Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox

Author:Lauren Fox [Fox, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-02-05T22:00:00+00:00

“HEY, BABE-A-LICIOUS AND MR. LICIOUS!” HEATHER SOUNDS like she’s shouting into a megaphone on our answering machine. “Tell the maid to fluff up my pillows and make sure there’s plenty of whiskey in the liquor cabinet. I’m a-comin’ home for Thanksgiving!”

Ever since my mother and I had lunch together and she served up her all-you-can-eat buffet of cautionary tales—age-related infertility, emergency hysterectomies, and other tales of childless woe—I’ve been thinking: what exactly will I leave behind? Will the genetic buck really stop here, with me? In deciding not to have children, I must surely be breaking some serious biological rules. I wonder if I even have the right not to reproduce. Here I am, the living by-product of generations of jealously guarded DNA, thick ancestral lines of beloved children brought up with tenderness and care so that they would survive to adulthood in order to have more babies…and I, Emily Ross, have the gall to say, “That’s the end of that”? Because of me, the big quilt of our family, the shimmery, gossamer threads of history interwoven with the bright yarn of the Ross family, that’s just going to unravel, blow away in gorgeous, impermanent wisps, until there’s no more solid flesh, until there’s nothing left of us but air? Because I say so?

Well, there’s Heather, of course. I suppose I could count on her to reproduce. But I’ve never been able to count on much with Heather. We’re two years apart, but there are a thousand miles between us.

As soon as she graduated from high school (while I was about to start my junior year in Madison as a serious, studious English-literature major), Heather fled to Minneapolis. Ostensibly, this was so that she could attend the University of Minnesota, but she only lasted three semesters. She’s smarter than I am, but she’s a dilettante; her most consistent lifelong pursuit has always been boys. As soon as she dropped out of college, she moved in with her first in a long series of what Kevin and I call the TIBs, the Totally Inappropriate Boyfriends. “Heather has a new TIB,” I’ll tell him, or, “That TIB didn’t last long.” Her first live-in TIB, when she was just nineteen, was Bill, a twenty-eight-year-old slacker/punk who, I’m pretty sure, hit her. She never confessed, but when she came home for a weekend visit in October, she had a nasty bruise on her cheek from, she said, walking into a wall. My parents drove to Minneapolis a week later and helped her move out. Bill the slacker/punk was definitely the worst of the TIBs; after him, they’ve mostly been harmless, usually nice guys, and Heather’s always the one who calls it quits. She told her mechanic boyfriend that she couldn’t be with someone who didn’t have a more intellectual job, and then she hooked up with a lawyer. Six months later, she broke it off with him because, she said, “he walked around with his big lawyer head up his big lawyer ass.”

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