by Diana Welch
“Elizabeth!” she cried. “What have you done to your hair?”
It was horizontal, brushed up and over as if a fan was blowing hard on one side of my head. To create this effect, I used Mom’s curlers, half a jar of Dippity-do, and a blow dryer. I then sprayed the tabletop sculpture into place with Aqua Net.
“You could balance a bowl of soup on it!” Mom continued, aghast.
“It’s totally hip,” Rita said, sauntering in. Mom did not love Rita’s hair, a side ponytail teased to look like a porcupine’s tail, either.
“Are you two going to the circus or the prom?” Mom asked, aghast.
I rolled my eyes at her and said with a dramatic sigh for effect, “You’re just jealous we have hair!”
Mom’s face softened as she smiled big and said, “Have fun.”
And we did—first guzzling beer in Lance’s Saab before arriving at the White Plains Hyatt, where we danced for four hours straight. It was fun until our principal, Mr. Lamonica, got on the microphone to announce Prom King and Queen. When Lance’s name was called, he literally sprinted to the podium. When mine was called, I froze, then quickly slid beneath the table where I was sitting. I was on my hands and knees panicking when Mr. Lamonica called my name again. Rita’s face suddenly appeared beneath the red polyester tablecloth.
“What are you doing down there?” she asked. “Get your ass up to the stage!”
“I lost my earring,” I lied. The truth was, I didn’t want to be Prom Queen. I just wanted to be a popular girl who wore fashionable clothes and went to New York City on weekends. Somehow, being Prom Queen was taking the fantasy too far. That meant everyone in that room beyond my tablecloth tent accepted my ruse, that I had tricked them all. And somehow that was a betrayal of Mom and my siblings.
“Elizabeth Welch!” I heard my name boomerang around the room and knew there was no escape. I crept out from under the table and walked to the podium, faking a big smile. Mr. Lamonica gave me a hug, put a tiara on my shellacked hair, and then handed me a trophy as tall as a toddler. The next morning, I gave it to Mom, who was so thrilled with my win that she placed the trophy on her dresser, next to her row of wigs. And that made me happy, to see her happy. She wanted me to be a normal teenager more than I did myself. So when I told her my AP French class was scheduling a special trip to Angers, France, that summer, she insisted I go. I was hesitant.
“Who’s going to take care of Diana?” I asked one afternoon. “Who’s going to take care of you?”
“Everything will be fine, Bitsy,” Mom said. “I want you to do this.”
And I wanted to do it too, badly. But I would not go without finding someone to replace me. Rita was too wild—plus, she had just started dating a twenty-two-year-old guy. Amanda had enough on her plate, chauffeuring Mom back and forth to the city for medical appointments. So I called Maureen, my best friend from tenth grade. Her dad had been transferred to Schenectady, New York, and I knew she missed Bedford as much as I missed her. So when I called her to see if she’d like to spend the summer at my house and take care of Diana in exchange for fifty dollars a week and a car, she didn’t hesitate. She said yes.
Maureen arrived the week before I left for France, so I could show her the ropes—grocery shopping, laundry, keeping the house organized, making sure Diana was bathed and fed, and making Mom’s macrobiotic meals. It took a few days for Maureen to get used to seeing Mom so frail. The chemo made her lose weight so fast her skin hung off her like loose clothing, and her hair had only just begun to grow in, a soft, see-through carpet covering her pale scalp. But with her hair, the spark in her eye was coming back. She had survived a brutal winter. She was going to be just fine. That was what I thought the day I left for Angers. I had to think that; otherwise, I couldn’t have gone.
That morning, I popped my head into Mom’s room to say “au revoir.” She was sitting up in bed, having just finished her revolting breakfast.
“Eat many croissants for me, my darling,” she said. I gave her a quick hug, promised I would do more than that, and shouted “à bientôt!” as I rushed up the stairs to finish packing.
Auntie Eve had come to see me off. She sat in my room as I sat on my suitcase to close it and placed my passport and traveler’s checks in the money belt I had bought specifically for the trip. I was buzzing with excitement, but Auntie Eve seemed upset. Every time I looked at her, she shook her head from side to side as if something was wrong.
