by Kris Radish
“Girls,” Emma cautions both of her nieces, “I hope you are taking notes about how to behave and how not to behave as part of this insane family.”
“Are you kidding me?” Kendall laughs. “Things are getting so exciting around here I am thinking of not leaving for college just so I can sit around and watch.”
“No shit,” Chloe adds as Emma taps her niece’s potty mouth lightly. “I was supposed to go over to a barbecue at my friend’s house but I’m afraid if I leave for just a little while I might miss something. Plus, we all know that you have all been fighting, like serious fighting.”
“It has been a bit much,” Emma agrees, not surprised at all that the nieces know everything. She’s also wishing she never had to go inside the house and see her sisters. “But if things were calm and quiet and boring, we would know that aliens have invaded our bodies or something. We have always been like this.”
“Not quite this bad, though,” Kendall reminds her. “Grandma is sleeping around, all my aunts are pissed at each other, Uncle Rick is having an affair, about a zillion relatives will be here in two weeks, and I think Aunt Erika is coming home this week for a while.”
“What?” Emma exclaims, startled.
“Mom said Aunt Erika was flying in alone for a while and staying with Grandma, I think, because she has some business around here. And then Uncle Jeff and Tyler will just come later for the reunion.”
“Great,” Emma sighs, putting her head in her hands and wondering if Grandma and Thongman have any idea their romantic bungalow is about to be invaded. And also feeling hurt because Erika has not bothered to tell her about the trip. Or anything else, for that matter. “Are you birds making all of this up?”
None of it, the two swear, putting their hands over their hearts, and then sitting as if they are waiting for a package to arrive as Emma decides it’s time to face her sisters and whoever else might be in the kitchen.
Emma has had several days to recover from her long overdue long haul, which half ended after she talked with Marty, weeded furiously in her garden, and then found out that Samuel’s photograph was missing. Her increasingly frantic search for the misplaced photograph led her to an album of old photos in her room, certain that in her emotional angst she had mistakenly returned the photo to a new location.
The old photos were tinted Polaroids from the early seventies, all greens and reds and browns, all faded as if a careless someone had spilled colored water on top of them. Emma recalled the camera and how her mother went crazy taking photographs because as Marty kept pointing out, you could see them right away. Modern magic, Marty called it, and she was right.
Looking through the photos had unleashed a wave of emotional longing for the lovely memories captured there—parties and picnics and graduations. The memories, as Emma flipped through the album pages, seemed as faded and muted as the photographs. She had to struggle to remember as she held up first one and then another picture. Was this taken before her father was sick or after he got ill? Was this photograph from the backyard or from the neighbor’s side of the fence? And where were photographs, any photographs, of a garden her father might have planted, a trip to an arboretum, fresh flowers from a roadside stand, her father standing proudly over a row of seedlings?
The notion of her father passing on his innate abilities to make things grow had never before been part of any of Emma’s imaginings. Emma tried to recall something about gardens and plantings with her father but there was nothing she could hold on to, no signature moment under a pine tree, no memorial tomato plant harvesting, no grafting experiment in the basement during the cooler winter months.
The seemingly simple idea that her father wanted to be a gardener and could not because it was a low-paying profession, something only a laborer would consider, something someone from the Gilford family could not possibly do and raise a family, brought Emma from the couch to her knees as she thumbed through the photographs.
Societal guidelines, and generations of familial expectations, and the leveling of personal passions as if they were non-important closed in on her as she came to the last set of photos, the photos she has always thought of as horrid and sad, the pages that documented the last months of her father’s life.
Emma was in every photo. Sitting on his bed. Holding his hand. Curled up in his lap. Her remembrance of these moments was startlingly fresh.
She wondered if he’d traced her lifelines with his fingertips and then filled in the cracks with the dirt that was buried underneath his own fingernails. She wondered if he had taken her hand and walked her through the tomato plants, past the flowering magnolia that is now as high as Marty’s roof, around the sides of the house where the bushes back then must have been tiny dots of green. She wondered if he didn’t leave for her, someplace, under a rock in the backyard, behind a bush, a secret message, something sweet, the scent of sage, an inscription with detailed life directions scrubbed on the bottom of an old watering can, one last fingerprint from his life that Emma desperately longs to touch so she will know which direction to head in next. The secret, maybe, was in the soil. Some gift, a clue, a grainy meld of sand and rocks and fragments of the earth that holds everyone up, that supports everything, that is the very foundation for life.
Overwhelmed by her emotions, Emma stops looking for Samuel’s photograph. She sits among the faded Gilford pictures and thinks about what she wants.
She wants to laugh again, to trust her sisters, to make them forgive her, for them to see her as she sees herself—competent, loving, fun and open. She wants to fix whatever it was in their lives that was making them yell even more crazily than usual. She wants someone to take a new photograph: a photograph of four happy sisters and one laughing mother.
