by Ann Packer
Ryan had a lot of love in him; Rebecca knew this in her bones. And she wasn’t sure if she did or not. She had other things, like maturity and common sense, but she felt she wasn’t quite as lovable as Ryan. Which, she understood, was not the same thing as having or not having love inside herself, though it was close. Being lovable versus being loving. She thought again of Leanne Mack and decided that she really didn’t need to consult her father.
• • •
This marked the beginning of a new phase for Rebecca. She began bringing girls like Leanne Mack home from school, inviting them for Saturdays, even sleepovers. The first time, Leanne sat on Rebecca’s bed and Rebecca stood at the record player and played different songs from No Secrets, always lifting the needle when a song finished and holding it above the record so she could tell Leanne what she liked about it without ruining the next song with talk. Leanne had never heard of Carly Simon and admitted to not having a record player, though when Rebecca tried to find out if that meant Leanne didn’t have one in her room or in her house, Leanne’s disjointed reply told Rebecca she should drop it.
After they had listened to all the songs Rebecca liked, Leanne accepted the album cover from Rebecca and made a comment that Rebecca would remember for years. “Do you think those are peas?” Leanne said, giggling as she looked at Carly Simon’s chest. The simple fact was that Carly Simon wasn’t wearing a bra and her nipples were sticking out. Rebecca had discovered recently that her own nipples felt good when she touched them; the lighter the touch, the better the feeling, especially if she went around in circles. Leanne’s comment was very immature and Rebecca had to try a lot harder to give her the benefit of the doubt.
That wasn’t quite it, though. She wasn’t just trying to give Leanne the benefit of the doubt; she was trying to give her whatever the opposite of doubt was. Faith, said the antonym dictionary, but that didn’t sound right to Rebecca, as if Leanne were God or a religion. “Hope” and “charity” were words that went with “faith,” and they were more like what Rebecca was trying to give. She was trying to give Leanne a friend, which was strange, because if asked she would never describe Leanne as her friend. There was a difference.
She invited Edith Ketler over, too. Edith had woman-size bosoms and obviously wore a bra; you could see the indentation of the straps on her shoulders and across her back. She didn’t look at the picture of Carly Simon at all. When she slept over she put on her nightgown in Rebecca’s closet, but it was thin and clingy and Rebecca could see the exact shape and size of her bosoms, which were even more huge and hanging than Rebecca expected. Rebecca’s mother’s bosoms were small, and she began to wonder what that might mean about the future of her own body. She was curious about her future in general and sometimes thought about how every single step she took sealed off a hundred or a thousand other steps she no longer had the option of taking. Ryan disagreed and showed her, with wet footprints on her bedroom carpet, how you could step backward into your own footprints and return without a trace to the place you’d begun.
Ryan was a mama’s boy—so Robert said to Rebecca. In Robert’s view it went along with Ryan going to Sand Hill Day and augured nothing good for his future. Robert, as of March a bona fide teenager who managed to find something sarcastic to say at any and every juncture, thought Ryan needed a good kick in the pants.
“Don’t hold Mom’s hand,” Robert said. “You’re nine. And don’t hold James’s hand, either, he doesn’t need it anymore. You can put your hands in your pockets if you need something to do with them. See, look, my hands are in my pockets and I’m just walking. I’m strolling.”
The family was on its way to a recital in Atherton. They had to park almost a block away and proceed one by one up the shoulder of the road, crowding to the side when a car zoomed past. Hundred-year-old shade trees filtered the sunlight, and through gaps in walls and hedges they glimpsed neat beds of daylilies planted in front of mansions.
Halfway there, Penny said she had to return to the car for something. She got the keys from Bill and headed back.
“Come along,” he said to the children. “We’ll get seats.”
The daughter of one of his colleagues was an aspiring cellist, and her grandmother was hosting this special afternoon performance. She was to be accompanied on the piano by a prodigy Robert knew slightly from his days as a piano student, and this was one of the reasons he felt grumpy. Another was that he was dressed in a stiff blue shirt with fold marks from the cardboard. His brothers wore identical shirts, Ryan’s big in the shoulders with cuffs nearly covering his hands, and James’s a little small, which their mother had pointed out only as they were getting into the car. Their father, who had bought the shirts late the afternoon before, smiled grimly but didn’t comment, and Robert had almost wished he’d just snap a response at her. He wondered if she ever felt that way herself.
“Why,” Robert said, “do you need good seats at a recital? It’s not like you need to see.”
“He didn’t say good seats,” Rebecca said. “He just said seats. But it does matter where you sit at a recital, especially at someone’s house. The acoustics may not be that great.”
“The acoustics may not be that great,” Robert muttered, but when his father raised his eyebrows he feigned a look of distraction.
Harold Lawson stood on the gravel drive in front of the house. His wife was from an old Atherton family with roots in early San Francisco banking, and the house was an imposing stone structure with three floors and a five-car garage. Harold had come to the Peninsula from a small town in eastern Washington, and to Bill he was a kindred spirit, modest and reserved, markedly different from both the California natives and the East Coast transplants.
“Dr. Blair,” he said, shaking Bill’s hand. “What a fine-looking family.”
