by Susan Shreve
Jess stood in the doorway, watching her sisters.
The corridor was empty except for a small man — young, a little plump, but cute. Cute, like a little boy, with black hair and straight-across bangs. He was wearing jeans and a bright green shirt with a button-down collar and the sleeves folded up. He looked as if he was waiting for the elevator, but when the elevator stopped at the sixth floor, when Teddy and Whee got in and disappeared, the small man was still standing beside the elevators. Then, with the snap of the closing doors, he turned toward Jess as if he was headed in her direction. Instinctively, she backed into the room, shut the door, and put Baby Ruby on her back in the middle of the bed.
Then, returning to the door, she opened it a crack, just enough to see the same man, now in sunglasses, peering down the hallway, and then, as if on cue, Baby Ruby started to scream her high-pitched, breathless cry. Jess rushed back to the bed to pick Ruby up, walking her back and forth across the room to stop her tears.
When Ruby settled down, Jess put her on a towel on the carpeted floor, watching her raise her tiny arms in the air to examine her hands.
Four months old, round and pink, with cotton-puff yellow hair that stuck straight up, little red lips like a circle drawn where the mouth belonged, and soon, soon, maybe before the eight p.m. bottle — Jess knew from experience — Baby Ruby would be crying bloody murder, because that is what she did.
Danny had left Beet’s breast milk on the counter of the kitchenette. In the light pouring through the window, the milk was bluish white and thin, not at all like milk, and Jess wondered if all breast milk was like this or possibly only Beet’s milk — pale sourpuss Beet O’Fines, making washed-out blue milk.
She put the bottles in the tiny fridge, took a package of M&M’s from the hospitality basket on the counter, and ate them one by one, watching Ruby O’Fines do nothing at all but stare at the overhead light and make little sounds of ooooooooo and aaaaaaaaa and mmmmmm in the back of her throat.
Jess checked the clock beside the bed. Seven o’clock, an hour before the bottle, before Danny O’Fines would be giving his important toast to Whee, who would be crying. In Jess’s chair at the head table, next to Aldie, Teddy would be preparing to have a panic attack.
She stopped, shhhed Baby Ruby, and there Teddy was — whoop — beeping on Jess’s cell phone.
You okay? Teddy had written. Having fun?
Jess rolled over on her stomach and hit the REPLY button on her phone.
Baby Ruby is blah blah blahing away on the floor. Beet’s breast milk is sitting on the counter and I’m thinking of leaving this hotel room for Paris. And you?
There was a beep before Jess even sat up.
Having a blast, Teddy had written. PANIC ATTACK! The EMTs should be here any minute.
Jess flipped her cell phone shut and hung over the bed watching Baby Ruby, whose little round legs were waving in the air as she reached out hopelessly to catch a foot.
“Hi, Ruby,” Jess said.
“Mmmmmmm,” Ruby replied.
“Hungry?”
“Mmmmmmm.”
“The only thing I have here is Beet’s breast milk and I can’t imagine that’s good for you.”
“Oooooo.”
“Just you and me, Ruby, not invited to the party.”
“Oooooo.”
“Exactly. Maybe it’s good for you so far, but that’ll change pretty soon. Look at me, in a hotel room taking care of a baby when my new dress is stuffed in a suitcase all by itself.”
Jess slid off the bed and lay down next to Ruby, chin in hand, watching the baby girl smiling her furtive little smile, her lips turned up like quotation marks, a dimple in one corner of her mouth.
“I’m very sorry about your father, my brother, my imbecile brother. If you’d looked for all the possible fathers to choose from, you could have done a great deal better.”
“Mmmmm.”
Baby Ruby was getting sleepy — a long stare, her eyelids fluttering, her hand playing with her ear.
“We’ll find the perfect father for you, lamb chop,” Jess whispered in a singsong voice. “And then we can ditch your mother and I’ll take her place. We’ll travel. We’ll get a dog.”
Another whoop and Jess opened her cell phone to Teddy’s new message.
