“Okay,” she says, and they do the deed, and that’s what it feels like—a perpetration—and once it’s over she just lies on top of the covers.
She walks over to the mirror and examines herself. “Great,” she says. “I’m starting to break out.” She’ll have a big zit on her nose for her brother’s memorial. She rifles through the closet. She tries on a white shirt, but it looks bad on her, and so she’s back to where she was, undressed.
She removes a scale from the closet and steps gingerly onto it. “Good God,” she says. “I weigh forty-three pounds!”
“That’s very light,” Nathaniel says.
“Now I know why I’m infertile.” She has read that 12 percent of infertility is caused by weighing too much or too little, though if she were really forty-three pounds, she wouldn’t be infertile, she’d be dead. She has the same scale at home, a battery-operated contraption, which, if you don’t step on it just right, will register something outlandish. Last week, she weighed 219 pounds. She weighs too much and too little. She wonders what percent of infertility is caused by that.
She threads her legs through the holes in her underpants and strings her bra over her shoulders. “My uterus is retroverted.” She acts as if this is something she just learned, when, in fact, she discovered it when she was twelve, at her first gynecological check-up. The doctor left her with her feet in the stirrups and called in the medical students to have a look. This was unprofessional conduct, she knows now, but at the time she had no idea, and being a specimen like that, and at such a young age, felt like a humiliation. Later she would learn that it’s not unusual to have a retroverted uterus, so her doctor’s excitement baffles her now. Still, there’s something about that word, retroverted, that continues to haunt her, and she recalls that doctor’s appointment with a clarity and horror that surprise her this many years later. She feels a residual shame at having been treated this way, and even now, when a gynecologist is examining her for the first time, she’s quick to announce that her uterus is retroverted, as if hoping to preempt a response.
Nathaniel gets out of bed and dresses again.
“Take two?”
He doesn’t respond. He’s buffing his shoes once more, though they’re as dark and shiny as the outside of a limousine. “I’m sorry, Clarissa. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Can’t do what? Have sex with me?”
“No,” he says. “I’m always happy to have sex with you. What I can’t do is have a baby.”
“That’s the thing, Nathaniel. You don’t have to have the baby. All you have to do is shout, ‘Push!’”
“I’m serious.”
She can see on the wall behind Nathaniel a framed copy of Shakespeare’s sonnet number 30. “When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought.” She had to memorize that sonnet in junior high school, and she still knows it by heart. Everything she committed to memory is still committed to it, the things she wants to remember and the things she doesn’t want to remember: nothing ever leaves. She takes a step toward him. “What in the world do you mean?”
“I can’t keep going on like this.”
“Why?” she says. “Because I made you have sex in a cheap motel? Because I told you a minute ago to get undressed? A lot of guys would be happy if a half-decent-looking woman wanted to have sex with them.”
“I’m one of those guys.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is I can’t continue like this.”
“Like what?”
“With the pregnancy tests and the ovulation kits and the basal thermometers.” Most of all, he says, he can’t continue with the disappointment—with his disappointment, with hers. “Your brother died, Clarissa. Your parents are splitting up. How can we add more stress to that? It could break us.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t care about breaking us?”
He was the one, she reminds him, who wanted to have a baby; she, on the other hand, wasn’t sure at first. They were at a standstill, doesn’t he remember? For a time they considered breaking up. And now, more than ten years later, he’s changing his mind? What is this, a seesaw? She says yes, and he says no? It’s us against the world, they used to say. And the words come back to her: star fucker. She heard them once from her own sister, from Noelle. And it’s not just Noelle. It’s practically in the air she breathes. Married to the future Nobel laureate. It’s always been that way. Her high school boyfriend became a Rhodes Scholar. A young man she dated in college is now a star at the State Department. People think she can sniff out success. But she doesn’t care about success; she hates it, in fact. Ambition: it ruins you. Accomplish this, accomplish that, and for what? She used to be a star herself and she was treated that way, but now she’s not a star and she’ll never be one. Is that why she wants this so badly—because she was once a star, because Mrs. Pritchett said to her, “You could make it all the way to the Philharmonic, Clarissa, it just depends if you want it badly enough”? But she hadn’t wanted it badly enough. She hadn’t wanted it at all. So this is what she has left: becoming a mother. Sometimes it seems all she’s doing with her life is trying to get pregnant. And the crazy thing is, she doesn’t even know if she wants to get pregnant. She’s not a kids person. They’re cute, she supposes, at least some of them are, but she’s not drawn to them, she really isn’t, and here she is spending the holiday with her five nephews, and she likes them, sure, at least for five minutes, but then she’s thinking, You run along now. “What do you want, Nathaniel? Do you want a baby?”
“I don’t know.”
And she thinks he can’t not know, that in his quiet way Nathaniel has always known what he wanted, and it protected her, this knowing, when so often she didn’t know what she wanted herself. “I just want to go to the doctor,” she says. “I want to find out what’s wrong with me and then I want us to decide.”
