Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  CHAPTER 47

  Irina

  IRINA RUBS HER EYES AND TURNS TO LOOK FOR DARIUS. GONE, and she sighs with relief. The sound of running feet filters into the cellar, which is now lit by a slice of light coming in from the kitchen.

  She follows the noise, nearly tripping over the hem of her mother’s old dress.

  Katya comes flying back into the house, her eyes red. “Where’s my sketchbook?”

  “Your what? What’s wrong?”

  “Go look outside.”

  She steps to the back porch and breathes in fresh morning, astounded at how good the air feels reaching into the deepest pockets of her lungs, but shocked at the sight of Katya’s SUV smashed by the neighbor’s tree.

  Just like Katya to be freaking out over a stupid car, when their mother is dying and her kids are smoking pot and they could all have been sucked into the sky by a twister.

  She turns the other way and grasps the doorframe for support: The big maple in the front is down, having ripped a chasm in the yard. Some official-looking men in hard hats with lights on them are circling the tree, which is straight across the road.

  Why did Katya want her old sketchbook anyway?

  Irina sees Van, Jenny, and her mother deep in conversation and hangs back from walking out into the driveway. It hits her that no one told Van about the cancer, since he wasn’t home for the big revelation. She wonders how he’ll react, gloomy as he always is even on the best of days. He won’t take it well.

  Who can be expected to take it well?

  She glances around, listening to the silence in the house. Must be no power, yet, or someone would have the TV on, listening for news reports.

  Katya trots past her again, still in her pajamas but now wearing her sneakers, too, carrying her old sketchbook and a pencil. She parks herself on the wet grass right in front of the old tree, puts the pad on her lap, and starts going at it with the pencil. Her hands skate over the page nimbly, her left hand pushing locks of hair behind her head as she keeps checking the tree and going back to the page. After a few moments she turns the spiral bound pages and starts anew.

  She looks like a crazy person.

  Irina sees Van hugging their mother. Jenny stands to the side, both hands over her mouth in the manner of shocked bystanders. So, now they know.

  Irina wanders back into the house, suddenly famished. She sticks her head into the refrigerator, but it’s mostly bare, and anyway, she’s letting the cold air out in a power outage. Instead, she hops up on the counter and helps herself to an orange from the fruit bowl.

  She gets orange rind under her nails as she shreds the peel. It’s strangely satisfactory, and even after she gets the peel off, dropping it in the sink next to her, she goes to work on the tiny stringy bits.

  It’s like their mother has clocked out of being a mother. Distracted and unavailable as Mira was during Irina’s own childhood, she really can’t imagine her mother would just let herself die if she still had a child living at home.

  Irina peels the orange in half, then sections it out, lining up the other sections on the counter.

  Maybe Mira has been counting the days until retirement as a mom, that when Irina turned nineteen and moved out, Mira threw herself a party and thought, I’m free!

  Irina does mental math, and calculates she’ll be forty when the baby is nineteen. That’s not so old, really. Some women are just having babies then. She could start over, recapture her youthful life.

  The orange is biting and refreshing, like a cold dip in the water.

  Then again…nineteen years. In her head, she hears a fearsome judge with an echoing voice pronounce her sentence, and she feels like weeping. Nineteen years, for one broken condom? Unfair! Call the ACLU!

  Irina stuffs another orange slice into her mouth and wonders if she’s gone completely loopy.

  The last person she wants to see comes in the back door.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  “How are you feeling?” Darius remains distant. He’s asking in the same detached voice he used when he talked about the storm last night. His eyes are shuttered against her; she can’t see what he’s thinking.

  “I’m hungry, but I’m eating, so I’m fine.”

  Silly bitch. Irina would have preferred more heat and anger. His coolness is frustrating and more than a little spooky.

  He takes a few steps closer, but remains more than an arm’s length away. “I just went for a walk. Power’s still out, and downtown’s a mess. Boats are tipped all over the place out there, smashed up pretty good, too. There’ll be some pretty pissed off rich folk today.”

