Say the Word

by Jeannine Garsee

  Over the weekend Dad throws a dinner party for some colleagues.

  Correction: Dad “throws” the party; Klara and I do all the work.

  Normally I make a terrific hostess. I like to plan menus and select flowers for the centerpiece. I enjoy deciding which set of china will look best on our formal, twelve-foot-long table. This only shows you how desperately dull my life really is.

  I couldn’t care less about this latest party. Beef brisket or chicken cordon bleu? Klara shuffles about in a tizzy, belly straining against her apron as she nags for my opinion. I’m like, “Order what-ever.” Chances are I won’t be eating much anyway. Isn’t it tacky to throw a dinner party only a few weeks after a funeral? Tacky, and creepy.

  Tonight I follow my usual routine: greet guests, serve drinks, and place hors d’oeuvres in convenient locations. Charles, poor baby, has been banished to my room. As small as he is, he flies below radar and has been known to trip unsuspecting guests. I intend to eat as quickly as possible, then make a gracious and inconspicuous escape. I like planning parties. I just hate to participate.

  With Arye’s e-mail gnawing my brain, I peek around the table at Dad’s mind-numbing guests: four male doctors, each with a collagened, liposuctioned trophy wife who added her own dead animal skin to the furry jumble in the closet. Then there’s Babs, a life-sized Bratz doll with huge platinum hair and weirdly oversized eyes. Aside from her massive boobage, she’s frighteningly thin. She can’t be a doctor. A lab experiment gone wild?

  She keeps calling me Sharon. Like, “So, Sharon, your daddy tells me you’re thinking about medical school!”

  “Not thinking about it,” my daddy corrects her. “She already made the decision.” He arranges his napkin fastidiously across his lap, then rearranges it when it doesn’t suit him the first time. “Yep, she’s keeping with the old Gallagher tradition. Three generations of physicians. My own father, you know, delivered more than ten thousand babies before he retired . . .”

  I sigh heavily, remembering what Poppy is like now: eighty-five years old, immobile, and demented. Every morning Nonny rolls him to his old office at the back of their house, where he sits with his sippy cup, a stethoscope around his neck. Does he ever wonder why no patients show up?

  Babs asks, “Where are you going for premed?”

  Dad, who so far has already answered every question directed at me, says, “Kenyon. My old alma mater. She’s already been accepted, I’m happy to report.”

  I was?

  “Already?” Babs pretends to look ver-ry impressed.

  “Well, she has more than enough credits to graduate in January,” Dad brags. “God knows why she wants to hang around for the whole second semester.”

  “No point in rushing it,” Babs babbles, a wee bit tipsy. “Enjoy high school, Sharon! You’ll have a tough enough road ahead.”

  Another guest asks if I’m majoring in biology or chemistry, but I’m still too shocked to utter a word. First of all, I didn’t know I’d been accepted. Dad must have opened the letter and neglected to tell me. I slice my eyes at him, but he’s too busy refilling Babs’s wineglass to realize the significance. He does, however, notice enough of Babs’s cleavage to splatter a few drops of wine on my snowy linen tablecloth.

  Perfect Shawna, at last, answers politely, “Biology, sir.”

  But Evil Shawna hopes Dad’ll trip and land face-first on Babs’s astounding bosom. Maybe impale his skull on one of those jutting collarbones.

  Mom says in my ear: Call him on it, Shawna. He had no damn business opening your personal mail!

  Pathetic Shawna ignores her.

  “Well, congratulations!” Babs raises her lipstick-smudged glass. “I hear Kenyon’s one of the hardest colleges to get into. Your grades must be excellent.”

  “Not bad,” Dad agrees, no longer fawning over her mammaries.

  Chicken and spinach form a lump in my throat. I grab a hasty gulp of water. “What do you mean, not bad?” I ask, not very modestly. “Have you seen my GPA?”

  “Well, if I remember correctly, didn’t you finish off last year with a B in English? That was disappointing.”

  Well, thanks for memorizing every frickin’ grade I ever made.

  “It was a B plus for the semester. My final grade was an A,” I clarify in case anyone cares.

  Certainly not Dad. “How can you fail to make an A in your own native language? Haven’t you been speaking it for seventeen years?”

