The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

by Kris Radish

  She simply waits and finally Stephanie pulls away and asks, “So why was the town gossip here anyway?”

  Emma hesitates for as long as it takes her to realize that Stephanie probably knows a lot more than she thinks she does.

  “She wanted to know if your grandmother is sleeping with two men at the same time.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That I have no clue.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Emma moves her eyes, finally, off the nose ring and towards all her unplanted flowers. She could swear she hears them crying, sobbing, begging her to get them into the ground. But then Stephanie the Wise pulls Emma’s chin around so she can look her straight in the eye.

  “What?” Emma asks.

  “She is.”

  “Is what?”

  “Sleeping with a mess of men.”

  “What’s a mess?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Apparently I know nothing.”

  “She probably didn’t think you could take it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that if I am not home in like ten minutes your oldest sister is going to kick my ass.”

  “Stop swearing.”

  “I’ll try … if you try to live a little bit more like Grandma and a little less like a grandma.”

  Emma opens her mouth to call her niece an impertinent brat, when her left eye catches the corner of the house and sees that all her dying-to-get-planted flowers and bulbs and shrubs have slipped into the half-mast position.

  Her natural impulse, as Stephie turns to leave, is to throw her hands to her heart and rush to them without thinking again about wild septuagenarian sex, pierced noses, family reunion planning sessions, annoying phone messages or the last twenty, and very true, words her niece has just spoken.

  But Emma does not do that.

  Instead she stands silently in front of the whimpering plants while she carefully rolls off her leather gloves, throws them into the old wooden crate next to what seems like a mile-long garden hose, and then walks into her house, pours herself a huge glass of almost stale cooking sherry, does not let herself worry about the as yet undecided theme for the family reunion, and wonders what it would feel like to get a fern tattooed on her left hip because a nose ring is not allowed where she is employed.

  And of course ignores, with great success, the notion that she lives like a woman twice her age.

  3

  THE THIRD QUESTION:

  Is it possible that we do not all have the same father?

  THE SUPPOSEDLY INFORMAL, NON-INVITATIONAL, but mercilessly obligatory family Sunday morning brunch and the first formal Gilford Family Reunion planning session of the season at the Gilford family matriarch’s home experiences a slight lurch when the matriarch—that would be Grandma Marty Gilford—leaves the room to get a pitcher of mimosas and daughter number three, who almost single-handedly drank the first pitcher of champagne-laced drinks, asks if it isn’t quite possible that the four female Gilford siblings could have been spawned by separate fathers.

  This ridiculousness occurs as Emma is dealing with her own cooking-sherry headache, which she refuses to mention to her siblings, who would not only chastise her for drinking bad wine but would also make fun of her inability to hold her liquor no matter how bad it is—serious liquor consumption, after all, being a much sought-after Gilford asset.

  The sister siblings. The Gilford girls. Joy, Erika, Debra and Emma.

  The entire room, which today includes only three of the sisters and unfortunate Stephie, pauses while Debra’s question hangs in the air. Emma puts her elbows on the table, rests her chin on the palm of her hands, closes her eyes for just a moment and sees all four of them lined up, oldest to youngest, which amazingly also meant tallest to shortest. Even as girls growing up, there was no mistaking that they were sisters. There were four sets of blue eyes, four shades of blonde hair, four sets of long Gilford fingers, and when they stood in line for all those family photographs, the two oldest, Joy and Erika, would always tip their heads to the right and the last two, Debra and Emma, to the left. You would think the left leaners would be a team and the right leaners another, but it was always Joy and Debra pitted against Erika and Emma.

  Joy, the oldest, who never, ever, let anyone forget that fact. And Debra, who as the third in line admitted feeling lost in the crowd on occasion but not lost enough not to let Emma, the baby, know that she knew more and could prove it.

  Erika and Emma became a team during the years that Erika was home and the ten-and-a-half-year difference in their ages could have turned them into something more like mother and daughter but Emma always considered Erika a true sister, her one ally, a friend—even as Erika moved away and became the only sister brave enough to settle away from Higgins.

  And though they all grew out of the photographs and into their personalities and adult bodies, Emma thinks now that maybe they have not changed so much at all.

  Somehow they have all managed to stay fairly trim and even though Emma is the only Gilford sister who has kept her hair long they have all also stayed blonde. There was that one year when Joy tried to be a redhead and Debra, of course, then had to try something new and briefly experienced the life of a brunette. The whole experiment lasted only through one dyeing cycle.

  The four of them have also managed to keep their oldest-to-youngest height differential intact and even as Emma has always wished that she’d been taller, or maybe even the tallest, when she turned forty she felt as if she had joined some secret new sisters club because they suddenly all stopped calling her Shorty. Emma knows bodies start to shrink as they get a little older and she’s secretly waiting for the day when Debra’s two-inch difference evaporates.

  They all have well-earned lines that move from the edges of their eyes and head south in varying degrees and to a variety of places. Emma has always considered laugh and eye lines sexy but she stands alone in the Gilford sisters’ parade on that opinion. She’s almost positive that Debra has had a little work done but she’s equally as certain that she’ll never have the courage to ask her.

