by Juliette Fay
“I won’t. And I’m seriously sorry,” Alder said, squinting at the glass dangling in her hand. “Hey.” She looked up at Dana. “Did you ever kiss a girl? Not like a peck, I mean a real kiss.”
“Uh . . .” Dana’s brain seemed to lurch around inside her skull. Was Alder really asking . . . ?
“You don’t have to tell me if you did,” Alder said quickly. “It’s kind of... different, and I just wondered if you ever had.”
“Well, I’m certainly very fond of some of my friends, and I guess I don’t think there’s anything wrong with . . . But I can’t say I ever wanted to . . .”
“Yeah,” said Alder. “I didn’t think so.” She put her glass in the dishwasher. “God, I’m tired,” she said, and headed for her room.
I should call Connie, Dana kept thinking as she climbed the stairs. But it was late, probably too late, and for that she was thankful. The light was on in Grady’s room, and she realized she’d forgotten about him completely. He was lying across his mattress, a Star Wars spaceship in one limp hand, C-3PO in the other. His pants were off, but he still wore his shirt, socks, and boxers. Dana set the toys on his dresser and slid him under the covers. She picked up the dirt-smeared pants to put them in the bathroom hamper.
When she opened the bathroom door, a smell hit her— something like sweetened parmesan cheese. She recognized the odor almost immediately. Someone had thrown up, and the stomach contents had not been pungent like hot dogs or sour like yogurt. It had been sweet. Like cake. Dana looked in the toilet bowl and noticed flecks of something unnaturally pink inside the rim. Frosting. There was no doubt about it.
CHAPTER 13
DANA LAY IN HER BED THAT NIGHT TRYING TO snatch at sleep, but she couldn’t power down from the anxiety that had mounted all evening. It was certain now—she could no longer wish it away. Morgan binging and purging. Alder smoking pot with a nameless junk-car-driving possible lesbian. Even Grady, putting himself to bed like a motherless child.
These were indicators. Big flashing neon signs of Dana’s ineptitude at the most important job she’d ever have. How had this happened? Hadn’t she once been competent? Her reviews as an office manager had always been glowing. Her grades had always been good. Yet her marriage had failed, and the children in her care were troubled. (Well, Grady seemed fine, but who knew how long that would last if she neglected him as she had tonight?)
And now I have to get a job, she told herself. I have to solve all these problems while earning an income. The tears came, a welcome release. It was the only reasonable response, and it was comforting that this one thing, her sadness, still worked. The sobbing wore her out, and she slipped into a merciful torpor.
Ma, said a voice. It was her own voice, calling out in their old house in Watertown, Massachusetts, the two-family with the land-lady living upstairs. Ma! she called again, running through the kitchen, out the back door to the tiny yard. So small, and yet complete. The swing set and the sandbox and the fort she used to play house in, which leaned up against the detached garage, two-byfours and plywood their father had nailed into place before he’d slipped away from them into the empty shell of his sad, quiet world.
Her mother was sitting on one of the swings drifting back and forth, guiding the gentle motion with bare toes dug into the grass below. “Ma,” Dana called to her. “I can fix it!”
Her mother glanced up, face lit with surprise. “You can?”
“Yes!” said Dana. “There are these pills now.” Her shorts hung straight down from her waist, no womanly hips to impede her little hand as it wiggled into the pocket to find the cool, round tablets. “See!”
“Those are just pebbles,” said her mother. “Pebbles won’t fix him. They won’t fix anything.”
“No, Ma, they’re pills. They’ll bring him back to us. Make him take them!”
“He’s too sad,” said her mother, who settled back onto the swing and started to pump. “He won’t let go of his darkness. Throw those pebbles away and swing with me.”
“Ma, please!”
As her mother picked up speed, swinging higher and higher, a baby’s cry came from the house. “All your sister does is squawk and squawk,” muttered Ma. “You get her this time.”
“Ma, make Dad take the pills!”
“Take them yourself.” And the swing flew off the swing set, sailing high up into the sky until, like a balloon let loose from the bunch, her mother floated out of sight.