  Irina snorts. “They’re insured. They’ll buy newer boats.”

  “How are you doing about, well, your mother?”

  Irina can’t finish the orange. Her stomach roils suddenly, and the pleasant tang turns to acid in her throat. She gulps. “About like you’d think. Um, excuse me…”

  She dashes past him and up the stairs. The bathroom is still dim. The only light is the soft morning creeping in around the window shade.

  She lifts the toilet seat and the medicinal, sterile water sets her off.

  She hears no footsteps behind her. Darius has not pursued her. Katya is still freaking out over the tree.

  Her mother has not come to help her.

  CHAPTER 48

  Mira

  I ALREADY MISS THE LIGHT.

  The special morning light, as it would weave in around the leaves of our own Big Tree, felt like magic. It would carry in golden bits of dust and you’d think they were spirits of your ancestors come to wish you good morning. It was a dappled, playful light that would dance around the room as the breeze stirred the old maple’s branches.

  Out my office window now, all I can see is mud and broken roots. Her leaves rest on the porch of the house across the street. These are the last lush, green leaves she will ever wear, in fact. She can’t be put back together, after the wind ripped her from the earth.

  I twist the ends of the joint I just rolled. I’m not quite the expert at this as Chip. My fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be.

  What a lousy grandmother I am. My most significant contribution to his life in recent memory is to provide him with drugs. Of course Katya should be furious. She has every right.

  Not that fury needs permission. Fury comes when it chooses, and it can stay long past its welcome. My own anger simmers. I can almost feel my lid rattling with the pent-up force of it.

  I tuck my joint and a book of matches into my bra—next to the renegade left breast—underneath my favorite blouse, silky and in the colors of peacock tails.

  It takes a few good yanks for me to open the stubborn old window, but the screen pops out easily. I swing my legs over the sill with some difficulty, but my yogi says I have supple ham-strings for a woman my age.

  I’m on the first floor so it’s a short drop into the muddy garden. I land smack on some yellowed tulips flattened to the earth by the rain. I’m on the other side of the tree from the main exit of the house. It’s a simple matter to walk where I choose without anyone needling me: Where are you going? What are you doing? When will you back?

  None of your business, nothing, and when I damn well feel like it.

  This is why I’ve never gotten a cell phone. It would be like wearing your family around your neck. I’m glad I raised my children in a time when you could leave the house and really, truly leave.

  I set off toward town, walking, in no particular rush, my Birkenstocks sloshing through puddles, cold rainwater splashing over my toes. My neighbors pay me no mind as they inspect their own damage. They’re righting patio furniture, picking shingles out of the yard, inspecting tree limbs. I note some smashed porches and tree limbs poking into windows. I hope no one was hurt. The unfortunate neighbors across the street had the wind blowing the large old maples toward their homes, instead of away.

  Our tree must have been more rotten and aged than she appeared from the outside.


  Couldn’t have been a real tornado. The damage would have been worse. Much worse. I suppose if people make it to church this morning, they will be praising God for sparing them.

  What if a tornado had hit? Would they be praising God for that? Maybe for their own survival, but what if it killed others? Is that worthy of praise?

  I wonder if people will try to drag me to church, now that I’ve got cancer. I turn onto Michigan Avenue. Hardly anyone’s up yet. I cross in the middle of the street to the west side. I drop my head so my hair will fall a little, shielding the side of my face from the early-morning rays.

  I grimace to myself. I can’t imagine being one of those deathbed Christians who find themselves terrified into believing. Patty always asks me, but what do you believe? I don’t have a good answer for her. I can’t say “nothing” because the world is too powerful to be an accident of rocks in space banging around.

  Maybe I should figure that out, then. Before I kick off.

