Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  Lucia took a few steps closer, tightening the belt on her leather coat. The almost-dead grass bristled under her feet.

  “It’s always a pleasure to see her,” she said. “Although Evan and I have dinner plans tonight. Come in for twenty minutes, Rachel, and then we’ll drop you back at your aunt’s.”

  “I can walk,” Rachel said.

  “We’ll drop you,” Lucia said. “You don’t have a coat?”

  “I can’t ever get her to wear one,” said Margaret. “Where are you going for dinner?”

  “The Bamboo Garden.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of it,” Margaret said, coming out from behind the car door. “I went to the Lampliter the other night—they’re putting on Guys and Dolls. The musical? You know it? They did this chicken pasta for dinner, and it was too spicy, really. But, still, it’s the theater you go for, isn’t it?”

  Rachel slammed the passenger door. Her hair whipped around her head, revealing sequined turkey earrings that dangled nearly to her shoulders. She angled through the yard, her daisy-print blouse loose and blowing.

  “Bye, Mom,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Oh, she’s always so—” started Margaret, voice low again. “You know how she is. And did you see those ridiculous earrings?”

  “I’ll have her back soon,” said Lucia. “In plenty of time for dinner.”

  Margaret lifted her hand to smooth her hair, her keys and her bracelets jingling. “You’ve been in this house for how long?” she asked.

  Rachel was waiting with her hand on the doorknob.

  “Four years,” Lucia said.

  “And you still feel good about the neighborhood?”

  “Margaret,” said Lucia. “Your earrings. They’re so pretty.”

  “These? I got them at Parisian on sale.”

  “Really beautiful,” Lucia said, as she started up the drive. A couple of steps, then a look over her shoulder. “So nice to see you.”

  She had learned this method of escape from her mother, who always needed to get home to start dinner after church on Sundays but inevitably got trapped in the pew by Mrs. Norris, who talked about her granddaughter’s ballet recitals, or Mrs. Rigby, who talked about her back pain, or Louis Herbert, who stared at any woman’s chest the whole time he talked to her. Louis, her mother had said once, what smooth sleeves you have. Not a wrinkle in them. She had been building momentum as she spoke, and as he thanked her, she had darted past him toward the fellowship hall, dragging Lucia along by the hand.

  “Thanks again,” Lucia called.

  “Sure,” Margaret replied, turning, finally, toward her car. “Sure.”

  Inside the house, Lucia shed her coat and grabbed a Tab for herself and a ginger ale for Rachel. Evan had obviously put the dog in the backyard because there had been no mass of fur hurtling toward them, only Evan, who kissed Lucia and asked her if jeans were all right for dinner—which was likely a way of making sure she remembered their plans. He exchanged a few words with Rachel and disappeared toward the bedroom.

  Rachel took her usual spot on the couch. “I’m nearly done with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Thanks again for it. It’s horrible. Amazing, I mean, but horrible.”

  “You haven’t read anything like it in school?” Lucia asked, although she knew the answer.

  “No,” said Rachel, frowning. Considering.

  If she had to make a bet, Lucia would guess the girl had never heard of the bus boycott. She could imagine the school-board men dickering among themselves in rooms filled with pipe smoke, deciding that it was best to keep teachers from stirring up the past. Not that it was the past. Those black boys on the igloo wouldn’t have been allowed on that particular playground a few years ago. Brown v. Board hadn’t done anything here—it took Carr v. Board of Education in 1964, and then redistricting in 1969, and then another round of redistricting in 1974, and the upshot of it was that Montgomery had managed to avoid integration for two decades, and maybe a silver lining was that it let tempers cool. No one got mobbed. No one got beaten.

  The consequences were more subtle.

  “I heard they used to assign reading with Black History Month,” Rachel said. “Before they canceled it. It was, like, really disruptive. Mom read in the paper that the black kids at Lee wanted to skip classes on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, and the principal said no, and they did it anyway. He suspended, like, two hundred of them. Mom said they were out of control, acting wild and making trouble.”

