Say the Word

by Jeannine Garsee

  And Paige, of course.

  I admit Susan and I had already been drifting apart. In sixth grade I decided to become a doctor like Dad, while Susan decided she’d grow up to be the next Meryl Streep. Every year we had less and less in common. But we remained best friends, and closer than most sisters.

  After swimming in Susan’s pool we took turns in her shower. Susan came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, which slipped, like, one teeny inch. When she yanked it back up with an exaggerated shriek, I’d joked, “Chill out, Susie. It’s not like you’ve anything to show off.”

  “It’s Susan,” she shot back. Then, slyly, “Yeah, you’d know—I’ve seen you checking me out.” To the others she added, “Shawna’s mom’s a lesbian. Maybe it runs in the family.”

  Up until that moment nobody knew much about my mom. Clearly it’s not something I brag about. I’d sworn Susan to silence. Evidently, she forgot.

  Brittany and Alyssa stared. Paige exploded into giggles. “She is not! Is she?”

  Delighted with the response, Susan explained, “She lives with somebody in New York, like, this total butch.”

  I sat there, speechless and humiliated, while they battered me with:

  “Gross, really?”

  “God, what does your dad say?”

  “Did you ever see them, ya know, kiss and stuff?”

  “Ew-w! I’d die if my mom ever did something like that.”

  Then, from Paige, “Are you really gay? Omigod! We took gym together last year.”

  Belatedly, I gathered up my stuff and stomped out. I wanted to die. I fully expected to die. Who could feel this embarrassed and not drop over dead?

  Susan rushed after me. “Shawna, wait, don’t leave. I’m sorry! I don’t know why I said that. I have su-u-uch a big mouth.”

  And for that one instant I believed she was sorry. In that instant I almost forgave her.

  Then: “God, whatever you do, don’t tell my mom about this. She’ll kill me. I’ll be grounded for life.”

  Yes, Susan was sorry. Sorry her mom might find out what a bitch she was. But not sorry she blabbed about my mom. Not sorry she pretty much accused me of being a lesbian myself.

  I left anyway. I’ve barely spoken to her since, and no, I never told Mrs. Connolly. What for? The damage was done. The news spread. When school started that fall I became known as “Shawna, that brainy chick. Her mom’s gay or something.” But at least nobody tried to pin the same thing on me. Aside from the occasional snide remark from Paige, that is.

  I missed Susan. My only saving grace was that I still had two good but not “best” friends left: Melanie Katz and Danielle Walsh, both fellow science geeks and future physicians who loathed Susan and congratulated me on seeing the light.

  Then LeeLee and I got thrown together, on a field trip to the science museum. Although she wasn’t impressed, as I was, by the “living mouse stem cells!” or the interactive global warming database, we bonded over the exhibit of five-thousand-year-old skulls. She didn’t have many friends; Wade Prep can be very, well, shall we say “snooty”? People sneered at her shabby secondhand uniforms and made fun of her double ponytails, a blatant fashion no-no. They resented the way she never groveled to the “in crowd” and how she peppered her comebacks with indecipherable Spanish insults. LeeLee’s so un-herdlike. I love that about her.

  As far as last night’s party goes—yes, I was shocked when Susan invited me. I’d even wondered if this was her way of reaching out, of trying to make up. But Susan, who alternated between mingling with her deadly trio—Paige, Brittany, and Alyssa—and making out with Jake Fletcher, was too busy to say more than hi to me. Oh, and to snarl at LeeLee for barging in, uninvited.

  I had one glass of beer. Devon likely drank twenty. LeeLee grazed at the munchie table, deliberately double-dipping. One minute Devon and I were flirting, acting silly, simply goofing around. The next thing I knew, we were entwined in a corner, actively sucking face to a thundering Mary J. Blige.

  A simple drunken romp? Or a hint of things to come?

  I press the doorbell, hoping to find out now and wondering if I remembered to brush my hair this morning.

  The Connollys’ notoriously rude housekeeper frowns through the porthole before she swings open the door. “Yes?”

  “Um, I think I left my cell phone here last night. Do you mind if—?”