  The long beautiful fingers have scars, but all forty of them are still there and there is also this one other thing. All four of them have a series of freckles somewhere on the top half of their backs that Marty has always told them is the Gilford brand. She said their father had it, his father and sister, and his grandfather, too, and she’s proven that it’s some kind of funky family trait by finding similar freckle patterns on several other relatives.

  Sometimes, like now when Debra is being an ass, Emma reminds herself of those freckles and that no matter what Debra or Joy or Erika say or do they are still sisters. Sisters who have so much of the same stuff they have always had.

  Erika was always the most daring. Number Two sister is the one who protested in high school when girls were not allowed to play sports, went to college out of state, dared to marry a divorced man with a child, and became a respected high school teacher. Debra, Sister Number Three, who always had the biggest mouth, became a bossy investment expert, mother of two strikingly lovely daughters, and managed to marry a man who doesn’t mind if she stands up at brunch and asks embarrassing questions.

  Joy, the darling oldest daughter, still played that card way too often as she bossed around her quiet husband, Stephie and her two brothers, and pretty much anyone else, including the three hundred men and women Sister Number One supervises as a department head at a company in Charleston.

  Before she dares to analyze herself, Emma drops her hands and looks at the two other Gilford sisters at the brunch, who are obviously now women. As Marty bangs cupboards in the kitchen, Emma really looks at them like she has not looked at them in a long time.

  Debra is still standing with her empty glass in her hand, looking as if she might die of thirst. She’s also looking like she has missed about three appointments with her hairstylist. Emma is shocked to see gray hair cascading from Debra’s center part and
three inches into her brown-and-blonde highlights. She’s either been too busy investing money and worrying about her next drink or she’s broken every mirror in the house. Emma decides it would be hard for anyone, even a close friend or a sister, to tell Debra she looks like hell.

  When she looks closer, Emma realizes that the usually put-together Debra looks like hell everywhere. She’s normally dressed to the nines, because God forbid you can’t not look like you are meeting the Queen of England in ten minutes. Today, however, she’s wearing an old white tank top, brown elastic-waisted shorts, and she doesn’t even have on earrings. Hungover, perhaps?

  Joy looks a little better but she’s got bags under her eyes the size of quarters. Why isn’t she sleeping? Her right hand, as always, is hovering above her cell phone, which seems to beep every ten seconds with a new text message, presumably from one of her employees because after all, even on Sunday, Joy is indispensable. At least this sister dressed up a bit for the obligatory planning brunch. But under her lovely aqua blue sundress that matches her eyes, Emma can see her collarbones. Joy has lost weight. A ton of weight. Emma is suddenly so worried about Joy she almost misses the dried-up spider plant sitting on the table behind her that cannot go one more second without being watered.

  Emma leaps up, grabs Stephie’s glass of water, and saves the plant as Debra says, “You just can’t control yourself, can you?” to Emma who wisely ignores her but silently agrees that yes, it’s impossible for her not to save a dying plant.

  When she turns to go back to her assigned seat, Debra looks at her as if just that could make her throw up, sits without letting go of her empty glass, and then starts drumming her fingers on the Gilford Family Reunion book, or bible, as they have all taken to calling it, that has been placed next to her and right in front of Marty’s plate.

  The GFR bible, a gigantic tattered black vinyl three-ring binder, that is now as thick as a racehorse’s left thigh and filled with details of every reunion since 1948 when Marty’s mother-in-law started gathering notes, is always the centerpiece of the brunch table when reunion planning starts. To be the keeper of the GFR bible is to be the goddess of the Gilford clan, the monarch of the reunion, the head of a family institution that rules the days and nights of almost half of a year, every single year, for Marty and her four daughters.

  The bible is filled with reunion anecdotes, ordering details, stories from long-deceased relatives, advice for the often reluctant planners and dozens of pages of notes that Marty painstakingly organizes and works on from the end of one reunion to the beginning of the next.

  On any morning but this one the GFR bible would be an anthropologist’s dream. Years and years of Southern family history, photographs that capture decades of style, changing geological formations, weather patterns and the nuance of family interactions. There are bold stars by memorable reunion events and lists of nicknames, ages of children, updated addresses, and sweet and often hilarious entries about what worked and what was a crashing disaster.

  Marty, who is obviously having trouble finding more champagne, made some type of deathbed promise to their father that she would always and forever keep the Gilford Family Reunion alive even if she couldn’t keep him alive. And some years, especially the first few following his death, Emma agreed with her sisters that the reunion was a lifeboat, something to keep their mother floating, one more thing that kept his memory, and possibly even their mother, alive.

  But the bible and every reunion assumption be damned this fine spring morning, for in the minutes that are left of what could have been a lovely meal and exchange of family pleasantries—minus the gasping at little Stephanie’s portable towel holder and Emma’s stolen glances at her mother to see if she could discover any signs of wild lovemaking marks on her skin, or in her smile, or on any random articles of clothing abandoned under a table or chair—it is Debra who, once again, has captured the center of attention.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered?” Debra asks again because she cannot stand the quiet. “That maybe we don’t all have the same father?”

  “What makes you ask that question now?” Emma wants to know.

