She thinks of Mark Weatherlove. Should she call him? She wants to call him. But why? What would she say? What did that mean anyway—“I think you’re really cute?” Does he mean it in an “I’d like to date you” kind of way or was it more of a polite, friendly kind of thing? More to the point: Does she think he’s cute? She has never really thought about it. He has never really seemed to be the kind of guy to think about. She has known Mark Weatherlove since they were both at Mrs. Kraus’s nursery school together, but they have never been friends. He was always part of the game geek squad, those scrawny boys who sit on the lawn at lunchtime and read video-game magazines and brag about how they’ve jacked the video cards on their desktop setups in order to increase their respawn rates in Half-Life 2. At the obligatory neighborhood barbecues, Mark would usually just sit inside and fiddle with his Game Boy, no matter how much his mother nagged him to come out and play. Once, Lizzie recalls, he tried to show her how to play Super Mario 4, but she was more interested in the contents of the buffet table than in saving a digital princess from a bunch of gorillas.
She used to think that Mark Weatherlove was an antisocial dork; now she wonders if perhaps he was just shy. She thinks again of the way he turned bright pink when he told her she was cute. She’s never made a boy blush before. She didn’t even know boys could blush. Maybe she will call him, to apologize for calling his mom a bitch.
Lizzie puts down the tweezers and picks up Us Weekly. She devours the glossy photographs of the “Stars Are Just Like You!” pages—her favorite section, which shows teen starlets with pimply skin pumping their own gas and buying Dr. Scholl’s foot powder—and lands on the gossip section. Halfway down the page, she stops abruptly. She examines the photo, reads the caption, and then examines the photo again. It shows Lizzie’s favorite star, Ysabelle van Lumis, exiting a white Bentley outside a Hollywood restaurant. In one hand she is clutching a gold Fendi purse; her other hand reaches behind her to grasp the hand of a gruff-looking man, cigarette hanging from his teeth, who peers out from the depths of the Bentley’s back seat. The picture is blurry, but Lizzie recognizes him instantly: It’s Bart.
“Ysabelle van Lumis has a hot new man,” the story reads,
in Brit Bartholomew Johnson, former Fahrenheit 88 hunk and her costar in the new action thriller Thruster. Our Hollywood spies have seen the happy couple canoodling at My Pilates Body and buying nonfat green tea Blended Freezies at the Coffee Explosion…. Word is that Johnson has even moved into Yzzie’s six-bedroom mansion in Malibu! Is the new 5-carat pink diamond on her right hand a gift from her new love? “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an engagement ring,” says an insider. “It’s a whirlwind romance!”
Lizzie is outraged. Poor Margaret—here she is, home taking care of her family in a time of crisis, and Bart is cheating on her. The jerk.
She hesitates for only a minute before deciding that Margaret needs to know—this second—exactly what’s going on behind her back. Margaret will show Bart a thing or two. Maybe she’ll get on a plane and go kick his ass. Lizzie envisions her sister driving to Malibu with a righteous fury, screeching to a halt in front of Ysabelle van Lumis’s Greek Revival mansion, and storming up the steps. And then she’ll walk in on Bart and Ysabelle drinking Cristal half naked in bed, and she’ll throw a bucket of ice water over the both of them, and stalk out. Ysabelle’s hair will get soggy and she’ll scream like a baby. And then Bart will realize that Margaret is such a badass that he never should have fooled around on her and he’ll race after her. There will be a high-speed chase through the hills of Malibu until Margaret comes screeching to a halt—maybe because there are sheep in the road?—giving Bart a chance to catch up. And then he’ll fall to his knees and apologize and they’ll kiss under the setting sun and then Margaret will bring Bart up to Santa Rita to see her family and they’ll all go out to dinner at the Fountain. And everyone in town will marvel.
As Lizzie bounds down the hall to Margaret’s room, the Us Weekly rolled tightly in her fist, she admits to herself that she thinks it’s pretty cool that her sister’s boyfriend would cheat on her with a huge Hollywood star. It makes Margaret seem even cooler. Someday, Lizzie thinks, she’d like to date someone who also dates huge celebrities.
