The Kids Are All Right

by Diana Welch

  There, I spent a lot of time alone, entertaining myself on a big pile of dirt next to our driveway. Even though I wasn’t allowed in Mom’s room anymore, I snuck in there sometimes to lie on the bed next to her. With my hands pressed together between the pillow and my cheek, I stared at her, at the row of wigs on her dresser, out her window. I listened to her breath, slow and deep, and kissed her face as she slept. Sometimes she would wake up with a start, like I did when I dreamt of falling off the bed, and her eyes would be wide and wild, searching the ceiling until they found my face, and then she would close her eyes and smile.

  Earlier that summer, before she went away to Angers, Liz had surprised me with a pair of Guess jeans that zipped at the ankle. There is a rare picture of Mom and me in her bedroom during that time of quarantine. I’m sitting in a rolling office chair next to Mom’s bed, wearing those Guess jeans, a Canal Jeans sweatshirt, and a white baseball hat that says “Danny” on it in puffy paint. Mom is wearing just her nightgown and her big dip eyeglasses, and as thin as she is, she is stunningly beautiful, all pink lips and high cheekbones and sad brown eyes. She is completely bald and sitting up on one elbow, leaning in toward me, stick arm around my stiff shoulders. The look on my face makes me think I am trying to act cool, but beneath the white sheet and thin blue blanket, I can see I am clutching Mom’s hand.

  AMANDA

  I TOLD MOM I wanted everybody to live with me: We could stay in the house; Liz could finish Fox Lane; Dan would be at boarding school in the fall; and I would defer my education so Diana could stay with us. We talked about it a lot. But every time, it was the same: I was too young; I had to finish college; I deserved to be nineteen.

  Aunt Barbara, Dad’s older sister, offered to take all four of us, even though she and Uncle John already had seven kids of their own in Massachusetts. But Liz and I both thought that everybody should stay in Bedford, to maintain some sort of continuity, some normalcy. And then Mom did ask Auntie Eve if she would consider being our guardian. It meant we’d have to move—Mom still owed the Bank of New York that money and had arranged to pay them as soon as we sold our house upon her death. But Auntie Eve said she was too old; well into her seventies, she was already worried about dying herself. Beyond that, I just think Mom couldn’t deal. Actively seeking out homes for her kids meant she was actually going to die. And she couldn’t admit that, not until the bitter end.

  A few local families did come forward to say that they wanted to help out, people that Liz babysat for—the Stewarts and the Chamberlains. Both families said that they could take either Liz or Diana but not both. And neither offered to take Dan: He was way too wild for Mrs. Chamberlain, and Mrs. Stewart bizarrely told Liz that she didn’t want all Dan’s friends hitting on her. Then this random guy named Topher Scott, an old friend of Dad’s from Johns Hopkins that none of us had ever met, came by to see Mom. He asked her if there was anything he could do, and Mom said that yes there was: Take Dan. And he said he would. It was totally out of the blue.

  Mom asked Liz and me to figure out where Diana should live. She couldn’t decide—it was too fucking painful. The Stewarts were a possibility, but Montgomery bragged about his gun collection and that really freaked Mom out. It seemed that they weren’t raising their children in the way we were raised: We had softball games in our yard; the Stewarts had paintball wars.

  The Chamberlains seemed more like our family. Mr. Chamberlain seemed warm and genuine and was sweet with his kids. Liz said that they had a really nice house and that they were always kind to her when she babysat. And Mrs. Chamberlain truly seemed to care about Diana. So we decided that Liz would move in with the Stewarts, since she had only a year left of school and she really liked Daisy. Diana would move in with the Chamberlains, pretty much right away, so that she’d be living there when she started third grade that September. Mom had said more than once that she didn’t want Diana to watch her die. But Diana’s going to the Chamberlains could also have had something to do with Mrs. Chamberlain coming home with Diana one afternoon that summer and finding my friends and me hanging out in our living room, stoned out of our minds. Mrs. Chamberlain narrowed her eyes and stormed off to Mom’s bedroom, shielding my little sister with her body. Diana moved out soon after that.

