The Kids Are All Right

by Diana Welch

  “Her name is engraved on one of the plaques in the club house!” Diana exclaimed. She was bouncing instead of walking. I was even more excited. These were concrete things that linked her to me, to our family. And each time we discovered another one, I saw the spark in her eye and the smile-induced dimples that were undeniable proof.

  I told her about the family reunion, how I wished she could have been there with us. “Do you think Mrs. Chamberlain would have let you come?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, she turned into a gravel driveway leading into one of Bedford’s oldest cemeteries.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “This is the place I was telling you about,” she said.

  I followed her, the sun casting intricate doily-lace patterns onto the grass beneath the centuries-old oaks. We sat on a stone bench that overlooked a few faceless graves. “Why here, Di?” I finally asked.

  “It’s the one place I can come and think,” she said.

  We sat there together listening to the multilayered chirps of birds and the occasional hollow and faraway whoosh of a car passing. I wondered if Diana thought of Mom and Dad as she sat her by herself, but before I could ask, she said, “How’s Amanda?”

  “She’s fine!” I said. “She sends her love. She really misses you. Maybe we can see if Nancy will let her come next time?”

  Diana’s face tightened, and her head shook at the tail end of a full-body shudder. “She says Amanda’s a drug addict.” The words came rushing out as if she’d been holding them back this whole time. She was trembling as she said this, as if she were telling me a terrible secret.

  “That’s ridiculous!” I nearly shouted. My mind was racing faster than my heartbeat. Amanda stopped doing drugs entirely after she moved to Virginia. She was talking about applying to the University of Virginia to finish her undergraduate degree. She was talking about buying a house. I told Diana all of this, and I could see the muscles relax. She was breathing again.

  “She also told me that Dan was a thief,” Diana said.

  I was boiling now. “This is insane!” My loud, angry words were incongruous with this peaceful place.

  “Something about how he stole a movie from the video store?” Diana was trying to make sense of the story by giving me pieces of a puzzle she had been holding in her head for far too long. “Or a poster or something?”

  “Diana, that was a misunderstanding,” I said. “Dan is not a thief. He is still the goofiest, funniest, sweetest guy around. He’d throw himself in front of a Mack truck for you. We all would—me, Dan, and Amanda. We’d do anything for you, and I want you to know that.”

  I looked into Diana’s eyes, shiny with relief, and hugged her close. “We love you more than anything in the world,” I whispered into her ear. And that caused a tremor to set off in her long, skinny body. She let out a sigh that sounded as though it was too big for her esophagus, as though it hurt to cough up. I hugged her even harder. And as we sat on that stone bench in that cemetery, I said, “Don’t believe a word Nancy says, okay?” She pulled away from me and smiled so hard her eyes disappeared. She let out another sigh, but this one sounded more like a laugh. This one sounded like it felt good.

  DIANA

  AMANDA NEVER SENT me a mix tape. At least, I don’t remember getting it. Those songs Liz talks about don’t resonate with my eleventh year, either. That summer, I was into the Grateful Dead and James Taylor. I do remember Liz coming to visit, though, and I remember feeling that she was just swinging by again, so I didn’t let myself get too excited. I remember telling her what my mom was telling me about Amanda and Dan, and I remember her assurances that it wasn’t true. But I wasn’t sure whom to believe. What did it matter, anyway? I never saw those people. I was in a different world.

  I was a Chamberlain now, officially. The trial period of being Diana Welch-Chamberlain came to an end when I started fifth grade as Diana Chamberlain, the eldest of three.

  AMANDA

  SOON, DENNIS AND I decided to buy a place together in Virginia. We had broken up when I moved down there, because he wasn’t ready to leave New York, where he was born and raised. But when he came down to visit in July, he decided to stay. I was happy. I hadn’t wanted to break up, but I also wasn’t willing to structure my life around a guy. That’s not my style.

