Janice smiles wanly. “Right,” she says. “Something like that.”
“Want me to call the doctor?”
“No!” Janice says. “There’s no need.”
“Okay,” says Lizzie. “But what should I do about the guests?”
“Just tell them I have the flu. No, tell them it’s terribly contagious. Tell them it’s a bacterial virus.”
“Okay,” whispers Lizzie conspiratorially, pleased to be on the planning committee of a secret’s formation. She is also faintly relieved that her mother won’t be coming downstairs after all; Lizzie’s not at all sure she could handle seeing her mother talk to the Groupers right now. “I’ll tell them your doctor told you not to move out of bed.”
“That’s my baby,” says Janice, and puts her hand out so that Lizzie can help her up from the tile. She is surprisingly light, and when her robe accidentally gapes open, Lizzie can see her mother’s breasts. She averts her eyes from the blue-veined flesh, tucks Janice back into the bed, and moves a wastebasket within arm’s reach—just in case Janice vomits again—before slipping back downstairs.
there is a crowd in the living room now; lizzie counts at least two dozen couples, including the Groupers, the Gossetts, Luella Anderton and Barbara Bint, the Maxfields, and Dr. Brunschild from around the corner. To her alarm, the Bellstroms (parents of Justin) and the Franks (parents of Johnny, 6/9 and 6/18) have also arrived. It’s almost as if her mother invited only the parents of classmates Lizzie had sex with—what a terrifying thought! She looks around at the faces of her classmates’ parents, faces she has seen at endless summer barbecues and holiday cookie-decorating parties and Labor Day pool parties and winter ice-skating weekends and more birthday galas than she can count, since she was old enough to walk—and reads nothing but burning condemnation in their gazes even as they smile and wave at her. How can they not know about her reputation? The whole school knows!
The room is warm despite the air-conditioning, and the volume keeps rising as the guests attempt to outtalk one another. A jazz CD plays on the stereo. She can hear the rich clink of jewelry against stemware. Margaret has raided their parents’ wine cellar, and a half dozen dusty bottles of Château Lafite are sitting on the sideboard beside the crystal. A plate of olives is arranged next to the wine, along with a bowl of peanuts and a plate with pita bread cut into triangles and a tub of hummus. Lizzie admires her sister’s industriousness: She would have just made spaghetti.
Margaret is backed up against a wall with Steven Bellstrom on one side and Barbara Bint on the other, her nose buried in a glass of wine. She has an expression on her face that reminds Lizzie of a stray dog that’s been cornered by county animal services. Lizzie can hear only bits and pieces of their conversation from across the room—“academic pursuits” and “the age of affluence” and “potential in wireless networking.”
Margaret catches her eye from across the room, and Lizzie shrugs. “Sick,” she mouths at her sister. “The flu.” Margaret narrows one eye and nods, without stopping her conversation.
Lizzie feels a hand on her arm and looks up to see the Franks, Linda and Jeffrey, standing right next to her. The Franks. She recoils, but there’s nowhere to run. Linda Franks reaches over and pats her on the head. Lizzie thinks she might pee her pants.
“So good to see you, Lizzie,” says Mrs. Franks. “I hear you’ve joined the swim team! Good for you. I’m sure your mom is very proud.”
“Right,” says Lizzie warily. “I got third place at the last meet. Sort of.”
“Good for you!” continues Mrs. Franks. “You heard that Johnny won the all-league MVP for soccer this year, right?”
Lizzie remembers this fact vividly, since she let Johnny talk her into giving him a blow job in the Franks’ guest bathroom one evening as a “celebratory gift,” when the Franks were at the opera in San Francisco. She nods, unable to trust her voice.
“Well, of course you probably knew, didn’t you. I actually heard—through the grapevine, since Johnny never tells me anything anymore, such a boy he is—that you have been spending some time with Johnny lately.” She sips from her wineglass. “My neighbor saw you going into the house a few weeks ago—and Johnny knows he’s not supposed to have friends over when we’re out, but when I heard that it was you I forgave him. I know your mother has raised you as a proper little lady, but next time, only when we’re home, okay?” She shakes a finger in mock admonishment. “You know, you kids are almost getting to the age where we need to worry about you. I keep forgetting you’re not in junior high anymore.”
