After the Reunion

by Rona Jaffe

  “If you didn’t do that,” she said to him quietly, with hurt and anger in her voice, “then I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Yes you would,” he said lightly.

  “Cathy’s Dad’s only unsuccessful patient,” Jeremy said.

  “I’m not his patient,” Cathy said.

  “Bigfoot,” Jeremy said. “Ouch!” He rubbed his arm where his sister had pinched him and glared at her.

  “Daphne’s going to think you’re savages,” Michael said.

  “I’m not,” Cathy said. “He is.”

  “The kids at school call her Bigfoot,” Jeremy said to Daphne, by way of explanation.

  “I think that’s cruel,” Daphne said.

  “Children love to be cruel,” Cathy said. “They think it’s funny.”

  Daphne smiled. “Then I guess nothing has changed since I was a kid.”

  “You were never fat,” Cathy said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

  “No,” Daphne said.

  “Then you didn’t have my problem.”

  “No. I had others, though.”

  “Really?” Cathy said. She looked rather pleased and interested. “Like what?”

  Daphne glanced at Michael. She could read his mind: he was saying go ahead, tell them, who cares? “Epilepsy,” Daphne said.

  The two kids were staring at her. Here was an adult they had just met, a woman who was here to make a good impression on them, and she was telling them outright, in the calmest way imaginable, that she’d had a rotten childhood too, that she had no secrets, that she could understand.

  “Were the kids mean to you?” Cathy asked.

  “I wouldn’t let them be,” Daphne said. “If they were, I ignored it.”

  “Did they make you feel terrible?”

  “Very.”

  “When you’re a fat person,” Cathy said, “everybody acts like that’s the most important thing about you. They don’t even bother to see what you’re really like.”

  “I know,” Daphne said.

  “No you don’t,” Cathy said suddenly. “How could you know?” She looked away, dismissing this intruder, and devoted herself to the food on her plate. For dessert she ordered strawberries, and then she loaded them with whipped cream and sugar and gobbled them up almost vindictively. The rest of them pretended not to notice. Daphne asked Jeremy which movies he had seen lately that he liked, and which ones he wanted to see. She felt like a good dinner guest, giving equal time to the person on her left and then the one on her right, but she felt as if she were at the wrong dinner.

  At the end of the evening they all walked Daphne to the garage where she had left her car. Even though she knew it wouldn’t be for much longer, she felt like the outsider, going home by herself, and Cathy didn’t even like her. She leaned down and kissed Jeremy on the cheek. His skin was still soft and childlike. Then she tried to kiss Cathy, but the girl stiffened, and very subtly but firmly pulled away. When, finally, she kissed Michael goodnight, Daphne could almost feel his daughter’s eyes boring into her back.

  The next day Michael reported to Daphne that his children had loved her, that they thought she was beautiful and nice.

  “You wish,” she said lightly. “Only Jeremy does.”

  “No …”

  “Bring them to the country for the weekend,” she said. “I’ll try harder.”

  “Just be yourself,” he said.

  She prepared her house for their visit. Michael would stay in Matthew’s room again, for appearance’s sake; he could sneak across the hall to hers when everyone was asleep, not that it would fool anybody. Jeremy would like Teddy’s room, she thought, so she would put him there. And Cathy … There was a feminine, pretty, girl’s room waiting empty. It seemed natural to give it to Cathy, so she did, and tried to ignore the brief stab of pain for the child who would never live there anymore and what could never be …

  “Whose room is this?” Cathy asked.

  “My daughter Elizabeth’s.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She lives in a special home. She’s retarded. I visit her.”

  There was a long pause. “My mother would never have given her daughter away,” Cathy said.

  Only a child, but what power they had to hurt you when they wanted to! “I know,” Daphne said calmly. “I didn’t know your mother, but I’m sure she wouldn’t have.”

  “My shrink says that I’m angry at my mother for dying, but that’s ridiculous of course because I know she couldn’t help it. Nobody wants to die.”

  Daphne thought of Jonathan and her eyes filled with tears. She turned her head away, but not before Cathy saw, and knew she’d drawn blood, more than she’d meant to, and didn’t know why. Daphne didn’t say anything.

  “I guess I’ll unpack,” Cathy said.

  Michael’s children did not come every weekend, because sometimes they had things to do in the city with their friends, but now it was April, and her boys were back for their Easter vacation from prep school, and the plan was for all of them to be in the house together. Matthew would need his room again. Jeremy could double up with Teddy, as there were two beds. But Michael? The last door had to be opened, both literally and figuratively. She could not keep Jonathan’s bedroom a shrine forever. Ina cleaned and aired it. Daphne helped her move the furniture around to make it look a little different, and bought a new bedspread. But Daphne knew nothing would really change that room, even the presence of Michael who was so alive and filled her life, and besides, no one was actually going to sleep there.

  “Who used to live here?” Cathy asked. It still didn’t look like a guest room, it looked like the room of someone who had grown up and moved away.

  Daphne took a deep breath. “I had a son who died. He … killed himself.” There was a pause while they looked at each other. “I guess there are some people who do want to die,” Daphne said.

