“Right. But I hurried upstairs to my place, ditched my clothes, slipped on a trench coat, and hurried back here. When they opened the door . . .”
“Oh no.”
“Yes, oh no. I think I flashed them by accident.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“The Asian guy was wearing Glass and I think he took a picture. Or a movie.”
“Shit. Shit!”
“I’m sorry, Clay. I really am. But you know, it really wasn’t my fault.”
“Liz is gonna kick my ass. What happened after that?”
“I shrieked! Then I said, Sorry! Wrong apartment!”
“What did they say?”
“Your son said, maybe. His friend said, maybe not.”
“This is a big fat problem,” I said. “I should’ve told you they were here. This is all my fault.”
“Sort of,” she mumbled.
Great, I thought. This is just great. Time to start moving assets to the Cayman Islands. All hell is about to break loose. And I’m just telling you, I am in some seriously deep shit.
CHAPTER 4
Liz—My Side
I’m really sorry about my behavior at my mother’s birthday dinner two weeks ago. I know I sounded like a total witch. Sometimes, I get so frustrated and then I say the dumbest thing in the world and it makes everyone uncomfortable. I apologize. Please. Stay with me because you don’t know enough about us yet to judge.
Today, as I always do on Tuesdays because I’m the dutiful daughter, I’m taking my mother out to lunch at the Mustard Seed on James Island. I’ve always loved that restaurant, especially their pad thai. The portions are usually generous enough to feed a family of four. When Ashley and Ivy were children I’d take them to the Mustard Seed in Mount Pleasant and we’d have a feast. It was there they learned to eat enchiladas and mussels and all sorts of daring things. Oh, they were so precious when they were young. Then the little darlings slipped right through my fingers and grew up.
Family, family. It’s so frightening and, yes, almost embarrassing to muse over what my idea of family was years ago when I was dressing on my wedding day, Maisie attaching that veil to my hair. I remember it like it was yesterday. Like every other girl I knew, I thought I’d fall in love, marry, and conceive, and somehow I expected to deliver a better version of Clayton and me. Brother, was I naive!
Let me tell you, my friend, the gene pool is a mighty big place and like they say, there’s literally no lifeguard. I hardly recognize myself in either one of my children except that Maisie insists my dead sister, Juliet, seems to have been reincarnated in my daughter. I know. What a creepy thought. How creepy? I’ve never told Maisie or anyone but when Ashley was very young she used to tell me to call her Juliet. How do you like them apples? But who knows about all that stuff?
I don’t have the first clue what or who is in Ivy’s DNA. It doesn’t matter really. You take the children the good Lord sends you, love them with all your heart, and give them your best efforts to help them prepare themselves for life. I know Clayton and I made some mistakes with ours, Ivy in particular, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t love them. The biggest problem I’ve ever had or continue to have raising our children, believe it or not, is Maisie.
Maisie was raised by parents whose circumstances had been dramatically reduced by the Great Depression. The aftershocks of that terrible catastrophe were good and bad. On the positive side, she learned to be self-sufficient, when she’s so inclined. She keeps herself and her home immaculate. And she manages money well. My father used to say she could squeeze the balls off a buffalo nickel. There are other idiomatic expressions I much prefer, such as she can stretch a dollar so thin you can read the newspaper through it. Or she’s tighter than a mole’s ear, not that I’ve ever examined a mole’s ear or ever would.
When Juliet and I were really little, our mother kept chickens for their eggs and their eventual commitment to our dinner table. My sister and I loved to play with the chicks and gave them all names. Whenever we realized that Maisie was about to send a chicken to its great reward, we’d cry and howl and beg her not to wring its neck. She’d tell us to go watch television and sure enough, we’d have fried chicken for dinner. And we ate it with a smile on our face because there was no point in being emotional. Maisie wouldn’t stand for it.
Maisie would catch some creek shrimp or fiddlers, bait her own hooks, drop that hook in the water, and pull in fish by the bucketful. She would clean them outside on an old wooden table while my sister watched, completely entranced. I gagged.
