by Ann Packer
“Hey,” Lauren’s dad said, standing up, “who wants more salmon? Marguerite? You sure? How about you, Robert? I’ve got a nice crisp end for you.”
“Got to watch my waistline, Brody,” Lauren’s grandpa said. “Thanks, anyway.”
“Honey?”
Lauren’s mom didn’t respond. Her face was still pink, and Lauren wondered if she’d even heard him.
“Well, I will,” her dad said. “How about you guys? Laur? Joe? I don’t know how the rest of you can resist, it’s so good.” He picked up his plate and headed for the salmon, whistling as he walked. He forked a piece of fish onto his plate and brought it back to the table. Lauren watched him take a bite, chew, drink some wine. He was pretending it hadn’t just happened, her mom saying what she’d said.
Across the table, her mom and her grandpa had started discussing a trip her grandparents were planning, to Scandinavia, and she watched her mom, saw how she nodded while she was listening, her head cocked a little to the side. She was pretending, too. What was Lauren supposed to do? She wished she could leave the table, but she didn’t want to do that. I’m not going to school today. She didn’t want to be that.
“June,” her grandpa said, “is supposed to be the best month for the fjords.” He turned to Joe. “What about you, Joe? Going back to camp this summer?”
“Definitely,” Joe said.
Lauren looked at her dad again. He was watching her mom, and she thought suddenly of the portraits by Alex Katz, how there were three things that told you what kind of mood the person was in: the set of the mouth, the shadows on the face, and the reflection of light—the little white dots—on the eyes.
40
Temperatures were rising, and Sarabeth called Miranda, suggested a walk around Lake Merritt. They went on a Sunday, passed picnicking families and couples on Rollerblades, and a pack of teenagers who were perched on a pair of bike racks: talking loud, chiding one another, laughing. Sarabeth imagined a time in the future when Lauren would look her up, and the two of them would have dinner and talk first about the present, and then about the recent past, and only toward the end about this year. I thought about you, Lauren might say, I wondered what happened to you, and Sarabeth would say, I thought about you, too.
Because she did. She thought about Lauren much younger and also Lauren now, about the things inside her that had caused her to do what she’d done. Sarabeth wondered what those things had been, what they’d felt like, sounded like. How much they’d been like the things inside Lorelei.
The song was quieter. It was hardly there. It was so familiar, she would tell Lauren. I was sure I knew it. I was always trying to hear the words.
Don’t worry about the words, she imagined Lauren saying. You don’t want to hear the words.
Another day, she set about washing the outsides of her windows. The sky was a soft, hazy blue, and it was so warm she stripped down to the camisole she wore under her sweater. It was satisfying to stand on a ladder in the sun, satisfying to give her house a little elbow grease. Windex hooked to her belt loop, she moved from window to window, until at last she arrived at the big front one.
The red tablecloth looked pretty bad from out here, and as she sprayed she thought she should get a real curtain. She wiped the running Windex and then rubbed the glass in circles, imagining something sheer, something that would let in some light. The window was a little wider than her arm span, and she found that she couldn’t quite reach to the far side. She considered repositioning the ladder but instead stepped to the window ledge, where she found her balance and sprayed again.
“You’re kind of like Spider-Man,” said a voice.
She turned, and there was Pilar, standing in the middle of her family’s backyard, wearing too-small flowered bike shorts and a tank top.
“I guess I am,” Sarabeth said.
“I’m not allowed to see that movie,” Pilar said, taking a step closer. “My sister isn’t, either.”
“If you’re not allowed to see it, then how do you know what he’s like?”
“I snuck.”
“You snuck into the movie?”
“I snuck watching the preview. Dummy.”
“Oh,” Sarabeth said. “Got it.” She hesitated for a moment and then turned back to the window. She wiped it, sprayed again, wiped again. She hooked the Windex back in her belt loop, stepped onto the ladder, climbed down.
“Fighting is worse than kissing,” Pilar said from very nearby. “In movies.”
