Pass the turkey, please.
Sorry, it weighs four hundred pounds. Self-serve!
At least a hundred people were stuffed into Noah’s parents’ New Jersey house for our engagement party. There were siblings, first, second and third cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and close friends of the family who were called Aunt This or Uncle That. There were children, at least ten, of various ages, building things out of Play-Doh or reading comic books or sulking about “this stupid boring party.” There were even two dogs, a German shepherd named Buddy and a terrier named Scruffy, playing teeth-tug-of-war with a ratty bone.
And there was Noah, looking incredibly handsome in his gray shirt and charcoal pants, debating the last presidential election with his uncles.
Last but not least, there I was, facing the bookshelves (heavy on the leather-bound editions of classics, à la Philippa’s fake library) at the far end of the living room, sipping a glass of wine and staring at my watch, which tick-tick-ticked very slowly. It was only seven-thirty. Snippets of twenty different conversations went on around me. Mostly about me.
“I hear both her parents are dead, poor thing.”
“Nah, Eloise just doesn’t talk to her family.”
“She’s very pretty, but a little skinny, don’t you think?”
“Is Uncle Jeffrey coming?”
“Some big advertising promotion for the magazine she works for.”
“Maybe her father’s in prison. Some kind of white-collar crime, most likely.”
“Beth says the bridesmaids have to wear Halloween costumes.”
“Can someone please turn down the stereo?”
“I thought we were meeting Eloise’s family.”
“No family?”
“I hear she has a sister.”
“No, a brother.”
“Eloise has no family—no one. So sad.”
“Hmm, this chopped liver is delicious!”
“She has a sickly grandmother. I hear the poor little old lady is in a nursing home.”
You hear wrong. You all hear wrong. My grandmother wasn’t sickly and didn’t live in a nursing home. Five feet ten inches tall and weighing one hundred and seventy-six pounds, seventy-nine-year-old Bette Geller, of the cashmere sweater sets, heavyweight dungarees, rouge and lipstick, was as robust and full-of-life as you got, despite the partial paralysis that made it difficult for her to get around or travel, which was why she wasn’t here tonight. She played poker and adored Rodney Dangerfield and hooted with laughter at his movies.
It was true that my grandmother had been sick. A little over a year ago, she’d had a stroke. One minute she’d been fine, sitting across from me in the diner where I met her for lunch every Saturday afternoon, and the next minute, she wasn’t fine.
She’d been sipping the chocolate egg cream that she always got for dessert and telling me a joke, one of her favorites of Rodney’s that embarrassed her and delighted her at the same time, when she suddenly stopped, just sort of froze, and things had gotten worse from there.
There was a rush of waiters, people sitting around us, the diner manager, and then the ambulance sirens. Then there were doctors and nurses and Jane and Amanda and Natasha, baby Summer cooing in her stroller. There was Noah, whom I’d been dating somewhere between casually and seriously for almost a year. There was my old boss at Posh Publishing, a couple of girlfriends from high school and one from college. Even Michael, my ex-boyfriend from a decade before, showed up in the hospital with a bouquet of red tulips and a box of Whitman’s Samplers, which my grandmother had kept on her shiny mahogany coffee table every day of the year. There were my grandmother’s friends, who’d come every day and sat for hours, playing cards by her bedside, talking to her, telling her who was having a sale on rib roast, whose husband was in the doghouse, whose granddaughter just had a baby.
There was no Emmett, but no one asked why.
It was understood that Emmett was traveling.
My brother was one of those “march-to-their-own-drummer” types who graduated (barely) from Yale, then got a job driving a truck to Alaska, where he fished for a while until he decided to climb a mountain in Africa, funding for which was provided by the occasional wealthy older woman he was sleeping with.
I was the only one who asked where Emmett was.
“Where the hell is Emmett?” I’d scream and rage at the top of my lungs in the tiny studio apartment I lived in at the time.
