Social Engagement: A Novel

Prologue Now—February

Red sauce splatters my wedding dress. The white crepe train serves as a picnic blanket for a large pizza, which I ordered to the Ocean House honeymoon suite after my marriage blew up. We lasted six hours, seven if you count the first look.

I try to remember the best remedy for stains—seltzer and letting it sit, something involving baking soda and a no-rub policy—but this is probably too far gone. My mud-smeared blue satin heels lean against the warm, greasy cardboard box, tableau vivant of a hot mess. Portrait of the Divorcée as a Young Woman.

I flick the sauce off my dress and climb into the marble bathtub, which is deeper and probably more expensive than a casket. I hike up the skirt to my waist. When you’re stressed, do something with your hands, my mom always told me growing up. She meant paint or bake or exercise, not masturbate and binge eat, but every piece of advice is subject to creative license. I picture his face—not my groom’s—during the wedding ceremony. The stained glass above his pew cast a dusty light onto those long curls, the ends I used to touch in the gray liminal hours before sunrise.

The pizza crust is a hardened sponge in my mouth. My groom snores in the king-sized bed, unaware that his almost ex-wife is housing the pizza he told me not to order, because how could I care about food at a time like this, on the best-turned-worst day of our lives?

In a plot twist fit for an Alanis lyric, the wedding day was perfect before we broke up. Watch Hill, Rhode Island, in February was an odd choice, but I liked the idea of a winter wedding. It was unexpected, cheaper, and easier to schedule; sweatproof, fur friendly, and nostalgia resistant. I grew up going to Watch Hill every year and feared a summer wedding would be a palimpsest over too many memories, moments surfacing with forceful clarity: bike rides to town and walks on the beach where I once swam with Virginia, Ollie, and Gray, the years stretching from floaties on to suits off altogether. A winter wedding would be too cold for skinny-dipping, even in unseasonably warm, sunny weather like we had been handed today.

I pick up my phone. Time flattens and folds, origami-like, on this screen—I can access an image from decades ago as easily as one from today, this morning’s breakfast (poached eggs) next to a new picture of an old picture (my parents in their thirties on the same beach where we held tonight’s reception). The feed has already tried to immortalize my wedding: more than a dozen pictures were uploaded earlier tonight, none of our guests yet aware that forever lasted only six hours.

Aunt Linda with a close-up of her place setting, floating candles in decorative basins etching light onto the calligraphy.

My mother with a picture of us during the first look, the New England winter sun as bright as an operating room.

Bex with an overly filtered image of herself and her husband, Greg, and a variation of the caption I’ve seen so many times before: My best friend married her best friend.

My father-in-law with the first dance—a frozen sway to Van Morrison in the Ocean House’s ballroom, buttons curving up the back of my dress like an external spine.

My best friend, Virginia, with nothing because we weren’t speaking. After what happened at the wedding, I wasn’t sure when we’d talk again. I almost texted her an hour ago, when I walked into the honeymoon suite, but then I remembered. The spontaneous amnesia is similar to waking up in a new place disoriented, the contours of the unfamiliar room swimming to remind me I’m no longer home.

I scroll and zoom and squint until my eyes hurt, then go to my own page. Over the last year, I attended so many weddings and wedding-adjacent events that the nights began to congeal. But thumbing back, images unknot themselves, become singular and inevitable. I avoided posting too many posed pictures of us as a couple, thinking it would make me look cliché. Or was my reluctance a clairvoyant guard against the future, subconscious breakup insurance?

Everyone talks about how their phone is a rabbit hole, but tonight, I imagine it as a magnifying glass. I want to trace my relationship’s demise like a forensic scientist vultured over a bloated corpse. I’m being dramatic and deflective, sure, but these are dramatic and deflective times. I’m in a bridal suite, no longer a bride, my failure white and pallid against the bathtub. At least the ghost is attractive and well made.

