I look around and gesture to the closest man I see—my hair stylist, Tommy. Not my optimal choice, but he’ll have to do. But before Tommy can even set his drink down, I see Vaughn approaching.
“Who are you?” Vaughn barks. Ari’s entire demeanor changes. He lets go of Norah’s hand and steps back. He mumbles that he’s here with his brother, stammering as he tries to remind Vaughn of how they met some two years ago.
“I don’t know you,” Vaughn says. “How did you get in here?”
“My brother…”
Soon it becomes evident that there is no brother and he’s indeed crashed my party. In a moment he’s engulfed by a circle of men.
“No!” Norah pleads. She even reaches for Vaughn’s forearm before I pull her back. “He didn’t do anything wrong. We were just talking!”
Ari stutters, jogging his mental rolodex for another name to drop, but it’s too late to play six degrees of separation.
All I hear over Norah’s babbling are Vaughn’s reprimands. “You crash my wife’s party … in here drinking my liquor, eating my food … trying to bag my sister-in-law … do you know who I am? …”
I could try and talk him down, but I’ve learned to keep my distance once he’s incensed. Besides, he knows better than to hurt the guy. He’s way too smart to risk a lawsuit. But still, his temper has its limit, and Ari is nearing it. I lean over to Cliff and urge him to defuse this before things get out of hand. Soon Cliff has Ari gripped by the crook of his neck and the back of his belt and is escorting him towards the door.
By now Norah’s voice is raised and all eyes are on us. I grab her arm and lead her to the bathroom. I nudge her inside and lock the door behind me. “What’s wrong with you?”
“You didn’t have to kick him out. We were just talking!”
“Yeah, maybe you were just talking, but that asshole was seasoning you up, ready to take you out of here and do God knows what. Nobody even knows who the hell he is.”
“So what! I was getting to know him before you had that goon get rid of him.”
Here we go again. My sister is an ugly drunk. A sloppy, unintelligible drunk.
“I’m going to get you some water and then have Cliff take you home, okay? You can come get your car tomorrow.”
“I don’t want any water and I don’t need a ride.” She studies her reflection in the mirror, smoothing back her hair. Then she starts reapplying her lipstick.
“There’s no need for all of that. You’re going home. The night’s over, Norah.”
I turn to walk out. Something flies by me, scarcely missing my head. Her bracelet strikes the door and lands by my feet.
“Are you crazy? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You!” She points a wobbly finger at me. “You’re what’s wrong with me. You and your bossy shit. You can’t tell me when to go and who to talk to. You’re not my mother!”
She digs into her clutch, I assume looking for something else to throw. When she can’t find anything, she flips it upside down, dumping all of the contents into the sink. Then she starts sifting through the heap.
“Norah, stop.”
“Don’t touch it. You didn’t pay for any of this!”
“Jesus Christ! Why tonight? Why start your shit tonight. Why ruin my birthday party—”
“Every day is your birthday, Blair. Every—single—day,” she slurs. “You’ve been getting what you want ever since you married that man.”
“I’m not doing this with you tonight. I’m not. I have guests out there. Do not embarrass me—”
“Embarrass you? I’m embarrassing you?”
“Just stop, okay? Enough already. Let’s get you home.” I grab her purse. She knocks it from my hand.
“I’m not the one who’s embarrassing you.” She stumbles toward me, her nose inches from mine. “You think that whole room doesn’t know everything? You think they don’t know about all his other women—”
“Get out of my face.”
“You can bury your head in the sand if you want to, but we all know the truth. And just because your shit is messed up you want to stop everybody else from having a life. You only kicked Ari out because—”
“Ari? Are we still talking about that guy? He wanted to get you in bed, Norah. That’s it. And if you, at nearly forty years old, can’t see that, then I feel sorry for you. How desperate can you be—”
“I’m not desperate.”
“You’re something.”
“And you’re a fraud. You may have everyone else fooled, but I know the truth. I know just what you are,” she hisses.