“Jesus Christ, I don’t know!” shouted back the guy who lived in the apartment above me. The walls, floors and ceiling in that dumpy walk-up were so thin, you could hear way too much of what went on in your neighbors’ lives. I mourned for the days, the years, when Jane lived above me. Before she moved into a swanky Upper West Side apartment with Ethan, Jane and I could conduct entire conversations via our kitchen cabinets.
Where the hell is Emmett? I started raging silently.
Despite the many warm, caring people, from friends to doctors to co-workers to strangers I met in the hospital elevator and in the hallways where I prayed that my grandmother wouldn’t die, there was no family.
My family was Grams, myself and Emmett, and Emmett was nowhere to be found.
He often took off for weeks at a time and couldn’t be reached.
“What if something happens!” I had yelled at him for years. “You have to be reachable!”
“What’s going to happen?” he’d say. “Stop being so melodramatic.”
“Get a cell phone!” I’d scream.
“Stop telling me what to do!” he’d scream back. “And I’m not getting a cell phone. You can get cancer from cell phones.”
“What if something happens?” I yelled again.
His response was some indecipherable mutter (his usual response).
And then something happened. And I couldn’t reach Emmett.
Despite all the people, there’d been no family.
No family meant me. And I was strong, I’d been born strong apparently, and made stronger just a few years later, but I wasn’t that strong. I wasn’t immune to the aforementioned raging. The crying jags, the fear.
Emmett turned up three weeks and four days after my grandmother’s stroke, with an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, his stupid grin and shaggy blondish-brown hair that always needed a cut but always looked rock-star good anyway. I opened my apartment door to find him with a girlfriend in tow, a pretty blonde with braided pigtails despite her age, which had to be at least twenty-five. Her name was Charlotte. Emmett wanted to know if he and Charlotte could crash on my couch for a few days until Charlotte’s freshly painted living-room walls dried.
“It’s a really cool plum color,” Charlotte said.
I ignored her and told my brother to go to hell.
“You have a lot of rage,” Charlotte said before I clued them both into why.
“I didn’t know, okay?” he screamed back, red-faced. “How was I supposed to know that Grams had a stroke if I didn’t know?”
Gee, Emmett, and you went to Yale?
“You were supposed to know because you should have been here!” I said. “You should have been here or should be reachable. But you’re a selfish, self-absorbed brat!” I stood there yelling. “Grams is all we have of family…where the hell have you been since you were eighteen…taking off on whims without a second thought…leaving all the responsibility to me…where have you been the past three weeks when Grams, our only family in the world, has been in a hospital, slowly recovering from a stroke that you didn’t even know she had…you wouldn’t know it if I dropped dead in the street…Selfish brat!…Self-absorbed!…Immature!…”
I went on and on and on.
Lips tight, Emmett listened until I stopped yelling. Then he said, “I don’t need this crap,” and he and Charlotte stomped off, her pigtails flopping against her puffy white jacket as they headed down the stairwell.
That was the last time I saw him.
He sent my grandmother postcards. During the past year,
he’d been all over the United States. Beverly Hills. Las Vegas. Chicago. Nashville and Memphis. Atlanta.
“Don’t be so hard on your brother,” Grams would say when I’d toss the postcard aside with a harrumph. “It’s all very complicated.”
It wasn’t complicated. Nothing was complicated. Things either were or weren’t.
And Emmett was a weren’t.
“Emmett and I have the same background,” I ranted to Grams. “What’s complicated about him should be complicated about me. And here I am!”
“Yes,” she’d say, “but you’re different people.”
Right. I was a normal human being who took care of the one true relative aside from Emmett I had on this earth. And Emmett was a self-absorbed jerk brat!
“Things aren’t black and white, dear,” Grams would say.
I would nod, but I secretly didn’t agree.
You were or you weren’t.
“Eloise, dear, as a traditionalist…”
Startled out of the memories, I turned around to find Noah’s mother, Dottie Benjamin, eyeing me with a frown. I took my hand off the leather-bound Great Expectations I didn’t even know I was clutching.
