by Deb Caletti
I knew various facts about other things too. My mother’s subsequent boyfriends: Vic was a cheapskate and Tony’s ex wife took everything he had and Mark thought he was so hot but he couldn’t figure out how much to tip a waiter without counting on his fingers. I also knew that my sister lost her virginity with Buddy Wilkes on her fifteenth birthday, in his parents’ rec room, under a mounted deer head that Buddy and his father killed on a hunting trip. The day after Juliet’s fifteenth birthday, she became a vegetarian for one year; until then, that was the longest she’d been dedicated to anything. And somehow she’d also become just as dedicated to Buddy, as attached as that deer head was to the faux pine paneling of the rec room wall.
From my place upstairs, then, I did something I was very good at. I watched and I listened. From the landing I could see Mom’s feet—painted toenails, brown sandals—which were facing Hayden’s—a pair of guy’s feet in sturdy well-worn Birkenstocks. Can toes look angry? Because Mom’s did. It was a foot face-off. I wished I had my camera with me, because it would have been a good shot. Feet versus feet, the moment in the animal shows just before one creature gets ripped to shreds.
“I know this is a shock,” Hayden said. These were the words being used—shock, surprise—words of sudden ambush. “It’s a surprise to me, too,” Hayden said.
“You must have realized there was this possibili—”
“Can we go outside or something? The heat is killing me.” Juliet’s feet joined theirs. White sandals with fragile, thin straps and the narrowest of heels. That summer, I would come to understand something about fragility—how powerful it was, how other people’s need could draw you in, bully and force sure as an arm twisted behind your back. But right then I saw only shoes, no big metaphor, two sets of reliable, dedicated feet following those delicate heels outside.
The feet exited stage left. I heard the screen door open, and Hayden called out something to Zeus. Ice cubes were freed from a tray, clinked into glasses. The screen door shut again. Everyone was likely sitting at the umbrella table outside, which meant I’d have a good enough view from the bathroom. I crossed the hall, lifted myself up onto the countertop. The bathroom was still all new starts and shiny surfaces, smelling the blue-brightness of Windex, cleaned only an hour ago by me. Since Juliet had left home, her returns had reached the status of Company Coming, meaning the bathrooms were cleaned for her and Mom had made a dessert, and Mom never made dessert.
“It’s just Juliet,” I had said as Mom spread the pink peppermint-chip ice cream into a chocolate-cookie pie shell, swirling it with the edge of her spatula.
“Juliet’s doing big things in the world,” Mom had said. Mom respected “big things in the world.” Ever since we were kids, we’d hear her talk about Following Your Dreams and Aiming High and Seeing the World as she packed our lunch or drove us home from swimming lessons or carried our tri-fold boards into the cafeteria where the science fair was being held. She’d sing her favorite song “Be” by her favorite singer Neil Diamond as she pasted photographs of places she’d never been into the scrapbooks she made with the scrapbook club Allison, her best friend, started. She’d belt out “Sing as a song in search of a voice that is silent” as she glued bits of feathers or shells or other found things to the borders of images of vineyards and castles and ancient cities and other faraway places. The song was her personal big dream anthem—she thought it was about embracing life and finding your true love, but if you listen closely, it’s really a song about God. Big Him, not little him. I pointed this out once, but she didn’t seem to care. She told me she went through her entire high school years thinking “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar described her boyfriend, Roger, perfectly.
I opened the window, put my face close to the sneezy mesh of the screen. In the window ledge was one long-expired potato bug, who had apparently set off on a journey across the wide plain of the south side of our house, traveling the endless distance up and over each dangerous stretch of siding, all in order to die in the gutter ledge of our second-story bathroom window. He had had big dreams, too, and look where that had gotten him.
The umbrella of the table hid their faces, but I could see Hayden’s back, and Juliet’s tan arms, and Mom’s profile. Juliet poked at her ice with the tip of her finger.
