by Kris Radish
Emma quickly calls Erika, who cheerfully picks up the phone on the first ring and greets Emma as if she’s been sitting in her living room and waiting for her to call.
“Sugar pie!” Erika says without hesitation.
And Emma tells her almost everything. She tells her about shopping and flipping out in the aisle and how stressed out she is at work and how Debra looks like hell and how Joy is even more agitated than usual and how Stephie is moving in with her for a week and how their mother looks young and fresh and lovely and is having sex with men Emma has never even met and how she walked out of the brunch because Debra wanted to know if they all have the same father.
Erika stops her right there.
“What in the hell is going on in Higgins? Sex and drunken sisters and someone flipping out in public and reunion-planning stress. So far this all seems pretty darn normal to me for our family, except the parts about you.”
Before answering, Emma takes in a breath and runs her fingers lightly across the scissors, which she has bravely picked up again. “I screwed something up really big-time, Erika,” she replies, “and I have no idea what to do about it. Actually, I may have screwed up tons of stuff …”
“I can’t imagine how you could do that. You are the sugar pie. What did you do and I hope it was something more bizarre than Joy or Debra?”
Emma hasn’t decided yet if she is going to mention Samuel’s phone calls. A long time ago, when Samuel left and Erika visited her and saw that she was a mess from missing him, she’d learned about their relationship and that Emma had been totally in love with him. Emma had sworn her to secrecy and as the years passed neither one of them had ever talked about it again. Years when Emma had dated other men and even dared to bring one or two of them to the family reunion. Years when she held up her invisible checklist and no one else even came close to the standards she had set since Samuel. Years when she had finally, so she thought, pushed him away from the center of her heart and just assumed that he had been her one love and her only, and very lost, chance.
The one thing that Emma so loves about Erika is that she has also never judged her. She’s never complained about how Emma lives or what she drives or how involved she seems to be with her gardens and their mother’s life. She’s never given her unsolicited advice and has been free and open with her heart. Emma has always felt lucky and blessed to have her, not just as a sister, but also as a best friend.
All of that even as the years have seemed to move too quickly and Erika’s life and job and responsibilities as a wife and mother have kept them from seeing each other as often as they used to when life did not seem so complicated. Emma wonders now for just a moment how much she really knows of Erika’s real life and passions. They are both so busy. It’s been way too long since they have sat and talked without the worry of time and responsibility.
This is why Emma knows that it won’t matter when she tells Erika about the reunion mess and how much work she now has to do in such a terribly short period of time. So she tells Erika. Her beloved, open, lovely sister.
And Erika freaks out.
“What?” she screams.
“I didn’t answer my messages. I just pulled the plug. I have no idea what to do now—”
“Why in the hell wouldn’t you answer your messages?”
“I don’t know,” Emma lies.
“Sweet Jesus, Emma! This is like the biggest deal for Mom and about five hundred other people. Did you at least start on the invitations?”
“No. That was on the list, too. I really haven’t done anything—”
“Well, Joy and Debra seem useless. Here I am trying to find a new full-time teaching job and filling in for all the sick teachers here. Shit, Emma. Just shit. You never act like this. What is wrong with you?”
Emma has no idea how to answer the question so she just sits on the edge of the kitchen chair and can only think to finally toss the scissors out of arm’s reach because once again they are way too tempting. She has never felt so alone and useless in her entire life.
She can hear Erika breathing into the phone as if she’s just run around the block at full speed.
“Erika?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Do I just go down to the park office and throw myself on their mercy? Do I tell Mom? Do I tell Debra and Joy?”
“No!” Erika screams again, firmly.
“What then?” Emma asks miserably.
“Just give me a minute. Let me think about this. Do not—and let me repeat that, not—tell Joy and Debra. You’ve already pissed them off enough. And anyway Joy is leaving town.”
By the time Emma hangs up the phone her headache has returned and she feels as if she’s been run over by a truck. She is actually relieved to hear Stephie singing as she pushes the front door open.
“I’m here, Auntie Emma!”
Joy does not even get out of the car, which Emma decides is the best thing that has happened to her in days. She merely waves, throws one more bag of Stephie’s stuff out the window, and drives off.
“That was lovely,” Emma remarks as she ushers Stephie into the guest room.
“She’s like totally off the wall about something. Has she said anything to you about anything?”
“No,” Emma shares, suddenly thrilled beyond belief by the distractions Stephie will now be bringing into her life.
“It’s like worse than ever. I’m hoping she doesn’t kill my dad or one of my brothers at the beach in their sleep. She’s so edgy. But, really, I cannot believe she is letting me stay here. I’m not big on the Jesus stuff but this is pretty close to a miracle.”
And so it began.
Stephie settled in and Emma tried to put one foot in front of the other. She could only think to tell her niece to never, ever touch the answering machine, which Stephie thought was a bit odd but what the heck.
What the heck because here she was for a week with her favorite auntie who is not anything like her mother and who is allowing her to stay up late, take over half the house, loves the variety of music Stephie listens to and will let her just be herself.
