TWENTY-TWO
Sasha
Chip was turning seventy and everyone was too busy to plan a proper celebration, but if Sasha had learned one thing, it was that you couldn’t take fathers for granted and also, she really needed to make up for calling the limestone “janky.” She told Tilda she would host a dinner party for him at Pineapple Street and the theme would be Sailor’s Delight, a tribute to Chip’s childhood love of sailing. It was her penance. Vara’s girlfriend, Tammie, ran the props department on big film sets, so Sasha brought her in and together they turned the Pineapple Street dining room into a seafaring phantasmagory. They hung fishermen’s nets from the chandelier, creating a canopy over the table that they strung with fairy lights and tiny glittering lures and feathered flies, using the hooks to dangle them from the netting. They melted red candles into wine bottles, wrapped heavy rope in coils on the table, and set a clamshell at each place so that guests might open them up to find their name card. She put Chip and Tilda at the heads of the table. Sasha might have technically been the hostess, but she couldn’t fathom sitting at the head on Pineapple Street.
When Tilda arrived, wearing sailor pants with gold buttons, a white blouse, and a jaunty red scarf, she saw the room and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, it’s beautiful, darling,” she said and hugged her daughter-in-law close, and Sasha was pretty sure Tilda was more emotional over the tablescape than she had been over their pregnancy announcement. The Stocktons all turned up, more or less on time, more or less dressed for the theme, and took in Sasha’s creation. Cord was jittery, wearing a pirate’s hat and button-down, and he kept coming up behind her and patting her bum and whispering, “Good job.” She mixed Dark ’n’ Stormys, though she noticed Georgiana wasn’t drinking. She brought out a silver tray of cold shrimp with cocktail sauce and passed it around, but despite all her efforts at festivity she couldn’t help but feel the tension in the air. There was still so much uncertainty around Georgiana’s decision to give away her inheritance. Chip and Tilda were treading lightly, looking at Georgiana as one might regard a newly housebroken pet. Darley seemed preoccupied, and Sasha felt even more grateful than usual that Poppy and Hatcher had come along. Children had a way of diffusing social discomfort. You could ask them anything and count on their answers being amusing. You could leave the room to cater to any one of their needs. Or, worst-case scenario, you could at least rest assured nobody would scream much profanity in their presence.
When they sat down to eat—miso black cod with seaweed salad—Sasha tried to play the part of a hostess and spark some kind of festive conversation. “So!” she said brightly. “Maybe we could all go around and say something nice that happened this week?” Cord gave her a sort of panicked-looking smile and she realized how deranged she sounded.
“I’ll start,” said Tilda gamely. “I found out they are going to have a Tory Sport trunk show at the Jupiter Island tennis shop! I absolutely love her running skirts!”
“Great!” Sasha said enthusiastically. “Chip?”
“The Knickerbocker changed their lunch buffet and now they have white asparagus,” he said thoughtfully. “But it doesn’t taste all that different from green asparagus.”
“Okay, Georgiana?” Sasha directed, hoping she wasn’t opening the floodgates for a diatribe on the offensive history of sailing culture.
“I had a really amazing morning, actually.” Georgiana smiled. “I met with a woman who provides feminine hygiene products to schools in northwest Pakistan. She told me that less than twenty percent of women in Pakistan have access to pads. Otherwise, they just use a piece of cloth. And women are told not to bathe during their periods because they have been taught that it will make them infertile. I donated ten thousand dollars and that will pay for almost five hundred school-age girls to have pads for a year.”
“That’s amazing,” Sasha said. It was amazing. What an incredible thing to do.
“I’m really not sure that is dinnertime conversation, Georgiana,” Tilda interjected. Chip looked slightly green and was staring at a puddle of cocktail sauce on his plate.
“Mom, I think poverty is a really important dinnertime conversation,” Georgiana countered. “I think that’s a big mistake we’ve been making as a family, only talking about things that make us comfortable. We need to talk about what life is actually like for most people.”
“But we don’t need to talk about menstruation!” Tilda objected.
“Fine,” Georgiana agreed calmly. “But I don’t want to hear about white asparagus or trunk shows. Let’s talk about something real.”
“Okay.” Tilda wrinkled her brow in concentration. “Sasha, would you like to tell us what it was like growing up poor?”
The entire table swiveled their heads to look at her. Cord, Darley, and Malcolm wore looks of horror. Georgiana bit her lip. Hatcher gnawed on a buttered dinner roll.
“Sure.” Sasha laughed. “But I should clarify that I didn’t actually grow up poor. My family was middle class.”
“Oh, of course, dear,” Chip interjected. “You know, seventy percent of Americans define themselves as middle class. But the reality is more like fifty percent . . .” He trailed off and Sasha smiled, amused at his insinuation.
“Okay,” Sasha started. “Both my parents worked. My mom was a school guidance counselor at a middle school two towns over and my father worked for a company that made uniforms for sports teams.” Sasha was trying to think of what might seem strange about her life to the Stocktons. Maybe it all did? She knew that to the vast majority of people she met, the life that she was describing was completely ordinary, but they were listening to her as though she were describing an upbringing in a yurt on the salt flats.
Some part of her must have secretly wondered if she felt shame before her in-laws over her relatively modest origins. Chip and Tilda had never seen her childhood home, had barely spent time with her parents, but as Sasha spoke, she was surprised by the ease with which she told her story. She pressed on. “I had jobs on the weekends and then summer jobs when I got older. When I was fourteen my dad was laid off and things were stressful for about six months. We had to cut back. Then my dad got an even better job, this one at a company that put custom logos on branded clothing, and everything went back to normal. We got a new car and a few years after that he bought his boat.”