My phone is full of proof, images that betray my complicity in tonight’s disaster. My social feed stretches back years, each picture leaving filtered bread crumbs. Then there’s my camera roll, the private trail that tells a different story. I often click on these two squares—the drab gray camera, the bright pink-and-orange peephole—when I’m bored enough to flip through the past in my pocket. We all carry this weight: the constantly refreshing feed and the photo memories feature remind us of our rearview even when we want to look forward.

I click on a post I put up a year ago, on the day I moved into the apartment with Virginia. A sunset over Park Avenue, the citrus sky saturating with fiery streaks. Despite the image, that day marked the rising, not the setting, of the strangest year of my life—the bright start of an arc that could only end in darkness. I lean back toward the brass faucets and scroll.

1 January—thirteen months earlier

calliememaybe uptown girls 🌇

I moved into 1100 Park Avenue on a rainy Thursday, yellow cabs sluicing curves of water onto the sidewalk like a screen grab from a film set in the Big City, still gleaming through a spew of liquid shit. On this stretch of the Upper East Side, even the sewers looked like they’d require a guarantor.

Virginia was on her phone. Mimi, who had finally convinced me to stop calling her Mrs. Murphy, was holding a box of croissants from what she claimed was the best bakery in Manhattan, expertise earned from her glory days in her twenties when she rented a place a few blocks from this three-bedroom apartment she now owned, both of which were only an hour from her primary residence in Connecticut where the taxes were lower, square footage was higher, and you didn’t have to launch a political campaign to get your kid into preschool. She’d explained this to me so many times that I almost said, The lady doth protest. I refrained, not because she would’ve been offended, but because it would’ve prompted a long anecdote I’d already heard about the time she visited Shakespeare’s grave as a study abroad student and fell into a three-month affair with the funerary site tour guide. In her move-day state, Virginia might have snapped at her mom for talking too much, which would’ve embarrassed us all.

’Ello, Marcus, Mimi said to the doorman, inexplicably in a British accent.

He laughed. Money made you laugh.

Mrs. Murphy, good morning! He tipped his hat, the kind of rigid popover found on the heads of men standing in lobbies up and down the island of Manhattan. I’ll take good care of the girls, Mrs. Murphy.

One of my literature professors once pointed out that good dialogue eschews personal address, because name callouts rarely happen in conversation, most of us acknowledging people through eye contact, head movements, or generic heys. This did not apply to the doorman-owner dynamic. Marcus and Mimi were caught in a perpetual volley of each other’s names, she brandishing his like an advertisement for thoughtfulness, he using hers as a bid for a fat end-of-year envelope.

"Marcus, did I show you the pictures from St. Barts? Oh my god, it was divine." Emphasis as if she hadn’t abandoned church before Virginia turned ten, when the hot forty-something pastor was replaced by a Dumbledore look-alike who induced sleep within minutes of starting his sermons.

Mimi flipped through her camera roll, narrating an international trip to someone who probably hadn’t left a thirty-block square of the world in years, if ever. This was Mimi—intent always magnanimous, outcome often tone-deaf.

The movers are here, Virginia said. She hadn’t looked up from her phone in minutes; one of them must have texted her.

Mimi asked Marcus if he wanted a croissant (No thank you, ma’am) and skipped outside to stand under the awning, waving at the movers with gleeful abandon like they were a long-gone ship pulling in to shore. She’d been in this sunny mood ever since Virginia moved home from L.A. After we graduated, Virginia had gotten a job at a small art gallery out there, a decision that confounded her parents, East Coast stalwarts hoping for grandchildren nearby and as soon as possible. Virginia, their oldest daughter, hadn’t introduced them to a significant other since high school.

Virginia twisted her long brown hair into a pink clip, one of those plastic crab claws that I normally associated with tweens or old ladies. She consistently made ugly crap look cool, which, to me, was the clearest measure of attractiveness.

They waited for the elevator. I opted to take the stairs, thanks to a compulsive and embarrassing need to monitor my step count. The stairwell was white, gold, and immaculate—a far cry from the rubber steps and dirt-swirled walls of the Bushwick building I’d left behind.