  We drove around the Virginia countryside checking out farms and old houses. Then we found it, a repossessed farm house on twenty acres. It was an old house with two bedrooms and a giant kitchen. It had a barn, a riding ring, and a garage. The grass was waist high, mice were living in the kitchen, and the house itself had been stripped of everything. There was no dishwasher, refrigerator, nothing; even the doorknobs were missing. Dennis thought it was disgusting, but I saw the potential: There was a living room where we would put the Christmas tree, a dining room big enough for Mom and Dad’s dining-room table and hutch, and a huge kitchen, perfect for making big holiday meals. I borrowed sixty thousand dollars from the trust and bought it outright.

  By then, I was fed up with Abbie. She pissed me off one too many times. I was mucking fifty stalls a day for her, and she’d criticize how I was doing it. One day, I put my pitchfork down and walked out. We had a contract on the house and it was vacant, so I squatted there for two months before the contract became finalized. Then Dennis and I tore out the nasty carpeting and redid the plumbing. We got a U-Haul and drove all of Mom and Dad’s stuff down from Bedford—the grandfather clocks, Mom’s portrait, the Etruscan trunk, the Oriental rugs, everything. This house was my dream, come true.

  LIZ

  AFTER SEEING DIANA, I kept the promise I made to myself and wrote to her more often. I pinned her photo above my desk at Georgetown. I made a point to try to talk to her on the phone, but I never got to actually speak with her. She was never home. Off doing whatever eleven-year-old girls do, I guessed. But I missed her now more than ever because, for the first time since Mom died, it felt as if the Welch kids had a home. It was called Morningside Farm, but it reminded me of the gray house of our childhood home. There were two large pastures out back and an old barn as well.

  I borrowed my boyfriend’s car to drive down several weekends that fall to help Amanda move in. We put the gold brocade couch in the living room, the trestle table in the dining room, and we hung Mom’s portrait there as well. The hutch went in the corner, and I spent one whole weekend unpacking Mom’s hunt-pattern china and arranging it so the horses looked as though they were galloping across the bone-white plates.

  Dan and Karen came down for Thanksgiving, and we spent all day cooking. Amanda prepared the turkey; Karen made Mom’s stuffing—lots of celery, raisins, and apples; I baked the pies. We set the table with Mom and Dad’s wedding china—gold-rimmed white—and I polished the silver. Karen ironed a linen tablecloth and took lots of photos of the table laden with food before we dug in. We made a real feast, like the old days, and Karen brought a case of chardonnay.

  Dan and Karen came down for Christmas, too. We spent an entire day decorating the squat cedar that we found in the woods behind the house. Amanda hung the four stockings Mom had made for us years ago—red and green patchwork booties with our names stitched in white rickrack letters: AMANDA, LIZ, DAN, and DIANA. As I unpacked all the ornaments, I discovered that the ceramic Mickey Mouse characters from our trip to Disney World with Dad had survived. Sadly, the four fragile eggs Mom had hand blown before painting each with our portraits had not.

  On Christmas morning, Amanda got up early and made Mom’s pumpkin bread. Dan put on the Santa hat and handed out gifts, one at a time, from a pile so big it seemed to hold up the tree. We all stayed in our pajamas until well past noon.

  That afternoon, Amanda and I made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner, and Karen made an apple pie for dessert. More photographs were taken, and in each Amanda and Dan and I are beaming. We were as happy as we’d ever been before things fell apart. But it still was not perfect; it was still not right. Diana should have been there too.


  DIANA

  THAT SPRING, WE all went up to Albany to see Mimi and Pop-Pop. They were my mom’s parents, and they weren’t rich like Gram, no maids or fancy cars. They still lived in the same house where their kids grew up. It seemed that my mom had good memories of growing up there; she was popular and roller-skated to school every morning. She even gave me roller skates for my first communion. I was particularly grateful for that gift because everybody else gave me religious stuff, like a white leather-bound Bible and a rosary made out of crystals.

  Though I really tried, I couldn’t imagine Nancy Chamberlain at my age, the eleven-year-old everybody called “Nance.” I knew she was born somewhere in the middle of two sisters and a brother. They were all grown up now, living with their own families, but her brother lived just down the road. He smiled a lot and had a smiling wife and two little sons who smiled a lot, too. It seemed that everyone smiled in Albany.