“Okay,” he says. “We’ll go to the doctor and decide.”
“Jesus,” she says. “My brother’s memorial is in less than an hour. Why aren’t we getting ready?”
“I am ready.” Nathaniel is sitting before her in his suit and tie. She, on the other hand, is in only her underwear.
“Okay,” she says, “I’ll get ready.” And, choking back a sob, she runs into the bathroom and closes the door.
Now, fully dressed, she descends the stairs to the first floor, to where Noelle and her boys are waiting. Lily and David are already at the Community Center, setting up for the memorial. Marilyn emerges from the bathroom, and now she leans against the banister, bending down to adjust her shoes. Thisbe comes in from the garden holding her own shoes; she opens a compact and applies eyeliner, then dabs her eyelids and applies some more.
“Is everybody set?” Marilyn asks.
Noelle lines up her boys in the foyer. They all have on neckties except for Ari, who’s wearing a clip-on bow tie, which Noelle found in Leo’s old bedroom. “Do you kids have tissues?” she asks. They have been known to wipe their noses on their shirts and pants, on whatever piece of cloth presents itself to them.
They nod.
“Has there been any word from Amram?” Thisbe asks.
Noelle gives her a cross look. She’s been telling the boys he’ll be back soon, but she hasn’t heard from him. “He’s coming,” she says. “He wouldn’t miss this.”
“Check that the lights are out,” Marilyn says, and Nathaniel walks through the house extinguishing the lights while Marilyn goes to wash the last few dishes.
Thisbe is brushing Calder’s hair, and now she’s wetting down his cowlick.
“Do I look handsome?” he asks.
“You’re the handsomest young man in the world.”
Nathaniel adjusts his tie in the hallway mirror, and now Clarissa is behind him, examining herself, too.
“Okay,” Marilyn says, grabbing her pocketbook. She opens the door, and one by one they emerge into the sunlight. Everyone gets into their cars.
11
; “Could you give me a hand with this?” Lily says.
David hefts a case of beer, and now he’s hefted another one, and he seems about to heft a third before he changes his mind and deposits what he’s lifted onto the table in back. They’re on the second floor of the Community Center, setting up for the memorial. It’s ten o’clock, and the service won’t start until noon, but Lily has insisted they get here early.
At the back of the room, Lily makes sure the white wine is chilled and the corkscrews laid out as they should be.
“Everything looks good,” her father says.
She’s on her knees now, placing beers in the cooler.
“As do you,” he says gallantly.
“What?”
“You’re looking pretty, Lily.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She had an early-morning hair appointment with Priscilla, the mother of an old friend from town. Priscilla, as always, has done a lovely job, but now Lily in her red dress and heels, anticipating everyone’s arrival, finds herself sweating, tendrils of hair plastered to her forehead like papier-mâché. She’s so intent on not disturbing a strand that she’s been walking around with her head straight and now her neck is starting to hurt. It’s hot out—it’s supposed to hit ninety-five today—and she contemplates placing herself beneath the ceiling fan, but that will make her hair blow in all directions.
She was already dressed when her father woke up this morning. She told him she had a request to make; she wanted to preside over the memorial. “I’ll just stand up front and call the speakers to the microphone. And I want to pay for everything.”
“Lily,” he said, “come on.”
“I’m serious.”
When they got into town, she left him in the car with the motor running and returned with the bottles of red and white wine and the cases of beer, with seltzer, Coke, 7-Up, and cranberry cocktail. And the snacks, which she lays out now on porcelain plates the color of bone. Nuts and dried fruit, raw carrots, celery, stuffed grape leaves.
She distributes the chairs about the hall, thinking they would look best in semicircles, expanding outward like the rings around a planet. But there’s something too kindergartenish about sitting in a semicircle; the mood should be more understated, she thinks, and more severe. So she rearranges the chairs in rows of ten, each directly behind the other. The chairs are wooden, hardback, the fold-up kind, which her parents rented from a caterer in town. She counts them now, a hundred and thirty total. There are more chairs downstairs, in the old billiards room; she can take them out if she needs them.
It was Thisbe who insisted that this not be a huge event. She reminded Lily that Marilyn and David have summered in Lenox for forty years now. Marilyn, officially off duty, has been called on more than once to assist in medical emergencies; she even helped deliver a baby—on July Fourth, in fact—when the local doctors had evacuated town. And everyone knew Leo. And they know the girls. It doesn’t have to be family only, Thisbe said, but neither does she want people draped from the rafters, gaping down from the nosebleed seats.
Lily doesn’t want it to be a spectacle, either. And it couldn’t be one even if she wanted it to be; the room holds only 150 people. Yet even as she thinks this, she finds herself worrying not enough people will show up and this will reflect badly on her brother’s memory, on all of them. She has set up thirteen rows of chairs, but even in this small room they look paltry. She could put out the extra chairs and fill the hall, but what if they remain unoccupied? There’s nothing worse than empty seats.