Moving into the Murphys’ pied-à-terre rent-free had been pure, unimpeachable logic, but I’d still resisted. I liked my Brooklyn neighborhood. The apartment itself was bleak and the landlord was a creep and it took me almost an hour to get to work, but I was doing it! Supporting myself in a city that made you bend to its terms. Mimi’s offer to move in had been a loophole in the abstract contract we all signed—we being people under thirty without family money or a job in finance—to live here. You will sleep in a closet and complain about your bank account like it’s a problematic relative you still want to love you. Friendships and relationships were forged out of this shared desperation, gripes that metastasized into anxiety over ordering a second drink at a bar.

This camaraderie was an adjustment, because I had grown up accustomed to spending time with people who were flush and therefore ambivalent about money. People who treated their finances like I’d treated those walls in my Bushwick building: something they didn’t need to look at too closely, a given that would always be there. The other families who summered (a verb for their type) in Watch Hill were different from mine—different being a euphemism for richer. It was a seasonal zip code for the Kennedy-adjacent and kids whose last names were on buildings at their alma maters, not general contractors/aspiring novelists (my dad) and third grade teachers (my mom). Our place, named Ginger House for its small proportions and exterior reminiscent of the Swiss Alps, was passed down from my paternal grandfather. He’d made a decent fortune working in advertising, but the money started dying when he did, before I was born. My dad’s whims and fantastical mind weren’t conducive to stable finances. He spent money he didn’t have on things he didn’t need: a kayak, wine and hot sauce subscriptions, a vintage dollhouse for my birthday, day trips to Newport with me and Virginia where he’d buy us matching dresses and rope bracelets and take us to the bookstore to fill up our libraries with The Baby-Sitters Club.

Virginia and I had known each other since we were infants, oblivious to the striations of wealth that banded and separated Watch Hill. I knew her house, Idyll Wind, was bigger than anything I’d ever been inside—a structure that could’ve digested Ginger House—but this realization didn’t intimidate me. We became so close that Idyll Wind soon started to feel like my home, too. At the end of the summer, we’d go back to our separate Connecticut towns—she to New Canaan, me to New Haven—and have quarterly sleepovers and weekly landline calls, picking up right where we left off every Memorial Day.

We ended up going to college together at Brown, where her dad was on the board, shifting our special summer friendship into a year-round best friendship. I’d subconsciously absorbed the Murphys’ Providence propaganda after borrowing a series of university sweatshirts so worn they felt like velvet. I listened to their stories about themed parties (some half nude), art exhibits (some fully nude), and a legendary deli (sandwiches so thick and delicious they made you never want to get nude again). Mimi and her husband, Walter, drove us to Providence from Watch Hill the summer after our freshman year of high school just to see, and I liked—no, loved—what I saw: a vibrant, artistic campus nestled inside a manageable city; an hour drive to Watch Hill; excellent premed, English, and art programs. My application wouldn’t get preferential treatment like Virginia’s—I wasn’t technically family and applied the same year as her—but I decided to go for it anyways. I cried when I got a scholarship, a tight ache in my chest blooming into an open, fulfilled longing.

We’d been out of college for seven years and hadn’t experienced one of those stretched-out Watch Hill summers in almost a decade, but I still considered Virginia my best friend—despite the time lags between our texts and the uneven ratio of blue to gray, my updates and questions going unanswered for days when she was on the West Coast. I often heard people talk about their childhood friends by saying, If we met now, we wouldn’t get along, and that was probably true for us, too. But she’d been there for me during the worst time of my life, with a fierce protectiveness that was only possible for someone with her confidence and what I’d always thought of as essential goodness.

I took the stairs halfway but still somehow beat Virginia and Mimi to the eleventh floor. Virginia mumbled about her mom stopping to talk to a woman named Connie about fabric swatches.

Voilà! Your new home, Mimi said.

