“You look like the Statue of Liberty,” Erica said, giggling.
“That’s what this is,” he replied, deadpan. “A Statue of Liberty hairdo.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to dance to ‘YMCA’ with me?” Erica asked. “I have no idea how a song about casual gay sex came to be so popular at bar mitzvahs.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Jared grimaced. “I think I’ll remain in these elegant environs for a while.”
: : :
Erica steadied herself under the crystal chandelier in the marble lobby and then dove back into the sea. The entire blue room teemed with schools of fish: whales, sharks, brightly colored tropical species warbling their bubbly oceanic songs, ancient fish with bald tops and gray tops and even flaming red tops, parentfish and cousinfish and neighborfish. There were tons of teenfish, the females preternaturally mature in their low-cut black dresses and mascara, the males shorter by a foot, hanging back in their ill-fitting suits. Kiddiefish, in miniature tuxes and elaborate pink taffeta dresses with matching hair ribbons darted through the under layer. On the dance platform, Debbie, the silverfish, performed an approximation of her high school cheerleading routine, jumping up and clapping her hands over her head, then crouching and kicking her heels out in a pushup. Ron, the slithery eel, stood flattened against the wall, ready to pounce and gobble his prey whole.
Erica swam over to Debbie and did ten jumping jacks.
“Rah, rah, go, Wolverines!” Debbie cried, grabbing Erica’s hands and swinging her around, just as the DJ went silent, and the room darkened again.
Up by where the movie screen had been, Lauren and her parents stood in front of a large candelabra. Lauren read shyly from a folded yellow sheet:
They always like to joke and play.
I love them more than I can say.
Grandpa Stan and Grandma Jill, come
and light my first candle.
Erica rejoined Ethan at the table as Grandpa Stan and Grandma Jill, wearing a lime-green pantsuit with tufts at the shoulders that resembled giant kelp, walked smilingly over to their granddaughter Lauren and lit their candle and then posed for both the photographer and videographer. Erica clenched her jaw muscles to suppress her rising laughter. Lauren continued to the second verse.
Whether we swim or whether we ski,
at their Vermont house I like to be.
Grandpa Dan and Grandma Hetty, come
and light my second candle.”
Grandma Hetty stood close to six feet and two hundred pounds, wearing a shocking-pink sheath dress. The laugh rose higher and settled in Erica’s mouth.
“Why do they make so much fuss about a thirteen-year-old’s birthday party?” Ethan whispered before turning his polite face back to the crowd. Verses droned on, as Erica gripped Ethan’s hand tightly, averting her eyes from any more giggle-inducing fashion mistakes by watching the fish float by overhead. Lauren’s voice shook her out of her reverie.
Their house is fun and full of toys
with a baby girl and three boys
Ethan and Erica, come and light my tenth candle.
Still gripping Ethan’s hand, Erica rose unsteadily to her feet, and they walked toward the candle table. Her cousin Amelia, Lauren’s mother, handed her a lighted match. The world was drenched in royal blue, luminescent and ludicrous. Fish swam gently through the air, their glassy eyes fixed on her. At table seven sat Ronfish, the slimy diamondback eel with the greasy-blond-hair fin. Next to him sat the small, round brown-fringed, silver-bodied Debbiefish, her impassive marine eyes betraying nothing. Erica gaped dumbly in the blueness, the beady eyes of the fish upon her, murmurs rippling through the ocean, an impatient white flash of the videographic sun. Ethan guided her hand, as if through mud, toward the candle. The wavering flame infused the room with a certain beauty.
Back at her seat, a plate of salmon, rice, and undercooked zucchini awaited her. She chewed a bite of salmon slowly and carefully. Lukewarm and drowning in an unctuous white sauce, it tasted distinctly off. She imagined bacteria crawling up and down the flakes of fish, a salmonella superhighway. Lauren continued reading:
They’ve always been my special friends,
with lots of books and games to lend
Ron and Debbie, come up and light my eleventh candle.
Debbie, poised and smooth, lit candle eleven as Ron stood stiffly at her side.
“I met my best friend in second grade—” continued Lauren.
From table seven a voice drowned out Lauren’s monotone: a growl, arising from the Ronfish.