They have hired a security guard, who’s already patrolling out on Walker Street. The family has agreed to allow a single member of the local press to attend the memorial, but aside from that, the event is closed off to all cameras and reporters. There were dozens of journalists at the funeral last year, and it won’t happen again this time; the security guard will make sure of it.
Lily adjusts the doily on the podium, checks again that the seats are arranged right. She has written out her speech, and she checks that too, to make sure the pages are in order. She’s rewritten and rewritten it and she still can’t stand it. She might discard it entirely and extemporize.
Again she readjusts the doily on the podium.
“Caught you,” her father says.
“What?”
“Being compulsive. And here I was thinking you were a slob.”
“I am a slob. Remember my college roommate preference form?” She had to rank herself from one to five, one being “neat,” five being “constructive disorder,” and she gave herself a resounding five. Yet she ended up with a compulsive for a roommate. She could have had her own reality show, Cluttered Eye for the Neat Guy. Sophomore year, her suite was broken into, and when the police showed up, they took one look at her room and said, “Poor girl, her possessions were ransacked.” But they hadn’t been ransacked; they hadn’t even been touched.
“You always said a cluttered room was evidence of an organized mind.”
“It is,” she says.
“So what happened?”
What happened was, she met Malcolm, and a chef needs order in his restaurant. The problem is, the order has started to spread to their apartment. Malcolm gave her the home office because he believed if there was a single room in which she could commit clutter, it wouldn’t bleed into the rest of the house. He needn’t have worried. Last week, she found herself balling up his socks; next thing she knows, she’ll be color-coding them. And look at her now: she’s practically lining up the carrot sticks and grape leaves.
“You look good, Dad,” she says. He has only a couple of suits, one of which he’s wearing for the occasion, a gray affair that makes him appear handsome in an effortless, rumpled way. He has even gotten a haircut, which he consents to do only when prodded—a task that has devolved upon her mother, who puts the word haircut on the calendar on the fridge, spaced out every couple of months. And now she’s leaving him, Lily thinks, and his hair will be left to grow like a clump of weeds; what if he won’t be able to take care of himself? “How are you doing?”
“Pretty much as expected.” He’s at the front of the hall, beside the stage, and he hoists himself up onto it.
“Meaning not good?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Will you be?”
“I always have.”
Her mother used to say that her father dealt gracefully with whatever was handed him, and though on balance, Lily thinks, what was handed him was good, he has had his share of misfortune, starting with his father’s death when he was only a boy. And then his stepfather died as he was leaving for college and his mother got married again.
“What about you?” he says. “How are you doing?” He removes a grape leaf from the tray and takes a small bite, then sets it on a cocktail napkin, where the oil starts to bleed through.
“Mostly I feel numb, but then that’s no surprise.”
“Why not?”
“The girl who goes outside without her winter coat on? Too cool to feel the cold?” It’s why she asked him if she could preside over the memorial. It’s her way of doing penance.
He seats himself in the front row of seats. Then, reconsidering, he move a few rows back, only to change his mind again, and now he’s over at the liquor table, dipping his hand into the cooler of beer. He brings a bottle up, looking at it with surprise, as if he’s caught a fish.
“No alcohol before noontime?”
He laughs. It’s the rule they used to have when the children were growing up. No sweets before noontime. So Lily and her siblings would make a ceremony of standing by the cupboard where the cakes and cookies were housed, counting down until midday.
“Speaking of which, I got you this.” He hands her a package of gummy bears, which he picked up this morning at the candy store in town. “You still like gummy bears, don’t you?”
She nods.
“There was a sign in the store that said ‘Unattended children will be given espresso and a free kitten.’ I thought it was funny
. I had half a mind to take it home with me. Back to my days of petty crime.”
“What days of petty crime?”
“Just your typical adolescent things. Stealing road signs and filling my pockets with sweets. The occasional dustup with some neighborhood kid.”
“Dustup?” she says.
“You see all the things you don’t know about me?”
She steps out onto the balcony. The playground and tennis courts are arrayed below her; down the hill is the Childcare Center, where she and Thisbe sat yesterday drinking beers. She wouldn’t mind another beer now. Beer and gummy bears. It would be enough to make her sick. But it would be a good kind of sick, the kind of sick that would distract her from a deeper sickness, from everything that’s about to happen.
The memorial is being held in the center’s ballroom, though it’s not anywhere Lily would want to hold a ball. It’s more like an elementary-school auditorium. Sixty years ago, she wouldn’t have even been permitted inside the building. Before the town took it over, the center was home to the Lenox Brotherhood Club, and the Saturday night dance was the only time women were allowed in. Lily has an image of herself in the 1940s being escorted to a dance by some club member. She’d almost rather go to her brother’s memorial.
Leaning over the railing, she’s startled by the touch of a hand on her shoulder. It’s her father’s hand; he has come outside to join her. He’s drinking a ginger ale, which he offers her a sip of, but she’s still working on her gummy bears.
“You’re looking contemplative,” he says. “What are you thinking about?”
World Without You Page 24
