“Debbie?” Erica asked. “What happened to your old albums? You know, Sgt. Pepper and stuff?”
Debbie shrugged, her face a blank. “I don’t know. I haven’t listened to them in so long. They’re probably in the basement somewhere.”
“Do you think Jared has them?” Erica asked, her arm gripping Sophia, who’d edged dangerously close to the perimeter of the couch.
Debbie snorted. “Jared? I can’t stand the music he listens to. Nothing but noise.”
“What bands does he like?”
“Who knows? They’re awful.”
“When are you getting a CD player?” Erica asked.
“We’re still paying off Jared’s stupid Atari thing,” Ron said.
The doorbell rang. Erica sprang up and admitted Ethan. He looked tired, his suit pants wrinkled, his damp curls sticking to his forehead, slightly stunned to find himself in the shelter of Debbie’s orderly living room.
“Boy, it’s nice to be here,” he said, smiling benignly. “The week was a bitch. The traffic was terrible.”
: : :
The chicken was surprisingly tasty, but as it was red in color, Jake threw it on the floor.
“Can I make him a peanut butter sandwich?” Erica asked.
“It’s in the refrigerator,” Debbie said, eyes rolling.
Erica spread Skippy and grape jelly onto white bread. Figuring Debbie’s floor was spotless enough to eat from, she laid the two rejected chicken legs on Ethan’s plate. Ethan ate with gusto, and so, Erica noticed with interest, did Jared, who was shoveling in chicken, potatoes, salad, challah, and Jell-O with shaved carrots in it.
“Great stuff!” Jared exclaimed between bites. He sported new straggly moustache hairs on his upper lip. He took a third helping of Jell-O and jiggled it around his plate, to Dylan’s wild laughter. Erica met Jared’s wide-eyed gaze, all pupil. All of a sudden, it came to her: Jared was stoned. How could she have missed it up to now? The stomachache: her family’s traditional, foolproof excuse for escape and privacy. She’d used it to handy advantage all through high school when she was too chemically altered to face her parents. And it came to her, in a sharp and unexpected pang, how much she missed that sensation of being so intensely engaged with her surroundings yet somehow floating above them. She couldn’t recall when she had last gotten high. Not in this decade.
“Want the rest of my chicken, Jared?” she asked. “I’m kinda full.”
“Sure,” he said, grinning. “Thanks.”
After a dessert of lemon bundt cake, Debbie’s favorite recipe made with pudding mix, everyone rose from the table. The boys ran back to Jared’s room.
“Think you could give me a hand with the computer again, Ethan?” Ron asked.
“Do I have to?” Ethan blurted out but then caught himself. “Just joking,” he reassured Ron. They’d given Ron the Apple IIGS for Hanukah and now he requested technical assistance every time Ethan came over.
“We can’t all be brainiacs like you,” Ron said.
Debbie started clearing the table, and Erica would have helped her, except that Sophia was nuzzling and whimpering and clearly needed a feeding. She sat down on the living room couch and unbuttoned her blouse, listening to the click and splash of Debbie loading items into the dishwasher, wondering what Ethan and Ron were up to. Probably installing an updated version of Leisure Suit Larry.
Driven by the mysterious impulses of little boys, Jesse burst into the room and heaved a Matchbox Volkswagen at the coffee table, knocking over a globe in Debbie’s prized snow globe collection. The snow globe fell to the ground, rolled against the sharp corner of the bookcase, and shattered, sending shards of broken glass and water across the carpet. Both Ron and Debbie rushed in from opposite directions.
“What’s going on here?” Ron’s tone was calm, but his pale skin reddened, his lips contorting as if they were holding in something unpleasant. Thin bristles of white-blond hair vibrated at the base of his receding chin. Jesse, frozen and wide-eyed, stared wonderingly at the miniature wood-frame colonial and snow-covered trees sinking into the white slush of the soaked carpet. “Car accident,” Erica explained, detaching Sophia from her breast and wrangling the buttons of her blouse quickly into their respective slots. “Sorry.” She picked shards of glass out of the carpet with her one free hand as Debbie rushed for rags and rug cleaner and then vigorously scrubbed at the spot.