  DIANA

  WHILE EVERYTHING CHANGED, some things stayed strangely the same. I went to the same school and lived in the same town. It was a big house with a big yard with a pool and a pool house. There was one brother and only one sister but they were both younger than me. There was a mom and a dad. No horses, no cats, just one big, greasy standard poodle named Thurman. No Auntie Eve to scratch my back or threaten me with a wooden spoon, but there was a lady called Rhonda, who flashed a gold tooth when she smiled and kept the kids in line with the threat she’d “box their ears” if they didn’t do what she said.

  I felt most comfortable around Rhonda. She called the mom “Mrs. Chamberlain,” same as I did. Sometimes I slept in the sister’s room, but most nights I slept across from Rhonda in a gable above the kitchen. The two rooms were practically mirror images of each other: two twin beds, a closet, and a desk. While her room was cramped, both beds piled with laundry and the walls lined with the yellow handles of brooms and mops, mine felt empty. So I hung out in her room a lot as she ironed between the buttons of Mr. Chamberlain’s oxford shirts, only going into my room when it was time to go to sleep. In there, strawberry wallpaper covered the slanted walls, which came together in a point at the ceiling. Outside the window were treetops that I watched sway in the dark as I fell asleep. But sometimes I would cry, my face smashed into the pillow to muffle the sound.

  One night, Mrs. Chamberlain came up to say good night and found me with my face in the pillow. “What are you doing?” she asked me from the doorway.

  “Sleeping,” I told her, raising my head just enough to get the words out. I wasn’t crying anymore, but I was worried that my face would be puffy and that she’d be able to tell.

  “People don’t sleep with their faces in pillows,” she said to me, not moving from the doorway.

  I said nothing and she closed the door.

  Another night that August, I got to go home. Mrs. Chamberlain dropped me off for Dan’s going-away party before boarding school started. She came in to check and make sure that there was a grown-up around, and there was, a nurse. The house was dark. It felt good to be invited, but it was strange to be there, back in my home, which seemed to be doing fine without me. I wanted to go see Mom, but the nurse told me I wasn’t allowed to. I wandered into the kitchen, and Liz and Amanda were there, putting the finishing touches on Dan’s cake. They brought it out to him, and it was time to open presents.

  Dan was sitting in the living room, surrounded by friends. His red hair was cut shorter and cleaner on the sides than it had been a couple of weeks ago when I last saw him. His face was extra freckled from the summer, and his skinny fingers seemed to be longer than ever before. People were laughing, listening to music, and smoking cigarettes. He opened a present from his girlfriend Dana, who had braces and wore a headband. It was a big painting of people lying around in fancy clothes. When Dan flipped it over, they were naked. Then he opened his other present; it was a carton of cigarettes. I got a present too; Amanda gave me the WHAM! Make It Big! videotape that we had all watched together in Mom’s room before I had to move out. Mom loved “Last Christmas” the most. I liked “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”

  I don’t remember if I ever got to see Mom that night. I do remember that I ate six bowls of whipped cream that Amanda and Liz made from scratch. When I went into the kitchen for my fifth, a teenager I didn’t know asked, “How much whipped cream have you eaten?”

  “Four bowls,” I said and shrugged. The teenager held her can of beer up and said, “Well, it is a party.” She took a swig and smiled. I smiled back and went into the living room to sit next to Dan and eat my treat by the spoonful.

  DAN

  WHEN I ARRIVED at Trinity Pawling, I was intimidated. I me
an, it was my freshman year, and I was leaving all my friends behind at Fox Lane, where I would have had it made. It really helped having a hot older sister; Liz was popular, and I was psyched to ride on her coattails. But Mom really wanted me to have some structure. She said I needed guidance. So she got me a scholarship to come to TP, where they said they specialized in kids with learning disabilities and behavioral problems. Mom thought I was getting lost in the public system. Because of my dyslexia, I needed extra attention.

  To be honest, I didn’t feel that we had the money or the prestige to be there. We had to wear jackets and ties every day, so Liz and Amanda dropped me off with a trunk full of Dad’s old suits. But Dad was stocky and five-foot-eight. At fourteen, I was almost six feet tall and skinny, so all his suits were too wide and too short.

