by Diana Welch
I spent an hour or so with Dan and then told him I had to get back before it got too late. He walked me to the car and stood there with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. I gave him a big hug, but he stayed still, like a statue. I could feel his body shaking.
“I’m always here for you, Dan,” I whispered into his ear before getting into the car. From my rearview mirror I watched his gangly frame, dressed in Dad’s old tweed coat, turn and tromp back to his dorm. As I pulled out of Trinity Pawling’s driveway, I too began to tremble. As I drove south on Route 22, I thought, “What did any of us do to deserve this?”
My mind was racing and numb at once, my breath fast and faint. Then I passed the Goldens Bridge exit heading south on 684 and had an awful realization. Dad had been heading south, coming home from Boston, when his car veered off the highway, right there, between Goldens Bridge and Katonah. Somewhere along that dark stretch of highway, he’d crossed the median barrier and smashed into an abandoned car on the other side of the road. My headlights poked two hazy holes in the darkness.
“Did he fall asleep?” I wondered as I pushed hard on the accelerator and barreled into the thick blue black of night. “Or did he just turn the wheel once, hard?” The speedometer clocked eighty. As the Land Rover started to rattle, I thought of Dan trudging back to school alone and lifted my foot off the gas. I thought of Diana’s eyes widening behind her glasses, and the way she clung to me whenever I hugged her hello or good-bye. I thought of Amanda’s laugh and then of her packing up the house all alone. And I kept driving.
DIANA
THAT WINTER, I lost eight coats. One snowy evening, I walked right out of Heller’s shoe store in Mount Kisco without my coat, the eighth. Back in the family’s gray station wagon, Mrs. Chamberlain turned on the windshield wipers. The snow was really coming down. As she twisted her body to back the car out of its parking spot, her eyes fell on me. “Where’s your coat?” she asked, startled.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“How can you not know where your coat is?” she said, pressing her eyebrows together and jerking her head back in disbelief. I couldn’t recall having a coat, and I didn’t feel cold; I didn’t really feel anything. But then I remembered—I had been wearing a coat, a new one. It was ankle-length, down-filled. Quilted. Mauve.
“I must have left it in the shoe store,” I guessed. There was a Calvin and Hobbes sticker on the back of the driver’s seat, its dirty edges peeling up from the red vinyl. I picked at it as William nodded off to sleep in his car seat next to me.
“Well?” Mrs. Chamberlain said, turning to face the front of the car. Her hands were on the steering wheel, her arms stiff and straight. “Are you going to go and get it?”
I opened the door to the cold. In the warm shoe store, I made a crack about how spacey I was to the sales guy, who laughed as the heavy glass door closed itself behind me. The car ride home was silent.
Around this time, Mrs. Chamberlain took me into New York City to see a psychologist. We played board games. I chose Chutes and Ladders because she didn’t have Parcheesi.
I never went back. Mrs. Chamberlain told me that the doctor said I was well adjusted, which seemed right to me. I didn’t feel there was anything wrong with me. But I did have lice a lot. They were a real epidemic at West Patent Elementary. Maybe I shared combs with the wrong girls, or maybe I was the wrong girl. School had been weird ever since Mom died. My first day back after the funeral, people gave me presents like it was my birthday: a Cabbage Patch Kid and a paperweight in the shape of a dog. It wasn’t so bad to be the girl who had lice, because I got to leave school early. And I liked it when the whole third grade lined up outside the nurse’s office once a week to get checked. The sharp metal comb felt good scraping against my scalp, and the nurse’s breath on my neck reminded me of nice things like Mom talking out of the corner of her mouth while I kissed her or Auntie Eve scratching my back while we watched her soaps on TV.
At the Chamberlains’, Mrs. Chamberlain and Rhonda took turns scrubbing my head with RID while they made sour faces and raised their noses high in the air. It burned and it stank. Eventually, I just did it myself. It seemed like Mrs. Chamberlain thought I was disgusting, like she didn’t want to touch me, like I had a disease. But one evening, when I was sad and missing Mom, I wandered into Mrs. Chamberlain’s bathroom crying, my fist in my eye, just as she was getting out of the shower. When she saw me, and my tears, she sat down on the toilet, still naked and wet, and pulled me onto her lap. I hid my face in her neck and cried even harder. As my tears blended with the moisture on her skin, I thought, maybe, just maybe, this lady could love me.