  Cathy was at a loss for words. For the first time, at last, she looked at Daphne with some human sympathy, even concern, as if she were more than the interloper who was trying to take her mother’s place. “A lot of terrible things happened to you too, didn’t they,” she said finally.

  Daphne nodded. “Maybe now only good things will,” she said.

  The children got along. It occurred to Daphne that hers weren’t all children anymore: Matthew had been accepted at Harvard and would be going there in the fall. He was graduating from St. Martin’s at the end of May. She and Michael were planning a June wedding. They had started looking for a large apartment in New York with space for all of them, and she had put her house up for sale. Michael was going to sell his co-op, and he had suggested they also buy a house at the beach for summer weekends. He worried a little that a Manhattan co-op board would not let them in with so many children and two big dogs, but Daphne wasn’t worried. She had never been rejected by any place in her life.

  During the school holiday she took Cathy shopping for clothes. Cathy hated everything. “I look disgusting,” she said. “I wish I was thin like you.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Daphne lied, “I was going to try to lose a few pounds for the wedding. Why don’t you and I go on a diet together?”

  “You mean for moral support?”

  “Why not?”

  “But I have to lose at least twenty!”

  “You have two months, and at your age it’s easier than it is for me. You’re still growing, and your metabolism’s faster. What do you say, want to try it together? You could call me up every night and report how it’s going, and tell me what you ate, and how you overcame temptation …?”

  “I don’t overcome temptation very often,” Cathy said.

  “I’m going to wear a sort of pale pinkish dress to the wedding,” Daphne said. “I see you in apricot. What do you think?” Cathy shrugged. “You’re going to be in the wedding pictures …”

  “I’ll hide behind three people.”

  “No you won’t. Come on. It’ll be summer. You’ll be thin by then. We’ll get you
a bikini too, for East Hampton. And designer jeans, from wherever you want.”

  “You sure you won’t mind if I call you up every night?”

  “I’d be flattered,” Daphne said.

  “I guess I could try,” Cathy said. She looked down at her hands. “I just want to tell you,” she said shyly, “that I think you’re a wonderful person, and that I think of you as a friend, and I’m glad I’m in your life, and … I really like you.”

  “I love you too,” Daphne said.

  So the weeks went by quickly. Daphne found an enormous apartment on Park Avenue, and the board accepted them, children, dogs, and all. Between them she and Michael had plenty of furniture, and the painters promised to be finished in time for them to move in before the wedding. They planned to be married in their new apartment by a judge, in the living room; one of the few rooms in this monolith they had purchased that faced the wide and sunny street. There would be flowers everywhere, a wedding cake, and just the family. And then she and Michael would go to Venice, Rome, and Florence, for two weeks.

  They didn’t care that the apartment was dark; all they cared about was that they would be together. She had always been good at fixing up places, and she knew she could do a lot with the space. She wouldn’t miss the country. New York would be her place to roam now. For an instant she remembered those years long ago in New York, when she and Richard were first living together before they were married, in their tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. Everything had been so new and wonderful and romantic; she was confident that they had such happy lives ahead of them; if only she could keep the secret of her illness, if only he would divorce The Waitress and marry her, if only they could have children … All those “if onlys.” The memories dropped away without regret.

  It was all as new and exciting as it had been the first time. No, it was even more so; because this time she had never expected any of it.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  June, 1984

  I am a New Yorker, and since yesterday afternoon I have a stepfather and a stepsister and a stepbrother. Life is amazing. The wedding was really nice. I didn’t know how I would feel about it, even though I like Michael, and I was nervous, but after the wedding I didn’t feel any different than I did before. The only change is going to be getting used to living together, but since this is the first time I ever lived in New York and the first time in years that I won’t be away at boarding school, I can get used to everything at once.

  Trinity accepted me for this fall. Jeremy, my stepbrother, goes there, and so does the son of my mother’s friend Chris, who is named Nicholas, so I already know two people. Sam wants to stay at St. Martin’s and then go to Harvard where Matthew is going, so in between their school vacations I’m going to be here all alone with this new family, except for my same old mother of course. (The “old” is a joke.) My mother said she was really happy that I decided to stay with her instead of going back to St. Martin’s, but that she didn’t want to pressure me either way. I feel that if I’m going to be a writer it would be good experience for me to live in New York where so many things are happening, and Trinity is supposed to be a very good school. It will also be good experience for me to have a normal family, not that I’m any judge of what that is. (I see that I said “good” three times in the last two sentences, which is something I wouldn’t do if I were writing my novel instead of this secret journal. Louis L’Amour was interviewed on the radio and he said using the same word over and over is the thing he changes when he revises his books, so I guess that’s a problem writers have. I’m going to have to watch it.)

