by Bernie Su
We were all sitting in the formal living room—which is really just Dad’s den, but Mom forced him to hide all his papers and desk stuff and move the “good” couch from the regular living room in there. Then she made him feng shui the entire space. (Another aside: I know formal living rooms are a relic from when people “paid calls” on each other and sat sipping tea, but when did we stop having formal living rooms? The eighties?)
Mom had also demanded that her daughters dress appropriately. For my mother, “appropriately” means something akin to a debutante ball. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had lace parasols in a closet somewhere, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice. Luckily, Jane got home from her work in time to bring some fashion expertise and sanity to the situation, and we all looked normal, if a little dressy.
“You look amazing,” Bing said to Jane, as he sat next to her. “Is that new?”
“Oh, my, is it from Marc Jacobs’s fall collection? You have samples at your store?” Caroline fawned, reaching forward to touch the skirt.
“No, actually—this is a vintage dress I altered,” Jane replied.
While that made Bing light up with admiration, I couldn’t help but notice that Caroline dropped the material instantly.
“My Jane can make a ball gown out of sack cloth, if she puts her mind to it,” my mom said, sitting on the arm of my dad’s chair. “She is so talented. And smart. If only that job of hers appreciated her skills. To be honest with you, I think her employers are using the economy as an excuse to keep her pay low. Why, with a little more money, imagine what Jane could do—start her own clothing line, move out on her own. Of course, you don’t need to imagine, Bing, you know.”
“Erm,” my father interjected, picking up the bottle Bing had brought. “Shall we try this wine?”
Whatever conversation my dad had with my mom earlier, it must have been extreme to have unsettled her like this. Because my mother would never—never—talk about money in front of new acquaintances. Especially ones she wanted to impress.
It’s also possible that she’d been taking nips of some cooking sherry in the kitchen. Sometimes the cooking itself isn’t enough to de-stress her.
But Bing didn’t seem to notice anything untoward, launching into a polite conversation about the wine with my father, how they had picked it up at a local winery, and venturing that perhaps he and Jane could go there sometime, make a day of it.
From there, we repaired to the dining room (we only have the real one, thank goodness), where Mom served everyone an . . . international array of cuisine. The evening was still going okay at this point, which was when Lydia decided to make herself known.
I can only guess that she was pretty bored and no one was paying much attention to her.
“So, um, Bing,” she started, scooting her chair closer to his. As I was Mom’s assistant in the kitchen, I had to be near the kitchen door, and thus was not able to position myself to block Bing’s non-Jane side from familial intrusion. “You’re, like, a med student, right?”
“Yes,” Bing smiled, a little cautious. After all, he’d been thoroughly questioned already about his medical studies at UCLA, his choice of specialty, and the weird growth on my dad’s big toe.
“Do you, like, examine people yet?”
“Not yet—I still have another year to go before we see patients on our own.”
“Then, how do you, like, practice? Do you—oh, my God—play Doctor with your fellow med students? You’d have to, like, look at their privates and stuff. That would be so crazy. You’d have to see them naked.” Lydia’s eyes went wide. “And I just got the best idea of how to pick up guys.” She turned back to Bing. “Do you have a stethoscope? Can I borrow it?”
“Actually—”
“OMG, can you imagine the number of guys I can get to take their shirt off, just by saying I need to listen to their heartbeat? Good way to find out if they are too hairy to take home first, am I right? Caroline, you must have tried it before. No? Bing, please can I borrow your stethoscope? Please? Pleaaase?”
“Lydia,” I warned, kicking her under the table.
“What?” Lydia answered with a responding kick. “What did I say?”
That’s Lydia for you. She has no idea when she’s gone too far for fancy-dinner conversation. Or for regular conversation. Even my mother, who usually indulges Lydia’s enthusiasms (after all, boy-crazy is only one step removed from marriage-crazy), had turned a mottled shade of pink.
Swiftly, I tried to adjust Lydia’s line of questioning to something more palatable. “So, Bing, when do you head back to school?”
“Oh. Um . . .”