AMANDA
I PARTIED SO hard that winter I barely remember any of it. I was living alone in Mom’s house for three months before the new owners were ready to move in. Mom had sold the house to them before she died, for five hundred ninety-five thousand dollars. After the Bank of New York received the final two hundred fifty thousand that Mom owed them, the rest of the money went to the trust, which Mom had set up specifically to pay for our education and any medical emergencies. Thank God we had that money. It was our only security left in the world.
When it came time to get all our stuff out of the house that spring, not one adult helped us. It was just Liz, a few of her friends, and me. We spent several weekends loading up the Jeep with everything we could—the grandfather clocks, the sofa, the chairs, the Etruscan trunk. We had to leave a ton of stuff behind because there really wasn’t anywhere for it to go. Some of it went to my friend Sue’s mom’s garage in Mount Kisco; some went into Anna’s parents’ attic down the road; and some went to Brooklyn, where I had found an apartment.
I furnished my new place with things from the house, and then, once I’d moved everything, I sold the Jeep. I couldn’t get a title for it because it was in the name of one of Dad’s bankrupt companies, so I sold it for a couple hundred dollars, cash, to a guy in Brooklyn who said he was going to use it as a hunting vehicle in upstate New York. And even though I still had my Karmann Ghia, I kept the Mercedes, and I drove that thing until the day it died.
DAN
I FINALLY TOLD the Hayeses how miserable I was at Trinity Pawling, and they said I could transfer back to Fox Lane. I was psyched. The Hayeses even let my dog Ralph, who had been staying with Amanda in Brooklyn, come live with me. At the Hayeses’, Ralph and I watched a lot of TV together. I’d eat an Oreo and then he’d eat one, as I kneaded my toes into his back. Just like at the cottage and Mom’s house, Ralph was still my best friend.
Of course, it was strange living with this new family so completely unlike my own. To start, they were religious kooks; they went to church every Sunday and prayed every night before dinner. Plus, they enforced a lot of rules, and a curfew, which was totally new to me. And though she was tiny, Mrs. Hayes was a tyrant. When she screamed, which was often, she would scare the crap out of everyone, including her giant husband.
They had two kids. Billy was twelve and already a hellion. He’d look at you wide-eyed and smiling like, “What window are we going to break? What tree are we going to cut down?” I shared a room upstairs with Brad, who was in my grade. He was popular and good-looking, and though we ran in the same crowd at school, we never became friends. Once, he said to me, “Between the two of us, we could get any girl we want at Fox Lane.” But I had had such a weird experience with sex up to that point that I really didn’t want to go out with anyone. The two girls I did wind up dating both wanted to have sex with me, but I couldn’t do it.
I got to see Liz every day at Fox Lane, which was great, but otherwise I hated it at the Hayeses’. There were so many rules! Mrs. Hayes wouldn’t let me go into the city on auditions, even though I had made ten thousand dollars doing commercials the summer before Mom died. She was messing with my livelihood! Plus, I wasn’t allowed to hang out with older kids: I couldn’t even get into a car driven by a teenager, including Liz. She said it was because teenagers were irresponsible. I was like, “Have you
met my sister?”
LIZ
MAY BE IT WAS the spring or seeing my brother daily in school, but I came out of my winter depression, a snake shedding its skin. I started dating a guy from Horace Greeley, Fox Lane’s rival school, and though I still had a curfew, the Stewarts would let me spend the night with Amanda in her Brooklyn apartment every so often. She and I would go to clubs like Pyramid and King Tut’s Wa Wa Hut and dance until two in the morning, eat pancakes at a diner in the East Village, and head back to her place to crash. Dan was never allowed to come with me on those weekends. The Hayeses had him on a tight leash, but they did let me drop by whenever I pleased.
Seeing Diana was trickier. Whenever I called, the maid would answer “Chamberlain residence” in her clipped British accent before informing me that Diana was at ballroom dancing school, or at soccer practice, or playing at a friend’s house. It made me feel good. As much as I missed my little sister, I thought that was exactly what an eight-year-old girl should be doing.
