“Damn,” Fish said, looking out the window before he sat down with his tea. “It looks like it’s going to rain. I want to put a tarp over the fireplace rocks so I don’t have to wait for a sunny day to get them to dry out again.”
“Do you want me to help you?” I asked.
“I can do it,” Fish said. “But I bet my dad would love the company.”
“Do you Scrabble?” Ernie asked.
“Do I play Scrabble?” I asked. “Like the board game?”
“It makes you sound more serious if you say it like it’s a verb.”
“Well, then, yes,” I said. “I do Scrabble.”
“Uh-oh,” Fish said, grabbing his coat. “You don’t know what you’re in for. He’s become a Scrabble pro in the last few years.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m no slouch.” As an only child, there weren’t many games I could play by myself, but Scrabble was one of them. I would switch from one set of tiles to the other on each turn. It wasn’t the same challenge as playing with another person, but it was still a word game. It was less pathetic than when I tried to play Battleship alone.
Fish got the board and another tray table for us to play on before he left.
“You’ll have to do the letters for me,” Ernie said. “I’ll give them to you and tell you where they go.”
“I’m happy to,” I said.
“I make a mess when I do it myself.”
Ernie kept his tiles in the box top in his lap instead of on the small wooden stand. They were shielded by the table, so I couldn’t see them.
I got to go first. I spelled out “honed.”
“So what are you doing with yourself these days,” Ernie asked, handing me a J. He pointed to the spot on the board where he wanted me to start and gave me the letters one by one.
“I’m an account executive at a PR firm,” I said, laying his letters on the board carefully until I’d spelled out “jivey.”
“I used to be in ad sales for the newspaper.” He wobbled his head. “And I hated every minute of it.”
It surprised me to think of Ernie in sales. He was wearing a thick wool sweater, sweatpants, and shearling slippers. He was short, like Fish, only a couple of inches taller than me if he were standing, I guessed. But he had broad shoulders and a square jaw, and I could picture him more easily as a carpenter or a fisherman than a salesman in a suit.
“It’s so fake,” he said. “You’re always pretending to be excited about something you couldn’t give a damn about. Exhausting! And at the end of the day, you haven’t really done anything. All you have to show for yourself is a couple of squares in a newspaper, filled with ads for car insurance or business college.”
“That’s how I feel about my job,” I said. “Most of the time. There are good days.”
“I watch Gil,” Ernie said, “and I wish I’d had the smarts to be like him. Even on a bad day at work, he’s still changing someone’s life.”
We played and chatted. I boiled more water and filled our mugs again.
Fish came in wet and dirty and said he was going to take a quick shower.
“We’re fine,” Ernie said. Then he smiled at me. “I shouldn’t answer for you. Are you fine?”
“I’m fine,” I called out.
We were neck and neck in our game. I was just three points behind Ernie when he handed me his remaining letters, one by one, to spell out “quixotry.” I wasn’t entirely sure it was a word, but I was too polite to say so.
“Challenge me,” he said, giving me his half smile. “I can tell you want to.”
“I’m sure if you say it’s a word . . .”
“Challenge me,” he said. “It’s more fun that way. The stakes are high! For the win!”
“Okay,” I said. “I challenge you.”
“Mean it!” he said, waving his fist at me.
“I CHALLENGE YOU!” I cried, waving my fist back at him. I was embarrassed as soon as I did it, but Ernie was thrilled.
“Wonderful!” he said, clapping the heels of his hands together.
Ernie pointed to the bookshelf. “Dictionary!”
I went over to look for the dictionary. Chip followed me, looking up at the shelf too, like he wanted me to know that he could step in and help if I needed it. In front of the dictionary was a picture of Fish in his graduation gown. He had one arm around Ernie, who was handsome and healthy, his smile straight, and his hand making rabbit ears behind Fish’s head. Fish’s other arm was around a woman with curly brown hair, big brown eyes, and a nervous smile. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking past it. She and Fish had the same nose, straight and narrow through the bridge. It was the day Fish worked up the nerve to tell Jessie he loved her. He must not have done it yet. The smile on his face was real. I wondered where his mother was. I hadn’t heard him talk about her at all.
I grabbed the dictionary and brought it back to Ernie. Chip followed me and sat down at the side of Ernie’s chair.
“Susan left me,” Ernie said, gesturing toward the picture. “After the stroke. She couldn’t handle it.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s amazing,” Ernie said, “that me and Susan—both cowards—could make a man like Gilbert. He never complains, even with all of this.” He shook his hand.
“He’s a good guy,” I said.
Ernie’s mouth crinkled into a strange smirk, and I worried for a moment that he might cry. Chip got up and solemnly licked Ernie’s hand like he was trying to comfort him. Ernie took a deep breath and shook his hand up and down. “Read the word. Look it up,” he said, when he could talk again.
I used the thumb imprint at the side of the book to find the Qs and flipped through the pages until I found it. “Quixotry,” I read out loud. “Visionary schemes.”
