by Laura Wiess
You go back downstairs.
The house, decorated by strangers, is elegant and pristine. The family room has a hearth Wendy would have loved.
The pit in your chest blackens, knowing that she died too soon, and for nothing.
Vacation stretches on, hot, hazy, and unremarkable. You sleep late, lie in the sun, wander around online, and do a half-assed job of learning Spanish from Lourdes.
It’s the first summer you’ve ever spent without Wendy.
Your parents come and go, leaving used coffee cups in the dishwasher and the lingering scent of jasmine shower gel in the air, but you rarely see them. When you do, they’re on the phone or by the fax machine, checking e-mail or hurrying out the door.
You make no demands or complaints, just watch from the sidelines and your passive exterior seems to reassure them, as they leave you an occasional fifty-dollar bill with an order to Buy yourself something nice! Once your father leaves you a note asking if you’re ready for that new puppy yet.
You tear it up and flush it down the toilet.
Your mother’s archenemy, Jeanne Kozlowski, scores another coup, prosecuting and convicting the township’s code enforcement officer on bribery charges. Your mother is rabid over the positive media coverage and your parents become campaign groupies for the party in power, attending political fund-raisers throughout the state. The first time they leave you alone overnight, you and Ardith go on a grocery store spree, buying so much that you have to borrow the shopping cart to get it all home. You scan the streets, wondering if maybe Officer Dave will cruise up and scold you for the stolen cart, but he doesn’t.
You carry the bags into the house and Ardith pushes the cart back down to the corner. When she returns, you prepare a feast of garlic bread, spring rolls, and mozzarella sticks. You eat in the family room and for a while the house rings with life and laughter.
Ardith opens a pack of cigarettes and you learn to blow smoke rings while you tap your ashes into a Waterford crystal vase and wonder aloud who your first real boyfriends will be, shrieking at the grossest prospects. Not Louie, who picks his nose and eats it, or Zeke, who always farts, or Wesley, who walks like he has a stick up his butt.
Ardith says she wants one nice, smart guy who doesn’t party or try to go up her shirt on the first date. Oh, and he has to have decent feet.
You want to date a lot of guys, be wined, dined, and romanced, and you want them all to think you’re the hottest girl in the world. And you don’t want anyone who hates dogs.
When the imagining shifts to sharing secrets, you confess that when you’re alone at night you strain to separate the house’s normal creaks and groans from the stealthy approach of burglars and rapists. Sometimes you can tell the difference and sometimes you can’t. When you can’t, you curl up in the closet with Wendy’s plaid blanket and a serrated steak knife from the kitchen.
“I keep a screwdriver under my pillow,” Ardith says, shrugging.
“Biggest, pointiest mother I could find. I’m not taking any chances.”
“Would you actually use it?” you say, prying off your Nikes. “I mean, you said your house is always full of people. Couldn’t you just scream for help?”
“I could,” she says, “but look who’d show up.”
Later in the week, you and Ardith each add a new claw hammer to your arsenals.
September rolls around. Ninth grade starts and the days whip by. Your parents come home from work early on Fridays now and take you out to dinner, shepherding you into the same crowded, upscale restaurant week after week, smiling as they sip wine and occasionally touch hands. They ask about school, teachers, homework, and friends, hanging on your every word and only shifting attention when colleagues stop to say hello.
“That went very well,” your mother says on the first night during the ride home, when you’re slumped in the back of your father’s Lexus, woozy from too much food and attention. “We’ll do this every Friday. I’ll make a standing reservation.”
“Every Friday?” your father says, braking for a red light. “For how long?”
“For as long as it takes,” your mother says coolly, shaking back her hair.
The light turns green. Your father sighs and accelerates.
“It’s important to present a united front, especially in public,” your mother says, giving him a pointed look.
“I know,” he mutters, turning into the cul-de-sac. “I don’t need a lecture.”