“What?” I finally asked. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, wearing one of her trademark polyester suits—pale green pants with a short-sleeved button-down top that had pale pink flowers, their stems picking up the green in the pants. Auntie Eve liked synthetics because, as she always said, “You don’t have to iron them and you still look neat and tidy.” Her silver hair stood up on its ends, like cotton candy, sprayed into a soft helmet.
“It’s just that I’m getting old,” she said. “This might be the last time I ever see you.”
Then her eyes brimmed with tears. She would say that to me every time I left for anywhere over the next twenty years.
“You’re not going anywhere!” I said as I wrapped my arms around her. “Who would take care of us?”
AMANDA
AUNTIE EVE STAYED with us for a couple weeks while Liz was gone that summer, to help Maureen around the house. It was a good thing she was there, too, because otherwise I would have killed Dan. He wouldn’t listen to anything anyone said; he was so confrontational, like, don’t tell me what to do, I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want. So I was like, well, then I’m going to kill you.
It escalated one afternoon when we were all in the kitchen. I said, “My friends saw you out at three o’clock in the morning. What were you doing running around Mount Kisco at three o’clock in the morning?” And Dan was like, fuck off, I don’t care. Then he grabbed his crotch at me. I lost it. It was just so offensive, and he was giving me that I-don’t-give-a-fuck face to go along with it. It made me so angry I tackled him. It was just all my rage at everything that I couldn’t control coming out. I was on top of Dan, strangling him, and Auntie Eve was hitting me on my back with a wooden spoon, screaming, “You’re killing Dan! You’re going to kill him!”
DAN
MY CHOICES WERE: Do what I say, or die. Amanda outweighed me by at least fifty pounds. I was scared to death. My arms were trapped underneath her, and she was smacking my head against the tile floor over and over again. She was crying and her face was all red. She didn’t talk to me for two days after that.
Amanda was a classic bully. In order to subdue her, I had to beat her. So I decided to challenge her to a game of Mercy. Amanda was great at it; I once saw her beat my friend Joe Knezevic, who at fourteen was six-foot-two and two hundred eighty pounds. Amanda turned his wrists upside down and twisted, literally lifting him up off the ground. It was insane. As we stood facing each other, I knew I couldn’t lose this time. We clasped each other’s hands by interlocking our fingers, my palms pressed against hers. The whole idea was to bend your opponent’s fingers back until they’re about to snap off. The first person to shout “Mercy!” loses. I clenched my jaw, dug in, and won. That was it. We were buddies from then on.
Amanda and I were the ones who went with Mom to the revival. Mom was doing everything in her power to get well, even going to charlatans in tents. When it was our turn, Amanda hung back and I pushed Mom up on the stage. She got out of her chair, and the preacher did his whole thing, pressing his palm against her forehead and banishing the cancer from her body. She fell backwards into her wheelchair, really dramatic, like “I’m saved!” When I wheeled her off the stage, she was smiling.
AMANDA
THOSE FUCKING REVIVALS didn’t work. None of it worked—not the healers, or the macrobiotics, or any of that shit. Mom always had faith in the power of the mind. Just like she thought that Dan had magical powers in his hands and that Diana could communicate with the dead, she thought that she could beat her cancer if she tried really ha
rd, if she had the right attitude. She never gave up, even after everyone else did. Including us. Mom went back into the hospital that July because she had blood in her stool. The cancer had spread to her colon, which they removed on July 18. She weighed one hundred seventeen pounds. Medical records dated July 31, 1985, say that she “weighed one hundred ten pounds, was alert and oriented, spoke openly about illness and terminal prognosis, and voiced concern regarding her children.”
DIANA
I DON’T REALLY remember how it started. All of a sudden, people were driving up our driveway, opening their car doors, telling me to hop in and buckle up, then taking me places I didn’t want to go.
A lady called Dagne drove me to visit Mom in the hospital. She wore her hair in two long blond braids like a little girl, even though she was Mom’s age. Sitting in the passenger seat of her car, I felt weird and resentful. As we passed the Finast where Mom used to take me grocery shopping, a song by Bruce Springsteen came on the radio.
