Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  She blinked until her muddled brain coughed up a definition of meritocracy. “Yeah, well, the meritocracy hasn’t made its way to Scott Schiff’s bedroom yet.” She swallowed her french fry and started to cry. And she never cried. Not even when Mary had called her, not at the funeral, not after, when her father, freshly shaven and wedged into a suit that Kelly remembered from her baby sister’s first communion, told her that her mother left a will. Doreen got Paula’s pearl earrings, Terry the diamond solitaire necklace their father bought her for their tenth anniversary, and Maureen the gold bracelet she’d gotten from her own mother. She left Mary her wedding rings. Her mother had left Kelly her rosary beads and her Bible. When her father handed over the Bible, a St. Joseph prayer card fell into Kelly’s lap. The card had marked the page from Ecclesiastes, yellow highlighter marking the verses Paula O’Hara wanted her daughter to have instead of diamonds and pearls: I made me great works; I builded me houses. . . . And behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

  “I’m such an idiot,” Kelly wept, as he unlocked the door of his apartment. She knew that her nose was running all over the lapel of Steven Day’s suit, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I thought he loved me.”

  “Shh,” Steven said, smoothing her hair off her face. He pulled off Kelly’s shoes and sweater and slipped one of his T-shirts over her head. “Let me,” he whispered, and she’d blinked at him. His breath smelled of mint toothpaste, and it was cool against her cheek. At that moment, she was so weary, so sad, so completely empty—no Scott, no mother, no nothing—that she would have let him do anything at all, as long as she didn’t have to be alone.

  She sat up in Steve’s cluttered bedroom with his blue plaid sheets bunched in her hands. “Let you what?” she whispered back.

  He eased her head down onto the pillow and kissed her, first on the forehead, then, lightly, on the lips. “Let me take care of you.”

  Later that night, she’d woken up alone in the unfamiliar bed and looked across the room at the man who’d brought her there. He was still fully dressed, right down to his wingtips, with a blanket pulled up to his chin. His eyelids glimmered in the dark. It was five o’clock in the morning. You, she thought. She knew that she sounded like a housewife selecting a melon at the supermarket. She knew that she was still drunk, still chagrined and furious at the thought of Scott Schiff—and, for that matter, at the thought of her mother and that mocking bit of Scripture. None of it mattered. Her mind was made up. And when Kelly decided on something, that was what she got. She’d been that way since she was six years old. You, she thought, and that was that.

  By the next night, they had kissed, and that weekend, they slept together, and six months later, right before graduation, they were engaged, and six months after that, just after Kelly’s twenty-second birthday, they were husband and wife, living in this three-bedroom apartment on the eighteenth floor of a brand-new building on Market Street where the whole city was spread out, sparkling at her feet. The rent was technically more than they should have been spending—according to the formulas she’d seen, you were supposed to spend something like a third of your income on your residence and they were spending more like half—but she hadn’t been able to resist the place. There were two full bathrooms, and they each had Jacuzzi tubs and marble floors. The wall-to-wall carpeting was brand new and so were the kitchen appliances, and the walls didn’t smell of decades of someone else’s meals—just of fresh paint. True, the lack of furniture was a problem—her sisters had practically busted a gut laughing when they’d seen the empty living room and complained about having to eat on the floor—but it was a minor inconvenience, and one that Kelly was certain wouldn’t last long. If Steve kept earning as much money as he did, in a year or two she’d be able to buy exactly what she wanted. And Oliver would have the best of everything—no hand-me-downs, no winter coats that smelled like cigarette smoke, no toys that some older sibling had broken. If he wanted something, all he would have to do is ask.

  She heard Steve’s key in the door, and she got to her feet. Oliver James, she whispered. She kissed her fingertips and tapped them on top of the crib’s mattress. Perfect. It was all going to be perfect.