“Fine,” she says, gathering her purse. “But next week keep your wine consumption down to two glasses and your attention on your daughter when she speaks. Glazed eyes and fidgeting don’t exactly indicate rapt fascination, you know.”
“I’m doing my best,” your father says through gritted teeth.
“Well, do better,” your mother replies. “Important people are watching.”
You sit like a stone as your father cruises up your driveway and straight into the garage. The overhead door closes behind you. You climb out of the plush backseat and follow your bickering parents into the house.
Your mother stops you on the way to your room.
“Oh, and next week, Blair, don’t shovel your pasta in like you’re eating with a trowel,” she says, unbuttoning her jacket. “It’s not necessary to finish everything on your plate, either. It makes you look…starved.” She tugs her silk blouse out of her waistband. “And try to keep the ‘you knows’ and ‘likes’ down to a minimum, please. You’re conversing with adults now, not classmates.” She pushes your hair from your eyes and studies your face. Her fingers are cool and smooth. “Taming this mop is next and then we really do have to do something about your wardrobe. Remind me, will you?” She sails off to her room, mistaking your silence for agreement.
You lay awake that night, watching Wendy’s urn glitter in the moonlight, and rubbing your stomach as the ziti burns high into your throat.
You told them about your classes and teachers. Babbled on, hogged the conversation, even shared some of the cleaner jokes going around school. The more they listened, chuckled, and exchanged proud-parent looks, the more you talked yourself into believing they were truly interested.
You burp. Exhale scalding breath.
You must not really have believed them, though, because when they asked about your friends, you didn’t tell them about Ardith. No, a colleague interrupted that question and for some reason, maybe instinct, you allowed it to pass unanswered.
And they must not have really cared, because they let it pass, too.
With the exception of Happy Family Fridays, your lifestyle makes it easy to keep secrets.
Ardith comes home with you after school, eating over, doing homework, strolling down to Dunkin Donuts with the dogged hope of running into Officer Dave, and then leaving at ten, right before one or both of your parents is scheduled to arrive.
You treat Ardith to dinner at Chili’s for her birthday and then the two of you go to your first Thanksgiving dance as ninth graders, the oldest kids in junior high. You slow dance with anyone who asks, just to get the feel of it. By the time the night is over, your arms have been draped around five different necks and your shirt is spotted from five pairs of damp hands.
Ardith has danced with only one guy, Jeremy, but they danced three times and he took her phone number.
“You know what was weird?” you say, pondering this interesting new power you have to make guys sweat. “They were all so nervous. I mean, they danced with me but they wouldn’t even look at me.”
“You’re too intense,” Ardith says, wearing the same vague, moony smile she’s sported all evening. “Jeremy says you’re like an extreme sport.”
“What? Why?” You’re peeved at his intrusion into your conversation, but also intrigued by the unexpected opportunity to hear a guy’s opinion of you. And you don’t think it’s at all strange that your best friend and the guy she likes spent their dance time discussing you. You think it’s excellent.
“Jeremy goes mountain climbing with his
dad,” Ardith says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket. You each take one and glance over your shoulders, making sure the coast is clear before lighting up.
“So what does that have to do with me?” you say, exhaling a hearty stream of smoke. It’s too windy to blow rings.
“That’s what I said, and he laughed and said the first time you check out a mountain, it’s like this awesome challenge but you’re pretty sure you can handle it,” she says, flicking her ashes. “But when you get up close and see what you’re really taking on, you still have to climb it because you already told everybody you would. So you do, but you’re scared and sweating your ass off, hoping that if you just keep going and don’t think, you’ll make it through.” She grins. “When you’re done, you either quit climbing forever or the rush sends you right back for more.”
“And the mountain is supposed to be me,” you say, and lapse into contemplative silence for the rest of the walk home. You skip up your driveway, deciding that if Ardith likes Jeremy, he must be pretty smart. And you hope for her sake that he has decent feet.
