After I'm Gone

by Laura Lippman

Her boss had already told her to pack a bag and check into a centrally located hotel tomorrow and to be prepared to work around the clock through Monday morning. Linda never minded long days or hard work; she was the family breadwinner. And her being on-call didn’t upset the family’s various child-care arrangements because Henry had left his public defender’s job a few years ago and was now teaching science at City College, one of Baltimore’s best high schools. His newfound professional contentment was like the little woodstove in the corner of their great room—it didn’t really contribute much to the bottom line, but it made everyone feel a little cozier.

  And, oh, how Linda envied him at times. I never get snow days, she thought self-pityingly, removing the string from the tenderloin and starting to slice. The warm meat almost sighed at the knife’s touch. Linda was the only decent cook among the Brewer women, and she recognized her own smugness on this topic. Linda knew all her faults. The more honest you were with yourself, the less you had to worry about the world’s opinion. She was always trying to persuade her bosses of this approach. Tell the truth, whenever possible, and start with yourself.

  “Hey, sis.” Rachel came in the side door, hung her coat and scarf in the alcove of cubbyholes and hooks that Linda’s family used as a de facto mudroom. Seeing the ready platter of tenderloin, she took it from Linda and placed it on the table. “Are you making a béarnaise? Go ahead, and I’ll do whatever else needs to be done.” She waved her arms around theatrically.

  Her boyfriend, Joshua, waited in his coat until Rachel pointed him to an empty hook. He then stood in the center of the kitchen, pretty much in Linda’s path, until Rachel indicated that he could take a seat in the corner of the large space off the kitchen that served as a family room. Linda liked Joshua. He was a mensch, a word no one would ever use in connection with Rachel’s ex-husband, Marc. But he was so passive, one of those people who never take the initiative in anything.

  “The good silver?” Rachel asked, still making those weird gestures.

  “Sure. Oh, fuck—my carrots,” Linda said, rushing to the stove before the steamer went dry.

  “The carrots are fine,” Rachel said.

  “The carrots are fine.”

  Still nothing. Rachel had thought it a good bit of wordplay, but no one else noticed, not even Joshua, who was in on the joke, or should have been. She began collecting crystal stemware, continuing to flutter her fingers. She wasn’t crazy about religion, but she approved of Linda’s dinners. She was going to do something similar when she had children. Maybe not a Shabbat dinner, but something regular, ritualistic.

  With Joshua parked on the sofa by himself—Henry was upstairs, doing something with the kids, no doubt—Rachel continued to set the table, wiggling her fingers at Linda every chance she got, but her sister remained distracted, probably by the weather news. What a horrible job Linda had. She was important only when things went wrong and then she became the face of the public utility, the messenger that everyone wanted to kill.

  “Everyone is coming tonight, right?” Rachel asked, putting out the silverware. The good stuff, which had belonged to their great-grandmother. She was surprised Bambi hadn’t pawned it at some point and wondered at her decision to give it to Linda. Had she despaired of Rachel ever having a family? Rachel and Marc had owned nice china and silver, but it had come from his family and gone back to them. She wondered if he and his second wife, a pretty, pliable girl whom he had married in an insultingly short time—and most definitely not the woman he had cheated with—were putting out the silver tonight. No, she would be forced, as Rachel had been forced, to eat in the Singers’ claustrophobic dining room, the cold and formal antithesis to this lively hodgepodge.

  Bambi and Michelle arrived. Somehow, it was still a surprise to Rachel how much Michelle resembled their mother now that she was in her twenties. And yet Bambi retained some indefinable edge, even at fifty-five going on fifty-six. Her beauty was more profound, while Michelle’s felt flashy and fleshy, a little too carnal.

  The meal ready, the prayers recited, Rachel took the seat to her mother’s right and plopped her hand between their plates. Still, no awareness. Was she going to have to send up a flare? It was Michelle, down the table, who finally noticed. Magpie Michelle never missed anything shiny.

  “Is that a yellow diamond?”

  “It was my grandmother’s,” Joshua said quickly, more or less as they had planned. “We got married this week.”

