Once Upon a List

by Robin Gold

  “That’s what you said two minutes ago.” Leo tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel, not bothering to hide his worried expression. “You’re stalling.”

  Clara didn’t respond.

  “Look”—he paused for a moment, choosing his words carefully as he studied his younger sister—“I know you haven’t been home in a long time, and I know you’re anxious about this weekend, but it’s not gonna be that bad. Really. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time of joy, not torture.”

  “True. But you’re not the one under a microscope,” Clara mumbled in a meek voice, shrinking in her seat like a child.

  Leo shook his head. “Neither are you.” Smiling, he gave Clara’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before turning off the ignition. He threw open the car door, letting in a frosty blast of November night air. “And if Libby catches us sitting out here in the dark cold like this, she’ll only worry about you more.”

  Clara rolled her eyes. “Like that’s possible?”

  “Sorry. You know I love you.” And with that, Leo slammed his hand on the horn, alerting their anxiously awaiting mother that they were home.

  “Hallelujah! You’re here!” Libby squealed from upstairs when she heard her children enter the front door, to which a colorful WELCOME HOME CLARA! banner had been affixed. She’d planned to join Leo in retrieving Clara from the airport, but ended up stuck at home with Todd, the perpetually tardy but drop-dead gorgeous part-time piano technician, who had arrived three hours late to service her Steinway due to a last-minute gig he’d booked modeling menswear for the Sears catalogue. It was an annual holiday tradition for Libby Black, an internationally renowned winner of five Clio awards (the equivalent to an Oscar in advertising), to entertain her Thanksgiving party guests with a medley of her most famous commercial jingles, and she had no intention of performing with an instrument that didn’t share her perfect pitch. “Finally! I love you I love you I love you!” She bounded down the mahogany staircase at lightning speed with her untied bathrobe flying behind her like a superhero’s cape. When she reached the bottom, she wrapped Clara in a powerful embrace. “Clara-pie! It is so wonderful to finally have you home.” Libby squeezed her even tighter, cradling Clara’s head in the back of her hand. “Oh, thank God you’re here,” she whispered. “Thank God . . .”

  Clara had not returned to her childhood home in River Pointe, a suburb located north of Chicago and filled mostly with successful lawyers, doctors, and other “highfalutin types”—as Leo called them—since before the fatal automobile accident that claimed her fiancé’s life the previous March, less than two weeks before they were to be married. Prior to this tragedy, Clara had made it a regular habit of visiting her mother and brother at least once every few months, if not more often. The hardest part about living in Boston was not being near Leo and Libby; however, planning frequent trips to the Windy City helped dull the pain of the distance and made it at least a little bit more tolerable. Sebastian often teased Clara that if they had a dollar for every time she said, “I wish we lived closer to my family,” they would have been millionaires. Clara agreed. This was the longest period of time she had ever stayed away—a point Libby highlighted during a recent, tense telephone conversation when Clara mentioned there was a chance she might remain in Boston this year for Thanksgiving.

  “No way. Not happening, sweetheart,” Libby had threatened, worried more than ever about her depressed daughter’s increasingly withdrawn behavior. “If you believe for one second that you’re spending the holidays alone, I’m telling you right now that you’re mistaken. I am not going to let you wallow in misery doing God knows what. You may be thirty-four, but you are still my baby, and I will drive to goddamn Bean Town, throw you in the goddamn backseat, and drag you back to River goddamn Pointe myself if I have to. Do you understand me? I am not messing around,” promised Libby.

  “Yeah. I got that,” Clara had snapped.

  Libby inhaled a slow, deep breath. When she spoke again, it was with a softer, milder tone. “Believe me, Clara-pie . . . I’ve been where you are now. I lost a husband. I know how difficult the holidays are. And I know how much it hurts not to have Sebastian here. I honestly do. But, I’ve got news for you. Like it or not, you are going to have to get back in the swing of things and get on with your life. Take it from one who knows. And trust me, it will be a hell of a lot easier if you stop isolating yourself and let the people who love you in, rather than insisting on going it alone.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” countered Clara, growing short on patience.

  “Oh, that’s exactly what you’re doing,” Libby assured her.