Listen Jess. I have a thought — do something BIG like bolt the hotel. Take Baby Ruby with you. Maybe even Whee’s wedding dress. You might find it useful in Paris.
Jess lay down on the carpet, watching Baby Ruby, whose eyes were closed but fluttering. It was seven thirty, a little after, and she was thinking maybe Teddy was right — she should do something, not exactly something big, but she did have time to do something like try out Whee’s new makeup.
At least Whee shouldn’t mind if she tried on the makeup. Just a little.
Not the wedding dress.
She opened the door quickly, closed it, and turned on the light.
The bathroom was huge, with a mirror that stretched across the double sink, a shower with a glass door, a bathtub, and a bidet, which Jess had never seen before, but this was her first trip to California. The bidet looked to Jess like a small toilet for children, perhaps. The sink counter held Whee’s makeup bag, a small suitcase, and her wedding shoes, which were red satin, pencil-thin high heels.
She opened the suitcase, blue with a blue silky lining, and inside she found white lace bikini underwear, a strapless bra, a blue garter, an old lace handkerchief, and, in a jewel box, a diamond on a slender chain.
Jess looked at herself in the wide mirror behind the sink. Her body was larger than she remembered when they had left Larchmont for the airport just that morning. Even her face, normally a regular face, not even plump, with a shadow of cheekbones and no double chin, looked as if it had spread in the last twelve hours. She unzipped her sundress and stepped out of it. Took off her underwear and stood on the toilet so she could examine herself in full in the mirror.
What she saw was not good news. All she had had to eat since she’d left home was a bag of chips on the plane and two orange juices, chicken salad for lunch with one muffin and butter and jam, and a chocolate milk shake with Teddy after they arrived at the hotel. There was no reason for her to expand this quickly in a single day.
She hopped off the toilet, opened the door very slowly to check on Baby Ruby, who was sleeping just as she had been when Jess went in the bathroom. She hung her sundress on a hook and closed the door again.
Whee’s wedding dress was hanging in a large plastic bag in the shower to steam out the wrinkles, Whee had told her.
“The dress is a secret,” Whee had told Jess.
“From everyone?” Jess asked.
“Pretty much. Only Mom has seen it.”
Jess unzipped the bag.
The dress was strapless, with tiny pearls scattered like raindrops across the bodice. She pulled it out of the bag — carefully, carefully — Whee would kill her — and held it up to her own body, which was not so tall.
Then she picked up the makeup bag, set it on the sink, and turned on the water.
Every kind of makeup was there, as if Whee had stripped the cosmetic store of its stock — lipsticks, lip gloss, mascara in two colors, eyeliner, lip liner in four colors, eye shadow in sky blue and turquoise, concealer, foundation, loose powder, blush. Jess set it all out on the sink counter and started with foundation. She poured it in her palms, rubbed her hands together, and spread it across her face. In the mirror, under the bright light, it concealed the multitude of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Then she traced her eyelids with the dark blue eyeliner, the way she’d seen Whee and her mother do, brushed on sky-blue eye shadow, and applied mascara, which she had to put on twice because it smudged. The water was still running but Jess wasn’t aware of the sound any longer, wasn’t even aware of Baby Ruby sleeping in the next room, or whether she might be crying, or even if she could hear her if she did.
Slowly, she transformed her small, freckled face into a thing of beaut
y. A face for the fashion magazines that Whee leafed through, looking at the pictures of models with their pouty mouths and wide eyes.
She chose raspberry lipstick, peach blush. In the mirror, she looked beautiful. She put the tops on the makeup and zipped up the bag.
Leaning against the wall, she considered Whee’s wedding dress.
It was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen. Did she dare? If she tried it on, really quickly just to see herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door, would she be sorry? It could be too small, especially around the waist since Whee was thin. It could rip. And then what? And what about Whee? It wasn’t Whee’s fault that Jess was babysitting during the rehearsal dinner.