  Mimi was especially kind. When I accidentally farted in the bed one night and a little squirt came out, Mimi was the one I told. “It’s not thyat byad,” she said when she lifted the blankets to reveal the little brown stain. “It’ll come right out in the wash.” One afternoon, when it was just the two of us in the kitchen, I asked Mimi if I could have a donut. She opened the paper box that was on the counter and put two powdered-jelly ones on a plate. Winking at me, she cut another one in half, putting one half on my plate. I looked up at her, unsure if I could eat all of it, and she said to me, “There, now, go ahead,” and nodded at the white mounds in front of me. “This is what grandmothers are for.”

  “Thanks,” I said, picking up the powdery half circle. I licked the red jelly oozing out of the neat little hole. It was delicious. I finished it. As I reached for a whole one, I smiled, knowing that I had powdered sugar on my cheek. Mimi smiled back.

  The front door slammed. It was my mom home from shopping with Margaret and William. As she came into the kitchen with two grocery bags in her hands, her eyes went from the plate in front of me, where one donut was left, to the powdered sugar on my face. I had the other donut in my hand. “You are so selfish!” she said to me loudly, before setting the grocery bags on the kitchen table. “Who do you think you are? Does it ever occur to you that there are two other children in this family who might want a donut?”

  I looked at Mimi, who was at the sink, tidying up, to see if she would say anything. She didn’t look up from the suds. “Go to your room,” my mom yelled, pointing up the stairs behind her. “And stay there until you learn how to be a part of this family!” I put the uneaten donut down next to the other and shoved my chair back. Her arm was still pointing to the stairs. “Now,” she said, firmly. I dragged myself away from the warm kitchen and the nice grandma and my plate of powdered jelly donuts, and I started up the stairs on my hands and knees, peeking through the banister at the women in the kitchen. “She’s just so selfish,” I heard my new mother saying as she started to unload the groceries. “To come upon a plate full of donuts and assume that they were all for her!”

  Mimi, still scrubbing at things in the sink, said in a quiet voice, “She wasn’t told that, Nancy.” She shook her head and stopped washing, pausing for a moment to admonish her daughter. “She asked me for a donut and I gave her more than one. That’s it.”

  My mom stopped for a second. “Oh!” she said, laughing and shaking her head as though getting rid of a fly. She seemed embarrassed by her mistake. Her mistake! I crept up the stairs, tingling. Mimi had just backed up my version of reality, one where I wasn’t an ingrate, a lazy liar, too big for her britches. I was a normal kid. I didn’t do anything wrong; it was my mom who was wrong, and somebody saw it! I was almost at the top of the stairs when I heard my mom’s voice behind me.

  “I am so sorry, Diana,” she said. “I misunderstood.” I turned to look at her, smiling sheepishly at the bottom of the stairs. “But when I came in to see you eating all those donuts …” Her voice trailed off and with it her smile. She looked worried, almost confused. And I, standing at the top of the stairs, felt victorious. I wanted to milk this moment for as long as I could. So I sat down and pouted, hoping that my sad face would make her walk up the stairs and hug me, rock me back and forth, and tell me she was sorry, so sorry. That she loved me. That she promised she would be nicer to me. That she realized that I was a great kid. That she was glad that I was a part of her family. That I wasn’t a burden. Instead, she stared at my frowning face and downcast eyes for a moment before turning slowly to walk away.

  DAN

  LIZ SAID HER college essay got her into every school she applied to, so I told her I wanted to see it as an example. She sent it to me, and I changed a few words, so “Liz” became “Dan,” and then I sent it to Curry College, because they have a special program for dyslexics, and to Rochester Institute of Technology, which had a really good photography department. I got into both.