The ringing of the phone woke Dana, partly dissipating the haunting ache of desertion.
“Please tell me you are not still in bed!”
“Not really,” said Dana, raking her fingers through the snarls in her hair.
“Get your butt up and get over here!” commanded Polly playfully. “I need a walk!”
Dana pulled on her sport pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. On her way downstairs, she peeked into Morgan’s bedroom. The girl was curled around her squishy pillow, fashioned to look like an oversize Hershey bar, her breaths coming in slow, even passes.
Dana went downstairs, following the sound of voices to the kitchen. “Just smack it on the side of the bowl, G,” Alder was saying.
“I can’t. It’ll come out all ewwy and disgusting.” Grady’s voice now.
“You want scrambled eggs, you gotta do it. I’ll cook them, but you have to crack them.”
“Good morning,” said Dana. “What’s going on here—a cooking class?”
Grady held out an egg to her. “Mom, you do it.”
“Polly wants to walk,” she said, ignoring the egg. “Is everything okay here?”
“G’head. It’s a beautiful day,” said Alder. Out the kitchen window, the sky was a perturbed gray.
“You’re sure?” asked Dana. “I’ll make it a short one.”
“Totally. Go.” As Dana went into the mudroom to find her sneakers, she heard Alder say, “Jeez, what do you think is in there—monkey brains? Just do it.”
A crack sounded, and Grady said, “GROSS!”
Alder laughed. “There’s worse things than that, G.”
Dana set off down her driveway. Her lungs fully expanded, taking in the dank chill of the air and a sense of relief to be away from the house and the events of the previous evening.
Polly soon joined her. “I was worried about you last night. How did it end up with Alder?”
“She apologized.”
“Apologized?” Polly was shaking her head. “They usually deny it. Or they say it was in the brownies and they didn’t know.”
“No, she took full responsibility. But I still didn’t get to the bottom of this new friend of hers.” Dana wanted to ask Polly about the kiss—did kids experiment so freely with that kind of thing these days? But it was too personal; Alder was hers now—for the time being anyway—and protecting her niece from amateur analysis overrode her need for reassurance.
“You know,” said Polly, “the thing about teenage girls is, they change friends about every twenty minutes. You’d be amazed. They try them on like jeans in a department store. They might wear them for a while, but they generally don’t keep them for long if the fit isn’t good.”
“So you think I should trust her?”
“Well, that’s another thing altogether. There should be a different word for when a parent lets out the leash a little. It’s trust, but it’s trust in a thing that’s so changeable you barely can stand it, and you have to keep all your fingers and toes crossed.” They swung onto a side road that skirted Nipmuc Pond. A heron flew out from the shallows, its narrow gray wings flapping hard until it was safely aloft. “But the party was good?” said Polly. “Morgan was happy?”
“I guess,” Dana sighed. “One of the girls, Kimmi Kinnear, gave her a lot of attention. All the other girls follow Kimmi around like she’s got a treasure map or something. So I guess that makes it a success, when the popular girl chooses you.”
Polly brightened. “Oh, yeah, she’s Nora’s girl. You know Nora?”
“I met her for the
first time when she picked up Kimmi from the party.”
“She’s a hot ticket. She’s the marketing director for that new chain at Evergreen Mall—Perfectua Couture. You’ve heard of it, right? It’s very in.” Polly’s eyes glimmered with interest, which surprised Dana. Polly wasn’t usually so taken with people’s résumés. “She runs my book group—very selective about who joins. She’s got a thing about ‘group dynamics,’ which is smart when you think about it. One obnoxious person can ruin a whole evening.”
“How can anyone be obnoxious about books?”
“Oh, please, like it’s about the books. It’s a chance to get out of the house, drink wine, and gab!” Polly smirked. “I think Victor has a little bit of a crush on her.”
“Victor your husband?”
“Yes, Victor my husband! How many Victors do you know?”
“But doesn’t that bother you?”
“Nah, who cares? We all have innocent little crushes from time to time.” Polly flicked her hand. “Enough about that. Tell me about the party.”
