The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

by Kris Radish

  The long haul that has been lengthened by Marty’s triumphant return back to her queendom, the series of phone calls announcing her return, and also discovery of the long-held secret about Emma and Samuel that spewed from the lips of evil sister Debra like cannon fodder in the heat of a siege—not to mention the fact that reunion work is all but at a dead stop.

  And Marty’s four daughters have declared war on each other.

  “HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT, if anything, Emma even did with this man?” Marty asked Debra during a phone conversation as she threw her clothes out of her suitcase hours before she confronted Emma.

  “I saw her face,” Marty’s third daughter snorted.

  “You still know nothing, Debra. Why in God’s name didn’t you stay and ask her?”

  “I was angry and hurt.”

  “Why? He was no longer your boyfriend, he was part of your past. You had no claim on him.”

  “That’s not the point,” Debra snapped back.

  “Help me out here, dear. What is the point? Is the point that this man liked your sister more than he liked you?”

  Debra laughed. It was a kind of fake laugh that sounded like Glenn Close, acting as Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians, and suddenly that was exactly what Marty imagined, her daughter in a clingy black evening gown, head tipped back, cigarette holder dangling off her ruby red bottom lip while little black and white doggies yipped at her heels.

  “I’m sure, Mother. Give me a break.”

  “You can be pretentious and snobby, darling, and if I haven’t mentioned it before you can also be a total pain in the ass.” Marty stood up and ignored the suitcase and the man who was in her shower. “Do you ever stop to think about how someone else feels? Or is it always about you?”

  Marty could hear Debra suck in air as if she had been punched in the stomach with an implacable fist.

  “Listen,” Marty went on, “in the world of love and romance, once you have discarded someone he is fair game for anyone else. And anyone includes your sister. If you stopped to think for three minutes, you would have realized years and years ago that Emma and Samuel always had a lot in common and were always attracted to each other.”

  Debra had sunk back into her own couch and was trying to remember if she had ever hung up on her mother.

  And what Marty wanted to add, and restrained herself from saying, was that Debra should have been whipped with something more than wet noodles a very long time ago. A long time ago when she treated her younger sister Emma like a contagious disease, paraded her professional credentials like a fifty-carat diamond and forgot about the things—like family and true love and honor and kindness—that really matter. Back when they were growing up and Marty felt more like a referee than a mother when all her girls were in the same room and Debra was all but wiping her nose on her sister’s pant legs when the entire time she was the big snot. Those years when it became apparent that Joy, Debra and the almost always absent Erika took baby sister Emma totally for granted.

  But Marty said none of this. Her remarkable restraint happened only because she felt that feminine hormonal-induced mothering phenomenon called guilt. Guilt because what she was about to say she should have said sooner, louder, longer and perhaps constantly until this seemingly grown daughter got it.

  “Why wouldn’t she tell me?” Debra whined, oblivious to her mother’s inner turmoil.

  “Think about it. You have not exactly been an open and loving book of tender forgiveness and understanding your whole life,” Marty explained. “Do you ever put anyone else first? Do you ever think about what you are doing and saying and how it might affect or hurt someone else? Don’t you realize yet that the world does not revolve around you?”

  Another woman might stand humbled and speechless but not Debra Gilford Jasperson, which totally proved her mother’s loud point.

  “Mother, what the hell happened to you on this trip that you never bothered to tell any of us about? You sound unleashed, for God’s sake.”

  Unleashed is putting it mildly, Marty thought, but she was not about to share anything more with her pinheaded daughter. She felt another powerful desire to slap Debra upside her pretty little head but Marty had prided herself on never hitting her children even as her peers were belt-whipping their babies, spanking them with their closed hands, and reading Dr. Spock as if no one had any common sense or had ever raised babies before.

  “Debra?” Marty asked, wishing she had never left the fabulous and very isolated island she had just come from, “I am going to hang up now and give you a chance to think about what you and your sisters should do next because I know you will call several of them the second I hang up. Bye, dear.”

  And Marty had hung up, leaving Debra sitting in stunned silence because her mother had actually hung up first. Then Marty raised her hand in a lovely salute to the retired attorney who was now standing behind a very small towel in her bathroom and immediately dialed Emma.

  Emma did not pick up.

  Marty dialed again.

  No pickup.

  Marty knew that if she persisted Emma would eventually answer. She knew Emma was home because she had seen her car in the driveway on the ride home from the airport and she knew—she knew because she knew her Emma.

  “Mother.” Emma picked up the phone sounding as if someone with a tiny bow and arrow had stood on her tongue and drilled it full of metal arrows.

  And that was all it took.

  Marty could tell with just that one word that her beloved Emma was in trouble.

  “I heard about Samuel,” Marty admitted calmly while the retired attorney put away groceries and started a load of wash.

  “How in the hell do you know about Samuel?”

  “How do you think?”

  “Debra is a selfish woman who thinks she’s the center of the universe. I did not and do not owe her an explanation.”

  “Maybe not,” Marty offered. “But …”

  “But what?”

  “She’s your sister. You can practically see her roof from your kitchen. Think about how you would feel if this situation was reversed. It’s new information and Debra just needs some time to absorb it. No one committed a crime.”