“Hey, what’s all the noise about?” Ethan asked, appearing belatedly at the entrance to the room. “Hey, Ron, come back here,” he urged, steering Ron back down the hallway. “I added a new memory card and defragged your hard drive.”
“Sorry about this,” Erica repeated while swabbing at the perimeters of the spot with her one free hand.
“Ron bought me that paperweight the year Jared was born. It’s his favorite.” Debbie poked around the legs of the coffee table with her Dustbuster. “You buttoned your blouse up wrong,” she noted. “It’s hanging funny.”
“I could buy you another one.” Erica rebuttoned her blouse, but it still pulled at the bustline.
“Ron found that one at an antiques store in Albany. I doubt it’s replaceable.” Debbie wiped down the coffee table with Windex. “This house looks like a hurricane hit it,” she complained.
“Then why invite the hurricane to visit,” Erica thought. Her four children were like her body: overflowing, excessive, unruly. “I think that table is as clean as it’s going to get,” she said as Debbie dug her paper towel into the interstices between the glass and the brass knobs at the corners.
“Oh, I suppose,” Debbie said, giving it one more swipe. “I just wanted to make sure any slivers of glass are gone. If one of those gets ingrained in your skin, you can get a nasty infection.”
Debbie looked at her expectantly, as if expecting Erica to say something to restore the social equilibrium. Erica couldn’t remember a time when Debbie hadn’t made her feel guilty of crimes sometimes obvious but more frequently undisclosed. She’d never been “nice” enough to satisfy Debbie, if one accepted Debbie’s definition of “nice.” She’d never been appreciative enough of Debbie’s obligatory kindnesses, never considerate enough of her troubles, never respectful of her immaculate housekeeping, on the whole an aggravating embarrassment.
She wanted to get the hell out of Debbie’s house. While Erica feeling inadequate around her sister was a standard condition of her life, Debbie’s aspect this past week differed in an uncomfortable way. There was something wrong going on with her, something as erratic and unpredictable as Vince Volvo’s stalling engine. That wavery voice that came and went, that ephemeral tremulousness, those bruises that showed themselves only to vanish under a neatly cuffed sleeve. They all called out to her to pay more attention than she had the bandwidth for. Debbie was hiding something, but Erica wasn’t sure she wanted to find out what it was. Not tonight, anyway.
“We’d better go,” she said. “It’s past the twins’ bedtime.” She stuck her head into the den, where Ron sat hunched over the computer, playing a defragged version of, no surprise, Leisure Suit Larry. “Where’s Ethan?” she asked.
“I bored him, I guess,” he said. “I think he’s outside.”
She retrieved the kids from Jared’s bedroom, wondering where he hid his stash, safe from Debbie’s relentless housekeeping and Ron’s evil eye.
“Bye, Jared,” she said.
“Yeah, it was good seeing you, Aunt Rikki. Thanks for coming.”
Debbie pressed several chocolate bars into Erica’s hand, already overcrowded with Sophia’s car seat handle, the twins’ sticky fingers, and the diaper bag. “Here, take these. I want to get them out of the house. Ron and I could skip the calories, and Jared is allergic to chocolate.”
“I’ll call you Monday.” Erica backed rapidly down the stairs, tearing open a chocolate wrapper as she did so. “We need to go shopping for Lauren’s bat mi
tzvah.” Ethan was standing on the sidewalk smoking one of his disgusting clove cigarettes. The door shut, and the edgy fear rising in her settled into a faint pulsing at the back of her skull, eclipsed by an overwhelming sense of relief.
CHAPTER FOUR
Erica decided, just for that night, to break her rule about no hard alcohol while nursing. She always looked forward to attending large parties in theory but inevitably changed her mind as soon as she arrived, then threaded her way through the crowd toward the alcohol source. The alcohol made her feel dizzy but settled. One night’s deviation could hardly turn her bright-eyed infant into a blithering idiot.
On a Saturday night the spring of Erica’s junior year of college, she’d been on her third glass of Purple Passion, watching the smoke rise up from the Everclear, when she spied Ethan through the haze. Outside in the Boston April, timid new leaves huddled against the gray wind, but inside his MIT dormitory Ethan carried a halo of sun about him. Ringlets of reddish-brown hair brushed his shoulders and framed the honeyed complexion of his face. He wore jeans and a collarless Indian cotton shirt and a vest that looked like it had come from a vintage store. The combination of shock and Purple Passion glued her in place.