Your parents bite the togetherness bullet, and you spend Thanksgiving Day three hours away at your grandmother’s, ignoring the indifference in your father’s voice when he talks to your mother and the dagger look she gives him when he excuses himself during dinner to make an important phone call.
Your grandmother says the turkey is dry and the mashed potatoes lumpy because dinner was ready an hour before you arrived. If you had just called on that fancy cell phone to say you would be late, well, then maybe the cranberry sauce would still be chilled and the turnips hot.
Your grandfather wears a bib and eats with his fingers. He washes his mashed potatoes in his apple cider like a gaunt, senile raccoon and then searches his hands, wondering where his food has gone.
You eat two helpings of potatoes and three of turnips while studying the egg-headed, papier-mâché, yarn-haired angels your grandmother relentlessly crafts and imprisons in the china cabinet. They crowd the glass, staring out with vacant, unblinking eyes and beseeching with knotted, pipe cleaner hands. Their feathered wings are molting and their robes sparkle with the fallen glitter from their sisters’ halos. Redhead, blonde, brunette; their smooth, unsmiling faces all look disturbingly alike and you wish your grandmother would go back to decoupaging Norman Rockwell scenes onto old pickle jars instead.
“Give me your hand.” Your grandmother captures your grandfather’s arm and wipes the smeary mashed potatoes from between his fingers. “There now, isn’t that better?” She looks at your father.
“I had to change his shirt twice before you got here. The first time, he pulled the giblets out of the bag and emptied them into his pocket. Then, he—”
“Is he always this bad?” your mother interrupts.
“We’re getting along just fine,” your grandmother says, avoiding her gaze.
Your mother leans forward in her chair. “Mother, if he’s becoming unmanageable, he belongs in a home.”
“God, Mom,” you mutter. “He’s not deaf.”
“Eat your dinner,” your mother says without even glancing your way.
“He’s my husband,” your grandmother says.
“And my father,” your mother shoots back.
“May I have the peas?” your father says pleasantly, as if your mother hasn’t just wrenched the lid off an enormous can of worms and dashed them across the dinner table.
“He may as well not be anyone’s father, for all the attention he gets from you,” your grandmother says, taking the spoon from your grandfather, turning it right side up, and handing it back to him. “It’d break his heart to know that his only daughter is too busy making money to come and see him.”
Your mother bristles. “I have to earn a living, Mother. Isn’t that why you sent me to college? So I’d have a career to fall back on if my husband ever left me?” She thrusts the bowl of peas into your father’s hands. “So I wouldn’t have to send my daughter to the store with food stamps while my husband is out whoring around with his secretary?”
“Butter, please,” your father says, forcing a smile.
No one moves, so you reach across the table and hand it over. The knife rattles against the silver-plated dish during the brief transfer.
“And now you want me to jeopardize my security and my career for a man who walked out on us without a second thought?” Her anger sucks the oxygen from the room.
“He came back,” your grandmother says, covering your grandfather’s hand with her own gnarled one. “He missed us and he came back.”
“He came back because she dumped him when he lost his job.” Your mother flings the words like jagged-edged stones. “He came back because he had nowhere else to go and you let him. He hurt us—”
“That was thirty years ago,” your grandmother says.
“That was yesterday!” your mother cries, slamming her hand down on the table. “He doesn’t remember it and you don’t want to, but I do.”
No one moves. You stare at your plate, thinking of what you’ve just learned and what you already know. You don’t want to understand it.
“Hey,” your father says finally. “How ’bout that Tiger Woods?”
Your grandfather farts. “I poofed,” he whispers, hunching his shoulders.
“He belongs in a care facility,” your mother says stiffly and her eyes widen as the unmistakable scent of a bowel movement penetrates the air. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mother! He just went to the bathroom in his pants!”
“It’s all right,” your grandmother soothes, taking your grandfather’s quivering arm and helping him to his feet. “No harm done, Stanley. Let’s clean you up.” And to my father, “He wears those adult diapers now, so it’s much easier than it was.” She puts her arm around his waist and gently leads him out.