  Babs picks up on my mortified vibes and nudges Dad with her pointy Bratz elbow. “Oh, John, leave her alone. I’m sure Sharon’s just as brilliant as you are. Good luck, sweetie,” she adds with a sugary smile for me.

  I’m twenty-five percent grateful, twenty-five percent humiliated, and fifty percent ready to barf on my Limoges dinner plate. And I hate that Babs had the audacity to call me “sweetie,” of all things.

  “Excuse me, but I have a test to study for. An English test,” I add meaningfully. Transforming myself back into Gracious Hostess, I simper, “So nice to meet everyone. Thanks for coming.” Amid a chorus of good nights, I fly upstairs.

  I phone LeeLee, and scorch her ear for five minutes. “. . . and he just about embarrassed me to death!”

  “Did you call him on it?” she asks, eerily echoing Mom’s imaginary nagging. “Did you tell him he embarrassed you? To say nothing of committing a federal offense.”

  “You mean in front of everyone? Of course I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I splutter, “How could I? It would’ve been, well, awkward. It would’ve made everyone uncomfortable.”

  “I know, right? Because you’re the only one who’s allowed to be uncomfortable. On top of it all, he insulted you!”

  “You don’t get it,” I say tiredly.

  “Oh, please. Why didn’t you say, ‘Gee, Dad, that was a shitty thing to say’? What’s the worst he could do?”

  “. . . I don’t know.”

  “That’s because you never piss him off. Doesn’t that get, like, boring?”

  Now I’m sorry I called her. I wasn’t expecting an attack.

  “Are you mad because I said that?” she asks when I don’t reply.

  “No,” I lie. But my chest hums painfully.

  “Well, good. Because you really needed to hear it.”

  “Hear what? That I’m bor-ing?”

  “Oh, is that all you heard?”

  “That, and the fact you think my dad’s a prick.”

  “Well. Isn’t he? I mean, seriously, who cares if you got one damn B in your whole life? Chica, you aced the SATs! You got into Kenyon, your number one choice! Why aren’t you freaking out from happiness?”

  I let that sink in. LeeLee’s right—I should be ecstatic! How many people get accepted to the one and only school of their dreams?

  But I feel no joy, and why not? Because my inconsiderate father opened my mail?

  “He’d never talk to me like that if I were a boy,” I finally say.

  LeeLee pauses. “Where did that come from?”

  “It’s true. He always wanted a boy, and he got stuck with me instead.”

  Nonny told me that when Mom’s sonogram showed she was pregnant with a boy, Dad did everything but dance an Irish jig. But when I turned out to be a girl, he gutted the room he’d paid a fortune to decorate in a Cleveland Indians theme and told Mom do what-ever she pleased with it. Mom opted for unicorns and lots of pink.

  “It’s not like he says this to me,” I clarify, so Dad won’t come across as a total ogre. “But that’s why he named me Shawna. For Sean, right?” The Gaelic version of John.

  “Shawna, your dad’s, well, your dad. He’s mean to everyone.” LeeLee giggles. “Hey, I know! You want to send him over the edge? Change your major to art. Hasn’t Pfeiffer been nagging you about that for, what, two years?”

  True. Miss Pfeiffer, our art teacher, told me she has a friend in Boston, a teacher at MassArt, and if I’m ever interested in having him look at my work, yadda, yadda. Th
is was after she confiscated the mock portfolio I threw together last year so she could use it for future classes. As a good example, I hope.

  “You’ll hate med school,” LeeLee insists. “You can’t even sit through a slasher movie.”

  “It’s not the blood. I don’t like to be terrorized, okay? And I will not hate med school.” Why does she nag me about this? If I wanted to be an artist, I’d be an artist. I want to be a doctor.

  “Shawna, don’t you remember that psych class last year? All that ‘self-actualization’ stuff they stomped into our brains?”

  “Right. And how many artists support themselves? Without going on welfare. Or selling caricatures on the street.”

  “Your mom did it.”

  “La, la, la,” I sing out, because arguing with LeeLee’s a lot like arguing with my dad. Totally exhausting. And totally futile.

  30

  Spurred on by LeeLee, yes, I eventually ask Dad, in a polite, round-about way, why he felt compelled to screw with my mail.