“I told Hank I quit,” Juliet said.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said. “I just can’t believe this.” She shook her head. One of the chopsticks in her hair was sliding loose and about to fall.
“I suggested maybe just some time off … ,” Hayden said.
“They’re not exactly going to want a pregnant woman crooning to middle-age men on business,” Juliet said.
I sat away from the window. I may have actually gasped. I leaned my slow and clueless self against the just-cleaned mirror. Pregnant? As in, having a baby? Juliet? I think my heart might have stopped for a second then. At least, the moment had a shutter click of stop action. My stomach did the elevator drop stomachs do when something is utterly and completely wrong. This was not our life. Juliet as a mother? Juliet had had a cactus once, given to her by some boy just back from a vacation in Arizona, and that cactus had sat on her bookshelf until it turned a despairing yellow and then shriveled up and died. She could kill a cactus. She’d be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We’d hear about her on the evening news.
And how did this happen? I mean, I know how, but how? It was just after Buddy Wilkes when I first saw the round pink package of pills in a protective oval appear in our bathroom drawer, hidden under the box of tampons. Maybe my cluelessness was understandable, given that pregnant was the last thing you’d expect from Juliet. You’d expect that she’d be telling us she’d just gotten a record deal and was about to become world famous. Maybe that she was moving to a foreign country and taking us all with her, which was, in a way, what was happening. If anything was a foreign country, marriage was. A baby, too.
Hayden leaned back in his chair. There was a sigh in his shoulders.
“So you don’t have your room at the hotel anymore,” Mom said. She sounded crushed. Juliet’s job at the Grovesnor came with room and board, meaning a great big suite and room service whenever she wanted. The room was a strange mix of past and present—a quilt from home on the shiny gold hotel bedspread. A photo album in the drawer next to the bed with pictures of Juliet’s friends from high school, keeping company with the room service menu and the Portland Attractions Guide. When it was time for a meal, though, a little table would be wheeled in, with a white tablecloth and elegant food under silver domes and tiny salt and pepper shakers. During our first visit there, my mother, who is as honest as anyone I know, wrapped those tiny salt and pepper shakers in a napkin and snuck them into her purse. The next time we visited, we had a new bath towel at home, with a big, embroidered G across the bottom. Mom loved that hotel.
“I didn’t think quitting was necessary—we could stay in married student housing. I could finish my degree… .” Hayden was appealing to Mom, but when Juliet sighed, Mom reached out and took Juliet’s hands. I more than anyone could have told him that no one came before Juliet. You could feel the truckload of loneliness heading his way, as he just stood there, blinking in the bright light of his new marriage.
“I just want to have my baby at home,” Juliet said.
There was the weight of silence, the clasped hands. The chopstick finally slid free from Mom’s hair and clinked to the floor. She bent down and picked it up, stabbed it back decisively in her hair. Zeus, maybe sensing that his beloved Man was outnumbered, came over and set his chin on Hayden’s lap.
“Of course you do,” Mom said. The words were a whisper. Gentle as falling snow. As quiet and powerful, too. “Of course.”
Chapter Three
I’ve been told a million times that when I was only three years old, I gave my beloved blankie to my mother because she was crying. It was when my father left, I’m sure, though
that isn’t the part of the story that gets told. I covered her knees with it. I still have that blanket, though I won’t go around admitting it.
From that moment on, being kind and caring was what I was known for, same as some people are known for being smart or beautiful or for playing the piano, a quality as much a part of me as the scar on my hand from when I picked up broken glass when I was two. In the first grade, I was the one who invited Sylvia Unger to my birthday party (nine years before her first suicide attempt), and from the second grade on, the weird and friendless sat with me at lunch. You ate your tuna and Fritos and tried not to stare at their misguided clothing choices or the way they’d chopped their bangs or the red scratches on their wrists.