“Don’t give me that look, young man!”
Jared rotated his green scales in the direction of his father.
“Are you making fun of me?” Ron roared. “Wipe that ridiculous grin off your face!”
Debbie, the pretty silverfish, hung motionless, riveted to her chair.
There was silence as Lauren stopped midpoem. Then a splat, as Jared took the roasted potatoes a waiter had just placed in front of him and tossed them at Ron’s chest. Then a louder sploosh as Ron heaved his entire plate—rare prime rib, potatoes, spinach—into Jared’s face. Then Debbie’s muffled whimper, and Jared rushing to her lap like a little child, and blood, either from the prime rib or Jared’s nose, dripping onto her silver dress.
“What in God’s name?” said Ethan, clearly wishing he could teleport himself from the scene.
Erica knew she needed to do something, but her body refused to react. A bumpy, clumpy sturgeon of a fish, she stood plastered to the sea floor.
Lauren, newly thirteen and clueless, returned to the verse she’d already started:
I met my best friend in second grade,
when with My Little Pony we played.
Steffie, come up and light my twelfth candle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Back home, Erica dumped the boys’ party favors—goldfish swimming gamely in plastic bags—into a glass salad bowl. Ethan stripped down to his underwear and settled next to her on the couch.
“Want to watch that movie about Amazon women from Venus?” he asked. “It’s on again.”
“Debbie isn’t answering her phone,” Erica said. “What do you think is going on?”
“Haven’t you had enough family melodrama for one night?” said Ethan, flipping on the movie.
“All Jared did was give Ron a funny look!”
“Yeah, Ron. My delightful brother-in-law. The one who’s always asking me to program pornography into his computer. The one who tosses his dinner around.”
On television, gargantuan blond women sunned themselves in a tropical Venusian valley.
“Jared is innocent,” Erica said.
“I feel sorry for the kid. But, you know, we have four of our own—isn’t that enough to worry about? My sister lost her job and my brother drinks too much; you don’t notice me dropping everything and hopping on a plane, do you?”
“Our family is different.” Erica ate barbequed potato chips out of the bag.
“Jared’s going to be all right,” Ethan said, grabbing a handful of chips. “His hair color will return to normal. He’ll reconcile with his good old dad. Maybe he’ll even join the Marines.”
“I doubt it,” Erica said.
Ethan sighed. “You know, just for once on a Saturday night it might be nice not to go to a bar mitzvah or a wedding or a graduation. We could go to a movie. A restaurant. We could get a good night’s sleep.”
Erica turned her attention to the movie. A flying reptile attacked. The Amazon women wore seashell bras. She laughed so hard she rolled over and fell into Ethan’s leg.
: : :
Monday, Erica poured the last of the coffee into the oversize mug Dylan made for last Mother’s Day. Vince Volvo was finally home and humming, one hassle off her back. Lisa called to remind her to fill out registration forms for Camp W
hispering Wind, where Dylan and Jason had spent their summers the past three years. But overwhelmed by their number and complexity—page after page of health, legal, and athletic preferences—Erica dialed Debbie’s number at the salon instead. She couldn’t let go of the image of the blood dripping down Jared’s face, and most of all she couldn’t let go of the image of Debbie passively watching events unfold, pretty and stunned and frozen.
The moment Debbie answered the phone, in work mode, all brisk and assertive, Erica regretted her impulse. Why was Debbie assertive only at times when it didn’t matter? She could have tossed some undercooked broccoli. She could have dumped a glass of cheap Chianti on Ron’s greasy head.
“What’s wrong, Rikki? I’m rolling crème developer in a client’s hair. She’ll turn platinum blond if I don’t get off the phone quick.”
“I wanted to let you know that I talked to Jared, like you asked me to. At Lauren’s bat mitzvah. But the next thing I know your husband is throwing a plate of meat in his face, so I was wondering how he was doing.”
Debbie sighed. “You interrupted me at work for that? Everything is under control, Rikki. It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not all right! You don’t throw food in your child’s face!” Erica crumpled a corner of the Sunday Times in her fist, a paper she had not yet even glanced at, even though it was Monday afternoon already.