“In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days,” Dagne sang in a clear falsetto like Mom’s. She smiled and twitched her head from side to side in keeping with the beat, tapping the steering wheel and, eventually, my knee, walking her fingers up my leg, an itsy-bitsy spider.
“It’s ‘golden days,’” I said. Stupid, I added silently.
“Huh, sweetie?” she asked, turning her beautiful, smiling face to me for a moment before returning her gaze to the road in front of us.
“He says ‘golden days,’ not ‘glory days,’” I said in my snottiest voice. I knew I was being a brat, but I didn’t know why. Auntie Eve called Dagne an angel on this earth. She looked like one, too: Fair-haired and blue-eyed, she was the original Ivory Soap Girl, an actor friend of Mom’s. I knew that it wasn’t Dagne’s fault that she was driving me around; I knew it wasn’t her fault that Mom was trapped in that smelly hospital room full of beeping machines. But she was in Mom’s spot, at the wheel. And I hated her for it.
“Oh,” she laughed sweetly, crinkling her nose. “And here I thought, all along, that it was ‘glory days.’”
The song ended, and the deejay announced in his deep, cheerful radio voice, “That was the Boss, coming at you with ‘Glory Days.’”
I looked at Dagne, stunned that I was mistaken. I waited for her to laugh at me, to say I told you so. But she just continued to drive, humming a new song. Everything was all wrong. I shrank into the seat, digging the frayed seat belt into the soft skin beneath my chin.
LIZ
THROUGHOUT THE MONTH, I called home weekly from Angers to check in and share my latest news. “French people don’t wear shorts!” was an early discovery I shared with Auntie Eve. I saved “There’s no drinking age!” and “Heineken only costs a dollar!” for when Amanda answered the phone. Every time I called, either Auntie Eve, Maureen, or Amanda would pick up. Never Mom. And when I’d ask to speak with her, they’d say “She’s out to lunch with a friend” or “She’s getting her nails done.” And I’d hang up even happier. That meant she really was getting better! Maybe the toasted rye seeds soaked in sauerkraut was working! Maybe we were finally home free.
As my entire AP French class flew back to New York, I took a Hovercraft from France to England to visit Janie Rayne, one of Mom’s old acting friends. She lived with her husband, Robbie, and their son, Damian, in a four-story town house called Brunswick Gardens. One morning, Janie and I walked her two dogs through Kensington Park, and she told me how she and Mom had met in the sixties, while studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Mom had asked Janie to be her scene partner. “I’d only been in New York for one week and did not know a soul,” Janie said. “Your mum was my guardian angel.” She went on and on about how famous Mom was, shouting, “She was Dr. Maggie Fielding in The Doctors, for Christ’s sake!” She called Mom the most beautiful woman in all of New York.
I looked at her, startled. Janie was a former top model. Glamorous photos of her from French Vogue and British Elle lined the hallways at Brunswick Gardens. And she was calling Mom beautiful? But then I remembered how glamorous Mom looked in the photographs that hung on the wall in her office in the gray house. I had spent my life longing for the Mom that was in those pictures. Now, thousands of miles away from home, I desperately missed the Mom that I knew.
I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, because Janie had my day planned out down to the hour. That afternoon, I went to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum with Damian before meeting her and Robbie at the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. The next morning, I woke to the whisper of a typed itinerary being slid beneath the door: 9:00 a.m. brekki at Harrods; 11:00 a.m. Buckingham Palace; 1:00 p.m. pub lunch; 4:00 p.m. Tate museum; 6:00 p.m. pub for pre-theater drinks; 8:00 p.m. Starlight Express; and 11:00 p.m. supper at Annabel’s. As I brushed my teeth, I could not stop smiling. This was turning into the best summer of my life.
After checking out the Tate, I headed back to Brunswick Gardens to change for the theater. When I walked in the front door, I heard Janie in her office at the end of the landing say, “She just walked in.” She sounded concerned. When I popped my head into her office, she looked up at me, tears in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head back and forth a few times, cradling the phone receiver with both hands.
“It’s your mum,” she said.