“Yeah Norah, and what am I? Better yet, what are you? Take a look in the mirror. It’s time to get your shit together. This taking shots and ‘I’m the life of the party’ crap is cute when you’re twenty-five. But it’s time to get it together. No man wants a woman they have to babysit.”
“Go to hell. I don’t know why I even came here tonight.”
“Good. Then go home.”
“When I’m ready.”
“You’re ready now.”
“You would love that wouldn’t you?”
“What are you talking about? You know what, I don’t even know why I’m trying to reason with a drunk.” I turn to walk away.
She grips my shoulder, spinning me back around. “What did you call me?”
“Norah, forget it. Just go home.”
“No, what did you say?” She shoves me with the heel of her palm. I stumble backwards.
“Don’t touch me.”
“You got all the balls in the world now, ‘cause you got your little entourage out there. But, I’m not Ari. Nobody’s gonna manhandle me and throw me out in the street.”
Again she shoves me, only harder.
“Norah, I’m warning you.”
She starts laughing. “I can’t wait ‘til your shit falls apart. And it will. It’s just a matter of time.”
I take a deep breath. “You have a choice. You can get yourself together, walk out this door, get in a cab and go home. Or I’ll get security to take you out. It’s up to you. But I’m done with this conversation. Seriously.”
“What are you going to do? Get your thug husband to come and kick me out, too?”
“Oh, now he’s a thug? He wasn’t a thug when he got your car out of impound or when he paid your back taxes. Was he a thug then?”
“You said I didn’t have to pay that back. You told me to forget it, but I should have known you would throw it back in my face the first chance you got.”
“Not throwing anything in your face. But you’re going to stop talking about my husband.”
“Whatever. You two deserve each other. Two fuckin’ liars.”
“Norah, you have one minute to get your shit and start for the door—”
“And don’t think ‘cause you have a baby now that it’s going to change. He’s still the same man. Only difference is that you’ll get a bigger check when he leaves you!”
My hand delivers a sharp, deliberate slap across her cheek.
Before I know it, her fists have gripped two handfuls of my hair, and my hands are clasped around her throat. She charges me. I stumble backwards and slam into the hand dryer. I grab for her hair, then wrap as much of it as I can around my fist and yank until she cries out in pain. She digs her nails into my wrists. I yell out and before I know it we’ve both fallen to our knees and are grappling around on the floor. She has me by at least three inches and twenty pounds, so it’s only a matter of time before she overpowers me. I’m on my back, and she’s straddling me, pinning my wrists against the floor. My legs flail beneath her. She’s yelling, but I can’t make out any of her words. Someone’s pounding on the door. I hear a man’s voice calling, asking if everything is okay. I yell to them to get her off of me, but my voice is small beneath Norah’s belligerent screaming. They push against the door until it finally thrusts open. In a flash, there’s a sea of faces hovering over us. Someone grabs Norah by her waist and pulls her off of me whil
e her one heeled foot kicks wildly. Soon, Vaughn is helping me up off the floor and barking at everyone to clear out. I make it to my feet and pull my dress back down.
Vaughn slams the door shut. “What the hell happened?”
“She’s fucking crazy! I’m done with her. Done!”
When I see my reflection, I’m livid. My hair is a mess, my face is spattered with tiny scratches and my chest is blotched with red welts.
“What happened?”
I recap our discussion-turned-argument, editing her words about Vaughn.
“I hate to say it.” He wets a napkin and blots at the scratches on my forehead. “But I knew it was just a matter of time before this happened. She’s been jealous of you for years. It was bound to explode.”
“We’re too old for this shit,” I cry. “After everything I’ve done for her. Everything we’ve done for her. And this is how she treats me?”
Vaughn smooths down my hair then zips up the back of my dress. “It was the liquor, Babe. She was drunk off her ass.”
