“Kind of aggravating,” Erica replied. “The Volvo broke down.”
“You’re kidding,” Ethan said. “It only has—what—ten thousand miles on it? What a lemon.” Ethan turned his head to watch a policeman knock down a door and slam a bunch of drug dealers up against a wall. From the baby monitor on the coffee table came a rustle of shifting limbs and then a steadily intensifying cry. Erica ran upstairs and settled down in the armchair with Sophia sucking at her breast; then Erica fell asleep. When she woke up, Sophia was lying tightly held in her arms on her lap, and the house was dark. Erica put Sophia back in her crib and walked downstairs where she put away the Legos and Transformers in their appropriate plastic bins, put Ethan’s clothes in the hamper, and set up the coffee for the next morning. She changed into an oversize T-shirt, washed her face, climbed into bed, and buried her nose into Ethan’s hair. He was already snoring, tucked against his oversize pillow. He still smelled like Herbal Essence, which was what they had washed each other’s hair with the night they met, at Ethan’s frat party at MIT. He grunted, turned over, and withdrew deeper into the blanket.
Erica stared up at the skylight. Sophia’s cries would wake her before long. In the distant past, when she had had time to sleep, she’d never taken advantage. As a child she was tucked into bed at eight o’clock, come hell or high water, where she traced pictures on the wall with her fingers, listened very quietly to the radio or read books by the flashlight she had tucked under her pillow. She listened to Debbie chat on the phone outside in the hallway, heard her shower, cream off her makeup, set her hair. She listened to her father practice his flute and her mother bustle around cleaning and straightening things. Then she would listen as the house quieted down: her parents’ door shutting, their TV going on, and later off; Debbie toweling off her hair in the bathroom and then the gentle slam of her door as well. Erica would peek out of her room, into the shadowy hall with its nightlight, watching the lines of darkness leaking out of her parents’ and Debbie’s closed bedroom doors.
Now she lay in the bedroom of her own home, staring at those same lines of darkness.
CHAPTER THREE
Debbie called the following morning during her coffee break. Erica had already arranged rides for the twins to preschool; reluctantly skipped aerobics; engaged in a long, unpleasant, and inconclusive conversation with the Volvo service manager; rented the car guaranteed by her insurance (a Dodge Aries with vinyl upholstery and a creaky windshield wiper); and sat down at the kitchen table ready to tackle a toppling pile of mail. Sophia lay next to her on a quilt, rocking back and forth on her belly like an airplane about to take off.
“How’s Jared’s stomach?” Erica asked.
“Oh, better, I hope.” Debbie’s voice no longer wavered. It sounded rather brisk, actually. “He wanted to go to school, so I packed him a lunch with rice cakes and peanut butter. His pediatrician thinks he might have a wheat allergy. And I told him, in no uncertain terms, to call me at the salon if he wasn’t feeling well. But I haven’t heard from him.”
“That’s good. My brand-new car is completely dead, and no one knows why.”
“You shouldn’t have gotten that foreign car, you know. Ron always says American-made are still the best, even if they’re not trendy these days.”
“The Volvo 760 got excellent ratings in Consumer Reports.” One of Debbie’s many annoying habits was to quote Ron’s platitudes. Erica ripped open a manila envelope and pulled out a lengthy registration form for Camp Whispering Wind, Dylan’s summer camp in the Poconos.
“Well, anyway,” Debbie continued, “You wouldn’t believe how busy it is here today. Wedding parties up the wazoo. You’d think the whole North Shore is getting married this weekend. I even had to do an eyebrow wax when the aesthetician didn’t show up. I don’t really have time to talk on the phone.”
“What did you call me about?” Erica reminded her.
“I called to invite you to Shabbat dinner. Are you free this Friday?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
Sophia propelled herself over on her back, off the blanket, and onto the shag carpet. The abrupt change in perspective frightened her, and she started to scream. Cradling the phone against her ear, Erica knelt to pick her up.
“Are you there, Rikki?” Debbie asked. “Well, see you Friday, then. Gotta go.”