  She bangs the door shut, and I stare at the ornate knocker in disbelief. A moment later the door reopens, and she holds my precious phone out between her thumb and index finger. “It’s been ringing all morning, I’ll have you know.”

  “Thanks,” I say to the knocker as the door, once again, swings shut in my face.

  Oh, well.

  6

  I oversleep in the morning, jump up to pee, let Charles outside to do the same, then rush around with last-minute packing. Nonny promised to come over to feed and potty Charles if she can get a neighbor or someone to stay with Poppy. Otherwise it’ll be up to Klara, but she’s only here during the day. I spread newspaper on the basement floor in case, and set bowls of food and water around in strategic places. I wish I could take him, but there’s just no way.

  At the airport, I park in the garage, then endure all but a body cavity search at the security gate, and finally board. I brought my sketchpad and a few colored pencils, but I’m aching for a nap. After mentally marking all the emergency exits, I shut my eyes till the plane is in the air, then stare bleakly through the glass into a black oval of nothingness.

  I forgot my rosary. Well, too late now.

  7

  My mom left me without saying good-bye.

  The final Susie and Shawna book had been released that week, so Mom and Mrs. Connolly threw a party at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Cleveland. They signed books, drank champagne, and schmoozed with the big shots, including a Hollywood producer who promised to turn Susie and Shawna into an animated series. That was the first time I heard the expression about blowing smoke up someone’s ass.

  Susan and I signed books, too. Fans fawned over us, stroked our matching blond ponytails, remarked over and over how darn cu-u-ute we were. Mom drank too much and worked up a sweat dancing. Dad didn’t bother to show up at all. Later, too loaded to drive, Mom asked a friend to drive us home—and that’s when I met Fran for the first time.

  I liked her. I liked the way she called me “sweetie” and tweaked my ponytail. I liked the way she’d spout out a four-letter word, then clap a hand over her face and whimper, “Sorry!” as if she wanted me to like her, as if my opinion counted. I especially liked the way she swung Mom’s hand as the three of us headed toward the car. Susan and I did that, too. Fran, I’d decided, must be Mom’s BFF.

  Back home, at three in the morning, I threw up a river of shrimp. If it weren’t for this I might have missed the whole fight. I heard Fran’s name shouted over and over. Finally, when it grew quiet, I ventured out to the kitchen, where Dad sat alone, with Mom nowhere in sight.

  “She went out,” Dad said in a funny choked-up voice. “Go back to bed.”

  I did, but I couldn’t sleep. I heard Mom come back in, then closets and drawers slam open and shut. More shouting, more swearing, and then, oddly, screaming. Once again I crawled out of bed, tiptoed to their room, and saw something that, to this day, I try not to think about.

  Mom left a second time during the night. In the morning, I peeked into her workroom and totally freaked out when I saw every table and shelf bare, every cupboard empty. I ran crying to Julie, my nanny, who tried to explain that Mom would be “visiting a friend for a while.”

  “She took all her stuff! Where’d she go? Where’d she go?”

  Julie couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me, and I cried all day. When Dad came home later, agitated and disheveled, I found out the truth—Mom wasn’t “visiting” anyone and it wouldn’t be “for a while.” She’d left us forever to be with Fran. Somebody she loved, Dad said, a whole lot more than she loved us.

  Six months later, with no ad
vance warning, Julie was gone, too.

  8

  Swinging my carry-on, I stagger down the ramp into the crowded terminal, where I wander aimlessly, panic creeping in. Where’s Fran? Did Arye give her my message? Why do I feel I might spend the rest of my life here, tripping over bags and toddlers and stray bottles of Aquafina?

  “Attention, please. Will Shawna Gallagher please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?”

  After wrangling my bag from the loaded carousel, I follow the dubious signage to the ticket counter. Miraculously I recognize Arye, although the buckteeth are gone, as well as the zits. Stocky, shorter than me—well, a lot of people are—he now wears his dark curly hair tied back in a ponytail. He might strike me as cute if he didn’t look so pissed off.

  “I’m here,” I announce unnecessarily. “How’s my mom?”

