Wallflower In Bloom

by Claire Cook

  Tag leaned across the table. “You might think he’s a nice guy, Coll, but he’s my friend. I know what he’s really like. Trust me, he’s a bad motorcycle.”

  “Define your terms,” my mother said.

  “A bad scene,” Tag said. “The worst.”

  Colleen leaned across the table, too. “Bag it, Tag. You say exactly the same thing about every guy who asks me out.”

  “Well, am I right, or am I right?” Tag held his palms up to the heavens in what would become one of his quintessential It gestures.

  “What’s the big deal?” Colleen said. “I mean, they’re good enough to hang around with you, and you think you’re God’s gift to the world.”

  “Coll, face it. There’s a big difference between being good enough to hang out with and good enough to date my sister.”

  “He has a point,” my father said. “I used to be one of those boys. They only want one thing.”

  “Guys talk,” Tag said.

  “Chicks talk, too,” Colleen said.

  “Don’t degrade yourself,” my mother said. “I did not give birth to poultry.”

  “Sure, girls talk,” Tag said. “They talk about did he take you to a nice restaurant and did he remember to pull out your chair. Guys only have one question.”

  “Did you get laid,” my father said.

  “Language,” my mother said. “And just to be clear, as long as you are living under this roof, the aforesaid will not be an option for any of you.”

  Colleen poured another glass of milk, and the rest of us went back to our tuna-noodle casserole. I extracted the peas carefully and piled them up on one side of my plate. I hated peas. I hated the way my stupid family never paid any attention to me.

  “And of course,” my mother said, “if we were to make it a rule, it would have to work both ways. There are no double standards in this family.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Tag never lifts a finger around here.”

  Tag put his elbow on the table and scratched his cheek with his middle finger. Joanie giggled.

  I slammed my glass down, and a wave of milk splashed over the edge. “I saw that, Tag. Mom, Tag just gave me the finger.”

  “That’s enough, Deirdre,” my mother said.

  “But I didn’t do anything,” I said. “Why doesn’t Tag ever get in trouble?”

  Nobody bothered to answer. They just went back to discussing their stupid dating rules, and since I’d probably never even get asked out on a real date anyway, it’s not like they applied to me.

  So I ignored my stupid family and stared across the table at the avocado green vines that twisted and crawled their way up the wallpaper all the way to the ceiling. Harvest gold flowers sprouted randomly among the vines. I imagined slipping unnoticed from my chair and climbing up those vines and taking my place with the sad-faced flowers.

  Because I was the family wallflower.

  Better to run over than to be overrun.

  Even though I’d quit and might never speak to him again, I had the cabdriver drop me off at Tag’s house when I got home from Austin. I’d just let myself in when my sister Colleen’s red Honda CRV rolled down the long tree-lined driveway and parked. The car door opened and Colleen jumped out. Her hair was pulled back into a curly, messy ponytail, and she was wearing sneakers and walking shorts. I considered a quick exit through the back door, but if she’d already seen me, she might follow me down the road to my house, which would be worse.

  She pulled out two large canvases from the back of the CRV and managed to walk them to Tag’s front door.

  I swung open the door and greeted her with a “What’s up?”

  She looked down at my suitcase. “Why aren’t you in Texas with Tag?”

  “Cramps,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Bad ones.”

  She shook her head.

  “Mom and Dad are with him,” I said. “I was there for Austin, so all that’s left is Houston. His Guruness will be fine. What are you doing here?”

  Colleen pushed past me into the house. “Nice to see you, too. I just have to change out some art. I’ve got a buyer for two of the pieces in Tag’s bedroom. And we’ve got nothing for dinner.”

  I followed her down the hallway and into Tag’s room. “Does Tag know?”

  “About dinner?” Colleen placed the canvases on Tag’s bed. They were multimedia things—huge images of Tag in sepia collaged with actual print newspaper clippings about him and then painted over in graffitilike Sanskrit and Asian symbols along with Tag’s signature tag-line over and over in fiery red: DO YOU HAVE PASSION? Then the whole mess was covered with thick layers of decoupage goop to protect it for all eternity.

  “About the paintings,” I said.

  Colleen lifted one off the wall. “He can’t tell them apart. As long as he’s in them, he loves them.”

  I decided not to mention that Tag wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell them apart. To my eyes, the paintings Colleen had just taken off the wall looked pretty much like the ones she’d brought with her.

  Colleen was an artist and her husband an antiques dealer. They were the only family members who didn’t live in the town we’d grown up in; they had a house a couple of towns away. But Tag had still managed to outsmart them. He’d bought a historic schoolhouse a block from the ocean and saved it from condo conversion. As if that wasn’t enough to make him a hometown hero, he turned it into gallery and classroom space for the Marshbury Arts Association. My sister and her husband managed it in exchange for prime storefront space in the building. Tag had a great tax write-off, the perfect place to host his own local gigs, and another family member under his control.