The truth was, though, I had never really had a golden heart; that’s not why I did any of those things. Not really. It sounds awful, but, honestly, I didn’t even really want to be friends with those people. Gillian Tooley, for example, was weird to the point of obnoxiousness, Kevin Frink was almost scary, and Sarah Volley had a disturbing tendency to grasp my arm with both hands while we walked, as if she were Helen Keller and I was Anne Sullivan. When Renee Wilters started hanging around Jackie Tilsdey instead of me, I felt the giddy relief you feel when you pass off the joker to someone else when you’re playing Go Fish.
The real reason I was so supposedly “kind”—well, it was just less painful to put up with a weird person’s company than to feel the horrible weight of their loneliness. I had a low tolerance for other people’s pain; that’s what it was. And a low tolerance for other people’s pain guarantees that you win the booby prize of hangers-on and clinging, irritating oddballs. You’re probably destined to grow up to be the sort of person who’s nice to telemarketers and who gives money to starving children in Africa while everyone else buys some great new pair of shoes instead. You’re definitely the one the dog stares at during dinner.
But on the other hand, Gillian Tooley had alcoholic parents, and Kevin Frink’s mom drove a hearse, and Renee Wilters lived in that creepy house with all the cats, and you could see they were hurting inside. I guess I also had the old-fashioned beliefs that if everyone turned their back on hurting people, the world would not be a very nice place. And that nice was a great word, even if it was a stepped-on and shoved-aside word, and even if nice people were stepped on and shoved aside too. That’s what I told myself anyway, every time I felt hollowed out by someone’s need, the kind of hollow that makes your insides feel like the wind is rushing through and that sends in the loneliest of lonely thoughts: How did I get HERE? You tell yourself that what you’re doing is good, because nice is sort of the reward for your efforts. A limp reward, a forever bronze medal, but still a reward. Helping people becomes who you are and what you do. It’s your job in the universe, and no one likes their job all the time. Still, you do it.
When I went to my room later that day, then, the day Juliet and Hayden came home married and pregnant, I shut the door and pulled out the boxes of books under my bed. It was clear that something should be done, although I had no idea what or for whom, which was probably a lie I was already telling myself. I saw those eyes, his eyes, again in my mind and the helplessness in those shoulders and I felt a true want, the urge to help maybe for the first time out of actual desire and not out of a painful sort of pity. I hunted through a few of the books—Principles of Psychology, Behavior Understood, Casebook of Abnormal Psychology, Personality Disorders of Our Age—looking for the right kind of advice. All of the psychology books I read said that too much information was bad for kids, but if you wanted too much information, they were a great place to start.
Personally, I loved information. The more, the better. Knowledge was a personal life preserver you could always count on when you were swimming in the deep end. I ran my finger down the glossaries. Teen pregnancy wasn’t exactly accurate—Juliet was twenty. I didn’t know how to define the problem. I couldn’t exactly find Nonmaternal Sisters Suspected of Getting Pregnant on Purpose. Or even, Nice Guys About to Be Destroyed.
I gave up on the books for the moment. I ignored a call from Nicole, who was likely only going to tell me about her father’s recent legal maneuver, or her mother’s, or a sighting of Jesse Waters from our American Government class whom we nicknamed Shy, because that’s what he was. Jesse was cute and quiet and never said a word to anyone, and Nicole loved him madly and was convinced he loved her back only he couldn’t express it. She’d use her camera phone to sneak-take pictures of him, or even better, herself with him in the background. She could study those pictures for hours. She’d give his elbow or ear or jacket sleeve fine qualities, like sensitivity or generosity.
I was at a loss about what to do with myself and my thoughts. I tried to do my biology homework for a while, but the pictures of the swimming organisms in a marine biome only made me think of one thing. Right then at that moment, a creature was growing inside my sister—creature was the word I thought of first. Cells dividing and forming. Baby. I tried to make this more than a word. More than science or a Fisher-Price commercial, with chubby-cheeked toddlers and sturdy dump trucks; more than the pink, soft smell in the baby aisle at the grocery store. This would be a real person, with real toes and real lips and real things it needed from us. But no matter what I did, baby just seemed like an idea, an unreachable concept like Paris or Mardi Gras or husband.
