Emma's Table

by Philip Galanes

  “Maybe,” she replied.

  Benjamin nodded. He knew it was a start.

  “We can talk about that later,” he said, sounding cheerful.

  He stood up again and walked back to the supply closet. For some reason, he felt determined to give the girl a gift. He knew that he shouldn’t, that she might mistake it for a reward—for going along with him just then, agreeing to his help—but he couldn’t stop himself. He found a coloring book with a shiny paper cover and elaborate line drawings of horse-drawn sleighs and bundled-up passengers inside, a village of houses with smoke curling off from every cross-hatched chimney. It looked as if it might take an army of Belgian nuns to color those pictures properly.

  Benjamin wanted the girl to know he liked her.

  “I have a present for you,” he said, extending the coloring book to her.

  Gracie took it from his hands. She thanked him shyly and unzipped her backpack, slipping the coloring book inside.

  He saw a large box of cookies in her pack.

  That’s not good, he thought—not for a girl who’s already obese.

  Gracie looked up at him quickly.

  “Did your mother give those to you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said softly, looking straight down into her lap again, just as she had when she lied to him the first time.

  So there it is, he thought.

  Chapter 5

  SUNDAY SUPPER:

  Pork Roast and

  Cardamom Chutney

  CASSY LIKED THESE NIGHTS MUCH BETTER BEFORE Benjamin started coming around. She glared across the table at him, sitting at her mother’s right hand like a perfect little lap dog. Emma sat at the foot of the table, and Cassy’s father at its head; she and Benjamin were placed on either side—just like always. Even so, there were sterling silver place-card holders, shaped like tiny acorns—gleaming nuts to mark their spots. The placement never varied here, but her mother set out acorns every time.

  And now we’ve got Benjamin’s crunchy girlfriend too, Cassy thought.

  She felt aggrieved.

  Her mother had seated Melora between Benjamin and her father. Cassy was all alone on the long left side of the table—like a little orphan girl.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  It was her father’s voice, booming out with good cheer. He was homed in on Melora, as he had been for most of the evening.

  “Something tells me you’ve heard crazier,” the girl replied, sounding cagey.

  Melora was smiling at Cassy’s father, egging him on. She’d been explaining her vegan diet—which seemed to take up half the night, everyone worrying whether the girl was getting enough to eat. Her father was playing it willfully obtuse, as if he’d never heard of vegetarianism before.

  “Don’t you miss a good steak?” he asked, a little louche.

  Cassy felt embarrassed for him, until she saw Melora wriggling to the edge of her seat—all wide-eyed and perfectly erect—as if she were aroused by the old man’s pervy banter.

  “I always found steak a little overrated,” Melora said, looking Bobby straight in the eye. Cassy could hear the wink in her voice. She suspected they were both half drunk. The bottle of red wine in front of her father was drained to its dregs, and the one beside Melora was only half full.

  “You just haven’t had the right cut yet,” Bobby said, staring at Melora as if he were famished. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the girl since the soup bowls were cleared away.

  Cassy felt invisible.

  Still, she was careful not to stare. She let her gaze wander back to the antique mirror—one of four large panels her mother had installed on the dining room walls—with fancy beveling all around the edges and splotchy patches of black where the ancient silver had worn away. Those mirrors freckled just about everything they reflected with dark age spots. Cassy let the mirrors do her staring for her. She fixed on Melora’s reflection in the panel across the table, studying the girl’s profile—her puffy lips and ample cheeks, nearly everything about her just slightly engorged.

  She was luscious. Cassy had to give her that.

  She’d tried entering into their conversation a little earlier, while Melora was explaining the spiritual aspects of her yoga practice, but Cassy had felt like an intruder. She saw, in a flash, how it would all play out—the unmistakable twinkle in her father’s eyes.

  She withdrew on the spot, before she lost outright.

  Cassy’s father hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction since.