  Dad brushes me off like a fleck of dandruff. “What difference does it make who opened the letter? The important thing is, you were accepted, Shawna.”

  “I know, and I’m happy, but. . .” I falter. “It was addressed to me. It might’ve been nice if I could’ve, you know, opened it myself?”

  Dad pierces me with a look. “Since I’m the one who’ll be paying that exorbitant tuition, I think I have the right to keep abreast of your college applications.”

  Yes, my college applications, and every other aspect of my life. Can we say “control freak” here?

  “He said he opened it by accident,” I report back to LeeLee. A teeny lie, but a simpler explanation.

  “Ri-ight,” LeeLee drawls, but doesn’t pursue it.

  She’s spending the night. Dad’s out boogying with the Bratz doll, so we have the house to ourselves.

  “So, how’s loverboy?” LeeLee asks.

  I make a face. “Aside from bugging me for pencils, he barely speaks to me.”

  “Are you or are you not gonna ask him to the Snow Ball?”

  “I haven’t decided,” I lie. The truth is, I’d never have the guts.

  LeeLee sets her glass of Pepsi aside—I eye it nervously because I’m not allowed to drink in my room—and drops backward onto the bed, arms and legs stretched to form an X. “God, I love your house. It’s so big, and quiet, and . . .”

  “Sterile?” I suggest, tickling Charles’s stomach.

  “Yeah, sterile. I love sterile. I love feeling pampered. Do you know how lucky you are not to have to share a bathroom? Can we please trade lives?”

  “Trust me. You don’t want to be an only child. At least your folks can focus on something other than you.” Plus, as much as I love Charles, it must be thrilling to have someone to talk to besides a dog. She has no idea what it’s like to have nobody but yourself. How lonely that can feel sometimes.

  We fall asleep with the TV on. When I wake up at two a.m., LeeLee’s not in bed, and she’s not in the bathroom when I get up to pee. I pad downstairs, and hear her voice in the living room.

  “. . . yeah, I know it’s a drag, but what am I supposed to do?” Then, “No, I’m sorry, I’m not ready for that yet.”

  Who is she talking to on the phone in the middle of the night?

  “Who? Shawna?” LeeLee whispers. “No, she doesn’t. God, Tovah. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  Tovah. Big surprise.

  “Yeah, I gotta go, too. I’ll let you know. ’Bye!”

  My first instinct is to race back upstairs. But (A) I wasn’t listening in on purpose, (B) this is my house, and (C) LeeLee, my best friend, was discussing me. On the phone, in my living room, in the middle of the night.

  She stifles a yelp when she walks into me in the dark. “Shit!”

  I shush her by asking, “I don’t what?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were talking about me. You said I don’t—what?”

  “Aw, jeez. It was personal, okay?”

  “Personal about me? Something you had to tell Tovah at two in the morning?”

  LeeLee pushes me to the sofa and collapses beside me. “This is so getting old. Are you jealous or something?”

  “No,” I say, louder than necessary. “But I think it’s weird you have to sneak off to make a stupid phone call.”

  “Maybe I wanted some privacy. Maybe I didn’t want you flipping out on me again.”

  I spring back up, twitching with resentment. “Whatever. Call her whenever. I really don’t care.”

  “Wow,” LeeLee drawls. “Thanks for your permission.”

  “But don’t talk about me, okay? Just keep me out of your secret little conversations.”

  “Nobody told you to listen in.”

  Yeah, no kidding. Upstairs in my bathroom, I press my hot cheeks into my hands, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut and just gone back to bed.

  Because LeeLee’s right. I am jealous. And I don’t know what that means.

  31

  To say Devon’s eyes met mine would be so utterly Harlequin. But that’s what happens on Monday morning.

  “Hi,” he says. “I was looking for you.”

  My heart flutters. “You were?”

  “Um, yeah.” Pencil time again. As I fumble with my purse, he casually adds, “So, do you have a date for the Snow Ball yet?”

  My purse lands on my loafers. Crap flies everywhere. “A date for the Snow Ball?” I repeat like a demented parrot.

  He squats beside me, scooping up keys, makeup, calculator, and lip balm. My face prickles as I swipe a tampon container out of reach. “Yeah. The Snow Ball.”