Dana could feel the hopelessness welling at the thought of it. She described watching Morgan eat the other girls’ cake and the sight of the frosting in the toilet bowl.
“Well, maybe her stomach was upset,” said Polly. “You don’t know for a fact that she stuck her finger down her throat.”
Dana stopped walking, and after another step Polly stopped, too. The two women looked at each other. Polly went first. “That was the wrong thing to say, wasn’t it?” she asked.
Dana nodded. Her head hurt and her eyes stung.
“I don’t want to believe it,” murmured Polly. “I love that kid.”
Dana turned to look out over the lake. An old aluminum rowboat bobbed at the end of a nearby dock. She wanted to get in and row.
“Okay,” Polly said softly. “She’s doing it. How do we help her?”
Dana shrugged. A gust of wind came across the lake and nudged a tear from her eyelid.
“This is not you,” said Polly. “This is not your fault. You’re a fantastic mother, kind and patient . . . Jeez, you’re so patient you make glaciers look like they’re in a hurry!”
“I don’t know what to do,” breathed Dana. “I can’t even . . .”
“You get her some help, is what. Start by calling the guidance counselor at school. You didn’t cause this problem, and you can’t fix it by yourself.”
Dana brushed the tears off her face. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? Not even Victor. He and Kenneth are such close friends, and I have to broach this with him my own way.”
“Of course,” said Polly as they turned to continue their walk. “Not a peep.”
When Dana got home, Alder was sitting on the floor in the TV room doing homework. She looked up, rolled her eyes dramatically, and pretended to snap her pencil in frustration when Dana peeked in. Dana smiled back. Grady was in the basement watching a particularly screechy cartoon. Dana turned the volume down and went up the two flights of stairs to Morgan’s room.
The light was still off, but Dana could see Morgan’s hand moving in the dimness. It was sliding slowly up and down the Hersheythemed pillow, stroking it as if it were a small scared animal.
I do that, Dana realized. I run my hand across things as if I’m soothing them, but really I’m soothing myself. She went over and sat on the edge of the bed.
“What is it,” said Morgan.
“Nothing. I just wanted to talk with you.”
“About what?”
“Sweetie, did you get sick last night?”
Morgan didn’t answer for a minute. “No,” she said finally, but without conviction, as if she were trying out the answer to see if it would work.
Keep going, Dana told herself. Keep moving toward an answer. “I think maybe you did,” she said. “I think maybe you ate too much cake and it didn’t feel good.”
“I didn’t eat that much,” Morgan murmured.
Dana knew it would be hard to get Morgan to admit to purging, and yet she was still surprised. It wasn’t so long ago that Morgan had told her everything. She had to approach her daughter from a different angle now, and, offered a version of a true story she and Polly had worked out on their walk. “I knew this girl in my dorm at UConn,” she said. “She used to put her finger down her throat when she ate too much. She was worried about her weight.”
Morgan closed her eyes and pulled the pillow closer, as if to drift back to sleep. Her words were almost inaudible. “Did it work?”
“Not really. She’d lose a few pounds and then gain it back. On top of being really bad for you, it’s not a very effective diet.”
“At least she didn’t get fatter.”
“No, but people started avoiding her. No one wanted to be around someone who did that.”
“She should’ve kept it to herself.”
“She did, but people found out. There aren’t many secrets in this world that don’t get found out eventually.”
Morgan’s eyes opened, and she glanced at her mother.
Dana pushed herself to form the words in her head, to make them real and solid enough to say. “Morgan, I think you’re making yourself throw up.”
Morgan didn’t answer.
Dana went on. “I need you to just tell me.”
After a minute, Morgan sat up. “I have to pee,” she said, and crawled out over the pillow.
“I’m going to keep asking you about this,” said Dana as she watched Morgan retreat from the room. Patient as a glacier, she told herself.