“It’s no excuse,” I say, “I’m done! She’s dead to me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do. Who does that, Vaughn? Who attacks their own sister?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked out her friend—”
“Friend? He was no friend, he was a vulture.”
“Babe—”
“I want her gone. Out of here. Get rid of her, Vaughn. Now!” I gather the stuff from her purse, slide it all into the empty trashcan and toss her clutch on top. Then I pull the plastic bag from the pail, tie a loose knot and hand it to him. “Here’s her shit. Tell her to leave. Right now.”
Hesitantly, he takes the bag from me. “I’ll get Cliff to take her home.”
“No! Let her find her own way.”
“She’s drunk, Blair. She can’t drive in her condition.”
“Then she can take a cab, but Cliff isn’t driving her anywhere. No more free rides on my dime. I mean it.”
“I know you’re pissed. And you have every right to be, but you can’t just kick her out onto the street.”
“Fuck her.”
“Babe.” Vaughn reaches for my hands and turns me to face him. “She’s your blood. You can’t turn your back on her. Family is all that matters at the end of the day.”
“Vaughn, please.” I sigh. “I just want to go home. Just get everyone out of here. I don’t want to have to explain this to anyone. I’m so embarrassed.”
“I’ll get rid of them.” He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a black key card. “Uh, I’d actually booked us a suite for the night. Figured we’d make a weekend out of it. But if you want to just go home, we can.”
There’s a hint of disappointment in his face, and I feel bad. He’s put so much thought and planning into my birthday. Although I’m craving the feel of my own bed, I won’t allow my sister to ruin this any more than she already has.
“You did?”
“Yeah, but we don’t have to stay, really.”
“No. No, I want to.”
After he leaves, I lean against the sink and take inventory of what’s left of my nails. My whole right hand is a cracked, jagged mess. My cell phone buzzes on the counter. My mother. Norah got to her already with what I’m sure was a skewed account of how I attacked her. I’d hope my mother will know better, but I can never be sure. Norah—who was once her problem child—somewhere along the line became her favorite. I believe it’s because they’re alike; she sees herself in Norah. But I’m nothing like either of them. If it wasn’t for the striking resemblance, I’d doubt I was even her child. I find it ironic that after all Norah has put our mother through, she still managed to secure a special, judgment-free place in her heart.
I can recall the day Norah came home with her news. I’d overheard her on a three-way phone call with two of her friends. Although I only got bits and pieces, words like: “abortion”, “baby”, and “married” were all I needed to hear to know the truth of it. My sixteen-year-old sister was pregnant. I knew it was a mistake. One that would close all kinds of doors to her and add her name to the ledger of struggling teen mothers everywhere. It was a full four months later before she told my mother. I was sitting at the kitchen table pretending to do homework, my mom was bent over low, cleaning out the oven. Norah skulked into the kitchen and told my mother that they needed to talk. A shadow crossed my mom’s face as she cautiously removed her yellow plastic gloves. She told me to go to a friend’s house.
I exited the front door then made my way back around to the side entrance of our house, and peered through the kitchen window. I didn’t have to read any lips because in a moment their voices grew loud enough to hear through the screen. The long and short of it was that my sister had deliberately waited until she was six months along before telling our mom. And even worse was her confession that the father, Eric (whom she’d met on a college tour upstate) was five years her senior.
My mother went on the warpath. She dug out the tattered legal manual she’d once found on a bus, and researched statutory rape. She then consulted an attorney and was advised that filing charges would likely land Eric in jail, but it would be a pyrrhic victory; a prison sentence would impede child support. And in all fairness, it was not far-fetched that he had believed Norah when she lied and told him she was eighteen. That, coupled with Norah’s plea not to imprison the man she “loved”, convinced my mother to set aside her witch hunt. She sought an alternative resolution. She contacted Eric’s upper-crust New England family and scheduled a meeting of the minds. It was then that we learned the truth of it all. Eric was not only engaged to his childhood sweetheart, but his dad was an attorney, who trumped Mom’s remedial law education with a few legal tricks of his own. He had Eric move all of his assets out of his name, so that on paper he was nothing more than a struggling grad student living off of a measly stipend. When the court determined his mandated child support, the payments were barely enough to cover diapers and formula. Defeated, my mother added another part-time job to her schedule, Norah began ringing groceries at the local Key Food and eventually I would wake to the daily cries of the infant sharing my bedroom.
