Devin turned around in her seat. “I thought we talked about doing this cleanse together?”
“Is wine not a liquid?”
She sighed in a way to let me know she was now going to do her “breath work.” I calculated how many bottles of wine I’d need to get through the weekend. I could hide one or two in my tote bag, and carry the rest in a shopping bag. I could say I was leaving the best bottle for Evan’s parents as a gift. I could say, “I got enough for everyone,” even though I was the only one who drank.
* * *
...
The old house was dark and imposing from the road, elevated on a grassy plot bordered by a low stone wall, miles from the nearest village. Square windows wrapped around the brown-shingled exterior like the panes of a lantern. There was no light inside. The house and the garage and the barn were all on different levels, connected by uneven shale paths and obscured by shrubs and shadows, so it was hard to tell how big the house was, but it was at least two stories with an attic, the roof peaked and topped with a chimney. A single light had been left on for us, above the yellow front door.
We’d spent too long at Evan’s apartment and the daylight was fading around the edges, but our legs needed a stretch, so we walked around back. Tall evergreens surrounded and shaded the house, and the yard pitched downhill, becoming a large grassy meadow with a pond the color of slate. The grass was dead and straw-colored. A damp red hammock hung motionless between two barren trees. Behind us, a dark tarp dusted with snow covered the swimming pool. I took a deep breath of the crisp bitter air. It was like entering the setting from the gothic novels I loved as a little girl: orphan gets sent to bachelor uncle, mysteries ensue on his estate.
“Stand right there,” Devin said. I was on the front porch, pulling the key ring from my bag. She snapped a picture and narrated the caption aloud, “Hashtag Victorian . . . rest . . . cure . . . hashtag bae.”
I staggered into the dark entryway, putting my hand out to reach for anything that might be a light switch. Before my eyes could adjust to the dark, I banged my shin into the corner of something cold and sharp that clattered when I touched it.
“Fuck.”
From behind, John shined his iPhone flashlight at the floor near my feet. I’d walked into the fire poker stand. “Technology is our friend,” he said.
“You’re telling me!”
“Poor Maren,” Devin said. She proceeded to turn on all the lights and open the curtains.
Rolling up my pant leg, I was confronted with the fact that I had not shaved my legs since the Obama administration. My shin was scraped, but not bleeding. We were standing in the living room: a few wrought-iron floor lamps, a wood-beamed ceiling, a white wicker sofa with upholstered cushions patterned with strawberries, and a large brick hearth for cooking children in fairy tales. Evan’s taste was futuristic compared to the Mary Engelbreit cottage aesthetic and wooden duck decor of his family’s manor. John dusted off one of the mallards and held it up for a better look.
“Homey,” Devin declared, satisfied.
It took me a couple of minutes to recognize the familiar smell, almost like popcorn, of historic homes I’d visited as a child. I was pierced by the memory of a tour guide in a period costume bending down to tell me how privileged I was to not have to spend all day gathering pails of water that were most likely contaminated with cholera-inducing bacteria.
Through the living room, there was a dining room decorated with nautical wallpaper and framed oil portraits of Evan and his siblings Josh (director of audience acquisition at a chain of elite concierge medical providers in the tristate area) and Zack (single dad of a toddler named Walter [as in “White”] and ringleader of a self-sustaining Libertarian enclave in the Green Mountains).
“Oh my god, look at baby Zack,” Devin said. I knew that she and Zack had hooked up in college, and I’d traveled deep enough into her Facebook photo albums to know what she looked like back then, which was shockingly average, like so many other sophomores, with bodies bloated by beer and Doritos. She once had rosy apple cheeks and a silly, unpracticed smile. You couldn’t tell Devin today that anything she was doing wasn’t working because the evidence proved the opposite true: she had tamed her body through her will and now she was the face of a startup with a multimillion-dollar valuation.
“We had sex here once,” she said, still staring at the baby portrait. “In the outdoor shower. It was weird.”
“I’ll bring in the bags,” John said.
“Come on! I’ll show you the master.” Instead of leading the way, she stood behind me and put her small pinkish hands over my eyes. I climbed the stairs, gripping the dusty banister, until she said to stop and swung me around by my shoulders, like we were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
It was the biggest bedroom I’d ever seen, a room that would qualify as a studio apartment in Manhattan. The only downside was the wallpaper—an ugly pattern of green and orange and yellow flowers and flourishes, clustered in a way to look like waving pineapples or, if I squinted another way, disapproving owls. It made the spacious room feel sickly claustrophobic. But there, in the corner, was a huge bed draped with a gauzy cream canopy, conjured by my inner six-year-old. I flopped onto the bed and plugged my nose to keep from sneezing. Devin had her phone out again, snapping pics of the books shelved on the white built-ins as she read the titles aloud to me: “Women Who Run with the Wolves, Women Who Love Too Much, Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don’t Know Why. Don’t plug your nose like that; you’re going to give yourself an aneurysm!”
“That’s not even true. What do Evan’s parents do?”
“His mom’s a therapist. Zack said she sent each of them to therapy from the time they were twelve. His dad works in pharma.”
“I need both of those,” I said.
“Both of those what?”
“Therapy and pharmaceuticals.”
Devin sat at the foot of the bed, crossing one tiny leg over the other. “I’ll be your therapist,” she said. “You can talk to me. I’m being serious! Don’t make that face!”
“I’m depressed,” I said.
“When’s the last time you had your vitamin D levels checked?”
“It doesn’t even seem to bother you,” I said, wiping my nose on my shirtsleeve.
“What doesn’t?”
“Every other day another racist cop shoots an unarmed black man or refugees drown in the ocean or a mother of four is murdered by her husband because she wants to leave—”
“Babe,” she said, closing her eyes. “I know. Believe me. I get the Times alerts on my phone, too. But I wouldn’t be able to do my job if I got emotional about everything. And then what would happen to Richual? It would stop helping so many women, right? This is why we make such a good team.”