  Rachel and Joshua had not planned on the long silence that fell. A grave, judging silence.

  “Congratulations,” Henry said when it became clear that the other three women were not going to speak. “It takes a tough man to marry a Brewer woman.”

  “Oh, hush,” Linda said. “That’s hardly the right thing to say.”

  “And I’ve never thought of you as particularly tough, Henry,” Michelle said.

  “I’m the only son-in-law,” Henry said, unperturbed by Linda’s corrections or Michelle’s insults. “I’m thrilled to have the company.”

  “You weren’t always the—” Michelle began. It was hard to say if she stopped speaking of her own accord or because of the look that Linda shot her.

  “When?” Bambi asked, slicing her tenderloin into very tiny pieces.

  “Two days ago,” Rachel said. “At the courthouse.”

  “Smart,” Henry said. “No tax implications for 1995.”

  “I mean, we’re very happy for you—we all love Joshua,” Bambi said. “Only—why that way? You could have had a small wedding.”

  “I don’t like weddings,” Rachel said. “I never have.”

  “Yes, we all remember your Vegas elopement,” Michelle put in, earning another glare from Linda. It didn’t intimidate her. “You could have had a judge just come to a party and marry you.”

  She was enjoying this, Rachel realized. Michelle was usually the one who disappointed the others. Taking an extra semester to get her degree, then moving back home because she had done absolutely nothing about finding a job, threatening to answer those “live model” ads in the back of the City Paper if her mother and sisters didn’t get off her back. She would, too. Michelle was never lazy when it came to vindictiveness.

  “No, you can’t,” Joshua put in. “If you get married anywhere but the courthouse, it has to be someone religious.”

  “Okay, so a rabbi, then.”

  “I don’t like rabbis.” True. Very true.

  “Then a Unitarian minister or a Wiccan priestess or whatever,” Michelle continued. “It’s only a ceremony. What’s the big deal?”

  “I just—I was embarrassed,” Rachel said. “It is a second marriage for me.”

  “But it’s Joshua’s first,” Bambi said. “At least—I think it is.” A gentle yet pointed barb. Joshua had been accompanying Rachel to family gatherings for more than a year now, but he never offered much information about himself.

  “It is,” Joshua assured Bambi. “And although it was hard to let go of that vision I’ve carried of my wedding day, I found I didn’t mind.”

  Joshua’s joke fell flat. Even Rachel found it wanting, and Joshua’s sense of humor was a large part of his appeal. But she wouldn’t glare at him or correct him. She didn’t want a Henry, who loved to be nagged so he could play the henpecked spouse, straight out of a sitcom. Linda and Henry’s marriage worked for them, but it wasn’t right for her. And Bambi’s way hadn’t worked for her, either. Rachel was going to find her own way of being married this time.

  “May I throw you a party?” Bambi asked. “A small one, for family and friends?”

  “No,” Rachel said quickly, too quickly, but she had to shut that down. Why did Bambi always want to spend money she didn’t have? Good Lord, couldn’t she remember what parties had cost her? But, no, she never remembered because she had been bailed out time and time again. And whose fault was that? Mostly Rachel’s.

 
; Linda’s oldest, Noah, bored by talk of weddings, begged to be excused and allowed to eat his food in front of the television. The three younger girls—“Linda breeds like an Orthodox,” Bambi had once noted in an unguarded moment, exhibiting that weird anti-Semitism that only Jews could carry—understood enough to realize they had been gypped out of being flower girls. Their voices rose, cascading over one another’s until Linda silenced them with a few well-chosen threats, softened by a promise of dessert if they behaved. Rachel looked forward to the day when her children would join them, hoped the cousins would be close.

  “So,” Henry said, “Linda tells me this blizzard is going to be the real deal. The big one. Is everyone prepared?”

  Rachel smiled at Henry, grateful that he had managed to divert everyone from the topic of her marriage—although Michelle left her place for a better look at the ring, which even she couldn’t help admiring. The talk ebbed and flowed away from Rachel. Henry had a gift for public relations, too, Rachel realized. Or maybe he just had a lot of experience at soothing angry Brewer women.