  That summer, I was seventeen years old. Liz and I lived together at Karen’s apartment. I gave her my room and slept on the couch. I was happy to have her there. We worked together, too. She was a waitress and I was a busboy at this lame restaurant on the Upper East Side. Neither of us made much money, but it was fun to take the cross-town bus together back and forth. I bussed her tables and she was always really generous about sharing her tips with me. I was still booking commercials, and Karen got me a job working as a bike messenger for Don Giamatti, a head-shot photographer. That job made me want to become a photographer—Don was this cheesy balding guy with a ponytail, but he hooked up weekly with hot actresses. Basically, he got paid six hundred bucks to get laid. It seemed like the best job in the world.

  Then I met Lisa while working at the restaurant. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. When I finally mustered up the courage to talk to her, I realized she was as sweet as she was beautiful. I fell in love that summer. I spent every minute I could with Lisa. I went to Staten Island, where she lived with her parents, almost daily. We’d play video games in the basement or go to the beach. And her parents always invited me to stay for dinner. It was the first time I had regular sit-down dinners in years.

  That summer felt like a new start. It was a really exciting time. Lisa and I started to talk about making love, a new thing for both of us. Lisa was a virgin, and I had never been in love, never shared that experience with anybody. I was nervous, so I asked Liz about it one afternoon at Karen’s. She told me to be gentle. She said it was a big deal. And I knew that.

  When we finally did it, right before I left for college, it was worth the wait.

  LIZ

  THAT SUMMER WAS all about me making money. I chose to spend my junior year abroad at Edinburgh University and couldn’t wait to get back to Europe. I chose Scotland because I was in the Honors English program at Georgetown, which put me on a fast track for a master’s degree. If I continued taking honors classes my junior year, I could take graduate-level classes my senior year, which would double as credits for both an undergraduate and a master’s degree. Of the three foreign schools Georgetown would accept honors credits from—Oxford, Trinity, and Edinburgh—I chose the Scottish one because my middle name, Morgan, and Amanda’s, Gordon, come from our ancestors there.

  Several weeks before I left, I drove Dan up to Rochester. He was nervous, I could tell, talking extra fast as I helped him pack sheets and towels into his trunk. I borrowed the Stewarts’ Land Cruiser, and we set out early one morning in late August. Dan had just gotten his driver’s license so I let him drive as I played DJ. I had brought a selection of Amanda’s mix tapes to listen to on the way up. I popped one in, and Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie” blared out of the speakers. Dan started to sing along, and I thrust my hand out the window and let it ride the warm late summer air. “This is a new start for you, Dan,” I said. “College lets you be whoever you want.”

  “It’s sort of scary, too,” he said. Then he stuck his head out the window and screamed at the top of his lungs. When he pulled his head back in, he had an ecsta
tic look on his face. “That felt great!” he said. “You do it.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. The Pretenders had just come on, and I wanted to sing along to “Stop Your Sobbing.” But Dan was insistent.

  “Liz, let it all out,” he said. “It’s okay to just scream at the top of your fucking lungs and let it go.”

  I found this annoying. It was a gorgeous, sunny day. I was relaxed. Why was Dan pushing me to do something I didn’t want to do? I ignored him and sang, “It is time for you to laugh instead of crying.”

  But Dan was persistent. “Do it, Elizabeth.” He was getting testy, too. I could tell by the tone of his voice. “You don’t have to pretend that everything’s perfect all the time.”

  I looked out the window at the other cars on the road. We passed one station wagon filled with large Tupperware trunks. A middle-aged man was driving; his plump blond wife sat next to him in the passenger seat; and a boy, around Dan’s age, sat in the back. They were all smiling, talking in an animated fashion. I wondered what they were saying. I wondered if they were on their way to RIT, too. I wondered what Dad and Mom would say to Dan as they drove him to his very first day of college.

  I stuck my head out the window and let out a scream, but what came out was more like a high-pitched squeak. I pulled back in and looked at Dan.

  “You can do better than that,” he said, shaking his head.

  So I tried again. And this time I searched deep in my gut and found a place I had kept under lock and key for years. Somehow I managed to pry open that casket of grief and longing and missing, and the fury that had been pent up all that time came whirling up my chest, filling my lungs and then my mouth, which opened wide to let out a primal howl. I shouted so loudly it hurt my ears and strained my throat. I shouted until there was no sound left and my lungs ached.