After I'm Gone

by Laura Lippman

  Ah, but Michelle deserved her party, Rachel thought, drying her hands and continuing to eavesdrop. (The girl who liked Joey had sent her emissaries back into the party to further parse his feelings. She remained behind with two others. She was pretty and appeared confident, but Rachel, as the older sister to a truly confident girl, recognized fake bravado when she saw it.) And the ballroom was really very charming, with the catering stations set up as pushcarts and sidewalk cafés. Artists sat at easels, drawing caricatures of the guests, and a strolling band of musicians played the kind of music heard on the sound track for Charade. Excessive, yes, but the crepes and pommes frites and madeleines were outstanding, not always a given at such a large-scale party. Lorraine Gelman had been right to crow about her caterer.

  But—ninety-five dollars a head, and that didn’t include the open bar—Rachel didn’t want to do the math. The per-plate fee also didn’t include the cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Figure another five hundred dollars or so. It would probably be tasteless, too; in Rachel’s experience, the more elaborate the cake, the less enjoyable it was. She had requested German chocolate cake for her bat mitzvah, which gave her grandmother Ida palpitations. Nana Ida could not stand anything German, although she made an exception for the Singers, the German Jewish family into which Rachel had married two years ago. And an exception for the BMW that Marc’s parents had given them as a wedding gift, in which Ida loved to ride. “It’s the least we could do,” Marc’s father said, “given that you kids took us off the hook for a wedding.”

  Yes, Rachel had wanted to say. It really is the least you could do. You’re very good at figuring out the least expected of you and doing just that, nothing more. Besides, my mother would have paid for the wedding, insisted on it, which is why we had to elope. But for all your alleged class, you have no antennae for the feelings of others.

  While Rachel had eloped, terrified by the unmatchable elegance of the engagement party thrown by Marc’s family, Linda had the smallest wedding possible, only family and the Gelmans. A brunch at the Gelmans’ house, coconut cake with whipped icing. Now that had been a good cake. My life in cakes, Rachel thought wryly. An interesting structure for a book of poetry. Except she wasn’t a poet. She had tried to be, but it just wasn’t in her. Instead, she had settled on a degree in semiotics, a very fashionable thing to study at Brown and an excuse to lose herself in the words that she could not corral on the page, no matter how she tried. There had been two Baltimore boys in the program, one named Ira, whom she never got to know, and Marc, whom she spent three years avoiding because they had been at Park together and she was all too familiar with his rep as a snob and a player.

  Then she fell in love with him. Crazy-insane-head-over-heels in love with him. Marc was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And now the worst.

  Respect your first instincts about people, her father had told her the day of her bat mitzvah. People make fun of love at first sight, but it’s just good instincts.

  You fell in love with Mama at first sight.

  I did. And she with me, although she always pretends she didn’t.

  Had Rachel fallen in love at first or second sight? Had she loved Marc back in high school, but pretended indifference because he was out of her reach? She could no longer sort it out. She loved him, he loved her—and he had hurt her more than anyone she had ever known.

  Sometimes, Rachel wondered if her parents’ big romantic story would be less of a burden if Felix had actually stayed. Certainly, that charade of perfect love at first sight couldn’t have been sustained as his daughters had grown, become more adept at picking up subtle signs that things were far from perfect. And yet—the myth survived, even after the terrible confidences that Bambi had shared with the two older girls not long after their father left. It was Michelle who was growing up with the full fairy tale, with no knowledge of the other woman. Women, although Bambi seemed to be bothered only by the last one, Julie Saxony, whom she described in strangely poetic terms. Flaxen hair. Cornflower-blue eyes. Those pretty words were worse, somehow, than the gag-worthy information that their father’s girlfriend was a stripper.