  LIA

  On my first flight to Los Angeles, when I was eighteen, I had the middle seat. The man sitting by the window was maybe thirty, with curly blond hair and a wedding ring and a briefcase full of candy—his daughter, he said, had loaded him up before he left. The entire five-hour flight I talked to him, flipping my freshly dyed blond hair over my shoulders, telling him about the parts I’d played in my high school’s musicals, the acting classes I was going to take, and the agent’s name I’d gotten. For five hours, the man had fed me Hershey’s Kisses and fruit-flavored chews, laughing and nodding, being—what? Bemused, I guessed. With my bad dye job and my delusions of what Los Angeles would be like, I must have been a bemusing sight. When we started our descent, he’d even changed places with me, giving me the window seat so that I could see California—“the promised land,” he’d called it—before he did.

  My flight back to Philadelphia eleven years later was different. I staggered through the airport like a zombie, paying for two seats so there’d be no chance of flying with a baby beside me. The week before, I’d been walking through the Beverly Center, just to have something to do, and a baby had started to cry and my breasts had started leaking and I’d wanted to die right there, just die on the spot. I paid cash for the rental car in Philadelphia, laying bills on the counter as the clerk at the Budget desk stared and asked me again and again whether I wouldn’t prefer to just put it on a credit card. But a credit card would have made it easy for Sam to find me, and I wasn’t ready to be found. Not yet.

  I was worried that I wouldn’t remember the way home, but I did. It felt like the red Kia I’d rented was driving itself—out I-95, past the Franklin Mills Mall, its parking lot packed as usual, past the sprawl of chain restaurants and cheap apartment complexes with RENT ME NOW banners flapping limply above the trash-littered ditches. Left onto Byberry, across the Boulevard, left and right and left again, the rented car’s wheels turning over streets that felt smaller and dimmer than they had when I’d lived here. The aluminum siding on the small ranch houses and even the asphalt on my street had faded, and the houses themselves seemed to have shrunk in the shadows of the trees, which had gotten taller. But some things hadn’t changed. My old key, the one I’d kept on my key chain for all that time, still turned in the lock. I set my bag at the foot of the stairs and sat in the living room without turning the lights on, watching the minutes tick past on the VCR clock.

  My mother came home at 4:15, which was exactly half an hour after the last bell rang at her school. She always came home at exactly that time. In the summertime, she’d simply shift her routine a little, and instead of going to Shawcross Elementary at 7:15, she’d go to a diner for breakfast, go to the Y for a swim, and then go to the library, where she’d arrive as soon as the doors opened at nine and leave precisely at four o’clock, with a break at around noon to sit on the front steps and eat the sandwich (which alternated between tuna on rye and cream cheese and olives on white) that she’d packed in her purse. “What do you do there all day?” I’d asked once, when I was fourteen or so and we were still talking. She’d shrugged. “I read,” she’d said. Maybe she hadn’t meant it as a criticism, or for me to imagine the inevitable And it wouldn’t kill you to pick up a book every once in a while instead of lying in the backyard in your bikini, combing lemon juice through your hair, but that was what I heard.

  She walked into the living room with her black nylon book bag in one hand, her purse in the other. She blinked at me twice. Other than that, her face didn’t change. It was like I stopped over every week to sit in her living room with the shades pulled and the lights off.

  “So,” she said. “I can defrost another chicken breast for dinner. Do you still eat chicken?” Her first words to me. Her first words in eleven years. I
almost laughed. Everything I’d been through, the distance I’d come, just to wind up back where I’d started, sitting on the same old blue couch, with my mother asking me if I still ate chicken.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “I’m asking,” she said, “because I thought maybe you’d become a vegetarian.”

  “Why would you think that? Just because I moved to California?”

  “I thought I read it somewhere,” she muttered. I wondered what else she’d read about me, how much of the story she knew. Not much, I decided. She’d never been much for the movies or the movie magazines. “Trash,” she’d said. “Brain rot.” My father was the one who’d taken me to the movies, who’d buy me buttered popcorn and rattling boxes of Good & Plenty and wipe my face carefully before we drove back home.

  She brushed by me on her way up the stairs, pulled off her shoes, and walked through the kitchen in her panty-hosed feet. She was wearing black pants—“slacks,” she’d call them—a white blouse with a bow at the neck that I thought I’d remembered from before I’d left home.

