by Jancee Dunn
To his obvious joy, I did not. “A senior living center, one hundred and seventy-five units. It’s the same model as that famous center in Tampa, you know, by that developer. He was in Time magazine.” My father frequently remarked that he had no use for books because the newspaper and Time provided everything that a man needed to know. “Ah, Jesus, what is that fellow’s name? Anyhow, I’m on the board. Who knows, I might end up in that senior center myself. Might as well get on their good side.”
We passed a hulking brick version of a French château, done Jersey-style with multicolored bricks, glass windows etched with decorative filigrees, and three garage doors. “See that house? Two lawyers bought the old place, a great little cottage, knocked the whole thing down, and built that monstrosity,” he said. “Takes up more than three quarters of the lot, which is a total violation of village guidelines. I heard they put an elevator inside. Why, when the place only has two floors? People should get off their big fat behinds.” My dad maintained a perpetual state of outrage, in defiance of the doctor’s warnings about his rising blood pressure. I suspected he felt that the vinegar coursing through his veins acted as a kind of preservative that maintained his youth.
He braked so I could observe the McConahys’ house. “A deer,” he said disgustedly. “Right on the McConahys’ front lawn, just as casual as you please, doo-de-doo. They’re bringing the deer hunt back this year. Some animal groups were protesting, but they obviously don’t have deer eating up all their flowers like it’s a g.d. salad bar.”
He was clutching the wheel a little too tightly. I knew part of the reason he was talking so much was that he was praying to Jesus I would hold it together emotionally until we got home and my mother could handle everything. When we pulled into the driveway, he practically jumped out of the car and speed-walked up the driveway. The house, I noted with satisfaction, hadn’t changed much since my last visit, aside from the shutters, which had been painted a cheery shade of blue, and the “fun flag” with a pumpkin on it that snapped and fluttered over the front door.
For my father’s sake, I managed not to cry until I was in their hallway and my mother ran over with a teary Oh, honey. He grabbed a newspaper and fled to the den while the two of us sniffled.
“You look terrible,” she said, her sharp gaze darting from my face to my neck to my spindly arms. “You’re even thinner than you were when we saw you at your apartment, and that was, what, two weeks ago.”
“I know,” I said damply. “Oh, Mom. You shouldn’t have to take care of your grown daughter at this stage in your life.”
“Now, stop it. How many times have we offered? A change of scenery will do you good.”
“This is the exact opposite of a change of scenery. I grew up here.”
“You know what I mean. Now, come on, let’s take that stuff to your room.” We trooped upstairs and she pushed open the door. “And here it is, just as you left it. Except this time it’s clean.” She swept her hand across the room in an oddly formal gesture.
“Okay, Ma. Thanks.” She continued to stand there, so I pretended to look in my wallet for a tip, to make her laugh. I wanted to signal to her that I wouldn’t always be moping.
“Funny stuff,” she said. She looked at one of my bags and frowned. “What’s that?” she said, pointing to a furry ear sticking out of my luggage.
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “It’s a stuffed elephant that Adam and I picked out for my friends Chris and Elaine. You know how they had a new baby? I don’t know. I just couldn’t give it away.”
My mother saw my stricken face. “No, no, no, don’t cry again,” she said quickly. “Oh, what is wrong with me?” Her eyes flicked around the room for an effective distraction, as though I were a fussing toddler. “Here’s something that will cheer you up,” she said suddenly. “Dinner will be ready in just twenty minutes, and your father is making your favorite.”
I snuffled. “Chicken in a bag?”
“Chicken in a bag,” she said triumphantly. This news actually did give me a lift. My dad, the sole cook in the family, was obsessed with convenience, so his favorite entrée was a slab of meat in a plastic roasting bag. The only problem was that the cooking aromas remain tightly encased inside, so my mother learned long ago to make a verbal advance announcement to build anticipation.