  The girl who pined for Joey suddenly squealed and ran out of the ladies’ room, her handmaidens in tow, and Rachel was left alone. She sighed and tried to do something with her hair, finally admitting to herself that her dawdling had as much to do with avoiding Marc as it did with playing Margaret Mead in the ladies’ room. She poked at her usually limp brown locks, which had been amplified by Bambi’s hairdresser into seriously big hair, with bangs and tendrils that looked sexily spontaneous until one tried to touch a strand. It all but repelled her comb. She then stuck an experimental finger into her outsize skirt, but the dent repaired itself immediately. Bambi had insisted that all three daughters buy their dresses at Barneys New York, and the result was that the Brewer women were so fashion-forward that they looked hilariously out of place at a Baltimore bat mitzvah. Rachel wished she could have had the cash her mother spent on the dress, but then—she would never take money from her mother. Like Linda, she was terribly worried about the cost of this event. She just wasn’t in a dull fury about it. Besides, Bambi swore that it was okay, that she had found a way to get the money without putting too much of a strain on the household. Which probably meant she had gone to Bert.

  Rachel needed money, too. What a joke, being married to a rich man and being so poor. It would be one thing if Marc’s family were cheap across the board. But Marc’s parents were exceedingly generous with themselves and their children. They were stingy only with those who had the bad judgment to marry into the family. Sometimes, Rachel would find herself staring mutely, pleadingly, at her brother-in-law, wishing he were the kind of person who would go outside and smoke a cigarette with her so they could share their mutual pain. But that tall drink of water, that stupid shaygetz, was so naïve he didn’t even know they called him the stupid shaygetz behind his back. Which was odd, because the Singers pretended they didn’t know Yiddish most of the time. They were too grand, too many generations removed. Oh, how Rachel wished her father had been there the night of the engagement dinner, if only for his commentary on the finger bowls. At least Bambi had been able to humble them a little, through her sheer beauty and poise. But the money in that house—that evening, Rachel had watched her mother’s hand go to her necklace, her favorite diamond earrings. A stranger couldn’t tell, but Rachel knew that Bambi was unnerved by her new in-laws.

  She wouldn’t have been if Felix were still around.

  Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it. She assumed Linda and her mother felt the same way, but they seldom spoke of him. They allowed themselves a handful of nice stories—“Remember the time at Gino’s?” “Remember the bumper cars?” “Remember the time at the Prime Rib?”—and that was all.

  Rachel had avoided Marc at Brown because he knew her story. Rachel had fallen so hard for him because she didn’t have to tell him her story. Upon arriving at college, she was determined not to lie about her father, yet also intent on avoiding the emotional promiscuity that dorm life seemed to bring out in people. Sex was one thing, but why were girls so slutty with their life stories? But Marc knew. Knew her and didn’t pity her.

  “So here you are,” Linda said, coming through the swinging door. “Marc looks unhappy.”

  “It’s a pose he affects,” Rachel said. “He’s more handsome when he’s brooding.”

  “What’s going on with you two?”

  “We had a fight.” Not quite true, but they were going to have one, tomorrow.

  “Oh, you two are always fighting.”

  “Not always. But it’s normal to fight sometimes,” Rachel said, hoping this was true. “You just think everyone should be like you and Henry in the Peaceable Kingdom.”

  “We fight,” L
inda said with a self-satisfaction that belied her words. She sat down carefully on one of the tufted stools. Although hugely pregnant, Linda moved with her usual grace.

  “You yell at Henry as though he were a bad dog and he hangs his head and asks for your forgiveness. Or laughs at you. Either way, it’s not real fighting.”

  “We happen to agree on most things. What do you and Marc have to fight about, anyway? Everything is going great for you.”

  Did it really look like that? Even to her sister? Rachel tried to stand outside her own life and see what others saw. The nice town house, a gift from Marc’s parents, although in a rather sterile development. She would have liked to live in one of the old neighborhoods near downtown, but when someone else is paying, choice is curtailed. Marc worked for his family’s real estate company, on the commercial side. Big deals, big money, he liked to say. Marc would rather sell one warehouse than five homes, whereas Rachel thought the only lure in real estate was the opportunity to make people happy. Rachel was a copywriter at a Baltimore ad agency, but the job was a favor called in by her father-in-law, and she wrote about things so boring that she literally fell asleep at her desk, which did not impress her boss or coworkers.

