Jess’s parents settled in their chairs, drinks cupped comfortably in their hands, and I thought it would be how it always was, them shooting questions at Jess about her classes or unwinding dull stories about people I didn’t know, and her father interrupting to rail on the mayor or the economy, but Jess thumped both hands flat on the tablecloth so it was impossible not to notice that showy diamond and said, “You guys aren’t very observant,” and Jess’s mother screeched and practically spit out wine as she grabbed Jess’s hand.
“What the hell?” Her father’s whole body clenched into itself. I was glad he had that martini, and probably so was he, because he gulped at it. It looked like he wished he had one in his other hand also.
The questions surged: Who? What? Where? When? Why, why, why?
The salads came and sat there until finally I started on mine. Lots of croutons. Crunching echoed in my ears.
“And why isn’t he here tonight?” Jess’s dad asked for the tenth or hundredth time. He reached for his salad, sliding it roughly across the white tablecloth to center the plate, chopping down with his fork the way bulldozers hacked into ground, probably not tasting a single thing; it might as well be dirt.
“Because I knew you’d be like this,” Jess said. “You’re supposed to be happy for me.”
“We’re happy,” her mother said. “This is so sudden. You’re not even legal for drinking.”
Jess grabbed her martini protectively. “I can vote,” she said. “And I’m the exact age you were when you got married.”
It was a pause where everyone stared somewhere that wasn’t at each other. And then Jess looked straight at me, like announcing, Showtime! and said, “You like Tommy, right?”
Their faces swung my way as if I were judge, jury, and God Almighty in one body. I badly wanted the waitress to show up with my fried shrimp, because chances were good that Jess was going to storm out in some sort of protest, and if the shrimp were here now, I’d at least get to snag one or two. Also, I wished I had one of those martinis. I imagined them tasting brutal and strong and true, like wiping a chalkboard clear of writing. I imagined erasing my own mind with crisp briskness. I sipped my wine, nodded to buy time, said, “He’s really in love with Jess.” The wine tasted worse than before. But I kept going, with the wine, with the words: “They’re a perfect match. A very perfect couple. They’re perfect together.”
Jess’s mother dumped a lot more wine from the carafe into her glass and a little bit more into mine. “Okay, lovey,” she said, and her voice was thin. “So. I guess we want to meet him. This perfect man. I didn’t realize you two were serious. When did he propose? There’s nothing wrong with a long engagement, you know.”
“For God’s sake,” Jess’s dad said. “Don’t encourage this nonsense.”
Jess tossed back her hair. I think she was getting drunk, because her smile seemed sloppy and her black eyeliner and mascara were fuzzy. Or maybe I was drunk. But I’d had more at any frat party, garbage can punch made from Everclear and store-brand Hi-C. I was one of those people who didn’t get drunk, or if I did, I hadn’t yet found the amount needed to get me there.
“He’s very romantic,” Jess said. “He sent roses the other day. And once he wrote me a poem.”
A limerick. “Jess” rhymed with “chest.” Probably copied off a bathroom wall.
“Christ,” Jess’s dad said, waving at the waitress and pointing to his empty martini glass. He wolfed lettuce as if he had to have something to do or he’d keep spouting words, the wrong ones, like he’d decided to relinquish all control over the situation to his wife, knowing she’d botch it, looking forward to blaming her later for the mess.
Jess said, “I really love him. Maybe you guys forget what it’s like to want to be with someone every minute of every day, but that’s how we are.” She made a fake pouty face at her father. “I want another martini, too.”
“Christ,” he said again, less forcefully, jabbing a finger at Jess’s glass. “Olives this time,” he called to the waitress, tipping the lemon rind onto his empty salad plate. Neither Jess nor her mother had touched her salad. The blue cheese dressing lay thick and viscous, like what pus probably looked like. Who could choke that down? Yet I knew I would order it next time.
Jess folded her arms across her chest. The ring was on the outside, impossible not to see.
Abruptly, her father laughed. “Arranged marriages. Those were the days. Call up your friends and they send over their sons.”
“Who did that?” Jess said. “No one gets married that way now.”
“Line up all the boys to look them straight in the eye,” her father said, his voice expansive, louder. “Smart as you are, Jess, lovey, I know a hell of a lot more about judging character than any college girl. I know—” and he swooped his arm in a semicircle, knocking over the bread basket. “Hell.” He pointed to the hostess, leading an older couple to a table in the back. “I could marry her and what would be different? Love is the least of it. ‘I reeeeaaaally love him,’” he mocked.
“What do you mean saying ‘her’ like that? Because she works in a restaurant?” Jess said. “Anyway—”
“Raymond,” shushed Jess’s mother. “You’re embarrassing.”
Now his eyes dug into me. “You know I’m right,” he said, finally lowering his voice, “tell me I’m right,” and he jerked the gold ring over his knuckle and halfway up his finger, then started twisting it aggressively. “Let’s hear what your old man would say if you came home tomorrow engaged.”
Jess slapped both palms flat on the table, prelude to jumping up, though she stayed seated. “Honestly,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me and everyone else.”
