“Another lead!” Mom exclaimed when Lauren got home. “And only a freshman. Lauren, you’re an absolute star. I’m so proud of you!”
To celebrate, Mom sent Mirela to Nana Dee’s for the night and rented Grease from Blockbuster for the rest of the family to watch together. They ordered pizza and wings from Bocce’s, with extra celery and blue cheese for Mom. Dad came home from work on time like he used to. Mom went to kiss him hello and he put his hands on her shoulders—a feint at an embrace, but really a defensive block—as he thrust one cheek at her, saying something about needing to brush his teeth after having Ted’s Hot Dogs for lunch.
“I haven’t seen this in so long,” Mom said as the movie began with Danny and Sandy kissing on a beach, which PJ and Sean found very upsetting.
“Suck my kiss!” PJ said through a mouthful of Sean’s ear. The Red Hot Chili Peppers had infiltrated the area middle schools.
“This movie was huge when Lauren was a baby,” Mom said.
“All I remember are the songs and the leather pants Olivia whatshername wears at the end,” Dad said. He was sitting up quite straight on the couch, not picking at the bottoms of his bare feet like he usually did after a long day. Like he was a guest. He hadn’t gone upstairs to brush his teeth like he’d said he would.
“Is Lauren Olivia whatshername?” Sean asked, wiping his ear on PJ’s pant leg.
“No, Lauren is Ritzy,” Mom said.
“No, Rizzo—like Ratso Rizzo,” Dad said.
“Like Fatso Rizzo,” Sean corrected him.
“Yes, I have to sew my own fat suit to be in the musical,” Lauren said.
“You won’t need one!” PJ yelled, pinching the skin above her knee, and Lauren smacked him on the arm and PJ ululated and turned a somersault on the carpet and their father pounded his fist three times on the arm of the couch.
“I don’t think of Dustin Hoffman as fat,” Mom said.
“Rizzo is the one that gets pregnant,” PJ said from the floor. He was eating a wing and bicycling his legs.
“No wings on the carpet,” Mom told PJ.
“Wait, how have you seen this?” Lauren asked PJ.
“No, Rizzo is the gay hooker,” Dad said.
“Who?” PJ asked. An orange globule of wing sauce arcing through the air.
“PJ, the carpet,” Mom said.
“Fatso Rizzo,” Dad said.
“A pregnant hooker,” Sean said.
“No, Lauren is the pregnant hooker,” PJ said.
“Only in the movie, I bet,” Mom said. “They probably clean it up for high school.”
In the movie of Grease, all the high school students looked twenty-five except for Rizzo, who looked thirty-five. Sean thought Movie Rizzo was a teacher’s aide who just liked to hang out with kids. “Like Steff in Pretty in Pink,” he said.
“Like Mr. Smith,” Lauren said.
“You’re always talking about that guy, but nobody knows him and nobody cares,” Sean said through a mouthful of chicken, in a tone more observational than critical, and Lauren smiled and pretended to yawn, stretching her arms above her head for enhanced effect. She felt her muscles opening, her fingers laced and limbering against one another, and remembered daybreak at Abby’s house, that same embracing joy of belonging. The fake yawn became a real one, and she sat back on the couch, closer to Mom.
“She looks too pure to be pink,” Movie Rizzo said of Sandy. Dad whistled low through his teeth, and Mom laughed.
The phone rang and rang. “Are you going to get that?” Dad asked Mom.
“Let it go. Let’s just have a night,” Mom said.
“What is going to be left of this script once they cut out all the sex stuff for the school play?” Dad asked as a high schooler lay prone on the bleachers, leering up a classmate’s skirt, while PJ and Sean, repeating the patter of one of the secondary greasers, yelled, “She puts out? She puts out?!” They continued reciting this for weeks, at any provocation and no provocation at all.
“‘Model of virginity’?” Mom asked. “They’re not going to let anybody say that in a high school production.”
“Are you allowed to come up with your own substitute lines?” Dad asked Lauren, who shrugged.