“Goodness, you’re very quiet,” Sarabeth said. Pilar had moved—as stealthily as the Indian whose headdress she’d worn on Thanksgiving—and was now just a few feet away.
Pilar shook her head. “No, I’m not. My teacher says I’m too loud.”
“Oh. That’s not very nice.”
“Well, my mom says I have to cooperate or I’ll get a consequence.”
Sarabeth looked Pilar over. She wore orange plastic sandals and glittery purple nail polish, and a dirty Band-Aid flapped from her knee. This was the first time Sarabeth had seen her up close since Thanksgiving, and she thought Pilar was not as fetching as she had been. She was growing and leaving her cuteness behind.
They stood there looking at each other. Sarabeth considered taking the ladder back to her shed, but she wasn’t sure how to walk away. “Would you like to come in?” she said.
“Do you have any cookies?”
“I may.” She led the way up the porch steps and into the house. In the kitchen she opened a cabinet. “I have some digestive biscuits,” she said. “Do you like those?”
Pilar stared up at the shelf. “What are they?”
Sarabeth handed Pilar the package. “They’re pretty tasty, actually.”
“Are they good for you?”
“I think so. I think they’re high in fiber.”
Pilar handed them back. “My dad eats cereal like that. To help him poop.”
“Ah.”
“Do you have any lemonade?”
“You know, I don’t. I have tangerine-grapefruit juice, though.”
“That’s OK. Look, I lost a tooth.” Pilar thrust her jaw forward and pulled down her lower lip, revealing a tiny space right in front.
“Very cool,” Sarabeth said. “Did the tooth fairy come?”
“She gave me a dollar.”
“Wow. She’s gotten a lot nicer since I was a kid.”
“Were you fast on teeth?”
Sarabeth didn’t understand this. “Fast on teeth?”
“I’m slow on them. My sister is superfast. When she was my age she’d lost five teeth already.”
“Oh,” Sarabeth said. “I see.”
“I’m fast on height. I grew three inches since my last birthday. My sister only grew one.” Pilar looked at Sarabeth. “What are you fast on?”
“Me?” Sarabeth said. “Grown-ups can be pretty slow, actually.”
“So can kids. My brother is very slow on table manners.”
“He’ll get there.”
“That’s what my mom says. My dad says, ‘Isaac! Use your fork!’” For this last, she nearly shouted. “My dad thinks you’re pretty,” she added.
“You know,” Sarabeth said, “you might not want to tell people what other people think about them.”
“It’s OK,” Pilar said. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s really no such thing as pretty.”
Sarabeth smiled. Pilar was still fetching—but in a different, more complicated way. When you didn’t see people for a while, you could see the changes in them more clearly.
“I have to go now,” Pilar said. “But I could come back over sometime, when you have other cookies.”
“I’d like that,” Sarabeth said, and she walked Pilar to the front door and then watched as she trotted home. When the Heidts’ patio door was closed again, she went down the porch steps and circled her house, admiring her cleaned windows. She liked the way bits of branches and sky were reflected in the glass. It was quite cool in the shade now. She re
membered springtime in her own childhood, when the nights were so much cooler than the days, and the house in the late afternoon was chilly and dark. She pictured Pilar inside her house, shivering in her bike shorts and tank top but refusing to change.
41
Liz returned to yoga. She felt so stiff and weak—far more so than when she had first started, years ago. “Take it easy,” Diane told her, but she pushed hard. She pushed against her burning hamstrings, against her tired arms and resistant hips. She pushed against having let yoga go for so long and against how difficult it was to return.
Next, she went back to the bench. She wrote up a schedule for herself, a habit from long ago—from junior high, in fact, when she and Sarabeth would plan their assaults on the boys they liked, down to Hi on Monday and Do you have a pen I can borrow? on Wednesday or Friday. Making the schedules was far more fun than talking to or even kissing the boys, though they hadn’t known that then. They spent hours at it, laughing over the question of which was a bigger step, asking a boy for the time or saying Hey, cool bike.