That night they all stayed in and watched a movie together, though it was Saturday and the phone rang with offers. In a succession of calls from the still-unnamed friend, Alder reiterated her intention to “hang home.” Dana was relieved not to have to worry about her whereabouts or state of consciousness. She didn’t think to ground Alder until Alder essentially grounded herself.
Darby called, inviting Morgan for a sleepover, but Morgan declined with vague excuses. “No,” she said to Darby, “she’s not . . . I would tell you . . . Of course I would invite you, too, but we’re not getting together . . . I swear I haven’t talked to Kimmi since yesterday . . .”
Timmy Koljian invited Grady to go to Kreamy Kones. “No thanks,” said Grady, and hung up.
“Why did you say no?” Dana admonished him. “You love Kreamy Kones.”
“Timmy’s annoying,” said Grady. “Do we have any heavy popcorn?”
“Heavy?”
“Yeah, not that light stuff. The kind that has all the butter so it weighs a ton.”
They watched an action-adventure movie about an archaeologist racing to find a treasure hidden by a Civil War hero. Grady twitched in his seat as if he were trying to beat the bad guys to the loot, too. Morgan didn’t appear to be watching all that much. Alder laughed a lot, mostly at Grady.
They all went willingly to bed after the credits rolled. It was ten o’clock, and Dana knew Kenneth would be up, probably reading the latest bestseller about the 114 habits of highly successful salesmen or the like. Though she dreaded it, she knew she had to tell him about Morgan. She kissed the kids good night, closed her bedroom door, and dialed.
“Yuh?” said a woman’s voice, breathy, as if she’d been exercising.
“Excuse me, I’m so sorry,” said Dana, at first thinking she had misdialed. In the next moment, it dawned on her: Tina. “I’m trying to reach Kenneth Stellgarten,” she said coldly.
“Kenny,” muttered the woman, “it’s for you.”
Dana heard fabric rustling, then whispers: “What? No!” and “Just take it.”
Kenneth cleared his throat, a juicy hawking sound indicating he hadn’t been taking his allergy medicine. “Can I help you?” he said irritably.
“It’s Dana.” The archness of her tone surprised even her. “Call me when you have a minute to talk about our daughter.” She hit the “off” button.
“Uhhh!” She shuddered in disgust. An image came to her, unbidden, of how Kenneth used to wrap himself a
round her after sex, his breath blowing on her neck like a bellows until it made her chilly. But it wasn’t Dana in the image. It was this Tina.
She flinched again, her shoulders clenching up around her neck. In a second she was out of bed and heading downstairs. She flipped on the kitchen light and poured herself a glass of sugar-free lemonade. Why did she pick up the phone? You don’t answer when you’re still panting from . . . And “Kenny”! He made me call him Kenneth for years, and she gets to call him KENNY!
Dana picked at the remnants of the “heavy” popcorn she had virtuously avoided all evening. The salty richness of it settled her. Kenneth was sleeping with another woman—this was not news, she told herself. (Though why he had chosen someone who would be so coarse as to answer a phone practically mid-coitus was beyond her.) What bothered her more, she had to admit, was the fact that he had someone and she didn’t.
Not yet anyway. Her date with Coach Ro was coming up next weekend, and who knew if that might be the start of something? And if they liked each other, how soon would it be before they might spend the night together? Never with the kids around, of course, but possibly on weekends when they were with their father. What would it be like to be with someone new? She hadn’t slept with anyone but Kenneth in almost twenty years. There had been several before that, but when she thought about it now, it seemed as if she were remembering a story about some other woman. Not her. Not this present-day, problem-laden single mother.
Billy the pothead came to mind. He had been very nice to her, surprisingly sweet and considerate, at least on the nights he wasn’t giggly and stupid from having partied too much. Too bad about him, she found herself thinking. He was a pretty good boyfriend about fifty percent of the time. Maybe Jack would be like the good half of Billy. He seemed to find her appealing, and he had a way of standing close, touching her without crossing the line to intrusiveness.
How would it be for that line to disappear completely? For him to be granted full access, with nothing between her body and those hands? A pleasing ache began to throb as she imagined the scene, his closeness, his wanting her . . .