Ethan remained capable of movement, though, and responded to her dumbfounded stare by sidling over. “Hi,” he said.
“What’s your major?” she asked, because her conversational gambits were as pathetic as the pimply, polyester clad physics students surrounding her.
“Economics,” he replied, and after a couple hours she followed him upstairs into his dorm room and into the rest of his life.
: : :
The door to the banquet room of this Grant Fishel extravaganza consisted of two thick panels of etched-glass flamingoes edged with cherrywood. Erica fixed its location in her head, like she would the exit door of an airplane. A couple of conversation clusters away, Ethan’s head bobbed up and down enthusiastically. The drink of choice at this gathering was a frothy combo of peach puree, champagne, and liqueur, called a Bellini; Erica was sipping her third, but she still felt in danger of either floating away or crashing. The oversize room—converted industrial space—felt insubstantial and fragile. There were tin squares on the ceiling, green glass tiles on the walls. The conversations of hundreds of people echoed metallically.
She wore a black washed-silk dress with a low-cut V-neck, all slinky and slidey, procured by her mother at a 75 percent discount. She’d assured Erica it was a designer dress with timeless style. Erica’s thighs pressed against the smoothness of her skirt, which skimmed the tops of her knees. She wasn’t sure it was the most flattering length or fabric. Parts of her anatomy jutted out at every opportunity. At least, unlike most of the other women in the room, she wasn’t wearing a poufy floral dress with a giant bow at the back, looking as if she’d been stranded in time at her senior prom. She was wearing her mother’s jewelry: sunburst earrings of twenty-four karat gold and cubic zirconia, a gold bracelet with another chunk of zirconia at its center, and a genuine diamond pendant Dad had given her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Erica fingered the pendant to reassure herself that the diamonds were still there. A waiter walked by offering beluga caviar on toast points, and she tossed a couple in her mouth.
She maneuvered her way to Ethan and placed her hand lightly on his arm. He squeezed her arm back in recognition but continued his stultifying conversation about designations or assignations or acquisitions. Erica drifted off again. She worried about the foundation she was wearing, another suggestion of her mother’s. When she’d glanced in her rearview mirror after dropping the kids off at Lisa’s, her complexion had looked sallow and fake.
Driving here, she’d cruised sleekly over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and parked in a garage only two blocks away from this renovated factory. Ethan was happy to let her drive the Mercedes. At home in California, he navigated freeways with equanimity, shifting lazily between lanes, adjusting the radio, resting his hands ever so lightly on the wheel. But he’d never truly adjusted to driving in New York City, intimidated by the maze of roadways, the squeegee men, the taxis darting out of nowhere. Erica planted her gaze on the etched-glass birds marking the exit. If only she could walk through those swinging wooden doors, retrieve the Mercedes, and dart through tangles of lights like one of the bouncing balls in her boys’ Nintendo games.
“Erica! You look wonderful as usual! Where did you get that dress? Is it vintage?”
She turned in the direction of the voice to see Ethan’s boss’s wife, whose name she had forgotten, wobble towards her in five inch heels. The wife was about ten years older than Erica, sporting a lavender-and-turquoise concoction that bunched like runaway cotton candy just below her tush.
“Thanks,” Erica said. “But it’s not vintage. My mother gave it to me.”
“Well, I love it,” said Mrs. No-Name. “So different! How’s your new baby girl?” She jiggled her alligator skin purse, which matched her alligator skin heels and clashed totally with the prom dress. Mrs. No-Name seemed as uncomfortable as Erica was, shifting back and forth in her tight shoes, her designer tag jutting out from her neckline.
“She’s doing great,” Erica said. “This is our first night out in the city since she was born.”