“Wholesome times infinity,” Mom said. “Master’s in divinity.”
“Cops in the vicinity,” Dad said.
The phone rang and rang.
“Rizzo is a bitter old hag,” Lauren said, to her brothers’ screeching approval. “Even her big musical number is just about dissing some poor girl she barely knows.”
Lauren did admire how Movie Rizzo could manipulate the people around her into doing what she wanted them to do, like when she contrived a scene between Sandy and Danny at a pep rally that left both of them feeling confused and down. Movie Rizzo’s biggest problem was that she was always bored, like her boredom was a low-grade illness brought on by being a thirty-five-year-old still in high school, and the boredom made her do things that were impulsive and self-defeating, like climbing down a trellis to meet up with five guys—five!—or throwing a milkshake at Kenickie, or engaging in unprotected intercourse with Kenickie, a character whom Dad thought had some kind of endocrinological disorder. When Movie Rizzo said that she felt like a broken typewriter because she had missed a period, Mom objected, not because Rizzo was possibly pregnant and that would say something about her moral compass and the inappropriately adult themes and situations of Grease, but because “defective typewriter” wasn’t a strong metaphor.
“How many things could ‘I’m a defective typewriter’ mean?” Mom asked. “Aren’t there better typewriter jokes they could come up with?”
“I got my ribbon in a twist,” Lauren said.
“I couldn’t find any space at the bar,” Dad said. “The space bar.”
“A fight broke out at the Star Wars Cantina and a starship pilot broke a typewriter,” PJ said, as Sean did the splits in a handstand and PJ knocked him over.
“‘I skipped a period’ is not really a joke, it’s more like a bad crossword clue, where you have to have most of the letters already before you can figure it out,” Dad said.
“Yeah, it’s like the feeling when the clue to eighty-five across is ‘See eighty-five down’ and so you look at eighty-five down and it says ‘See eighty-five across,’” Mom said.
“Locking in on a punny crossword clue should feel like the teeth of a zipper coming together,” Dad said, steepling his fingers, as lights in their driveway flooded the den windows and reflected off the television set. Nana Dee’s Saab. Dad hit pause on the VCR as Mom went out the front door to investigate.
“Fuck,” Dad blew through his teeth, peering out the window.
“Mother fuck?” PJ whispered.
When Mom came back, she looked harried and resigned. “We’ll have to finish up movie night another time, everybody,” she said. “Mirela’s having a rough one.”
“I don’t want to keep playing the old lady,” Lauren complained to Mr. Smith after English class.
“Maybe you’re just an old soul,” he said.
“I watched the movie,” she said.
“Don’t go by anything you saw in the movie. Everything gets edited for the school version.”
“Rizzo is a hag, and I’m not.”
“Didn’t we have the same conversation about All My Sons? I’ve told you before: the audience wants to be told what to see.”
“Mr. Smith—” Lauren began. Her hands were trembling.
“Speaking of old ladies, Mr. Smith is what my mother calls me,” he said with a grin. “When class is not in session, you can call me Ted.”
“But class is in session,” she said.
“Are we not in fact between classes?” he asked. “Does Bethune not lack walls and doors? To be a teacher or a student here now is to stand poised in a threshold space, where convictions blur and identities mingle. Like the balcony in Romeo and Juliet—we are both inside and outside, lending our every encounter a jolt of the uncanny.”
&
nbsp; “Real fast—I have something to show you,” Lauren said. Her hands shook so badly that she had trouble unzipping her backpack. The zipper caught on the fabric, and she felt the shuddering in her ears as she worked the cloth out of its teeth. She reached into the bag, looked quickly around her, flashed a single tray of birth control pills in front of Mr. Smith just long enough for his face to change, and dropped them back inside.
Then she said the line she’d rehearsed in her head a million times. “Unlike a broken typewriter, I’ll never miss a period,” she recited, zipping up her bag and striding away without looking behind her, a small secret smile on her face. She was in a movie walking into her close-up, hitting her mark. She could turn on her heel and cue a popular song. Other students would leap onto their desks, tap heels clicking, jazz hands in formation.
