“When I was firing up the shower, I asked him, ‘How’d I do?’ And he goes, ‘Okay, I guess. Not as good as my mom. She never lets me hit my head.’ So I told him that I sometimes wish your mother would let me hit my head more often,” she said, leaving a bit of silence dangling at the end of the sentence.
“You seem to manage doing that all on your own.”
The pride in her voice was hard to hear. I imagined her in her pee-soaked shorts, moving the soapy water around in circles on the floor, her heart calming down a little with every swirl.
“God. It must feel heroic to always be so necessary,” she said, exhaling.
I ignored the statement, but I wanted to say, to tell her, that the horror of always being so necessary is the worst part about being a mother, something no one tells you about until you have children.
“That’s good,” I said. “I’m relieved to know that your guilt didn’t interfere with helping my child get through his seizure.”
“Peachy. That’s not what I meant. I’m trying here.”
“Trying what?”
“To be good,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you that I think you’re a fucking hero for what you do every day. I’m trying to tell you how sorry I am for what I did, for how I hurt you. I’m trying to show you I can be a good person.”
Beth had a knack for walking down the brightly lit corridors of other people’s dramas, dropping their most interesting hurts into her grocery cart.
“Beth. Thanks, okay? But the only hero here is Sam. And I’m glad you were there, but what do you want, a medal? That’s just what has to be done. That’s life. That’s what it looks like.”
“I know. I’m aware of that. I’ve been made aware of that, among other things,” she said in a voice so meek it was barely recognizable as Beth’s. “Where are you? Are you going to meet Marcus? You know I almost stopped in town to check the email. I was going to send him one, telling him everything about what I did, but I didn’t even have a minute. Not even one fucking minute today. It was kind of great.”
“Yeah, well, Saturdays with kids are like that. I gotta go, Beth. I’ll be home around noon tomorrow. And I don’t want you to be there when I get home.”
“Peachy, please. We have to—we can’t not talk about what happened.”
I hung up just as the battery was signaling its near death knell, and just in time to prevent Sam’s dilemma from giving Beth an opening back into my heart. Too often Beth had left me feeling like all those police officers in all those superhero movies, relegated to moving people along. “Nothing to see here,” they’d say, while awestruck cleanup crews dealt with the upturned trains and toppled buildings the hero left in his wake. I wanted to tell her there were no capes in my closet. Sam’s spells had nothing to instruct, nothing to show us. These were stupid and unruly events, I wanted to tell her. They came with almost no warning, and our powers merely consisted of the casual clichés of parenting; cushion the fall, soften the blow, do what you can, hope for the best, apologize if necessary, but when someone goes down, you have to try to catch their goddamn head.
chapter fifteen
THE BAR PART of the restaurant was front-loaded with attractive people, men the same size as the other men, all in dark suits and white shirts, the women the same size as each other, each looking vaguely related. I felt like I’d walked into a family reunion for which I was the sole adoptee. I craned around, suddenly panicked that I couldn’t remember what Marcus looked like. I can see why Beth says that it’s possible that even people who are supposed to meet still don’t find each other in these homogenous crowds of people trying so hard to look so different from one another that they all end up looking the same. The women seated at, or standing near, the bar seemed to possess Beth’s anxious energy and shoulder-length hair, expensive-looking and clean, hanging unnaturally straight and giving off an unnatural golden glow. Their heads were bent up toward the men they were talking to like so many chatty, skinny flowers. And the men’s booming voices barking back down at them seemed to be the heavy beat that underpinned this social symphony. Just then, a tall man in a dark suit leaned away from the crowd of talkers to touch my elbow.
“Georgia?”
“Georgia,” I repeated.
“I mean, I’m … you’re Georgia, right?” The man squinted into my eyes, which then traveled from my forehead and down the length of my body to my new shoes, just beginning to pinch my toes.
