Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  CHAPTER 35

  Irina

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE, IRINA FINDS HERSELF IN ENVY OF her older brother.

  The band plays “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and at the center of the floor, he sways along with Barbara. She is a looker. Wavy auburn hair, creamy skin, and a slender body with enough boobs to fill out her dress but not so much that she’s falling out all over the place. She envies Van not for his girlfriend—after all, Darius is smoking hot himself, and gets stares from women everywhere he goes—but because Barbara is only a girlfriend. At any time, he can walk away.

  Oh sure, she can get divorced, and she most assuredly will. And she can even hand over the baby to Darius and wish him well. But, young though she is, Irina realizes she will be changed by this. In an elemental sense.

  She’s already felt some primal urge to protect the baby, this baby she didn’t plan and does not want. Which means, no matter how much she wants to carry on with her single, freewheeling life, some part of her will resist. Some part of her will cling to that bundle and not want it taken away. That thought fills her stomach with a heavy dread.

  And Darius will never forgive her. She will inevitably feel guilt over that. Unlike what Katya seems to think, she doesn’t just screw everything with a dick within a twenty-five-mile radius, to hell with consequences.

  Just that the consequences have never been steep before since she always made the guy wear a condom.

  Stupid old condoms aren’t supposed to break. She should sue Trojan. At the time, they made a joke of it. “No condom in the world can contain me,” Darius joked, standing over her on the bed, flexing his muscles and posing like a comic-book superhero. She laughed until she cried.

  Two weeks later, she just cried.

  Darius, sitting to her side, tries kneading her shoulder, but she gingerly shifts it out from under his hand. She begged off from dancing, pleading exhaustion, which was partly true. And the music was too loud for easy conversation, so they’ve been sitting in silence, watching the party.

  Irina fingers an ivory cocktail napkin, with gold script reading, “Max and Mirabelle Zielinski, 35th anniversary, June 2, 2007.”

  Irina couldn’t conceive of it. She’d known Darius barely thirty-five days before he knocked her up, and already she wanted out.

  Maybe Kat was right about her after all.

  “Hell of a storm,” Darius shouts over the music.

  She nods vaguely. She hasn’t been paying attention, since they returned to the party. Inside the reception hall, everything is twinkle lights and candles refracted in crystal. Easy to forget the turmoil outside. She has to give Katya that much. It’s pretty, and her big sister is really good at pretty.

  “Reenie!” Irina turns to see cousin Angela with her daughter propped on her hip. The kid’s name escapes her. Britney. Christina. Some pop-star name.

  Angela plops down uninvited next to her. She’s wearing a dress that couldn’t be more unattractive if she’d gone out of her way. It’s the color of shit and hangs like a sack straight down from her shoulders. Angie’s hair is so flat to her head she might as well not have any. The kid has grabbed a fistful of it and is chewing on it. The sight makes Reenie’s stomach turn, especially when the candlelight glints off some fresh snot on the kid’s face.

  “Congratulations!” chirps Angela. Reenie squints at her, and she says, “Oh, my mother told me after she heard from Grandpa about you fainting on the balcony. I take it you’re OK now and anyway, congrats!”

  “Thanks.” An uncomfortable silence passes. “How’s your little one?” Reenie asks, hoping she’ll answer with the kid’s name.

  “Oh, she’s great. Fifteen months now. She’s up way past her bedtime, and she’s so cranky because I won’t nurse her right now. She’s still loving the breast!” The band was just winding up a song, so Angie ends up shouting the word “breast!” across a nearly quiet hall. She doesn’t seem to notice.

  Reenie looks down to adjust her shoe, which doesn’t need adjusting, because she’s afraid that her disgust at imagining a toddler sucking on Angela’s boob has registered on her face.

  She steals a glance at Darius, who looks not one bit disgusted, and in fact, he’s playing peekaboo. The nameless boob-loving toddler buries her face in her mother’s hair, smiling shyly.

  Irina finds she can’t stand to sit there any longer. “Restroom,” she says over the sound of the band, which has drifted into some other ballad she doesn’t recognize.