She handed me the phone, and I heard Nancy Chamberlain’s voice on the other end. I felt like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. “Liz, we didn’t want to ruin your summer,” she said. “Your mom just got back from the hospital. It’s not good.”
I could hear Nancy’s words—colon, operation, didn’t get it all out—but none of them made sense. Then Maureen got on the phone, sobbing.
“I wanted to tell you!” she cried. “But your mom wouldn’t let me. She made me promise.”
“Is Amanda there?” I managed to ask.
“Hey.” Amanda’s voice sounded heavy and tired, laced with lead.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked. She was the only one who could make sense of this for me. The others were talking gibberish.
“The doctors say she’s too weak for chemo,” Amanda said, steely and straight. “They say the chemo would actually kill her. And that the cancer is now in her kidney.” She trailed off.
“And?” I said.
“And you need to come home,” Amanda said quietly. “So we can figure out where everyone is going to live.”
DIANA
ANOTHER LADY WHO picked me up was Mrs. Chamberlain. In the car on the way to the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club, she told me that little girls were “germ factories,” and that Mom was too “susceptible to disease.” Mrs. Chamberlain had two kids, whom Liz used to babysit for. They were younger than me and no fun; they could barely even swim. So I made friends with the pool manager’s daughter, and one time I went to her house for a spend-the-night, but I hated it there. Their only pet was a ferret, and they ate Count Chocula for breakfast. Another lady who picked me up often tried to get me to weed her giant garden. When I said I didn’t feel like it, she said, “After all I’ve done for you?” I just ignored her and kept reading, but it made me feel bad.
The only people I liked picking me up were Auntie Eve and Uncle Harry. They always took me to Auntie Eve’s house in Yorktown Heights, where she lived with her son and his family. It was fun there. They had MTV and an above-ground swimming pool in their backyard. Auntie Eve’s granddaughters, Cara and Bridget, were both blond and tan, and Cara had braces and long fingernails she painted pink. Bridget was ten, three years older than me, and I copied every move she made.
One evening, Bridget and Cara sat me down for a talk in their bedroom. I thought for sure it was going to be a lecture about copying, and how annoying I was. That afternoon, Bridget and Cara were talking about how hot one of the guys in Tears for Fears was, and when I agreed, Bridget asked, “Which one?” I pointed to the one who looked as if he was wearing a little bit of lipstick.
Both gir
ls groaned. “That guy’s so gay!” Cara said.
“Oh, I know,” I said quickly, sliding my finger across the television screen to the other guy, who kind of looked like McGruff, the crime-fighting dog.
“No, you already said that you think the gay one is cute. You can’t change it now,” Bridget said.
“Fine!” I yelled, then ran into the adjacent room and played with Bridget’s Barbies, embarrassed.
Now, up in their bedroom, the girls were looking straight at me, their backs against the white slatted folding doors of their shared closet. “We heard that you’re going to live with the Chamberlains,” Cara said gently. “We heard your mom was really sick.”
“Yeah,” I said, plucking at the blue carpet with my fingers. I hadn’t been thinking about Mom, and it felt good just playing, watching TV, and eating Twinkies. Mrs. Chamberlain was just a lady who came by the house a lot and drove me places. I didn’t remember anybody saying anything about living with her.
“Do you think she’s going to die?” Cara asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“I hear that they’re really rich,” Bridget said, hopefully. “That’ll be cool.”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I turned toward them and, feigning happiness, clasped my hands together in front of me and said, “Pray that she dies.”
They looked at each other in horror. Bridget’s face turned grayish white as her mouth dropped open, and Cara’s went hot pink as she smiled a slow, shocked smile.
I could not believe what I’d just said. It was terrible. I didn’t want Mom to die, and I hadn’t really thought that she would until right then. My whole body felt hot. I scrambled up from the carpet and, starting to cry, ran into the bathroom to sit on the fuzzy pink toilet lid behind the closed door. When I pulled on the toilet paper, it released a gross smell from the beads inside the roller knocking against each other. I pressed the paper against my eyes hard until my body stopped shaking before I wiped them off completely. Then I went into the kitchen and asked Auntie Eve to call Uncle Harry so he could take me home.