Her dad’s eyes glittered, and I imagined their glint across a conference table while you signed the loops of your name, suddenly getting that you’d been screwed, or their dangerous flash rising out of a cluttered alley behind a bar after last call. How had I not seen his eyes this way before? I waited for Jess to leap up and drag me in her wake: our protest that would leave her childishly triumphant and me hungry, with no shrimp and too late for dorm food. I waited for her mother to hiss or screech or warn, “Raymond,” but she sipped wine robotically, as if she had left the table, leaving behind this husk of a body. I waited, but there was only silence. The hostess glided past with a miniature, disengaged smile, as if she hadn’t heard, though surely she had. Everyone had.
I said, “She’s so pretty, isn’t she?” and I don’t know why I did. No one agreed or disagreed. I felt my face burning a horrible red, and my fingertips seemed dipped in ice. Because I knew exactly what my father would say as if I heard the words echo in the room: With that huge-ass ring, you can buy your love somewhere else. Actually, no, my father could not be that clever. He would say, Quite a ring you got there. Hang on to whoever gave you that. As easy to love rich as poor. But even that was too polite. He would say—my father would say—he really, truly would look at that ring and I knew he would say...
They kept staring at me, this awkward, unhappy, confusing family I could never understand, and I blurted it out: “He’d take one look at the ring and say, ‘Bet there’s more where that came from.’”
And the three of them laughed. They laughed hysterically in gulps and cackles, clutching the table edge and one another’s hands and forearms. They didn’t see that I wasn’t laughing. The new martinis came and Jess’s dad fished out the plastic sword spearing his olives and handed it to Jess’s mother, who slid the olives into her mouth. The waitress took the two empty salad plates, mine and Jess’s father’s.
“You’ll stay in school,” he said to Jess.
“Of course,” she said, giving the lie he expected.
No toast this round, just Jess’s dad laying into his drink. I knew, watching that thirst, his vehemence, that I would bull down martinis and blue cheese, choking myself until I learned to love both, and when blue-cheese-stuffed olives for martinis hit Chicago bars in the nineties, I would feel vindicated.
&n
bsp; Then her father said, “We love you, Jess. Whatever makes you happy makes us happy.” The words seemed to suffocate him, and he tugged the rim of his shirt collar.
Jess’s mom said, “We’re eager to meet Tommy and welcome him into the family. I’d love for you to think about an engagement party this summer at the club to introduce him around. People ask about you; they’ll want to know.” There was lots more chatter, mostly between Jess and her mother. Her father cradled that martini. He seemed suddenly calm. I imagined him having another whole separate family with his mistress, another daughter making him proud but who was also disappointing, who wanted the house salad but got prime rib when he pointed his finger. Another daughter who would attend this fancy college, or who maybe would be the hostess at this restaurant. Or maybe he didn’t know this other daughter existed. Maybe she was a secret, floating unnoticed like a ghost, never drawing attention, passing along edges, watching, observing, learning the way to be.
A little later, before the desserts and coffee came, Jess’s mother stood up and announced that she was going to the little girls’ room. “She likes to pee in a herd,” Jess had warned me when I first met her parents, so now she smiled at Jess, who rolled her eyes and looked my way for a rescue, so I got up, but Jess’s father pointed at me: “Hang on there,” he said, so I sat down and Jess stood. The two of them walked toward the back of the room as sudden sweat dampened my armpits. I struggled to think when I had been alone with Jess’s father. His eyes were half closed as he leaned back in his chair, regarding me as if I were at a job interview and failing it. I sat straighter. I picked up a spoon. Before I could tap it or turn it over, his brow furrowed, so I loosened my grip and flattened my hands on the table, palms down. I had to breathe, so I did that quietly.
Finally he said, “You’re a good friend to Jess.”
“Thank you.”
He reached over and rested his hand on top of mine, patted my fingers absently. “I lost control earlier,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
I shrugged. It was an uncomfortable silence. I suppose it was touching that he thought he owed me an apology, if that’s what this was, if that’s why he wanted to speak to me alone. I wanted to tell him that was why never, never lose control.
“I love my daughter,” he said. “I would do anything for her, anything to help her, and I’m not on board with this engagement. That big ring is nothing compared to her happiness.” His eyes were shiny for a moment, as if he might cry, but then they weren’t anymore.
“I love Jess, too.”
I truly did. I loved her in a fierce and confused way, like a sister. I loved Jess for saving me from who I was. What her father said made sudden and absolute sense of why I was doing what I did with Tommy: I was trying to save Jess back, because I wasn’t on board with her engagement either, and her father, his hand now gripping my hand, pressing his heavy gold ring against my knuckles, understood all this.
I said, “Between us, I’m sure they won’t get married in the end.”
“Would you bet money on that?” he asked. Joke words. But his face was 100 percent serious, looking me straight in the eye, the way he had when he asked about my father.
“I never bet real money,” I said. “But yes.”
“Well, then,” he said. “I think you know something.” His hand pressed heavier now, and I couldn’t slip mine away. The restaurant dipped into seamless silence, and he slanted his head in, close. Tiny black whiskers lined his jawbone. I smelled gin. I leaned forward. He said, “I think you know a lot of things.”