“Dear,” Mrs. Benjamin said, “I’m sure Beth was exaggerating—she’s been in the foulest mood lately—but she was muttering like crazy about having to wear a Halloween costume to her own brother’s wedding. Dear, does that make any sense to you? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
A woman standing behind Mrs. Benjamin wiggled her way through the small group of people between us. “Louise, did I just hear that you and Noah are marrying on Halloween—in costume? How festive!”
Eloise, I corrected mentally. Why waste the breath? Besides, the woman was already deep in conversation about whether Cousin Marcy was carrying high or low and whether that meant she was pregnant with a boy or a girl.
I turned back to my future mother-in-law. “Mrs. Benjamin, the dress is a little different, but—”
Mrs. Benjamin leaned close. “Dear, a wedding is no time for different. But don’t you worry—I saw the most beautiful bridesmaid dress today, and I took it upon myself to put a deposit on five of them. Don’t even try to thank me—that’s what a mother-in-law is for! The dress is a lovely deep purple taffeta with cute little polka-dot bows on the neckline and a festive bow at the back waistline. Beth, as you know, looks great in jewel tones.”
“Um, Mrs. Benjamin, the magazine feature—”
She waved her hand. “Oh, don’t you worry about a thing! Once your boss sees these dresses, I’m sure she’ll want to feature them in the magazine.”
“Mrs. Benjamin—” I waited for her to say, Dear, call me Dottie, we’re family, but she never did. “I hope you can get back your deposit. The bridesmaids’ dresses are a done deal. Yes, they’re a little different, but—”
“Different?” repeated Beth, appearing out of nowhere behind very pregnant cousin Marcy. “It’s hideous. I’m not wearing it. I’m a size fourteen if you haven’t noticed, and there’s no way that skintight thing will look good on me.”
Be kind, she’s going through a divorce, I mentally chanted.
“The color’s great on you, though,” I said.
Mrs. Benjamin and Beth Benjamin eyed me as though I were speaking Swahili, as they often did at family functions.
Two of the kids began feeding the little dog Play-Doh, and Mrs. Benjamin ran off to save it. Beth slunk away, and I was back to my books and inability to shut out conversations about me.
“I hear they’re getting married on Halloween.”
“Their wedding is a costume party.”
“What? What kind of nonsense is that?”
“It’s bad luck is what it is!”
“Ooh, I’m going to go as Jay Leno. I bought a rubber mask of his face last year.”
“I just met Eloise’s mother. Lovely woman.”
I raised my eyebrow at that one. What I would do to meet my mother at this party, chat with her for a little while. Hear her voice. The voice of reason, at that.
“We can sneak out if you’re dying,” Noah whispered in my ear. “There are so many people here, no one will notice.”
Effectively reminding me of why I had said yes all over again.
Sunday morning, Noah and I got into a huge fight.
“You’re mad at me because I drank the last of the Diet Coke?” he asked.
I stood in the doorway to the bedroom, waving the empty soda bottle at him. “Whoever drinks the last of the soda has to either buy more or write Buy More Soda on the fridge!”
“Fine. I’m sorry. I will.”
“Oh, like you can buy soda from Chicago,” I snapped.
“What?”
“Stay home,” I said. “Blow off the trip. Who cares if Oprah is rumored to be marrying Steadman in a secret ceremony on air?”
“Eloise, I can’t not go,” he said. “It’s my job.”
Sometimes I wanted his job to be being my fiancé.
“Are you mad that I drank the last of the soda or that I’m going away?”
“That you’re going away,” I admitted, and slunk down on a chair like a sulking child.
He sat down next to me. “Sweetie, being an investigative journalist means hitting the road. I’m very likely going to be traveling a lot forever.”
But—
“Eloise, I know it’s hard on us as a couple, but I love you and you love me and—”
“‘We’re a happ-y fam-i-ly’?”
“What?”
