The Kids Are All Right

by Diana Welch

  The hair on my neck hupped to attention. Goose bumps covered my body as if trying to provide a protective layer between him and me. I felt queasy and faint. I knew I should say something. I should turn around and say, “Never, no way. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”

  But then Amanda appeared, flushed from running. She was carrying a gallon of milk and smiling. And the lady in front of us had paid. It was time to unload our groceries onto the belt.

  Back home, I was standing in the pantry, placing boxes of raisin bran and Wheat Thins and tins of tuna on the shelves but really just dawdling. Amanda had gone out to feed the horses, a chore Duncan usually helped her with. But this time he said he was going to help me with the groceries. I told him it wasn’t necessary, and Amanda shrugged and walked out the door. Mom was upstairs in her bedroom—even though her cancer was in remission, she still spent an awful lot of time in bed.

  We were alone again, me in the pantry and Duncan just outside the door, sitting on the counter and kicking the kitchen cabinets softly. I could hear the thuds over my racing heart. And then he said, “Liz, I have a secret.”

  My body froze up. I did not answer, hoping he would simply disappear. Instead he said, “I dream about you. I dream about you at night, every night.” I said nothing. I closed my eyes and wished for a machine like the one on Star Trek so I could beam him somewhere far, far away. Then he said, “I love you.”

  The only man who had ever said those words to me before was Dad, and he said them in a different way entirely. Duncan’s words made me feel sick, so sick I thought the wave of nausea boiling up in my stomach would swallow me whole and drag me out to some sloshy, dark sea.

  I kept silent and he stopped kicking the cabinets. The only sound was my heart pounding hard and fast, so loud I was sure he could hear it, and I hoped he would understand its Morse code, telling him, “You scare me.” Perhaps he did, because he quickly added,

  “But you mustn’t tell your mom. She wouldn’t understand. She would make me leave. It has to be our secret.”

  I heard the kitchen screen door squeak open and then someone’s footsteps, and I felt safe enough to get out of the closet without having to look at him. I ran upstairs. Mom was in bed, surrounded by piles of paperwork. She looked tired, but when she saw me in the doorway and sensed I was upset, she patted the rumpled sheets beside her. I plopped myself down, fighting back tears. My heart was still on fast-forward as I told her what Duncan said. Every last word. Then I looked in her face. It was pale and her bottom lip started to tremble. Her eyes grew moist before she grabbed hold of me and hugged me tight and said, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” She told me to wait right there, and I did. She got out of bed, pulled on her robe, and marched downstairs, and I never saw Duncan again.

  Later that evening, I was reading in my bed when Amanda popped her head through my doorway. This was it, I thought. She would hate me forever. “Can we talk?” she asked rather gruffly. I patted my mattress as Mom had done only hours before. Amanda sat down next to me, the look on her face teetered between anger and utter disappointment.

  “What a jerk,” she said

  I wanted to throw my arms around her and squeeze her tight and tell her how much I loved her. But instead, I played it cool, shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I know, right?”

  AMANDA

  I DID HAVE a crush on Duncan, so I was disappointed that he turned out to be such a creep. I even spent the night with him at his apartment in the West Village, but he never got weird with me. I was too old for him, I guess. After Mom kicked him out, I never heard from him again, which was good.

  That whole castration thing really messed with me. Up until that moment, my plan was to become a veterinarian. I applied to Cornell, Tufts, U-Penn, and Wesleyan for their pre-vet programs, and I was sure I’d get into at least one of them; I was thirteenth in my class and had a 91 percent average. But when I saw the blood dripping out of Bartholomew’s empty ball sack, I was like, there is no way could I do this for a living.

  That fall, Mom gave away Precious Little, her favorite horse. At that point, we had only Berry and Bartholomew and Pony, and we rented the empty stalls out to boarding horses. Mom was downsizing. She decided to sell the seven acres with the house, pool, and pool house but keep the remaining seven acres with the caretaker’s cottage and the barn. We’d build a brand-new house there from scratch. Mom said she wanted to move because the house held too many memories and felt too big and lonely without Dad, but I knew the truth. We were broke, totally broke. After Mom tallied it up, she realized that Dad had left us $1.2 million in debt.