“Maybe,” I said. My heart beat extra loud.
He whispered, “You’re prettier than that restaurant hostess any day.” As if he read my mind.
The silence was tense, and I wanted to pretend I hadn’t heard, but surely he could see that what he said had punched my breath out. I figured I’d remember this moment for the rest of my life, and then it was over because he sat straight, nodding to the far corner, to Jess and her mother returning, snatching his hand off mine so fast it was as if my skin had burned his with flames. He grabbed his water glass, cocked his head sideways as if puzzling the answer to a tough question. When Jess and her mom reached the table, he said loudly, “There’s my two girls,” in a voice that wouldn’t fool anyone but did and half standing as they bustled out chairs and re-draped napkins across their laps. But they were in the midst of a conversation about how many bridesmaids and barely seemed to notice they were at the table.
Whereas I understood exactly where I was: in a restaurant I could not afford, with a family that wasn’t mine, with a man whose hand grabbed my hand for too long. I didn’t want to be evil, but I was. I was, even when I didn’t want to be. As if what my father had done to me had left a physical mark on me that any man could read, that no amount of money would erase.
I smiled and stood up and politely said, “Excuse me.” I walked across the restaurant quickly, my open skirt swishing, showing off my legs to anyone paying attention. It seemed like a long time ago that I had gotten dressed, and I wasn’t sure how I had ended up in this outfit or why I had worked so hard to get this sweater for myself from Marshall Field’s. My head buzzed and hummed with wine, and the tall shoes made my footsteps as clattery as hooves.
I could stay in control. It was only walking to the ladies’ room. I wanted to stare at my face in the mirror, to see what they all saw. And I wanted to know for sure he wasn’t going to follow me. Could I have at least that?
HOW WE LEAVE HOME
(summer, before college)
I.
Here could be the beginning, that summer in Iowa when we longed for adventure. We sprawled on towels on the glittering concrete of the pool deck at Mercer Park and sighed, arching our necks, flexing our toes, bemoaning how boring Iowa was, how bored, bored, bored we were—how we needed—no, deserved—adventure. We glopped handfuls of baby oil over each other’s shoulders, desperate for any zinc-nosed lifeguard to swivel his head our way.
The adventure on my horizon was that I would leave for college in Chicago in three weeks. I hadn’t told my friends. They saw me on the path we all followed: maybe the state school in our town or community college, living at home in my childhood bedroom, working a mall job. The only thing different would be nothing. Same people at the same parties at the Reservoir in their same run-down cars, same brand of beer bought from the same place that sold to minors, Dirty John’s on Market Street.
I felt sorry for my friends, the dull blur of them. They sensed my pity—maybe read it as disdain—and all summer they’d been avoiding me, or cutting me with the slightest of slights, like not acknowledging my new haircut. It was okay. I floated a stratosphere or two above them. I was leaving. I was out. I was so out, and the poor things didn’t even know.
At the same time, I missed them already, their clattering gossip about people we’d known since third grade. I was the one insisting on this afternoon at the pool. I wanted to bawl. I loved them so much. I wanted to tell them that adventure was stupid and all wrong.
My stomach curled and flip-flopped, so I pushed my salted nut roll to the edge of my towel. It seemed accusatory. Usually it was my favorite choice from the pool vending machine. I could smell the peanuts over the chlorine lacing the air, so I concentrated on the lifeguard scanning the blue pool, the screeching kids, the chubby moms clustered in the semi-shady corner.
“Well, I’m going in,” Janey said, as she rose, all six feet one inch of her. She wore a glittery pink headband, too narrow for her crazy wad of dark hair—“That girl needs to learn control,” my mother said about Janey—and Janey tugged off the band, letting it drop to the concrete as she shook free her hair. Her coppery skin glistened with baby oil; she tanned the best and showed off with white tank tops deep into autumn. Though she and I had been friends since seventh grade, it was an uneasy friendship, each of us certain we were better than the other without evidence backing us up.
She was too tall for our school, with too much hair, and j
ust always too much something. After my new haircut, with five inches chopped off and bangs, she stared at my face with intensity and said, “God, your chin shouldn’t be pointy like that.”
Now, she glanced down at me sitting cross-legged on my towel and demanded, “Come with me.” I scrambled up, startled to be noticed, grateful, nervous—so nervous that my bare foot crunched the discarded hairband as I followed her; I heard it snap. We moved fast over the stovetop heat of the cement, and the pain scorching my feet felt distant.
We sat on the lip of the pool, dangled our legs in the water. “I wish the water was blue,” I babbled, “not clear.”
“There’s islands in the world where it is,” she said hazily.
The lifeguard whistled at some boys dunking each other. “No roughhousing,” he yelled. Whistle Nazi, we called that one, even as we flipped our hair when his gaze skimmed us.
“What if it’s our last summer together?” More babbling. I should shut up already.
“Look,” Janey interrupted. “I know you’re pregnant. I already know that.”
That hot sun was frying me. I half jumped, half fell into the cool, colorless water that should have been the cheerful turquoise of the painted walls and floor—I disappeared into the cold, scraping my hands back and forth against the rough cement to make them bleed.
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