“That line is not in the school version of the play, by the way!” Mr. Smith called after her. The punch line in the movie.
The first rehearsal was short: permission slips, announcements about costumes and fund-raising, an abbreviated run-through of the big ensemble song, “We Go Together,” with Mindy, the choreographer, who ran the ballet school in the Bells strip mall. Mr. Smith didn’t even hang around to watch. Paula was home sick, officially, although Lauren suspected she was home sulking about having been made property mistress again. Walking home, Lauren cut through Stitch’s yard, reached the weeping willow, looked through the kitchen window. Nobody home yet. She passed PJ and Sean shooting hoops in the Schecks’ driveway three houses up from home. Lauren walked through the front door and into the living room, pausing a moment when she saw Mirela asleep on the sofa. Mirela was taking Ritalin, which was something she had in common with Andy Figueroa. Her morning dose wore off in the late afternoon, making her ravenously hungry. She could eat a sleeve of Chips Ahoy! in a sitting, half a box of Hostess Powdered Donettes, great heaping BLTs, a tall glass of orange juice and half of another. Sedated by food, she would then fall asleep anywhere, almost like she was unconscious. Lauren tiptoed past her into the kitchen and saw Mom sitting at the table alone, hands folded in front of her, staring intelligently at nothing.
“Lauren,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Come sit with me.”
Lauren maneuvered carefully into the round-backed chair opposite her mother. It was pulled too close to the table, but she didn’t dare push it back, in case the scraping sound stirred Mirela. It felt as if a hushed and jumpy team of surgeons huddled over the girl in the next room.
“So,” Mom murmured, letting out a half sigh, half laugh, “what’s new with you?”
Lauren shrugged and looked out the window that faced the backyard. “How is Mirela?”
“The same,” Mom said.
“I was thinking of how I might be able to help you more with Mirela,” Lauren said. There was a cardinal in the beech tree. Mom and Dad would get so excited when they saw a cardinal in the backyard—they always wanted everyone else to come see. “I wasn’t expecting to be in the musical, and I’ll have a lot of rehearsals, but—maybe after it’s over—this summer.”
“That’s sweet of you, Lauren. Don’t worry about Mirela. That’s my job. How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“How’s school?”
“Good.”
“How’s the play? The musical?”
“Good.”
They sat in silence for a while. Watching the cardinal preen and tic and nod and go about its business, Lauren felt the warm pooling feeling in her chest.
“How’s your friend Paula?”
“She’s home sick today. But she’s good.”
“Good,” Mom said, and they both laughed almost noiselessly under their hands.
“She’s a little negative,” Lauren admitted. “Negative energy.” Mom didn’t like negative energy.
“Does she have stuff going on at home?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“It must be hard for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she . . . she didn’t win the lottery in the looks department. And you’re so pretty. It could be that she wants what you have.”
“No. I don’t think she cares,” Lauren said.
“Your friend Skip Rosen is in the musical with you again?”
“Stitch. Yeah, yeah, I know, you hate his dad.”
“I don’t hate anybody.”
“He’s a doctor, Mom. He helps people. He doesn’t hurt people.”
Mom sighed through her nose and rubbed her eyelids. “Andy Figueroa, too? He’s in the musical?” she asked. This was something Mom did when she was straining for conversation—she would pose factual statements as questions, as if she didn’t know the answers.
“Yeah, he’s playing Travolta,” Lauren said. “He has laryngitis, although Mr. Smith thinks he’s faking.”
“Oh?”
“Or not faking, but he says it’s—it’s psycho—psychodramatic?”
“Psychosomatic.”
“Yeah. It’s anxiety. Or that’s what Mr. Smith says.”
“His vocal cords work, but he thinks they don’t work, so they don’t work, because he’s nervous.”
“Something like that. But he didn’t have it during auditions, when it would make more sense to be nervous. He only has it now that he needs to practice.”
“They used to call that hysterical blindness. Happened more with girls, supposedly. So Andy has hysterical laryngitis.”