  Lucia considered that Jane Pittman might have a limited effect. Wild. Out of control. She knew that Rachel could not feel the age-old currents underneath those words.

  “I was in algebra class when Kennedy was assassinated,” Lucia said. “The principal made an announcement over the intercom. Kids cheered. You could hear the yelling and clapping all through the school. Those white kids were fairly disruptive.”

  “They cheered?”

  “They did.”

  Rachel pulled at the metal tab on the ginger ale. It snapped off in her fingers. “Is that when you decided you wanted to be a lawyer? Because of, you know, how unfair everything was back then?”

  Lucia told herself she should have expected the question. The girl was especially interested in character. Motivation. She believed an action must have a reason.

  “No,” Lucia said. “I didn’t know law was a possibility when I was in high school. I was in college before I thought about being a lawyer.”

  “And you love it?”

  Lucia tugged at her pantyhose, which had twisted at the knee. She suspected she was incapable of an unedited answer at this stage of her life, particularly with Rachel.

  “I feel like I make a difference,” she said.

  She had clearly chosen the right answer. Rachel smiled and dug her feet into the couch cushions. Her turkey earrings swayed, transcendently tacky. In October, she’d worn silver skeletons and rats that hung from their tails.

  “I got grounded,” she said.

  Lucia looked away from the turkeys. She’d never known the girl to get in trouble. “For what?”

  “I roller-skated.”

  Lucia laughed. She had come to believe that these stories were like the silly presents, a currency offered in exchange for a visit. She increasingly felt the clever engineering of them. The stories were constructions—good ones—but she wondered what was underneath their gloss.

  “I couldn’t sleep last week,” Rachel said. “It was about midnight, and I thought exercise would be good. So I went skating, maybe for half an hour. But Mom woke up and found me gone, and when I came back she was standing at the door, like, ‘Where have you been, Rachel?’”

  She had a talent for mimicking Margaret’s Southern-lady accent.

  “I told her—I mean, it was pretty obvious with the skates—that I’d been skating. She said, ‘With who?’ like I’d had some sort of drug deal or sex date on—”

  “Sex date?” said Lucia.

  “On roller skates. I told her I’d just been skating by myself, and she said anything could have happened, that there was no telling who was out at that time of night, that I could have been kidnapped or crammed in a van—which are basically the same thing—and she would never have known what happened. She went on like that for a while until she told me I couldn’t go anywhere but school and church for the next two weeks. I can’t believe she let me come here.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “It’s a waste, isn’t it? I might as well have had a sex date.”

  Blues guitar played in the background, and Lucia didn’t recognize the song. Evan had a better ear than she did.

  “You know I have to kick you out in a minute, right?” said Lucia.

  “Yeah,” said Rachel, content.

  1981

  Rachel

  I.

  I closed the back
door and dropped my damp purse next to the buffet, careful not to jar the porcelain kittens. My sandal snagged on the turned-up edge of the God Welcomes Us All mat. An obstacle course of small rugs—Oriental, floral, braided—covered the den carpet. They add depth, Mom always said.

  I smelled tacos. No surprise. When we weren’t eating at Aunt Molly’s, Mom did either tacos or fettuccini or Rotel dip. Occasionally stroganoff.

  Mom was stretched out on the sofa, mostly hidden behind a newspaper. I could see her bare legs, her fingertips, and the curls sproinging from her bun. She wore it like that to work. I didn’t like not being able to see her face.

  “Oh!” she said, letting the paper drop. “I was getting worried. Were the roads bad?”

  The look on her face was a relief. Not angry. Not sad. Those were the big two.

  “They were fine,” I said, as if I’d ever admit that they weren’t. “Just wet.”

  She stood up, circling around the coffee table.

  “That leak is starting again in the guest bathroom,” she said.

  “It’s dripping?” I asked.

  “No. But I feel like the ceiling might be discoloring. You want to look?”