  This is unreal! Not only is Devon Connolly asking me out—he’s asking me to the Snow Ball! Now! At this moment!

  “Okay. That’ll be fun,” I say with incredible poise as I hide the plastic container under my regulation gray vest. “Thanks.”

  “Cool. I’ll call you.” Devon chucks my chin, and helps me to my feet. “Later, Gallagher.”

  If I’m not in heaven now, I’m definitely close.

  32

  “I don’t think you should go,” LeeLee says in my car after school.

  We made up over the weekend, of course. We always do. But this is not what I expected to hear. “Why not? You’re the one who told me to ask him.”

  LeeLee sighs. “Ever see Carrie? The pig blood?”

  “You think Susan and Paige’ll pig blood me?”

  “No,” she says slowly. “It’s just a feeling I have.”

  “Well, I’m going, LeeLee. And I wish you were, too.”

  She yammers her thumb and fingers together in an imitation of my mouth. “Wish all you want, chica. I’m staying clear.”

  Annoyed that LeeLee destroyed my fabulous mood, I drop her off and drive home in a snit, only to discover an unread e-mail from Arye. More hate mail, no doubt.

  Haven’t heard from you, so I guess you didn’t talk to your dad. Mom fired our worthless lawyer. Your dad already found a buyer for the house. We’re moving in with Aunt Rina next month.

  You guys WON. I hope you’re happy.

  I don’t understand. What does he want from me? Sympathy?

  I hit DELETE.

  I wish he’d leave me alone.

  33

  Dad has another date, his second one this week. Go, Babsie! I study for midterms, watch some reality TV, and then take Charles for a walk in the chilly night air. Charles sniffs every dead leaf and pees neatly on every tree. By the time we get home I see a strange car in the driveway. Charles goes nuts when he smells the unfamiliar perfume, and races ahead of me as I push open the back door.

  No, not the Bratz doll. I stare at the flippy dark hair and gray eyes, trying to place this person . . .

  “Shawna! Long time no see, huh?” Julie, my old nanny, flings her arms around me. “Oh, my God, you’re beautiful. And so tall! I can’t believe it.”

  I stare at Dad over Julie’s shoulder. This is Dad’s date? What about Babsie?
r />   Dad smiles back a smile I haven’t seen in ages. “Surprise!”

  Surprise, hell. What I’d like to do is scream at Julie: Where have you been? Why did you disappear? How could you do that after what Mom did to me?

  I wriggle out of her embrace. “Wow. It’s you,” I say as politely as possible, remembering the morning I woke up, six months after Mom left, to discover Julie had bailed out, too.

  “Yes, it’s me, all right. I was in Europe last month, so I didn’t hear about your mom. But then I ran into a mutual friend, and—well, when I heard, I called your dad.” Julie moves forward as if to smother me again. I step back rapidly, pretending not to notice her puzzled expression. “I’m so sorry about your mom. What a horrible shock.”

  I take a closer look. She’s plumper than I remember, but very cute except for a mole next to her mouth. I can’t believe people walk around with those things. One quick zap with a laser is all it takes.

  “Anyway, your dad and I kind of clicked. Isn’t that wild?”

  Wild, yes. Since when does my father date former employees? A former employee who’s young enough to be my sister, no less. Why would he give her the time of day? She quit without notice, no good-bye, nothing. Dad threw a fit at the time.

  Julie surveys me up and down. “Jack, truly, she looks just like Penny.”

  Oh, and where did this “Jack” come from? My mom called him Jack. Nobody else.

  Perfect Shawna holds her breath against the waft of floral perfume. “So. What have you been up to, anyway?”

  “Julie’s an editor for Cleveland Moves,” Dad says. He doesn’t sneer when he says it, but I know he hates that magazine. He calls it a “liberal rag.”

  I wonder if Julie minds Dad’s habit of answering other people’s questions. But she continues to smile and her eyes continue to shine. Uh-oh, I know that look well. I’ve see it often enough on Dad’s other bimbos-of-the-week. Usually about twenty-four hours before they disappear.

  “I can’t stay.” Julie reaches for her coat. Dad practically throws his back out leaping to assist her. “I just wanted to make sure I got the chance to say hi. I’ll see you soon, all right?”