  I followed her up the stairs and watched as she put the chicken in the microwave, then reached for the box of bread crumbs, an egg from the refrigerator, the cracked white bowl. She’d dipped the chicken pieces into that bowl before putting them on a cookie sheet to bake since time immemorial. She’d shrunk in my absence, just like the rest of the neighborhood. Her sandy-blond hair looked faded, her shoulders were slumping underneath her cotton-polyester-blend blouse, and there were brown patches on the backs of her hands. She was getting old, I saw, and it startled me. Time passing in the abstract was one thing, but seeing her was something else. I opened my mouth, thinking that I had to start somewhere, with someone; that I had to start figuring out how I would tell my story. I went to California and I fell in love . . . My throat felt like it was swelling shut. I imagined Sam standing in the movie theater lobby, maybe holding a tub of popcorn, wondering where I’d gone. I blinked rapidly, licked my lips, found a head of iceberg lettuce in the refrigerator, and started tearing it into chunks. My mother looked at my Vera Bradley monstrosity crouching at the base of the stairs. “Nice bag,” she said, handing me a bottle of low-fat ranch dressing.

  “So,” she continued, once the chicken was in the oven and a pair of potatoes were rotating in the microwave, “what brings you back to town?”

  Her tone was carefully neutral. Her eyes were on her feet. The answer was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t make myself say the words. And I might have been wrong, but it seemed as if she was having the same trouble: She’d open her mouth, then close it. Once she said my name, but when I turned my head, she only shrugged and cleared her throat and stared at the floor some more.

  She pulled two plastic place mats out of the drawer where the plastic place mats had always resided. “Your grandmother died,” she said. “While you were gone. I would have called you, but . . .” She shrugged. She didn’t have my number, and she didn’t know my new name.

  “Did they pound a stake through her heart to make sure?”

  She pursed her lips. “I see California hasn’t changed that smart mouth of yours.”

  I didn’t say anything. My father’s mother had lived in Harrisburg, around the corner from her other daughter and my three cousins. She’d never had much time for me. I would see her once a year, the day after Thanksgiving. She always wore a sweatshirt with three painted handprints—one for each of my cousins. When I was eight, I asked why my handprint wasn’t there. She thought about it, pointed to the smallest of the handprints, and told me I was welcome to pretend that that one was mine. Gee, thanks.

  “Mom,” I began, before realizing I had no idea how to start this story, no idea what to say. I looked down at my plate and poked at my chicken.

  “You’re welcome to stay if you like,” she said quietly, her eyes not meeting mine.

  “Mom,” I said again. I met a man and we got married, and something terrible happened . . .

  “You’re my daughter,” she continued, “and you’ll always have a place here.” I waited for her to touch me, knowing that she wouldn’t. She had never touched me when I’d lived with her. My father gave the hugs. “You remember where your bedroom is,” she told me, pushing herself away from the table, scraping her mostly untouched plate into the trash can that was, I swear, the exact same trash can she’d had since we’d moved to this place twenty years before. “There are clean sheets on the bed.” And with that, she was gone.

  My bedroom was just the way I’d left it—pink shag carpet, Tom Cruise posters on the wall, a tiny single bed that creaked and listed to the left when I lay down on it. The bed was draped in a Strawberry Shortcake comforter, the one I’d coveted and nagged my parents for when I was eight years old. My mother had told me I already had a perfectly good comforter and that I’d be bored with Strawberry in a year. No, I begged. Please! I really, really want it, and I’ll never ask for anything again. In the end, it was my father who caved in and bought me the comforter for my birthday. Once he was gone, my mother made me keep that comforter on my bed all through high school. “Comforters don’t grow on trees,” she said. But she had enough money to spend on her own clothes, and mine, and, I noticed, a new comforter for herself—beige on beige, filled with some kind of starchy polyester filling, which made a scratching sound every time you touched it. It wasn’t about the money. The comforter was my punishment, a reminder of what girls got when they whined and nagged—a father who’d bolted, a ratty quilt stained with spilled Kool-Aid, bearing the face of a cartoon character nobody could even remember. By the end of ninth grade, I quit asking for a new comforter, and I quit bringing friends up to my bedroom. We hung out in the family room instead while my mother was at work, watching MTV and pilfering swallows of Baileys Irish Cream from the dusty bottles in the liquor cabinet.

