No One Tells Everything

by Rae Meadows

  “Hi!” she says, kissing Grace’s dad and then her mom on the cheek. “Look at you,” she says, enveloping Grace in a hug. “Come on in, folks.”

  The house, as her mother has told her, was redone a few years ago. Grace feels like she has stepped into a design showcase for country chic, complete with pine floors, distressed cabinets, and an enormous stone fireplace. Black-and-white portraits of their kids—two boys and a girl—are hung all over the house. Grace used to baby-sit them when the sunken living room had rust shag carpeting and a sectional couch that wrapped around half the room.

  Their yellow lab, Louise, whom she loved as a girl, is long since dead, but a replacement, a little thinner and paler, greets them with tail-thumping interest. And then Mr. Chenowith, Harvey, appears from the back patio in madras pants and a panama hat, with wide arms and a loud “Look who’s here!”

  Aside from being her mother’s maybe-paramour, he was the neighborhood flirt, always telling the women how beautiful they looked and the girls what heartbreakers they were sure to be, pulling them onto his lap, well past the age of appropriateness.

  He picks Grace up in a hug and she’s afraid he might start tickling her like he used to. He is an avuncular version of his old pervy self.

  “You lucky girl, getting your mother’s looks,” he says.

  “Jackson,” he says to her father with mock seriousness. “We need you back out there on the course. Newton is pulling us all down with him.”

  They pump hands and Harvey slaps him on the shoulder.

  “Gorgeous, as usual,” he says to her mother, who shakes her head at him but smiles.

  Once, when Grace was babysitting here, she found a Hustler magazine in their bedside table while snooping around after putting the kids to bed. She was twelve. Hers was not a naked household like some were. She had never seen a penis. She knew the biological basics of sex, mainly from the Where Do Babies Come From? film they showed in school, but she was still a kid.

  On the cover of the issue was the face of a woman in a box with the title “Giving Head,” the meaning of which was entirely lost on Grace. Inside there was the Hustler Honey Centerfold on a chaise lounge, sitting knees up, spread-eagled. “Beaver Hunt” featured readers who sent in “snatchshots” taken by their boyfriends. There were cartoons about child molesters that she didn’t understand but made her blush anyway. Photo upon photo of vaginas, penises, insouciant bodies. She was fascinated and repulsed and confused and riveted. Each image in the magazine was etched into her memory. She felt like she had peeked through a window into the secret lives of adults.

  When the Chenowiths returned that night, Grace was too ashamed to look them in the eye. She thought that when Mr. Chenowith drove her home, he would say something because he could tell. Although she only saw the magazine that one night—it was gone the next time she looked—she’s afraid that no amount of chintz and old farmhouse furniture will make her remember this place any differently.

  “Okay, what’ll it be?” Harvey bellows, shaking his already empty glass of ice toward them.

  He tends to the libations with expert quickness, erring on the strong side. With drinks in hand, they go out back where a plate of steaks rests next to the smoking grill.

  The sun has fallen behind the western woods, filtering through the branches and new foliage. The sky above is inky blue. Fireflies begin to wink. Grace excuses herself, refreshes her vodka tonic, and takes a stroll around the expansive yard, shoes in hand, the grass cool and soft. The dog trots along somewhere behind her. The backyard slopes down with a curve—one of her and Callie’s favorite sledding places—and they have since put in a pool, not yet uncovered for the season. She hears a child cry and peers through the hedge to next door. There’s a large swing set in a state of half-installation where the Meltzers’ badminton court used to be, before they filed for bankruptcy and fled to Arizona.

  ###

  By the time the strawberries with Devonshire cream come around for dessert, Grace is stuffed and her head swims. Marjorie is talking about her youngest, Scott, who graduated from Princeton and has joined Morgan Stanley as an analyst in Boston but she hopes will settle a little closer to home.

  “Oh wouldn’t that be great if he moved back to Cleveland?” Grace’s mother chimes in.

  Grace wonders if her mother ever had a secret life of her own. An affair with Harvey Chenowith, smoking cigarettes, an amorous pen pal, shoplifting candy bars, visiting the hospital nursery, writing sestinas. Something that was hers alone.

  Alcohol loosens Grace’s father’s stubborn speech but he’s still not comfortable with his thickened tongue. He stares off into the dark.

  Harvey takes it upon himself to liven things up.

  “So, Ms. Grace,” he says. “Do you have a boyfriend out there in New York City?”

  He raises his eyebrows together in quick succession.

  Her mom giggles and says, “Good luck getting anything out of her, Harvey.”

  “No,” Grace says, laughing a little.

  She feels the breeze on her neck and she shifts in her seat, the iron of the chair now cold.

  “No? Come on, give me a little something here,” he says, shaking her shoulder. “Tell us about your romantic adventures.”

  “What, do you want to know about my sex life?” she asks.

  “Grace,” her mother says, shooting her a stern look.

  “Now we’re talking,” Harvey says, and claps his hands.

  “You know the Stevensons,” Marjorie says to the table as she scrapes the remains of the desserts into her bowl. “Their son Rob is in New York, I think. He’s probably about your age, Grace. A lawyer. Not married.”