“My grad program is on a trimester schedule,” I continued. “When we get off in June, I actually don’t have to go back until October.”
“And sometime in the middle of September, Lizzie will start to go stir-crazy without lectures to attend and papers to write,” Jane finished for me, giving me a smile from across the table.
“Usually, it’s August,” I replied.
“Well, I have some time,” Bing answered. When Caroline cleared her throat, he continued. “Until I have to go back to school, that is. And I’m lucky that my sister could take time from her own work to help get me settled.”
Caroline smiled graciously at him. “And decorate! Which is really why I came—Bing’s idea of furnishing is an armchair and TV. Besides, who wouldn’t like to paint on a blank canvas?” she said to Jane, who giggled.
“And does Darcy like to decorate, too?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.
“No, decorating’s not really his thing.” Bing laughed. “He’s just hanging out with me. He doesn’t love telecommuting, but he can still pop up to San Francisco when he needs to.”
Yeah, I highly doubt that. More likely, he inherited his business, and it’s run by people who actually know what they’re doing so he can take weeks off at a time to “just hang” with his buddies.
“But whatever are you going to do about that gorgeous house of yours?” Mom interjected. She fanned herself lightly, the picture of Southern fragility. She was stuck on the idea of Bing going back to school—i.e., leaving without her having secured him for Jane. “It’s not meant to be a summer house. It’s meant to be a family home, with children and dogs, and . . .”
“My brother’s a very busy young man,” Caroline jumped in, saving us all from Mom dropping her widest hints. “But don’t worry, if there’s anyone who can handle the rigors of being a medical student and then a doctor along with the joys of homeownership, it’s my brother.”
“You know, there’s an excellent medical program right here . . .” my mom tried again, but thankfully she was stopped this time by someone with a little more force.
“Well, my dear, I believe it is time for dessert!” my dad said, rising from the table. “She’s been putting together something special for tonight—she wouldn’t even let me see what it was.” He smiled at the guests.
“Oh, yes! You all stay right here—I’ll be back in a moment!” Mom said brightly, bringing attention back to where she (read: we) were comfortable having it: the food. It was admittedly delicious (which is standard for my mom; she really knows how to cook), but in a terrifyingly overelaborate way (which is not standard, and you will see the terror it invokes in a moment).
My mom trotted off to the kitchen, and after refusing assistance from her appointed helper (me) came back with a wheelie cart.
And a blowtorch.
“Bananas flambé!” she cried. “Girls, this is how I snared your father.”
My dad looked a little taken aback, but he played along. “Yes, she was training to be a table-side dessert chef at a restaurant when we met.” There was a brief pause. “Thirty years ago.”
“And I remember exactly how it goes—don’t you worry, honey.” My mother smiled, and turned on the blowtorch.
I think you can guess what happened next.
I doubt we will ever get the smell of burned bananas out of the dining room dr
apes.
Once we’d put out the tablecloth—Dad fetching the fire extinguisher and Bing smothering the flames with a casserole pot lid; I like to think they bonded during this small crisis—Mom looked ready to break down in tears.
My dad only had to shoot me one look for the appointed helper to spring into action.
“Jane, I have a thought,” I said. “Why don’t we go out and grab a drink?”
“Oh, yes!” she said gratefully. “The night is still young.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Bing approved, with visible relief. “Carter’s Bar?”
“I’ll text Charlotte, have her meet us.” We would need reinforcements to get over the trauma of dinner.
“And I’ll tweet Darcy,” Caroline added, her fingers already flying on her phone. Which I had actually seen her do a couple of times during dinner. Great—that meant chances were Darcy was informed of the Great Bennet Dinner Debacle already (™ the Universe).
I had been trying to do a video update during this dinner, running up and down the stairs to film short snippets in my room as the meal spiraled out of control. (Considering the number of times I excused myself to “use the bathroom,” I can only imagine that Bing and Caroline now think I have an incontinence issue.) I wanted to see if immediacy added to the energy of my posts (boy, did it!), but I had to abandon the story half told to go to Carter’s.