  “And red meat’s a terrible waste of energy,” Melora said, striking a more serious tone. “Did you know it takes eight pounds of corn to produce a single pound of beef?” she told him. “That’s a huge waste of resources.”

  “But I like meat,” Bobby said, grinning like a fool.

  Cassy couldn’t remember the last time he’d joked with her.

  She thought back to those ancient Sunday nights, when it was just the three of them around the dining table—her mother and father and little-girl self—before her father left them, all those years before.

  He hadn’t had nearly so much to say back then.

  Of course, they hadn’t had these brilliant conversationalists at the table with them either. Benjamin and Melora were like a couple of tag-team lotharios—claiming her parents from the moment they sat down, regaling them both with endless talk.

  “So eat meat then!” Melora told him, as if she were exasperated. She threw her hands up in frustration, even as she smiled. “Be an energy hog, if that’s what you want.”

  “Careful, young lady,” Bobby replied, mock strict. “You’re not too old for me to take you over my knee,” he said.

  “Don’t you wish?” Melora shot back, and the two of them dissolved in gales of laughter, their boozy red faces growing brighter with every guffaw.

  They were loaded.

  Cassy watched her father lean into the girl, placing his hand lightly on her upper arm.

  “Oh, God,” Melora groaned, as their laughter subsided. “You’re a funny one, Bobby,” she said. She seemed to mean it too.

  Cassy watched her father leaning closer in.

  She wanted this foolishness to stop right now. She was surprised, in fact, that her mother hadn’t put an end to it already, but Cassy saw that her mother was thoroughly engaged with Benjamin, at the other end of the table, going over some business from the office, no doubt.

  She wondered why she bothered coming to these dinners at all.

  Cassy wanted to be patient, but she was breathtakingly tired—operating on about ten minutes’ sleep from the night before. She looked down at her wristwatch peeking out from the cuff of her turtleneck sweater, but she couldn’t quite make out the time; she brushed her fingers across her green sleeve, lifting it just high enough to see the face.

  As if anyone else cares, she thought.

  No one had spoken to Cassy in a long, long time.

  It was almost nine thirty. She’d been there for three hours already, and they weren’t finished yet. Cassy began to dread her Monday. Having to go back into her mother’s offices and begin another stifling week, suffering the worst fallout from her debauched weekend too, sadness falling all around her like thick velvet drapes—the inevitable result, she supposed, of her sleep deprivation, and the copious disco drugs.

  Her father seemed to be growing even more animated.

  It made her angry, and hurt her feelings too. She turned to her mother at the other end of the table, hoping to commiserate over what a bastard Bobby Sutton was.

  “Take some chutney,” she heard her mother say, offering the gravy boat to Benjamin. She sounded strangely cheerful about it, Cassy thought—as if the chutney were some kind of unexpected good news.

  “I came up with it today,” she added—all hopped up, like a hostess on speed. Emma held the sterling gravy boat aloft, just waiting for Benjamin to dip the silver ladle in.

  “I’d love some,” he said, spooning a hearty serving onto his
plate.

  Benjamin dipped his index finger into the lumpy red pool, and brought it straight to his mouth. “What is that?” he asked, humming ecstatically, as if he’d flown straight to heaven.

  “Cardamom,” Emma whispered, her eyes opened wide. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Their ridiculous animation was nearly enough to make Cassy turn back to the pole dance at the other end of the table. She wondered what ecstasies they’d reach with a pinch of allspice thrown in.

  “Have you tasted the chutney, Cassy?” Benjamin asked.

  She must have been staring.

  Cassy shook her head.

  “It’s sensational!” he said.

  “Cassy doesn’t like chutney,” her mother told him, a tight little smile etched onto her face. “Do you, dear?”

  Cassy couldn’t think of anything she liked at that moment.

  “More for us then,” Benjamin said, beaming at Emma, who smiled right back.

  Emma popped up from her seat at the table. “I’ll be right back,” she announced. “I want to get the recipe for you, before I forget.”