Debbie sighed again, weak and reedy now. “I can’t have private conversations like this at work, Rikki, or I’ll lose my job. Jared presses Ron’s buttons, that’s all. He’s got serious problems, and we’re dealing with them. I really have to go, Rikki. I’ve got the most awful headache today.”
Well, all righty then. A headache she claimed, an ailment no doubt as dubious as Jared’s stomachaches. The blood dripping from Jared’s chin, and Debbie’s bruises, for that matter, were physical facts, but evidently it wasn’t nice to call attention to them.
Erica uncrinkled the Times. Maybe, as Ethan always implied, the incessant Lassler family drama resembled those tropical storms weather forecasters so eagerly reported, the ones that never coalesced into the disastrous hurricane they kept predicting. Might as well shift gears and see what was happening in the wider world. Under a boldface headline, an article about Grant Fishel stared her in the face:
“Grant Fishel’s quantitative analysis department is changing the stodgy face of investment banking, plunging into areas that prior generations dared not touch.”
And then her husband’s name: “‘We aren’t reactors—we’re actors,’” stated star analyst Ethan Richards.”
And more: “Buoyed by success, analysts, brokers, and traders are pulling down seven-figure salaries. Trader Stephan Langston is reputed to have earned a record three million last year.”
Stephan Langston’s name sounded vaguely familiar.
Ethan rarely spoke about his work, and when he did, he totally confused her. What he did for a living sounded significant yet tedious, with the tiniest hint of thrill and defiance, if thrill and defiance could coexist with investment banking. Whatever he actually did, it generated money like nothing she’d ever experienced. No matter how much money she managed to spend, their bank balance inevitably floated upward like a constantly rising lake.
She presumed their economic status was another thing Debbie must resent. Debbie never mentioned anything specifically, but Ron never missed an opportunity. “Well, if I worked on Wall Street, I might have ceramic tile on my floors instead of linoleum. If I worked on Wall Street, I might vacation in Carmel instead of on the Jersey Shore. If I worked on Wall Street, I might buy those snazzy running shoes.”
Mom always rambled on about how Ron barely made ends meet at WBEZ, as if the circumstances of Debbie’s life rained down on her from above, with no agency on her part. No one had commanded Debbie to marry the creep. Just like no one made her date that idiot Randy Wasserman, the one with the open bottles of beer in the car, who rolled his car into a ditch after homecoming, tearing Debbie’s left meniscus. Her parents never so much as lectured Debbie after the accident but actually bought her a Volkswagen Beetle, so she wouldn’t have to walk to school.
On the other hand, despite the genetic misfortune of being Ron’s son, Jared struck her as someone she could spend time with, not merely out of obligation but out of genuine affinity. She couldn’t push him out of her mind. What was he doing now? Taking a history test? Waiting to see the gastroenterologist? Getting high in the boys’ room?
The doorbell rang, and as if she’d summoned him up from her imagination, Jared stood in front of her. He looked a little sheepish and a lot less outrageous than at Lauren’s bat mitzvah, wearing a loose pair of olive khakis and a Clash T-shirt, greenish hair flattened down messily against his scalp. A petite skinny girl with long blond hair, tight jeans, and a fuzzy sweater stood next to him, her thin arm wrapped around his waist. She had a vague, lost look in her eyes and a strange but oddly attractive air of premature dissipation. She looked to Erica like a cheerleader gone wrong.
“I was telling Ashley how cool you are, and she said she wanted to meet you,” Jared said. “She babysits. I thought you might need a babysitter.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Richards,” Ashley said, sauntering over to Sophia’s playpen. Sophia, sporting a new pair of yellow overalls with an embroidered parrot on the chest, was poking the squeaky cow on her baby activity box.
“Oh, Mrs. Richards, I just love your little girl’s overalls!” Ashley reached down and tickled Sophia’s chin. “This one family I babysit for, they have a little girl with the same overalls, only they’re red. I love dressing her. She’s like a little baby doll. I can’t wait until I have my own babies.”
“Thank you,” Erica said. “But you don’t need to call me Mrs. Richards.”
“My father taught me to call adults by their last name. He was real strict about that.” Ashley moved a plastic pig along its grating Busy Box track.