  Michael talks to me like I’m a real person with opinions of value, and he also listens. He and my mother are obviously very happy together and in love. There is no tension around here anymore. Cathy is my age, and since she lost twenty pounds for the wedding she’s slinky and pretty. It will be excellent to have her for a friend because I don’t know what to say to girls, and when I’m ready to start going out with them I’ll have to talk. She and I like the same music and the same movies, and even most of the same books, and we both hate math. She admitted that she doesn’t know what to say to boys either, because when she was fat none of them would ever look at her except to say cruddy things. I have decided that between childhood and sex there’s this great big gap, and we’re in it.

  My father came to see me today. The apartment was still full of flowers from the wedding. My mother and Michael are in Europe on their honeymoon trip and Matthew and Sam left this morning for The Wilderness Adventure, which is something Nicholas recommended very highly, so here I was alone with him.

  “So your mother got married again,” he said. It was a comment, not a question, so I didn’t say anything. “Do you like him?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Your mother is a person who should be married,” he said. He walked around looking at the apartment, which he had never seen before. “Dark, isn’t it,” he said. I didn’t say anything. The truth is I never really noticed. “But big,” he said. I nodded. “Some people really need to be married,” he said. “Some don’t.”

  “I guess that means you’re not going to marry your girl friend,” I said.

  “Which one?” he said.

  “The lawyer.”

  “Oh, well, we don’t see each other anymore,” he said. “She wanted to get married and have a baby. She’s young; that would be nice for her. I already have children.”

  Yes, I thought. You have the Senator, whom you pretend you don’t know, and you have Elizabeth, who is supposed to be a secret, and you have Jonathan, whom you never mention, and you have the three of us.

  “When do you start camp?” he asked. I told him and then he took me out to lunch and to see Ghostbusters. I loved it, he hated it. I think he wishes we were all back in the country playing touch football. I don’t. I’m perfectly happy the way we are now. I’m not the one who made our family fall apart, and I’m not the one who put it together again, but that’s the way it is when you’re a kid—you just get swept along. The strange thing is, I think my father feels that’s the way it was with his life as an adult. I don’t think he realizes he had anything to do with it. I think he honestly believes that everything that happened to us was just some kind of ironic destiny.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  By the end of May they were almost finished shooting the picture. Kit was half relieved and half sorry. The relief part was because all through the filming her whole life had been directed toward the work; there was nothing else, no one else, only the total concentration to put herself into her character’s skin, to open herself, to be emotionally truthful, even to bring up things that hurt and use them. At night she fell into bed exhausted at half past nine, turned off her phone and let the answering machine take the calls—and then all night she dreamed about her part and the other people. She had to get up at five in the morning, but she didn’t mind, she was ready, her mind already active with the new day’s challenges.

  On weekends, with her head still full of the part, she had to drag her stuff to the laundry and the cleaners, take a double yoga class both days to keep in shape, buy groceries, and then, finally, study the script. Her father made her let Adeline come once a week to clean her house while she was on the picture, since Kit didn’t have time. Kit agreed only because she wasn’t there anyway and it was convenient. Ordinarily she didn’t want Adeline, or anyone else, hanging around when she wasn’t working; especially Adeline, since she could carry stories back to her parents, and was always full of gross free advice. But now that her parents were divorced and her father had Adeline full time, Kit figured he wanted to get rid of her once in a while for the same reason. She could just imagine the kinds of parties he must be having in his house.

  Or maybe he was just being a solicitous father. She didn’t know anymore. Figuring out a part made her understand more about human nature, that people could be both good and bad in the same instant, so her work made her know more about life instead
of the other way around.

  But the main reason Kit knew she would be relieved when the filming was over was not because of the single-minded discipline, but because of the fear. All through the picture a part of her was always afraid she hadn’t been good enough, because this was the most important role of her life. But then, at the end of every day, Zack told her she had been wonderful, and she felt fantastic. The day was over, she had survived, and he was pleased. He was the authority; she was not. Even when she thought she had been wonderful she wasn’t quite sure. But after Zack reassured her, she would sail home on a cloud of utter rapture. She had survived. She had not failed. She had accomplished something important. She was talented, special. She didn’t have to worry again about not being good enough until the next morning.

  But those few evening hours of totally relaxed and relieved rapture were exactly why she would be sorry when the filming was over.

  That feeling was better than even … sex; which was the best thing she knew. After sex she felt relaxed and satisfied, but never so totally happy and flying. Even when the sexual encounter was a conquest, it was never as triumphant a feeling as the one she had when she knew she had done acting she should be proud of. Her acting was her identity.

  One day Zack asked her if she wanted to come see the dailies.

  “I don’t know,” Kit said, scared.

  “You never ask,” he said, “so I thought I’d ask you.”

  “Maybe I’ll hate myself,” she said.

  “If I thought you would I wouldn’t invite you.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  He seemed to have totally forgotten about the hideous incident in the pool at that brunch party, and she had even managed to put it away in her file of things that didn’t matter. He was apparently having an affair with Emma’s mother, who had told her mother, who told her, that she was very good in the dailies, but what did they know anyway, civilians? Zack was the only one Kit believed.

  Kit sat in the screening room watching herself. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t herself at all, but someone else; and she had total objectivity. That person was fascinating, beautiful. She would want to know that person. You would really care what happened to her.