“I wish I had that excuse,” Lauren said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think I’m a very good singer. Or dancer.”
“Malarkey—you wouldn’t have been picked for the musical if that were true.”
“I stepped on my own foot when we were running through a song today. And Andy kept glaring over at me whenever I sang with the group, so I lip-synched.”
“Ignore him. He sounds like a fruitcake. Much as I like his mother.”
“I think I’m going to be the worst one in the whole play.”
“Mamie Figueroa. She always has been such a nice woman. She asks after Mirela. She wants to know how to help.”
“Mr. Smith asks, too,” Lauren said.
“You like him a lot, don’t you?” Mom asked with a big smile, her chin in her hand.
“I guess so.”
“It’s nice to have some younger teachers in there. Someone closer to all of you in age. That youthful vim.”
“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “He’s weird. Moody. He, um—he just wants to be everyone’s friend all the time.”
“Oh. What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know. It’s creepy. It’s kind of pathetic.”
“Lauren, that isn’t very tolerant. Maybe you have been spending too much time with Paula.”
“You’re the one who said—” Lauren stopped. The warm pooling in her chest was turning cold. The cardinal flew out of the tree, and Lauren felt a new quick strange pressure on her sternum, a little phantom shove, like the cardinal had pushed and lifted off her chest to take flight, and then a ridiculous sadness, one she could not articulate or admit to anyone, and it occurred to her with a dull thud to the head that it would always be possible to feel this way, for the rest of her life she would be stalked by this panicky sorrow, even a stupid bird could bring it on, that it wasn’t the bird but it was her, it came from inside her, she was the one who was doing it.
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. The o on sorry quavered like a soap bubble.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
Lauren stared into the wood grain of the table. Something was spilling over, and she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t have words for it. It was a tearful harmony over an organ line. Use your words was something Mom used to say to Sean when he was little. Or Mom said it to all three of them, but Lauren could only remember her saying it to Sean. There must be so much that she’ll never remember.
“You can tell me anything, honey.”
“
Mom?” Lauren asked. “Do you remember my birthday party?”
Mom laughed. “How could I forget it?”
“I wasn’t—I wasn’t nice to Mirela at my birthday party.”
Mom put up a hand. “Lauren. You are so sweet. Don’t worry about it. It’s so long ago now. And it was perfectly understandable.”
“No, I—”
“Anyone in your place would have been frustrated with how she behaved. That should have been your day. It’s okay, honey. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“But the thing is—”
“The important thing is—”
The phone was ringing, and Mom leapt up to get it. Often Mom let calls go to the answering machine, so she could screen the caller. The other night she didn’t answer it at all. Maybe Mom was worried now that the ringing would wake Mirela. But she jumped up so fast to answer that her chair scraped the floor.
“Mom, could you—”
Mom held up a hand with a confidential, apologetic smile, as if she was going to get rid of the caller as soon as possible. She beeped the new cordless phone awake and put it to her ear. “Oh, hello, Dr. Zeller.” One of Mirela’s therapists, Lauren guessed. She couldn’t keep track of them all, and they all eventually disappeared anyway, so it wasn’t worth learning their names. Lauren could learn them all this summer, when she had more time to help out.
She held eye contact with Mom for a beat. Mom looked up at the ceiling and twirled her finger in the air, pantomiming her impatience. She held the phone to her cheek with one hand and, with the other, raised the antenna.
“Could you tell them you’ll call back?” Lauren asked, but before she could finish, Mom turned her back to face out of the kitchen, toward the foyer.
Lauren panted. Like a dog, she thought.
“Yes, I see,” Mom was saying. “Well, what about—right, right.” She was walking slowly into the foyer, her head bowed in consultation with the voice on the phone.
Lauren, still sitting at the kitchen table, heard the weak groan of the carpeted stairs beneath Mom’s feet. She walked into the foyer to the bottom of the stairs and watched her mother climbing to the top, the tip of the phone’s antenna scraping against the ceiling.
The Fourth Child Page 21