That was why Amanda and I had chosen the Chamberlains. They seemed normal, the opposite of the Stewarts, who were a funny mix of seventies hippies and Bedford preppies. Only fourteen years older than I, Daisy Stewart was more like an older sister or a young aunt than a mother, which was the reason I wanted to live with her. I didn’t want a replacement for Mom. Daisy intuitively understood that. In fact, she couldn’t have been more different from Mom.
One day after school, I found Daisy in the kitchen drinking herbal tea. She offered me a cup and then asked, out of the blue, “Have you ever dropped acid before?”
“No,” I said, cautiously. “Why?”
“Well, if you ever want to, let me know. I know a doctor who can get us really good stuff.”
I looked at her as if she were tripping.
“I’d rather you do it with me, here,” she explained. “I think it’s safer.”
At the time, I was still attending weekly grief counseling sessions. One day, after session, Brenda, the social worker, told me that Daisy had come to see her.
“What did she want?” I asked.
“She’s worried about you,” Brenda told me. “She said you weren’t having sex and that she didn’t think that was normal for a seventeen-year-old girl. She wondered if it had something to do with losing your parents.”
That explained why Daisy took me to the gynecologist to get fitted for a diaphragm, even before I started dating again. She was really trying, in her own way, to be cool. And she actually was. Later that spring, Daisy had a few errands to run in Stamford, Connecticut, and invited me along. When she turned down the street that led to Bloomingdale’s, my heartbeat quickened. “Where are we going?” I blurted.
“I have to return a sweater. It’ll only take a minute,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said, my voice shaky.
She parked the car and turned to face me. “Why not?” she asked.
The only person who knew I had been banned from the Stamford Bloomingdale’s was Maureen, who was with me the day I finally got caught shoplifting, two weeks before Mom died. Now, four months later, I told Daisy everything—that I had been stealing for over a year, that the security guards had my exploits on tape, that they threatened to have me arrested, and that the only reason they didn’t call Mom was because Maureen had burst into tears and begged them not to, wailing, “Whatever you do, don’t tell Liz’s mother. It’ll kill her!” The security men let me go with the warning that if I ever stepped foot in that Bloomingdale’s again, I’d be arrested on the spot.
When I was finished, I waited for the disappointment to kick in. This was the moment of truth. I was not this good girl after all but a pathological liar and a raging kleptomaniac. I had duped her, and I waited for that realization to register on her face. Instead, Daisy smiled in a conspiratorial way.
“Well, let’s see if that’s true,” she said, unclipping her seat belt. “If you get arrested, I promise to bail you out.” I held my breath as I pushed through the heavy revolving doors. Instead of getting arrested, I got a free makeover, and Daisy bought me a bottle of Anaïs Anaïs perfume.
Even though Daisy was cool, I still couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Bedford. Every day there was a reminder of the life I no longer lived. So I bounced an idea off Daisy and Montgomery. “I’m thinking about deferring a year from college,” I said. “I want to go back to Europe, maybe work on my French …”
“I think it’s a great idea,” Daisy interjected. Montgomery agreed. They even knew a Norwegian family who wanted a nanny in Oslo. I wanted to go back to Paris, but I wasn’t about to argue: I was simply stunned they supported my madcap plan.
As it turned out, I was accepted to Georgetown and everywhere else I had applied. Europe was, in my mind, as far away as I could get from Bedford. If I went to Norway, I could leave immediately after graduation. If I went to Georgetown, I was stuck in Bedford until the end of the summer, which felt like an eternity. I deferred for a year.
The Chamberlains brought Diana to my high school graduation barbecue. Amanda was there, and Dan, too. It was the first time we had all been together since Mom’s funeral six months earlier. Diana had changed dramatically. I hardly recognized this quiet girl in her white silk dress and pale blue headband. She looked like Alice in Wonderland. I preferred Diana as a Muppet, all giggles and spunk. I knew her best as the girl who insisted on wearing pink and purple even though it clashed with her hair, and who would wear socks pulled up over her knobby knees with gym shorts to go play with friends. The girl who showed up at my graduation party was not the Diana I remembered, but I was still glad to see her. I was glad to see everyone. Auntie Eve came, too, wearing her best polyester pantsuit. Uncle Harry escorted her, wearing his one and only tie.