She took the white lace strapless bra out of the basket on the bidet and took the wedding dress off its hanger, unzipping the side, the dress over her head, sliding down her arms, her torso. It was heavy, a little stiff, and it almost fit, but she couldn’t zip it up because the zipper was in the back. She checked the mirror, adjusted the front of the dress so it lay flat against her chest, her head up, no jewelry, only makeup.
Makeup!
And she’d put the dress on over her head.
Oh god, she thought. Could lipstick or concealer or powder or blush have gotten on the dress? She glanced through half-closed eyes. Nothing, nothing, and then she just saw a tiny mark at the top of the dress, tiny, tiny, tiny, she thought, and concealed by the pearls strewn over the front.
Would Whee notice? Or would she be too nervous to notice anything except how beautiful she was.
A jumble of thoughts rushed through Jess’s mind, and suddenly she remembered that she had left Baby Ruby lying on her back on a terry cloth towel in the middle of the bedroom.
She turned off the water and listened.
Nothing.
Slowly, her heart pounding in her head, warm blood sinking to her feet, a weak sick feeling in her stomach, she opened the bathroom door.
Jess was seven when her parents announced they were getting a divorce.
It was a Tuesday in June, the week after the Larchmont public schools shut down for the summer, and the family had just grilled hamburgers in the backyard. Dessert was ice-cream sandwiches, Jess’s favorite, which she would later throw up on the blue-and-white-striped rug in her bedroom.
All of the O’Fineses were there: Jess, Teddy, Whee, and Danny, in a bad humor since he had made plans to go into the city to meet friends.
“Let’s retire to the living room,” Aldie had said. “It looks like rain.”
“Why do we need to retire at all?” Danny asked. “I’ve made other arrangements for tonight.”
“I told you that your father and I wanted to speak to all of you together after dinner. Did you forget?” Delilah asked.
“I just hoped you’d forget,” Danny said, following his father into the television room, where they sat, Delilah and Aldie side by side on a piano bench, the children, not exactly still children, sinking into the sectional.
Aldie spoke first, a hitch in his voice as if he were about to weep, something Danny pointed out later.
“Did you check Dad out? He was almost crying. Obviously, this decision was Mom’s,” he told his siblings.
“After years of deliberation, your mother and I have concluded that we are going to separate,” Aldie began, as if he were a stranger reading a script for a play.
“Years of deliberation?” Danny asked. “What does that mean?”
“It means that we are taking this very seriously and have discussed it for a long time,” Delilah said.
“Our family means everything to your mother and me,” Aldie added.
Delilah would stay in the family house with Jess and Teddy, who was eleven; Aldie would move to an apartment in New York City; Whee would be leaving for college in a year; and Danny was already a sophomore at Tufts in Boston. Chaucer, the family’s black lab, would continue to live with Delilah in Larchmont, although Madeline, the parakeet, would be given away.
Poor Madeline, Jess was thinking. Why should she suffer when she’s just a bird?
“I want to go back to what you referred to as years of deliberation,” Danny said. “How many years have you been thinking about a divorce?”
Delilah shrugged.
“What do you think, Aldie? Six, seven?”
“Eight,” Aldie said with confidence, as if he had in mind a fixed date when the troubles began.
“That’s a long time,” Whee said.
“I guess there’s nothing to say,” Danny said.
“You should feel free to ask us anything at all,” Aldie said.
Jess made a funny sound in her throat, as if she might be sick.
“I have nothing to ask,” Danny said.
“Whee?”
Whee shook her head.
“I’d really like to cut this short,” Danny said.
“If that’s the way you want it.” Aldie glanced at Delilah, who was tapping her fingernails against the wooden bench.
“Girls?” Aldie asked.
But no one spoke.
Jess and Teddy sat on the sectional, pressed together, looking down at their laps.
“Do you girls have any worries?” Aldie asked gently.
“No worries for sure,” Teddy said in a tinny voice. “So …” She didn’t finish.
“So?” Aldie asked.