“See,” he said. “It is a word.” Then he laughed. “Actually, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.”
I laughed too.
“It’s nice to see Fish happy,” Ernie said. “The old Jessie Morgan made him miserable.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling my heart beat in every single inch of my being.
He bumped his hand against the side of his nose, like the way people do to say they’re in on your secret. Or maybe he was just referring to Jessie’s supposed nose job. “I mean you’re a new girl, and I like it.”
I wished I had the courage to challenge Ernie again, to nail down exactly what he meant.
“So,” Fish said, when he drove me back to Myra’s house, “I’m thirty-one years old and I live with my dad. Do you still like me?”
“I think I like you even more,” I said.
There was a purple sedan in Myra’s driveway, next to Myra’s Honda.
“You coming in?” I asked, when he shifted the truck into park.
“No,” he said. “Heather is here. I think you guys have some girl time ahead of you.” He got out of the truck and ran around to open my door. “I promised Robbie I’d help him finish up a motor repair that’s giving him trouble. And I can’t dance to Janet Jackson to save my life.”
He walked me to Myra’s door and kissed me on the doorstep, just like the end of a date on a TV show. Myra must have seen us. She flashed the porch light.
She opened the door just enough to stick her head through. “Ooh,” she said, and then shut the door again.
Fish laughed. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.
“I hope so,” I said. I watched him walk to his car and drive away before I opened the door to join Myra and Heather.
I had a sleepover party at my house once. Fourth grade. My parents were still together then. My mom was having a good streak. We made invitations for the party on the kitchen table, and she didn’t even yell at me when I squeezed the tube too hard and got glitter glue e
verywhere. There was a spot of purple glitter that didn’t get cleaned up, on the seat of the chair where I always sat. I never scratched it off. It was like a reminder that it had all really happened.
The biggest problem with having my mom for a mother was that when she wanted to pretend something hadn’t happened the way it really had, she just acted as if the reality she wanted was true. So my memories were all twisted around varying levels of truth and lies. Things I actually remembered mixed with things my mother told me happened. Sometimes the lies were like looking through a piece of gauze, because I could still see behind them. But sometimes the truth was the gauze and the lies were like silhouettes. Sometimes I forgot which was which, and there were two versions of a story, but I couldn’t remember which one to believe.
But I know I had a sleepover birthday party when I was in fourth grade, and I know we made invitations with purple glitter for every single girl in my class. And I know that at the party, around midnight, when we were supposed to be asleep but were waiting until the clock struck twelve to see what would happen if we said “Bloody Mary” into the mirror three times, my parents started fighting.
What began as hushed, sharp whispers turned into my mother’s voice exploding from the bedroom, and my father yelling that he was tired of her bullshit. Some of the girls laughed, but most of them didn’t, and in the green light from the VCR, I could see the horror on their faces. Tracy Witzleben pulled her sleeping bag over her head and cried.
On Monday no one made room for me or Tracy at any of the lunch tables. We got stuck sitting together at an empty table by the smelly garbage cans. We didn’t talk. I’m pretty sure she hated me.
I didn’t work up the nerve to have friends over again until the Four Amigos, in junior high school. But when things started to get bad with my mom, I knew how hard I needed to work to keep it a secret. I never had another birthday party. Drinks and dinner with Luanne don’t count.
Even under the current circumstances, having a sleepover with Myra and Heather felt much safer than my fourth grade party. My mother was all the way across the country, for one thing.
Myra’s house smelled warm and garlicky. Heather was in the kitchen cooking, and something sizzled loudly in a big wok. She used a pair of chopsticks instead of a spatula. The steam from the pan made her blond curls frizz around her face.
“What are you making?” I asked, walking into the kitchen.
“Pad see ew,” she said, waving her chopsticks at me. “I found the hugest shrimp at the public market today. They’re like fists!”
“I’ve never been particularly keen on eating my hand,” Myra said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, scissors at the ready, thumbing through a magazine, with pieces torn from the pages piled in front of her.
Heather gave her a look.
“What?” Myra said, laughing. “It smells amazing, but if you were going to write it as a menu item, ‘fist-sized shrimp’ wouldn’t necessarily be the most compelling description.”
“Are you opening a restaurant?” I asked.
“I wish!” Heather said. “It’s a pipe dream. Robbie needs me at the store. And we don’t have the kind of start-up funds lying around to make it happen.”
“I keep telling her that she should get a job at a restaurant to start making the right connections,” Myra said. She cut paper dolls out of the magazine scraps. A model from one magazine, a skirt from another. The beautiful blue sky, from a perfume ad, cut into a blouse.
“But who will do Robbie’s books?” Heather said. She squirted oil into the pan, and the sizzle turned into a roar.
“They’re called accountants,” Myra said.
Heather held up her hand and gave Myra the finger over her shoulder.
“I’m just saying,” Myra said, “you’re talented. Don’t let fear stop you. You need to think about what you’d do if you knew you couldn’t fail.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” Heather said. “Because, obviously, I’d fly.” She piled noodles into three bowls and brought them over to us. Myra swept her paper dolls into a pile at the side of the table, to make room.