  I checked the couch for a plate, but she wasn’t eating. She hardly ever ate. Since I could smell the tacos, though, I figured they were ready. Sometimes Mom finished cooking and then drifted away and let the food either get cold or turn black, depending on the burner situation.

  “I should probably put a bucket under there,” she said, “just in case.”

  Apparently, we were going to keep talking about a leak that was not leaking.

  “I’ll look in a minute,” I said. “But all you can do is put the bucket there, right? And then call someone tomorrow if it does start to drip.”

  I angled around her, focused on my feet. Heel, toe, heel, toe across the rugs. But Mom didn’t head for the bathroom like I expected. Instead she reached for the Journal.

  “Lucia Gilbert is in here,” she said. She was using that tone she had when something mattered to her but she was trying to pretend it didn’t.

  I kept my voice and face blank. “Oh.”

  She shook the newspaper at me. “She volunteered at some crisis center for women.”

  She watched me.

  “It says here,” she said, “that the Bar Association arranged for real attorneys to man the phones at the Crisis Center for Law Day—have you ever heard of that? Law Day? Battered women could call in and ask for legal advice. They have a picture of Lucia. They interviewed her.”

  Mom lowered her head to the paper and read, her voice singsong. “‘A woman can seek counseling if she doesn’t want to take legal action,’ said Ms. Gilbert, a self-described feminist. ‘But most counselors won’t see a wife about abuse unless the husband is willing to go as well. And there are limits to counseling. Sometimes a woman must recognize that she needs to end a relationship.’”

  She folded the paper, dropping it onto the coffee table. I didn’t look at it.

  Mom wasn’t impressed by Lucia, not since that first meeting, or, more likely, she was too impressed. It added up to the same thing.

  I made things worse, of course.

  “That’s interesting,” I said, not sounding interested. “Can I get some tacos?”

  Mom couldn’t see me anymore once I stepped into the kitchen. The shells were lined up on a baking sheet, so she had remembered to toast them this time, and that was nice. The meat was still simmering, orangish, in the skillet. I turned off the burner and scooped filling into a couple of shells; I decided I didn’t feel like shredding cheese. I just squeezed taco sauce out of the packet.

  By the time I’d fixed my plate, Mom had disappeared. She’d gone to stare at the nonleaking ceiling, most likely. I ate a few bites, standing by the kitchen table and staring at the lemon wallpaper until I made the pattern of lemons and leaves blur into fat honeybees with green wings. When the hallway to the back of the house stayed empty and silent, I hurried back into the den and grabbed the newspaper. I spread it across the kitchen table and read the article for myself. It was only a couple of short columns. Mom had covered most of the part about Lucia, but not the ending.

  The pretty little blonde has a history of firsts, it said. Before moving into private practice, she was the first woman to be appointed a deputy district attorney in the state of Alabama.

  First woman to substitute on the bench of the Montgomery County Criminal Court, it said.

  One of only two women in her class at Cumberland Law School, it said.

  I studied the black-and-white photo. Lucia was talking into a phone, her hair hanging across her face. When I saw her in the afternoons, her makeup had usually worn off, her freckles showing, but in the photo she was a Hollywood version of herself.

  “She’s not that little,” said Mom from behind me, and when I turned she was in a towel, showered and barefoot. One downside of all the carpets: you could never hear her coming.

  I bit into my taco. Mom pinched a bite of meat from the skillet, flinching at the heat of it. She’d likely snitch another bite and consider it supper.

  The phone on the wall rang, making the receiver jump. Almost surely Will Pearson. He always called between 8:00 and 8:30, which meant that on Tuesdays he interrupted Hart to Hart. Honestly, it would have been hard enough to make conversation if he called once a week—why would a boy call if he was just going to sit there and breathe?—but he called every night, which Mom said was a sign of a good boyfriend, but he wasn’t my boyfriend, so he wasn’t being good at anything except breathing. I’d pace between the kitchen table and the stove, and a silence would seep through the twisted-up phone cord, and eventually I would fill it. I’d talk and talk and he’d laugh at my jokes, and I couldn’t stand it, but on a Tuesday? Even worse.