The door knocker was in the shape of a horseshoe, a kitschy nod to their Connecticut horse farm and Mr. Murphy (the protestations to call him Walter hadn’t yet stuck like Mimi’s had) and his racehorse Liquid Courage, runner-up in the 2010 Kentucky Derby.

As we fell through the door with our backpacks and carry-ons and other soft cases that would’ve been crushed in the jigsaw of the moving truck, Virginia tapped the knocker three times.

Making sure the ghosts know you’re here? I said.

It’s good luck.

Like you need it.

Up here, I do. She pulled up her baggy mom jeans, a trend that only thin people could pull off. We do.

She gave me the conspiratorial look—mouth in a side twist, eyebrow slightly raised—that used to force me into dares like running around Idyll Wind in my underwear at night, sending an AIM message to a crush, and stealing a pack of peach ring gummies from the general store. Historically, that look had been punctuated by a thrilling or sinister agenda, and I wondered how that spirit would function now that we were adults, a word that still didn’t sit right with me, no matter how much I resented being one of those millennials who acted like my age was an elaborate cosplay, a scam I pulled over everyone. The idea of adulting was dumbly ubiquitous, but it still resonated.

The Murphys’ entry foyer was simple, but I had seen and bought enough cheap furniture to know that this was nice, the kind of side table that, dimension and style-wise, looked close to what you’d find at Pottery Barn, but with an extra $5K on the price tag. A massive deep blue porcelain vase held a curve of orchids.

We walked into the living room and sat down on the cream couch. The movers were filing in, and we wanted to get out of their way, but really, we just wanted to sit down. Nothing better than when inaction is a directive.

Home sweet home, not in Kansas anymore? Mimi said. She often spoke in Frankensteinian platitudes, Mad Libs of common phrases that always elicited light laughter from her audience, regardless of whether they made sense.

I’m just happy to have consistent hot water, I said. Seriously, Mimi. This is incredibly generous.

I wasn’t going to strand Virg up here alone. This will be good for you girls. When I was your age—

The Upper East Side was like the West Village, we know, Mom.

All I’m saying is it’s cyclical. Trends come back.

I’m not sure gentrification and bell-bottoms are the same thing.

That reminds me. She fished through her purse, pulled out a pouch, and doled out a pair of earrings with the nonchalance of shaking pills from a canister. "I got these from a store up here the day I moved to the city for the first time. They’re so seventies, but, you know, the seventies are back. They were from this hole-in-the-wall jeweler, the man who owned it was so sweet. I remember he was eating homemade hummus the day I got the earrings, and I thought, Huh, you can make hummus? I don’t think I’d ever made anything but scrambled eggs!"

I love them, Virginia said, tracing the design. They were bright turquoise drops set in silver, delicate yet funky, and jewelry she’d actually wear. Thank you so much. They hugged. This gift was peak Mimi: making something look spontaneous that she’d probably planned and anticipated for months.

I commented on how special the earrings were, trying to stave off the creeping, gut-deep ache that I didn’t get to have this, the transfer of talismans and stories. I couldn’t wake up one day—with horror or gratitude or a mixture of both—and realize I was becoming my mother. I didn’t even know what that meant anymore.

I hadn’t seen my mom in over a year, and my dad died the month before my seventeenth birthday. Multiple myeloma. The disintegration happened so quickly, I barely had time to Ask Jeeves about his chances. After he passed away, we had to give up Ginger House. He’d mismanaged our finances to the point of foreclosure. My mom was so angry with him, a kind of blunt resentment that blinded her to my grief. I still couldn’t understand why she’d curdled toward my dad after his death and dwelled on the mess he left behind instead of his full, living memory. She shut down, preferring to avoid mentioning him, and I resented her repression. She moved to Maine, where she got a different teaching job, a catering gig, and a failed relationship with a gardener. She’d lost touch with the Murphys, and I sensed tension whenever I mentioned them. We caught up on the phone every few months, limp conversations that always ended with unfulfilled promises to make plans. During our last call, I’d told her I was reading Leviathan by Paul Auster. My dad’s copy was annotated on almost every page, tight scribbles tracing a map of what was inside his head. You need to stop dwelling, she’d said. It’s unhealthy. If she knew about my other habits, she’d realize that reading good books was the least of my problems.