  I knew I’d do all right, though, because I was a chameleon. I’d been changing my personality from year to year, from group of friends to group of friends. I remember going to Tim’s house after spending a summer with Curtis. We were riding our BMX bikes around when Tim said, “You’re talking black. You know that, right?”

  “Really?” I said. I had been saying “yo” a lot, and “dag,” and sometimes “homeboy.”

  And he was like, “Yeah. Stop it.” And then he rode off.

  That’s when I realized that I had to be a different person for different groups of friends. So I became this surfer–Gator board–Tony Hawk–skater kid, and everything I owned suddenly had to have checkers on it. But at boarding school, everyone was into messy preppy clothes and the Grateful Dead. The big thing here was to wear your khaki pants down just low enough to expose the elastic waistband of your plaid boxer shorts.

  My roommate was a real kook, this hick from the South who was really into eighteen-wheeler trucks. He had pictures of Peterbilts all over the walls. He never shaved because he wanted a beard, so there were, like, three pubic hairs coming out of his chin, and he never did his laundry, ever. He had this piss-stained laundry bag with a Trinity Pawling crest on it, and it had been sitting there ever since we arrived, just stinking up the room.

  Luckily, Liz helped me get some hot-sister cred at Trinity Pawling, too. She and Rita came to visit me once, and my whole dorm started freaking out about how there were these two cute girls on campus. When I brought them up to show them my room, this one kid came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, making his voice deep on purpose. “I was just about to shave.” And, like an idiot, he’d smeared shaving cream all over his face, around his nose and all the way to his eyes. He didn’t even know how to pretend how to shave.

  I knew how to shave because, when I was little, I used to hang out with Dad a lot in his bathroom. One time, he was taking a piss in front of me, and I was staring at his penis, like, how come his is so big? He winked at me and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll grow.” He told me to wear boxers, not briefs. He also taught me how to shave, right then. He lifted me up and put me on the toilet and put shaving cream on my face. As he started shaving, he told me where to go against the grain for a smoother shave and how to get against your nose. Then he took the blade out for me so I could practice with his razor.

  LIZ

  I WAS OFTEN the only one home during the day, besides Mom and one of the nurses who were now with her around the clock. Amanda was at NYU, Dan was at Trinity Pawling, and Diana had already moved to the Chamberlains’. Still, I had to force myself to go visit Mom in her bedroom.

  I understood what was happening to Mom. I could see her decline almost daily: The Craftmatic bed got bigger and bigger as her body grew thinner and smaller. And even though it hurt my heart to walk down the hallway that led to her room, I knew it was important to Mom. She wanted all the gossip. Rita had moved in with her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend. Mom wanted to know what he was like. Was Rita happy? And was my French better after my summer abroad? Mom also wanted to know about volleyball. I had started playing in the seventh grade, went to the Junior Olympics in eighth grade, and played varsity throughout high school. Tryouts had just finished, one week into my senior year.

  There were twenty or so girls vying for twelve positions, and I thought I’d make it—no sweat. It was an intense tryout. By the end, my arms and legs felt weighted down with bowling balls. I fantasized I could snap them off, like a Barbie doll, and trade them in for new ones. But it felt good to be playing volleyball with my friends, to be part of this team. It felt good to feel something other than the all-consuming dread of what waited for me at home.

  But right before the coach gathered everyone together to make his picks, he called me over. He looked disappointed.

  “Welch, how are you supposed to spike the ball if you can only do twenty-five situps in a minute?” he asked. “Your spike is stomach muscle. What were you doing all summer?”

  He was not being an asshole on purpose. No one at school except my closest friends knew Mom was ill, let alone dying. Still, I was shocked when I didn’t make the team that year. Then I went home and told Mom the whole story, pretending that it was no big deal. Mom shook her head. She was upset.

  “I have a lot going on this semester anyway,” I assured her. It was true. I had to retake my SATs and apply to colleges. And I had to decide where I was going to live once Mom died.