  The phone kept ringing.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Mom said. Her face was slicked with Pond’s, which she always said would soak in, but it never did.

  “The show’s about to start,” I said.

  Fourth ring. He’d hang up after the sixth.

  “It’s rude not to answer, Rachel. If a boy cares enough to call, you can care enough to answer.”

  A piece of shell caught my gums like a shard of glass. I thought about reminding her of John Martin, that nice turtle of a man, no neck but so kind, and Mom made me answer the phone four nights in a row and tell him she was in the shower, until he said, She takes a lot of showers, doesn’t she?, and finally he stopped calling.

  There came a time with every man where she enjoyed ignoring the phone more than she’d ever enjoyed it ringing.

  “I don’t want him to call, Mom,” I said.

  “It could be your father,” she said.

  She knew I would pick up the phone if I thought it was Dad, but if I admitted it, her face would shut down and in whatever invisible point system we had, she would score. Once upon a time Dad used to call most nights, but that had stopped because who could come up with that much conversation? (I’m talking to you, Will Pearson.) Then for a while he called every Thursday, but after he got the job as regional sales director last fall, he started traveling so much that we stopped our regular weekends. That meant we didn’t need to go over so many details. I’d talked to him last week, and he never called two weeks in a row.

  The phone finally hushed. I carried my plate to the sofa, just as the television screen went white with bright sky and the plane took off the runway. The theme song had started: This is my boss, Jonathan Hart, a self-made millionaire. He’s quite a guy.

  “You need to be nicer,” Mom said.

  “I am nice,” I said, but mostly I soaked in the credits and Stefanie Powers’s magical hair. This is Mrs. H. She’s gorgeous. She’s one lady who knows how to take care of herself.

  “Are you?” Mom sat next to me, sofa cushions tipping enough that my taco
slid across the plate.

  “You hear me talking to him most nights, Mom.”

  “Maybe he’ll grow on you.”

  I wanted to watch my show. I wanted her to shut up about this boy she’d never even met, who possibly smoked pot and plus he was Catholic, so why was she his biggest fan?

  “Why should I hope he grows on me?” I said. “Like, what, fungus? Is that a good theory of dating?”

  Her lips clamped together, making wrinkles where there weren’t usually any. Her eyes turned wet. She could do that so quickly.

  She stood up, tightening her loose towel, and I stared at the television. Her footsteps were loud and heavy as she left the room. It was a joke, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I focused on Jennifer Hart taking off her fur in a train compartment, pouring champagne, smiling up at Jonathan, and soon there would surely be a charming sex reference. I thought of how I would love to ride in a train, the kind with beds attached to the walls. The kind where murders happened.

  Mom banged around the kitchen, muttering. For someone talking to herself, her voice really carried.

  I always say, she said. She used that phrase a lot with herself. I always say there’s no point, she said, and a cabinet door slammed. Margaret, she said, you know you do this every time, and you know how she is—

  “I’m putting your lunch money in your purse,” she said, loud enough that she was clearly not talking to herself.

  She liked to give me money when she was crying.

  Then she was back in the room, pointing a pen at me, her face shiny and blotchy and hard. The pen had liquid inside, and when you turned it over, a Moxie-ish dog floated up through the liquid.

  “Is this for Lucia?” she asked.

  “That was in the bottom of my purse,” I said.

  “Is this a present for her?”

  “Why were you going through my purse?”

  “I was putting your money in. Is this for her?”

  Now she was avoiding saying Lucia’s name. Not good. Lucia racked up points in Mom’s usual categories—attractive, well dressed, good manners. Nice-looking husband who wore a suit to work. But Lucia scored well, too, in a whole different system, and I still hadn’t figured out how that affected Mom’s calculations. I was never sure whether Mom wanted to take me away from Lucia or take Lucia away from me.