  Sebastian had been gone for eight months now, though to Clara it felt more like an eternity, each gloomy day blending into the next. And the last thing she had wanted to do was discuss it with her mother. “Fine,” she muttered, trying her best not to dwell on the tragedy that had taken her soul mate—her anchor—away from her, leaving her drifting and unglued.

  “There’s been an accident near Logan Airport,” the solemn-sounding Boston police officer had told Clara during the haunting telephone phone call that forever altered her world. “An accident . . .”

  “Just please stop this annoying soap opera speech, Libby. I can’t take any more talk about Sebastian, okay?” Clara’s chest ached with excruciating emptiness even to conjure her fiancé’s name. “You made your point, and I will see you at Thanksgiving. Happy? Gotta run! There’s someone at the door.” Clara hung up the phone abruptly.

  There wasn’t really someone at the door.

  Now, in the warmly lit foyer of the home Clara grew up in, she remained locked in her mother’s tight, organ-crushing embrace.

  “It’s such a relief to see you,” Libby said, beaming.

  “Nice to see you too,” Clara responded halfheartedly.

  About thirty seconds later, when Libby still hadn’t let her go, she silently mouthed “Help!” to Leo, who stood nearby beside her suitcase.

  Obviously amused, he warned their mother, “Careful, now. You break her, you buy her. House rules.”

  Libby loosened her grip on Clara, but did not release her. Instead, her hands explored the length of Clara’s spine, vertebra by vertebra. Then, suddenly, they moved to both sides of Clara’s protruding ribcage, patting it up and down before she gasped, “You’re a bone! Let me look at you . . .” Finally letting her daughter go, Libby stepped backward, an alarmed expression spreading across her face. “Jesus Christ. And you’re pale as a ghost. When was the last time you ate?” She paused, gawking. “August? Honey, I have never seen you this small before.”

  “I can assure you, I’m the same size I’ve always been,” Clara muttered. “You just haven’t seen me in a while, that’s all.”

  “I can assure you, that ain’t it, kiddo. Try again. You’re practically emaciated.” Turning to Leo with one hand planted on her hip, Libby demanded, “Doesn’t your sister look emaciated?”

  “Uh . . . I—I don’t know.” He shrugged, clearly not appreciating being thrust into the spotlight. “I . . . reckon she might be a little on the skinny side.”

  “A little?” Libby parroted at the same exact time that Clara, equally surprised by her brother’s choice of words, repeated, “You reckon?” Leo had a puzzling habit of only “reckoning” things when tangled in the process of whipping up a big, fat lie. Curiously, he never seemed to “reckon” diddly-squat when telling the truth.

  “Huh.” Clara blinked at his choice of words. “You really . . . reckon?” She wondered if perhaps it might be true. Clara glanced in the bathroom mirror on most mornings after she got out of the shower when she was combing her wet hair, but she rarely, if ever, bothered to really look at her reflection. It made no difference to her anymore.

  Exasperated, Leo sighed. “What do I know?”

  Tilting her head to the side, Libby raised an index finger to her chin, examining Clara. “A
buck fifteen. A buck twenty, tops,” she announced after several contemplative seconds. “You don’t weigh a pound over. Believe me.” Libby Black had always considered herself to have two special, God-given gifts in life: one was perfect pitch, and the other was the ability to accurately assess an object’s weight without the aid of an outside instrument. The latter had earned her the nickname “The Human Scale” at the Libertyville County Fair, where she had worked for three consecutive summers during her teenage years as the Guess-Your-Weight-or-What-Month-You-Were-Born Girl. This unique skill also came in handy at the supermarket. Libby knew exactly what a pound of cherries looked and felt like, and when her children were younger, she often turned grocery shopping into a fun game, challenging them to try to stump her. If they succeeded, for their prize they could each choose any box of sugar cereal that they fancied (a stellar reward in the mind of a freeze-dried-marshmallow-obsessed girl whose personal heroes at the time included Cap’n Crunch and the monstrously dreamy Count Chocula). Clara and Leo would hand Libby what they estimated to be a one-pound bag of snap peas, she’d raise it in the air, pause, add or remove however many snap peas were necessary—one-by-one, making a theatrical show of it—and then let them race to the scale in the center of the citrus section to weigh the bag and see if she was right. She was always right. On Clara’s ninth birthday she had a sleepover party, and though Merv the Magician had been hired to enchant her guests, The Human Scale was a much bigger hit with the kids, who giggled with glee when Libby lifted them up and correctly guessed each and every one of their weights.