“I’ll be down to help in a second,” I said. First I had to make my ritualistic room inspection. Because of my vigilance, my bedroom was never in serious danger of being transformed into a guest room or my mother’s fleeting scheme of a crafting center. Over the years I had always looked crestfallen when they hesitantly proposed various ideas, so my room remained as carefully preserved as Graceland. When my older sister, Ginny, had left home two days after graduating college, she gave our mother her blessing to turn her bedroom into a scrapbooking station, which has since evolved into an eBay-packaging-and-shipping room (one of my father’s retirement gigs was flipping local garage-sale merchandise).
I shut the door and flopped luxuriously down on my old bed. Dinner was in twenty minutes! I felt a flash of shame at being so gleeful, remembering Ginny’s ten seconds of silence when I informed her that I was moving back home.
“Wow,” she had said finally. Ginny had about seven ways to utter the word wow, all with varying degrees of condescension. Ginny, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had never lived alone. She married Raymond, an endocrinologist, right out of grad school and promptly produced two kids. Ginny had never faced Sunday at 4:30 P.M., the worst part of the week for a recently single person. No friend wants to meet on Sundays at 4:30. It’s too early for dinner. The museums are closing. There is nothing on television.
On some weekends, I wanted to tell Ginny, I didn’t receive a single phone call. Most of my friends had retreated into family life, toting their young children to birthday parties and playdates. On weekends, the bustling quotidian activities that move the day forward would slow and catch. I was steeped in lonesomeness. My pride wouldn’t allow me to tell Ginny that I was foolishly, absurdly glad to go to sleep knowing that there were other people breathing quietly in a room down the hall.
I surveyed my bedroom. The branches of the tulip tree I used to wake up to every morning still tapped gently at the window. Had my mother changed anything? I scanned the faded lilac walls for my familiar artifacts: to the left, the black-and-white Soloflex poster of a guy pulling a white tank top over his denuded chest; to the right, the mandatory Robert Doisneau shot of the French couple kissing; behind me, the poster for the Squeeze Singles album that Molly Ringwald had hung in her bedroom in Sixteen Candles. On the wall above my desk hung the collage that my friend Sandy Swartz had made for one of my birthdays, a medley of blurry party photos, pictures of Sandy looking better than me, and phrases cut out from magazines, some of which made sense (“when you need a friend,” “Spice up your life,” “rad body”) and others that did not (“Come to flavor country,” “There’s only one Capri Sun”).
My mom had managed to take over my closet and filled it with her summer clothes, but the contents of my dresser were intact, the bottles of Anaïs Anaïs and Giorgio still resting reassuringly on the dresser top. I opened a drawer with leisurely anticipation. I knew what was inside, having inspected it dozens of times, but it had been a year and I was banking on my evaporating memory to yield a surprise or two. The drawer slid open with a jingle of caps from the beer bottles and berry-flavored wine coolers I had saved to commemorate when something noteworthy occurred at a party.
I couldn’t bear to throw out a thing; not the barrettes with pastel satin ribbons woven in, nor the cards from my late grandma, with ancient pieces of cracked Beech-Nut Fruit Stripe gum taped inside (one with a note that read, “I’m so proud you’re turning 18. You’re a special young lady now”). Amid the flotsam at the bottom of the drawer were brown bits of dried carnation that had flaked off of a prom corsage, three black rubber bracelets, The Official Preppy Handbook, blue novelty shoelaces with tiny r
ainbow prints, and high school notes folded to the size and density of bullets for easy passing in class.
I carefully unpleated one note with the precision of an origami craftsman for correct refolding later. It was from Lynn Casey, one of my three best friends in high school. On the front she had scribbled, “for your eyes only.” For added security protection, we had devised nicknames—mine was Lulu, hers was Mimi.
Lulu,
Howya doing? I’m in Earth Science right now, almost over, thank god. Twelve minutes left! I’m totally dreading field hockey, I think Miss Chestnut is going to make us run the two mile. I would ditch it if we didn’t have a game on Friday. Hey do you want to go to the mall on Saturday, I swear I only have three pairs of shoes, I need some new Mias. I saw K this morning in the hall and he said hi to me, and then after lunch, again. We’re practically going out, ha ha. T.T.L.C. right?
K__ was her crush, Kurt Sebalius. For triple protection, Lynn and I only used initials for key phrases. T.T.L.C.—what could that be? It was something boy-related. I couldn’t remember.