  “She’s not interested in normal things,” her father slurs.

  “What?” Grace asks.

  He finishes his latest drink.

  “Look what you’re missing out on,” Harvey says, opening his arms wide with barely veiled irony. “Don’t you want to get married, buy a house, have kids?”

  “Keep Hustler in the bedside table?” Grace asks.

  Marjorie drops a fork, sending a splash of strawberry-stained cream across her sandaled foot.

  “I was dating someone for a while,” Grace adds. “But he was married.” Her mother’s face goes taught. “Now I just stick to casual sex.”

  “Jesus, Grace,” her mother says, as Harvey laughs.

  “That’s the spirit,” he says.

  Her dad looks at her with drunk, bitter eyes.

  “What?” she asks, sloshed too.

  “Nothing,” he says, opening his palms to her. “It’s your life.”

  “How about you, Mr. Chenowith? Any philandering you’d like to catch us up on?”

  He laughs but stops.

  “Or maybe you want to answer that one, Mom?”

  “Okay, then,” her mother says standing. “Marjorie, Harvey, thank you.”

  Her chair scrapes against the brick as she moves to go.

  Grace lurches ahead.

  “Callie would have been different, right Dad?” she asks him, quietly. “She never would have ruined a perfectly nice evening.”

  He looks at her, startled. Something passes between them, imperceptible to everyone else.

  “The good thing is that we won’t remember this tomorrow,” Harvey says.

  “Speak for yourself, Harvey,” Marjorie mutters, getting up.

  “I’ll see you two at home,” Grace’s mother says.

  “Susan, I’ll walk you,” Marjorie says, pulling her sweater from the back of the chair.

  The women disappear down the dark driveway.

  “Shall the rest of us retire inside for a nightcap?” Harvey asks, snuffing out the last remaining lit candle nub. “Maybe Grace can enlighten us on other subjects.”

  “I’m going for a walk,” Grace says, stumbling, as she catches her heel on the chair.

  “Better take your training wheels, young lady,” Harvey says.

  She leaves the men in the glow of the light fr
om the kitchen.

  “No one gives a shit about the truth,” she says as she nears the end of the driveway, but the night swallows her words and the men have already gone inside.

  CHAPTER 21

  You have said to your mother, “Please don’t,” but she just smiles and says, “It’ll be so much fun,” in that hopeful, cheery voice, the same one she uses to turn down the phone solicitors who call during dinner. She has hired a caterer, and oddly, a carnival supply company, as if you are still a child and there is time to fix you, to set you straight, to make you normal. The only people you could rightly invite would be Steve and Kelly, and you could casually mention it to Hadley, but instead your mom has managed to invite your entire class as a graduation celebration. If you think about it too much it becomes a scary montage of garish faces laughing at you. Your dad is not involved with the planning except for shelling out the dough.

  You feel the old eggbeater at work in your head, stirring up the morass of drift, failure, and confusion. And anger. Always anger.

  You want to hide, you want to be gone, you want to disintegrate like those swirling flocks of birds that move as one but then scatter into a million tiny points. You want to shake your mom, that nice lady who gave birth to you and your impossible desires. Mess up her neat hair, destroy her ordered house, kick her until she calls off the party through broken teeth and bloody lips.

  You’re able to stuff the violence back in a cage. And instead you masturbate to you and Hadley on the hood of your car. But it doesn’t work all the way and you get limp and you sneak out to your BMW and fly through the contained suburban streets.

  Downtown. Dirty and mean and pulsing with filthy life. You go west to where the dealers and the whores troll, and in your fancy car you circle the decaying blocks and their vile humanity looking for something, anything.

  Yeah, you’ve got forty bucks to get off with her ugly vacant mouth and you feel the tide of heat and anger rise in you once again, her small neck so close to your fat hands choking the steering wheel. You wonder if this makes you no longer a virgin.

  Then you drive home and nothing has changed but at least you are exhausted. You fall asleep curled up on the floor beneath your window and focus on how you will reinvent yourself at Emeryville College. You will be thin and handsome and comfortable and smooth. You will fit.

  CHAPTER 22

  Grace used to go for months—and one time in her twenties, for years—not thinking of Callie’s death. Of the car. The glare. The blood. These days, it’s more and more like an infected wound, deepening, itching, burning. Her life careened off-track at the moment of impact. She remembers there was a woodpecker, the tap-tap-tap of its beak against an oak trunk in the background, underneath the call of the cicadas. She remembers that Mr. Jablonski, the old widower who lived in the only small house on the street, had already driven by once that day, probably on the way to one of his church meetings. She had a fiery sunburn on her back from falling asleep under the sprinkler. The night before she had been awakened by the sound of her parents fighting, their words spit and hurled, then her mom crying. She tiptoed to Callie’s room but, as usual, her sister just slept right through it. She remembers thinking that if there were a fire, she wouldn’t help Callie down the rope ladder that was kept in a trunk in her closet, that Callie would be on her own.

  ###

  “I haven’t told my lawyer I talk to you. He wouldn’t be too happy if he found out. He doesn’t want me to talk to anyone.”

  Charles sounds low today, like getting the words out requires tremendous effort.