  I stretched back on the bed and put my hands over my eyes. It was seven o’clock at night, four o’clock in California. I thought about my husband in our apartment, which had miniature rosebushes growing in pots on the narrow balcony and sheer golden curtains in the bedroom and nothing at all that was beige. We can get a house, Sam had told me, once he’d signed the contract for the sitcom. Maybe up in the hills. Nothing too big, but something nice. We made plans to start looking—we called agents, visited a few open houses, drove up the twisting roads with the seat belt stretched tight over my belly. I remembered Sam’s smile underneath his baseball cap, the way he made me laugh by trying to pronounce the abbreviations exactly the way they were spelled in the classified ads. Three bdrms! Hdwd Fl! Bldrs Spcl! Canyon Vu!

  I imagined him sitting alone at our dining-room table with the paper or with the frozen pizzas he’d eat when I wasn’t around, or out by the pool, an old cowboy hat cocked back on his head, fishing each leaf and dead insect out of the water with the long-handled mesh skimmer. The apartment complex had a guy who came every other day, but Sam had taken over skimming duties. “It’s how I meditate,” he told me. “And it’s cheaper than yoga, right?”

  He wouldn’t be able to find me here, any more than my mother would have been able to find me on the West Coast. Like thousands of women before me, I’d used the move to Los Angeles to reinvent myself. I’d chosen a new name to go along with my slimmed-down body, the lips I plumped up, the nose I pared down, and the hair whose color I changed at least three times a year. Lia Frederick, I called myself on my credit cards and driver’s license. Frederick was my father’s first name, and Lia was my own name, minus an S. I gave friends and boyfriends—Sam included—the biography of the girl I’d roomed with during two weeks of Girl Scout camp in the Poconos. As far as my husband knew, I was from Pittsburgh, where my father had been a bank manager and my mother taught fifth grade. I had one little brother, and my parents had been happily married. Had been was the operative phrase. Once I realized that Sam would, quite naturally, be interested in meeting and spending time with the close-knit, loving clan I’d described, I killed them all in a ca
r accident when I was away on spring break my senior year of high school. Poor baby, Sam had said.

  But I did give him a little piece of the truth. My mother was a fifth-grade schoolteacher, who’d been in charge of the same classroom at the same rambling redbrick elementary school I’d attended myself. Through budget cuts and layoffs and six different principals, my mother, Helen, had stayed the course, teaching social studies and English and spelling to ever-enlarging classes of ten- and eleven-year-olds. She kept framed copies of all of her class pictures hung along the stairs, a laminated march through time. With each step up, my mother got older and the classes went from eighteen white kids to twenty-eight kids of all races. In each of the pictures, my mother wore a version of the same lipstick, the same outfit, and the same smile. My class picture was there, too, framed and hung at the top of the stairs. I hadn’t been a pretty girl. That would come later. In fifth grade, I still had buck teeth and braces and brown hair that hung to my waist. I was in my mom’s homeroom, but I took pains to position myself as far away from her as I could. In the picture, I’m wearing a red-and-green kilt and a white blouse and tights, and she’s wearing black slacks and a white blouse. She’s giving her typical cool smile as she holds the sign reading MRS. URICK GRADE FIVE, and I’m looking sideways, not smiling at all, clearly desperate to be somewhere else, away from this, away from her.

  In bed, I laced my hands over the skin of my belly, which felt loose and pleated. Downstairs, the television set clicked on. First Jeopardy!, then Wheel of Fortune. My mother called out the answers as she walked through the den in her blouse and her slacks and her panty hose. I could imagine the stack of papers set on the coffee table, the mug reading WORLD’S GREATEST TEACHER filled with decaf on the arm of the couch, listening to everything ABC had to offer until after the eleven o’clock news. In this house, the channel never changed. I’d broken the remote control years ago (in an accident that probably had something to do with those purloined swallows of Baileys), and she’d never bothered to replace it.