by Marian Thurm
“I know,” Stacy says. “I know.” She offers to help him, as she has once or twice before, and this time Marshall says yes, as soon as Stacy’s back from Florida they should make a date to go through Clare’s stuff.
“She would have wanted you to have her mink bomber jacket,” Marshall tells her. “It’s a beautiful jacket, just a couple of years old. Promise me you’ll take it?”
It’s eighty-four degrees today in Fort Lauderdale, and the very idea of a mink jacket seems sort of repellent on any number of levels, Stacy is thinking, but she wouldn’t dream of turning Marshall down. Because if he’s convinced that Clare would have wanted her to have it, she can’t and won’t disappoint him. She’ll never wear it, but Marshall doesn’t have to know that, doesn’t have to know that a temporarily retired social worker whose specialty was arranging services for the homeless can’t possibly fit comfortably into a mink jacket, no matter what the size.
“Yeah, sure, I’d be honored to have it,” Stacy says, and promises, before hanging up, that she will absolutely, positively, go through Clare’s closet with him when she gets back to the city.
“Kisses for the kids,” Marshall says, instead of good-bye.
Olivia, who is sitting next to Roger, scoots under the table and emerges on the other side, climbing into Stacy’s lap now, pressing her face against Stacy’s, her pale hair smelling of french fries, her cheek nearly as satiny as a baby’s.
“What is it, sweetie pie?” Stacy says. She plays with her daughter’s hair, traces the rim of her ear, as Will ducks beneath the table and cozies up next to Roger.
“Marshall didn’t need to speak to me?” Roger says. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Can I get my ears pierced?” Olivia asks.
“What?” Stacy says. “You’re five years old, sweetie pie. What’s the rush?”
From across the table, Roger is eyeing them in a melancholy way.
“Hey, lighten up, big guy!” Stacy says. He must be thinking about his sister, she guesses, and imagines just how hard it is for him to talk to Marshall on the phone, let alone visit with him at the apartment on East End where Marshall and eighteen-year-old Nathaniel are doing their best to stay afloat.
She and Roger don’t talk about those things, not that Stacy hasn’t tried. Lately he just doesn’t seem to want to talk to her about anything at all.
It’s worrisome, no question, but things are bound to get better, aren’t they? If not today, she thinks, then surely some other day. Taking out her bottle of Pepto-Bismol, she unscrews its child-proof cap with the center of her palm. She shakes out three caplets, even though the label says that two at a time is enough. Enough for some people, maybe, but not for her. She whose husband seems to have lost the desire to share even the smallest shred of information with her, preferring, instead, to sit in silence contemplating his BlackBerry, as if all the wisdom in the world were visible on its 2" x 2" screen.
~ 10 ~
Stacy had never had a manicure in her life and she never would; though her fingers were long and quite thin, her nails were small and a little wide, and she hated drawing attention to them. And so when Roger’s mother suggested she get a manicure to show off her ring, Stacy had to say no.
The Sunday brunch on Long Island that Beverly had arranged so attractively across her French provincial dining-room table wasn’t the standard bagels and lox that Stacy had been expecting; it was, instead, a lovely selection of sushi, avocado rolls, yellow tail-and-scallion rolls, and shrimp tempura, along with bowls of edamame, plates of shrimp gyoza, seaweed salad, and tuna tataki.
“And I never even thought to ask if you liked Japanese food,” Beverly said as she cupped Stacy’s face in her own small manicured hands. “It could have been a disaster!”
“No, no, we love Japanese food,” Stacy reassured her; by “we,” she meant Roger and herself; as for Lauren and Chuck and their family, well, they would just have to get with the program.
“What was she thinking?” Lauren whispered in Stacy’s ear. “Does she really think four-year-olds are big fans of seaweed salad? I mean, come on, this mother-in-law of yours needs a reality check.”
Mother-in-law-to-be.
