The Believers by Zoë Heller Page A

moment?"
    "Mom..."
    Her mother smirked. "All right, buzz off then. You don't need to babysit me."
    Karla found Mike and Colin and Julie in the front room, emanating the slightly affronted gloom of relatives who have been consigned to the sidelines of a family drama. At the sight of Karla, they all set their teacups down and stood up. Mike approached Karla and pressed his cheek against hers. "Where's Ma?" he asked. "Can I go see her?"
    Karla shook her head. "I'd hold on for a bit. She'll be up soon."
    "I told him he should wait," Julie said crossly. Clearly, she thought Mike's behavior very pushy for someone who wasn't even a blood relation.
    "I think I should go down," Mike said.
    Karla laid a restraining hand on his arm. "No, Mike, really, I wouldn't."
    Mike's presence in her parents' house always made Karla tense. In private with her, he often spoke unkindly of Joel and Audrey. He accused them of being self-satisfied champagne socialists and claimed--not entirely unjustly--that they thought he was boring. Yet whenever he came to Perry Street all trace of this animosity disappeared, and he became feverishly anxious to please and impress. He flirted with Audrey and sucked up to Joel. He pontificated about politics and used lots of gratuitously fancy words incorrectly. (Once, after Karla had gently pointed out to Mike that the phrase "mute point," which he had been using all evening with her parents, was correctly pronounced "moot point," he had refused to speak to her for three days.) It never occurred to Karla to give the disparity between Mike's private pronouncements and his public behavior the name of hypocrisy. She thought it touching that in spite of all his understandable class resentment, he should still crave her parent's good opinion. She only wished, for his sake, that he could relax a little and not try so hard. Rosa and Lenny were always sniggering at his obsequious manners behind his back. And even Audrey and Joel, who were by no means averse to the subtler forms of flattery, seemed embarrassed at times by the brazenness of their son-in-law's fawning. "He's a good kid," Joel had once remarked after Mike had left the house, "but Christ almighty, I wish he'd stop kissing my ass."
    "Do you think Aud's hungry?" Colin asked now. "She should probably have a bite to eat."
    Karla, who had consumed nothing since the hospital Danish, stood up quickly. "I'll go and see what's in the fridge,"
    "No, no," Julie protested. "Let me. You've had a long day."
    Karla felt a mild panic at the thought of being hostage to someone else's culinary choices. She liked to prepare her own food. "Honestly, Julie--it's no trouble."
    "But I'd like to do it."
    The polite but intense struggle over who would get to author the refreshments was still going on when Audrey appeared.
    "Ma!" Mike said, advancing quickly across the living room. He hugged his mother-in-law tightly and then held her at arm's length, to study her face. "You look tired. Come, sit down."
    Karla glanced over at her aunt and uncle. Colin was watching Mike much as a circus audience watches a lion tamer placing his head in the lioness's jaw: half admiring the courage, half desirous of witnessing a bloody calamity. Julie, taking advantage of the distraction, was attempting to scuttle out to the kitchen unnoticed. Unwilling to accept defeat, Karla pursued her.
    When the two women returned to the living room fifteen minutes later with a tray of sandwiches, they found Audrey standing in front of the fireplace. "It's an absolute disgrace," she was saying. "It's a fucking travesty!" Colin was sitting pinkly in an armchair, pretending to read a magazine. Mike was pacing.
    "What's wrong?" Karla asked. "What's going on?"
    "Honestly, Karla," Audrey said, "I don't know how you could put up with this. I couldn't show my face if I were you."
    "What are you talking about, Mom?"
    "The endorsement!" Audrey shouted. "Did your husband not tell you? Your shitty fucking union is planning to endorse