The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

      THE YEAR WAS 1989. The first George Bush was president. The previous month on TV, we’d watched as young men and women with outdated haircuts and funny clothes took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall. There was a sense of radical change and diminished threats. It was June, a beautiful warm night, and we were eating dinner with the back door open. Light-hungry moths fluttered against the screen. The night air smelled of dew and pavement.

      “I don’t want you girls making the same mistakes I did,” Noni was saying. “I loved your father, I did, but you must not rely on a man. You must have your own money. Your own direction in life.”

      By now we were accustomed to this line of discussion. We all nodded. We were eating pork chops, steamed broccoli, underdone rice that stuck between our teeth. Tonight Joe had played baseball, and he still wore his uniform, which was dirty across the front from when he slid into home in the seventh inning. A nick of mud marked his chin.

      When Noni discussed feminism, Joe remained cautiously curious, wide-eyed, mostly silent. He was afraid to ask the wrong questions, ones that would invite our mother’s disdain, and also he sensed—correctly—that these discussions were not for his benefit. They were intended for us, the girls. Noni believed that the world was harder on women than it was on men, particularly women without men, and you could become one of those in a heartbeat. Noni wanted us to be ready in the ways that she had not. Joe’s passage would be smooth, paved with the wishes of all those who loved and admired him and wanted only to see him succeed.

      Renee and I listened avidly to our mother’s lectures, tonight and every night. We nodded and used words like patriarchy and privilege and gender. Shortly after the end of the Pause, Renee had announced that she would become a doctor, and now all her efforts pointed to this goal. AP chemistry, biology, and calculus; her part-time job at the lab in New Haven; her dominance on the Bexley High cross-country team.

      Only Caroline, at sixteen, yawned or examined her fingernails or tried, occasionally, to dispute Noni’s lessons.

      “But what if we want to be married?” Caroline asked tonight. “What if we want other people?” Caroline’s hair fell long across her back and was streaked a whitish blond from the Sun In she used every morning with the blow dryer. We knew that she was thinking of Nathan Duffy and the Goats, who now called Caroline an honorary Duffy. In the afternoons Nathan would ride his bike slowly past our house and leave on the front steps odd little gifts: one silver stick of dusty Juicy Fruit, a silky brown horse chestnut big as a child’s fist, a lone pink carnation frilly as a tutu.

      Noni answered Caroline’s question in the abstract. Even if she knew that the front-door gifts were for Caroline, she believed them irrelevant.

      “Fine. Have other people,” Noni said. “But remember that they can be gone—poof! In an instant. Gone. So be prepared.”

      This answer did not satisfy Caroline, who shifted and fidgeted on her chair. She blinked rapidly, her entire face reddened. She looked ready to weep.

      “Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, and her voice softened. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you, really, I don’t. I just want to prepare you. So you won’t have to suffer. So you’ll have an easier, better time than I did.” She took hold of Caroline’s hand. We had finished eating our pork chops; on each of our plates lay a ragged, moon-shaped bone.

      I wanted to believe that Noni’s suffering would not be our own, but her lessons seemed difficult to place within the context of our actual lives. Noni herself had sworn off dating and all men. For her, easier and better meant being alone. We watched The Love Boat every Saturday night with a mixture of delight and unease as the new cadre of attractive passengers flirted and kissed and paired off in the few short days of their tropical cruise. Was this supposed to happen? Caroline seemed to me the purest example of true love: worshipped by Nathan in a factual, fateful way. But even their relationship was dependent on parental whims and the absence of snow, which in the winters made the roof too precarious for Caroline to shimmy across and down to Nathan’s waiting car.

      Caroline, still sniffling, turned to Noni. “Can I ask you a question?” she said gently.

      “Of course,” Noni answered.

      “I was wondering if I could have a slightly later curfew. Just on Saturdays. Or Fridays. One day.” Caroline’s eyes glistened, still wet from her tears. “Please,” she said.

      I almost considered Nathan to be one of us, the Skinners. He loved the secret, rushing green of the pond; he knew about the Pause. I’d watched him grow just as I’d watched Joe, with his sudden height and the rough spots of beard that appeared in patches across his cheeks and neck like camouflage. But Noni knew nothing about that. To her, Nathan presented the same risks and liabilities as a stray dog brought home from the park. Would it bite? How long would it stay? She looked at him askance no matter how strenuously he tried to impress her.

      “I’m going to study biology,” he had told Noni earlier that year, “be a university professor. I’m particularly interested in amphibians, frogs mostly. They’re disappearing. We need to save the frogs.”

      It was the pond that had started this for Nathan. The baritone bullfrogs and the smaller ones, green as a new leaf. The plunk-splash sound as they leaped into the water. The bulging, lidless eyes, jellied, glistening.

      But Noni had no use for frogs, or for Nathan. She had imposed a strict 11:00 P.M. curfew on Caroline, Renee, and me, although it was clear that only Caroline truly needed it. I was in sixth grade, twelve years old, and had nowhere to go, nothing outrageous to do. My most scandalous behavior involved sneaking into movies I hadn’t paid for at the cineplex with my friend Violet and eating far too much buttered popcorn.

      At night Renee studied organic chemistry and compared medical schools. After one brief romantic fiasco last year involving our high school’s star wrestler, Brett Swenson, Renee now ignored boys altogether. She was too busy, she said, for distractions. She accepted Noni’s curfew with a shrug.

      On this spring night, all of us together at the dinner table, Noni tilted her head and narrowed her eyes as she considered Caroline’s request for a later curfew.

      “No,” she said. “We’ve been over this, Caroline. You have a curfew for a reason. I want you home.”

      “But what about Joe?” Caroline asked.

      It was true that Joe glided through the gauntlet of Noni’s discipline unmarked. Noni let him go to parties, date widely, deeply. And—this was the kicker for Caroline—stay out as late as he wanted. By the time Joe reached Bexley High School, he was a six-foot-four center fielder with the reach and charm of Willie Mays, the goofy grin and sleepy eyes of Joe DiMaggio. Girls swooned over him, boys followed him down the hallways and invited him to parties. Teachers indulged him whether they realized it or not. His dimples, the soft swell of his walk, the subtle crack in his voice, the tall golden promise of Joe Skinner. Parents congratulated Noni routinely, because they understood that just to have a son like Joe—simply to be the origin of whatever DNA soup produced a boy like that—was something to celebrate.

      Noni said that Joe didn’t need a curfew. He was always up early for baseball practice anyhow. He hated alcohol. Hated the taste, hated the way it made him feel: out of control, bumbling, fuzzy. And think about the public service he performed as the reliable designated driver, the lone sober man among a battalion of high-school drunks. Why would Noni put others at risk just to make a point?

      “But Joe is younger than me!” Caroline exclaimed.

      Noni sighed. “Listen, if Joe needs one more hour to keep some other kid from driving home drunk and killing himself—Caroline, I’m going to let him do it.”

      The rest of us remained silent. This scenario had played out before, always with the same result. Now, predictable as Christmas, Caroline would push away from the table, pound down the hall, and close her door with a wall-shaking slam.

      But this time she didn’t.

      “You play favorites,”