Maybe this invitation was Debbie’s roundabout way of apologizing. She hoped Jared would be there. Maybe Debbie would even allow them to have a conversation.
She’d been fifteen and a sophomore in high school when Jared was born, shocked by the rush of wonder and envy she’d felt holding this miraculous creature her sister had produced. A placid, happy baby, Jared grew into a cautious, pudgy child, prone to ear infections and asthma, suffering through a life-threatening bout of pneumonia at age two and a lazy eye that required thick glasses as a toddler and an operation at age four. This did not dissuade Erica from playing with him in a way his mother did not: pushing him so high on the swing he squealed with a combination of fright and joy, chasing him around the furniture in games of tag, allowing him to eat forbidden cookies and stay up way past his bedtime.
As Jared neared adolescence, though, he could no longer spend the night without Erica getting a dressing down from Debbie the next day. She fed Jared fish and wheat when obviously she should have known it aggravated his ear infections. Ethan said a four-letter word in his presence. One weekend they let him watch an R-rated movie with full-frontal nudity, and after that he became a polite stranger Erica only saw at Sunday family dinners and other public occasions. She missed Jared. He was the first newborn she’d cradled in her arms.
: : :
The auto shop couldn’t figure out what ailed Vince Volvo, tossing around ideas from the solenoid to the central computer. It needed more tests, and then, who knew what kind of parts had to be ordered and how long they would take to arrive. The Dodge Aries stunk of cigarette smoke, Erica couldn’t adjust the seat comfortably, and worst of all, the Aries didn’t come with a tape player. She missed her music desperately.
She didn’t feel like getting in the stupid vehicle if she didn’t have to, so even though Friday afternoon rolled around chill and drizzly, she decided to walk over with the kids to Debbie’s for dinner. Ethan could drive them all home later in his Mercedes. She envied Ethan’s snazzy sports car, which sat all day in an outdoor parking lot, getting corroded by acid rain.
The boys dragged their feet. They meandered past West Meadow Elementary, past the wood play structure that had replaced the old metal jungle gym, past what used to be a decrepit chain-link fence with an equally decrepit frame house behind it. The old lady who used to live there would watch Erica and her schoolmates’ games intently from the window and the second a ball flew over the fence, dart out to steal it. She was long gone now, the chain-link fence replaced with a cedar one, the frame house replaced with a faux Georgian colonial. They took a turn to the right and then a soft left onto Debbie and Ron’s street.
As always, Erica stalled at the high ranch on the corner, the one that used to be Jeff Russell’s. Through the window of the daylight basement, halfway hidden by a hedge, she could see the family room where she first slept with Jeff. Even though they found lots of other cool places later, like the mossy concrete foundations of the Mackay mansion or his sister Eve’s playhouse, her favorite remained that floral-printed plastic-covered family room couch. Sometimes his mother would walk around upstairs, making dinner or whatever, and Erica got a kick out of listening to her footsteps approaching and then receding.
Jeff did the odd thing and attended some little college all the way in Oregon, where, rumor had it, the students ran around naked and committed suicide at alarming rates. His parents did the odd thing too and followed him out West, to Arizona. Since then their house had changed hands three times, twice brokered by Erica’s mother, Suzanne. The newest owner was a dentist. He’d opened a little offi
ce in what used to be the garage. The orange-and-avocado-flowered curtains in the daylight basement, sewn by Jeff’s mother, had been replaced with generic beige Venetian blinds.
“Let’s go, Mommy, I’m cold,” complained Dylan, kicking at the wet plastic casing of an advertising mailer lying forlornly on the driveway.
Two more split-levels and a high ranch and they arrived at Debbie and Ron’s, a Dutch colonial identical to Erica and Ethan’s prior to their renovation. It was testimony to their mother’s real estate prowess that she had managed to sell them both the same house, three blocks apart.