“Oh, Linda,” says Jeffrey Franks. He pokes his wife in the arm. “Leave Lizzie alone. I’m sure she doesn’t want to talk about her social life with her friends’ parents. I don’t think the kids would think that’s cool, would they, Lizzie?”
“Um,” says Lizzie. “I’m not sure what the kids think.”
Linda Franks keeps smiling while she shakes her head. Lizzie is struck by her resemblance to a polished hazelnut: brown skin stretched so high and tight over her cheekbones that it looks like it might crack if she smiled. Mrs. Franks tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Jeffrey, you have no idea,” she says. “I’m sure that Lizzie doesn’t mind talking about Johnny. I’m sure she’s popular with all the boys these days.”
“Popular!” says a voice right near Lizzie’s ear. She looks over her shoulder in alarm and thinks her heart might thud straight out of her chest when she sees that it is Joannie Cientela, mother of Brian. Brian, 5/24. Brian, a pale boy, blond to the point of albino, has a crooked ballpoint-ink tattoo of a snake on his hip that he carefully re-inks every night before he goes to bed. He showed Lizzie this tattoo and swore her to secrecy before he got her stoned for the first time a few weeks before school got out. They had done it twice, once in his parents’ bathroom, which Lizzie doesn’t think counts because Brian ejaculated prematurely in the sink, and once in his bedroom, which had Star Wars sheets on the bed. He told her he thought she was really nice, and she thought that meant he wanted her to be his girlfriend, but then he never spoke to her again. Slut.
Joannie Cientela leans over and gives Linda Franks an air kiss, then grips Lizzie’s upper arm with a tight fist. “It sounds like Lizzie is just fighting them off,” she says. “Aren’t you, Lizzie.”
Lizzie stands stock-still, petrified, as Mrs. Cientela’s wedding ring digs into her shoulder blade. “Um, fighting? Not really,” she mumbles.
But Joannie Cientela isn’t listening. “Just look at her!” She pushes Lizzie a few inches forward. “Cute as a button. You finally grew into your own, sweetie, and you’re such a darling thing, it’s no wonder all the boys have crushes on you. Your mother must be so proud. Where is your mother, sweetie? So good of her to have the party—keeping up her spirits despite everything. It’s nice to see. Anyway, let’s not talk about that. How is school? I hear you’re doing well?” She turns to the Franks. “Brian told me Lizzie was tutoring him after school a few weeks ago—his Spanish is terrible, and this one here”—she jiggles Lizzie’s shoulder—“has apparently been helping him out after school. Lizzie, you know you left a barrette in the bathroom? I should have thought to bring it.”
Linda Franks turns to Lizzie. “You tutor! Your mother never told me. Johnny needs Spanish help too.”
Lizzie’s vocal cords have frozen, so she nods instead. In fact, she is getting a C in Spanish, but she decides this probably shouldn’t be mentioned. She sees Justin Bellstrom’s mother, Cecile, walking their way. Oh God. She hates herself! These parents, they are all so nice and trusting and they have no idea that they are talking to the school slut. What if her mother found out? Would she throw Lizzie out of the house? How could Lizzie have been so stupid? She thought they liked her when all they liked was her…Lizzie thinks of a vile word and then erases it from her mind. She tenses up into a hard little knot of muscle and thinks that if she lets her muscles relax she might just melt into a puddle, like the Wicked Witch of the West. Her nether regions tingle from
the need to pee.
The doorbell rings again and Lizzie sees her opportunity to escape. “Gottagetdoor,” she mumbles, slipping out from under Mrs. Cientela’s grasp.
As she pushes her way through the living room, Noreen Gossett appears in Lizzie’s path. Her patrician nostrils flare like a rearing horse’s and she purses her peach-lacquered lips with displeasure. “Where is your sister,” Mrs. Gossett says, articulating every syllable. Is. Yer. Sis. Ter. “Your sister, Margaret. I need to speak with her. I am very upset.” Lizzie shakes her head. Noreen Gossett cranes her neck to survey the room and spies Margaret by the sideboard, guzzling a glass of wine with her eyes rolled back in her head while Mr. Bellstrom, on her left side, pontificates at the empty air. Margaret lowers her glass and makes eye contact just as Noreen Gossett locks in on her target.