Juliette, her grandmother, sidled over to them; unlike Lauren—and the twins—all three of whom were wearing jeans, sneakers, and souvenir sweatshirts from the San Diego Zoo, Juliette was more formally dressed in a dark pantsuit with a gold starburst pin on the lapel. On her feet were ankle-length, square-toed black boots; a silver cane hung from her wrist. “The big news is that my surgeon says I need a knee replacement,” she announced, “but I can tell you right now that it’s not happening. Ever. My personal goal in life is to avoid hospitalization at all costs. The last time I was in the hospital was in 1964, and that was for gall bladder surgery, because in those years you—”
“I was in the hospital in 1964!” Beverly said excitedly. “I was thirty-eight years old and had to have an appendectomy, which—”
“Maybe I can find some peanut butter for the twins,” said Stacy. “Let’s go take a look,” she instructed her sister. Roger’s mother and Juliette were in a senior citizen huddle, their helmets of silver hair shining in the track lighting overhead as Stacy and her sister left them and went off to the kitchen. Stacy was wearing her highest heels and tightest black leather skirt; standing next to Lauren in her jeans and sneakers, she felt too tall and considerably overdressed. But really, couldn’t her sister have found something more suitable to put on than those clunky cross-trainers and that sweatshirt advertising a zoo? And why was her sister dressed exactly like the twins? It seemed kind of juvenile, a grown woman dressed like her four-year-olds.
Stacy and Lauren were three and a half years apart; her sister was born in 1968, that terrible year in which both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, but also the year Stacy started preschool and had become what everyone called—their voices invariably rising in pitch and enthusiasm—the big sister. Though her parents never believed her, she had sworn, years later, that she vividly remembered seeing the newborn Lauren for the very first time in one of those see-through plastic bassinets in the hospital, her father in his full-length tweed coat holding Stacy up to the glass wall of the nursery and pointing out her sister, who’d been born with so much hair on her head that the nurses had clipped a ribbon to it. Never mind her parents’ disbelief; Stacy remembered the red ribbon that distinguished her sister from every other newborn in the hospital’s nursery. She remembered, too, standing outside a small store (the Butterworth Bakery?) in a strip mall in their Long Island town, carefully guarding Lauren in her stroller while their mother went in to buy something—a peach pie? A loaf of bread adorned with the caraway seeds her father liked? So far so good, except that Stacy had grown tired of watching over the baby, and, in a moment that was tainted by impatience, boredom, and probably more than a whiff of jealousy, her four-year-old self tipped the stroller back so that Lauren would fall out onto the hard, hard sidewalk and maybe even crack her head open the smallest bit. And just as Stacy tipped the stroller and the baby began to slide down toward the pavement, two women happened to walk by. Young lady! one of them called out to her while the other one righted the stroller. If you’re going to be naughty like that, we’re going to take that baby away from you! A plan which, at that moment, would have suited the four-year-old Stacy just fine. Actually . . . better than fine. The baby merely turned her head to stare at her, while one of the women stepped into the bakery to get Stacy’s mother, and Stacy herself must have felt something like remorse, because except when it came to that baby, she’d always, it seemed, done everything right. Her parents rarely raised their voices to her; she was, they always said, such a good girl.
She wanted her sister to be happy for her now, at this little brunch in honor of her engagement, but it was asking too much; her sister had other things on her mind. She hadn’t even asked to see Stacy’s ring; instead, unbidden, Stacy
shyly extended her hand—as she had for Beverly and Clare, both of whom had said they were dying to see it—so that her sister could get a good look whether she wanted one or not. Very nice, Lauren said, so perfunctory, when what she should have said was beautiful or gorgeous; at least she’d kissed Stacy’s cheek, though without the hug that might have accompanied it. It hit Stacy then that her sister didn’t have an engagement ring of her own, that Chuck hadn’t had the money for one and that Lauren had insisted years ago that she honestly didn’t care, that it was petty to care—what did she need a ring for when she knew perfectly well how much Chuck adored her? And Stacy was mortified at having insisted Lauren take a nice long look at something she probably didn’t want to see.