  This softened Emma for just a moment until she blurted out, “He’s called more than once.”

  Marty asked what that meant, got part of the story, all that she needed to know to realize that Emma loved this wandering jackass of a man, and that she was hurting like she had never hurt before, and yet Marty says something that does not seem to make sense to Emma.

  “What did you expect from him?”

  “Some kind of explanation about why he went away. Why he never came back. Something to settle my heart, Mother. I feel like a damned fool.”

  Marty has to pause to slow her own breath and to keep her seventy-eight-year-old heart beating just the way it needs to keep beating so everything stays in place. The wonderment of motherhood never ceases to amaze her even as she accepts the fact that most of what she has done, does, and will always do is a huge crap-shoot because like every other mother, she has absolutely no idea if she is ever doing or saying the right thing.

  This is when the words kittens and beer come flying out of Marty’s mouth and when Emma wonders why in the world she’d bothered to pick up her telephone.

  “Mother, that is not nice,” Emma wails.

  “Well, what did you think would happen? Did you think the man would show up on your doorstep after all these years with roses or something? Life is not always like that, honey. And I’m not the one who is going to lie and tell you so. And why have you never talked about this? Why has it been such a secret?”

  Emma thinks it should be fairly obvious that she has been embarrassed by the depth of her love for a man who had been her sister’s boyfriend, love for a man who chose the jungle over her. But that is not all of it. Not at all.

  “There’s not much of what I have that is just mine,” she admits, quietly and very carefully. “We have a family of commu
nal emotions and happenings and events. I wanted something—one thing—that was mine. Just mine.”

  Marty is sitting on the side of her bed that faces the curtainless window that overlooks the simple but elegant flower garden Emma has planted and partially maintains for her. Emma started the garden, which had fallen into total disrepair, not too long after Marty’s husband died and it had been a salvation for both Emma and Marty and the beginnings of Emma’s passion for her beloved plants. Emma doesn’t know that her mother spent hours sitting in this very same spot watching her daughter dig and plant and lose herself to the earth. Hours imagining what her life and Emma’s life might have been like if Louis had not gotten so sick and died. Hours watching her daughter mimic the movements of her father without once ever acknowledging to Emma how similar they were, how emotionally alike, how tied in soul and spirit.

  Those had been the hardest and the loveliest days of Marty’s life. Days when she could cry uncontrollably in the same room where her husband had died, days when she could muffle her sorrow under the knowledge that she still had the children—their children—and this one amazing daughter still at home who was so much like her father that Marty’s heart often stopped simply when she looked at Emma.

  Emma.

  Marty asks herself now why she has never told Emma about those days and more about her father and the similarities that have bonded Marty to her last child in a way that has sometimes seemed almost desperate. Her own secret about this rises up until an uncontrollable cry seeps past her throat and erupts, without warning, into the phone.

  “Mom, are you okay?” Emma asks with a hint of panic in her own voice.

  “Yes,” Marty whispers softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? Oh, Mom, it’s okay. I know you said what you did to slap me back into reality. I was expecting kittens and free beer.”

  “That’s not what I was talking about, sweetheart.” Marty’s trying to imagine how she can say the rest of it, what she should have said a long time ago, what she feels she must now say in order to keep on breathing herself and to help her daughter through this very hard long haul.

  “Mom, did something bad happen to you? Are you okay?”

  This question pushes Marty over the edge because it is so Emma-like and so like her father, so much like Louis Harold Gilford, a man who always put everyone else first, a man whom Marty loved so desperately that she knows without hesitation that she would have answered his phone call on the first ring. A man who she often thinks saved his best for this last child, this gem of a woman, his baby daughter Emma. And all this, Marty realizes now, she has never shared with her daughter. All of this and more, so much more.

  Marty talks in a whisper and Emma has to hold her left hand over her ear to hear what her mother is saying.

  “Emma, dear, you get to a point in your life when you are fifty or sixty, or in my case seventy-eight, and you realize that holding back and not saying what is real and is in your heart is crippling,” Marty tries to explain, through her own tears. “There are so many things I should have told especially you all these years because you are the one who has suffered the most, the one who needs to hear it all, the one who always has so much to lose.”

  “Mom, I never ever thought of you as the holding-back kind of person,” Emma exclaims because she cannot stand the sound of her mother sniffling on the other end of the phone. “You say it like it is. I’ve always wished I would have inherited that trait from you.”

  “Honey,” Marty finally admits, “your father was a master gardener. He had the gift for the earth just like you have the gift for the soil. And he had to give it all up because gardening back then was not a way to support a family.”

  “Why would this be such a secret, why would you never tell me something like that, why would it not have been good to let me know where this compulsion comes from, why—”

  “There are reasons that no longer matter and promises I made to your father that do matter, but that no longer seem as important as they once did,” Marty shares. “And there are other things, things about me that I should have told you, that would explain some of my own compulsions. And there are things that I will tell you as soon as you can pick your sorry rear end off the floor and make yourself something to eat and get out of your little funk, my dear.”

  Emma hangs up.