  Mom told me that, although she hadn’t known it at the time, Dad had been struggling for a while. I guess he really thought the deal in Honduras would solve all his problems, but when that fell through, we were completely fucked.

  Dad had taken out a five-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy right before he left for Myrtle Beach, filled out all the paperwork, and left it for his secretary to send off. The insurance company had cashed the check but then claimed that the policy had not been “certified” or some bullshit. Mom tried to fight it, but her lawyer warned that the insurance company would take us to court and would play hardball. She told me they would put people on the stand to question Dad’s drinking. He’d already had two DWIs, and Aunt Barbara said he’d had a couple of martinis before he left her house in Hanover the night he died. Mom said that the insurance company was going to say that he was drunk or, worse, that he had committed suicide. And she said that they were going to want to put us on the stand, too, the kids. She didn’t want to put us through that. So she decided to let it go and sell the house.

  That was the beginning of the end. We never even celebrated another holiday in that house, and in our family, Christmas and Thanksgiving were always such a big deal. We’d dress up for Thanksgiving, after helping Mom, who would cook all day. For Christmas, we always went and picked out a live tree with Dad while Mom put electric candles in all the windows and hung our stockings from the fireplace mantel.

  But that Thanksgiving, we flew to Portland, Oregon, and drove up the coast to bum-fuck nowhere to see Aunt Gail, Dad’s youngest sister. We couldn’t really afford the trip—I remember Mom complaining about how expensive the airfare was. But we were still rich compared to Aunt Gail. She and her two kids lived on welfare, but she told us it hurt her feelings that Mom sent her our hand-me-downs when she had her first kid. She said she’d expected Bergdorf Goodman the way Dad bragged about how well-off he was. Mom tried to explain that things had changed, and that Dad was not as well-off as Aunt Gail thought, but it was useless.

  On that trip, for the first time, I saw my family in a new light. I saw how Liz took care of Diana, always holding her hand and watching out for her, making sure she was included. And I saw how Dan seemed lost, with this vacant look in his eyes. And Mom was just a mess. I saw that she was lost, too, without Dad.

  For Christmas, Mom decided to take us to Disney World. All I remember is waking up on Christmas morning to presents under the fucking TV. Everything about it was horribly sad and depressing. We were in a dingy motel room where I had to share a bed with Liz. Diana slept with Mom, and Dan slept on a roll-away cot. I just couldn’t understand why that was supposed to be better than being at home.

  DIANA

  THERE WERE GHOSTS in our house. Mom said she saw them, too, late at night while everyone else was asleep. She said I had ESP. Me and Dan both. She had weird people come to the house and look at our auras, and when they agreed that we were special, Mom looked so happy.

  Dan said he didn’t see ghosts like I did. He said that maybe his aura was different from mine. And he said he didn’t think he had any special powers, but he liked it that Mom thought so.

  “I have warts all over my hands,” he told me one afternoon in Mom and Dad’s room. He held out his hands, and there they were, nestled in the webbing between his fingers. The ones on the back of his hands blended in with his freckl
es, but if you looked close enough, you could see them, little snow-capped mountains, scaly and pink.

  “And one on your face,” I told him, and reached over to touch his upper lip with my finger. His face was covered in tiny leopard spots, like mine, and his lips were thin and curly, just like Dad’s. His red hair was straight and cut into the shape of a bowl.

  “Don’t!” He flinched and jerked his head away, grabbing my wrist. “They’re contagious.” Then he started rubbing his warty hand all over my face, giggling as I squirmed. His grip was strong.

  “Don’t!” I yelled, panicking. “They’re contagious!” His hands were clammy and smelled like sweat. Mom poked her head around the corner of her bathroom door. She was rubbing cream on her cheek.

  “Daniel,” she said softly. “Do not rub your warts all over your sister’s face.” Dan dropped my wrist. As I ran over to Mom, I turned to stick my tongue out at him, but he had already turned away. He was staring out the window with both hands in the pockets of his camouflage pants.

  DAN

  I DIDN’T HATE Mom, but I couldn’t love her anymore, either. The cancer scared me to death, and the thought of losing her was too much for me to handle. But I did love her. Of course I did. I just lost respect for her for some reason. She seemed so pathetic. One day, she came to pick me up at the Bazaar Mall in Mount Kisco. I had been playing PacMan there all day, and she had to drag me out. When we were leaving, there were four or five pennies lying on the pavement in the parking lot. She bent down to pick them up.