  She parks herself in a stall and just sits there, like she used to when she worked at that horrible accounting firm with the boss and his roving hands, and the women with frosted hair and dagger-length nails who gossiped about her in the coffee room. So sometimes she’d hide in a bathroom stall. If she balanced just right, she could almost nap that way. It was rejuvenating, anyway.

  They probably all thought she had dysentery.

  As she comes out of the bathroom, she nearly collides with Patty, her mother’s neighbor. Patty has teased her yellowy white hair into cotton-candy froth. Patty takes Irina’s arm and her grip feels wiry and clawlike. She wobbles in place, and though Irina knows some of that is age, it appears some of the wobble might have to do with the drink in her hand, which is almost empty but used to be pink and frozen. She licks some of the sugar off the rim and bites her lip as she looks into Irina’s eyes.

  “Oh, honey. You’re going to have a baby.” Christ, she thinks. Everyone must know by now. Did Katya take out an ad or something?

  Irina is about to say “thank you” when she realizes that Patty didn’t say “Congratulations.” She replies, “Yes, I am.”

  “Take special care of your mother.” Patty squeezes Irina’s arm as she says this. Her watery eyes remind Irina of old Katharine Hepburn movies.

  “What did you say?” Irina asks, in case she misheard over the band. Mira hasn’t needed anyone to take care of her in all the years Irina can remember.

  “She’ll tell you when she’s ready, but just be kind to her. She needs your support.”

  Irina plunges into a lie, unsure why she’s doing so. “No no, she did tell me. I just wasn’t sure I heard you right. Yes, we’ll have to take care of her.”

  Patty makes a great show of sighing, her shoulders drooping. “I’m so glad you know, it’s awful hard to walk around with a secret like this. It must be terrible for Mira, after all these years of being the spitting image of health and vitality.”

  “I know just what you mean.” Irina steps closer so she can hear better, and puts a commiserating arm around Patty’s shoulder. Tell me more, she urges silently. What’s going on?

  “It just seems wrong.” Patty gazes into Irina’s face, now just inches away. A tear drips from one eye, tracing a particularly deep wrinkle down the side of her face. “It’s never the rapist and warlords dying of cancer. It’s always the good people, like your mother.” At this, Patty wraps Irina in an awkward hug, one hand still clutching her drink. “Excuse me,” she says through a choking sob, and shuffles into the bathroom.

  Irina stands with her arms still slightly open for hugging Patty.

  Cancer?

  Without realizing she’s doing so, Irina sweeps her eyes over the party, searching for Mira. She spots her mother talking to Paul, her old boss at the university, in front of the memory display Katya created, lined with photos of the family through the years. Paul bends over her like a tall, old tree. He has one hand on her shoulder, and Mira looks away, to one side, as if she can’t bear to meet his gaze.

  CHAPTER 36

  Mira

  I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW YOUNG WE LOOK.

  Katya put together a wall of memories for this shindig. It’s been mostly ignored since dinner was served, and this is the first chance I’ve had to study it.

  I’ve seen these photos before. Katya raided my own collection to put it together. But now I see them as part of a finite collection of memories that will come to an end. Maybe that picture, there, will be the last time I’m ever pho
tographed wearing that dress.

  Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe other sixtyish women have long been contemplating the downhill side of life. After all, cancer or not, I crested the mountain probably twenty years ago.

  Maybe I’ve been fooling myself these many years by acting young. Refusing the old-lady conventions of sensible clothes and cropping my hair short. Having a late-life baby helped in that, I think, though for those middle-of-the-night feedings, I certainly felt older than the pyramids.

  Maybe this same photo wall will appear at my funeral, with a few photos from tonight tacked on. Maybe a few from next Christmas, too, a few more holidays if I’m lucky.

  I imagine other photos: cheerful me putting up a brave face while wearing some dopey headscarf, hollows under my eyes, a rubber boob. All skin and bones.

  I hear Dr. Kevorkian just got out of prison, though he swears he’s retired now from the “putting out of misery” business.