Over many days, she got the blue and yellow lines she’d painted in the fall to intersect in green, a slow process of taping and painting and waiting and taping and painting and waiting. At last, her plaid finished, she was ready for the final touch.
So many things could suggest a flower: a circle of dots, a dot surrounded by zigzags, a series of soft arcs to imply a rose. She used them all. She painted tiny red snapdragon-like flowers and tiny orange zinnia-like flowers and tiny daisies of yellow and white. The work was slow and painstaking. At first, she tried not to repeat herself, but she had too much space to cover for that. And who ever heard of a garden in which every flower was unique?
She finished late one Sunday afternoon, her legs and arms stiff and aching as she straightened up and dropped her brushes into the garage sink. Brody and Lauren were in the family room, Brody grubby from an afternoon spent in the yard. “I’m done,” she said, stepping up into the kitchen.
Brody looked up. “Done done?”
“I believe so.”
“Your hands,” Lauren exclaimed, coming over. “They’re like a Seurat.”
Liz turned her hands over, turned them back. They were dotted with color.
“Hang on a sec,” Lauren said, and she ran up the stairs and returned with a piece of paper. “Here, do a print.” She laid the paper on the counter and directed Liz to press her palms to it.
“Cool,” she said when Liz lifted her hands away. “Check it out.”
The paper bore two ghostly handprints, patterned with what looked like pastel camouflage.
“Now that,” Brody said, “is a fine collaboration.”
They followed her back to the garage, Lauren slipping past her and saying, “I can’t believe how many flowers you painted. That is so OCD.” She looked back at Liz. “But in a good way. It’s really cool.”
Liz leaned against the washing machine as they bent to look closer. She wondered if there would come a time when this bench would stop reminding her of the split in her life, when she would no longer think that the yellow and blue represented innocence while the rest was from After.
She’d planned nothing for dinner, and Brody suggested going out for pizza. She headed upstairs to tell Joe, passing by the bathroom that only he now used.
He was at his desk with a book. His room was immaculate, bedspread pulled tight, not so much as a single sock in sight.
“What are you doing?” she said, and he turned to look at her.
“Reading.”
“You OK?”
He gave her a puzzled look, as if to say: Of course I’m OK. Why wouldn’t I be OK?
No reason. Anxious expectation, that’s what she had. Her new companion. Mother’s little helper, but in reverse. Mother’s little hindrance.
“You know,” her own mother had said to her in the kitchen before Easter dinner, the two of them working together, arranging asparagus on a platter, tossing tiny boiled potatoes with butter, “you know, you kids really raised yourselves. I was just there in case things went wrong.” Which had made Liz want to take her mother by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, shake some memory into her. Hello? she’d wanted to say. Remember the day John was born? Remember the day Steve left for college? Don’t you remember being kind of busy for the twenty-five years in between?
“We’re going out for pizza,” she said to Joe. “Ten minutes.”
“Can we get pepperoni?”
This was because Lauren didn’t like pepperoni; Lauren preferred veggie or pesto chicken. His diffidence broke her heart. She went to him and kissed his head, smelled soap and a trace of unfresh scalp. She put her hand in his hair and ruffled it a bit. “Absolutely we can get pepperoni,” she said. “We’ll get whatever you want.”
Suddenly the end of the school year was in sight. It was still seven or eight weeks off, but Lauren believed in it now, knew it was a matter of actual days beginning and ending rather than a miraculous lift from here to there. This was partly due to the weather, partly due to a plan she and Myrna had to get Myrna’s dad to teach them to surf, and partly due to the fact—the fact—that she was feeling better.
Leaving math on Wednesday, she scanned the courtyard for Myrna, eager to tell her about the crazy thing that had just happened, Aimee Berman getting busted for using her cell phone during class. Mr. Pavlovich had humiliated her, demanding that she come up to his desk, and then flourishing a yellow principal’s ticket at her as if the whole thing made him happy. Aimee’s phone would be confiscated and kept in the office for a week. Far worse, she’d be barred from attending the next—and as it happened final—school dance.
