My Liar

by Rachel Cline

  The teacher issued her instruction to “very slowly and gently wiggle your fingers and toes,” which meant that after another few moments of sitting and then bowing forward and chanting Om, the yoga class would be over. She would then have to get back in to her by now too hot Jeep (she’d had to park on the street) and make her way back to the house, and the husband, and the problem of what to do next. Greg should come to this class, she decided. It might help him get out of his funk, and it wouldn’t be too difficult physically. She would even volunteer to come with him, if that would help. He would like the soft-spoken Sarah, and he certainly couldn’t find himself comparing badly with the sixtyish bald guy, the crispy surfer dude, or the asexual youth in baggy homespun shorts…in what universe was that look a good look? she wondered. Now she was bowing. “Namaste,” she murmured in a sincere-sounding whisper, wondering if “I honor the light in myself and in others” was a reliable translation and, if so, whether it was in any way true for her at that moment, or if she even wanted it to be.

  She stopped for an iced latte on the way to the car and looked in the windows of a few stores on Main Street but saw nothing to her taste. When she wasn’t working, there was almost nothing else to do in L.A. but shop. She had thought about taking up hiking, or gardening, or mountain biking…but she was perfectly happy with running, yoga, and dieting (and/or starving) and the great outdoors was never a good place to network.

  33

  Annabeth was alone in the living room when her brother, Jeff, showed up more or less out of nowhere one Saturday. He lived in Eden Prairie—a good four-hour drive on snowy roads. Annabeth had never liked Jeff, really, if it was possible to say that about your own brother. He was just enough older that he had always seemed foreign to her. After their father had taken off for the last time, she’d experienced a spell of looking up to him and sometimes even feeling that he was looking out for her but, since college, they had hardly kept in touch. Now she saw that he’d aged badly (much more than their mother seemed to have), and Annabeth could only just align the face of the Jeff she remembered with the soft-edged, bald-headed Middle American who’d parked his Saturn in the gravel driveway. He embraced her awkwardly and half-smiled, half-winced as he said, “Behold, the return of the prodigal daughter.”

  “Behold, yourself,” said Annabeth, surprised at the instantaneous re-creation of sibling snottiness between them.

  “Let’s try that again,” said Jeff. “Hi, Annabeth. It’s nice to see you.”

  She looked at his eyes and found them sincere. “Hi, Jeff,” she said and then, after another second, “Can I take your coat?”

  “I think I remember where we keep the closet,” he said. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Upstairs. Headache.”

  “Drunk?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Annabeth, surprised by the question.

  “I guess you got spared that gene,” Jeff said. “You look well, is what I mean.”

  “Thanks,” said Annabeth. “I was just…reading. In the kitchen. It’s warmer in there.”

  “Okay,” said Jeff, and having hung up his coat, followed his sister.

  Gradually, Annabeth gathered that Jeff’s unannounced visit had as much to do with not being where his wife, Sheryl, was as with any great longing for a family reunion, but he did seem to be genuinely interested in her life, and that felt very strange. Just as she had designed it to be, her stuttering career in Hollywood was an object of fascination from the vantage point of northern Minnesota. Jeff spent almost an hour asking her questions and listening to her answers—not interrogating her, just building up enough rapport so that, by the following afternoon, Annabeth felt almost close to him. She and her mother prepared the near equivalent of an old-fashioned Sunday supper to feed him before he set off on the drive back home the next morning.

  Cooking with her mother turned out to be fun. Much more fun than Scrabble, in any case. They made roast chicken (with two lemons in the cavity, as Annabeth had learned to do from David), and scalloped potatoes, and green bean casserole (since they would not all be together on Thanksgiving), and apple pie. Annabeth found that she still knew her way around this kitchen better than any kitchen she’d had since leaving home and that the continuing existence of certain items and implements (the rolling pin with the green wooden handles, the wire basket of lemons in the refrigerator) gave her a great sense of order and equanimity. The kitchen she shared with David, she realized, was a barely contained disaster area—and had been that way well before she’d gone back to work, before the earthquake even. Chicken or no chicken, that was a bad sign.

  At one point, Eva left the room and put an old Beatles record on the console in the living room: Rubber Soul. Pleased with the nods of approval she got from both children on this choice, she poured herself the evening’s inaugural drink. She offered one to Jeff, as well, who demurred. Annabeth, she knew, would help herself to a beer if she wanted one. They all sat at the kitchen table engaged in their respective tasks (bean snapping, potato eyeing, apple skinning, coring, and slicing) until the song “Norwegian Wood” came on.

  “I’ve never known the Norwegians to be particularly renowned for woodwork,” said Eva.

  “‘Danish Wood’ doesn’t have enough syllables,” said Annabeth. “It’s funny, though, I’ve never noticed that before.”

  Eva had been ready to be irritated by her daughter’s instantaneous rejoinder but had to forestall her irritation after Annabeth’s second remark. Jeff saw the whole thing but didn’t say a word. When the song ended, Annabeth repeated the phrase “This bird had flown” aloud, for no particular reason.