  Just to get her out of my hair faster, I helped Colleen switch the paintings. I’d checked out of the hotel as soon as I got back from Lake Austin Spa Resort last night, then grabbed the final flight out of Austin, which just so happened to be going in the wrong direction. As soon as we landed, I’d scarfed down two slices of pizza and a beer in the Milwaukee terminal and tossed and turned in yet another hotel until morning. Then I’d jumped on the morning’s first flight to Logan. To say that I was tired and grouchy was an understatement.

  Colleen rested the paintings she was taking with her against the front door and headed for the kitchen. Tag’s home was an old red farmhouse with a fieldstone foundation that sat up on a knoll, king of the hill. He’d left the front of the house largely unchanged, but as soon as you got to the kitchen, the whole thing opened up. Black soapstone counters and an old-fashioned white porcelain sink balanced the shiny professional-grade stainless steel appliances and huge dining island. The view past the massive fieldstone fireplace and walls of glass to the pool and cabana and out to the rolling hills beyond was breathtaking. If you knew where to look, you could even see a trail down to a dock on the North River, which wound its way through spectacular marshes until it spilled into the ocean.

  My parents lived in the converted carriage house out back. My sister Joanie and her kids and her husband lived in a renovated Cape on the other side. Tag’s first ex-wife and their kids lived in the converted barn; he’d bought and renovated a midcentury ranch abutting the opposite end of the property for his second ex-wife and their kids. The way I looked at it, if my brother kept getting married, eventually he’d own the whole town.

  I lived on the property, too, in a converted sheep shed. It was lovely, but sometimes all I could think was Baa.

  Colleen opened the refrigerator wide so I could see inside, too. “Ooh, pasta primavera,” she said. “I’m all over that.” She reached for the large bowl, its contents labeled on the plastic-wrapped cover in a swirl of red marker with a big red heart around it.

  Tag’s two ex-wives had started a catering business together a few years ago. It was called Afterwife. Seriously. I seemed to be the only one who didn’t find the name hilarious, but even I had to admit that a little bit of notoriety turned out to be great for business. That and Tag’s standing daily order, no mat
ter where in the world he was traveling, kept them squarely in the black. My sister Joanie, who cleaned house for Tag twice a week and did his shopping for extra money, wrapped up anything we didn’t eat right away and put it in Tag’s industrial-size freezer. When Tag was around, he usually dined out so he could commune with his local fans. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone farther than my brother’s kitchen to graze when I wasn’t traveling.

  Colleen looked up from the pasta primavera. “Unless you want to split it? Doug and I will never eat all this.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’ll probably just have that salad in there after I finish working out.”

  I could feel Colleen giving me her yeah, right look. I ignored it. Colleen was the thinnest girl in the family and completely superior about it. She’d been trying to get me to walk with her for years. I had a vague plan that I’d start training secretly first, then once I was sure I could kick her butt I’d ask her if she wanted to run a road race with me.

  As soon as she left, I locked the front door, as if everyone in a half-mile radius didn’t have a key to Tag’s house. In one of the lower cabinets, I found a pile of the unbleached cotton bags with Tag’s logo printed on them that Joanie used for grocery shopping. I filled them with enough provisions from the kitchen to last at least a few days, maybe more, and then I lugged everything out to the garage, along with my suitcase, and loaded up Tag’s golf cart.

  He always left the key in the ignition, so I just fired up the cart, opened the garage door, and started putt-putting my way toward my place: home sweet sheep shed.

  Just before I turned onto a dirt path that was a shortcut, a car pulled down the long driveway heading in my direction. For a quick crazy second I thought it might be Steve Moretti. As if he’d changed his own plans, booked a flight, rented a car, and knew where to find me. As if Tag might have given him the address. As if Steve might ever want to see me again.

  Then I recognized the car. It was Mitchell.

  He pulled over and climbed out. When I rode slowly up to him, he pretended to jump out of the way of the golf cart. Until then, I hadn’t even considered bothering to run him over, which was probably a sign of my growing maturity about our situation.

  I put the golf cart into park but kept the engine running. “No, I don’t want to give it another try.”

  Mitchell grinned. When I met him, he had limp, stringy blondish hair that he wore long enough to make it look limper and stringier. He played the drums in a band on weekends, which was his justification for the fact that he also had it dyed every four weeks. Once he began going bald, he’d started shaving his head, as if he could make it look like he was doing it on purpose. Somehow he couldn’t quite pull it off; it made him look like a just-hatched Tweety Bird.

  “Hey,” he said.

  For ten years, this is how it went with Mitchell and me: We’d go out, he’d treat me like gold, I’d fall in love, he’d move in, he’d get lazy, I’d want more, he wouldn’t, I’d kick him out, we’d take a break and see other people. Then we’d do it all over again. And again. And again.

  After a while the breakups started to blur, and at this moment I couldn’t even remember why we’d called things off the last time. As Mitchell stood in front of me, I did a quick calculation and realized we’d been apart for six months. This was the danger zone, when enough time had passed that all the bad stuff started to slip away and a kind of wistful longing crept in to take its place. I mean, we had so many shared memories. Did it really matter that Mitchell didn’t believe in marriage, that he didn’t want kids, that he’d always held on to his apartment even when we were living together at my place?

  “Leave,” I said. “Now.”

