The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

by Kris Radish

  “Come on in, Mother.”

  “Don’t be a smartass,” Marty says through her teeth.

  Emma so desperately wants to take off her shoes and walk through her usually quiet gardens with her bare feet so she can feel the grass, the location of all of the new weeds, the soft mist from the early evening air that is already resting like a silent invader on her stone walkways.

  There is no getting around this, Emma reminds herself as she plants her behind obediently on a chair across the table from her mother and offers her a glass of white wine.

  “No thank you. I can’t stay long. I have plans. I’ve been worried about you.”

  Here it comes.

  Emma has decided to erase the discount store incident from her mind. She has planned on going to yet another discount store to get everything on the list because she was certain Marty would want to see a receipt.

  “Is it about the reunion?” Emma feels the edge of the headache she still vividly remembers from three days ago push lightly against her temples.

  “I’m worried about that, I always am, but I’m also worried about you, Emma. It’s not like you to not call for so long or to leave an event abruptly.”

  “Do I ever not get the reunion work done?” Emma asks, hoping to avoid the questions she imagines her mother must really be wanting to ask. To her delight she succeeds. Her mother asks if she’s gotten together yet with Joy and Debra to pick a theme for this year’s annual event.

  Just now, Emma would love to be running with the scissors. Just now she would love to tell her mother that she’s heartily sick of her sisters and that she screwed up the discount order. But she sits like a stone because she’s missed something here.

  Was I supposed to meet with them and pick a theme?

  Emma immediately guesses Debra was supposed to tell her about the reunion theme. Instead she probably ran to their mother to tell her about the fight they’d had. That surely must be part of this home visit by the matriarch, because the fight was a rare blowout—rare, meaning Emma did the blowing this time.

  She’d been having an informal meeting with her boss, Janet, when her phone rang. Emma had picked it up without thinking that someone like Debra would be on the other end.

  Noisy, bitchy, bigmouthed and occasionally cruel Debra, calling to make certain Emma knew she remembered that Emma had abruptly left brunch even if she had been drinking all those mimosas.

  The sound of Debra’s voice made Emma jump to her feet, which made Janet jump off the desk and mouth, Who is it?

  My sister, Emma mouthed back.

  “Shit,” Janet said, loud enough for Debra to hear.

  Emma motioned Janet frantically out the door and then held up her hand to tell her to come back in five minutes.

  Five minutes of hell, Janet wanted to say, because she’d heard about some of Debra’s antics from Emma before.

  “I was just checking because of how you stormed out of the brunch the other day,” Debra began.

  “It was not a storm. I merely left.”

  “But you never leave.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “We were supposed to be planning the reunion and instead you wanted to talk about Mother’s sex life,” she reminded Debra.

  Debra was silent, a sweet ten-second gift that gave Emma a chance to realize her sister was half blitzed and there was a good chance Debra didn’t even remember everything she’d said, not just at the brunch, but for most of her life.

  Most of her life when Debra was busy feeling sorry for herself because she was the third daughter and not the first. Most of her life when she took out her frustration on her little sister. Most of her life when she was busy making certain she had the biggest and the best and the most everything.

  “I don’t like you, Debra.”

  Emma blurted it out before she had a chance to think about what she was saying. She blurted it out and the second she did, she realized that her whole world has been in a very new and unfamiliar orbit since Samuel left his message and she’d discovered that her mother was sleeping with half of South Carolina.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I don’t like you, Debra.”

  “Emma, what the hell is wrong with you? You run out of brunch, you don’t call anyone for days, now you are yelling at me and saying something horrid.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “Like what?” Debra asked, raising her voice.

  “Being treated horridly.”

  Debra was furious and Emma could hear her throw something. She imagined the other stockbrokers in her sister’s office were used to the sound of things hitting the walls when her sister was on the phone, and when Emma started to laugh, Debra started to scream.

  “You need help, Emma! Something has happened to you. I’m going to call Mother.”

  “I’m terrified,” Emma teased, wondering who had jumped inside of her body and was speaking for her. “She likes me the best anyway.”

  “No shit,” Debra continued to yell, falling right into Emma’s trap. “You were the fucking princess who could do no wrong while the rest of us worked our rear ends off.”

  “What?” Emma said because it was her turn to be astonished.

  Debra became unplugged. She wailed about Emma being the baby and their mother doting on her because she was so young when their father died. About Emma always being first. About how Marty could never come visit her when she was in college because she had to stay with Emma who was still in school herself and could not be left alone.

  “Debra!” Emma shouted just as her boss walked back into the office. “Go to hell.”

  And then Emma Lauryn Gilford, to her own astonishment, hung up the phone.

  “I had no idea she thought that way about me,” Emma finally managed to say.

  “I’m imagining your sister is saying the same thing,” Janet told Emma.

  Add that little scene to the flip-out at the discount store and Emma, watching her mother across the dining room table now, thinks she can guess exactly what Marty is going to say next. But what she gets instead is just the Look.