Searching through Beverly’s pantry now, Stacy found a jar of extra-crunchy peanut butter, which, wouldn’t you know it, the twins wouldn’t touch, wouldn’t even look at, because of course they only liked the plain creamy kind, Lauren explained apologetically. She took the jar from Stacy, asked for some bread (no, the twins didn’t like raisin bread, but they’d take the seven-grain if nothing else was available), and, to Stacy’s astonishment, after making the sandwiches at the kitchen counter, proceeded to pick out the nuts from the peanut butter with the tines of a salad fork. Not to be believed, Stacy thought, as her sister went at it with the concentration and precision of a surgeon, tossing minuscule bits of peanut into the sink.
“I’m just kind of blown away by what I’m seeing here,” Stacy said, but Lauren misunderstood her.
“You mean my kids are spoiled brats because they won’t eat what’s on the table like everyone else?”
“No, of course not, it’s not that. It’s that . . .” It was hard to talk about love with her sister, even that extravagant, over-the-top maternal sort that compelled Lauren to patiently extract every last speck of peanut from her children’s lunch. “You’re such an incredibly devoted mother,” Stacy said, “that’s all.”
“Yeah, yeah, I kind of go a little crazy sometimes when it comes to them, but, hey, they’re my kids; it’s my job, you know?”
Stacy nodded, but she didn’t know, and would, if pressed, admit that she didn’t fully understand, though she suspected that someday she would.
Lauren’s husband, Chuck, came looking for them in the kitchen. He was burly and bearded, and dressed in jeans and a linty black T-shirt. There was a crucifix around his neck; Stacy couldn’t help but stare at Jesus’s long, pitifully thin outstretched arms nailed to the cross. Usually the sight of a crucifix meant nothing to her, but this one, lying against her brother-in-law’s chest, seemed terribly poignant.
“Hey, Savannah and Danielle are hungry,” Chuck announced. Even though he wasn’t much more than thirty, Stacy noted, with surprise, a few strands of silver glinting in his hair.
“How are your parents?” she asked him. She knew that his father had recently lost his job as a manager at a Chrysler Plymouth dealership, and that his mother had been obligated to look for work after decades at home. The only time Stacy saw them was at the twins’ birthday party every year.
“My parents? Well, both their parakeets died, one after the other,” Chuck said. “And my mother was actually kind of heartsick. She and my father decided to open a small bird shelter to honor their lives. The parakeets’, that is. Listen, dogs and cats I get, but parakeets? I think my parents need to move on.” He put one arm around Lauren, and the other around Stacy. “You two girls need to spend more time together,” he said. “Just a suggestion, you know?”
Stacy reached over and touched the small gold crucifix that hung from the chain around her brother-in-law’s neck. “You’re right,” she said, and waited for her sister to agree with her.
Lauren said something that sounded like mmm; Stacy decided to interpret that as a yes.
“You could come wedding-dress shopping with me,” Stacy said.
Her sister nodded soberly. “Sounds like fun.”
Watching Savannah and Danielle as they devoured their peanut butter sandwiches at the table that held the Japanese buffet, Stacy was embarrassed to admit that four years after their birth, she still had trouble telling them apart. They dressed exactly alike, but today, at least, one of them (Danielle?) had a pink satin headband in her dark hair, and the other twin, a purple one. And each of them had a Beatrix Potter stuffed animal resting in her lap—Peter Rabbit sporting a royal blue jacket, and Pigling Bland in a striped vest and yellow shorts.
Clare had joined them at the table now; she stood beside Stacy and Lauren and sighed at the sight of the twins. Stacy understood that this was the sigh of a woman who would have chosen a daughter for herself in that Colombian orphanage if only that had been possible.
“So, girls, which one of you is Savannah and which one is Danielle?” Clare asked. She loaded up her plate with seaweed salad and gyoza and used the lacquered chopsticks that Beverly had brought back from a trip to Beijing with her husband back in the eighties.
“I’m Savannah,” the twin with the pink ribbon said, and the other one snickered.
“She’s lying—I’m Savannah.”
Though Stacy would never admit it to her sister, she had no idea who was telling the truth. She wasn’t the greatest aunt, she thought regretfully. She only had two nieces to keep track of, and she couldn’t even tell who was who. Her impressive SAT scores were of no value here, nor was her prodigious memory. When it came to anything that had to do with her sister or her sister’s family, she just wasn’t up to snuff.