She throws open the door to her sister’s room to find Margaret dead asleep on her bed in the middle of the day. An open book—it appears to be Lizzie’s freshman English copy of The Catcher in the Rye—lies on the bed beside her. Lizzie sighs. Margaret has spent the better part of the last week sleeping and drinking beer. She barely leaves her room at all except to eat, and even then she never has dinner with Janice or Lizzie anymore. She just eats in the living room by herself, in front of the TV. Lizzie wonders if Margaret is sad—maybe she has already heard the gossip?—and, for a minute, considers whether this is such a good idea.
No. Margaret needs to know. And Lizzie will be there to console her. She slams the bedroom door shut, waking Margaret up. Her sister jolts upright in bed.
“Wha?” she says. “Lizzie, I was sleeping.”
“I have some bad news,” Lizzie says, as gravely as she can. She throws the open Us Weekly onto the bed, letting her hand linger in the air for dramatic flair. “Look.”
Margaret grinds bits of sleep from the corners of her eye with the edge of her thumb. “Jennifer Lopez is pregnant?” she asks.
“No,” says Lizzie impatiently. “Below that.”
Margaret stares at the page in silence. She slumps in her wrinkled sundress. “Oh,” she says. “Right.”
“That’s your Bart!” points out Lizzie.
“I know,” says Margaret. “He’s dating Ysabelle van Lumis.” She tosses the magazine down on the floor and falls back into the pillows. She yawns.
Lizzie is appalled by her sister’s lack of vindictive fury. Isn’t Margaret supposed to be jumping from the bed, screaming and yelling and wailing in rage? “He’s cheating on you, Margaret,” Lizzie points out gently, just in case Margaret doesn’t get it.
“He’s not cheating on me,” says Margaret. “We broke up months ago.”
“Oh,” says Lizzie. She looks down at the page again and watches her romantic revenge movie fade to black. No credits, not even a blooper reel. “Why did you pretend you hadn’t?”
Margaret sighs and screws up her shoulders. “Oh, you know. I didn’t want everyone to make a big deal about it. Our mother, in particular, would have gloated.”
“But you could trust me, Margaret! You could tell me anything! Maybe I could have helped you work things out with him!”
“That’s sweet, Lizzie. But you’re fourteen. I’m not sure you would have had a whole lot of context on the situation.”
Lizzie stares at Margaret uncomprehendingly, wondering who on earth this cynical stranger sleeping in her sister’s bed might be. What has she even been doing here for the last month, anyway? She views her sister in a completely new light, as if someone has just flipped the world upside down: Her sister is not enviable, living a fast-paced glamorous life in a city far away; she is not the savior who is going to help fix their family; she is not even that good of a friend. She is actually (Lizzie sees now) a seemingly underemployed, secretive know-it-all who never includes Lizzie in anything. It feels like the air in the room is hissing out, leaving Lizzie deflated and flat. She looks down at the pink raw skin on her legs. “I’m not a child, Margaret. You don’t need to act so superior.”
“Aw, Lizzie,” says Margaret. She reaches out from the bed and pats Lizzie on the shoulder. “It wasn’t anything to do with you. I just didn’t feel like talking about it. I needed to go through my own internal grieving process first, you know?”
“No, you lied,” says Lizzie, and yanks her arm away from her sister’s patronizing touch, finding herself unexpectedly quite angry. “You know what you are? You’re a total faker, Margaret. And you know what? I don’t even like your magazine.”
“Oh, Christ,” says Margaret, flopping back down on the bed. The Us Weekly riffles in
the breeze from the open window. She talks to the ceiling: “I can’t believe that even my little sister hates me now. It’s just all too hilarious.” But she doesn’t sound amused at all.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Lizzie says, already feeling guilty about having been so mean to her sister, despite how pissy Margaret is being. She thinks of M&M’s pouring from the ceiling into outstretched palms—that’s what she wants. “You should pray to God. That might make you feel better. Or I could lend you my Bible.”
Margaret stares at Lizzie in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? Your Bible?” She opens her mouth to say something, then stops. “You know what, I don’t even have the energy to ask.”
Lizzie watches her sister lying on the bed for a long while, feeling decidedly queasy. She thinks of Pastor Dylan and the way he stood there, so confident, at the front of the room, dispensing grace and mercy and love to his gathered masses. She squinches her eyes tight and focuses very hard, trying to feel the God light in her belly. There. There it is. A hot little spot beneath her belly button. When she opens her eyes again, she is dizzy. The room seems to spin slowly around her and her sister, who still lies there on the bed as motionless as a corpse; it’s as if the entire universe is rotating around just the two of them.