“Excuse me,” says Mrs. Gossett, sweeping past Lizzie. Margaret drains the wine in one gulp, drops her glass on the sideboard, and makes a beeline for the kitchen, Noreen Gossett in pursuit.
The doorbell rings again—BA bum BA bum ba bum be ba bum—and Lizzie flees to the foyer. She squeezes her eyes shut as she pulls on the handle to the front door, not sure who else might arrive on the doorstep but convinced that there must be still more punishment waiting for her. The Liverbachs, maybe? When it swings open, she sees James, the pool boy, standing on the front step. He is not dressed in party attire, at least not unless he considers party attire to be a wife-beater tank top paired with shorts held up by a belt of brown yarn.
James hooks a thumb over his shoulder and gestures at the cars. “Are you having a party or something?” he asks.
“What are you doing here?” she says. “I thought you already came today?”
“Special delivery for your mom. Where is she?”
“She’s upstairs,” says Lizzie. “But she’s sick. She isn’t seeing anybody.”
“Oh, don’t worry. She definitely wants to see me.” He steps through the doorway and heads straight up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. Lizzie follows him to the bottom of the staircase and watches him vanish in the upstairs hallway. His presence baffles her. Maybe her mother forgot to pay him?
She lingers for a minute with her hand on the balustrade, listening to the din in the living room and wondering if anyone would notice if she just slipped out the front door and left. Would Margaret be mad? Maybe Lizzie could go back down to the Fountain and get a hamburger and fries and by the time she returned everyone would be gone. She turns around, preparing to bolt, and runs smack into Barbara Bint, who has materialized behind her in the foyer.
Barbara plants her pump on the first stair. “I just thought I’d chat with your mother while she gets ready. See how she’s doing. Catch up.”
“Catch up about what?” says Lizzie, thinking of her mother wrapped around the toilet, and stalling.
“There are lots of things to talk about,” she says. There is a slithery quality to this statement, something decidedly ominous—and pointed? From her elevated position on the step, Barbara gazes down her nose at Lizzie, her face cast in shadows by the overhead chandelier. Lizzie panics.
“You shouldn’t go up there,” she says. She lurches forward and, as Barbara climbs up the stairs, grabs Barbara’s fuchsia dress by the hem. In the process, she accidentally gets a glimpse of control-top panty hose stretched tight over Barbara Bint’s thighs. “She’s really sick.”
“Sick?” says Mrs. Bint. She reaches down and gently unpeels Lizzie’s hand from its grip on her dress, then smooths the skirt back over her thighs. “How awful. Why didn’t she cancel the party? If I’d known I would have brought a pot of soup. I’ll go see what she needs.”
“No, that’s a really bad idea. She has bac…bad…” She can’t remember the phrase, though, and struggles to retrieve another medical-sounding illness. “Melanoma. It’s really contagious.”
“Melanoma?” Mrs. Bint says. “She has skin cancer?”
“Um, I mean. Food poisoning?”
Mrs. Bint looks at her suspiciously. “Are you being honest, young lady?” Lizzie tries to smile but fails and can feel her face flush pink. “You know, Jesus pities a liar. That’s the Ninth Commandment! ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’”
Lizzie feels the weight of yet another screwup piling up on her and slumps under the added burden. “Is it?”
“Lizzie! Everyone should know the commandments.”
A figure appears at the top of the stairs, and both Lizzie and Barbara look up. It is James, who hurtles down and past them. He pauses at the front door, winks, and vanishes, slamming the door closed behind him. Barbara watches him go with a cocked head.
“Who is that?” she asks.
“James,” says Lizzie, relieved that her failings are no longer the topic of conversation. “The pool boy.”
“Oh,” says Barbara, sounding puzzled. But then her hand jets forward to clutch Lizzie’s forearm. “To finish what I was saying…. Maybe—and I’m just saying this because I feel a lot of compassion for you—maybe you should consider going to church more often, Elizabeth. I have heard things from my son Zeke, things that he’s heard about your behavior—very disturbing things that I don’t plan on repeating right now, but I think you know what I’m talking about. And I know you haven’t had a whole lot of good role models lately, what with your father’s behavior. And I know your mother is having a terrible time of it—the poor thing—but that doesn’t give you license to do…the things you’re doing. Your body is a sacred temple, Lizzie. It belongs to Jesus Christ! Didn’t you know that?”