Where the second half of the evening was, if you can believe it, even more interesting than the first.
And once again, Lydia played her part.
At first things were going well. The addition of Charlotte and the atmosphere of Carter’s helped to normalize everyone. Also, alcohol.
Darcy, of course, kept to himself. Even when he was sitting at the table with us. His mouth shut and his chin pushed back in a look of complete condemnation of anything, you know, fun.
Saturday night and the bar was packed, so of course Lydia would run into someone she knew.
“Oh, my God, guys, this is Ben from school! Ben, my sisters Lizzie and Jane.” Lydia dragged a nice-looking guy over to our table. “Hi—my name’s David, actu—” he said, extending his hand to me. But before he could finish, Lydia cut him off.
“Bing! Ben and I were just talking and we decided that it would be so awesome of you if you threw a party. Like an end-of-semester thing. Your house is perfect, and Ben’s band could play.”
“But, I don’t have a—”
“Whatever, I would be the cutest groupie you ever saw.” Lydia gave David-not-Ben a once-over. “It’s too bad I didn’t bring my stethoscope with me,” she sighed, her words beginning to slur. “So, what do you think, Bing?”
Bing was a couple of beers in at this point, and I didn’t blame him for it. After all, he’d survived dinner with my mom, and he had a driver. But this made his eagerness to please susceptible to those who always had an angle. Like Lydia. “You know what, a party sounds like a great idea, Lydia. Thank you for sush—suggesting it.” Then he turned his smile back to Jane. “Would you like to come to a party at my house?”
She smiled back at him, and they were lost in their own little world.
“Yes!” Lydia fist-pumped, taking this drunken agreement as the full-on promise she would inevitably force it to be. Of that I have no doubt. Then her eyes hit on something on the far side of the bar. “No way! When did Carter’s get Whac-A-Mole? Come on, Ben! Let’s play!”
“It’s David—” But Lydia didn’t seem to care, as she dragged him off toward the game.
I turned around. In my rush to get us here and out of the house, I hadn’t noticed that Carter’s had really spruced up the joint. There was new felt on the pool table, and yes, a Whac-A-Mole game, and . . .
“Oh, Lizzie,” Charlotte said, eyes wide. “Is that Just Dance?”
I am a sucker for Just Dance.
“Oh, my God.” I grinned. “Char, play with me.”
“Hell no. Not in public.”
“Oh, come on!”
“If you want to embarrass yourself, go right ahead. I’m fine right here.”
Embarrass myself? As if. I rule at Just Dance.
“If you like, I’ll—” Darcy cleared his throat, but I didn’t catch the rest because I was digging in my purse for quarters.
“That’s fine,” I said, pulling out three bucks in quarters, my emergency parking-meter money. “I’ll just play against the computer. And kill it. Like I always do.”
I didn’t kill it.
In my defense, the computer on Carter’s game must be different from the computer on the home game, because it started doing some beyond-crazy steps. Did I accidentally hit the setting for cephalopod? However, I had a good time, and by the time I got off the machine I was laughing, and Charlotte, Jane, and Bing cheered me when I finished.
But Darcy? No, Darcy had removed himself to the wall. The dark shadows that are his natural habitat. He was talking to Caroline. Charlotte walked by and she immediately shut up, so I know they were talking about me and my spectacular failure. So I looked Darcy dead in the eye, just to let him know that I knew he was talking about me.
And what did he do?
He started texting. Fake texting.
As well he should, the little snob. (Okay, the tall snob.)
I rejoined the table after that, and after laughing at my Just Dance prowess, I told Charlotte what I did to Darcy.
“Uh, that’s not what they were talking about,” she said.
“Then what was it?” I asked.
“Well, they were talking about you, but not in the way you think.”
“What way were they talking about me, then?” Could they have been discussing something worse than my dancing? Was my bra strap showing or did my skirt flip up?
Charlotte was about to answer, when the bartender, the aptly named Carter, came over to our table.
