by Diana Welch
“All finished?” Mrs. Chamberlain asked as she walked over to the breakfast table and picked up the pile. She moved each card to the back of the stack quickly, inspecting each one. When she finished, she squeezed the stack in one hand and asked sternly, “What is this?”
I just looked at her, not quite understanding the question. She began to shake slightly, just a quiver. The hand that clutched the thank-you notes was up next to her blond-bobbed head, a wadded fist. “You have got to try,” she said, tears forming in her smallish brown eyes. Her nose started to run a little, and its tip turned pinkish like her husband’s. As she wiped at it with her wrist, the thank-you notes hid her face for a second. “You have got … to try,” she said again, shaking her head, and threw the cards on the breakfast table, scattering them, before she quickly left the room.
I wasn’t sure what that meant or what I was supposed to do. All I knew was that I hated it there. I hated this lady who kept expecting things from me that I didn’t understand. I thought that I was just staying there for a while, until things got settled, but it felt as if I had been there forever and I was sick of it. I had no idea where Dan, Liz, and Amanda were. For all I knew they were on another planet, with Mom and Dad, covered in tinsel, playing Trivial Pursuit.
LIZ
I’D BEEN AT the Stewarts’ for about a week when Daisy asked, rather sheepishly, if I had finished my college applications. I had not. It was at the top of that all-important, life-determining checklist a high school senior was supposed to make, a list I had misplaced earlier that fall, somewhere between my mother’s moans and the healers who failed at healing. I wanted to go to college, that much I knew, if only to get the hell out of Bedford. I figured I would live with the Stewarts until I graduated from high school that June. Then I’d go to college and get on with my life.
On December 27, I sat down to fill out the applications, which were due January 1. The first section—name, birth date, SAT scores—was relatively easy. “Address” was odd: After sixteen years of writing “West Patent Rd.,” I wrote, “c/o Stewart, Succabone Rd.” At least the town, state, and zip were still the same.
I chose six schools to apply to. Georgetown University was my first choice because I’d met a cute lacrosse player when I went to Key West with my friend Betsey and her mom over Christmas break the year before. He was a freshman at Georgetown who kissed me at midnight and cast a spell. If I got into Georgetown, I would find him and become his girlfriend. Then there was Middlebury, in Vermont, where Mom grew up. I heard the town was pretty and the school had a good creative writing program. I applied to Northwestern for their drama school and to NYU as my backup—I was still entertaining the idea of being an actress like Mom.
I also applied to Skidmore because they had an equestrian team and I thought I might like to start riding again. I chose Colgate as my safety school because it reminded me of Dad’s favorite toothpaste.
Each college required I write an essay. From the selection of topics to choose from, I picked “Describe an event that has had the greatest impact on your life.” Sitting at the Stewarts’ breakfast-room table, I wrote “Liz Welch” in the top right-hand corner of a piece of lined paper and put a horizontal line through the zag on the z, my signature style. Then I sat back and thought hard. We had discussed the college essay in my AP English class that fall. My teacher said it was important to think of ways to make yours stand out. I decided to write about my mother, the actress. That was different, I thought.
I skipped one line and wrote, “Ann Williams, actress: Known for her starring roles in The Doctors, as Maggie Fielding; in Search for Tomorrow, as Eunice Wyatt; in The Edge of Night, as Margo Huntington; and in Loving, as June Slater. She was widowed on April 21, 1982. She was my mother.”
My teacher also said that the college essay was a good place to show off your vocabulary skills. I had scored higher on my verbal SAT than in math, though I wasn’t sure if that was because I was good at vocabulary or sucked at math. Probably both. I used words like “laudatory,” “debilitated,” and “devastating” to describe how Mom was diagnosed with cancer a month after Dad died, how she beat it, then got cast on Loving, and got sick again. These, I thought, were impressive words.
I continued, scribbling in my pudgy print, upright letters with a bit of script thrown in for flair. “As my mother’s physical strength progressively decreased, her inner emotional strength seemed to increase to the point where everyone perceived her as unconquerable.” I used our last Thanksgiving together as proof. “She was vivacious, beautiful, and proud. The only signs of her illness were the wheelchair in which she was placed, her newly grown layer of hair, and the nurse by her side.”
“She left us elated,” I wrote, “convinced that her strength knew no bounds and that she, in fact, was unconquerable.” As I wrote this line, hot tears welled up in my eyes, and I thought of Rita coming to my house the day Mom died, hugging me so hard I thought I might bruise, and saying over and over again, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” Before she left, she whispered in my ear in what was more of a noiseless shout, “I’m not coming to the funeral. It’s too hard.” And I understood. It was the reason my tears were now spilling down my cheeks and splattering onto the page. It was too hard. I had thought Mom was unconquerable and I was wrong. I took a deep breath. I had to finish.
New paragraph.
“Her greatest and final role performed before her family and friends was done with such excellence and poise that her subsequent rate of deterioration and frequent bouts of unconsciousness were received by all with incredible shock and disbelief … on December 13, 1985, she died.”
I paused. “Died” seemed the wrong word. I tried “expired,” then crossed it out and wrote “ceased to live.” And then I went back to “died.” It was the wrong word, but it was the best of the bunch.
