The Kids Are All Right

by Diana Welch

  LIZ

  MY FRESHMAN YEAR at Georgetown was coming to an end, and I was in a panic. To start, my roommate Susanne and best friend Birgithe had given me a dwarf rabbit for my birthday. They were so proud of themselves, literally giggling and wide-eyed as they presented me with a box-shaped present the size of a micro wave. It was wrapped in newspaper, and I could hear something scurry inside, little claws against metal. When I ripped open the package and saw this silvery gray bunny the size of a softball peering up at me, I froze. “Happy birthday!” my two friends shouted in unison.

  “For the girl who has everything!” Susanne added, all boisterous and smiling.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I hurled the words at them. Tears were coming, fast, right behind. Their faces fell. “You don’t give a fucking orphan a pet rabbit!” I was so angry, I practically spat the words at them. “I don’t even know where I’m going to live this summer, and now I have to find a place for this fucking rabbit?”

  My furious outburst startled Susanne and Birgithe as much as it did me. “It didn’t occur to us …” Susanne said.

  “Maybe we can return it,” Birgithe offered, meekly.

  Their gift was a kind gesture, and it took me years to figure out that their insensitivity was, in fact, my fault. I had set out to convince people at Georgetown that I was this outgoing, hardworking, fun-loving, up-for-anything, totally responsible nineteen-year-old girl and not some homeless and pitiful orphan. I worked hard on the facade. After being racked with worry I’d fail out my first semester, I made the dean’s list with a 3.8 grade-point average. I did so well in my psychology class that my professor asked me to be his teaching assistant during my second semester, and then informed me I was the youngest TA he’d ever worked with. I was popular and had tons of great friends and a boyfriend named William who had gone to Exeter. And although he and my close friends knew that I had lost my parents, I never complained about it. In fact, I rarely talked about it. The last thing I wanted was people feeling sorry for me. I pretended that having no parents was no big deal—and tried to believe it myself. Getting a pet rabbit made me realize how lost I still was.

  With summer fast approaching, I had to figure out not only what to do with this rabbit, whom I called Harold, but also what to do with myself. Susanne was going to Big Sur, where her parents had property; Birgithe was going back to Jakarta, where her parents lived; and William was going to spend his summer between Manhattan and his parents’ summer home in Connecticut, seeing friends and having fun. So when my friend Kim mentioned she was going to summer school at Harvard, I asked if she wanted a roommate.

  I signed up for a class in psychoanalytic theory, and Kim and I found an apartment through the university. When I called Amanda to tell her my plans, she offered me her Saab. “You’ll need a car, Liz,” she said. “Plus, the Benz is still kicking.” She was being so kind and supportive. “The trust will totally pay for the schooling,” she said without me even bringing it up. I felt bad asking her to bunny-sit.

  “It will just be for the summer,” I promised her.

  “I take care of fifty horses and have two dogs,” she said. “What’s one more pet?”

  But Harold wasn’t just a pet. He was a nightmare. Within his first month, he had chewed through the telephone and stereo wire in our dorm room. He left BB-pellet-size poop everywhere, because Susanne thought keeping him in the cage was cruel, and his pee left smelly red-rimmed watermarks that looked like period stains. Thankfully he preferred Susanne’s bed to mine. And God forbid you tried to touch him. If you could catch him, he’d fake an epileptic seizure, and if you held on, he’d puncture your hand with his two upper teeth. I didn’t mention any of this to Amanda.

  So I got the Saab, and Amanda got Harold.

  AMANDA

  LIZ CALLED ME that August in tears to say that the Saab was pouring smoke out from under the hood. She was headed back to Boston after a weekend away when the car began to overheat. “Did you check the oil?” I asked.

  There was silence on her end of the line. “Is there any oil in the car, Liz?” I shouted. Then Liz started to bawl. I knew she didn’t overheat my car on purpose, but, man, I was pissed. I gave her my car to borrow, not destroy. Meanwhile, Harold was the demon bunny from hell. He bit me every time I tried to change his water or feed him.