  “Don’t pick that up!” I said, embarrassed. “It’s like you’re a bum!”

  She was quiet from that point on. I had hurt her feelings, and I couldn’t say I was sorry. I knew I should apologize. I felt horrible, but I couldn’t do it.

  DIANA

  I ALMOST GAVE Mom a heart attack. It happened when I was walking home from my new school, West Patent Elementary. It was different from my old school, Rippowam Cisqua, because you didn’t have to wear a uniform and there were more kids.

  Every afternoon, Mr. Tagliano, the gym teacher, organized the bus lines in the atrium, blowing his whistle and shouting out names alphabetically. I loved Mr. Tagliano because he looked like the Fonz, and I liked it that his nickname was Mr. T, who was on my lunchbox. So when Mr. T shouted “Welch, Diana!” I happily gathered up my Snoopy pencil bag and coat and rose from my spot in a clump of first graders on the floor. I had a note in my pocket from Mom saying that it was okay for me to walk home from school on my own, which I presented to Mr. T, who waggled his eyebrows at me and told me not to get lost.

  I made my sneakers squeak on purpose, twisting them on the white linoleum tile as I left all those bus-riding babies behind. Once outside, I tried to twist and squeak my sneakers some more, but the smooth pavement just rubbed my soles like crumbly erasers. As I hung a right to crunch down the gravelly edge of West Patent Road, there was Mom, at the end of our driveway, waiting for me. When she saw me turn the corner, she straightened up and started waving and smiling. The sun was shining on her and on the leaves on the trees above her head. Excited, I waved back and picked up my pace and hooked my thumbs up under my backpack’s straps near my shoulders to hoist it up a little. It was starting to feel heavy, full of my new textbooks that we had spent the morning in homeroom covering with brown paper grocery bags. I had drawn some balloons on mine. I was going to have homework, like Dan and Liz, also a first, also grown-up. So I began to yell to Mom that I was going to have homework, and her arms began moving in big, frantic waves, and I thought, “Wow, she’s really excited to see me!” And it felt great. Then, when I started to cross the street, Mom started screaming, and then—whoosh!—a big yellow school bus flew between us, its current knocking me back a step or two.

  After the bus had passed, Mom was still yelling and crying, her eyes wildly searching up and down the road in the directions from which the bus had come and gone. Finally, she waved me over to her and clutched me to her legs, then crumpled to the ground, squeezing and rocking me and saying “Oh, God, oh, God” over and over. After we had made the long, sobbing walk up the driveway and were back in our kitchen, Mom got on the phone to my school. As I sat on the counter banging my legs against the cabinet and eating boysenberry yogurt, she clutched the receiver with two veined hands and yelled, “She could have been killed!”

  Now every afternoon I had to take the bus home from school, like everybody else, only it was a stupid, short ride. And every time, as I prepared to take the giant steps down from the bus to the asphalt, the bus driver, a nice old guy with milky blue eyes, warned me to look both ways. I did.

  LIZ

  IT WAS SUDDEN. One day, late that winter, Mom got out of bed, got dressed, and decided to take charge of things. She went from depleted to energetic, as if she were coming out of a grief-induced hibernation. She started going to the city looking for work in earnest and was thrilled when she booked a commercial for Brim decaffeinated coffee. Her line was “Fill it to the rim, with Brim.” She had practiced it the morning of the shoot in our kitchen as she filled her coffee cup, experimenting with different intonations. She finally settled on “Fill it to the rim” in a high, cheerful pitch, followed by “with Brim,” deep in her throat and low as if she was in on a secret. Satisfied, she smiled at me, and it was a real smile, the first I’d seen in months. But that was only the start of her good news. When she learned she’d been cast as June Slater on Loving, a brand-new soap opera, she could not stop smiling. She was thrilled! A full-time job, back on TV! We celebrated like it was New Year’s Eve: Mom made prime rib and Yorkshire pudding, everyone’s favorite, and strawberry shortcake for dessert.

  Things were going well for me at school, too. I made the junior varsity volleyball team and had lots of friends, which made it a bit less painful to be totally ignored by Amanda. She still wouldn’t even look at me at school. I doubted anyone, other than my close friends, knew we were sisters. She even refused to drive me there, forcing me to take the bus.