“What did you do for vacations?” Darley asked. She had been listening closely as Sasha spoke.
“Oh, we did lots of fun stuff. Normal stuff. We drove to Niagara Falls. We went to Orlando when I was nine. We drove to Quebec and I practiced my high school French, and we took a funicular up the hill in the old city.”
“Oh, I’ve been on that funicular,” Georgiana said.
“I mean, I had a good education and I graduated from college without debt, which is kind of shocking these days. And now I have my own business, and before Cord and I got together I was making plenty to pay for a nice apartment and a car and an upgrade every time I cracked my iPhone on the sidewalk. I’ve been lucky. I hope I can one day pass that on the way Georgiana did today.” Sasha smiled meaningfully at Georgiana.
“But Georgiana is still so young,” Darley interjected. “She doesn’t know yet what she might need her money for. You have a husband and a house, Sasha. Even if everything went sideways, you’d still be okay.”
“Even if everything went sideways, I would still be okay too,” Georgiana spoke up. “I have thirty-seven million dollars. And that’s not even counting the money tied up in property or what I’ll inherit from Mom and Dad. There is no possible event on earth that would cause me to need that kind of money.”
“But you don’t know that yet, George,” Cord said. “You’re still really young. A lot could change.”
“I’m actually not that young. I’ve been pampered. And I want a lot to change, Cord,” Georgiana said. “I am so grateful for the money. I am so appreciative of you, Mom and Dad. And of all our grandparents. The money is a gift. It’s a chance for me to create meaning in my life and for me to actually save people.”
“What would you do?” Sasha asked, looking at her sister-in-law. Georgiana suddenly seemed different. Where she had been filled with such furious energy for the past several months, she looked calm and emanated a force Sasha usually associated with people who did lots of yoga or rubbed CBD lotion on their bodies.
“Well, Bill Wallis and I have a plan,” Georgiana explained. “My trust currently throws off more than a million a year in dividends. Up until now I’ve just been leaving it alone and letting it compound. But we’re thinking I can start off slow and set up a foundation that offers one million dollars a year in grants. I’ll keep the principal invested for now as I get my bearings. But the goal will be that over time I will transfer all my stocks out to other not-for-profits.”
“What kind of not-for-profits?” Darley asked.
“I’m still figuring it out, I need to research more, but I want to focus on women’s health in Pakistan. That is what Brady was working on when he died. It’s a place where my money can have a huge impact. And it’s a place where there has been a lot of stigma and misinformation surrounding women’s health and sexuality. Nobody should feel ashamed to get their period. Women need access to contraceptives. They need sex education.”
“Isn’t that what you do at work, though?” asked Cord.
“From a distance. But I want to do more. I was thinking that instead of doing communications I could be a donor and I could tag along on some projects. There’s a trip to Benin, in West Africa, coming up, and I want to ask the founder if I can donate to the project and then go and observe their reproductive health program. Maybe someday I could join them on a trip to Pakistan. But I also want to work with other not-for-profits. I need to learn about more places. My friend Curtis has a whole group of people he hired to help him learn about good organizations. I’m sure it’ll take me a couple of years to really understand the best way to do it.”
“You don’t sound like someone who is having a psychotic break,” Cord acknowledged.
“Thanks,” Georgiana said drily.
“But you know foundations shouldn’t have to be the answer. The real problems are tax laws, antilabor policies, and the slow expansion of the welfare state,” Chip said. Everyone turned and looked at him as though the dog had begun speaking Dutch.
“True.” Georgiana cocked her head to the side. “But I can’t control that right now. I can only control what I do with my life.”
“So, while we’re on the topic of big life changes, Sasha and I have something to share as well.” Cord glanced at Sasha and she nodded. “We would like to offer to move out of Pineapple Street and have Darley and Malcolm move in.”
Darley put her glass down in surprise. They all turned to face her, watching as her hands flew to her cheeks. “Really?” She looked around like maybe it was a joke.
“Yes,” Sasha said with a smile. “I mean, it’s up to you, Chip and Tilda, but there are four of you and only three of us.”
“Oh my gosh, thank you! Seriously? Malcolm, if we moved in, we could ask your parents to live with us, if they wanted,” said Darley.
“I’d love that,” he said, nodding.
“Of course, that’s absolutely fine with us,” agreed Tilda. “The house is yours. You can do just anything you want with it. But as I mentioned to Sasha, you really do want to leave the drapes in the parlor. Those windows are enormous,” she said seriously.
“Where are you going to go?” Georgiana asked Cord and Sasha.
“We don’t know yet,” Sasha said. “We’re going to look around.”
“There are those old tunnels under the former Jehovah’s Witnesses’ buildings,” Cord mused. “We could live in those tunnels, right, Sasha? Like mole people? We’d bring the baby up to see the sun on special occasions, like his birthday?”
“Shut up,” Sasha snickered, and poked him under the table.
After dinner they moved to the parlor, where Chip poured them sharp little glasses of cognac and they toasted his birthday. They toasted the new baby. They toasted Malcolm’s new job. And they toasted Sasha’s great success hosting her first Sailor’s Delight theme dinner. It was only as the family made their way down the steps of the limestone and off into the evening that a candle on the dining-room table tipped and caught a bit of fishing net, the blaze climbing across the room in a web of fire.