  She finally wailed into the phone, “No one ever told me to check the oil!” She was crying hard now. It turned out she had a 102-degree fever; she was really sick. It broke my heart to think about her stranded on the side of I-95 in Bridgeport. So I told her to take my stereo and the license plates and just leave the car behind. She left everything behind, and I wound up getting tickets on those plates for years.

  LIZ

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the breakdown, I was still in Boston and back on my feet. Dan was heading into his senior year at Trinity Pawling, so he and Karen came up to look at colleges. Then we all headed up to Maine for a Welch family reunion that Aunt Gail, Dad’s sister, had organized. Aunt Gail had moved from Oregon to Bailey’s Island right outside of Portland where she ran a bed and breakfast called The Lady and the Loon. I was excited—more than forty people were coming, cousins I had never heard of, aunts and uncles I had not yet met, plus those I hadn’t seen since Dad’s funeral.

  On her sun-drenched lawn, Aunt Gail had everyone gather around for a portrait. Dan, Amanda, and I stick out in that photo. One man, a distant cousin, wore a denim vest without a shirt, others had long beards and wore mirrored sunglasses, and many of the women had big, feathered hair. I had stopped using mousse and spray in high school and kept my hair long and straight, as did Amanda, who had driven up from Virginia to meet us there. We joked afterward how all our relatives said things like “wicked cool” and called horses “hosses.” We didn’t dress or sound like these people, our relatives, but if you looked closely, you saw that Dan and our cousin John could be twins, if only Dan wore carpenter pants and Red Wing work boots instead of baggy khaki shorts and tie-dyed T-shirts. And all seven of Aunt Barbara’s kids had our sense of humor. “Black Irish” was how Aunt Gail described it. Our dad had it, too. It felt good to be surrounded by these people who had his big laugh and funny accent and freckled skin. Aunt Gail had long auburn hair, now silver-streaked with age but still thick and wavy. She wore it loose. “How’s Diana,” she asked me earlier that day. “Why isn’t she here?”

  The question stung like a slap because I didn’t know the answer. As I looked into my aunt’s face, it was like looking into a futuristic mirror. The Diana I remembered had the same slanted brown eyes and slightly bulbous nose, that same mane of wild hair. Diana was the most Welch looking of all of Bob Welch’s girls. Why wasn’t she here? Here I was, surrounded by distant relatives, and I had no idea how my own sister was doing, or what she was doing, or where she was doing it. I was so caught up in being nineteen, in pretending that my life was just fine, that I hadn’t thought much about her at all. Suddenly, I missed my little sister something fierce. Screw Nancy Chamberlain and her rules, I thought to myself. I was going to see Diana.

  DAN

  I CHERISHED THOSE weeks in Maine with my older sisters. I offered to take the smelly, weird-ass 1950s pullout couch in the den of the cabin Uncle Russ rented for us so that Liz and Amanda could each have their own room. I was so happy to be with my family, I would have slept on the floor.

  Aunt Barbara, one of Dad and Russ’s sisters, brought lobsters to the cabin for dinner one evening. It was idyllic until Russ and Barbara started bad-talking their sister, our Aunt Gail. I was shocked. I would never talk that way about any of my sisters. I worshipped them and the time we got to spend together. Those weekends were the basis of our relationships and the only time I was able to just be myself. Liz’s self-confidence made me feel human, and Amanda always made me feel safe. To be honest, I never thought much about Diana. I just assumed she was happy and well. I don’t think I could have handled imagining it any other way.

  DIANA

  CAMP WAS EVEN
better the second time around. I was voted captain of the Wampanoags again, and I was in the intermediate camp so there were some teenagers to rub elbows with. I loved Maine and its cool breezes and the call of the loons from the lake. I loved the smell of the pine needles. This time, I brought my Goofy baseball hat that I got with the Chamberlains at Disneyland. It had two long ears hanging off the sides and two felt teeth hanging off the brim. Trying to roll with the ugly thing, I was hoping to get a new nickname going: Goofy. Thankfully, it didn’t catch. Soon enough, I realized that there were no mean boys or moms to call me ugly, so I never had to put on my humor armor. Or my glasses. I could see fine without them. The only thing that happened was my eyes would cross when I got tired. And anyway, who was going to tell me I had to wear them? I soon forgot they ever existed.