“Yes. Of course! That’s me,” I said, shaking his hand with so much aggressive delight I think I frightened him at first. Marcus’s hair was not as red as it appeared in his picture, and he was taller than I expected. He stooped over to take in my face, giving me the impression that he was studying it a little. What saved him from being considered a gawky redhead was the way he stood with his hands in his pockets, flashing a ridiculously great grin—the wide kind—that confident people tend to sport. I grinned back, thrilled to see the features from his photograph finally moving. I was also stunned that the prank had worked. In me was the feeling that I had successfully built something complicated from a set of dubious instructions, like a gas barbecue or a small airplane.
“I’m Marcus.”
“Yes,” I said, wittily adding, “I know.”
“And you are Georgia,” he said, sounding like a teacher introducing a foreign-exchange student to a silent classroom. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were green or blue.
“Yes. That’s who I am!” I said, slapping the side of my thigh and trying hard to keep my smile undisturbed by the pain the rest of my body was in. Lying hurts, I realized, its clean execution almost impossible for the amateur. Then, sounding an awful lot like Nana Beecher, I said, “Gosh, it’s really crowded, eh?”
“Yes, it’s Saturday night, so—”
“You’re very tall. And you’re much better looking than in your picture too,” I quickly added.
He thanked me, then looked around to see if anyone had heard.
“Seriously. And your shirt’s really nice, too. And those shoes,” I said.
“Okay. Thanks,” he said. He pulled his lips into a stiff grin and held a hand up as though to deflect further compliments into the crowd. “Let’s sit down before my head gets so big it falls over on you, shall we? We’re back here.”
He steered me quickly to the restaurant part of the bar where he had reserved a tippy table. I felt like he’d taken a rolled-up newspaper, slapped me on the nose, then led me by a leash to the doghouse.
“So you’ve been here before, I imagine,” Marcus said, pulling my chair out for me and glancing around again. I couldn’t tell if he was hiding from someone or was fully expecting the room to burst into “Happy Birthday.”
“Um. No. But I didn’t have any trouble finding it,” I said.
“That’s right, you live in Park Slope.”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said, burying my face in the menu.
“Good. Well,” he said, sitting down. “I’m not in love with this restaurant, but they do a nice osso buco. And their wines aren’t ridiculously marked up.” He cracked his knuckles and erected his menu between us and began lobbing questions over the top of our laminated divide.
“Do you do a lot of Internet dating, Georgia?”
“Oh. No. I don’t. You?”
“Ahhh, no. Can’t say I have. I find it all too easy to misrepresent oneself.”
“I can imagine,” I muttered, taking a sudden and superkeen interest in the specials insert. But the words were playing wacky tricks with my eyes. Veal ravioli was becoming real vile liar. Beet salad looked a lot like silly bitch. Poached tilapia became pathetic twit. Marinated flank steak reminded me that I was married with two kids while grilled radicchio told me that this was totally ridiculous.
“You know, I don’t even know what half of this stuff is,” I said, shrugging, trying to sound charming, but coming off exactly like Beth’s hick replacement. I knew there was a chance this could begin as badly as it was likely to end, but I wasn’t
prepared to haggle over my feelings about it. Traitorous tears seemed to sting the corners of my eyes, and my mind desperately tried to locate the part of my brain that controlled the ducts. Close. Shut them now. Batten down the hatches, or hatten down the batches. What the hell am I doing? I thought. I have a husband, albeit a cruddy one, and two young boys who needed their mother at home, not wandering New York in an expensive dress, sitting across from a snooty lawyer who likely thought my ass too fat to merit further investigation into my personality, if indeed he imagined I had one.
“So. Let me see. You speak Italian, Georgia. Maybe you can tell me what some of these items on the menu mean,” Marcus said.
He knew. I didn’t know exactly what he knew, but I knew he knew something. I froze with a kind of hiker’s terror, when stumbling upon a bored bear in the woods.
“Would you excuse me for a second,” I said, standing up. Marcus casually pointed out the general direction of the washrooms, and I left him sitting at the table. And if he wasn’t gone when I returned, he’d leave in an acid hurry after I told him the truth of things. Because I was going to. I was going to pee and pray and tell him everything.
I negotiated around the Beth clones lining their lips in the mirror and talking to each other about the Marcus clones waiting for them at the bar upstairs.
“He needs it for work. I understand that. But why he brings his fucking BlackBerry to dinner is what I don’t get.”