  Should. I’ve never been good with “should.” I should have been more cunning and political in my dealings with university administration, but that’s precisely why I was anything but, why I threw their hypocrisy right in their faces when they tenure-tracked men at twice the rate of women. I should have dropped my old flaming-liberal, feminist leanings in the eighties, some told me, because the battle was over. The women won. Time to cut your hair short and dress like a man and fight it out on their turf.

  If not for Paul, soaring past me on the career ladder, then protecting me from his position on high, I would have been teaching freshman comp forever if I even managed to keep my job.

  And maybe if I weren’t so belligerent, Roxanne wouldn’t be threatening me with freshman comp to drive me out of work.

  I cross the bridge, which during the day bounces with the weight of cars that stream across. It’s only just morning, though, and the bridge is still. I walk down the concrete steps to the walk-way beside the channel and turn toward the big lake.

  I did toe the line with some of the “shoulds.” I stayed with my husband even after he cheated on me. Katya would be shocked. She’d say, Mira, the original feminist, stood by her man after he had an affair?

  What can I say? I loved him. The kids loved him. He was sorry. He’d been lonely and drunk on a book tour, heady with recent success. He confessed and tortured himself with his mistake for far longer than seemed reasonable.

  It hurt anyway, oh, did it ever. I’d been in meetings all day, then went out after work for a drink with the faculty, and the crowd dwindled down to me and Paul, and we flirted and smiled and toyed with the electric current that ran between us, letting it zap us, then retreating. It took everything to pull myself away and go home, chaste, and later I discovered Max was, perhaps at that very moment, screwing some bookstore clerk who wore cat’s-eye glasses.

  I kept the family together. I gave up working on my poetry, which I’d abandoned decades ago in the crush between children and paying work. I gave up spontaneity and stayed home from more than one protest march or petition-gathering session because I had babies to raise.

  I’ve outgrown shoulds. It’s my time, now.

  I kick off my Birkenstocks and pick them up loosely in my fingers.

  The sand of the beach is pockmarked by the hard rain, and it resists my step the same as hard-packed snow. I pause by the swing set and look out over the lake, which rests languid against the beach, looking exhausted after last night’s excitement. The brilliant sun warms my back, but my face is brushed by a cool breeze.

  I pull my feet through the sand and settle down against the stone wall that separates the beach from parking. I grind my toes into the sand. A couple of inches down, my toes find the smooth grains untouched by the storm.

  It’s not Irina’s place to tell me what to do, nor is it anyone else’s.

  Even poor Van will have to learn to grow up. I wish I hadn’t had to tell him separately from the others, watching his face crumple inward like it always did when he was a boy. In some ways he’s the youngest of the three, with none of Irina’s fierceness or Katya’s resolve.

  I’ve given them the best start I can, and they have to go on without me. I will not cut myself apart for them.

  I fish the joint out of my brassiere and light it up, breathing in the smoke and holding my breath against what everyone else expects of me.

  CHAPTER 49

  Katya

  KATYA’S PENCIL SKIMS THE PAGE, AND THE TREE APPEARS BEFORE her. It’s beautiful in a terrible way, on its side like that.

  She breathes fast as she sketches, having forgotten what it was like to pour out everything through the tip of her pencil. She has shifted her position from the porch steps, where she mainly saw roots, and gone around to the far side. She’s sitting on an old bath towel in the yard, recording the side view: now she is working on the knots in the bark, the splits where the tree grew wider than its old skin, then grew more to replace it.

  If only her mother could just grow a new breast after surgery, maybe she’d go ahead and let them operate.

  Katya feels a cramp of regret in her stomach for all the time she’s fought with her mother this weekend, this year, this life. Was it really worth it? It always seemed so at the time, so critically important.

  “It’s just a dress!” her mother had yelled, in that week before the prom, when Katya was a sophomore in high school and had been invited by a handsome senior named Danny Morrow.

  But it wasn’t just a dress, as any normal high-school girl would tell you. It was never just the dress.