  “What about what you want?” Grace asks.

  “That hasn’t always been the best guide.”

  “It still matters.”

  “Do you know what death method they use in New York?”

  “You shouldn’t think about it.”

  Lethal injection, she thinks.

  “If I’m sentenced to die, I hope I can figure out a way to kill myself before they can,” he says.

  “Charles, I’ve had times when I’ve thought about that kind of thing. Am I high enough if I jumped? Am I going fast enough if I crashed? It’s terrible to think like that.”

  “It’s especially hard in the late afternoon, just before the sun starts to set. Even though I’m glad I can see the sky through my tiny window, I’m anxious about the darkness. Dr. Jerry said that the stress of the approaching trial wreaks havoc on a person’s emotions. He said he’s seen inmates hallucinate.”

  Charles inhales, and then exhales before continuing.

  “You’ve seen her picture, right?”

  Grace starts at this shift to Sarah.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “It probably didn’t even do her justice. It wasn’t only that she was beautiful, or that I was into her, but she gave off light or something. It’s hard to describe.”

  Silence.

  “Charles?”

  “It’s hard for me to talk about her.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not like the papers said. We did know each other. I thought she knew me better that anyone had before. I thought, finally,” he says.

  “Did you two hang out together?”

  “At first I drove her into town when she had to run errands. We hung out in my room and listened to music sometimes. She liked classic rock. I pretended I did. When I moved off campus I thought she would come over and we could take walks on the beach and stuff, you know? That probably sounds stupid.”

  “No,” Grace says. “It sounds really nice.”

  “I just—” Charles’s voice cracks. “I thought that she could like me too.”

  ###

  “Grace, we’re playing tennis at four,” her mother says as Grace arrives back from a walk in the woods.

  “Uh, no thanks,” she says.

  “Yes,” her mother says, looking squarely at her.

  “What? No. I’m not playing,” Grace says, shaking her head.

  “Yes you are. And that’s final.”

  Grace realizes that tennis may be her mother’s version of a duel. Her mother hands her a plate with a tuna sandwich on whole wheat.

  “I don’t play tennis anymore,” Grace says.

  “Then you’ll be a little rusty. Lemonade?”

  She eyes her mother above her sandwich as she takes a bite.

  “Yes, please,” she says.

  “I have a racket you can use. And sneakers.”

  Her mother sets a big glass of iced lemonade in front of her.

  “It would be good for you to run around. Get a little sun.” She slides a napkin to Grace and sits across from her at the table. “You used to be such a good player.”

  “I was totally mediocre.”

  Her mother refuses the bait.

  “Mom, I’m leaving tomorrow. My flight’s in the morning.”

  Her mother closes her eyes and sighs.

  “I figured this was coming. Considering your performance at the Chenowiths’.”

  “My performance? What about Dad’s?”

  “Grace. What are you so angry about? You’re a grown woman. No, wait,” she says, holding up her hand as Grace opens her mouth. “Frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I’m too old for this.”

  “I think it’s fair to say it’s not helping. Me being here.”

  “I don’t get it with you two,” her mother says, exasperated.

  “Let’s face it,” Grace says breezily. “He thinks the wrong sister died.”

  Her mother’s hand catches the edge of Grace’s cheek, for the first time in her life, in an awkward slap. It feels hot and good.

  “Goddamn you, Grace,” she says. “You are infuriating.” She straightens her headband and takes a deep breath through her nose. “I’m sorry. That was inexcusable.”

  “It’s okay,” Grace says. “It puts me in a better mood to beat you.”

  Her mother laughs a little. In her tired face, resting in the cradle of her palms, Grace sees her own.

  �
��It doesn’t matter what I say, does it? When did it stop mattering what I say?” her mother asks.

  “Mom, there’s no need for you to worry about me.”

  “I hope you know someday what it is to be a mother,” she says.

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  For a fleeting moment, her mom is the young woman dressed in black in a church pew, sitting behind her husband, awash in loss. But then it’s gone and she’s up, whisking Grace’s plate away to the dishwasher.

  “Are you happy with your life?” her mother asks, looking out on the yard through the window above the sink.

  “Are you?” Grace launches back.

  Her mother swings around.

  “What does that mean?”

  Grace shrugs.

  “What is it with you?” her mother asks. “Is that some sort of jab?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, Grace Elaine, I will not forget it. Do you disapprove of me, is that it?”

  They stare, in standoff. Grace’s face prickles in shame. She wishes her mother would slap her again and again. She wishes her mother would scream and throw things and tear her hair out.

  “I made my choices and I’m content with them,” her mother says. “Don’t blame me if you’re not so sure of your own.”

  “Sorry,” Grace says, sliding down into her chair, regretting her childishness, weary of her provocation.

  Her mother sits again at the table but looks out the window at a hummingbird hovering at the feeder.

  “I know I wasn’t the type of mother that put notes in your lunchbox. Maybe I didn’t hug you enough or ask about your feelings like they do these days.”

  “Mom.”

  “You seemed like you could take care of yourself. Better than the rest of us, anyway. Remember that time I forgot to pick you up from dance class? You must have been seven or eight. You walked home by yourself and never even got mad about it.”