  Until my mom came to pick me up. “Where are your glasses?” she asked. I had no idea. I hadn’t thought about them since the day I took them off.

  “I lost them,” I told her.

  “You lost them?” she said, her voice high as she opened the car door.

  “We were sailing,” I said as I climbed into the passenger seat. “And we were going really fast. I was looking deep down into the water whizzing by, when the wind whipped my glasses off my face. I could only watch as they slipped down into the dark folds of the lake.”

  My mom looked at me suspiciously as she started the engine. “Why didn’t you jump in and get them.” It was more of a statement than a question.

  “I couldn’t abandon ship,” I said, like, duh-uh. I smiled at her skepticism, before turning to look out the window.

  The next day, back at home, Margaret and I were coming into the kitchen from an afternoon by the pool. Our mom was standing there with that look on her face that made me want to duck for cover. “So, I was unpacking your trunk,” she said, her hands behind her back. “And guess what I found?”

  My armpits began to sweat into my towel.

  “Well?” she asked. “Any ideas? Come on, guess!” I looked at her and waited, silently. I wasn’t going to say anything.

  “Your glasses!” she said, smiling as if it was good news. She brought her hands around to the front of her body; in one hand were my glasses. She held them between us, waiting for me to say something.

  “Wow,” I said, quietly.

  “Yeah, wow,” she said sarcastically, still smiling. “Get up to your room, and stay there until we leave.” I turned to walk through the door. “Hey,” she called out. “Don’t forget these!” I turned back to her and took the glasses from her without looking at her face.

  That’s when the Silent Treatment began. The Chamberlains had rented a house in Stonington, Connecticut, for a few weeks in August, so that afternoon we all piled into the Isuzu and drove there. I was quiet. I knew my lying drove my mom crazy, but I couldn’t stop myself. I would lose something, and then I would lie about it. Every time I was about to get into trouble, I automatically scrambled for a story that might be the right one—the one that wouldn’t make her flip out on me. She’d yell, ask what was wrong with me, call me ungrateful, send me to my room. But, still, I preferred the flipping-out to the Silent Treatment.

  There was nothing I hated more than being ignored.

  The whole time we were in Stonington, when I walked into a room, my mom would literally turn her head to avoid having to look at me. It was torturous. I avoided her as much as I could, riding my bicycle up and down the narrow streets of the town for hours, coming back to the house only to head straight up to my room to read Catcher in the Rye.

  One afternoon, we went to the beach. The whole family was there, plus my mom’s younger sister, Aunt Sandy, and her husband, Uncle Phil. We were all sitting on a blanket, and our mom was unpacking a picnic: sandwiches, fruit, potato chips, juice, and soda. She seemed to be in a good mood, laughing at Margaret and making monster noises at William. Then she took out some cookies and started to pass them around, and everyone was laughing and having fun. The sun was shining, and there was a nice cool breeze. William got some cookies, and Margaret. And, for the moment, I forgot that I was still being punished, so I asked, smiling, the sun on my face, “Can I have a cookie, Mom?”

  She didn’t turn her head an inch. She put the cookies back in her bag and leaned back in her beach chair, eyes closed. As everyone around me chewed cookies quietly, my face burned. I looked at the blanket, fighting back tears. There, in that perfect happy moment with her entire family around us, she made it clear: She’d prefer it if I wasn’t around.

  Embarrassed by the tears that were bubbling behind my eyes, I took a deep, ragged breath, stood up, and brushed the sand off my legs. I was going to go for a walk in the dunes, alone, so that I could cry. But before I could get away, Uncle Phil came running up behind me. “Hey,” he said as he caught up. “Can we talk?”

  “Sure,” I said, kicking sand with my bare feet as I walked. Calmer now, I was glad that he had come. I had gone to visit him and Sandy once, at the all-boys boarding school where he taught. While I was there, I saw little of my new mom in Sandy. Though they looked a bit alike in the face, Sandy was smaller and way more relaxed. Mainly, she was nice to me. So was Phil, who was tall and blond and had a habit of looking down a lot.

