a bed and a couch, but waiting almost two years to buy a dining room table. Most of the house sat empty for those first few years, but the list always made them feel like it was only temporary.
It was on that list that Weezy told Will she was first pregnant. She’d gotten home from the doctor, so excited, and she’d added A Crib to the list. So clever, she thought. She stood back and looked at it and laughed and even jumped up and down a little bit. She was giddy the whole day, waiting for Will to come home and find out that they were going to start their family. It was almost perfect, the way she asked him to check the list to see if she’d added milk, and how he scanned it quickly, taking a moment to let it sink in, to believe what he’d read. He turned around to face her with a look of disbelief on his face. Neither of them could believe it, really, that they were capable of something so amazing, so fantastic. They were so proud of themselves, as if no one before them had ever accomplished such a thing.
Of course, when Martha was two months old, and Weezy found out that she was pregnant again, there was no such moment. Instead, she’d sat on the kitchen floor and cried up a storm. She never told Claire this story. They were delighted when the baby came, of course, but on that day, newly pregnant with a fussy infant, she had cried. Holy moly, had she cried.
Once the list had been up there for so long, it just seemed necessary. Each family member wrote down whatever it was they needed, and it was all in one place. Today, the list contained the following items: Grape-Nuts, lightbulbs, car inspection (Volvo), AA batteries.
When Max was home, the list was filled with food: Cheetos, Oreos, turkey, Honey Nut Cheerios. Max still ate like a teenager, ravenous, shoveling food in his mouth like he hadn’t eaten in days. He was twenty-one now, going to be a senior in college, but he seemed younger to Weezy. His limbs still looked too long for his body, his smile a little sheepish, like he knew that he had grown up to be handsome, but he had no idea how or when it had happened.
Once, when Claire was in high school and in a particularly foul adolescent mood, she added A Life to the list. It was after they’d forbidden her to go on a weekend trip with a group of friends to someone’s unsupervised shore house. Claire had screamed in the way that only a fifteen-year-old girl can. She’d narrowed her eyes and accused them of abuse, and denying her the right to any fun at all. “Just because you have no lives,” she’d said, “and just because you are socially void, doesn’t mean that I have to be.”
Will had found the list in the morning while making coffee, and he’d brought it upstairs to Weezy, who was still in bed, and the two of them had laughed and laughed. “What a little shit,” Weezy had said, and Will snorted. They saved the list, thinking that someday they’d show it to Claire, maybe when she had a teenager of her own. “To show her what a horror she was,” Will said.
Martha had once added Peace to the list, during the first Iraq War, and Weezy was touched that she had such a sensitive daughter. (She was also a little concerned about Martha’s obsession with war, natural disasters, and just horrible news in general, but she tried to focus on the sensitive part.) Claire had ripped down that list, saying that she didn’t want any of her friends to see it, because it was “beyond embarrassing.”
“Why do we even have this list?” Claire had asked that day. “Things we need? It makes us seem so desperate. God, we aren’t poor.”
Weezy loved lists. They made her feel powerful. Today she sat down with her coffee to make a list for the day. Shore, she put at the top. Then underneath that she wrote, grocery store. She put her pen down and took a sip of coffee. She’d been trying to get commitments from all of her children to go to the shore house for a week in August. She and Will would stay on for another week after, but she wanted all of her children there together. Was that too much