  “Reminiscing?”

  Paul has appeared at my side, offering me a glass of champagne. I’m feeling not the least bit bubbly, but I take it anyway. It gives me something to do with my hands.

  “How can I do anything but at my own anniversary party?”

  “Max is a lucky man.”

  “Of course he is,” I say with a smile. Paul and I have had this exchange at least once a week. I like to pretend it’s all in fun.

  “You’re going to tell me what’s wrong yet? Or do I have to get you so drunk you spill the beans?”

  “I’m sick.”

  I don’t know why I just said that. It’s an immediate betrayal of Max, after swearing him to secrecy and using every emotional manipulation I could muster to get him to keep this from our children, his parents, everyone close to us. And then I go and blurt it to Paul.

  “What do you mean?” Paul puts his hand on my shoulder, and I want to shrug it off, but I know that would hurt him. He’s always hated to be pushed away.

  “Don’t tell anyone I told you. It’s not common knowledge just yet.”

  “Mira, what is it? Exactly?”

  So I stand closer, and he bends his head down so I don’t have to shout. Thunderclaps drown out my words, and now and then I have to repeat the story. Of finding the lump, ignoring it until I found a second one. Of Dr. Graham talking of surgery, chemo, radiation. I don’t mention the fight with Max the following morning though of course it leaps back to center stage in my mind.

  How I manage this all with dry eyes is beyond me. Maybe I’m well schooled in managing my emotions around Paul.

  “You can do it, Mira. I don’t know many other people stronger than you. Remember when the faculty strike dragged into its thirtieth day? Remember the dissension in the ranks, the death threats?”

  I wave my hand in the air, wrinkling my nose. That whole fracas was so melodramatic. “I never believed anyone would kill me over protesting a wage freeze.”

  “That’s not the point. You’re tough enough to beat this, and you’ll have all the support in the world. Max, your family. And me.”

  Paul squeezes my shoulder gently, and a warm shiver runs down my spine. It’s my own anniversary party, damn it, but I’ve never been able to control my physical reaction to his presence. You’d think that all those years of working side by side, of watching him get more gray and paunchy, of watching my own skin slide downward like a melting glacier, you’d think I would have gotten over it.

  I bring my eyes to a picture of Max and me, clowning on the dock behind the house. He’s hoisted me up in his arms like he’s going to carry me over the threshold, only you can already see his knees buckling. Some of that was comic exaggeration, but only some. He’s no athlete, my Max. I wonder if Max appreciates how hard it has been to keep to my vows all these years. He can’t appreciate it because he doesn’t really know. What am I supposed to say? Max, you should be glad I’ve never screwed around, because I’m really horny for my colleague. That would go over well.

  “Mira?” Paul prompts, and now I do shrug gently out from under his hand, unable to stand the distraction any longer.

  “I don’t want to be tough. I don’t want to be one of those poster-child cancer patients with the yellow bracelet and the bald head with the funny hats, trying to make light of dying.” My voice is getting louder, even though Paul is close by and the band isn’t all that noisy in this part of the hall. “I’m getting old, too old to put on a brave face and go through all that shit.”

  “Stop talking like an eighty-year-old dowager. You’re as young as you’ve ever been. I’ve seen you wheeling around campus on your bicycle while the rest of us slobs drive an eighth of a mile to our next lecture. You have to fight this.”

  “Don’t tell me what I have to do!” I push him at this. I actually put my hand on his arm and push him. Paul is much larger than me, but the surprise of it makes him stumble back.

  “You’re not making sense,” he persists, stepping back to the space I just shoved him out of.

  “It’s my body, and if I choose not to have parts of it chopped off, irradiated, that’s my choice.”

  “Think of your children!”

  “My children are adults and stopped caring about what I think round about the time they hit puberty.”

  “What about Max?”

  “He doesn’t own me!”