“I’ll pray for your soul,” Lizzie says. “Even though you totally suck.”
ten
the invitation for the annual summer silent auction at the golf club arrives on a sticky August morning, only four days before the actual event. Janice stands in her spotless hallway fingering the embossed envelope, feeling strangely jolted by this message from beyond her walls. She hasn’t been to the club in almost six weeks. Ensconsed as she’s been in the house, she has forgotten all about the party, usually the highlight of her summer. So it is only now that she realizes that she wasn’t asked to be the auction host, for the first time in six years, and feels it like a slap to the face. Une gifle en pleine figure. Perhaps it was just an assumption on the part of the club’s social committee, a delicate maneuver around her perceived grief, but Janice can’t help suspicion from settling in. Is she being publicly ostracized? Did Noreen’s rumor about James spread even further?
She will not let it deter her; Janice feels invincible. Just a quick visit to the ladies’ room is all it takes to conquer another six hours (actually, more recently, four; sometimes three). She’s even started to run out of household projects—having already given the wedding silver a really thorough polish, organized the books in the study by color and genre, ironed every napkin in the linen closet—and now, sometimes, she itches to do something beyond the boundaries of her home. The boundaries of Santa Rita, even. The other night, she looked up airline prices to Morocco after reading a story in Departures, although she didn’t go so far as to purchase a ticket. It was enough just to know that she had considered it.
James continues to arrive on Tuesdays and Fridays, his glove compartment a treasure trove of clear plastic baggies. He says nothing more about cutting her off, and she, in turn, brushes away any further thoughts of firing him. Yes, yes, his presence on her property is risky—Lizzie, she remembers sometimes, they could take Lizzie—but she cannot seem to let James go. Where else would she get It? She fantasizes about buying a year’s supply all at once and then sending him off until a less hazardous time, but this is implausible. (The cash outlay would be far too large, at least until she wins her case against Paul, and what if they are monitoring her bank account?) Her blood surges at the sound of his truck in the driveway; a whiff of chlorine makes her light-headed with anticipation. She is so alive, which just goes to show how dead she had been for so many years without realizing it.
Still, Janice senses the wolves outside, circling her house, waiting for her to make a fatal mistake: the lawyers, and Paul, and, now, the credit card companies pursuing her daughter. The phone rings constantly with collection agencies calling for Margaret, who has stopped answering the phone entirely. Instead, Janice takes down alarming messages in all capitals that she hopes convey to Margaret the urgency of the situation. She leaves these on Margaret’s bed or tucks them under her door: “MASTERCARD TWICE—WOULD LIKE YOU TO CALL THEM BACK IMMEDIATELY” “COLLECTION AGENCY/VISA: WANT TO TALK SETTLEMENT” “AMEX: HAVE YOU CONSIDERED CREDIT RATING? 1 WEEK TO PAY MINIMUM BALANCE, THEN THEY WILL PURSUE LEGAL REMEDY.”
When Margaret first told Janice that she was behind on her credit card payments, Janice assumed it was a manageable sum. Ten thousand dollars, maybe—nothing insurmountable. But then Janice answered the first call, and the second, and the fifth. She has done the math, by this point, and has totaled up a sum of over a hundred thousand dollars. The figure seems implausible. Margaret had mentioned financial problems with Snatch but this, this feels so much bigger. She is horrified by her daughter’s situation—hadn’t they always told Margaret to pay her balance off immediately?—but the clawing avarice of the collection agencies also brings out Janice’s most protective instincts. How could her straight-A daughter have gotten herself into so much trouble? Janice knows that she should feel the helium lift of victory—she was right, right about the prospects of that magazine, right about Margaret’s misdirected career path, probably even right about Bart too—and yet she can’t derive any satisfaction from this knowledge. Is her daughter’s irresponsibility a result of her own failings as a parent? She is aghast that her daughter would have concealed her situation, would have put herself at the mercy of these sharks rather than turning to her own mother for help. This wounding realization—that her daughter didn’t want her around in a time of crisis—is what deters Janice from just outright offering to help Margaret pay off her debts; that, and the fact that unless the lawsuit is settled in her favor, she doesn’t have a hundred thousand dollars in cash to give Margaret anyway. Yes, she could pay off the minimum balances to keep the collection agencies at bay—but would Margaret even let her do that? Somehow, she doubts it. Otherwise, what can she do? Nothing except take down the messages, each one noted in slightly larger letters than the last.