  Clara recognized that old, focused gleam in her mother’s big, chocolate brown eyes and, knowing exactly what was coming next, slowly started inching away from her. “No . . .” she warned, staving Libby off with both hands. “I just got home. I’m in no mood for games.”

  Tucking her chin-length, black-and-white-streaked hair behind her ear, Libby took a small step toward her daughter.

  “Seriously . . . I’m not joking,” pleaded Clara.

  Libby took another determined step forward.

  “I said don’t!”

  Suddenly, Clara darted off toward Leo.

  She had intended to use her brother’s sturdy, six-foot-two-inch frame as a shield, but her agile mother, having broken into a full gallop, was too close on her heels for her to reach her destination, forcing her to twirl around and hurry in the opposite direction.

  “Stop running! The floor was just waxed! You’ll fall, dammit!” Libby chased Clara around the elegant foyer.

  “And you wonder why I had to build up the energy to come inside?!” Clara huffed to Leo.

  “I said stop it this instant! Do you hear me?!” Libby’s arms were extended straight out in front of her.

  “Help!” Clara beseeched her brother, nearly tripping over a pair of Libby’s snow boots.

  As Clara bent forward, with arms flailing, to catch her balance, The Human Scale seized the moment with a quick lunge, grabbing her around the waist and swooping her up off the ground, such that they were facing each other with their stomachs touching. There were several inches of air between Clara’s dangling toes and the hardwood floor, which, now that it had been pointed out to her, did look particularly shiny.

  “Yep. Just like I thought.” Libby panted, trying to catch her breath. “One hundred and fifteen pounds.”

  Leo shook his head back and forth, amazed. “You truly belong inside a big orange tent beside a Bearded Lady or Frog-Boy,” he marveled. “Unbelievable . . .”

  Gently returning Clara to the ground, Libby looked deep into her daughter’s vacant eyes with an almost palpable intensity and smiled sadly. Though Leo was standing within arm’s reach, in that brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, Clara felt as if no one, or nothing else, in this whole wide world existed other than the two of them, and somehow her mother was able to see right through her and feel her agony.

  Then, without breaking her powerful gaze, Libby placed her hand on Clara’s cheek in the same, tender manner that she used to when Clara was a little girl with a boo-boo and needed to be comforted.

  “You have no idea how much I love you,” Libby whispered, quickly wiping away a single tear.

  2.

  Entering her Barbie-pink childhood bedroom with a reluctant sigh, Clara dropped her suitcase on the ground, observing that aside from Libby’s fancy new stationary bicycle set up in the corner, the space still did not appear to have been altered since she left for Boston University. Her complete collection of Sweet Valley High books remained in a neat stack beside her baton-twirling trophies on the bookshelf, the crystal tissue box was right where it had always been on the nightstand, and there was good ol’ Natalie Marissa, her beloved Cabbage Patch Kid doll, propped against some frilly eyelet pillows in the center of Clara’s bed. Natalie Marissa looked as if life hadn’t been kind to her either—weary and beaten—similar to the way Clara felt and imagined herself to appear (though, thankfully, Clara’s head wasn’t loose and droopy as a result of having once been accidentally popped off by an overzealous boy scout).

  Prompted by natural instinct, Clara picked up Natalie Marissa and gave her an affectionate squeeze. “Hi, old girl. Long time no see. How’ve ya been?” she inquired. Then it dawned on her that she’d just asked an inanimate object with a disastrous orange yarn “Mohawk” (compliments of “Clara’s Hair Salon” and yet another “healthy trim” gone awry), a sincere question. “Holy crap,” Clara mumbled, quickly returning Natalie Marissa to the bed, wondering if perhaps she was a touch closer to the proverbial edge than she’d imagined. “No offense,” she added apologetically to her doll. “Oh God! I’m still doing it!”