“You would?” I asked. “Because I think I’d swim the Atlantic.”
“I don’t know,” Myra said. “Just because you wouldn’t fail doesn’t mean you wouldn’t get really freaking cold.”
“True,” I said.
“I guess I’m just saying that it’s a little different for you,” Heather said to Myra. “And it’s a bullshit mantra—‘What would you do if you knew you wouldn’t fail?’—the whole idea that passion counts for everything. Because it doesn’t. Tons of people want to be fashion designers. They couldn’t all be you. Tons of people want to be chefs. Some of them have to settle for being bookkeepers. If I’m doing the books and Robbie has a bad month, he doesn’t have to pay me. If he hires an accountant or an employee, he loses the wiggle room. It’s not the same as your business. You don’t have a mortgage. You don’t have a husband counting on you.”
I worried it was about to get ugly. I wasn’t sure it was necessarily the safest thing in the world to point out to a woman who’d just had a run-in with her married ex that she didn’t have a husband. But Myra seemed to take it in the spirit in which it was intended. There was enough history, enough love built up, that they could be blunt. They could say the difficult things.
“I know,” Myra said. “I do get it. It’s just I think you’re so talented that if you took the leap, you wouldn’t fail. Not everyone can be a chef, but I honestly believe you could. Because this”—she pointed to her bowl with a chopstick—“is like the best food there ever was.”
I nodded. It was. The noodles were super hot, with just the right amount of salty and sweet.
“And, you know,” Myra said, “I’d tell you if I thought otherwise.”
“Oh,” Heather said, sighing. “You are such a pain in my ass.” She reached into Myra’s bowl with her chopsticks and stole one of her shrimp. “Like fists, I tell you.” She smiled a crazy big smile and Myra retaliated by stealing a shrimp from Heather’s bowl.
I was quiet while I ate, focusing carefully on balancing bits of vegetables between my chopsticks. Luanne and I never had talks like this. We always skirted on the edge of trying not to offend each other. We really only scratched the surface. I wondered who I’d be if I’d had friends to say the hard stuff.
Myra insisted on doing the dishes. She wouldn’t let me or Heather help. “Cooks and guests don’t clean,” she said, shaking her head.
Heather and I refilled Myra’s huge green glass goblets with wine and sat out on the back steps.
“Where did you learn how to cook?”
“My mom taught me,” Heather said, taking a sip of her wine. The goblet was so big it looked like she could drown in it. “She cooked so well, remember? I never bothered to learn. But then after I married Robbie . . .” She stopped and held her breath. Her face was pinched, her lips pressed together until they were almost white.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded, but she took a minute to collect herself, taking another sip of wine. “After I married Robbie, I had her teach me.” She made a funny sound, like a cross between a gasp and a squeak. I thought she was going to tell me that her mom had died. I searched my brain for the right thing to say. My attachment to my parents wasn’t the same as other people’s. I didn’t want them to die, but sometimes the idea of them simply not existing anymore calmed me. I’m sure that wasn’t the way Heather felt about her mother. I’m sure her death left a hole, a space that couldn’t be filled. I wondered what it was like to have the kind of mother who made life easier, who taught you how to cook. I couldn’t imagine having a wonderful mother and losing her.
But then Heather burst into tears and said, “I wanted to be the kind of mom she is.” She sobbed so hard that her wine sloshed over the edge of the goblet and splashed o
n the steps. I took the goblet from her and set it down next to me. I put my arm around her and hugged. I didn’t know what else to do.
“We’ve been trying for a really long time,” Heather said into my shoulder. Her voice was muffled and wet.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
She sniffed and pulled away, wiping her face with her hands. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She took a few deep breaths. “You don’t need me crying all over you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s really okay.”
Heather laughed. “You spend high school being terrified of getting knocked up, you know?” She reached across me and grabbed her wine.
I nodded, but I was so far from knowing. In high school I’m not even sure I thought sex was a thing that actually happened. I didn’t kiss anyone until I got to college. And even then it wasn’t like it was a frequent occurrence.
“Now we’re actually trying and it just never happens. I went to the doctor a couple of months ago.” She looked like she was going to say something more but didn’t. She put her wine down and picked at a splinter on the railing of the steps.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Everything is fine.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said. “Maybe it’ll just happen when—”
“Do you think,” she said, “since you’re here . . .” Her voice trailed off. She pried the splinter loose.
I thought for a moment that she was going to ask for one of my eggs or wanted me to carry a child for them. I took a big gulp of wine.
“Do you think you could talk to Robbie?” she asked. “He listens to you. All my tests came back fine, so now Robbie is supposed to go, you know, give a sample.” She smiled awkwardly. “But he won’t.” She used the pointier end of the splinter to poke at the pad of her opposite thumb, watching as her skin yielded to the pressure instead of breaking. “He’s missed two appointments. He says he’ll go, but then he doesn’t.”
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