  As we walked out over the dune, Phil started to tell me a long story about some kid at his school that got in trouble for lying or cheating or something. I didn’t see his point, and I told him so. “The point, Diana,” he said, his glasses slipping down his nose a bit, “is that honesty is the best policy. He wouldn’t have gotten in trouble if he had told the truth.”

  I looked at him then, and I wanted to tell him everything she had ever done, the way she made me feel every time she saw me getting too comfortable, too happy, too much myself. I wanted to tell him that I honestly didn’t know how to stay out of trouble, that I was terrified of nearly every interaction I had with her, my mom, his wife’s sister. “Okay” was all I said; I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t make him understand, because I didn’t. I didn’t know what it was about me that made her so angry. All I knew was that I couldn’t help it.

  LIZ

  ON MY WAY back to Georgetown, I decided to stop in Bedford to visit Diana. I called Nancy to set it up, and to my surprise, she agreed. She invited me to come at 3 p.m. that Thursday afternoon and said I could stay for two hours.

  When I arrived, Diana was waiting for me in the kitchen. Sharp-elbowed and gangly like a marionette, she had grown almost as tall as me. The Aunt Gail resemblance that I had seen so clearly in my mind’s eye only days earlier was faint, just a shadow. This awkward eleven-year-old was nervous to see me; she barely spoke. She looked at me with suspicious eyes and then responded to my enthusiastic hug by stiffly patting my shoulders. Her hands were clammy against my skin.

  Nancy suggested that Diana show me her new room, and I followed my little sister down the hallway and up the stairs. She didn’t look back and wasn’t saying much, and it seemed as if she was mad at me. I peppered her with questions—“How was your summer? Did you go to camp? Are you excited about school?”—but got only one-word answers: “Fine.” “Yes.” “Sure.”

  Diana sat on her bed, and I noticed she was wearing Bloochers, lace-up loafers from L.L. Bean. “I have a pair of those!” I said, and she suppressed the first smile. I scanned her room, decorated in peach and lavender hues. There were butterflies stitched onto her bedspread. Then I saw on her white wicker shelves the crystal polar bear I gave Margaret for Christmas. Beside it was the rag doll Mom bought for Diana right before she died. And then I saw the mix tape. It was vintage Amanda, marked up with black marker, a punk rock font. “Did Amanda send you that?” I asked.

  Diana looked at me for the first time. “Yeah,” she said and smiled again.

  I picked it up and read the scrawled songs—Depeche Mode, the Psychedelic Furs, Madonna, the Go-Gos, David Johansen.

  “She made me the same one!” I said.

  “My favorite song is ‘Borderline,’” Diana s
aid. She was now walking toward me. “What’s yours?”

  That was a tough question. I liked them all. They represented the sound track of my teenage years. “Probably, ‘We’ve Got to Get out of This Place,’” I said. Diana smiled again. She was starting to loosen up. I suggested taking a walk.

  “I’ll show you my favorite place,” she said, and told Nancy we’d be back in an hour.

  As I followed her down the driveway, Diana was still distant, walking faster than me, keeping five feet ahead. I had to jog to keep up. “What’s the big hurry?” I asked, trying to catch up. Diana shot me a glance, and I could see the anger in her eyes. “Why don’t you ever visit me?” she asked. “Or call me? Or anything?” The questions were like pointy javelins being hurled at me, sharp and fast. They explained her silence, her cold-shoulder treatment.

  The problem was I did not have a good answer. “I did write for a while, Di,” I said. “And I called, too. And I tried to visit. But Mrs. Chamberlain seemed to think it was better for you if we stayed away. She told us that you needed time to meld with your new family.” As I said these words, I realized I was scrambling. They sounded ridiculous to me, a nineteen-year-old woman; I couldn’t imagine what they sounded like to an eleven-year-old girl. “Diana, I know this is hard to believe, but if I wrote a letter for every time I thought about you, your room would be filled! There wouldn’t be space for you or your things!”

  And that made Diana soften. “Really?” she said.

  “Really.”

  We started walking in stride, side by side. The farther we got from the Chamberlains’ house, the more animated Diana became. When she mentioned she was taking golf lessons at the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club, I saw my chance. “Did you know Mom was club champion, like, three times?” I asked.