  Linda brought out the dessert, Berger cookies and ice cream. Linda was very canny about knowing when to do things herself and when to delegate, Rachel thought, where effort made a difference and where it didn’t. Rachel sipped her coffee. The evening hadn’t been as she had hoped, but it was behind her now. The announcement had been made.

  Then Bambi asked out of the blue: “Have you told Joshua’s parents?”

  “We had dinner with them last night,” Rachel said.

  “That’s not a yes or no,” Michelle said. Jesus, Michelle, go to law school already.

  “We did the same thing,” Rachel said. “As I did with you. I waved my hand around a lot, trying to catch the light. His mother noticed—but it’s her mother’s ring; she gave it to Joshua.”

  “So you told them last night,” Bambi said.

  “They happened to guess,” Rachel said. “When they saw the ring.”

  “But they knew first.”

  “We had to reschedule our Sunday night dinner with them because of the blizzard, just in case.” She had known this would be a sensitive point, but there was no way to tell Joshua that Bambi must be first. She would sulk for days now.

  “We could have had a wedding party in conjunction with my birthday,” her mother said. “That’s only three weeks away.”

  “But that wouldn’t have been fair to you, stealing your thunder that way.”

  “I don’t care about my birthday,” her mother said. “I’m going to be fifty-six. It’s a nothing age.”

  “We’ll have a huge blowout when you’re sixty,” Linda said.

  “Please—I’ll want to celebrate that even less.” A pause. “I got pregnant on my twentieth birthday. January 30, 1960.”

  The sisters looked at one another.

  “Mother,” Linda said. “Don’t be silly. I was born September first, and I weighed nine pounds. That would make me the world’s largest preemie.”

  Rachel assumed—and assumed her sisters were assuming—that her mother had tripped up on the oft-told lie about Linda being conceived on her parents’ wedding night. December 31, 1959. The girls had long ago figured out that their parents had sex before their wedding night. They rather liked them for it. They also liked their mother for her polite fictions about it, her old-fashioned decorum. But now she was taking it too far, telling such an obvious lie. Even Noah could see through it, if his attention weren’t consumed by the weird soup he was making from his ice cream and cookies.

  Her mother stood. “Michelle, we really should go. I have to get home before the blizzard.”

  “It won’t even start snowing until Sunday,” Linda said.

  “I want to make sure I have what I need. Maybe I’ll drive to the Giant and buy all the clichéd things. Milk, toilet paper, bread. You know our driveway: If it’s as bad as they say it’s going to be, I won’t get out for days.”

  “I’m not ready to go,” Michelle protested.

  “I’ll take her home,” Rachel promised. “It’s not that far out of my way.”

  “Or I could spend the night at your apartment,” Michelle said. Rachel could see the wheels turning. Michelle would get to her place—now hers and Joshua’s—in Fells Point and propose going out. She assumed Rachel would beg off—she always did—and Michelle could then head out on her own. She would show up late the next morning, clutching a huge coffee from the Daily Grind. It would never occur to her to bring one to Rachel or to divulge anything about how she had spent the evening. She might not even come back for days, blithely lying to her mother via phone that she was stranded at Rachel’s because of the blizzard. Michelle, ma belle, their father had sung to her when she was a baby. I love you, I love you, I love you. Had any other man told Michelle that he loved her? Admired her, wanted her, made love to her, yes. But had she been loved?

  Bambi left, clearly affronted. Rachel wanted to believe it was because Michelle was staying behind, or even that all three daughters had ganged up on her over the lie about Linda’s conception.

  But Rachel knew the real slight was her secret marriage to Joshua. Bambi had to know things first. Rachel had disappointed her mother. It was unfair. She could—she had—gone to such lengths to protect her mother, and now she would get the Frigidaire treatment, as her father had called it, Bambi’s patented deep freeze, all because Joshua’s parents knew first.