“Cut it out, girls, you’re confusing everyone,” Lauren said, but you could hear the affection in her voice. “I can’t even begin to tell you how many times Chuck used to mess me up just for fun,” she addressed Stacy and Clare. “This was when the girls were newborns, and the only way I could tell them apart was by the red nail polish I painted on Savannah’s tiny little big toe. I would change Danielle’s diaper, put her back in the bassinet and ask Chuck to hand over Savannah. And he would hand me back Danielle, just to drive me crazy!”
“You’re so lucky,” Clare said, and her voice sounded so wistful, Stacy put a hand on her shoulder.
“Lucky?” Lauren said. “It was a barrel of laughs, believe me, especially at three in the morning, when all I wanted was to put my head back down on that pillow.”
“I meant lucky to have two daughters.”
“They were a huge surprise, actually. There were no twins in either of our families.”
Stacy helped herself to a couple of gyoza; too lazy to use chopsticks, she ate with her fingers. “Not exactly true,” she said. “Mom had those cousins of hers, Marlene and Janet Something, who never married, lived together their whole lives, and dressed identically, even when they were in their seventies.”
“That’s so creepy,” Lauren said. “I mean, what the hell was wrong with those two?”
“Savannah and I are going to live together when we’re grown-ups,” Danielle informed them casually. “We’re going to live next door to you and Daddy our whole lives.”
“Is that the sweetest thing you’ve ever heard!” Clare said.
“Oh my god, are you kidding me?” said Lauren. “Girls, you need to set higher standards for yourselves. You don’t want to live next door, trust me.”
Though Savannah continued, contentedly, to eat her sandwich, Danielle burst into tears, and Stacy watched as Lauren calmed her, lifting Danielle into her arms, smooching her all over.
“Mommy’s so sorry,” Lauren said. “But you need to stop crying and finish your lunch, okay?”
“We DO want to live next door,” Danielle insisted. “And we’ll bring our husbands with us.”
Stacy had to smile. “Sounds like a plan,” she said. “A carefully considered one, apparently.”
“Just wait till you’re a mother, big shot,” her sister teased.
Roger’s mother and Stacy’s grandmother, who’d briefly disappeared, were back again, still talking about their health. “Every time I go to my internist, I have to make a list o
f all the medications I’m on, otherwise I forget one or two when he asks me,” Juliette was saying. “And I’m someone with an excellent memory, as it happens.”
“I’m not,” Beverly confessed. “I used to be, but I’m not anymore. For example, those two little girls over there? They’re your great-granddaughters, of course, but I can’t seem to remember their names . . .”
For a moment, Clare looked distraught, and then she said, “Danielle and Savannah, Mom.”
“Such sweet little girls,” Beverly said. “How old are they?”
Wiping away her tears with the palms of both hands, Danielle said, “We’re four. How old are you?”
“Hmm, seventy-two, going on seventy-three, I believe.”
“You’re old,” Savannah pointed out.
“Well, I’m certainly not young,” said Beverly. “Calvin Coolidge was president the year I was born. Did you know that he couldn’t stand his mother-in-law and she returned the compliment?”
Stacy reminded herself that this was the woman who was going to be her mother-in-law. “Fascinating!” she said.
“Does anyone want to know who was president when I was born?” Juliette asked. “Woodrow Wilson, for those of you who might be interested.”
“Ah, former president of Princeton University, and son of a slave owner,” Beverly said. “Also, the only US president who had a PhD. Actually from time to time I find myself wondering if I’m what they call an idiot savant. I know so much presidential history, it’s almost frightening. But ask me what I had for dinner last night, and, well, that’s a little frightening, too. I’m guessing pork chops baked with cinnamon apples, but it’s entirely possible that was two nights ago rather than last night.”
“Frankly,” Juliette said, “Jews—even secular, non-practicing ones—shouldn’t be cooking up pork chops in their kitchens, no matter how delicious the recipe might be.”
Everyone fell silent. “I wonder where the guys are,” Clare said a few moments later, and just as Stacy offered to go find them, Roger showed up, trailed by Marshall and Nathaniel, the little boy carrying a weird-looking stuffed animal resembling an owl, with jumbo-size pink ears and small white feet.