  Stepping inside this vestige of a room was like boarding a direct portal to her past. Nothing had changed. Except for Clara herself.

  Clara haphazardly hung a few items from her suitcase in the closet, including the dress she planned on wearing to the big Thanksgiving party, and tossed some clothes inside an empty dresser drawer. Next, she moseyed into the bathroom, which connected her bedroom to Leo’s. After splashing a handful of cold water on her face, Clara spotted the digital scale and decided to step on for the hell of it. She watched the bright red numbers do their frantic little dance until at last they stopped at 115 pounds, exactly as The Human Scale had predicted. Clara was shocked.

  At just over five-foot-eight inches tall, and blessed with a metabolism that most people wouldn’t think twice to kill for, her body had always been lithe and lean, typically fluctuating between 135 and 138 pounds—not that Clara was the type of person to attach a particular value to this genetic factor, which she had apparently inherited from her late father. Clara used to joke that she could eat like a huge, beefy bar bouncer named Biff, who drank raw eggs for breakfast and shopped at the Big & Tall Warehouse, and not gain an ounce. Come to think of it, lately her pants did seem to hang a bit looser than usual around her waist, but Clara had simply tightened her belt a few notches. Never did it dawn on her that she’d actually dropped a good twenty pounds. Maybe Tabitha—whom she had chosen to serve as maid of honor at her wedding and whom she’d recently been drifting away from—was correct, Clara worried. Maybe she really had stopped taking care of herself since “the loss,” as Tabitha had suggested. Maybe during their last, heated confrontation she shouldn’t have snorted at Tabitha’s stinging accusation of “being stuck in a devastating downward spiral” and then called her a “judgmental, meddling witch,” a particularly low blow on Clara’s part since she knew her best friend—or perhaps former best friend was more accurate—loathed sharing her name with that bratty, nose-wiggling child sorceress from television’s Bewitched.

  Clara was trudging her way out of her bedroom to go meet Libby and Leo downstairs for a nightcap when a brown, mangled, square box sitting atop her dresser—next to the framed photograph of Patrick Swayze in a rather dreamy pose from Dirty Dancing—caught her eye. It was hard for her to believe that th
ere had actually been a time in her life when she’d fantasized about becoming Mrs. Clara Swayze. Or fantasized about anything, really . . .

  She picked up the mysterious package, addressed to Ms. Clara James Black in fancy, cursive penmanship, gave it a gentle little shake, and searched it all over for a return address. But there wasn’t one. How odd, she thought.

  “What’s this?” Clara asked Libby, carrying the box into the music room, which, adorned with polished oak paneling, jewel-toned fabrics, and overstuffed leather furniture, possessed a rich, club-like atmosphere. Clara discovered her mother and brother sitting in front of the fireplace, where a crackling fire blazed. She took a seat on the couch beside Leo.

  “Got me. Why don’t you open it and see?” said Libby, rising to retrieve a wine goblet for Clara from the fully stocked, built-in bar in the corner of the room.

  “You’re a poet and you don’t even know it.” Leo pointed at her accusingly.

  “I do too, darling.” Libby smirked, asking Clara, “What did you think of the floral arrangement in your room?” She waited for a response.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Clara felt Leo give her foot a light kick. Quickly straightening her spine, she opened her eyes wider. “Pardon?”

  Libby and Leo exchanged a glance of concern.

  “Uh . . . Libby asked you a question,” he prompted helpfully.

  “Oh, I—I’m sorry.” Clara tried her best to look alert. “I was”—she used the first excuse that popped into her mind—“just thinking about this box.”

  “Well, you were clearly lost in thought about something. I wanted to know if you like the flowers in your bedroom.” Libby examined Clara closely, filling her glass with a fragrant Merlot.

  “The . . . flowers?” Clara repeated, dazed. She automatically launched into fib-mode, a well-intentioned tactic she had recently mastered in her ongoing effort to discourage people from worrying about her. “Oh, yes! That’s right. I meant to thank you for them. They’re beautiful.”