  Mitchell rubbed one hand back and forth across the stubble on his scalp, as if he were his own lucky charm. “I’m glad I caught you. I kind of wanted to talk to you for a minute. Just so, you know, you didn’t hear it from someone else.”

  My heart did a funny thing that made me think of a flounder flopping around on a fishing dock.

  Mitchell glanced over at his car and then turned back to me.

  “I met someone,” he said. “She’s pregnant. We’re getting married.”

  We looked at each other. A decade flashed before my eyes.

  “Liar,” I said.

  The golf cart engine revved. My foot must have made it happen, but I felt totally disconnected from the movement. I wished Tag had left some golf clubs in it. I could pretend I was Tiger Woods’s wife, Elin, and whack the shit out of Mitchell, the closest thing I’d ever had to a husband. At least Elin got alimony. At least Tiger had an Ambien prescription.

  “I can understand how it might take a little time to get used to the idea. But we’re actually really happy about it.” Mitchell rubbed his head again. “You’ll like her.”

  “Go away,” I said.

  “Is Tag around?”

  It was my turn to look at Mitchell’s car. The front of it was pointed at Tag’s house. If Mitchell had been on his way to see me, he would have taken the next turn off the main road, into my driveway, and not this one.

  “Ohmigod,” I said. “You didn’t come here to tell me. You came to tell Tag.”

  Mitchell’s hand was still on his scalp. “I want him to marry us, Dee. I mean, I know it might be a little awkward for you, but Tag’s like a brother to me.”

  I put the golf cart into gear.

  Then I pushed the pedal as far as it would go and aimed right for the man who had wasted the most valuable years of my life.

  Just before impact, a chiasmus flashed before my eyes like a vision: Better to run over than to be overrun.

  When people show you their true colors, color yourself convinced the first time.

  The first time I met Mitchell I was sitting at a little round table having a glass of wine with someone named Belinda. Belinda and I had gone to high school together. We’d chosen the Marshbury Tavern because it was the only place for miles around that had entertainment on Tuesday nights.

  Belinda was in town for the week to visit her parents. She lived in North Carolina but kept closer tabs than I did on what was happening on the hometown front. Belinda was one of those people who sent you a birthday and a Christmas card with a chatty little note every year, year in and year out, whether or not you ever sent them a card back, whether or not you’d ever really known each other in the first place.

  “So,” she said, “whatever happened to Marla Embrey?”

  “Marla Embrey,” I repeated. “Which one was she again?”

  Belinda sighed and reached for her wineglass. Clearly she was starting to wish she’d tracked down Marla Embrey instead of me. I wasn’t intentionally trying to disappoint Belinda. High school just hadn’t appealed to me much the first time around. Trying to give it a second incarnation by reliving it did even less for me. I’d also noticed that people who no longer lived in the town they’d grown up in automatically assumed those who did knew everything that was going on. The truth was that the way to handle still living there was to let go of the past.

  Belinda regrouped and tried a new direction. “By the way, I was so sorry to read about Tag and his wife splitting up.”

  I shrugged. “Split happens.”

  Tag’s star was rising fast back then and this was our family’s first major run-in with the tabloids. Shortly after the breakup, my father had made the mistake of talking to someone at the town landfill. That someone had in turn sold the story for big bucks.

  The headline in the National Enquirer screamed, “Tag Tells Wife of Seven Years: You’re No Longer It.” And the first paragraph of the story contained this little gem: “The New Age phenomenon’s own father told a close family friend requesting anonymity, ‘That boy never could manage to keep it in his pants.’”

  It was a wake-up call for the whole family. We closed ranks. For the first time, we were careful whom we talked to and what we said.

  I didn’t know it then, but it was the first step toward my isolated, family-o
nly claustrophobia of today.

  I took a sip of my wine while I rooted around for some safe conversational ground. “I can’t believe they’re playing ‘There’s a Kind of Hush (All Over the World)’” I said. “I mean, how retro can you get?”

  Belinda looked over at the band. “The drummer even looks a little bit like Herman of Herman’s Hermits.”

  “Peter Noone,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  I laughed. “No. Peter Noone was Herman of Herman’s Hermits. I had a huge crush on him. After Sajid Khan and before Micky Dolenz.”

  Belinda leaned forward as if she were about to get a tabloid-worthy scoop. “Okay, Micky Dolenz was one of the Monkees, but who was Sajid Khan?”

  I shrugged. “He rode an elephant on a TV show called Maya with the guy who played Dennis the Menace. I was madly in love with him. I was probably only five or six, but my mother helped me write him a fan letter, and he sent me a signed postcard of himself. And the elephant. I lived off the high for an entire year.”

  Belinda picked up her wineglass and suddenly froze. “Don’t look,” she said without moving her lips, “but he’s coming over.”

  I looked. “Sajid Khan?”

  It was the drummer. He walked almost to our table, made eye contact, ran a hand through his straight, stringy hair, and then kept going in the direction of the men’s room.

  “Ohmigod,” Belinda said. “The drummer totally likes you.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Holy déjàvu,” Belinda said. “It’s like we just flashed back to high school. Or maybe we just time-traveled to a John Hughes movie. Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club. Making It in Marshbury.”