“How are the jitters?” Bill said.
“Janet is fine. My wife is a wreck.”
“Like any good mother under the circumstances. Children, do you remember Dr. Lawson?”
Dr. Lawson had taken care of each of them on occasion—sent James for an X-ray, swabbed Rebecca’s throat. He was tremendously tall, and Robert had always been a little afraid of him.
“Young man,” Dr. Lawson said to him.
Robert offered Dr. Lawson his hand, and Dr. Lawson registered a flicker of surprise and possibly amusement before extending his own hand and giving Robert’s a hearty shake.
Ryan looked up at their father. “I’ll just wait out here for Mom.”
“No, let’s go in,” their father said. “She’ll be along.”
The front door opened into a large entry hall that was full of people, maybe thirty altogether. A young woman approached them, wearing a jumpsuit patterned with green and blue chevrons. She handed each of them a mimeographed program. “The recital will be in there,” she said, indicating a pair of closed double doors. “We’ll open up in just a few minutes. For now we’re asking everyone to wait in the foy-yay.”
She moved on to another family, and Rebecca said, to no one in particular, “I thought it was ‘foyer.’ ” She looked up at her father. “Isn’t it ‘foyer’?”
“Well, we knew what she meant.”
“But which is it?”
“It depends where you live, Rebeck. In France it would be ‘foy-yay.’ ”
“So here it’s ‘foyer’?”
“Rebecca,” Robert said. “You’re being a nitpicker.”
“I’m being meticulous.”
“Same diff.”
“No, it’s not. In fact, the diff between ‘nitpicker’ and ‘meticulous’ is bigger than the diff between ‘foy-yay’ and ‘foyer.’ ”
“Oh, my God,” Robert said. “I’m going to kill myself.”
“Now you’re being melodramatic.”
Robert walked away. He hadn’t wanted to come, and even his trump card—the fact that he was thirteen—hadn’t made a bit
of difference. He saw that there were no other teenage boys, which was partly a relief (no one to see him here) and partly a confirmation that attending a cello recital on a Sunday afternoon was not an appropriate thing for him to be doing. What would his friends say if they could see him? The fact that he didn’t really have friends anymore made the question all the more painful. It seemed junior high meant you needed four or five people to be able to do anything, and otherwise everyone stayed home. He’d been invited to go bowling by a guy in his German class, and then on the evening before the guy called and said there weren’t enough people so he was canceling. Robert couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to anyone’s house just to play, though obviously they wouldn’t call it that.
He returned to his family in time to hear James say, with a familiar edge to his voice, “Where’s Mommy? When are we going to sit down?”
“James,” their father said in a low voice. “It won’t be too much longer, honey. Can you be patient?”
“No. I want to sit down,” James said loudly, and he plunked himself down in the middle of the rug.
“James, get up!” Rebecca said.
“Daddy,” he wailed, and people near them began edging away.
“Never mind,” Rebecca said, “I’ll take him outside,” and she grabbed James’s hand and motioned for her brothers to go with her. Ryan followed easily, but Robert delayed long enough to calculate the costs and benefits of complying, ultimately deciding that getting out of the crowded room more than outweighed the loss of status he’d suffer by doing as Rebecca wished.
Dr. Lawson was still in front of the house, talking to a stocky white-haired man the children recognized as their father’s doctor, the existence of whom they found both preposterous and consoling.
Pulling free of Rebecca’s hand, James headed for a flowerpot, which he dragged over to a low stone wall and used as a stepping stone. Once he was on the wall, he held his arms out, lifted one foot, and began to hop. After advancing no more than a yard, he paused with his foot in the air and dipped sideways in what was obviously a bogus move meant to suggest he’d nearly lost his balance. Then he continued forward.
The other children watched him. More guests arrived, walking up the long driveway in couples and families.
Ryan said, “I just don’t know where Mom is.”
“You should spend less time thinking about Mom,” Robert exclaimed, “and more time—” He was going to say “more time working on your fielding” but stopped himself. That spring Ryan had gotten involved in Little League for the first time, and he was the only boy on his team who had never played before. On afternoons when Ryan had practice, Robert tried to assess his skills. It wasn’t that Robert thought Ryan should be as good as he’d been, but he ought to take it more seriously if he was going to bother doing it at all. Robert’s father had asked him to be careful of Ryan’s feelings, though, so he didn’t finish the thought.
“You guys?” Ryan said. “Why did we stop our crusade? I think we still need it.”
“Not this again,” Robert said. “It was a bullshit idea then and it’s a bullshit idea now.”
“Don’t say that!” Rebecca exclaimed. “Just because you’re a quitter doesn’t mean we are. And it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Maybe we’re not going to have a crusade, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something.”
“Why can’t we have a crusade?” Ryan said.
“It was just a word.”
“But it was a thing.”
“It can still be a thing,” Rebecca said, turning away so she could focus. She had thought about the crusade many times since the start of school, but lately it had slipped her mind. This made her feel guilty. But what was there her mother might want to do? Nothing. All she was interested in was some craft or other.
“Uh-oh,” Ryan said.