The financial burden was one thing, but Norah’s heartbreak cast a heavy blanket of misery over our home. She walked around with her head hung low, cried on a daily basis and barely engaged with the outside world. At one point she stopped eating altogether and lost so much weight her doctor had to intervene. Eric had ignored her letters and stopped taking her calls. So it was no surprise that it was only my mother in the delivery room with her on the day my niece came into the world.
In the months following Ashley’s birth, Norah was diagnosed with severe postpartum depression. But we all knew Eric was the one and only source of her unhappiness. It pained me to watch my sister fall to pieces, but my emotions took an even deeper dive when watching my mother struggle to pull those pieces together. She had to set aside her own feelings of embarrassment and disappointment in order to tend to Norah. Not only financially, but emotionally. It grieved her to intersperse encouragement and supportive words between lessons on baby feedings and diaper changes. Struggle became the running theme of our household. The light that used to flicker in my sister’s eyes dimmed. Her cock-eyed optimism waned and by the time I left for college she was no longer the fun-loving big sister I had once looked up to.
I remember the humid August day I left. My two suitcases sat by the door as I waited for my uncle to come and drive me up to Syracuse. I’ll never forget her face. Norah was sitting on the couch wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a wrinkled tank top. Cartoons blared on the television. My niece sat on the floor, banging an empty lotion bottle against the coffee table. Norah looked at me pitifully. Not because she was sad to see me go, but because it wasn’t her.
As I lean my ear to the bathroom door, my cell phone buzzes again. I send my mother to voicemail before gingerly opening the door. I peer out to find it’s empty. True to his word, Vaughn’s sent every
one home. I know I insisted he did but I can’t help but feel cheated. My first ever surprise party and it was ruined.
One of the double doors opens. It’s Cliff. “Vaughn asked me to make sure everyone’s out.”
“They’re all gone. Where is he?”
“Checking into your suite. Come, I’ll bring you down.” He holds the door open for me, pretending not to notice my scratched face and ripped dress.
“What happened to my sister? Is she gone?”
“Yeah, I just dropped her home.”
Didn’t I tell Vaughn to send that bitch in a cab? I nod and resist the urge to vent to Cliff. Over the years he’s seen a lot—if he was a different kind of man he could have earned a pretty penny from the tabloids. But, like Rosa, he’s discreet and pretends he doesn’t know nearly as much as he does.
While we stand in the elevator, he hands me a black keycard. A moment later the doors open to the twenty-third floor.
“Suite twenty-three-oh-two,” he says. “Have a good weekend, and happy birthday again.”
I kiss him on his cheek and thank him for everything.
There’s no answer when I knock, so I insert the card and gently push the door open.
“Vaughn?”
I peek inside the bedroom. One of my overnight bags is resting on the tufted bench at the foot of the bed. A familiar smoky aroma lures me to the terrace. There Vaughn is, puffing on a cigar.
“Feeling any better?”
“Now I am,” I say as I approach him and drink in the gorgeous view of the East River.
He holds me as we rest our bodies against the glass balustrade. The clamor of honking horns and the faint sound of a police siren can be heard in the distance. It’s unseasonably warm but breezy enough to form tiny goosebumps on my arms. I love this. Even after all we’ve been through, Vaughn’s body pressed against mine is still my favorite feeling in the world. He rests his chin in the crook of my neck.
“Why don’t we get some sleep,” he says. “It’s been a long day. Tomorrow we’ll start fresh in the morning. I’ve got another surprise for you.”
A Delicate Truth Page 3