Sue is wearing her black fringed boots again, UGH, I can’t take it anymore. Talk to ya later, Mimi.
Lynn wrote me a note every single day, all with recurrent themes of seeing K__, feeling totally fat or, at the very least, bloated, teacher bashing, the gossip of the day, and field hockey practice dread. The point wasn’t the actual messages. It was about being seen by others as we gave and received notes.
I unwrapped another, this one sloppily folded. It was from Christian, my senior-year boyfriend. Christian Somers, the star soccer player who drove a battered black Jeep and only drank Dos Equis, his “signature” beer! He rarely spoke or smiled, which of course only burnished his allure. A gaggle of followers slavishly copied his every move, collecting Christian-sanctioned albums from the Clash and the Smiths and joining him for midnight screenings of Eraserhead, never daring to admit that they’d much rather just go to the multiplex and see The Breakfast Club at seven-thirty.
After Christian boldly wore black Girbaud jeans to a Friday-night basement party, his acolytes couldn’t race to Bloomingdale’s fast enough. When he abruptly decided to stop eating lunch at the school cafeteria to spend the hour under a knot of trees behind the track field, reading, each day another devotee would be seated beside him, trying to look engrossed in a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. Even Mr. Kast, the soccer coach, twenty-two and fresh out of Rutgers University, cultivated a friendship with him. On Friday nights, the two would kick a soccer ball back and forth in the twilight, while those not lucky enough to play checked their watches anxiously in the parking lot near the field, waiting for them to finish so the night could begin.
Christian’s mystique trailed him through college, when he spent a semester in London and impulsively decided to stay. His friends were wounded when he dropped away entirely. Hadn’t he had a great time in school like they did? Eventually, as the years passed without a word from him, he was dismissed, Jersey-style, as a “total douche.”
I opened the note, my heart thumping painfully. On a piece of wrinkled notebook paper he had written “THIS IS SO FUCKIN BORING.” At the bottom corner was a doodle of a bomb with a long fuse that ran the length of the page. “This letter will self-destruct in thirty seconds,” it said. On the opposite corner, I had marked “Social Studies class, May 20, 1988” with the precision of a museum curator.
I had saved that thing for twenty years.
chapter five
“Lillian!” my mother called. “We’re just about ready. Do you want iced tea? It’s caffeine-free, so you can drink it at night.” I speed-folded the note, stashed it in the drawer, and ran downstairs.
My father was hacking open the chicken bag. “Want to set the table?” he said. On the counter sat three plates, three napkins, three forks, and three vinyl “rattan-like” place mats. The real rattan was tucked away for company.
My father had changed into his favorite navy V-neck sweater for dinner. “It goes with everything,” he explained. “Since I retired, I only have about six outfits. That’s what retirees do. We whittle it down to a few favorites, and we wear them until we die. Right, Sharon?”
My mother winced. She was in the same size 8 Liz Claiborne jeans she had worn for a decade and a yellow cable-knit sweater with a daisy pin. When she was younger, her hair had been as dark as mine, but after she read in a magazine that women should lighten their color every five years, she had gradually upgraded from Medium Golden to Ash Blonde to her current incarnation of Winsome Wheat.
My parents were very capable, involved-in-the-community types, and the way that we expressed familial affection was to find methods to make one another’s lives more comfortable and efficient. We weren’t huggers, but my father always did my taxes. He never told us he loved us, but if my sister drove to visit them, he was up at dawn, taking her car to the car wash. Whenever Adam and I moved into one of our many new rental apartments in the city, my mother showed up and descended on the bathroom, bucket and bleach in hand. I, in turn, set up my parents’ computer and programmed their remote control. It never felt like a chore, because we all prized more than anything crossing a task satisfyingly off a list.
I watched with bemusement as my dad put together dinner and my mom briskly swabbed the counter with a sponge. Then I brought the plates and place mats to the coffee table in front of the television in the den. “Lily, can you toss the salad?” called my father from the kitchen. He had placed a bag of prewashed greens next to a bowl.
I stared at it. “Isn’t it already tossed?”