For as far back as I can remember, Maisie has grown delicious vegetables and gorgeous flowers. Needless to say, she made pickles from cucumbers and string beans, and chutney from Jerusalem artichokes. I guess the only groceries she ever bought were flour, sugar, other meats, and milk. She would’ve kept a goat for milk but our neck of the woods on the Wappoo Creek wasn’t zoned for any farm animals bigger than poultry. When Juliet and I were teenagers, we’d collapse in horror when she’d bring up the subject of getting a goat. We would’ve been made social outcasts forever if some cute guy came to pick us up for a date and there was a goat in the yard. Never mind goat droppings.
After Juliet died, Maisie gave up her chickens, grew fewer vegetables, and rarely fished, giving in like most of us have to filling up a cart at the Piggly Wiggly, which apparently is going to take another name. But she never gave up her flowers, saying flowers were her therapy. Somewhere along the line she learned to hybridize her hydrangeas and rhododendrons into amazing, vibrant colors and combinations only found in her yard that baffled garden club members from all over the South. It was not unusual for Maisie to find total strangers in her yard taking pictures of her flowers.
The point is she learned all this from her mother who learned it from her mother before her. Juliet could grow vegetables and make relish like Maisie. I thought it was unnecessary labor and a good way to wreck a manicure. Maybe that sounds shallow or defiant but I preferred reading or listening to music to digging in the dirt. That was one more reason Juliet was always my mother’s favorite and it’s also why she gave up her vegetable garden and so forth, saying she had no one to share them with, a comment that was repeated often even though she knew it made me feel sick inside. Her feelings were more important than mine.
My father, Neal (who died right after Juliet, in a hunting accident at fifty-two), was cut from the same cloth as my mother. He banked every nickel Maisie saved. My parents worked for everything they had, which was probably what attracted me to Clayton. Clayton was as completely self-made as they were. But back to my mother. With Dad and Juliet gone, my mother fell into an understandable but terrible depression. I was already in New York by then but I came home to visit as often as I could. We would sit across the table from each other, wallowing in silence. She thought she was the only one who had suffered a loss. She really did. Talk about denial? Over and over she’d say, I can’t believe this happened to me.
Lately I’ve been wondering about the impact of all this loss on me, and one thing is certain: I’ve always been risk averse, almost to the point of absurdity. I knew Clayton was a safe bet when I married him. He might not have an overabundance of passion in him, but he was steady. His professional life was complicated and stressful so naturally he wanted his life with me to be reliable and calm. I could usually deliver that much without a problem. He sort of balked at my work initially, but in an odd way, it added some cachet to our family’s reputation. As long as I didn’t put myself in personal danger or bring too much of it home, he was fine with it. And it gave me spending money, taking some degree of pressure off him.
Way before Clayton came along, when I was a very young girl, Maisie worked as the secretary at my school, which was wonderful if I skinned my knee on the playground, but it also made it impossible to play hooky. She ran a strict house and was as hard on herself as she was on us. When Dad died, things ch
anged dramatically. She claimed it was no longer necessary to work. She dumped her sensible shoes for kitten heels, started wearing makeup all the time, and made no secret of the fact that she was desirous of male company. The more I inched toward the altar, the more flamboyant she became. And by the time my children came into the world after Juliet was gone, she had become this other person, angry one minute and ebullient the next, as though she didn’t want to be anyone’s mother anymore but being a fairy godmother might suit her fine. It wasn’t just a monetary issue. She spoiled my children rotten with things she never gave me—attention, approval, gifts—and darn near ruined them. She drowned them in undeserved praise while withdrawing from me at the same time.