We spent a magical afternoon together by the Stewarts’ pool, laughing and snapping photos. In one photo, Dan is squeezing Auntie Eve, his eyes are sparkling, and Amanda’s head is thrown back and she’s laughing. Even Diana loosened up. I saw the Muppet in her was still alive; it came out in that bubbly laugh and the sparkle in her eye.
Soon after, I went with Dan and Amanda on a road trip up to Maine to visit our Uncle Russ. I called the Chamberlains to see if Diana could come, too, but Nancy didn’t think it was a good idea. She said that Diana was still settling in and that they already had plans for the summer.
It was too bad. Russ was everyone’s favorite uncle, a softer, tubbier version of Dad. Perhaps that was why we loved him so, or maybe it was because of his infectious laugh, deep and hearty. He made a welcoming feast—steamers, lobster, corn on the cob, and blueberry pie—and throughout the meal regaled us with stories of Dad as a young man. “Did you know your old man was class president at Johns Hopkins University?” Russ asked. We did not. We knew Dad’s mom died, but we didn’t know it happened when he was sixteen, the same age Amanda was when Dad died. Nor did we know that Dad drove eighteen-wheel trucks every summer throughout college to help his dad pay for groceries and for school clothes for his younger siblings. “Your dad put me through art school,” Russ said. “He bought me winter coats and boots throughout high school. He was a good man.”
Hearing these stories made me realize that there was so much that I didn’t know about our father. Yet looking around the table, I knew he was directly responsible for Dan’s freckles and dimples, for Amanda’s belly laugh, and for my squinty smile. And though Diana seemed subdued the last time I saw her, I knew in my gut that she inherited Dad’s spunk and determination and certainly the up-for-anything glint in her brown eyes. We all inherited his sense of humor, too. So that night, Amanda, Dan, and I made a pact: Every summer, no matter what, we would spend a weekend with Russ. We all shook on it before heading off to bed.
DAN
I GOT KICKED out of the Hayeses’ on the Fourth of July, two days after Liz left for Europe. I was so jealous—I wished more than anything I could have gotten on that plane with her. Instead, I was up in my room blasting the Violent Femmes’ song “Add It Up” as loud
as it would go. I was pissed. Before the Hayeses and Trinity Pawling, I had been free, walking around Mount Kisco in the middle of the night, hanging out with anyone I wanted. I never had to check in with anyone. Now, there were so many rules, I couldn’t do anything. Curtis’s mom had died of a heart attack earlier that spring, and Mrs. Hayes wouldn’t let me go to the funeral because it was during a school day. I was devastated; even though Curtis and I had grown apart, his mother was like family to me. When I saw him in the hallway the next day, I told him I was sorry. I told him that I didn’t know what to say.
“I thought you’d be the only one who would,” he said, and I felt like such a coward. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t just tell the Hayeses to fuck off. I should have been at that funeral.
But I had to watch myself, because I got in trouble for things I didn’t even know were bad. Like the time I brought home the video of A Clockwork Orange for Mr. Hayes to watch. He told me that he had always wanted to see it but never had. It was my favorite book, the only one I ever finished in school. And the movie was a masterpiece; everybody knew that. Anyway, I was watching it with Mr. Hayes one evening as Mrs. Hayes was cooking in the kitchen. There’s a scene where Billy’s gang is raping this woman, and Malcolm McDowell’s character comes in and stops the rape and then Malcolm’s gang beats the other gang senseless. It was a pinnacle part, so I said, “Mrs. Hayes, you have to watch this scene.” She came in to see five guys raping this woman, and she blew her top. She went wild. We had to turn the movie off, and I had to go up to my room.
I had borrowed the tape from the video store where I worked, but Mrs. Hayes refused to believe that the manager would let me take an R-rated film home. She accused me of stealing it and made such a scene that I wound up getting fired. The whole thing was a mess.