Now Erica’s kitchen was twice the size, with a center island and a shiny outsize refrigerator with a cold-water dispenser. Her family room opened out from where Ron and Debbie’s living room ended, extending to sliding glass doors and a wooden deck. While Ron and Debbie’s bedroom was a cramped affair barely containing their Ethan Allen queen bed, night tables, and dresser set, Erica and Ethan’s boasted a king-size waterbed, a skylight, and closets replete with Formica cubbies. Erica knocked on Debbie’s front door, which was the same as hers, a dull brown wooden rectangle. Peering through a gap in the curtains in the dining room, a bay window just like their own, she saw Ron get up from his easy chair and shuffle toward them.
“Shabbat shalom,” he said. “Come in and rest a while.” He returned to his La-Z-Boy and the NCAA Final Four. The boys made a mad dash for Jared’s room; Jared still recognized their existence, treating them like the little brothers he never had. Debbie and Ron’s house looked like Laura Ashley threw up in it: new floral wallpaper in the entry hallway, a crocheted bunny doorstop, and a needlework picture stating, “Bless our home.” As children, according to the neat definitions preferred by their parents, Debbie had always been “the artistic one.” She did not possess the unsettling kind of talent that might lead to a bohemian lifestyle and a loft in Greenwich Village but rather a contained artistry that produced drawings of houses with two neat curtained windows, a chimney puffing smoke, and a pathway leading up to it in proper perspective, lined with abundant cheery flowers. She knotted lanyard necklaces, made macramé plant hangers, and rolled her hair into a flawless French twist. When she graduated high school and announced she wanted to go to beauty school instead of college, her parents were not thrilled but accepting.
Erica walked past the dining room table, carefully set with blue-and-white china, a shiny challah, and candles, finding Debbie at the kitchen counter basting chicken legs with a tomato-and-soy marinade. She was wearing a blue pantsuit with a blue-and-white-striped apron over it. Her hair was newly streaked blond and cut into a perky bob. Erica felt oversize and sloppy staring down at her sister’s rounded but neatly proportioned body. Errant flesh bulged out between Erica’s leggings and the sweatshirt she’d pulled on early that morning, no makeup, hair back in a banana clip. A few oily strands escaped, and she pushed them back before they drooped too near the chicken.
Debbie stroked Sophia’s head. “Hello, cutie,” she said. There it was again, that disturbing wavery voice. As she drew her hand away from Sophia, her hand holding the basting brush shook softly, like it was buffeted by some private wind. On her sister’s wrist, sneaking out from under her sleeve, Erica could swear she saw the purple rim of a bruise.
As Debbie slid the pan of fluorescent poultry into the oven, a tremor ran up her arm, starting at her fingers, rippling past the faint white scar at her elbow. Her grip on the pan loosened, and for a split second the handle hung precariously off the edge. Just before the pan tipped past a point of no return, Debbie grasped it with her other hand, gave it a nudge, and closed the oven door. Then she opened the refrigerator and removed a head of iceberg lettuce like nothing had happened.
“Are you all right, Debbie?” With one hand, Erica poured herself a glass of water.
“I’m exhausted, that’s all. Work is insane,” Debbie said. “What’s new with you?”
“We’re meeting Don Johnson tomorrow,” Erica said.
“No kidding,” Debbie said. “From Miami Vice? How did you swing that?”
“He’s starring in a new movie,” Erica said, sitting down at Debbie’s kitchen table, “and Ethan’s company, you know, Grant Fishel, is throwing a movie premiere party. I’m hoping I can shake his hand, and maybe get his autograph, although I guess that’s kind of dorky, don’t you think?”
“I can’t blame you. I’d do the same if I had the chance.” Debbie poured the same orange pseudo French dressing their mother had served them as children in a thick gooey stream all over the iceberg lettuce. “Ethan works in the movie business now?”
“No!” Erica and Debbie had engaged in this conversation, in many variations, as long as she’d been married to Ethan. “Ethan is a quantitative analyst,” Erica explained for the thousandth time. “He devises computer programs that predict the movement of world money markets.”
“What does that have to do with Don Johnson’s new movie?” Debbie asked, mixing up a box of Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes, pouring them into a pan, and putting them in the oven next to the chicken. Her movements were deft. Erica began to think she’d only imagined the shaking hand, the hesitation at the oven door.
“Grant Fishel financed the movie,” Erica said. “So we get to go to the party.”