Once the movers walked out to bring up their second haul, Mimi offered to give us the grand tour, heavy on the sarcasm because she thought the place was tiny. We walked a circle around the living room, which contained a piano, a faded Persian rug, the cream couch, and leather club chairs that looked comfortable enough to disappear into. An impressionist painting I vaguely recognized from the one art history class Virginia had forced me to take in college hung above the fireplace.

The dining room had an antique-looking mirror and table, plus thick curtains in a toile pattern. It opened into an actually small kitchen—The prewar compromise, Mimi said—that was still bigger than my living room–kitchen combo in Bushwick.

Down a hallway that led to the bedrooms, Virginia’s art was all over the walls. She’d been a painting fiend since we were kids, finger growing into watercolor and graduating to oil. Her official reason for moving to New York was to get an MFA with a painting concentration at Columbia. But I suspected she also missed her family and wanted a good excuse to come back, an explanation that wouldn’t foreground her homesickness.

Photographs were interspersed with Virginia’s paintings. Most of them were taken by her cousin Ollie, a professional photographer who got assignments in places like Fiji and Australia for National Geographic. I quickly averted my eyes. I couldn’t look at the pictures without seeing his face behind a camera, too. It hurt to look at that face because I’d known it so well: the open-mouthed laugh that showed his crooked bottom teeth, those bowed lips, the thick eyebrows I traced in the middle of the night after drinking wine I didn’t have the tolerance for yet. I’d been trying to blur it for years, and here it was, coming to me fully formed in the middle of a black-and-white image of the Great Barrier Reef. I kept walking and looked ahead.

Virginia would live in the guest bedroom, a designation that attempted to conceal the room’s intended occupant: Virginia. Mimi had framed a Picasso print they’d gotten her for graduation, and her face looked out from almost a dozen silver frames: Virginia in front of an easel; Virginia and her younger sister, Gray, in ketchup and mustard costumes for Halloween; Virginia jumping off a diving board in Watch Hill; Virginia and me smiling on the porch of Idyll Wind, teeth white against sunburns we tried to will into tans. Aside from the pictures, Mimi had decorated the room sparsely, knowing that Virginia would recoil at anything she hadn’t picked out herself. These generic light green pillows would be replaced by flea market finds within two weeks.

Last but not least, the grand finale, Mimi said, leading us out of Virginia’s room and to a door at the end of the hallway. Callie’s crib!

It was, indeed, a crib. The room could fit nothing but a double bed and dresser. Oddly, this calmed me. It was like I’d copy-pasted my Bushwick bedroom onto this separate stratosphere of the city—minus the mice and clicking radiator and landlord who’d look me up and down as he stood in my doorway eating a mysterious sandwich pungent with Russian dressing. I was used to tight spaces. I could fold myself into them nicely, and after so many years of monitoring my weight, I liked feeling small. A Girlboss panel would find this idea appalling, rows of size 2 founders telling us to take up space as they saved half of their Sweetgreen salads for later.

Mimi explained that my bedroom had been the servant’s quarters, how cozy, sounding like a Zillow write-up that used charming as a euphemism for tiny. She didn’t apologize, which I’d always liked about her. Growing up, my mom would say sorry before we started eating dinner, claiming that she’d messed up the sauce or overcooked the meat, only to have it all end up tasting delicious. This was the parental equivalent of a kid insisting she was going to fail a test she’d studied hard for, and I found the impulse disingenuous.

On my bedside table, a single framed picture: my parents and the Murphys in Watch Hill, holding baby me and Virginia. It was hard to distinguish between the two of us all swollen and swaddled, but I noticed with a