Stephie feels lucky because Emma could have chosen one of the others. It could have been another niece or nephew that she held so close to her heart. It could have been one of Stephie’s brothers, the almost twins Bo and Riley, who are so opposite it has become yet another family joke.
Bo, totally obsessed with his genitalia, is a poster child for anything testosterone. He plays soccer, football, basketball, rugby and has been to the emergency room an average of five times, not a year, but a season. This is a boy who is attacking the world as if he is a gladiator from ancient Rome and yet he also remembers to call Emma on her birthday, helps her without complaint for all heavy-lifting projects, and has secretly been phoning her to ask her questions about girls.
Riley is the quintessential second son. He is short and thin and loves music and the thought of anything typically masculine makes his lovely hazel eyes roll back so far inside of his head it’s a wonder he has not gone blind. And yet Riley is gifted in the arts, a boy who lives by the song he has always felt moving through the thin veins of his heart that no one else in the entire world can hear.
It could also have been one of Debra’s two daughters, Kendall, eighteen, and Chloe, sixteen. Chloe can only be called independently individual. Once, when she was ten, she stood up during the slicing of the ham at family brunch and announced that she was a vegetarian and could no longer eat at the same table as her sick meat-loving family. Two years later, she declared she was thinking of becoming a nun. “You are not Catholic,” her mother reminded her. This comment and Chloe’s announcement launched such a long and loud discussion about religion that Chloe finally made the sign of the cross and actually slipped under the table. Stephie always hopes Chloe will come to the family events just so something remarkable will happen but when she doesn’t Stephanie fills the gap with a pierced face or green hair to keep things stirred up.
Kendall will
probably become a professional cheerleader and make her mama proud. She’s already been the homecoming queen, has dated half of every male sports team at the high school, and if she could move into the new Higgins Mall, where she already works as a sales clerk at a trendy and very expensive urban fashion store, she’d be gone before her hairspray dried.
There’s one other choice, too. It’s Tyler, who almost always prefers to stay with his “real” mother when Erika and her husband can manage a visit to the Gilford homeland but when he does come he’s polite and fun and Stephie thinks he’d give her a run for her money in the Aunt Emma Loves Me the Best Department. She hasn’t told anyone, even Emma, that Tyler has started emailing her and asking her all kinds of questions about Higgins and South Carolina or that he’s told his “other” mother that he’s coming to this year’s family reunion.
By the time Stephie has settled in and managed to get Emma to agree to letting her have her two best friends come in the morning and spend the day while Emma is at work, Emma has given up waiting for Erika to call back. She’s convinced herself that her older sister is designing some great reunion master plan that will rescue her from Gilford disgrace, get her mother and the other two sisters off her back, and maybe even find a cure for cancer and save a few whales.
Emma Lauryn Gilford is in total denial.
She’s been so successful at ignoring the reunion, the things she didn’t do, Samuel’s latest phone message and her mother’s silence about why she looks ten years younger than she normally does, Emma hasn’t even noticed that Stephie’s put her scissors back in the shed, washed all the dishes by hand, and made them both some chamomile tea.
Stephie snuggles into bed with Emma to read, excited about her week of absolute—so she thinks—freedom, and then falls asleep curled next to her like a very large puppy. This, Emma thinks, is lovely, as she falls asleep herself.
In the morning, when reality drops back into her world way too quickly, she has a dream hangover the size of a fairly tall man and when she stops to think about it, Emma knows exactly what that man looks, sounds and feels like.
Stephie, on the other hand, has a few dreams of her own. And she doesn’t care if she gets in trouble reaching for them. Or if her unsuspecting aunt gets arrested helping her do so.
8
THE EIGHTH QUESTION:
Could you get arrested for bringing me here?
THE DIMLY LIT ROOM CANNOT HIDE the sticky feel of the tabletop, the seedy-looking bartenders, a crowd of people who look as if they have escaped from wire holding pens at the Humane Society. Emma is certain she is a breath away from one of those horrific nightclub incidents that are plastered on the front pages of National Enquirer-like newspapers when Stephie swivels her head around as if she’s an extra in The Exorcist, pulls Emma’s head to her ear and whispers, “Could you get arrested for bringing me here?”
Emma will later be glad for this fascinating and brief interlude when reunion invitations and reservations, old memories, one horrific mistake by a beloved niece, yet another emotional explosion with a sibling, and uncovering her mother’s many secrets are put on hold. She will remember Stephie’s question as one of the best, something she can repeat at dinner parties and in the lunchroom when she is trying to impress someone she has recently hired, at the next college roommate reunion or during one of the raucous Friday night wine-tasting parties at the restaurant her boss Janet’s husband owns.
And without a doubt she will never ever tell Joy or Debra where she has taken Stephie tonight. And not just because she is a great, fun and funky aunt but also because they will add this adventure to what appears to be a long list of reasons why Emma has lost her mind.
Really, Emma right now will do absolutely anything to keep from thinking about what she is supposed to do or whom she might consider calling.
“Honey, snap out of it,” Emma orders cheerfully, gently putting her fingers on Stephie’s startled eyes. “While it’s probably true that I could get busted for bringing you to this joint, the cops would be terrified to touch you—what with that orange hair, enough wire to hang an entire art gallery dangling from your face, and that black smock you have on that looks like a tablecloth from a Halloween party.”