“So if we’re finished with the conversation, why don’t you guys go,” Teddy said. “Leave the family room.”
Aldie got up and clapped his hands together, saying he and Delilah wanted to see the new Woody Allen movie and the family was invited to join them.
“I don’t think so,” Danny said, finishing the rest of his father’s beer. “But have a good time.”
The children stood at the south window of the family room and watched their parents climb into the old Volvo and back out of the driveway.
“The movies! What are they thinking about?” Whee asked. “As if tonight, when they’ve put an end to our lives forever, is just a normal night and off they go in the car to the movies as if nothing whatever has happened.”
“So they have been lying to us for eight years?” Teddy asked.
“Not lying exactly,” Whee said. “They’ve been trying to work things out, whatever that means.”
“I hate them,” Teddy said.
“So, eight years ago. What was going on then?” Danny asked. “I was twelve and had just been asked to repeat sixth grade.”
“I was nine,” Whee said. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything of my childhood except trying to be perfect all the time. Teddy was almost four.”
“And I wasn’t born,” Jess said.
“That’s right,” Whee said. “You weren’t born until the next May.”
Jess collapsed on the sofa and rested her head on Teddy’s shoulder.
“So why did they decide to have me if they were thinking of getting a divorce?”
“That’s a good question. Why did they?” Danny asked.
“I think I know why,” Whee said, sitting in the wing chair next to the sofa. “I mean their marriage was getting unhappy, so what do they do to make it happy? They make another baby to liven things up.”
“What does that mean?” Jess asked.
“It means you were a Save-the-Marriage Baby, Jess.” Whee kicked off her flip-flops, crossed her legs, and rested her feet on the coffee table.
“A what?” Jess asked.
“A new beautiful little baby is what they were thinking, and then they wouldn’t need to get a divorce.”
“Brilliant, Whee,” Danny said. “I’m sure you’re right. Jessica O’Fines, the Save-the-Marriage Baby.”
And ever after that night when Jess was seven, her siblings called her the Save-the-Marriage Baby, long before Jess even thought about the consequences of divorce or sex or what it was to be a normal girl in a normal family.
“So they didn’t really want me?” Jess asked.
“They wanted you,
and they also wanted you to save their marriage,” Teddy said.
“Actually, a failed Save-the-Marriage Baby is what you are,” Danny said, laughing and hugging his little sister as if they all thought it was very funny.
But it wasn’t a bit funny to Jess.
So the Save-the-Marriage Baby hadn’t worked. The marriage wasn’t saved. Her father moved to an apartment in New York City. Her mother stayed in the house with Jess and Teddy and Chaucer, often crying at the dinner table.
And finally, in some complicated way that Jess didn’t exactly understand, the divorce became her fault.
She had not been good enough or smart enough or pretty enough or strong enough to save her parents’ marriage, and so their lives as a family were ruined.
And that was a fact.
Teddy was sitting next to her father at the head table in the Bay Room of the Brambles Hotel, watching him wind his short, freckled fingers around the wineglass. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at his hair, which had been thin and gray and now was thin and blond.
“Dyed,” her mother whispered.
“What kind of man dyes his hair?” Teddy asked.
Delilah shrugged.
“Your father. That kind.”
Her father, Aldie O’Fines, was about to get up to give the opening toast for Whee and Victor’s rehearsal dinner, beads of perspiration creeping across his bright red face.
Teddy slouched down in her chair.
Whatever it was he had to say would certainly embarrass her. Sentimental or sickly sweet is what she expected and that is exactly what happened when he started to talk about Whee, my first daughter, my darling baby girl, his eyes filling with tears.
“I hope he doesn’t cry,” Delilah was saying.
“Too late,” Teddy said. “He’s crying.”
“Were you listening?” Delilah whispered as Aldie ended his speech, the sweet gardenia smell of her perfume floating under Teddy’s nose, making her queasy.
“Louisa Adele O’Fines, light of my life, heart of my heart, good-bye and good luck!” her father said.
“I was listening,” Teddy said.