  “Well, it’s finally out that our mother is the hottest widow in town, thanks to the town gossip, who I hear even had the gall to ask you in your own sacred garden if Mother is having, um, having …”

  Stephanie starts laughing just as she’s about to swallow a mouthful of fruit salad and she coughs the tiny pieces of apples, bananas and kiwi into her napkin, which instantly disgusts Joy, who turns her head away in shock.

  “You can’t even say the word sex, can you, Auntie Debra?” Stephanie manages to sputter through a cough, knowing very well that she’s pushing hard against a very tight adult-child boundary.

  “Come on,” Joy says, sounding like an impatient teenager. “I cannot believe we are talking about this!”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered, well, especially now with everything we know,” Debra continues, dauntless. “Daddy was sick for so long and Mother was very attractive. And don’t you remember men always hanging around?”

  “Those were Dad’s friends, for crying out loud, Deb! Some of them worked with him, they helped Mom with all the things he couldn’t do,” Joy explains. But Debra isn’t buying it.

  “My point exactly,” Debra insists triumphantly. “Because think of what he couldn’t do. You know—like in the bedroom.”

  Hot Grandma waltzes back into the dining room with the mimosas at this astonishing moment and is greeted by a tall wall of sudden silence. Marty Gilford sets the pitcher down right in front of Debra, takes one step back, looks right at her oldest daughter and asks as if she already knows: “Now what?”

  Mother Marty looks ravishing. What’s up with that? Emma wonders and then realizes that if her mother really is hot to trot that could explain her rosy complexion and the spring in her step even as she walks straight into a firing squad headed by daughter Debra.

  But Marty, even at her worst, has always managed to look good to Emma. Marty is old-school Southern charm and grace. She never leaves the house without makeup and has so many tubes of lipstick hidden in pockets, drawers, purses and containers that she could color a female army for a good year.

  Marty can be spontaneous and have a good time but she’s always polite and kind. Even when all four of her girls were teenagers, Emma cannot remember her mother ever raising her voice, becoming overly angry or acting the way her friends claimed their mothers acted. Marty, in fact, was always there for all of her girls. She went to each and every teacher conference even when their father was ill, showed up for special events, made real dinners, and didn’t flip out when she caught one of them smoking under the backyard trees or sneaking beer from the garage refrigerator.

  Emma notices now that her mother has let her hair grow and it is beginning to curl in lovely gray waves around both ears. She’s wearing rather hip green glasses that pull out the hazel of her own eyes. It’s a shade of green, Marty has always said, that she can see just behind the blue in each one of her daughters’ eyes. It also looks like Marty has been going to the gym or lifting the old weights in the garage because her white sleeveless blouse is showing off some rather buff-looking arms. And her red Capri slacks are to die for.

  Emma hastily looks down and sees her cracked flip-flops, the washed-out denim skirt that is more like a uniform because she wears it about five days a week, and a blue shirt with a bird on the front that she faintly remembers buying six years ago. And she realizes with a shock that her mother, who is decades older, looks better than she does.

  She is suddenly longing to talk to Erika. Erika would know what to say right this moment. She’d stand up in that lovely way she stands up where she moves perfectly because of all the yoga and Pilates classes she takes. She would gently put her hand on Emma’s arm as if to say without speaking, “Don’t worry, sis, I’ll take care of Debra.” And then she would say something remarkable that is a total insult but an insult that sounds like something sweet.
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br />   Emma sometimes misses Erika, who doesn’t always make it back to every reunion, so much she calls her at inappropriate hours and begs her to move back to Higgins. Erika then begs her to move to Chicago, which usually makes Emma gasp and instantly change the subject. She sees her older sister as nothing short of perfect, a guiding light, a true friend, someone who acts like a sister is supposed to act and not like the two nutcases who are at this very moment insulting their wonderful mother and dying to fill their glasses with more spiked orange juice.

  “Well, I’m waiting. It is very quiet in here and I’d like to know what you three have been discussing,” Marty demands, standing back with one hand on her hip and the other gripping poor Stephie’s chair.

  Debra quickly pours herself another mimosa. She not so much sips as inhales the entire drink, and then turns slowly to look at her mother.

  “I just had this thought that maybe we all have different fathers.”

  Marty does not hesitate, which is one of her gifts: her sureness, the way she moves forward without having to examine her thoughts, actions or the destination of anything she says or does.

  She laughs.

  Marty throws back her head, opens her lovely long throat towards the ceiling and lets go with her trademark high-pitched wail that sounds more like an opera singer warming up in a tiny room than a regular Sunday brunch laugh from what some local gossips believe is the sexiest grandmother in town.

  This one extraordinarily beautiful thing that her mother does has always turned Emma’s heart inside out and sideways. It is the longest-held memory inside of her, a sound that she is certain she must have heard in the womb. She remembers longing to hear her mother laugh after her father became so ill, after the leukemia wandered into his blood and turned her mother’s beautiful laugh into a silent groan of loss, longing, exhaustion and heartache. There was the chemotherapy and the sudden promise of hope that was swiftly bulldozed by evil leukocytes as her father literally shrank day by day in front of all of them.