That is still what she is hoping for as she gets up from the step where she is sitting with her nieces, finally ready to try and make peace with her big sisters.
“Don’t be surprised if Joy irons the tablecloth before everyone sits down for the reunion-planning meeting,” Chloe adds, laughing.
None of that suddenly matters because just as Emma is about to pull open the door Stephie comes up the sidewalk toward the house. Her arms are hanging and her head is hanging and she is dragging her feet and she looks as if she has been crying for a solid twenty-four hours.
Kendall and Chloe scramble up immediately and run to meet her, hug her, and when Emma turns to follow them she sees her three nieces hunched in a tight circle, arms over shoulders, heads touching, and she can feel her heart move as if it is on a stick and someone is twirling it inside of her chest.
My girls, is what Emma thinks. My sisters’ babies who are lucky enough to be growing up with one another, who fight like cats and dogs, who whisper about each other, who are envious and sometimes jealous of what the other one has or does or is becoming, but who still love one another.
And Emma thinks this without realizing she is seeeing her own life and her own sisters.
When Stephie looks up, she sees Emma standing there. She runs from the circle and into her arms and all Emma wants to do is rock her like a baby.
“Oh, Auntie Em, my dad really did leave us and now that I know he has been a cheating asshole I hate him, I do,” Stephie sobs.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Emma soothes her niece while she tries to imagine a worse time for a father to mess up than when his only daughter is on the wobbly verge of womanhood. “We are going to all get you through this. It’s going to be okay,” Emma promises her.
“Men are such jerks,” Stephie says, as if she is reading Emma’s mind. “Next time I see him I’m going to kick him in the balls.”
Well, Emma would like to get in on that. She has to hold back a snort when she imagines them both coming at Rick with their feet kicking as Kendall and Chloe try and gouge his eyes out from behind.
“Oh, Stephie, it stinks, I have to agree with you. You have every right to feel like this, honey.”
Kendall and Chloe have moved in behind Stephie and are shaking their hea
ds up and down and have their fists clenched as if they are about to head off to a boxing match and are mouthing “yes” so that Emma can see them.
And this tight circle of Gilford women, Emma realizes, is a force of nature, an unstoppable and very powerful ball of female energy that can apparently ignite itself at the mere hint of a disaster.
Stephie knew where to go.
Stephie knew who would help her.
Stephie knew who would hold her and be part of her backup team.
Before they go inside where the family reunion planning session will be totally abandoned while the Gilford women hold court, hear the details of the slutty redheaded paramour, while they take sister Joy softly into their arms as if she is a thin piece of hand-cut paper, and while Debra, Joy and Emma will temporarily forget that they are furious at each other, Emma cannot help but lift herself above everything.
She wings herself skyward and hovers above her nieces, above her sister’s expansive house and Marty’s approaching car that is barreling down the street like a racecar that has a stuck accelerator.
Emma floats south just a bit and looks down. She can see her own yard, the roof of her mother’s house, and her evil brother-in-law’s lovely restored ranch home. She sees an invisible web of linked paths: the bush that Stephie crawls through to get into Emma’s backyard; the long sidewalk in front of her mother’s house that should by now be worn out from all the Gilford comings and goings; the tree-lined path to the cemetery where her father lies.
And as Grandma Marty comes up the path, enfolds all of them into her arms—which suddenly seem so large, so strong, so absolutely powerful—and ushers them into Debra’s house, Emma feels the stirrings of a new realization.
It is a surge of something beyond love, something sweet, soft, and infinitely comforting. This is exactly what she needs a photograph of for her new photo album.
Happy sisters, nieces and grandmother.
A sweet moment to pause and suspend anger and guilt and confusion and bitterness and know that you are not alone.
But it is a fleeting moment. Because then the door opens and Stephie runs inside towards her mother, and Debra claims Kendall and Chloe, and Emma stands alone while Marty gathers her brood into the house.
And Emma is suddenly feeling so desperately lonely that it’s all she can do to put one foot in front of the other and walk into the house to meet her reunion-planning fate.
16
THE SIXTEENTH QUESTION:
Honey, is there any way Erika could stay with you?
THERE IS A WAY TO SEE things coming, Emma thinks, if you have nothing else to do and are tapped into the astrology zone and maybe taking copious amounts of illegal drugs that help you prepare for a call from your mother in the middle of your workday that starts with a pleasant hello, moves to a short recap of several family tragedies, and ends with your mother calling you honey—always a bad sign—and asking if your sister Erika, even though you two aren’t speaking, can stay at your house instead of at Mother’s house.