  “She didn’t even say ‘mazel tov,’” she said to Linda later, cleaning up, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Why did you get married in such a rush?” Michelle asked. “Are you knocked up?”

  “Michelle!” Spoken in unison, as Linda and Rachel often did.

  “Are you knocked up?”

  “Michelle!” the terrible twosome gasped, always in each other’s pockets.

  Michelle was curled into an armchair, watching her sisters clean up. It wouldn’t be accurate to say it didn’t occur to her to help. It occurred to her and she decided not to. Even in Linda’s big kitchen, there was only so much counter space. A third person would just get in the way.

  Henry had decided, after Bambi’s departure, to make a late-night run to the Giant as well, and the kids had clamored to go with him. Rachel had sent Joshua with them and now it was just the three sisters. Three Sisters. Michelle was supposed to have read that for some course at College Park, but she got by with the CliffsNotes. She doubted Chekhov could tell her anything about three sisters that she didn’t already know. She sat in the chair, remote in hand, flicking, flicking, flicking through the channels. She hated Linda’s decor, the whole Martha Stewart, country-cozy thing. Michelle liked modern things, sleek and minimalist.

  “That was weird,” Linda said.

  “What?” Rachel sounded guilty to Michelle’s ears. Oh, this was rich, Rachel being in the doghouse for once. Michelle must remember to stoke her mother’s hurt, try to keep this going for a while. Plus, it would take Bambi’s mind off the fact that Michelle didn’t have a job.

  “Mom trying to persuade us I was conceived on her birthday. We’ve all lived quite happily with the falsehood of the wedding-night conception all these years. Do you think she’s getting addled?”

  “Fifty-five is young for that,” Rachel said, but she sounded worried. Rachel already had a dent between her eyes from her incessant worrying.

  “Trust me, she’s fine,” Michelle said, settling on MTV. It was a rerun of The Real World, which she wouldn’t mind auditioning for, although she couldn’t imagine a Real World: Baltimore. Baltimore was way too real for the Real World. Still, with her looks and her story, she would easily make it through the preliminary selection rounds.

  The problem was, she found the people on the show a little pathetic. She wanted the free rent in a gorgeous apartment, but not if the price was a bunch of petty squabbles and, worse, those terribly earnest conversations. Could be good expos
ure for an actress, but did she really want to be an actress anyway? It seemed like a monstrous amount of work, and there was seldom any money in it.

  “Mom’s just upset that you didn’t tell her about your wedding before Joshua’s folks knew,” Linda said.

  “She likes Joshua—”

  “We all like Joshua,” Michelle said. “Although I always thought he was gay. Are you sure he’s not gay?”

  She thought she’d get another double Michelle! But they held their tongues.

  “Okay, okay, he’s not gay. But I’m sorry, he seems like such a lightweight compared to—”

  “You were thirteen,” Rachel said, cutting her off. Man, she couldn’t even bear to hear Marc’s name. Weird. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know he was rich. And you let him screw you over. Not a penny.” She put on an English accent. “Not a penny farthing for you, Rachel.” She thought it would make her sister laugh. She was wrong.

  “We were married for only two years. It was a mistake. A very young, foolish mistake.”

  “It will be sixteen years next fall that I met Henry,” Linda said, obviously trying to steer them away from a fight. “Together for fifteen years, married for thirteen. Four kids.”

  “And Mom was nineteen when she met Dad,” Rachel put in.

  “So stop acting like I’m a baby at twenty-two. The way I see it, I’m not the one in this room with the blemished record.”

  That hurt Rachel, and Michelle instantly regretted it. She didn’t want to hurt Rachel. She looked up to her, truly. Looked up to both her sisters. But she resented them, too. Those photos in their oh-so-proper riding outfits. The years, however brief, of having their father and money. But she resented their closeness, most of all. They told each other things that they didn’t tell her. So it was only right that she didn’t tell them everything. Not that she had any significant secrets. But she was working on a few.

  “When are you going to have kids?” Linda asked Rachel.

  “Soon,” Rachel said. “Really soon.”

  “I repeat,” Michelle said. “Are you knocked up?”