  Kat was shopping in Traverse City with the popular girls, friends of Danny’s, who’d invited her along after they’d heard she was going to prom with him. She’d been plotting how to cobble together a reasonable dress given Mira’s hippie sensibilities. She could use something handmade by Patty, but time was running short, and she had other sewing projects. Kat had yet to find a pattern she liked at the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, anyway. She could troll secondhand stores or garage sales in fancy parts of town, where the styles might not be so out-of-date yet. But she hadn’t had the time between her schoolwork and the National Honor Society volunteering, and her after-school job at the corner grocery.

  Bottom line: Mira didn’t believe in shopping as recreation and thought buying old clothes was a good way to recycle.

  Also, a good way to commit social hara-kiri.

  One of the girls that day in Traverse City had complimented Katya’s denim skirt and asked where she got it. Katya paused for half a beat before making up the name of a store. They looked at her quizzically, and she said, “It’s a boutique in Chicago.” Patty had made the skirt.

  They started trying on prom dresses as a lark at first, claiming they were not seriously shopping. They’d do that later, with their mothers.

  But then Katya had tried on a royal blue dress, with a short flouncy skirt, an acre of sequins, and a ruffled, one-shoulder neckline. All the girls had exclaimed over the way it showed off her legs and made her eyes sparkle.

  Nowadays it would be ugly and kitschy, but in the eighties it was the height of fashion.

  They started urging her to buy it, as she stood in the fitting room, wearing the dress and thick cotton socks. Katya shrugged. She didn’t have enough money on her, and hadn’t expected to buy anything, she told them. That was true, but she was skating over the real heart of the matter. Mira had other plans for Katya’s dress, involving consignment shops or a sewing machine. She would never permit Katya to buy the polyester faux-satin ruffly dress.

  That’s when Tiffany stuck out her hand with her mother’s credit card. “I’ll buy it,” she said. “And you can pay me back whenever. You have to have that dress. You are gorgeous in that dress.”

  Katya couldn’t miss the significance of her phrasing. “Gorgeous in that dress” meant “Not gorgeous without the dress.”

  Katya’s palms were filmed over with dampness when she got home, the dress wadded into a ball in her oversize purse. She took t
he stairs two at a time to make it to her room before Mira came out of her office to say hello. She shook the dress out, smoothing the wrinkles as much as she could, and hung it in the far-distant reaches of her closet, where old, ill-fitting clothes silently yellowed away.

  She wiped her hands on her denim skirt and stashed the plastic bag from the store in her underwear drawer, also shoved toward the back.

  Katya knew she couldn’t very well hide the dress from her mother if she intended to wear it. She just didn’t want to fight that battle just yet.

  Days went by, and Katya held hands with Danny in the hall and sat on his lap at lunchtime, and laughed with the popular girls at the poor idiots like Peggy Mae, who could politely be called “heavyset” and looked like she wore her mother’s clothes from the seventies.

  Katya rehearsed her speech to her mother when she was supposed to be paying attention in algebra, and as a result, got only a C on the exam that covered the quadratic equation.

  She walked in the house after getting off the bus and surprised her mother in the kitchen. She’d come home early from university that day. It was exam week, and her hours were all jumbled up. They never knew if she’d be there or not.

  “Katya! You’ll never guess what Imelda just gave me. You’re going to love this.”

  And Katya knew already what it would be, and knew with a desperate, cold certainty that she would hate it.

  Mira flourished a satin-and-tulle cream-colored dress, with orange satin trim on the bustline, wide shoulder straps, and a cascading lace appliqué in matching orange, a floral pattern. Mira turned it over, and the appliqué reached around the back of the dress and trailed off.

  “Isn’t it stunning?” Mira hadn’t yet looked at Katya. She carried on, “It’s a 1950s dress, just gorgeous, like a glamorous film star would wear. Ava Gardner, maybe. You’re going to really stand out in this.”

  Kat threw her backpack on the floor. “Of course I will, because everyone will be laughing at me!”