“He’s addicted to that fucking thing. It’s the same as any drug,” another one said. “Those things are turning people into human rats. Send, send, send. Receive, receive, receive. Gimme, gimme, gimme. More, more, more.”
“You know what I hate? I can be sitting right next to him and he can be typing something to someone he’s fucking and I wouldn’t even know it. He could be all, It’s work, it’s a work thing. And I wouldn’t even know it. It’s not like email. I can check his email. But that thing …” A cell phone went off and the girl talk tone shifted immediately into professional barking.
“Hi. It’s okay. [pause] Click on Gemfile. On the desktop. [pause] What does it say? No. Yeah. That one. Read me the third clause. [pause] Yeah, but we were talking aggregates. [long pause] I don’t care what his client says. Just—you know what? We don’t have to deal with this right now. [pause] Make sure you put it in rough billing. Yup. First thing. Okay. Bye.”
“Fucking hell,” one of them said.
“Can’t even have a fucking bite to eat,” came the reply.
I listened with growing sadness. Boy talk and work talk. Beth talk. I wanted to yell over the stall that I wanted a career too, once. I wanted clients and appointments. I wanted a different kind of busy than being a mother. I wanted to fill out forms and make decisions. I wanted things to talk about too, bosses and wages and hours and commutes. I wanted other people’s stories to be my airplane small talk, not my own. No wonder I invented a woman with attributes so foreign to me that pretending to be her required a completely different language. I just wanted a night off, a bit of time away from being Peachy Archer Laliberté, to try on a bit of being more like Beth. But while Beth seemed to find a kind of pride in mastering what it was like to be me, I couldn’t pull off the art of being Beth. I was so much myself and so suited to the task of being me, I wearied of resisting it anymore. I didn’t even bother to wash my hands before heading back to the table.
I was not at all surprised to find that me and my newfound truth, the one I felt ready to burst with, would now be dining alone. Marcus’s side of the table was empty. Vanity is a strange thing when it finds you among strangers. Why should I care what people in the restaurant thought about the empty chair across from me? Blame it on being the mother of two young sons, but I instinctively bent to look under the tablecloth.
“No fair! You said you were going to count to twenty!”
It was Marcus holding two sweaty wine glasses.
“Oh, I wasn’t—I—frankly, I thought you’d left,” I said.
“No. I would never—I just went to the bar to get you a drink. I think our waitress was abducted. Hope white’s okay.”
He seemed hurt by my comment, my final cue to end the charade. This whole thing was meant to hurt Beth, but now I was doing damage to someone whose only crime was to rid himself of a damaged woman.
“Marcus. Listen. My name’s not Georgia,” I said. “Well, it is Georgia. But I don’t speak Italian. I speak only English, even though I’m Canadian. I mean, I should know more French, I guess, but I don’t. And I didn’t go to a fancy school. And I don’t live in Brooklyn. In fact, I’m only visiting for the weekend. And there’s more, but it doesn’t matter now. All I want to do is to apologize for all of this,” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate I had included the entire room, and perhaps the block and city too. “And then I’m going to leave. How much do I owe you for the wine.”
He rested his chin on a fist, his eyes misty from thinking.
“I figured something was up,” he said.
“What was your first clue?”
“Probably when you said ‘eh.’”
“It was never meant to hurt you, or to make you feel bad. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. This whole thing was between me and my—who—God—I can imagine how creepy this all—so ‘eh,’ huh? I hardly ever say ‘eh.’”
The word now dangled in the air like a gaudy bauble.
“Yes, ‘eh,’” he said. His hand mostly covered his mouth, so I couldn’t tell if he was angry or bemused.
“I apologize. Really I do. And um, so … why don’t you just tell me how much I owe you for the wine and then I will get lost, okay?”
“A hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, leaning back in his chair. I nearly spit the sip I had just taken into my mouth back into the glass. Between the dress and the wine, I had blown the family “extras” budget for the entire year.
“Holy shit!”
He started to laugh.