She told Ivy and Ashley they were special every five minutes. Not just a little bit special, but, by golly, they were geniuses! They should chase their crazy dreams and don’t worry about having a solid career to fall back on. Yes, I worked as a swimsuit model but I also had a business degree. Maisie always frowned on me as though I was some kind of slutty exhibitionist, so I took myself through night school knowing my firm thighs wouldn’t last forever. But let me assure you I made ten times the money walking a runway than I ever would have earned running a small office or doing some other dreary thing. And later on when I needed it, that degree qualified me to have a meaningful position with one of Charleston’s leading nonprofits that worked to stop domestic violence. Even I knew you shouldn’t be strutting around in bathing suits after twenty-two. Please!
Back to my children? Yes. Maisie darn near destroyed them. Ashley actually believes she can support herself painting landscapes and whatever it is she’s doing. Maisie always says, Why not? Of course you can! Outrageous! There is not one shred of evidence that this is true.
From the time Ashley was a little girl, Maisie’s refrigerator was covered in Ashley’s crayon scribbles. We’d be at Maisie’s making cookies or something and I’d ask Ashley to recite her multiplication tables to show my mother what she’d learned. But my little girl was never a Sea World spectacle who would jump for a fish. Ashley would pout, dig in her little heels, and refuse. Maisie would say, I know what, let’s make a mural of them in Magic Markers, and she’d produce a roll of paper and a bag of markers from thin air. It was as though she was always lying in the weeds waiting to sabotage my plans and undermine my authority. She gave my children money all the time, never came for a visit without an elaborate gift for them, and generally ignored me when I called Ashley and Ivy to dinner, to take a bath, to go to bed, on and on. Seems like I should have been able to expect backup from my own mother, doesn’t it?
In fact, from the time she understood ambition, Ashley thought she was entitled to pursue her dreams for as long as she liked, no matter how far-fetched they were, and Maisie agreed. God gave her an exceptional talent, didn’t he? Ashley is completely convinced that her talent is superextraordinary and that it would be a grievous sin not to use it. She knows that once the powers that be find out about her, the entire international art community will rear up on its hind legs and cheer her on to her certain and well-deserved immortality!
And if my son hadn’t met that Chinese man . . . well, he’s just lucky, let’s put it that way and let’s hope it lasts. I guess I should hope it lasts? Listen, it’s just been difficult for me and hard for Clayton, too, to reconcile ourselves to the fact that there will never be a Clayton Bernard Waters V. Living with Clayton’s long list of disappointments these days is just no fun. It’s why I dream of running away to Bali! God knows, I wait on him hand and foot. And while we’re on the subject of being driven to the edge? He’s categorically mistaken to believe he can make things right between us with a little velvet box that has something sparkly inside. Just last week he did something so thoughtless I couldn’t believe it. So I called him an ass under my breath and he heard me.
“Don’t call me an ass,” he said.
“Then don’t act like one,” I said.
That pretty much sums up the current state of affairs between us.
I pulled up in Maisie’s driveway and got out of my car. Her yard looked gorgeous as usual, as though she was channeling Gertrude Jekyll. I had my key ready, but when I got to the kitchen door, it was unlocked. There was a pile of Skipper’s laundry on the table. For some reason, it irritated me. Maisie was standing in front of the television watching The View.
“Don’t you love the way these girls just go at it? That Barbara Walters. Boy, she still has juice!” she said and pointed to her cheek. I gave her a kiss. “Where are we going?”
“Mustard Seed,” I said.
“Good. It’s my favorite.”
“I know.”
An appreciation of The View that bordered on obsession was one of the few things we agreed on. She loved Barbara Walters. I thought Whoopi carried the show, but I didn’t argue with Maisie. In fact, I rarely argued with her about anything because she would just ignore me and do what she wanted to do or think what she wanted to think. I would just be more frustrated. Wrestling the car keys from her was my only success. Then we hired Skipper, never expecting . . . well, Maisie is a grown woman. At first we thought he was a gold-digging gigolo, but it soon became clear that he had his own money and a llama ranch to boot. I know, llamas. Like, what’s the matter with dairy cows or horses? But Maisie’s happy and she rarely poses a danger to the public, only occasionally breaking our agreement and driving all over the road like she does with her nose glued to the steering wheel like Mr. Magoo. And Skipper’s devotion, not his laundry, to Maisie is a relief to me. Since his arrival on the scene Maisie seems calmer and she’s decidedly better behaved.