After a while, the smell of lasagna came up the stairs—warm cheese and tomato sauce, a dinner’s ready smell that would have ordinarily meant I’d be called to set the table. But I heard Mom down there, opening drawers and cupboards and doing it herself, and when she finally called us to eat, the daffodils had been set in a vase in the middle of the table.
“Your sister is having a baby,” she said, as we sat around the table and she edged out a fat piece of lasagna and slid it toward Hayden’s plate which he’d held up at her request. Most people could manage only a single tone in their voice—disappointment, or sarcasm, or joy. But my mother could play an orchestra of emotion in hers. In six words, she conveyed that she had been disappointed, gotten through it, and was now trying to view things in a positive light.
Juliet shouldn’t be trusted with a baby, I imagined myself saying. But I didn’t want to say what I was really thinking in front of Hayden, who might get the wrong idea of me or, rather, the right idea of me. Instead, I ran the words through the nice and polite filter and out they came in their revised form, sort of like a doughnut going through the icing machine. “So I heard,” I said. “That’s great.”
“You’re going to be an auntie,” Juliet said.
There was something about this that made me feel suddenly sick. Maybe because she made the word cute, and Juliet never made words cute. Juliet was a lot of things—beautiful and aloof and strong, feminine enough that men seemed to want to rescue her. But she was never artificially adorable. Maybe being pregnant had done it—something about hormones and maternal instinct. Maybe after the baby, she’d turn into Ally Pete-Robbins, our neighbor with the rotten twin boys, who hung those holiday banners up in her yard, in case we might forget it was Christmas.
“Wow,” I said. I remembered suddenly the time Juliet was supposed to watch Ginger, the Martinellis’ dog, when they took their new RV, the Pleasure Way, out for its maiden voyage to Montana. She’d forgotten to feed the little dog for a full day and a half until I had reminded her. Maybe it was a good idea that she’d come home to have the baby after all. Maybe it would have to stay in my room so that I could keep an eye on it.
“You going out to the game or something tonight?” Juliet asked me. And just like that, we were transported to some sort of normal life. Or we were using my normal life to pretend everything else was normal. Juliet was inhaling her lasagna like one of those superpowerful vacuums you see on TV, the ones that can suck up nails.
“It’s May. Football season was over a long time ago.” This was a stupidity of hers I was comfortable pointing out.
Hayden laughed, covered Juliet’s hand with his.
It was a sweet laugh. The sort of laugh that meant he thought everything she did was fabulous. She probably could have robbed a bank teller at gunpoint and he would have thought it charming.
“Game. Any game. Not just football,” she said. “I didn’t just mean football.”
“Football games are a singles bar with an ASB card,” I said. Hayden grinned at me across the table and I grinned back.
“Scarlet would never go to a singles bar,” Juliet said to Hayden. “She’s the good one in the family. She’s never done a wrong thing in her life.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not true.” She was right, though.
“Okay, she cut her own hair when she was three,” Juliet said.
“It was a lot of hair,” Mom said.
“After that, her days of wild living were over.”
“Ah, you don’t know. You don’t know that at all. Everyone has their secrets,” Hayden said.
He looked at me and grinned and I had one of those flashes of irrational thoughts you get sometimes, like when you’re sure a song on the radio has been played as a message to you, or when you think a certain star can bring you particular luck. When he said that, I felt like he might know things about me. Things I didn’t even know about myself yet. Things that might happen or would happen. “I’ll never tell,” I said.
“Okay, there’s no football. There are still spring sports to go to,” Mom said.
“Track meet … The student production of The Music Man. Whatever.” Juliet had gone to all those things when she was at Parrish High. Some people are high school people and some people are not high school people, and that’s just a fact of life. Juliet was one, and I wasn’t. She could do high school because she didn’t care about it in the least, whereas I couldn’t because I cared too much.