People were moving here and there across the courtyard, but Myrna was nowhere to be seen. Lauren figured she was already at her locker, and she headed in that direction, looking the other way when she passed Amanda and Noah on a bench outside the cafeteria. A year ago, she would never have believed that not having Amanda as her best friend might be OK, but somehow it was. They still sat together in the classes they had together, and they talked a bit, but the rest of the time it was as if they barely knew each other.
Lauren wondered what you did if you were Aimee Berman and in deep shit. Aimee Berman busted just didn’t compute.
Mr. Greenway walked by, nodding at her as their paths crossed. She nodded back. She received a strange kind of recognition from certain teachers, almost a sanction. It was like they were saying: Yes—yes, you. It bugged her, but seeing as she couldn’t stop it, she hoped it would help with her grades.
There was Myrna, coming out of the locker area, scanning the courtyard herself. Lauren raised her hand and waved, then quickly dropped it. She’d just seen Aimee. Aimee and Tyler and Jeff, standing near the science complex. Why hadn’t Aimee gone to the office? She was crying, and Tyler’s arms were around her, and Lauren thought, How pathetic, though she also felt kind of sorry for her. She made sure Myrna hadn’t seen her and stepped back into the shadows.
Jeff was just standing there, a few feet from Tyler and Aimee. Do something, Lauren thought. Leave. But he didn’t. His pack hung from his shoulder, and he moved the toe of his shoe back and forth over the asphalt.
Tyler put his hands on Aimee’s shoulders and bent to look at her. He would graduate in six weeks, and Lauren had heard he was going to the University of Oregon in the fall. What would happen then?
He took Aimee’s backpack from her and slung it over his free shoulder, and then, one of his arms around her, they began walking toward the office. Lauren tracked their progress, thinking, Dead Girl Walking, though it didn’t seem all that funny. She watched for a while and then looked back at Jeff, and to her surprise he was looking right at her. Immediately her heart raced, but she didn’t look away, and after a moment he kind of smiled and shrugged, then he turned and headed out of sight.
“Because he’s an artiste,” Myrna said a little later. “He has to suff-aire.”
They were at the Jamba Juice across from
school, sipping smoothies and talking about a cousin of hers who lived in New York City, in an apartment the size of “your average bathroom,” as Myrna put it.
“I mean, you should see the cockroaches in that place—they’re like the size of mice.”
“OK, I take it back,” Lauren said. “I’m not jealous.”
“If it was Paris I’d let you be jealous.”
“If it was Paris I’d be on the next plane. I’d be all, Hi, Myrna’s cousin, I’m just going to unroll my sleeping bag here, OK? Don’t mind me, I won’t be any trouble.”
“Au revoir, Mom and Dad.”
“No kidding.” Lauren pried the lid off her cup and used the straw to stir her smoothie. “Dear Mom and Dad,” she’d write on a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. But then what would she say?
“He even had a real mouse once,” Myrna said.
“Who?”
“My cousin. And listen to this—instead of setting a trap he fed the fucker.”
“Gross,” Lauren said, but she’d begun thinking of Dr. Lewis, of something he’d told her last week. They were talking about Prozac again, about whether or not it did anything, and somehow they got onto the subject of how antidepressants were first tested, back when they were new. Drug testing always started with animals, he explained, and he described how the researchers would give one mouse the antidepressant drug and another nothing, and then they’d put them both into buckets of water and see which fought harder to stay afloat. They were measuring the drug’s effect on mouse despair.
Mouse despair. Something about that really got Lauren.
Myrna’s mom arrived a little later to pick them up. She drove a funky old Saab, and when she saw Lauren she said, “Hey, doll—how’re things?”
“Fine, thanks,” Lauren said as she got into the backseat. The car was messy and smelled of Myrna’s dog, but she was happy to be in it. She had only been to Myrna’s house once, but she was dying to go again. Everything about Myrna was interesting.
They left the shopping center and drove past the high school and then up the hill. Myrna’s mom glanced over her shoulder and said, “So Lauren, what are you two beauties up to these days? My daughter won’t tell me anything.”