Lizzie is definitely going to pee her pants. She squeezes her legs together until they burn. Barbara stares at her, and Lizzie realizes that she is waiting for an answer. She can’t remember the question. “Yes?” she says tentatively.
“Well, then you should know better than to desecrate that temple, Lizzie! Lizzie, listen to me.” She leans in closer, using Lizzie’s forearm as leverage. She whispers, “Jesus forgives all sinners. His love is boundless, and if you come to Him and pledge your devotion He will show you the path to eternal grace. He will bless you with happiness.”
“He will?” Lizzie whispers back. She senses that she is being told a profound secret and lets herself be pulled in close. Barbara Bint is warm, practically steaming, and in the hot nimbus of this holy righteousness Lizzie is helpless. She feels herself being sucked into a dizzying vortex.
“Yes, Lizzie. And you should experience the joy of taking the Lord into your heart and being cleansed of sin. God loves you, Lizzie! Loves you! You should come with us to River of Life Church. Thursday nights are introductory nights for new members. We can give you a ride—it’s en route anyway. I’ll pick you up next Thursday at seven and Zeke can introduce you around.”
The vortex pulls her in and tosses her gently about. Jesus loves her. Really? She isn’t quite sure what this means, but it compels her. There seems to be no alternative but to go to church and see for herself. Lizzie closes her eyes and succumbs. She unclenches every muscle in her body and is relieved to realize that she isn’t actually going to pee on herself after all.
“Okay,” she says, still in a whisper.
Barbara steps back. “I’ll be praying for you,” she says. She looks up past Lizzie’s head, and her face, already glowing from the effort of her religious prostrations, brightens further. Lizzie turns to see Janice standing at the top of the stairs, her face freshly washed and her hair yanked back into a bun. She has traded in the bathrobe for a simple black dress. She has even put on panty hose. She looks pale, but she exudes a nervous buzz, as if every little pore on her body is pulsing with pent-up energy.
Janice bounds down the stairs, her manicured nails reinforcing each step with a tap on the balustrade, and stops to air-kiss Barbara at the bottom step. “I am so sorry to be so late to my own party,” Janice says to Barbara. “I hope my daughters entertained everyone while I got dressed.”
“Lizzie said you were very sick.”
“Sick?�
�� Janice looks amused at the very idea. Lizzie is confused. How could she have recovered so fast? Wasn’t she just puking a few minutes ago? “No. Nothing serious. Just a little upset stomach. I hope you weren’t too concerned.”
“Well, I figured it couldn’t be all that bad, because you had a visitor up there—who was that young man?” Barbara’s face twitches, as if she’s battling her own curiosity and losing. “What a strange-looking boy. He could use a real belt, couldn’t he.”
Janice doesn’t blink. “Just the pool boy, Barbara. I owed him his salary.”
“Well, don’t you worry yourself about being late,” says Barbara. “I’ve just been catching up with Lizzie. We’ve had a good chat, haven’t we Lizzie?” She winks at Lizzie. Lizzie blanches.
“Good good good!” cheers Janice. She steers Barbara back toward the living room. Lizzie follows behind, unsure if the vast sense of relief she feels has to do with her mother’s rapid recovery or with the bargain she senses she has just made with Barbara Bint. Janice comes to a halt just before the door to the living room, reaches up and smooths an invisible strand of misplaced hair, then wades right into the party as if she was never missing in the first place.
Heads turns. Hands are thrown up in mock-surprise pleasure. Faces register their delight. Her mother is swallowed up in the melee. Lizzie watches Janice, in the middle of the room, the Groupers on one side and Luella Anderton on the other; she talks animatedly, refilling drained wineglasses with one hand, grasping welcoming handshakes and peppering the air with kisses. Lizzie is struck by her mother’s efficiency, not for the first time. Only her mother could be a vomiting wreck one minute and a gracious hostess the next. Watching Janice, Lizzie believes in her heart that she will never be that capable. She has already messed up everything in her own life in a way that feels so ghastly and permanent that she knows she will never be anything like that pretty, perfect woman in the center of the room. Even if Jesus does forgive her.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Page 21