  “Thinking about heading back?” asked Eva.

  “Me? No,” said Annabeth. “The phrase just struck me. When I was little I thought he was saying Whispered alone, like he said the word alone to himself when he saw she was gone.”

  Eva rose to bring her bowl of skinned and eyed potatoes to the counter for chopping. After taking the proper knife out of the drawer, she turned to speak to Annabeth again:

  “Have you told Jeff about your problem with that Jewish woman?”

  “Come again?” said Jeff.

  “Laura Katz. That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t make her Jewish any more than Jensen makes me Lutheran,” said Annabeth. Jeff snickered.

  “Well, be that as it may…”

  “So what did the Jew do to you?” said Jeff, delighted to be needling both his mother and his sister simultaneously.

  “I’m not sure,” said Annabeth.

  “Oh, for Christ sakes,” said Eva, wiping her hands on her apron. “She decided to adopt some of our dirty laundry and put it in a movie, that’s what.”

  “God, where did she start?” said Jeff. “Uncle Albert the embezzler? Great-grandfather Olaf the scab?”

  “Hardly,” said Annabeth, “just some of my stupid memories about growing up…about Dad.” She still felt guilty for having even mentioned her father. But why? The more she heard other people’s reactions to her complaint, the more trivial it seemed.

  “About Dad? What about him?” asked Jeff.

  “You know,” said Annabeth lamely.

  “That he abandoned us,” said Eva. “Abandoned you,” she corrected, pouring herself another drink.

  “Why not you?” asked Annabeth.

  “I threw him out,” replied her mother with a kind of smugness. She jiggled her ice for emphasis. “On his ass, I might add.”

  This statement didn’t correspond with the memory of either child, but in point of fact, neither child could remember a particular time when their father had left for good. Annabeth had often wondered, in later years, why they were so sure he wasn’t coming back. Once, she’d even entertained a fantasy that her mother had killed him and cut him up into parts that were buried in the backyard or stored in the root cellar. But that was what women did to husbands who beat them or terrorized them. Her father had been entirely docile and apologetic about his periods of absence. Yo
u don’t need to kill someone like that to get rid of him; you just have to wait him out and change the locks. Or, she now realized, you could just tell him to get lost, which was apparently what had actually happened.

  The next morning, Annabeth woke up early and hungry. Downstairs, she found her brother staring at the kitchen floor, waiting for the coffee to drip. She sat down across from him and began to free a section of the paper from the still-folded sheaf on the table. To her surprise, Jeff reached over without looking and patted her hand. Her impulse was to pull away, and though she didn’t, she could tell that Jeff had sensed it. He looked out the window at the backyard, where the McMansions now loomed. A lot of the snow had melted and the light outside was overcast and flat.

  “Dad once made me promise never to leave him alone with the two of you,” Jeff said.

  “What?”

  “I was about ten, I think.”

  “Back up, start over.”

  “I just remembered this conversation. Mom was sitting with you on a blanket out there and Dad and I were sitting here looking out the window. Well, I guess he was looking out the window; I was doing something else. Homework? Anyway, he said, ‘Look at that,’ but I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be seeing—it was just you and Mom fooling around with some dolls. You were, what, four or five? I kept thinking there was something hidden in the picture somewhere, like in the Ranger Rick magazines.”

  “I don’t remember ever playing outside with Mom.”

  “Maybe you were three. Anyway, I went back to my homework or the comics or whatever and then the next time I looked up, Dad was crying.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yeah. I don’t remember exactly what he said then, but the gist of it was that he thought he wasn’t up to being a dad and that I was getting old enough that I should be ready to help him out sometimes—whatever the hell that meant. He said being alone with you made him feel too weak.”

  “Ugh. Do you remember what you said?”

  “‘Okay, Dad’? What was I going to say?”

  Again, Annabeth saw Jeff’s adult face as it was instead of the adolescent mask she tended to see—the red in his blue eyes, the gray in his formerly brown hair. “How many years did you have that hanging over you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “But when I think about it now, what I really think about is her.” He said “her” as though Eva were right there, sitting with them, instead of upstairs sleeping off the previous night’s excesses. “No wonder she turned into flint.”

  “Flint,” Annabeth repeated. He had nailed it. Who has sympathy for flint? “Have you ever told Sheryl that story?” she asked him after they had been silent for a while.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Why not, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Why would I?”

  “To make her love you more,” Annabeth responded, as though this answer was obvious. But she was surprised by how wrong it sounded, when spoken aloud.

  Part 6

  SMART AND FINAL

  34

  When Annabeth returned to L.A., she moved out of the house on Nowita Court. She told David she needed to sort herself out, and he seemed to understand. At any rate, he didn’t put up a fight. Then, after a month or so of house-sitting Peter’s girlfriend’s brother’s dismally empty apartment in Santa Monica, she went to work on the first job she could find (another independent feature, referred by Janusz). She also went back to the Al-Anon meeting in Brentwood. She wasn’t sure which one of her parents was the “real” alcoholic, but it now seemed apparent that one of them must have been.