  “Marc’s parents couldn’t even be bothered to attend the service this morning. Didn’t you notice? His father claimed he had an important golf game. There has never, in the history of time, been a truly important golf game.”

  “The only thing I noticed was how everyone turned around when the door slammed at the exact moment Michelle got up to give her haftorah. But I’m looking at the bright side—now everyone will think she was rattled, and that’s why she did such a shitty job.”

  “Linda!” But she was right about Michelle’s abominable Hebrew.

  “Is it too much to ask that she make even a halfhearted attempt to do a good job after all the expense and time Mother put in? She had her own tutor, Rachel, spent countless hours with him. And it wasn’t just the Hebrew. Her speech was ridiculous.”

  “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  “Rachel—she incorporated the lyrics of a Wham! song into the story of the Exodus. It was borderline sacrilegious. Make the bread before you go-go?”

  “ ‘Lose the yeast or it will be too slow-slow.’ I thought it was funny.”

  “Rachel, our semiotician. How’s that working out for you as a career?” But Linda, while frequently furious, was not cruel. She put her hand on her sister’s arm by way of apology. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for three years. And I’m just so pissed that Mother spent all this money she doesn’t have.”

  “She told me it would be okay. She swore. She said she had a little windfall.”

  “From what? Aunt Harriet is still alive and kicking, with no signs of letting go. She’s out there right now, stuffing rolls in her purse.”

  “She wouldn’t say. But she said there’s even enough left over to give her a little cushion.”

  But not enough cushion, Rachel thought, to bail Rachel out. If she left Marc, she would have nothing. She had no savings and quite a bit of college debt. The job, provided as a favor to his father, would disappear. The car, too, would be taken back; the title was in his parents’ name. And there was the prenup. Technically a postnup, presented to the happy couple when they had returned from their Las Vegas elopement. How Rachel and Marc had laughed at his silly parents. Why not sign a document that had no meaning, they agreed. They would be together forever.

  Rachel believed Marc had been sincere in that moment. He loved her and they were kindred spirits. He even wrote poetry and—knife to her heart—his was good. Second knife to her heart, he abandoned it. “I don’t want to get an MFA and teach and be poor,” he told her. “I grew up with money. I like it.” How could Rachel argue? She had known life with and without it, and there was no contest: money was better.

  But if she had Marc’s gift for writing and if her father were still around—she didn’t doubt that he would encourage her, support her. Your family should be your Medicis. Maybe if she found a real job, on her own—

  “Do you believe it?” Linda asked.

  “What?” she said, pretending she had been listening all the while, not lost inside herself.

  “You know. The story. The door.”

  “Oh, no. You know how people go in and out throughout the service.”

  “But the doors usually just creak, not make that hollow booming sound. Everyone turned around—except Mother.”

  Rachel smiled. The two sisters had an almost twinlike closeness. Nice for them, hard on Michelle.

  “You’re saying Mom is like the defendant in that old story about the trial where the attorney announces the real killer is about to walk through the door. He doesn’t turn around because he knows he’s the real killer. So Mom knows that nothing can bring Daddy back, not even Michelle’s bat mitzvah.”

  “If he were to come back, it would be for that, though.”

  “Really? Not college graduations, not our marriages? Only Michelle’s bat mitzvah would bring him back?”

  “You didn’t go to yours. Graduation, I mean. And I had no interest in mine because I was already planning my marriage to Henry. Did it ever occur to you,” Linda said, dropping her crankiness for earnestness, “that we both chose the kind of weddings where an absent father was less noticeable? You in Vegas, me at a brunch in the house.”

  “We were only trying to save Mother money.”

  “And save ourselves from disappointment. Think about it, Rachel.” Linda rose to her feet, swaying a little, like a balloon on a string, but still very graceful. “There’s always been this stupid fiction that he comes back, like some benevolent spirit, standing at the rear of the synagogue, like Elijah on Passover. He’s never come back. And he’s never coming back.”