“Oh, you must be so exhausted. I remember those times. My littlest one is fourteen now, you know.” Mrs. No-Name smiled expectantly while Erica’s mind raced, searching for her name. Maybe if she wasn’t so exhausted, her mind would function more efficiently. From a cooperative neuronal cluster, she retrieved a comment this woman had made at the last Grant Fishel event—a moonlight cruise—about her upcoming kitchen renovation, accompanied, thank goodness, by her conveniently alliterative name, Shelley Stanley. “How’s your kitchen coming along, Shelley?” she asked, accenting the Shelley part. A waiter—cute, with curly brown hair—proffered Bellini number four, and Erica accepted.
“Oh, the kitchen’s taking forever,” Shelley said. “Our first contractor quit in the middle of the job, would you believe it? Left our new center island sitting in the middle of the family room and disappeared. I finally found another contractor—we’re suing the first one—and then it turned out that the Sub-Zero refrigerator I ordered was too high for the alcove, so we had to break open the ceiling, and you wouldn’t believe the dust! Of course, Stewart didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, he’s so oblivious. . .”
Erica let the stream of words pulse over her like a soothing shower, obviating her need to respond in any way but a pleasant smile. But Shelley eventually paused, awaiting a response.
“Shelley, I know what you mean,” Erica said. “Our kitchen renovation took forever too. They sent the wrong tiles, six-inch instead of four-inch, so for two weeks we had no floor tiles at all, only subfloor, and now I hate the tiles I ordered. My sister convinced me to get them. They’re white. Do you know how constantly you have to clean white tiles with four kids?” Erica wobbled slightly, spilling her Bellini down the V-shaped bustline of her dress. The drink dribbled down her cleavage, leaving a sticky trail and finally clotting at her belly button.
“Let me clean you up,” Shelley said, blotting up the exposed part of the mess with her cocktail napkin. “Nice talking to you,” Shelley said after she was done and sashayed off into the crowd.
“Ah, the lovely Bellini,” said a short guy with thinning hair and horn-rim glasses.
“Pardon me?” Erica looked down at the trace of stain at her belly.
“Alcohol is always better than soft drinks. Soft drinks go straight to your hips while providing no pleasure.”
“So true.” Her dress, wet from where Shelley had dabbed it, clung to her rounded belly.
“Stephan Langston,” said Mr. Horn Rim, extending his hand. “Hey, look over there,” he said.
Don Johnson, brighter than TV, brighter than life, was striding toward them, unintentionally perhaps, but nonetheless drawing closer and clos
er.
“Oh my God,” Erica whispered.
“I’ll leave you two be,” said Stephan.
Don and Erica’s shoulders brushed. They were the same height. She could see directly into his warm brown eyes, rich and languid. “Excuse me,” Don said, presumably in relation to their accidentally bumping into each other. But now that he’d stopped, he smiled, all white teeth, extending his hand.
Somehow Erica managed to return the gesture, saying, “Nice to meet you, Don,” looking down at their clasped hands, fixing the moment in her consciousness.
Don was wearing a Miami Vice suit: white jacket, black T-shirt, a hint of tanned chest. A golden glow radiated from his every pore, reminding Erica of her first sight of Ethan, only more so. Her silky dress untethered from her belly and slithered over her skin.
“I love Miami Vice,” she heard herself say. “I watch it every week.” Their hands remained clasped.
“Thanks,” Don replied offhandedly. “It’s fun.”
“I’d love to see Miami sometime,” Erica said, even though she’d never before connected televised Florida, the one encapsulating her ineffable desires, with the Florida she knew personally, the one containing elderly relatives and all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. “I want to stand on Miami Beach,” she continued, “you know, my toes in the water, the sunset turning the ocean all pink, and there’d be a slight breeze up, and I’d be standing there in a cotton dress, with a margarita in my hand.”
Don’s hand dropped away, but his maple-syrup eyes still latched onto her like she was the only person in the world, his expression soft and serious. He did not pass judgment on the Bellini clutched in Erica’s half-open palm. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
Erica sank into his rapt, intense gaze. She loved a gaze like that more than anything. In her mind, guitar chords built to a crescendo. She allowed herself to believe that he did know, that he grasped the enormity of her desires, that pulsing hunger. She imagined the two of them standing under a palm tree, having narrowly escaped with their lives. In her fantasy world, Don tipped her chin up with his hand, as if to kiss her. She could see the blond stubble on his chin. Back in the real world of the Grant Fishel party, that stubble hovered so close she could touch it.
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