“I’m just so excited,” Stephie admits. “I’ve heard about places like this but I had no clue there were any in Charleston. And there is no way Mom would have brought me here.”
Emma, of course, had no clue either. She is thinking it is a minor miracle that she mentioned to her boss that Stephie was dying to go to an open mic poetry night or a poetry slam or anything close to that having to do with words and spontaneity. Janet had laughed in her face as if Emma had just fallen off a streetcar and then told her all about underground Charleston clubs.
Well, color me boring, Emma thought but never said out loud, and offered up her overbearing oldest sister Joy as an excuse to free Stephie from the protective chains of her family. There’s one year of high school left and two swift summers before college and that’s it. Time for Stephie to create a story or two of her own that she can share the first night in her dorm room.
That’s also what Stephie said every twenty minutes the first three days she’d spent walking around in a daze at Emma’s house because no one was barking at her to do something, go someplace, or act a certain way. “We’ve got to do something crazy this week, Auntie Em, we just have to,” her niece said, knowing the entire time exactly what she wanted to do and revealing only part of her plan to her auntie.
Emma’s idea of something crazy was to pick up her phone every five minutes to see if Erika had called her back. She also has been waiting for Debra to rise up from under a bush and attack her because they have not made up since the horrid phone call when Emma told her she didn’t like her very much. After that, Emma had thrown a towel over her answering machine, thinking the whole thing would disappear.
The whole thing, of course, also meaning the as yet unanswered messages from Samuel.
There were surely enough distractions to avoid all those unanswered items, with music in the house and lights on all of the time and Stephie asking if she could help with anything and wanting also to be quiet and work on her poetry.
“How can your mother be so angry about you all the time?” Emma asked innocently the second night as she ate the most delicious pepper pasta dish Stephie had made and wondered how much she really knew about her niece and perhaps the mother of the niece as well.
“Something’s really wrong with her,” Stephie confessed. “Really. She’s always been a bit of a nutcase, but for the past few years it’s been worse.”
“How worse?” Emma wanted to know.
“Maybe she’s in menopause or something but she is just into constantly attacking whoever is in the same room with her. And I know I get edgy when I get my period but it’s like Mom’s on the rag all of the time.”
“That’s part of it, but to tell you the truth, she’s already passed through the center of menopause from what she’s told me,” Emma shared. “Can you hang on for another year? Maybe she’s thinking about you leaving for college and everything changing. It’s a very big deal when a daughter leaves.”
Stephie gulped down her food and quickly changed the subject as if there was something else she knew about her mother but would not share, and maybe something else, one more thing she would hopefully never have to share with the auntie who trusted her so much. Instead, she told Emma that there was something she had to say that was important. Something she had not yet told her parents or anyone but her closest friends. Something that would probably push Joy right off the edge of her postmenopausal tree branch and into some kind of hellish freefall that would alter half the world.
Stephanie didn’t want to go to a four-year state university. Instead, she wanted to go to cooking school, to become a chef, to one day open her own restaurant.
In some families, Stephie would be saying that she is pregnant and wants to keep the baby. In some families, Stephie would be saying
that she has been mainlining heroin and intends to move to the seedy side of town and shoot up all day. In some families, Stephie might be asking to take a year off and travel. All of those things might create an avalanche of stormy emotions.
But in the Gilford family the idea of going to cooking school, an accredited world-renowned cooking school even, instead of a full-blown South Carolina university, is a sin that may not be forgiven. For the Gilfords, Stephie may as well be a heroin-addicted, unwed mother-to-be, who is about to head out on a two-year road trip with a mess of ex-convicts who want to start a juggling school.
Stephie started to cry then and Emma got up, knelt next to her, and held her as Stephie dropped into her arms sobbing about how she might have to run away to live her own life. Emma had to bite her tongue so she would not say, “Take me with you so I don’t have to solve my own problems.”
Instead, the reliable, almost-always-emotionally-supportive-until-recently-anyway Auntie Emma Gilford dried Stephie’s tears and helped her put away the remains of the pepper pasta and clean up the kitchen. Then she grabbed a notebook and they sat together on the living room floor for hours talking about cooking schools, writing down a list of what Stephie might need to do to find the perfect one, and planning how she should immediately find a new summer job at a restaurant.
And Emma promised to help.
She promised to try and be the buffer, to stand by her niece, to lobby her parents and do whatever it took to be the one who held up Stephie and whomever else needed assistance standing, sitting, or walking throughout this process. Emma also promised herself that she would finally work up the courage to have it out with her sister about her jealousy and her controlling way of life—no matter how painful that might be.
“Closing the distance between you and your mother and her expectations won’t be easy,” Emma advised her niece. “But I will do what I can to help you.”
At that Stephie really started to cry, and curled against Emma as if she were a little girl, and Emma thought for those few minutes that she knew, absolutely knew, what it might be like to be a mother, what it might be like to feel such a surge of love, such a solid force of protective energy, such a wave of gratitude for being able to love so deeply and Emma wanted to cry, too.