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Erica said, “but ‘Mrs. Richards’ sounds pretty dorky. Almost as dorky as Rikki Richards.”
“My name’s Ashley Ann. Talk about dorky.” Ashley wandered through the family room, playing with Dylan’s, Jesse’s, and Jake’s scattered toys. She pushed their Brio train over the bridge, past the woods, and down to the station while Jared slouched around, his hands in his pockets.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Erica asked.
“Yeah, lunch is over in fifteen minutes.” Jared nodded.
“Why don’t I walk you back?” Erica said, getting Sophia’s stroller.
“What happened after the bat mitzvah?” she asked, relinquishing the stroller to Ashley at her request. Ashley carefully tilted the wheels and, looking both ways, crossed the street.
“Nothing really.” Jared shrugged. “Mom said she had a headache and shuffled off to the bedroom; then Dad followed her in there, and I took a shower and watched TV and tried to forget the whole thing. And then the next day, Mom’s all over me asking if I feel okay. She even took my temperature.”
“And your Dad?”
“Oh, he lumbered around stripping wallpaper or something. Not speaking to anyone. Then he asks me if I want to go with him to the hardware store, like some father-son bonding thing the therapist probably suggested, and I said no, why would I want to go to the stupid hardware store, so he stalked off, and I just went into my room, saying I had to do my homework and just listened to music and stuff until the evening when I snuck out my window and went to the park. You know, I can climb out my window, perch on that box where Mom grows those purple flowers, and jump down into the bushes? Mom wonders why the birds are always trashing her flowers.” Jared chuckled.
They walked past the elementary school parking lot and then cut along the paved path that adjoined the playground, continued past the middle school and all the way to the north end of a grassy plain that used to be a potato field and before tha
t, presumably, a meadow. That was one of the selling points of West Meadow Knolls: children of all ages could walk to school. The linear progression of the schools promised orderly growth, predictable, visible steps toward maturity.
The high school was a sprawling U-shaped brick building, constructed in the ’50s. To the left lay the football field; to the right lay a parking lot and a thin strand of trees that bordered Mackay Estates. All around them, teenagers spilled out onto the grass and squealed out of the parking lot. They sat on top of cars, stood in small groups in the muddy field, climbed onto the football bleachers.
“We have open campus since last year. Dad hates it,” Jared said.
Ashley stopped the stroller, eyeing a bunch of kids by a giant old oak tree, the last remnant of the Mackay estate woods before they were cut down to build a development of outsized Georgian colonials. Erica remembered the spot.
“When I was at West Meadow we called that the dope-smoking tree.”
“That’s kinda what it still is.” Ashley looked embarrassed.
Erica watched the kids around the tree: slouching, sitting cross-legged, posturing to each other, a few of them smoking something. A girl whispered something in a boy’s ear. Their body language had a sweet intensity to it. Erica knew she was trespassing in a world no longer hers. She couldn’t understand where all those years had vanished—thirteen years, such a long span of time, over so quickly. When she’d attended this high school, she’d wanted nothing more than to grow up and leave all this behind, to enter the magic circle of adulthood. But now the tangible reality of that passage of time made her feel sad and full of longing.
“Hey, Jared,” she said softly. “Do you think you could get me some dope sometime?’
His mouth hung open. “Did you just say what I think you said?” he asked.
“Yes,” Erica assured him.
“I can get you some right now, if you want. You wanna wait here, with the baby?”
Fast-moving clouds covered up the sun, a hint of chill drifted in. The afternoon bore a potential for excitement. Anything could happen. She watched Jared strike up a conversation with two other boys, one tall and ruddy, wearing only gym shorts and a West Meadows High T-shirt, the other one skinny and small with spiky orange hair, looking barely older than Dylan. Thirteen years ago, she had stood in this same place, made similar exchanges, felt the same intimation of deeper dimensions hidden under the thinnest of veils. Thirteen years ago, she was the one standing under that tree, the gangly girlfriend shivering in her cotton skirt and tank top, with Jeff Russell’s warm arm around her waist. Or after he broke up with her, one of the Jeff substitutes, Rob or Chris, or that guy with the wavy red hair with a weird last name like Lemonpie.
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