I continued: “She was a brilliant actress, able to convince her toughest critics, her children, that she was unconquerable. My mother was only human, yet she possessed one characteristic above all others that radiated throughout her bout with cancer: an inner emotional strength that I find both fascinating and bewildering.”
The essay was supposed to be one thousand words, and I wondered how many more I needed to write. I decided to count. One, two, three, four … I counted each word and wrote the number at the bottom of each page, in the right corner. So far I had nine hundred forty-two words. I had sixty-eight to go.
“The greatest and most positive impact that I have felt from this dismal experience is that I realize the strength she possessed is equally evident in each of her four children. Her magnificent performance on Thanksgiving Day has inspired me to develop this quality to its utmost degree and realize that though I have lost this parent, this inherent quality will support me throughout my life.” That was only sixty-six, but I figured it was close enough.
AMANDA
WHEN I CAME back from Ireland, everything had turned to shit. When I left, Dan was going to live with Karen. When I came back, only one week later, he was suddenly living with some family called the Hayeses. I was like, “Who the fuck are the Hayeses?” I wasn’t involved in the discussion and had no idea how the whole thing happened. That was the whole reason Mom had set up the trust and organized the guardianships before she died. If Topher Scott wasn’t up to it, why didn’t he tell Mom then, when she could have had some control over the situation? Now these total strangers were making all these decisions even though I was executor of the trust. I knew what was best for my family, but nobody was going to listen to me. In their minds, I was just a fucked-up kid.
I finally met Mrs. Hayes a couple days before New Year’s. She said, “All Dan needs is love,” and I thought, “Lady, you are so fucked.” It was as if she was walking through the pound and saw this cute puppy that needed a home; she hadn’t thought it through. I just knew it was not going to work.
DAN
THE HAYESES TOLD me that “the town” decided I couldn’t live with Karen becaus
e she was a single woman in Manhattan. It was probably Child Protective Services, or maybe it was just everyone talking. Anyway “they” said that I needed to be with a family, and that’s when the Hayeses stepped in. They lived in Mount Kisco, and their son Brad was in my grade at Fox Lane, but we weren’t friends or anything. Mrs. Hayes was tiny, less than five feet tall. She was also a chain smoker, and sort of jaundiced. Mr. Hayes was a gentle giant, this six-foot-four Vietnam vet.
I had to go back to Trinity Pawling the first week in January, and the plan was that I’d spend weekends and holidays with the Hayeses. Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less about where I lived, as long as it was close to my sisters. I didn’t really want to be with anybody but them.
LIZ
AMANDA DECIDED TO have a New Year’s Eve party at our old house, where she was still living. I ate dinner with the Stewarts and then went to go see Amanda. I wanted to celebrate the start of 1986 with her, not them.
I hadn’t been in the house since before Christmas. And even though it had already been sold to a preppy Bedford family I once babysat for—he owned the local real estate company; she wore headbands that matched her espadrilles—nothing had changed. Dan, Diana, and I were long gone, and with us all of our personal belongings. But the family furniture, artwork, photos, and books, all that stuff, was still there exactly as before.
Amanda was in the living room with a few friends getting high. There were several empty bottles of Korbel champagne lying by their feet and several more unopened ones in the fridge. I sat down next to my sister and did a bong hit. Then she passed me a bottle of Korbel. I took a swig and the fizzy liquid flooded my mouth, its rowdy bubbles sizzling up my sinuses, an intense burn. I took another swig.
At thirty seconds to midnight, Amanda put Prince on the stereo, opened another bottle of Korbel, and began the countdown: ten, nine, eight, seven. We all joined in, chanting together, and when we reached zero, we passed the bottle again. I gave Amanda a big hug and said loudly into her ear, “May this year be better than the last.”
“It fucking better be!” she laughed, widening her eyes and flaring her nostrils before tipping the bottle into her mouth.
Then someone suggested going to a party nearby, but I couldn’t go. I had a curfew, the first in my lifetime. “You go ahead,” I said to Amanda. “I’ll straighten up and then head back.”
Once everyone left, I opened another bottle of champagne and sat in the living room alone, staring out the French doors that opened onto the deck. Mom was so excited about that deck. She’d even bought a picnic table and wooden lounge chairs for all the birthday parties and barbecues she planned on having there. But I couldn’t recall one celebration, or even a meal out there. I switched off the overhead lights and sank back down into the couch. The bright moon and stars lit the fields an eerie silver. I lay my head back on the couch pillows and listened in the dead quiet for something.
I listened for Dan playing Run-DMC upstairs, for Mom watching The Phil Donahue Show down the hallway, for Diana’s high-pitched Pillsbury Doughboy laugh that sounded like she was shouting “hey, hey, hey.” I listened for Auntie Eve clanking pots in the kitchen or Bentley’s nails clicking against the wood floors. I strained my ears in the dark for some familiar sound, but there was none. Then I realized, with an urgency that blocked my breath: I should have gone with Amanda to that party. I closed my eyes and imagined the purr of the Mercedes-Benz and the squeak and heavy thud of its driver’s door opening then closing. I prayed that Amanda would receive my ESP S.O.S. and come back to insist that I go to the party with her. But there was nothing. The house was dead silent because it had become a coffin. The family I strained to hear no longer existed.