He sawed off the top of a bag of microwavable Rice-A-Roni and dumped it into a bowl. “Take a look. There’s a bag inside of the bag that contains two bags, one of Asian dressing and one of crispy noodles. You see? Open them all up and toss.” When my father went grocery shopping, anything that came in a pouch or required little cleanup went right into his cart.
As I sorted out the bags, I saw my parents exchange a brief look and then my mother cleared her throat. “So, do you still talk to Adam fairly regularly?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said shortly. “About once a week.” Adam still wanted to be buddies, so he was exceedingly upbeat during our hurried exchanges, mostly about paperwork and stray possessions. Détente was achievable as long as our chats did not exceed seven minutes in length.
Adam used to phone me and use funny voices, like Grover from Sesame Street, or he’d sing my name. Now he began each conversation with a jovial Hey, you, which acknowledged our shared past without being too intimate. This was often followed with the more ludicrous I gotta go (“Listen, I gotta go, but how are you?”)—Adam, suddenly so busy-busy-busy. After he moved out, he had gotten a new job at a glitzy real estate company that peddled trendy “lifestyle” apartments.
My mom regarded me. “Lillian. I know how much pain you’re in. I say that you should have a good wallow.” She squeezed my arm. “Even when you were a baby, you weren’t much of a crier. I used to forget you were there, you were so quiet. You were always—what’s the word I’m looking for, Don?”
“Quiet,” he said over his shoulder as he wrestled with the chicken.
“I already said she was quiet. Honest to God, do you listen to me at all?” She studied me. “I think the word is watchful. Ginny was a nonstop talker, but you were a very watchful child.”
Her concerned gaze caused my chest to start hitching, so to head off more tears I announced, “Who’s hungry?”
I helped my dad carry the platters into the den, and we automatically took the same places in front of the television that we had when I was a kid. At my spot on the couch, Mom had placed an afghan. Each member of the family had his or her own ratty afghan, knitted by my great-aunt Ruth during the seventies. Mine was orange, Mom’s was avocado and gold, Dad’s a manly brown and tan. When Ginny and I left home, our afghans awaited our return in the hall closet. I spread the disintegrating orange web on my lap, taking a luxurious sniff of its familiar aroma: sour wool with a da
sh of corn chips. Every suburban home has at least one item that smells like corn chips—a rug or a reclining chair or an old blanket—even if it’s a family of strict potato chip eaters.
As we sat down, the lights on the deck adjoining the den clicked on right at seven o’clock. My father had rigged every bulb in the house, inside and out, on timers.
He fished around inside the remote-control holder that hung off his chair—a Christmas gift of Ginny’s to make life easier—and turned on the TV. “Sharon, I taped a good movie,” he announced to my mother.
She sighed.
“It’s called…” He consulted a pad and paper also kept by the chair. “I believe it’s called A War Worth Fighting.”
My mother took a bite of chicken. “Five minutes.”
“Your mother is the eternal movie pessimist,” said my father. He turned to her. “If you recall, you’re the one who mentioned you wanted to see this.”
“When did I say that?”
“You probably saw a preview and then asked me to write it down. How else would I know the title?”
“Don, you don’t know the title.” She picked up the tape. “It says Enemy Down. Do you even know who’s in it?”
“That young kid. You’ve seen him before. He was in that TV show, about the people who had a nuclear winter, and whatnot.” He turned to me conspiratorially. “I can’t remember names. Then again, neither can your mother.”
“I’m better than you are,” she said. My mom didn’t appreciate his “senior moment” jokes.
“I remember faces.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said, throwing her frayed afghan over her lap. “Five minutes,” she repeated. I sighed happily. This was much better. Their bickering about movie taping was utterly unchanged since my childhood.
Fifteen minutes later, my mother wandered away to her room to page through gardening catalogs. Right after dinner, she usually stopped talking entirely, to “recharge.” My mother was the eldest of six demanding siblings, and her butterfly attention had always fluttered in all directions, from friends to members of her various clubs to my father to the students she taught part-time at the community college. All of us received a maddeningly equal sliver and no more.