“You are naïve. Wow,” he said. His insult sounded more like a compliment, but I wasn’t trying to be cute. If the dress could cost half of Beau’s weekly paycheck, why wouldn’t I believe a glass of wine would cost as much as Jake’s soccer registration?
“Well, I’m glad you find it amusing,” I said with kindness. “But you’ve earned the right to make jokes at my expense. I don’t blame you. But I will pay for my wine at the bar and then I will get the hell out of here. Goodbye. It was nice meeting you. Sorry it couldn’t be under less criminal circumstances.”
“Wait! Wait, wait, wait,” he yelled, trapping one of my hands under one of his and winding down his giggles. A few faces turned to face us. “I have a confession to make too, Georgia, or, Peachy. Um, Nadia called me. You know Nadia? Your sister’s friend. Your sister Beth? That would be my ex-girlfriend, and, it would seem, your little Internet partner in crime.”
“I think I know who you mean,” I said, scanning the room for the exit. Do all Americans have guns? I wondered. Can they carry guns on their person, or was that just in Westerns?
“Seems your lovely sister, Beth, told Kate what you two had been up to, and, of course, Kate told Nadia this afternoon. Because Kate can’t keep anything to herself. And, well, Nadia, being crazy about you, apparently, wasn’t impressed. She said she tried to call you but your phone was off. But Nadia being Nadia didn’t want to see you do anything stupid. In fact, she asked me not to come, but, as you can imagine, I was pretty angry about you and your sister’s sick little stunt. And, frankly, also pretty intrigued to meet someone related to Miss Beth Ann Archer. Especially a sister. Especially someone with a name like Peachy.”
I stared at the white tablecloth, replaying my entrance in my head. Nadia knew too? I felt devastated by that because I loved Nadia, and I didn’t want Nadia to think I was anything like Beth. My sadness was slowly replaced by anger. Beth had done it again, however inadvertently. By telling Kate, she had robbed me of the opportunity of getting her back. Even if revenge was an option I might never have exercised, its poss
ibility was comforting.
“But wait, there’s more!” Marcus said. “Any minute now, Kate is going to coincidentally find herself here. In case I don’t show up. So she can take you by the hand and bring you home. Or in case I do show up, and turn into a raging asshole, which I have delayed by opting for the white wine,” he said, draining his drink and smacking it on the table. “’Cause when I got here, I planned on ordering the red. Red wine leaves awful stains. Then I thought throwing a drink on you would be very ungentlemanly of me. And I am nothing if not a gentleman. Then you had to show up in that dress, and I didn’t have the heart. It’s a hell of a dress.”
I blinked. Tears had been alerted and were on standby.
“Okay. I better go. Again, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. I just—you know what I wanted?” I said, blessed laughter busting through the absurdity. “I just wanted to go on a goddamn date. Do you realize I’ve never been on one? I didn’t either until very, very recently. But that’s not really your concern. So I’ll just go now. Again, I apologize from the bottom of my shitty heart. I really do.”
I stood up and inched away from the table. Marcus stood up too, and I braced for a possible white wine shower after all. But as afraid as I was of his ire, I was more afraid of Kate’s yammering. The standby army of tears allowed a few watery soldiers through. I felt them running down my cheeks. The thought that came to me was one I used to comfort the boys: I only had to go to sleep and wake up one more time and all this would be over.
“Wait. Don’t turn around. If you want to avoid Kate, who I think I see coming into the bar—”
“Fuck.”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin and threw it on the table. He used a hand to nudge me to the back of the restaurant toward the kitchen. I’m not sure why I let him shove me past the bustling wait staff, past tall pots of boiling water and the stunned-looking dishwashers, and the cooks manning grills the size of desks, mildly scolding us that we weren’t supposed to be back there, asking, hey, where you going? Home, I wanted to scream. I am going home where I belong. Because I don’t belong here. I belong to two boys who I should be tucking in at this moment, and to a Texan hairdresser happily stranded in a world so opposite to the one I’m visiting, if I emerged from the restaurant suddenly speaking in tongues, it wouldn’t surprise me. And though my husband may have thrown himself down a dark marital well, the paper we signed says I still belonged to him, too.
The Almost Archer Sisters Page 21