Margaret appears to be doing nothing to address her situation, either. Since their fight about the Gossetts’ dog, Margaret has been downright petulant—drinking beer in the middle of the day, spending hours in her bedroom with the door closed and the music loud, reading Lizzie’s trashy magazines out in the garden. The only person her elder daughter speaks to anymore is James, which causes Janice no end of concern. Sometimes, Janice spies on them through the blinds as they chat by the pool. Once, Janice was convinced that she saw Margaret follow James back toward the pool shed. Could he be giving Margaret It, too? The thought appalls her, but she can tell from Margaret’s behavior that this is not the case. If anything, Margaret seems to be sleeping even more than she did at the beginning of the summer.
There are so many questions Janice wants to ask Margaret: What happened to Snatch? How did she end up so deeply in debt? Does the fact that Bart hasn’t called once mean they’ve broken up? What is she doing out there in the shed with James? But Margaret’s confession about her poverty and Janice’s residual anger about the dog-walking mess have, together, broken apart some tenuous peace, so that Janice is now left distant, watching her daughter drift away on an invisible tide. Margaret no longer talks about assisting Janice with her lawsuit. In fact, she no longer talks to Janice at all, whereas Janice communicates through stiff, inch-high capitals.
And now this, from Janice’s friends at the club. She looks down at the invitation and realizes that it has been addressed solely to “Mrs. Janice Miller.” It should hurt to see that but, oddly, it doesn’t. Yes, she feels more utterly alone than ever before in her life, but is it so bad? No, not at all. In fact, her fortress of solitude is what makes her feel safe, untouchable, removed from the grasping fingers of useless emotion. She is fine as long as she has It, the icy bright powder that lights up inside of her brain.
Of course she will go to the party, she thinks. She will prove to everyone that she is doing just f
ine on her own. Better than fine. She’s terrific.
on the evening of the party, janice sets aside three hours to gird herself. She takes an hour-long soak in champagne bath salts and moisturizes with cardamom cream. She unsheathes a black Diane von Furstenberg silk wrap dress from a bag hanging in the cedar storage closet and freshens it up with a spritz of Evian spray. The special-occasion crystal-encrusted Ferragamo pumps are exhumed from their tissue-lined tomb on the closet shelf. From the safe in the floor of the linen closet Janice lifts the Tiffany necklace from its velvet box, a Christmas gift from Paul a few years back, and clasps the cold circlet of diamonds around her throat.
Standing before the mirror, she is pleased with her armor; the dress hangs on her a bit more than she remembers—well, she has lost weight!—but it shows off just the right amount of leg and cleavage. The wreaths of black exhaustion under her eyes are another matter; they require two coats of foundation to conceal. Her pupils have shrunk to pinpoints; the irises around them are enormous pools of fierce, furious blue. As she brushes on her mascara, her hand jitters so much from It that she has to reapply the black goo three times. There is nothing she can do about the red welts on her forearms from her fingernails, but the sleeves cover those. When she examines the result in the mirror, she is satisfied. She does not look like a retiring divorcée. In fact, she looks better than she has in years. In the mirror she sees sharp angles, lean lines, a point to her chin that lets the world know she is not to be taken lightly.
Before she goes downstairs she pauses in her bathroom to do a quick line of It for extra fortification, tilting her head back to enjoy the tickle in her throat, and stashes the baggie in the lining of her Judith Leiber clutch, just in case.
as she enters the kitchen, she sees lizzie sitting at the island eating a bowl of Corn Pops for dinner. Lizzie is clearly once again losing her battle with obesity, and Janice’s first impulse is to blame Paul for this, for upsetting a kind of precarious balance in their daughter’s metabolism. One step farther into the kitchen and she realizes that a boy is perched on the bar stool next to Lizzie. Janice stops, mid-stride, as his face comes into focus. It is none other than Mark Weatherlove, Beverly’s son, eating a bowl of sugary cereal with a spoon—the good wedding silver, the handles engraved with the Miller family initials. The logic of this stumps her: her best friend gone, and yet her son inexplicably here.
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