“Where are your boys?” Debbie stiffened in sudden concern.
“Playing with Jared, I assume.” Sophia twisted her way out of Erica’s arms, dangling her chubby fingers dangerously near the bottle of orange dressing. “They ran off to his room the minute we came in the house.”
Debbie twisted the ends of her hair. “Well, I hope they don’t make too much noise. He still isn’t feeling well.”
“I’ll go check,” Erica said.
Jared and Dylan lay on Jared’s bed, contentedly playing Atari. Jesse and Jake were gleefully running pint size Mercedes and Porsches from Jared’s old matchbox car collection between the legs of his desk.
“Hi, Jared,” Erica said.
Jared lifted his head up, and as he did so, she noticed he’d changed his hairstyle. It was short, almost shaved, but self-consciously so, as if to parody his father, and dyed a peroxide blond. He’d grown into his weight too, his limbs stretching out long and sinewy like Ron’s. “Oh, hi, Aunt Rikki,” he said, without averting his eyes from his video controls. She felt so awkward around him now. Perhaps Debbie had only accelerated the speed at which adolescence would draw him, like any child, away from her. She knew that one day in the unimaginable future there would be a time when her own kids would no longer cling to her leg, or chatter so incessantly she thought her brain would burst out of her head, or turn to her out of the blue to tell her, “I yove you.” At nine, Dylan already ran upstairs after school and closed his door, and he no longer asked her to towel him off after his bath.
Sophia wriggled, heavy and restless, rooting at her shoulder. Erica felt like a hulking, unnecessary presence among the boys. She returned to the living room and, tired, settled onto the creamy-white cotton sofa across from Ron. The glint of yellow streetlights through the drawn blinds cast tinted dashes on his closed eyelids.
“Wake up, Ron,” Erica said.
“Sorry, some of us have to work for a living. Speaking of which, where’s your hubby?” Ron asked, blinking. Behind him hung Jared’s bar mitzvah pictures and a series of needlepoint tulips, all in gold frames.
“He should be here any minute,” Erica said. “He can’t get out of work until the market closes, and then there’s usually a meeting, and there’s Friday traffic.”
“That’s the price you pay for working in the city.” Ron flicked from the basketball to a golf tournament to the basketball, then back again, clutching the remote like a weapon. Ron had learned radio engineering in the service and referred to his tour in Vietnam as if he’d spent two years rewiring faulty connections. She couldn’t imagine how he’d survived two years there without killing a man, or at le
ast having his synapses permanently skewed from the sight of dead babies and brain tissue leaking out of shattered skulls.
Debbie joined them in the living room and leaned her head against Ron’s. Her eyebrows knotted tensely. “All these crazy weddings are making me hate spring,” she said. “Thank God it’s Friday.” Her thighs looked thinner than Erica remembered and her skin rubbery. Erica could see the veins pulsing underneath. Ron set the remote down at his side and put his arm around Debbie, massaging her shoulders.
“What’s keeping Ethan?” Debbie asked. The wooden salad bowl sat on the table, as did the challah, the candles, the casserole of chicken on a heating tray, everything awaiting Ethan’s late arrival.
“Traffic, I guess.” Erica looked down disparagingly at her own chubby thighs, encased like sausages in their black leggings.
“Can I interest you in a whiskey sour, Rikki?”
When Ron married Debbie in a catering hall with crystal chandeliers, Erica wore a hideous pink bridesmaid dress, drank too many whiskey sours, and got sick. At least it gave her an excuse to throw away the dress, but the whiskey sour incident provided Ron with conversational fodder forevermore.
“No, thanks,” Erica said. “I’m nursing. I’m not drinking hard alcohol.” Sophia lay next to her in the grooves of the couch, dribbling a thin line of spittle between the cushions.
“A 7-Up?” Ron asked.
“Sure, thank you.” Erica leafed through the record albums in Debbie and Ron’s wall unit. What a pathetic bunch of crap it was: Paul Anka, Tony Orlando and Dawn, a Roger Whittaker collection advertised on late-night television. They were probably all throwaways from Ron’s easy listening show.
Wrong Highway Page 3