James had reached the far end of the wall and was using his belly to ease his way to the ground. Now his shirtfront was streaked with dirt, and he brushed at it with both hands, succeeding only in spreading the dirt around.
“He’s like Pig-Pen,” Robert said.
“He’s young,” Ryan offered.
“No, it’s true, he is like Pig-Pen,” Rebecca said, and that seemed to decide it.
Robert went back into the house and saw his father talking to a few other men. He squeezed past small knots of adults and arrived in time to hear his father say, “He’s working very hard,” and though Robert knew it was unlikely, he hoped his father was talking about him. He was working very hard; he needed to get home to rewrite an essay that was due the next morning. He had a sound thesis, but he’d been too literal when it came to “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” He thought he ought to use his thesaurus to change some of the words.
“And doing brilliantly,” said a man with thinning red-blond hair and a bushy mustache.
“I wouldn’t say brilliantly,” said a man Robert thought he recognized. “I’d say he’s doing well.”
If this was the person Robert thought it was, his name was John Mallon and he was an orthopod, a word Rebecca found hilarious because it sounded like some kind of prehistoric creature that walked on all fours. Either that or a robot. But orthopedics interested Robert. Lately he’d been thinking that if he became a doctor he might want to be an orthopedist, a doctor of muscles and bones, since that seemed a much cleaner business than most other specialties.
Robert’s father saw him and said, “Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce my oldest. Robert, these are Doctors Mallon, Burke, and Friedlander.”
One by one the men offered Robert their hands, and he felt a blast of righteousness. Dr. Lawson had viewed him as a child, but that didn’t mean everyone would.
Dr. Mallon asked where he was in school, and Dr. Burke asked if he was dissecting earthworms in science class. “Quite a business, dissection,” Dr. Burke went on without waiting for an answer. “Earthworms, frogs. The world inside.”
“Nothing can prepare you for opening up a human body,” said Dr. Friedlander, who wore aviator sunglasses even though he was indoors. “Not an earthworm, not any other animal.”
Dr. Mallon tsked.
“You disagree?” Dr. Friedlander said.
“Alas,” Dr. Mallon said, “I fear we are not so far from our predecessors as all that.”
There was a brief silence. Robert had found Dr. Mallon’s “I wouldn’t say brilliantly” a little obnoxious, and now he saw that Dr. Mallon was possibly an obnoxious person.
“I don’t mean anatomically,” Dr. Friedlander said. “I mean what it feels like. Another human being. Are you thinking about medicine, son?”
Robert said he was, but he wasn’t sure what kind.
“That’s okay,” Dr. Friedlander said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”
“If you ever want to talk about orthopedics,” Dr. Mallon said, putting a palm to his chest.
“I don’t think it would be orthopedics,” Robert said quickly. “Or gastroenterology.”
All the men laughed except Robert’s father. Dr. Burke said, “A GI doc I know married a gal who’s an OB/GYN. Tells me, ‘We’ve got both holes covered.’ ”
“Gentlemen,” Robert’s father said. “Excuse us.” And he put a hand on Robert’s shoulder and guided him away.
“Dad,” Robert said when they were clear of the crowd. “I’m thirteen. I got it.”
“I know you got it,” his father said. “But that doesn’t mean I liked it.”
Robert thought his father was a bit of a prude, but he didn’t mind being taken from the conversation. In the matter of sex, and especially the female body, and most especially the lower half of the female body, he was allowing himself a kind of Indian summer of disinterest, set off by some diagrams at his father’s clinic that he’d spied one Sunday afternoon. While his father was busy, Robert had w
andered into an empty exam room and found a booklet—or not exactly found it, since he’d seen it a few times without having had the opportunity to take a good look—and he spent a few minutes flipping back and forth between the page about male reproductive organs and the page about female reproductive organs, the complementary nature of which had left him uneasy.
“So, no orthopedics?” his father said now. “I remember teaching you the bones when you were, oh, just a little fellow. Five or six. You really enjoyed learning. I think you still do.”
“Can I see your wrist?” Robert said.
His father pulled back his cuff and held out his arm. Robert put his forefinger on the knobby protrusion on the outside of the wrist and said, “That’s your ulnar styloid process.”
“Why ulnar?”
“It’s at the end of the ulna. Can I try the carpals?”
His father put his hand on the crown of Robert’s head. “You can try anything, Robby. You can do anything.” As he spoke, his face changed around the eyes and mouth, as if love lived in particular regions of the skin, and Robert felt his own face grow warm.
“Scaphoid,” he said. “Lunate. Pisiform.”
His father shook his head. “You missed one.”
“I thought I knew them!”
“No reason you should. There are twenty-seven bones in the hand alone.”
“But I—”
“Remember the mnemonic?”
A mnemonic was a mental cheat sheet; Robert’s favorite had always been Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. He tried to remember the one for the carpal bones. It was something a little naughty. Then he got it: She Looks Too Pretty, Try To Catch Her. He had left out a T. He said, “Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform.” He paused to think. “Trapezoid, trapezium, capitate, hamate.”
“That’s all eight of them.”
“But in the right order?”
“Very close. Trapezium comes before trapezoid, but what mnemonic could remind you of that?”