  She walks into her backyard in late afternoon and finds a lonely row of nonblossoming plants that always seem to her to be looking with envy at the beautiful blooms of their sisters and brothers. She impulsively yanks out the few weeds that have slipped in between their gorgeous stems and then she lowers herself so that when she turns to the left it looks as if she is lying in tall grass at the end of a beach.

  From where she sits, she can see her entire house and almost all of her gardens. And when the wind shifts and the stems of her plants move, there is a lovely ripple of green that flashes like dancers moving as fast as spring lightning across a stage.

  Emma does not crave kittens or beer. But she does wonder how she could think all of these years that she knew her mother, her sisters or her very own and apparently out-of-control self.

  And then, emboldened by her talk with Marty and the strength she always seems to get from her flowers, Emma gets to her feet. She walks to her bedroom to look at the photograph of her and Samuel to see if she can find in it one reason to return his call. And that is when she discovers that the photograph is missing.

  15

  THE FIFTEENTH QUESTION:

  Have you heard that Uncle Rick has run off

  with a chick who has red hair?

  THERE IS A VERY BRIGHT STREETLIGHT in front of Debra’s house. Emma has paused under it to gather strength before seeing her sisters following their latest argument when she hears her nieces, Kendall and Chloe, chatting on the front porch. Kendall says in a voice that could probably be heard three counties over, “Have you heard that Uncle Rick has run off with a chick who has red hair?”

  “Are you serious?” Chloe wants to know. “Red hair? No one has red hair on purpose anymore except those grandmas who can’t quite seem to get the dye right and are too cheap to go for professional help.”

  It is not the chick or the infidelity that has apparently startled her two lovely nieces but the fact that Emma’s brother-in-law has taken up with a red-haired woman.

  “No kidding! Even the weirdos at school who still think Goth is cool don’t bother with red anymore and go for purple and orange,” Kendall agrees.

  If anyone can think of a better way to start a reunion-planning update meeting that was supposed to launch itself with Emma, Debra and Joy exchanging quiet words of forgiveness and love in the kitchen, Emma would love to hear about it. A meeting where Emma had planned to confess her reunion failings and ask for help and forgiveness as she once again slipped into the role of the screw-up baby sister.

  What Emma would really like to do at this particular moment is turn on her heels, just like Doris Day did in every single movie she ever made, smile over her shoulder, and then get the heck off the street and out of there before more Gilford hell breaks loose.

  But Marty Gilford’s daughter does not and cannot do that. Instead she saunters up to the porch making believe she has heard nothing, says hello to her two nieces, then sits down as if this is something she does every day at this specific time.

  The girls do not miss a beat and Chloe asks Emma the exact same question Kendall just asked her. “Have you heard that Uncle Rick has run off with a chick who has red hair?”

  “Who told you this?” Emma demands.

  “Stephie called just a few minutes ago. I’m surprised she hasn’t called you yet because she was kind of upset and stuff,” Kendall shares.

  “Is she coming over here for this meeting?” Emma wants to know.

  “You mean this pre-party fight?” Kendall asks her back, laughing so hard her face touches the top of her legs because she needs to bend over in order to stop laughing.

  Kids, Emma rea
lizes, know everything. And these two are kids age-wise but not so much in any other way.

  “Very funny, smarty-pants,” Emma says, pushing her niece back into an upright position. “Does this mean I’m not the only one who wishes we didn’t have to have another reunion and yet another night to plan it?”

  “My God!” Chloe exclaims, feigning shock by putting her hand to her head. “What would we do at the reunion without the arguments and the drunk people and Aunt Joy running around with her white plastic bags picking up paper plates and plastic forks?”

  What would we do, indeed? Emma thinks.

  There are a few blank reunion years that Emma cannot remember, most likely the ones towards the end of her father’s illness when someone else either planned the party or the entire thing was thrown together at the last minute but Marty, Emma knew, was always there, always involved, because she’d told her daughters more than once that the reunion planning was her duty, handed down by their father’s mother, and the promise she had made to their father.

  The family planning, the assignments outlined in the infamous planning bible authored by Marty, that include the annual family charity auction that has actually turned into a hilarious three-hour show that includes gifts and an assortment of wild and ridiculous items that Gilford family members work on all year long.

  One year someone hauled in an antique outhouse on which they had painted the Confederate flag, and some far-flung Gilford cousin bought it for five hundred dollars and had it shipped over a thousand miles home. There have been live chickens, car parts—including a huge chrome bumper that had been dented during an accident with a hearse and was supposed to resemble a profile of Elvis—a barn door splattered with shotgun pellets, an entire swing set hand-painted that was in a box the size of a mini-Volkswagen, and Emma’s favorite thus far—cartoon-like nude sketches of a variety of aunts, uncles, cousins and nieces that were not just hilarious but apparently extremely anatomically accurate as well.

  Last year the family auction raised five thousand dollars and the money was donated to a domestic violence shelter. As Emma thinks about confronting her sisters, her mother and anyone else who cares to have at it with her, she is wondering how many women in her family could be possible domestic violence perpetrators. Obviously, they might need an entire wing at the county jail for the wild Gilford females who have never been physically violent but who seem to have a penchant for yelling as if their lungs are on fire.