  It’s that Look that tells Emma she is supposed to be thinking about something that she missed or forgot or should apologize for. Something like a broken dish, missed curfew, bad grades in college, a felony indictment, telling your sister to go to hell, screwing up the reunion order, or walking out of brunch gets the Look.

  “Look, honey, is something going on? What is happening?” Marty finally says when Emma doesn’t budge. “I know the Sunday brunch is a pain in the rear end, and that sometimes this reunion planning is a bit much, but it’s a chance for us all to stay connected. To be together. So many families just fall apart and one goes here and the other there and this reunion is a huge responsibility.”

  Emma really wants to say the right thing. She wants to say she knows that her mother is right and that she understands what her mother is always trying to do by staying so involved in her life. She wants to say that yes, family is important and probably the reunion is important also, but she suddenly wants to say so many other things, too.

  She wants to say she gets all of that and then ask her mother When. When is a family allowed to branch out and have its own brunch? When can you really be considered a grown-up and start eating at the adults’ table? She longs to take the scissors and run with them so fast that she will qualify for the Olympics.

  But what she does instead is take in a breath, a breath so large that it is a wonder she does not lift right up and bump her head against the ceiling. Then she says what she always says and that is, “I’m sorry, Mom,” and drops her head.

  Emma decides out of exhaustion to just skip around the truth and sort of lie, something she has never been very good at. She tells her mother that she’s just been tired (which is true), that work has been hard (which is also true), that she’s been worried about her gardens and will call Debra about the theme by the end of the week—which is only
half true.

  Breathe, Emma, breathe.

  The half lying doesn’t work well and Marty cuts her off just after she says, for the second time, it must be her work schedule making her so cranky, by gently putting her hand over Emma’s mouth and saying, “Shhh,” as if Emma were a baby.

  “It’s okay, whatever it is,” Marty assures her.

  “I just told you what it was.”

  “Honey, I’m not stupid and I’ve also been your age, so that gives me a bit of a leg up on some, not all, but some of the things that might be floating through your mind and life.”

  Really, Emma wonders. When you were my age you were struggling with an ill husband, a mess of children, financial disasters, and a future that appeared uncharted and unmanageable, the other side of comfortable and totally the opposite of what was being discussed in McCall’s magazine.

  “Maybe you know more than I do, Mom, but it seems like if you dissected our lives the parts that are similar wouldn’t add up to much of a pile,” Emma responds quietly, suddenly embarrassed that her mother had to come check on her.

  Marty laughs. Sometimes her laugh is predictable, like after someone tells a joke, or when Marty gets some kind of fabulous news about one of the grandkids, or when she finds out that the godlike daughter Erika has received yet another promotion, or better yet, may be coming for a visit. But when Marty laughs like this, unexpectedly, when no one else in his or her right mind would laugh, it throws Emma into an emotional tailspin.

  “What is so funny, Mom?”

  “You are, my darling,” Marty manages to say as she leans forward so that she can put her hands on Emma’s face. “You think just because some people think I’m an old lady that once I wasn’t your age and once I didn’t feel and wonder and dream and imagine how some things could have been different?”

  “I haven’t thought about it that much but our lives, well, they seem like night and day in so many ways.”

  “I’m talking about the feelings of a woman, Emma. I was forty-three once, too. I had dreams and longings and plans and that has everything to do with being female and nothing to do with the year I was born and the fact that I am your mother.”

  Dare she ask? What dreams? What did you want, Mother, that you didn’t have or couldn’t reach? What made your heart ache and yearn? What would possess you to get up and leave a family brunch? What would make you lie in the yard and want to do nothing more than caress the back sides of your lovely ferns? When was the last time you ran with a scissors or any sharp instrument?

  Emma cannot bring herself to ask these questions out loud because then she would have to ask herself the same questions. She would have to get up, walk into her bedroom, close the door so that she could look into her own eyes, down her face, past her sinking breasts, beyond her waist and to the top of her toes. She’d have to look at herself and then most likely go and lie down somewhere in her yard and think about the answer.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Really,” Emma admits.

  “Don’t be sorry, dear. Don’t ever be sorry for how you feel. Some people don’t feel. Some women—well, heavens, many women—give up feeling. They end up like those little doggie dolls people have in their back windows.”

  “Doggie dolls?”

  “Yes, those wiggly-head things that move when the car moves and not when they want to move.”

  “Mom, you kill me. Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  Marty laughs again, softer, sweeter, a little sister version of her throw-it-from-the-pit-of-your-stomach laugh, and tells Emma that she feels as if she is a teenager who has a dozen wiggly-head dolls lined up in the window of a really fast car.

  “What?” Emma wants to know.

  “I’m just very happy right now,” her mother answers.

  Emma blushes, thinking it must be the sex—if all the rumors are true. And her mother simply stands up, ignores Emma’s flushed cheeks and not so much leaves as waltzes out the door. Emma watches her walk to her car and feels almost distraught because she didn’t confess about the shopping, doesn’t know anything about a damn reunion theme, and more than anything she would love to tell her mother about Samuel’s calls.

