. “Would you have guessed it?”

“Never.”

“You can’t tell me women in business behave the same as men.”

“Now, now, let’s not be sexist,” she said with a laugh.

He reached over for her hand and laced his fingers through hers. “Face it,” he told her, “we’ve both been under a strain. Right? Parents can be such a drag!”

“Tell me about it,” she said.