  She didn’t say anything to anyone there at first; nor did she buy the books, repeat the slogans, or accept the hugs of people she saw. She did find that after each meeting she felt better, though. She couldn’t help but judge the other attendees—the depth of their denial, their obsessive need to control and manipulate, their endless complaints of martyrdom—and she clung to the belief that her own problems were subtler, more complicated than any of theirs.

  Nevertheless, after three months of fairly regular attendance, she began to raise her hand and speak and found herself full to bursting with things to say. At first, it was all about Laura: her opportunism, her perfidy, her five-hundred-dollar face cream, her husband’s transparent sweatpants. But the healing thing, Annabeth began to discover as she went on talking, was to speak without trying to elicit sympathy—to describe her experience in such a way that she could actually hear her own rage and self-pity and, as Denise had always advised, “let it go.” She had almost forgiven herself for treating David so badly when she learned that he had killed himself.

  Annabeth drove directly to Brentwood after David’s memorial service and sat for over an hour at the coffee bar in Dutton’s bookstore, waiting for her meeting to begin. She wanted to go there and spill her guts, to “turn over” the weight of her guilt and remorse once and for all. But once she began to speak, she found herself instead telling the story of how much she had hated her first visit to Al-Anon, and how she had sought refuge afterward at the catering-supplies store. She told them about how badly she had then wanted to force all of her life’s detours and errors into a smart, final iris—like the tiny black dot at the end of a sentence, like water flushing down the drain. And as she described this fantasy of closure, she saw how it was exactly what David had meant to do with his not-so-decorative gunshot wound. He had also thought he could force the ending. But all he had really done was turn his back on a whole sunny roomful of people who loved him enough to come out and mourn him on a perfect afternoon in jacaranda season.

  “I always used to look at the world in terms of big fish swallowing smaller fish—all the little victim fish like me,” Annabeth told the Brentwood group. “But lately it seems more like the sea is just full of minnows, and that’s it. Like, the things I was sure were what really matters, and the people I thought had the power to give those things to me…Well, there are no victims, only volunteers, is the slogan, I guess. Can you say that about a suicide?” She looked down at her hands and found that they were making fists. “I just fucking hate him for doing it,” she said, expecting to feel relief for at least admitting this. The soft eyes and gentle nods around the circle meant they had heard her, but still no tears came.

  35

  When, three months later, Annabeth received a note in the mail from Naomi Bronstein, she was afraid to open it. It had been forwarded from the old house on Nowita—David’s last address—which was in itself so gruesome that she wished she could just burn the thing. If she had written them a condolence note, or even signed the guest book at the damn memorial, they could have found her. But she had been too much of a jerk to do either. She opened the envelope, fully expecting to be torn a new asshole in the most gracious and generous of terms. Instead, she found that it contained a note card on which was written the following: “Please come have dinner with us sometime soon. Any day that suits you. We look forward to it.”

  Still prepared for their rage, Annabeth forced herself to punch the digits of their number into her phone. Jerry answered. “Oh, Annabeth, good!” he said. “We’d almost given up on you.” He said this without apparent malice.

  She had intended to apologize for not writing to them but forgot this plan entirely when Jerry suggested that she come that Sunday. “Early enough to see if there’s anything here you want to keep for yourself,” he said, and they agreed on five P.M. All she could think of were the flip-flops—she would rather have eaten them than looked at them ever again.

  The Bronsteins lived in Mandeville Canyon, in a house that exemplified one particularly bohemian view of the late-1970s southern California lifestyle. Annabeth had never driven there before and was afraid she’d gotten hopelessly lost among the switchbacks when she recognized the ceiling lamp that David used to call “the monkey puzzle lamp.” It was visible through a glass cutout in the redwood façade of the Bronsteins’ home.

  Naomi hugged her at the door. She was shorte
r than Annabeth, and also skinnier, but the skin of her face and neck was soft and smelled of some French perfume no one much wore anymore. The hug felt authentically warm and forgiving to Annabeth. She did her best to hug back.

  Jerry was in the living room, working his way through an assortment of newspapers, but stood to shake Annabeth’s hand. “Can I get you a drink? A glass of wine?” he asked. Annabeth knew the Bronsteins were not really drinkers but that they used to keep some beer around for David.

  “I bet you have some Anchor Steam on hand,” she said and then regretted it, but no one seemed particularly spooked.

  Naomi got two bottles out of the refrigerator while Annabeth and Jerry smiled shyly at each other. He gestured at his pile of Sunday papers and said, “Can’t find anything new in any of them. What about you?”

  “No, not really,” said Annabeth and took the open bottle of beer Naomi handed her while Jerry accepted the other. His wife then looked at him and said: