Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
On the phone the other day, Jan was talking about her daughters, Rebecca and Julia,
both of them at college now, and recalling how in her mid-thirties, the ache to have a
child was so in conflict with her ambitions as a journalist, on the one hand, and with
her fear that she'd fail as a mother, on the other, that she had a year of intermittent panic
attacks and went into therapy.
“I dreamed I gave birth to a fish,” she told me recently.
“Whoa,” I said. “What did your shrink say about that?”
“She didn't know what to say,” Jan said. “But Becca thinks it explains why she was
so interested in aquariums.”
I've known the girls their whole lives, though not well. I had glimpses of them in-
termittently over the years, was suitably impressed each time I saw them at how they'd
grown, and heard reports about them from Jan over lunch from time to time. But I wasn't
all that interested in them until now. When they were tiny, I was among the faction of
single people that voted against allowing the family to be part of a summer house in the
Hamptons. Jan says I taught Rebecca to play chess, though frankly I don't remember
that. I do remember asking her, when she was thirteen or so, for pointers about buying
fish for a beginner's aquarium when I was thinking about getting one myself.
By my lights, both girls turned out just as you would cross your fingers and hope
they would—talented, mostly charming, and occasionally difficult. Julia, the younger
by a couple of years, is chatty and opinionated with a natural self-possession that belies
her work ethic and makes it seem as if she's breezing through life. Rebecca is more of a
brooder, incisively and often wittily self-critical with a broad intellectual curiosity that
buoys her with the sense that the universe is, in fact, worth exploring. It's hard to make
firm judgments about young people, of course, because they're sometimes so impossible
that you want to throttle them, but the odds are they're going to be terrific adults, the
kind of responsible people who you hope will be running the world in your old age.
Until recently I was always (I think) the tolerable, reasonably engaging friend of their
parents, but under the current circumstances that has changed, and they now have to
consider my existence in a substantive way. They have to acknowledge my character,
such as it is, and react to it, judge it. I can see how they'd perceive this as a nuisance.
More to the point, of course, is that now I'm someone to be suspicious of, a symbol of
the family breakup. I don't have much to go on at this point, just what Jan tells me, and
one dinner we had with each of them when she was briefly in New York, but it's my im-
pression they don't like me very much. They're loyal to their father—a guy who was a
friend of mine not so long ago—which is entirely the right thing for them to be.
