Page 50 of The Academy
“For the record, Tilly,” Charley says, “I didn’t write that list. Ravenna did.”
“For the record,” Tilly says, “you should just pretend you wrote it. It’ll make you seem normal. More normal, anyway.”
As Tilly walks off, Fran regrets not slapping her earlier like she wanted to. “Whoisthat?”
“No one you need to worry about,” Charley says, frowning. “Do you mind if we skip dessert? I’d like to call it a night.”
“Oh,” Fran says. “Okay?” She peeks down the table at the decadent wedges of chocolate cake and decides she’ll take a piece to go, for Joey. “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“I have zero interest in the football game,” Charley says. “But we can go out to dinner tomorrow night.”
“Wonderful!” Fran says.
“As long as you’re alone,” Charley says.
The next day Fran and Joey go for a drive to admire the foliage, then they find a bar with college football on TV. During a commercial break, when Joey orders nachos, Fran tells him she and Charley are going to dinner alone.
“No prob,” Joey says. “I have plans.” Turns out one of the other fathers—some guy Joey bonded with during the reception—invited Joey to dinner with his wife and daughter.You’ll keep me from being outnumbered,the guy apparently said.
“What’s this guy’s name?” Fran asks. “Which one was he?”
“Jimbo, I think he said? He looked like everyone else—thinning hair, navy blazer?”
Fran finds it very strange that Joey is going out to dinner with one of Charley’s classmates’ family but what can she say? Charley doesn’t want him around.
Fran and Charley score a last-minute reservation at a place called Hobgoblin, which is an Asian fusion restaurant randomly plunked inside a haunted-looking Victorian two towns away. As they’re being seated, they pass boisterous tables of ten or twelve, clearly other Tiffin families who are eating together, but Charley doesn’t wave or even acknowledge any of the other students and Fran is relieved when they’re seated at a two-top in a remote alcove, though she suspects they’ll be overlooked by their server.
Fran doesn’t have to wonder how to start the conversation because Charley plunges right in.
“I don’t understand why you married him,” she says. “He’s half a generation younger than you; he’d be in jail if it weren’t for Dad, he’s… beneath you, Mom. You deserve better.”
Right,Fran thinks. After Thad died, she should have dated men north of fifty-five who had established careers and grown children. But she had been so, so lost. Thad had gone into one of the country’s top hospitals for routine shoulder surgery. Fran had stayed at the hospital only until Thad was admitted, then she’d driven to a client meeting out in Glen Burnie, a meeting that was interrupted by a phone call from the doctor, informing her that there were unforeseen complications with the anesthesia. Thad hadn’t survived.
Fran didn’t grant herself the luxury of falling apart; she had Charley to think of. She made funeral arrangements, she dealt with the paperwork of death, and, eventually, she went back to work. Work proved to be a refuge; the acts of planting, watering, weeding, and installing soothed her. At the time of Thad’s death, Joey had been working for Fran for about a year and they’d developed something of an unlikely friendship. Fran knew Joey loved the Dropkick Murphys and disliked girls his own age who, he said, were all in love—first and foremost—with their phones.
At the annual end-of-season party for her staff held at Bertha’s Mussels in Fells Point, Fran got drunk, and long after everyone else went home, Joey remained. Fran and Joey stumbled down the street to the Horse to listen to some live music, and the next thing Fran knew, they were making out in an alleyway. Fran registered the absurdity of it: She was kissing wayward Joey, whom she’d hired only as a favor to Thad. But now Thad was dead, so what did it matter? What didanythingmatter?
Fran woke up the next morning with a skull that felt like cracked concrete and a burning sense of shame. She had kissed Joey, her employee.
She prayed Joey would laugh it off (and not, for example, sue her for sexual harassment). What she never could have predicted was the way Joey love-bombed her, claiming he’d had a crush on her since the night Thad brought him to the house for dinner. Hedreamed about Fran, he said. Fantasized about her. The reason Joey had been the last to leave the staff party was because he wanted to be in Fran’s presence any moment he could.
Fran was embarrassed to tell Charley now how vulnerable she was. That she was attractive to someone so much younger was too seductive to ignore. Fran and Joey started sleeping together and it quickly became an addiction. She knew she was too old for him, too “good” for him, yes she got it, she was a successful business owner, a professional, and the mother of a talented, intelligent daughter who needed her to set a good example. But Fran’s body wanted Joey. Her heart… well, even to this day, her heart belongs only to her late husband. She likes Joey, enjoys his company, and tells him she “loves” him, though what she means is that she loves how much he loves her. He’s crazy about Fran, besotted with her. He’s her puppy.
Still, Charley has a point: Fran didn’t have to marry Joey. Joey proposed with an earnest attempt at a ring—bigger than he could afford; Fran knew that much and figured Joey had worked out a payment plan—and Fran was touched and overwhelmed and visited again by the idea thatnothing matteredsince Thad had died, so what did it matter if she married Joey? There was also an element of self-preservation in her decision. Joey would stay with Fran after Charley left for college; he would take care of Fran when she was old and sick. She wouldn’t have to die alone.
Fran gives Charley a level look. Charley is wearing a monogrammed cable-knit sweater that used to belong to her grandmother Catherine Eaton Hicks (they have the same initials) over a turtleneck. Her hair is in two braids; the low lighting makes it impossible to see her eyes behind the lenses of her glasses. Fran noted all the other girls at school with their long flowing hair, their impeccably applied makeup, their flirtatious outfits, and she is glad (she thinks) that Charley isn’t like them. Her daughter was born a middle-aged woman; Fran and Thad used to laugh about it, but her exactingjudgment puts Fran on the defensive. She can’t get any shoddy behavior past Charley; she can’t lie or be disingenuous. Charley will call her out.
“He makes me happy,” Fran says. “Doesn’t my happiness matter to you?”
“I hate him,” Charley says. “He hit on my best friend…”
“He didnot,” Fran says. “I appreciate your loyalty to Beatrix but even you have to admit, the girl has always been an unreliable narrator.”
“Joey is the reason I’m at boarding school.” Charley leans across the table. “Doesn’tmyhappiness mean anything toyou?”
Fran sighs. Some parenting experts might side with Charley and say that Fran should put the happiness of her child first. They might believe that since Charley hates Joey, there must be something wrong with him. (Fran would argue Charley hates that Joey isn’t Thad.) There’s another school of thought that Fran should make herself happy so that she can be a better parent. What do they tell you on an airplane? Secure your own oxygen mask first, then tend to your child. Charley hates Joey now, but down the road, she’ll be relieved that she isn’t saddled with a lonely, unhappy mother she feels responsible for.
“Your happiness matters a great deal,” Fran says. She reaches across the table for Charley’s hand but Charley pulls back. “That’s why I agreed to Tiffin. I wanted you to have the best education.”