  Cassy watched her mother circling the room.

  “Everything all right down here?” Emma asked, looking at her husband through slightly squinted eyes.

  “Jim dandy,” he replied, smiling back up at her.

  Cassy watched her mother push briskly through the swinging service door. She gazed down at her plate. She hadn’t eaten much.

  She knew these dinners were a waste of time. Her mother had her precious meal to obsess over: the staging of the courses and all her various sauceboats, decanting more wine than they could possibly drink; her father floating off at the first opportunity—just like always.

  His coming back hadn’t changed a thing.

  Cassy heard the housekeeper pushing through the service door—on the return swing from her mother, it seemed—as if they were running a relay race: one efficient woman passing the baton to another; this second one stacking dishes on the sleeve of her plain white blouse.

  As a little girl, Cassy had been responsible for clearing the dishes and loading them into the dishwasher, for scrubbing the pots and pans—just like kids all over America, she supposed. But her mother always turned it up a notch: standing guard, like a sentry on the sidelines, studying the girl through a rifle scope. Her mother had strict ideas about clearing up, from the scraping of the dishes to the filling of the sink. She wanted clockwise spongework on the enameled pans, and special handling of her good knives. She wouldn’t stand for deviation.

  “Put some muscle into it” was her standard refrain.

  Cassy knew it was crazy, but she felt a nostalgic tug for the olden days, for those years when it was just them—their lurching talk and all the tense silences that followed.

  They weren’t so bad, she thought.

  For Cassy, those awkward spells were all suffused with hope, like a backlit doorway—glowing with invitation, holding out the quiet possibility that she might finally reach the place she wanted to be. Cassy wanted to love her parents, not just deep down, beneath it all, but in a daily way too—and she wanted them to love her back. She wanted to talk to them—really talk—but something in her simply wouldn’t allow it. The girl could never just reach across the table and begin. There always seemed to be some impediment, some mild annoyance or petty jealousy. And when it came right down to it, she couldn’t find a single pathway leading back to them that wasn’t blocked up with rage—at her mother, who chose her public life over the girl at every turn, and her father too, loving her indifferently, until the day he ran away.

  “I couldn’t disagree with you more,” Benjamin said heartily.

  Cassy snapped her head up, as if he were disagreeing with her, but she saw that he was merely joining in the fun with Melora and Cassy’s father. She listened in on their conversation—which might have turned to global warming.

  “Something, something, overheated Gulf Stream,” she thought she heard Melora say.

  That explains the summer top, Cassy thought, begrudging Melora her loveliness, not to mention the hold she had over Cassy’s father. It was nearly enough to make her wish she read the newspaper; she scoured her brain for something brilliant to toss into the conversation. She knew the long odds she was facing, wanting to claim her father back.

  She suspected, in fact, that it was hopeless.

  Cassy didn’t know a thing about the environment, and she couldn’t compete on the real battleground either—not for her father anyway. She’d watched him eyeing Melora’s plump breasts all night, as if they might pop straight through the gauzy fabric of her cheap peasant blouse.

  Cassy fiddled with the soft wrists of her modest turtleneck.

  She wished for a plunging neckline too, but she knew she couldn’t beat her in that department. “Melora,” she grumbled, beneath her breath—as if that’s her real name even.

  “I see you’re as crazy as your girlfriend,” Bobby called out merrily, to Benjamin this time. They were all three grinning like idiots.

  No more awkward pauses, Cassy noted—not with these two chatterboxes around.

  “You’re missing the point completely,” Benjamin said.

  Will you shut the fuck up?

  Cassy wanted to scream it down the table—at Benjamin and his beautiful girlfriend—neither of whom, she knew, had a thing in the world to do with the unbridgeable gaps around that table.

  GRACIE FLOPPED DOWN ONTO THE WINE-RED RUG that covered up most of her bedroom floor. She counted the number of tiles she could make out still, the alternating squares of black and white that circled the room; they were only visible at the edges though, peeking out from beneath that big burgundy rug.