“Does he have to pile his unmentionables on the kitchen table?”
“Lord! I had no idea you were such a prude! He can pile his bloomers on my dinner plate if he wants, okay?”
I just stared at her. Her skin looked radiant. Hmmm.
“Let’s go,” I said. “There’s going to be a waiting line if we don’t move it.”
“Oh, fine,” she said and clicked off the television. “Cher’s going to be on tomorrow.”
“I thought she retired,” I said.
“Guess not,” she said.
“Well, she should.”
“Why?” Maisie said, setting me up.
I took the carrot.
“Mother. She’s sixty-seven years old. Isn’t it a little undignified to be prancing around half naked at her age?”
We left the house through the kitchen door and she turned back to double-check that the door was indeed locked.
“I guess you’re the expert on that sort of thing,” she said. “Gosh, I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”
The expert. On that sort of thing. Thank you.
“Famished,” I said, and opened the passenger door for her.
Maybe I slammed the car door a little too hard, inadvertently letting her know I caught her slight. We rode to the restaurant with only the mournful sound of Joni Mitchell crooning away one of her very sad songs in the background.
At the table she scrutinized the menu and said, “So I imagine you want to split the pad thai? You always do.”
“Not really. I think I’m going to have the stir-fry.”
“Doesn’t all that broccoli cause intestinal distress?”
Intestinal distress.
“No. What are you going to order?”
“Well, I guess I’m not having the pad thai, am I?”
“That’s up to you. You don’t have to eat the whole thing.”
“I’ll have the seared scallops.” She said this with a sigh, exhaling deeply enough to dust the restaurant.
We ordered and when our iced tea arrived, it seemed the air had cleared, mainly because I just let it go. I always did. I had other things on my mind besides her snippiness.
“Did you see the Weather Channel this morning?” she said.
“No. What did I m
iss?”
“Well, there are a number of storms in the Caribbean. Any one of them could develop into something very nasty.”
“Mother? It’s hurricane season and if a hurricane’s coming, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of notice.”
“Let’s hope so. Is your bracelet new?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s from Tiffany’s via Clayton’s guilt. I think Clayton’s having an affair. Maybe.” In fact, Clayton and I had not had sex in months, but I didn’t tell her that.
“Why on earth would he do a stupid thing like that?” she said. “It’s very pretty.”
“Thanks. The reason I think he’s fooling around is that the last time I was in New York our bed had not been slept in. He’d been there for three nights. And the towels were unused. And there was no half-and-half in the refrigerator. You know he can’t drink his coffee without half-and-half. It was pretty obvious he hadn’t needed to call the cleaning girl.”
“Hmmm. He’s getting sloppy,” Maisie said. “Do you think he wants to get caught?”
“No man wants to get caught unless they’re really Catholic or really Jewish except the politicians who think they’ll never get caught. Idiots. All of them.”
“Amen to that. But if you think he’s dicky dunkin’, you can do one of two things.”
“Really? What might they be?”
“Well, you could fly up there without warning and surprise him.”
“I’m not so sure I want to do that. It’s not cricket, you know? What’s my other option?”
“Wait a short while and see if he buys you earrings to match the bracelet. Then you’ll know there’s some funny business going on.”
“They make a necklace too.”
“If he shows up with earrings and a necklace, get a lawyer.”
I knew she intended to be funny but I didn’t smile. Nothing about the topic was funny to me. I just looked at her, realizing then that indeed, my marriage had a fault line right down the middle. Our food arrived.
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said, cutting a slice of asparagus and eating it. “This is good.”
The Hurricane Sisters: A Novel Page 5