“So,” your father says grimly, leaning back in his chair and smoothing his tie, “would you mind telling me what you were hoping to accomplish with that? Other than making the rest of us wish we were elsewhere, of course.”
“Shut up,” your mother says, pushing away her plate and fanning the air. Her cheeks are red and her gaze distracted. “This is a fiasco. I had no idea he was this bad. She should have warned me. We wouldn’t have come.” Her fanning increases. “He’s draining the life out of her all over again.”
“That’s her choice,” your father says, shrugging. “You can’t change it.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t have to sit here and watch it happen,” your mother says, caught up in an argument that will never end.
“True, and your mother doesn’t need the stress of company on top of everything else,” your father says, which is the closest he’s come to agreeing with her all day. “Tell you what; let’s facilitate this whole affair. You and Blair clear the plates and I’ll get the coffee going.” He tosses his crumpled, paper Thanksgiving napkin on the table and rises.
You look at the goofy, cartoon turkey on the soiled napkin and then past it at the old, white lace tablecloth. It’s been mended so many times the scars are part of the pattern. You think of your grandmother, sitting in her recliner with the cloth on her lap, head bent and fingers cramped from the tiny, even stitches, and of your puzzled, blank-eyed grandfather, shaking your hand when you came in, asking your name and saying it was nice to meet you.
You think of hollow, fragile angels trapped in a glass cage and Norman Rockwell families painstakingly collected, layered, and shellacked onto empty jars. You think of Wendy that last morning before you left for school, of letting her out to pee, brushing off her ever-hopeful request to play, and leaving her with a quick pat and the promise of a nice long walk when you got home.
Only when you got home, it was already too late.
“Well?” your mother says, reaching for your plate.
“I’m not done yet,” you say, and take another heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes and two more shivering, ruby slices of cranberry sauce.
“Well, pack it up and ta
ke it with you,” your father says impatiently.
You pick up your fork and begin cutting the cranberry sauce into bite-size pieces.
“Blair, didn’t you hear what your father just said?” your mother asks.
“I’m hungry now,” you say, forcing one of the slippery wedges into your mouth. The truth is that you’re not hungry at all, but you’ve just realized you never needed to tell your grandmother that Grandpa couldn’t come to the new house because he was incontinent. The truth is that she knew it all along.
“That’s your third helping of potatoes,” your father says.
“They’re good,” you say as your grandmother escorts your freshly dressed grandfather back into the room.
“They’re lumpy,” she says automatically, but for a second light shines in her eyes and you know she’s pleased at your pleasure. She leads your grandfather to his chair and presses his shoulders until he sits. “Now, where were we?”
“We were talking about putting him in a nursing home,” your mother says.
Your grandfather’s head jerks up, his hand out and the plastic tumbler of cloudy, curdled cider tips over. Your grandmother runs for the paper towels, your father shakes his head, and your grandfather starts to weep. You put your napkin over the spill and pat his scarecrow arm and watch your mother ignore her father, and when the burning in your chest reaches critical mass, you say, “You know, Mom, Alzheimer’s is hereditary,” and smile as her detachment turns to bald horror.
You shovel in the rest of your food while the adults argue and when the shouting reaches its crescendo, you slip into the bathroom and, for the first time ever, stick your finger down your throat. Your stomach groans under the weight of your gluttony and, with effort, obeys your request and heaves up Thanksgiving.
When you finish retching you sit back on your heels, sweating, shaking, and feeling worse than you did before. Your mouth is sour, the stench sickening, and you can’t even look at the mess in the toilet. Disgusted, you flush twice just to wash it all away.
You return to the table, eat a tiny piece of pumpkin pie and drink your coffee alone in the middle of the fray. Not long after that, you accept the tray of leftovers your grandmother slaps together. You hug your grandfather good-bye and tell him it was nice meeting him. He draws back and looks at you like you’re crazy.