  One sunny afternoon, I walked up the driveway and saw the Mercedes parked in front of the garage. Before I opened the kitchen door, I could hear David Johansen’s raspy voice singing the Animals cover “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” Then Amanda shouted my name from the den. I popped my head into the den and saw her sitting on the couch with Anna, her best friend. Anna lived across the street and had blond frizzy hair that she wore big, like an Afro. She was big, too. Nearly six feet tall, she could pick me up and twirl me around like a baton, which she did, once.

  They were both smiling at me in a conspiring way. I looked at the TV and saw David Johansen prancing around, chest and chin thrust out, wearing only a vest, no shirt, with skinny striped pants and high-top Nike sneakers. Amanda had taped last week’s Saturday Night Live. She loved David Johansen the way I loved Jim Morrison, but after watching that video for the twentieth time, I was starting to fall in love, too.

  “We need your help,” Amanda said with a mischievous smile.

  “Yeah, come here,” Anna instructed, suppressing a cackle and sliding over to make room on the couch.

  Hoping to not get twirled like a baton I sat between them. Amanda pulled a small pipe from behind her back. “We’re going to get you high,” Amanda said.

  “But you’re not going to actually smoke or anything,” Anna chimed in. “That would be irresponsible.” They both laughed as if that was the funniest thing either of them had ever heard. Then they made me pass the pipe between them as they each took long drags, held their breath, and then exhaled into my face.

  The kitchen door opened and closed, and a little voice shouted “Hello!” Diana was home from school. I jumped up to fix her a snack. She wanted peanut butter in celery, her favorite after-school treat. As she munched away, sitting at the breakfast-room table, I realized that I was hungry, too.

  I knew there was a roast chicken in the fridge because I had made it the night before. Mom worked most afternoons and left Amanda and me in charge of things. I babysat Diana
and cooked everyone dinner and helped Amanda with the grocery shopping. I ate a cold chicken leg, but that wasn’t enough. I searched through the food closet and pulled out a package of Oreos and then got the Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese from the fridge. I pried apart the chocolate wafers, scraped the sweet white cream off with my teeth, and replaced it with a slice of cheese. I thought I’d discovered the best new snack and brought a plate of them into the den. Amanda teased me about how absolutely revolting it was but ate them anyway. Sitting there, surrounded by smoke and Amanda and Anna’s laughter and David Johansen singing, I was happy.

  Then Amanda invited me to go with her to see David Johansen play at the Ritz that weekend. The pot had been an initiation. I passed, and Amanda decided without telling me that she was going to mentor me in the ways of pop culture and New York City and rock and roll. It was 1983. I had just turned fourteen, and I was game.

  But when Amanda suggested I wear her orangey brown suede Frye cowboy boots, I was suspicious. “Are you sure?” I asked. They were her favorite. This must be a test. We were up in her room, getting ready for our evening out. Amanda was sitting at her desk, using a handheld mirror to apply eyeliner to her lower lids, extending the line beyond her eye for an Egyptian effect. She was already wearing her black leather pants, having squeezed into them only moments before. She looked like a rock star. “I mean, what are you going to wear?” I asked tentatively.

  “My ankle boots,” she said, flashing her eyes to the short slip-on black leather boots in the corner. “My cowboy boots will look cool with those jeans.” I could tell she was sincere.

  I slipped them on, tucking my pants inside so you could see the fancy swirled stitching. I felt like a rock star, too.

  That night, Amanda, Anna, and I piled into the Jeep Wagoneer. First, we went to Times Square for fake IDs. The bright lights and seedy people scared me, but I kept cool, quickening my pace to keep up with Amanda, focusing on her and not on the homeless man sitting cross-legged on the dirty pavement, or on the man in the shiny suit handing out flyers in front of a GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! movie house, or on the woman in short shorts and a rabbit-fur coat sucking her teeth and looking bored standing on the street corner. Amanda turned into a brightly lit storefront. Inside, there was a wall of fake ID cards to choose from, and my eye went straight to a pretty pink one from the Manhattan College of Arts and Crafts. I pointed it out to the man behind the counter and gave him my birth date, February 3, but instead of 1969, I said 1964, which made me eighteen—old enough to get into the Ritz.