  Linda looked very pale.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think I’m going to throw up. Other women have morning sickness during the first trimester. I have evening sickness in the final one.”

  Linda walked with admirable dignity to the nearest stall. Rachel waited for her, noting that her sister managed to vomit rather quietly. Ah, the powers of the trained PR person, so skilled in papering things over that she knows how to mask the sound of retching. Or maybe she simply hadn’t started yet.

  A girl entered, rubbing her eyes.

  “Sydney.” Rachel had known Sydney Gelman, now eleven, all her life. She had been adopted when Bert and Lorraine despaired of having their own children. Less than two years later, Lorraine gave birth to twin boys.

  “Oh—hello, Rachel.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No. I just had an allergic reaction to the shellfish in the crepes, so Mother asked the waiter to take it away and bring me a fruit plate.”

  Sydney was plump, always had been. It was a sweet, healthy plumpness, the kind that came with lustrous hair and shining eyes. Rachel thought Sydney would be much less pretty if forced to lose weight. But Aunt Lorraine lived off broiled grapefruit and Tab and didn’t see why Sydney couldn’t as well.

  “Did you get to have the crepes suzette at least?”

  “I don’t think I saw those.”

  “Why don’t you come with me and we’ll see if there are some left in the kitchen?”

  She started to take Sydney by the hand, something she would have done naturally a few years ago, before she left for college. But Sydney was only five then. To treat her that way now would be disastrous. Rachel sneaked her into the kitchen and procured a plate of sweets for her, despite the murderous glances from the man in charge of the catering crew. What was the big deal? Perhaps he didn’t want anyone eating there, but she and Sydney knew that if they took the plate back into the dining room, Lorraine would find a way to whisk that one away as well. It was a party. No one should have to diet at a party.

  “Are you h
aving a good time?”

  “It’s okay,” Sydney said. “I don’t know many of these kids because I’m two classes behind them. One girl asked why I was even here and I said Michelle and I were like cousins. And she said I was lying.”

  “She’s probably jealous,” Rachel said. “We are like cousins.”

  “Michelle doesn’t speak to me.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t say anything.” Sydney’s voice, while pitched low, was panicky. “I don’t care. Really.”

  Sydney was wise in her own way. It would be counterproductive to remonstrate with Michelle, but, oh, Rachel wished her sister weren’t cruel. Rachel and Linda had been kind to everyone, at their father’s insistence. The practice had served them well after he left because there were no grudges, no girls waiting for them to fall.

  The party was wrapping up when Rachel returned Sydney to the ballroom. The fact that Sydney was at Rachel’s side softened Bambi’s murderous look, but not Marc’s hurt one. Rachel followed him to the BMW, resolved not to fight. This would be Michelle’s bat mitzvah day, not the day she confronted Marc.

  In the car, she realized she had left her wrap behind. He didn’t want to go back and they drove another five minutes, which, as she pointed out to him, only added ten minutes to the trip. Said it nicely, still determined not to fight. The shawl was cashmere, a gift from her mother. There was no way she was going to trust it to the hotel’s lost-and-found overnight.

  When she entered the ballroom, it was almost empty of people, although the fake cafés and shops were still standing. A woman was walking the ersatz French boulevard, taking it all in.

  “Oh, I—I’m . . . I’m here to meet the caterer,” she said when she noticed Rachel. “About another job.”

  The woman was dressed like the catering crew, in black slacks and a white shirt. She had blond hair and blue eyes, Rachel noted. One might even say flaxen and cornflower blue. She was thin, much too thin. She bolted for the kitchen and Rachel was tempted to follow her, but she let it go, let her go. The encounter was so odd that she had an instantaneous desire to speak to Linda about it, followed by an immediate resolve to never speak of this to anyone. She couldn’t be, she just couldn’t be. Even if she was, it was just one of those Baltimore coincidences. She very well could be hiring the same caterer. Maybe she was getting married. Hooray for her. Rachel found her wrap draped over a chair and headed out into the night.