  Paul gingerly sets his champagne flute down on the memory table, near an album of pictures from the university years. It’s open to a newspaper clipping of the strike, where I’m leading the picket line, my mouth open in a most unflattering fashion, like I’m about to swallow a zeppelin. I drain my own glass quickly and put it down next to his.

  “So that’s it?” Paul crosses his arms and juts his chin forward. “You’re going to stamp your foot and tell the whole world, ‘You’re not the boss of me.’”

  “If you think belittling me will change my mind…”

  “I don’t care what it takes. I just want you here, on this planet, for as long as possible.”

  “No matter how sick I get or how miserable I am? Now you sound like the child. You want what you want, no matter what the cost.”

  “When it’s this important, yes, I do.” Paul steps in close, and this time puts both hands on my shoulders. “I love you, Mira.”

  I’d like to answer him, but my lungs have frozen, and I can’t find my tongue.

  He says quickly, “You’re my oldest friend, and I love you dearly.” This he says more quietly, and he lets go of my arms, casting a glance over my head. He must also be wondering if anyone else heard him, if Max has witnessed our exchange.

  He would go on, I can tell, but Katya has borrowed the microphone from the singer. She’s telling us that the storm has worsened, and now the weather service has declared a tornado watch. She calls off the party, recommending that everyone get to a hotel if they have a long drive.

  This launches a flood of partygoers coming up to me to say good-bye, or say hello if they haven’t done so earlier. An impromptu receiving line forms, during which Paul melts from my side before we can exchange another word. Max walks up to take his place, pecking my cheek between handshakes with guests.

  I don’t hear what any of them are saying. I can see their smiling, nodding faces, receive their enthusiastic hugs and kisses on my cheek. Several of them I might never see again, barring another family funeral or wedding in the coming months.

  I practice my uijayi breathing like my yogi taught me, or else I might fly apart in all directions like an exploding star.

  CHAPTER 37

  Katya

  THE SIBLINGS MAY MAKE FUN OF KATYA’S SUV, BUT SHE NOTICES that none of them complain when it’s time to go back to the house in a rainstorm, and she’s the only one who drove to the party. Even so, there was not enough room for the whole family. Paul gave Max and Mira plus Darius and Irina a lift back to the house in his own SUV.

  Charles taps his fingers on the steering wheel, staring fixedly out the window, though there’s nothing to see but darkness and streaming riv
ulets of water. He worked the room, glad-handing and small-talking, after their spat, resuming his typical distance both physical and emotional. Katya curses herself for not taking advantage of this rare display of spousal availability, but then, why should she have to “snap to” just because he decides to be husbandly for once in a decade?

  Maybe Tara is out of town this weekend.

  “Oh Charles?” His head inclines slightly, silhouetted in the light of the parking lot. “I think I’ll stay with the family tonight, instead of at the hotel.” He doesn’t reply.

  Katya massages her temples. The sudden interruption in the flow of martinis has resulted in a sensation of billiard balls rolling around in her skull.

  In the rush to escape the rain, Ivan ended up in the front passenger seat next to Charles. With the three kids in the back, that left Katya sitting next to Ivan’s silly date, Barbie. To Katya, she looks like a Barbie with a drugstore dye job. Barbara smells aggressively like Calvin Klein’s Obsession. Katya is baffled as to why this girl—who only yesterday had rebuffed Van completely—was riding back to the house with them like a proper sister-in-law. How had she gotten her hooks in so deep, so quickly? And what happened to the disappearing Jenny? Weird-looking girl, but nice enough. She’d ask Van later.

  “Are we all loaded in?” Katya has to shout over the rain lashing the car.

  Barbie’s cell phone trills, and she jumps on it like a heart patient waiting for a transplant. Then her face lights up, but she keeps her voice even. None of them can help hearing her, trapped in her conversation by the storm.

  “I didn’t think you’d call me back after the last time we talked…. Yes, well, after you said you didn’t want to see me…Oh, I see, you feel differently now…”

  Katya can’t hear the words on the other end, but the voice is distinctly male. Ivan is slumped against his armrest, his tall frame curved over like the letter C. And still she keeps talking.