Noah didn’t do much baby-sitting for two-year-olds and have the preschool crowd’s theme songs down pat.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”
“If you need me, Eloise,” he said, “you just call me.” He took my hands and looked into my eyes. “You come first. You need me and I’m in the middle of interviewing Oprah’s friend’s friend’s cousin’s next-door neighbor’s sister, I’ll take your call. You can count on that.”
I hit him with a pillow.
But I did feel better.
“So are you going to call Emmett?”
I didn’t feel better.
“Give it some thought,” he said.
I nodded and watched him choose between his red Snoopy tie and his blue Addams Family with tiny Morticias. He added Morticia to his at-the-ready duffel bag, the one that was always packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice, then kissed me long and hard and passionately, and was gone.
Call Emmett. Don’t call. Call Emmett. Don’t call.
I spent my Sunday going back and forth, back and forth.
When the sun went down, I moved from the couch to my bed and grabbed my packet from Perfect People. I pulled out the photo of my fake brother, Ewan McGregorly. He had long teeth. Model’s teeth.
I smiled wide at myself in the mirror over the dresser. I didn’t have big teeth. I had my mother’s teeth, my mother’s smile.
I had my father’s eyes. So did Emmett.
Ewan did too, apparently. Well, close enough. Almond-shaped, but slightly turned down at the corners.
Under my bed was a box containing the one photo album that had pictures of my father. I pulled the album onto my bed and flipped through it.
On the second page, Emmett, in his Scooby Doo pajamas, was sitting on Theo Manfred’s shoulders, covering his eyes and laughing. Theo was laughing too.
How did you go from being the man in this picture to never seeing that little boy again? Never feeling the weight of that little body in your arms? Never seeing that face, so much like your own?
How?
There was also one of me on his shoulders. Eloise, age five, and Daddy, said the caption label that my mother wrote. Theo Manfred’s hands were around my ankles, and he was looking up at me. My hands were high in the air, and my smile was so big it must have hurt.
Every time I looked at that picture, I thought that I must have felt safe up there.
Look, Ma, no hands.
&n
bsp; Again, how? How could you go from this picture to never seeing that little girl again?
The one photograph that always made me feel slightly sick was the one of me, just me, holding a small white paper bag in one hand and a fistful of jelly beans in the other. I was five.
My father had bought me that bag of jelly beans. He used to take me to one of those tiny candy shops lined with plastic cubbies filled with brightly colored candies and silver scoops. He’d hand me a white paper bag and check his watch.
“You have exactly one minute and fifteen seconds to fill up this white paper bag with all the candy you want,” he’d say. “Ready, set…go!”
And tongue out in fierce concentration, I’d go running. For the Tootsie Rolls. For the chocolate turtles. For the jelly beans. I’d end up with a pound of candy to eat for the week.
A couple of days after he left for good, I found three jelly beans at the bottom of the bag, green ones that I didn’t like and couldn’t get Emmett to eat, either. I scrunched up the bag and put it under my mattress. When I was thirteen and alternating between apathy and fury that later would become my trademark ambivalence about everything, I threw it away. Emmett, ten at the time, had thrown a fit. You should have given the bag to me…I don’t have a last thing from our father…who do you think you are, Eloise! I hate you! I hate everybody!
I’d changed in that instant. I’d gone from being your basic self-absorbed new teenager, wondering why I didn’t have my period, to being aware of people’s feelings. Suddenly, Emmett wasn’t my younger brother, in turn annoying and funny; he was a deeply sad boy whose father had left before he even had a chance to know him. I became ferociously protective of Emmett. If a bully was bothering him, I stalked over, hands on hips. If Emmett crumpled up his math homework in frustration because of not being able to do his fractions, I uncrumpled the loose-leaf paper and explained what a lowest common denominator was. If I was locked in my bedroom, devastated that a boy didn’t like me and heard Emmett howling with laughter over Saturday-morning cartoons, I smiled.
Once, I asked my mother if there was something wrong with me for caring so much about Emmett, when my friends wished their siblings would take a rocket to Mars.
Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Page 6