  It used to be a giant checkerboard in here.

  The little girl missed the covered-up tiles beneath that rug—even the loose ones that moved when she stepped on them, and the ones she could pick right up off the floor.

  Fifteen, she counted, then checked her work.

  Gracie made herself a bargain. She’d count straight up to fifteen, then backward down to one again, and if she did it just right—without one tiny mistake—her mother would open the door on the very last count, just as she whispered “one” that second time, all finished with her reverse-counting. Her mother would have the bag of swim things over her shoulder, her winter coat buttoned up tight.

  It seemed almost possible to the girl—her choreographed waltz of backward counting and opening doors, the seedling hope that perfect behavior might bring perfect control—especially when she considered all the things that had to go right before anyone actually opened that door. She stared hard at it then, wooden and white, closed up tight.

  She knew how hard it was to count backward.

  Still, she began. She counted straight up to fifteen, and perfectly too, but that was no surprise. Counting up is the easy part, she thought, taking a breather before the trickier descent, and wondering, in fairness, if she ought to have made the target number a little higher.

  “A deal’s a deal,” her grandfather always said.

  “Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,” she whispered, knowing that the hardest part was just around the corner, when she waved those “teens” good-bye. “Twelve,” she whispered, struggling, then “eleven”—but the little girl was losing heart. She stopped counting then, abandoning the effort altogether, and just when she’d gotten to the easy part too—the ten-nine-eight.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t finish. Gracie knew she could, in fact.

  The little girl had a different concern: What if I do my counting, she wondered, and the door doesn’t open? She was fearful that whoever she’d made her bargain with, whatever witch or good fairy controlled the opening of bedroom doors, wouldn’t hold up their end of things.

  That’s why she stopped. Gracie would rather throw in the towel herself than be disappointed by somebody else.

  “Please hurry,” she whispered—to her mother, she supposed, but she wasn’t exactly sure. She didn’t kn
ow where to send her prayers anymore.

  Gracie looked up to the ceiling, then down at the floor. She saw her tummy folding in on itself, sitting cross-legged like that—like a fat staircase, she thought, gazing at the flight of flabby steps that led from her breastbone straight down to her hips. She tried sucking them in, but that didn’t work. So she pulled her shirt taut—hiding every last stair. She knew they were there still, but at least she didn’t see them now, hidden behind a veil of white cotton. That was almost as good.

  Almost, she thought, but not quite.

  She shifted onto her side and pulled her legs beneath her, sitting on her feet and ankles, raising her torso tall. “Ta-da!” she sang, like a tricky magician in a silky black cape: every step of fat had disappeared! Her torso was as smooth as glass.

  Gracie propped her hands on either side of her then, burying them deep in the burgundy pile. Her grandfather had trimmed it from a larger stretch of wall-to-wall; its unfinished edges, cut as straight as he could make them with a razor blade and an old wooden yardstick, were forever sprouting strands that popped out sideways like weeds, as troubling to the little girl as coloring outside the lines, or that ugly lost-and-found bin at school: notebooks and shirtsleeves and lunchboxes in a jumble, a tossed salad of carelessness.

  Gracie crawled to the edge of the rug and plucked a couple of wayward strands; she pushed them deep into her pants pocket.

  The thought of school made her sink like a stone.

  And Valentine’s Day was just days away.

  She had to go back to school tomorrow, become “Gracie S.” all over again—the fattest girl in the whole third grade. She tried putting the thought right out of her head, but she didn’t get very far. Mondays were the worst of all—with five straight days to go—and Valentine’s Day on Friday, when all the cards would be exchanged.

  Gracie began raking her fingers through the shaggy carpeting on either side of her.

  And it’s not just the girls, she admitted to herself, her fingers scratching back and forth. She was the fattest one in the whole third grade. Boys included, she thought, shaking her head, as if she could scarcely take in her terrible luck.