“Hey,” he said, glowering. “You need to get your sister out of here, or I’m calling the cops. This is a public place.”
Jane and I whipped our heads around, searching for Lydia. She was by the Whac-A-Mole game, all right, but what she was whacking wasn’t a mole.
Her shirt was pretty much off, and her hand was down David-not-Ben’s pants. They seemed to have forgotten the existence of other people.
Jane and I were on our feet, immediately sober.
“Hey, Lydia, we have to go home now,” I said, and then turned to her partner in crime. “Sorry, David.” Who, for his part, at least seemed sheepish about his state, and the encroaching reality that yes, he was on second base in a crowded bar against a Whac-A-Mole machine.
“No,” she whined.
“Lydia . . .” I tried, but she pushed me away.
“No!” she yelled, belligerent. “I wanna keep playing the game!”
“Well, you’re out of quarters, honey,” Jane said in her nicest voice. “There are more in the car.”
Lydia blinked at Jane. “Can Ben come to the car, too?”
The noncommittal noise Jane made was enough to have Lydia willingly go with her sisters. We said our good-byes to Bing and the others quickly and got Lydia into the car. I was the designated driver, and I even dropped David-not-Ben off at his place on the way. Luckily, by that point, Lydia was asleep and could not protest the loss of her gaming partner.
This is what worries me the most about Lydia. She isn’t a thoughtless person. She can actually be really sweet. But she is careless. And mostly, she’s careless about herself. She’s home right now and asleep in my bed, thank God, but what if we hadn’t been there to take care of her? What if she’d been out on her own, met up with David, and ended up getting arrested, like Carter threatened? Or ended up in David’s car, and he drove her home drunk? Or they ended up together somewhere, and she passed out, like she did in the car on the way home—only this time, Jane and I weren’t there?
Anything could have happened to her. Yes, women should be able to go out and have fun without fear of consequences the way men do—but that’s not the reality. T
here are a lot of unenlightened douchebags out there. And my biggest fear is that Lydia is going to fall prey to one of them.
But right now, I’m tired, and Lydia seems to be in the non-thrashing part of her REM cycle, so I’m going to hold my baby sister and try to get some sleep.
FRIDAY, MAY 25TH
I am in term paper/studying hell, and this is the time that Charlotte decides to annoy me about annoying things. Namely, Darcy.
“I’m telling you, he would have played Just Dance with you.”
“I’m only decent enough,” I said. “Why would he play Just Dance with me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t think you’re decent enough anymore.”
“No, after my performance, one has to assume he thinks I’m worse.”
Charlotte shot me her patented “you’re-an-idiot” look. Which is awfully close to her normal face, but after years of study I can tell the difference.
“You didn’t hear what he said to Caroline,” Charlotte said. “I did. He was saying that you actually looked really pretty when you were dancing. Especially your eyes. That you have ‘fine eyes.’ ”
“And by that he meant my eyes are just fine. Passable,” I countered. “Again, decent enough.”
Charlotte just rolled her eyes this time. “Or he was trying to give you a compliment. He might just be, oh, I don’t know . . . shy?”
This wasn’t the first time Charlotte had tried to convince me Darcy is anything other than the boorish snob I know he is. Ever since that night at Carter’s, she’s been on a mission. But that’s Charlotte—always looking for a narrative where there isn’t one. And it was nice to see her in a good mood. More often than not these days, she’s all about schoolwork. And Charlotte is normally very practical, but that practicality is starting to feel very . . . cynical.
Again, I think she isn’t telling me something, and it’s starting to itch at the back of my mind.
“Shy is unassuming. Meek,” I replied, keeping on subject. “Darcy is not meek. He makes his opinion very well known.”
“Apparently not.”
“Char, stop it, okay?” I couldn’t help it. “I can’t joke with you right now about this stuff. I have four term papers due this week, my write-up on the videos for Dr. Gardiner’s class, three exams to take, and then sixty essays to grade. Not to mention finals are in a few short weeks. I can’t even think about what I’m going to do for a video this week, let alone play along with your wild Darcy theories.”