Then a double-picture frame sitting on the baby grand piano caught my eye. It displayed two school photos from 1978: Dan was seven years old in one, wearing a navy blue Shetland sweater, I was nine in the other, wearing a light blue ribbed turtleneck. We’re both smiling.
I finished the bottle of Korbel in the dark silence then drifted off. I have no idea how long I was floating in that spooky outer space, but the next sound I heard was sobbing. I felt a sharp pain in my chest and a dull ache in my throat and realized those cries were coming from me. They started out soft but grew louder as I opened my eyes and realized that I was no longer in the living room staring out the French doors; I was curled up in a tight ball in Mom’s Craftmatic bed. It was stripped bare, and I was in the fetal position clutching one of Mom’s pillows, holding it tight against my body as if I were trying to will it into something more than cotton and feathers. I had no idea what time it was or how long I had been there or how long I had been crying, only that the pillow was moist as was the mattress beneath my head. I sat up in bed, my face heavy and swollen and shiny wet with tears. Then I stumbled out of the house, leaving the girl in the light blue turtleneck behind with her ghost family.
DAN
THE HAYESES DROVE me to Trinity Pawling the first week in January. I hated that school now more than ever. Every morning, I woke up and said to myself, “Okay, Dan, you just gotta make it through one more day.” The whole thing sucked. I felt so far away from my sisters, so totally alone. I hated being around all those rich spoiled brats. I had to serve them their fucking food as part of my scholarship. I got a certain satisfaction knowing that the company that supplied the food also sold food to the local prison and insane asylum.
By early February, I was suffocating. Literally, I couldn’t breathe. I was sitting in my dorm room one night and I felt this pressure clamping down on my lungs, and I realized that I needed to get out of there. I had to get out of that fucking room and off that fucking campus. There was this whole world out there, and I wanted to get out into it. So I decided to run away. This kid Clay came with me, because he was a total hippie who didn’t like rules or structure.
This was how we did it: out my window and down this tree, with our laundry bags full of clothes. We ran around the perimeter of the campus and then through the woods so no one could see us, to get to Route 22. From there, we walked to town. By the time we arrived at the train station, it was nine o’clock and we had just missed the last train. Still, I wasn’t about to turn back. I said, “Okay, we’ll wait here until six in the morning, when the next train comes.” Sitting there on the pavement in the freezing cold, I realized that I didn’t know where I was headed. That I had nowhere to go. Nowhere.
So I just sat there shivering, until this van pulled into the station. Mr. Reed, the art teacher, got out. He was pissed. He told us to get in the van, and we did.
LIZ
DAN CALLED ME from Trinity Pawling one evening in tears.
“I fucking hate it here,” he said. “It’s like prison. You have to help get me out.”
His desperation was all too familiar; I was miserable, too. I don’t even remember turning seventeen that February, even though Adrianna, my best friend from seventh grade, threw me a surprise party and invited all my closest friends. Years later, she showed me photos taken that day. Those photos are painful to look at because I don’t recognize myself in them: I’m puffy and pale, wearing a white shirt buttoned up to my neck and clasped with Mom’s vintage ivory cameo. In one shot, I’m laughing, my mouth wide open—I can see my one crooked tooth and pink tongue, and my eyes are squinting almost shut. I can also see, through the slivers, that my eyes are as dull as tarnished silver. The laugh was a lie. My eyes told the truth.
It was that numb, faraway girl who drove up to see Dan one wintry February afternoon. I was going to try to cheer him up with some chocolate chip cookies I had baked for him. The gray skies were bloated with the threat of snow, so I took the Stewarts’ four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser and headed north on Interstate 684. I stopped at Burger King to get Dan his favorite meal—a Whopper, Coke, and fries—and then kept driving until I saw Trinity Pawling’s stone campus buildings sitting high up on a hilltop, the sloping front lawn freshly covered with a dusting of snow.
Dan was waiting for me i
n his dorm room, and though he seemed happy to see me, I sensed a familiar detachment. He smiled hard, his dimples piercing both cheeks, his lips clamped shut but stretching outward to connect the two deep dots. But his eyes were distant and so, so sad.
“Auntie Eve has been sending me care packages,” he said when I handed him the Tupperware packed with chocolate chip cookies. “I sell her brownies for a buck a pop.”
“Well, here’s two dozen cookies,” I said. “So that’s enough for, like, three pizzas.”
Dan stretched another fake smile and said, “That’s good, because the food sucks here.” His mouth began to twitch as his eyes darted from the ceiling to the floor. “Plus, I’m failing all my classes. People feel sorry for me because of Mom and everything, but I can’t take it anymore. I hate it here.” Then he looked right at me with wet eyes and said, “I want to go home.”
Those words sucked the oxygen from my body. Amanda was packing up the house and moving to Brooklyn. I was stuck on Succabone Road, Dan in boarding school, and Diana in tights and tafetta. We all wanted to go home, but none of us could because there was no home to go to.