  And she is suddenly and wildly angry. Angry at herself for not saying more, for not saying the truth, for worrying about things she shouldn’t worry about and really, she’s also sorry she yelled at Debra. Something, just from her looks alone, is going on with her sister.

  Emma slams her own front door and stalks through the back door as if someone is pulling her on a long rope that is attached to her waist, out into her well-organized but seemingly chaotic gardening shed. She finds the small pruning shears she has just had sharpened so they could be considered a lethal weapon anywhere else but in a garden.

  Emma picks up the scissors, flings open the shed door, and then without hesitation she begins to run up her own sidewalk, through the tangled rows of flowers and plants, around the side of the house, and back to one side and then around the other side of the garage.

  She does this brazen act with the scissor-like shears in her right hand, blades open, barefoot, and without even worrying about whether or not she could put her eye out.

  Then the phone in her pocket rings, she sees that it’s her mother, and she takes the call.

  “Honey, the real reason I stopped, I remember now, is to just double-check about you reserving the park for the reunion. I’m sure you got that long message I left you with all the reunion assignments. The park thing, last week, was a biggie,” Marty says rambling while Emma is stopped dead in her tracks like a madwoman with a pair of scissors clenched in her fist. “Gotta go, love you, see you at the next brunch,” she adds, laughing, and hanging up before Emma can say one word.

  Emma then lunges towards her kitchen door and for the much-loathed answering machine, holds her breath, and places the blades of the scissors over her closed eyes as she pushes the New Messages button.

  There are so many minutes of her mother and her instructions on the machine that Emma almost shuts off the recording. Then she realizes there is another message right after it and when Emma hears who it is she lets the sharp weapon slip from her hands lest she does purposefully put her eye out.

  7

  THE SEVENTH QUESTION:

  Could you just, please, pick up the phone

  and give me a chance?

  IT’S NOT THE LONG, DETAILED AND TERRIBLY explicit message from Marty that makes Emma throw down the scissors, lest she stab her own heart with their sharp pruning power, but the message right behind it. It’s from Samuel asking her to call him and give him the chance she never gave him all those years ago.

  His voice is filled with emotion and he mentions his phone number not once, but three times, and the third time she hears it Emma manages to grab a chair, pull it towards her with her foot, and sit down.

  Samuel doesn’t sound desperate or frightening, but persistent, and if Emma could focus on just that, whatever it is he might possibly have to say to her, or why he so needs to see her now, it would probably help her slow her heart from near bursting to a simple wild thump.

  But there’s also the other message. The one that’s been sitting on the machine for days. The one she never heard the day she was lying in her garden and trying to forget about Samuel, family reunions, and the fact that she is one of four sisters.

  It’s Marty with so many reunion assignments Emma is wondering if the entire affair has turned into a one-woman show. There’s the theme selection, which Marty wants her to discuss with her three sisters and decide upon, let’s see … tomorrow. There’s the shopping, some of which she’s already messed up, the invitation design and selection, and the most important, crucial thing of all.

  Emma was supposed to go stand in line at the park office yesterday in order to make certain she got the park reservation accepted. The park where the reunion is always and will always be held. The park where dozens and dozens of Gilford family members land simply by pointing their cars in that direction b
ecause they have been there so many times.

  “It’s the single most important thing I have to assign and that’s why I am giving it to you this year,” Marty said on the answering machine. “Don’t tell your sisters, but they seem distracted, and I know you can take care of this.”

  Shit.

  The reservation mess alone is a major problem because the city parks are absolutely beautiful and some people camp out for days to make certain they get their reservation approved. But Samuel’s voice, Emma’s increasing inability to be or do anything Emma-like, and then Samuel’s voice again, makes her feel almost incapacitated. What in God’s name is she going to do?

  The only thing that she can think of doing without actually falling on top of her scissors is to call Erika. Erika who will reassure her in a calm and loving voice that it’s no big deal. Erika who will think of a way for her to save herself. Erika who will laugh it all off and tell her that this is nothing. Erika who has always been there and been wise and picked her side in just about every single Gilford sister battle. Erika who is the only sister who actually knows about her and Samuel.

  Surely Erika will help her.

  Before she can even dial her sister, however, a call comes in from Stephie and Emma can’t bring herself to talk to her but immediately retrieves the message.

  “You are not going to believe this but I got tired of waiting for you to call her and so I asked Mom if I could stay at your house and here is the good part,” Stephie reported breathlessly. “She didn’t even hesitate. She said go tonight because they are leaving early. This is either the biggest break in the whole world or my mom has totally flipped her lid. See you very soon. Bye.”

  The good news is what Emma grabs on to immediately. At least she won’t have to convince Joy to let Stephie stay with her. But the bad news is that Stephie will be showing up with all her teenage stuff and maybe complicate what is turning out to be one of the worst days, weeks, and months of her entire life.