  I had several offers. Liz Subin said I could come live with them. And the Stewarts had offered too. Then Alison McGovern, a senior at Fox Lane who lived in a mansion on Hook Road, invited me to go shopping with her and her mom in Manhattan. While Alison was trying on back-to-school clothes at Bendel’s, her mother told me that Alison had always wanted a sister and asked me if I would live with them. I was dumbstruck. I hardly knew Alison, so I thanked Mrs. McGovern for the “generous” offer and said that it was not necessary. Mrs. McGovern looked alarmed. “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” she explained. “Alison really wants a sister.”

  In many ways, it didn’t matter where I wound up. I was planning on leaving Bedford as soon as I graduated. I just needed a place to stay until I finished school. I didn’t need a new family or new siblings, and I didn’t want them either. At least I had options. Mom had to coerce Topher Scott into taking Dan. No one else seemed to want him. And even though we all thought the Chamberlains were the best choice for Diana, Mom told me one afternoon that she was nervous about that choice, too.

  “Nancy Chamberlain came by today,” Mom said.

  We hadn’t seen much of Nancy ever since Diana moved there. She said it was because she was protecting Diana, which sounded like a good answer—and a terrible one, too. Yes, an eight-year-old should not have to see her own mother near death. But, still, it was her mother.

  “What did she want?” I asked.

  “She wants to adopt Diana.” Mom blurted the words out.

  “Isn’t that what a legal guardian does?” I asked.

  “She wants Diana to change her name to Chamberlain,” Mom said.

  “Well that’s ridiculous!” I laughed. “Diana’s a Welch! She’ll always be a Welch!”

  “I know,” Mom laughed, nodding her head, “I told her, ‘Over my dead body!’”

  DAN

  I KNEW I was going to have to go off and live with a new family, just like Diana, but I had no idea who this Topher Scott was. Liz claims that the first time I met him was at parents’ weekend at Trinity Pawling in late October, but I don’t remember that at all. He was a friend of Dad’s from college. That’s all I really knew.

  LIZ

  AND ALL I knew was that Topher Scott was a big mistake. I figured that out on the drive up to Trinity Pawling for Dan’s parents’ weekend. After picking me up in his Mercedes-Benz sedan, he spent the entire ninety-minute trip talking about his daughter’s engagement to a Kennedy. He did not ask one question about Dan, or about Dan’s school, although he did mention that he knew someone whose kid went to Trinity Pawling as well. When we arrived at the campus, Topher saw his friend and spent the entire afternoon with him.

  The wh
ole thing really pissed me off. I was mad at Mom for making such a bad choice. I was mad at Mom for being sick. I was mad. Period. So mad that my afternoon visits with her became torturous. I kept forcing myself down that hallway every afternoon. I knew she lived for my bits and pieces of gossip, for my silly school news. I couldn’t tell her the truth—that I was cheating in Latin and was failing pre-calculus. That I only read Cliffs Notes in English. So instead I lied when she asked me about college applications. I told her I had finished them all. I hadn’t requested any.

  I was still interested in acting and told her so, but she wanted me to get a liberal arts education. “An actor’s life is hard, Bitsy,” she said more than once.

  I knew that was true. Mom had started script-doctoring for soap operas. She needed a certain amount of paid hours to be eligible for insurance through the actor’s union she belonged to. Some afternoons, I’d come home and find Courtney Simon, an acting friend of Mom’s, reading scripts aloud. The two would talk about the plot and the characters, and Courtney would take notes. Many years later, Courtney told me that the soap community loved Mom so much that they made up work for her just to make sure she had enough paid hours to cover her medical bills. On the afternoons Courtney was there, I’d simply pop my head in to say hello and then turn and race down the hallway. But never quickly enough. Mom would always shout out after me, “I love you, Bitsy.” I would quicken my pace in a useless attempt to outrun those words. They chased me down the hallway. My skin would tense up like armor, my shoulders would scrunch up to my ears to block out the sound, yet those words would pierce my flesh every time, like darts. They stung. Those words hurt, and I had to swallow the response that came most naturally, “Fuck you.”