  Arye doesn’t answer. Nor does he offer to take my suitcase. He sprints ahead, forcing me to trudge miles behind, huffing and puffing and growing more annoyed by the second. I didn’t like this dude the last time around. Now I remember why: he hadn’t liked me, either.

  I catch up to him outside, the weight of my overstuffed bag wrenching my arm from my socket. I drop the load with a thud. “What’s your problem?”

  “I want to get back. Schmule’s by himself. I didn’t think it’d take this long.”

  “You didn’t have to pick me up,” I object. “I could’ve taken a cab.”

  “Mom thought it’d be too overwhelming for you,” Arye answers through distinctly curled lips.

  Luckily, a dozen eager cabs await us. Our turbaned driver spits on the ground, then snatches up my bag and throws it into the trunk. Inside, I’m knocked into Arye by a wild left turn. He shoves me off impatiently. Off we zoom, way over the speed limit, zigzagging pedestrians, clipping curbs, cutting off other vehicles at will. All I can think is, “Why did I get off that damn plane?” I could be somewhere a whole lot safer than New York City by now. Like Delaware. Or the bottom of the Atlantic. I rub my neck and shoot fireballs at Arye, who makes it a point to pretend he’s on this death journey alone.

  Forty minutes later, jammed in traffic, Arye glances murderously at his watch. “C’mon, let’s walk. It’s only ten more blocks.”

  “Thank you,” Perfect Shawna calls to the maniac driver who just tried to kill her.

  It’s a long ten blocks. Dead on my feet after a trek through unimaginably people-packed streets, I wait impatiently while Arye unlocks not one, not two or three, but four fricking dead bolts to the front door of Mom and Fran’s brownstone.

  Schmule pops up anxiously from beneath an afghan on the sofa. “Is she dead?”

  “No,” Arye says shortly. “But you better get dressed if you want to go see her.”

  Schmule stares at me. “Did you bring your dog this time?”

  “Why would I bring my dog?”

  “’Cause you freaked out last time. You thought nobody would feed him. You said you’d probably find his dead body under the kitchen table or something.”

  I don’t remember saying that, but it’s likely I did. “They don’t let dogs on airplanes. Unless you crate them or something.” Charles would never forgive me.

  “Yeah, they do. Like, if you’re blind.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  He grins, revealing a mouthful of metal. “You could pretend.”

  Arye kicks the sofa. “C’mon, get some socks on. I told you to be ready”

  Schmule stretches, then rolls off the sofa. His sandy hair hangs in overgrown curls and he has a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Long bony feet stick out comically from the bottom of his grubby jeans. While he gets his act together, Arye paces around, cracking his knuckles in an obnoxious way. Suddenly I wonder if he knows something I don’t.

  Is my mom already dead? And he’s afraid to tell us?

  9

  I last saw Arye and Schmule three summers ago when Mom opened Sonia’s, her Greenwich Village art gallery. Only strangers call my mom by her real name, Sonia. Otherwise, she’s Penny. I have no idea why.

  So wrapped up was she in preparing for the festivities, she paid no attention when I told her I was sick. I’d puked four times, my stomach was on fire, and I felt hot and cranky and just wanted to go to bed.

  “I can’t stay with you tonight, Shawna. A thousand people are expecting me.” Mom flitted about in her usual self-absorbed daze, adjusting her pale blond hair, peering at her makeup, tugging fretfully at her slinky black dress.

  Fran touched my sweaty forehead. “Pen, she does feel warm.”

  “Give her some Tylenol. She’ll be fine.” So I swallowed the Tylenol, which promptly came up again. Mom took this ver-ry personally. “Oh, Shawna. Of all nights for you to get sick!”

  A fourteen-year-old version of Perfect Shawna assured her, “I’m okay now. I guess I can go,” because who doesn’t feel better immediately after they puke? This gallery, I knew, was a big deal to Mom; along with her latest work, plus photographs by a few “promising new artists,” she was also displaying a ton of outtakes—photos that never made it into the Susie and Shawna series.

  She wanted me to be there. She was counting on me, right?

  Head stuck in a grocery bag, I made it to the opening in Mom’s rented limo. Arye rode with us, and Schmule, too, who looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy in shorts and a bow tie. Flashing cameras, thunderous applause, and then—POW! Someone tapped my face as I lay sprawled flat on my back

  “Oh, my God, Shawna,” Mom cried, “I told you not to wear those shoes.” As if my new platform sandals were the reason I collapsed in the middle of a Manhattan media blitz.

  Fran shouldered Mom out of the way. “Pen, she’s burning up.”

  “Maybe the Tylenol hasn’t kicked in yet.” Gee, Mom, because I threw it all up? “Here, Frannie, help me get her out of the way—”

  With a lead-melting glare at my mom, Fran hauled me to my feet, motioned to Arye and Schmule, and hustled us back to the limo. “St. Vincent’s!” she barked at the driver, who mashed his foot down and zoomed off, getaway style, down Bleecker Street.

  Arye whined the whole way. “Not fair, Mom! Why can’t I stay with Penny? I’m missing the whole thing!”

  “Shawna’s sick, dammit. And I need you to keep an eye on Schmule.”

  Schmule squinted at me. “Um, you’re not gonna die, are you?”

  Lucky for him I was too sick to swing a fist. Fran said, “Of course not!” I think the fear in her voice might have scared me if I hadn’t already believed I was dead.

  Sixty minutes later, a surgeon sliced out my ruptured appendix. I later found out the docs gave Fran a hard time because she wasn’t my legal guardian and couldn’t sign any forms. What saved me was the fact that I had no blood pressure to speak of. This took precedence over their idiotic rules.

  Dad showed up the next day, cussed out Mom and Fran and every doctor and nurse in sight, then lugged me onto the first flight out of New York. I spent a week at the Cleveland Clinic on antibiotics till the doctors decided I’d survive.

  The hospital phone rang as I was packing to go home. Dad was waiting downstairs with the car, so I was in a hurry, and tired, and insufficiently medicated. Seventeen staples in your stomach tend to make you pretty crabby.

  It was Mom, calling from New York. “Sweetie! How are you? Guess what? We’re flying in for a while, all of us, and we’ll be staying with Fran’s aunt in Cleveland Heights. So I was hoping we could spend some more time together. Of course,” she added with a brittle laugh, “your father’s giving me a hard time, as usual. But it’s up to you. Are you up for some company?”

  My ears rang. I tasted something funny in my mouth, either from the antibiotics, or possibly from her.

  “Sweetie? What do you think?”

  She didn’t get that I almost died from peritonitis. All she’d cared about was her stupid gallery. And two “sweeties” out of her mouth in a single conversation? How lame, how fake. Even when she live
d with us, she never called me “sweetie.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want you to come.”

  I sensed stricken disbelief. “What? Sweetie, don’t be silly, I—”

  “I said don’t—come! I hate you. Just leave me alone.”

  After that, I never saw her again. Fran, not Mom, invited me back once or twice, but I always said no. Mom had a new family now, one that didn’t include me. And Dad never missed a chance to tell me how much better off I was.

  Maybe I was. But now it’s hard to remember.

  10

  The three of us halt outside of Mom’s hospital room. “You go in first,” Arye directs me. “We’ll wait in the lounge.”

  Schmule startles me with a lethal glare. “Hey, I wanna see Penny!”

  “Shawna goes first.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  Oh, yes it is. Abandoning them, I take a deep breath and push open the door. First I see Fran, seated at Mom’s bedside, reading out loud from a book: “‘. . . once, indeed, seemed Beings Divine; / And they, perchance, heard vows of mine, / And saw my offerings on their shrine.’”

  I know this poem—Broëte? Browning?—because it’s one of Mom’s favorites. I hate the sound of those words coming from the Frankfurter’s mouth. I take a step in, then freeze in horror as the bed comes into view.

  The bed, and the thing that used to be Mom.

  A machine with glowing red numbers thumps and hisses, sending air through the tube that snakes out of Mom’s mouth. Other tubes rise in a tangle, connected to bags on poles. On a box on the wall, more blinking numbers flash across a screen—99/39, 96/40,102/49. On and on, over and over. A silent litany to let people know that yes, Mom’s alive.