Emma, surprisingly, is broadsided by Marty’s request. She feels as if an unlit barge has invaded her harbor and rammed her in the stern, rendering her unable to move forward or backward. Simply floating is as questionable as is being able to get up from her desk and her life that is apparently controlled pretty much around the clock by her family and surely, Emma thinks, not her own pitiful self.
“Honey, is there any way Erika could stay with you?”
This lovely query comes just as Emma has managed to skirt every single pending reunion question and was actually thanking Rick for being such a loser that he provided a wonderful distraction to keep the reunion planners busy dealing with depressed Stephie and Joy’s crushing blows of marriage infidelity.
Crushing blows that have all but cut brother-in-law Rick from the family line. Bad, bad Rick, who is hiding in plain sight and who has asked for a family meeting with a mediator therapist—family meaning his wife and children, but for Marty family means everyone but the fourth cousins, who never come to the reunion anyway.
Crushing blows that have had Emma on the phone for hours with Joy, Stephie, and occasionally Bo and Riley, her nephews, who are now both convinced that as Rick’s sons, they’ll grow up to be as humongous a cad as their father.
Crushing blows that reveal the not so pretty underbelly of married life, and how people change, and the unhappiness of living without love when you think that is what you are supposed to do because so many years ago you said those two terribly important and binding words, “I do.”
Crushing blows that have thankfully kept Emma away from too many thoughts of the persistent botanist Samuel, his unanswered phone messages and his mysteriously vanished photograph. Instead, she’s burrowed into work, answering her personal cell phone, and being at the beck and call of her emotionally messed-up family.
And now this request from her mother that should not, but does, send Emma’s mind on an imaginary road trip into the lively jungle that would be her life for the days her sister Erika would stay with her. Days that she would most likely absorb like a dehydrated slice of her garden because her mother does not want Erika, or anyone, lurking around her home and discovering that at least one lover, if not more, has his slippers under Marty’s bed. Marty, who still has not really come clean about what she is doing running off to islands with men no one in the family has met. Marty who is now at Joy’s disposal 24/7 as Joy lets go with her own secrets and confessions about knowing all along exactly what was happening with her failing marriage and doing nothing about it. And Marty who then wraps her arms tightly around her three daughters and braces for what is coming next. Marty, who tells Emma that she surely has the room to accommodate one house guest and wouldn’t it be good to spend some time together with Erika so she could try and get along with at least one sister?
Emma’s imaginary road trip takes a brief respite while her mother talks on and on about what a jackass her son-in-law Rick has become and how they must all rally around Joy. So that when Emma stops her and says the unthinkable, the worst possible thing, it’s a jaw-dropping sentence that silences Marty instantly.
“Mother, we should have all seen this coming,” Emma begins. “Living with Joy must be like living inside a blender that is filled with gravel and constantly set on puree. She’s impossible.”
“Are you saying this is Joy’s fault?”
“Absolutely not,” Emma answers hastily. “I think Rick is a total ass, a coward, and every other evil and horrid word you can think of. I’m just saying that if you step back and take a hard look, his leaving makes sense.”
“He’s tearing up the entire family, for God’s sake, Emma!”
“I’m not saying the way he did it is right, Mother. It stinks. But really, no one in that house has been happy for a very long time.”
“He has a responsibility,” Marty argues. “He is married to your sister, my daughter, and I know he was not raised to do something like this. His parents will be devastated.”
Marty, Marty, Marty.
Emma realizes her mother is not just concerned but possibly embarrassed by what is happening, by what people might think or say, by what the town gossip Al will be spewing from one end of Higgins to the other.
“Mother, shouldn’t the most important thing now be the care of Joy and the kids? It’s pretty obvious that Rick has moved on. Why do we really give a rat’s ass about what anyone else might think? Why do we always care so much?”
“Is that what you think this is all about?” Marty not so much says as screams into the phone. “You think that is all I care about?”
“Isn’t it?”
“You, my darling, do not know the first thing about me and what I think.”
“And whose fault is that?” Emma fires back. “Maybe it would help if you stood still for twenty minutes to let me know what in the heck is going on in your life, Mother. Is there a reason we haven’t met your boyfriend? What other secrets have you been keeping from us?”
“You are going to meet him sooner than you think and I am going to come over there and spank you, young lady,” Marty vows grimly.
Emma starts laughing at the mere idea. She thinks that sometimes Marty forgets that she is a grown woman and that her son-in-law Rick, the new naughty boy of the family, is a grown man, and this brings her full circle to the entire reason for this phone call and throws her back to her imaginary road trip where her lovely sister Erika shows up at her house with her luggage and her baggage, and they embrace, and she tries to figure out what to say to a woman who shares her last name, a mother, and two other sisters but whom she apparently does not know anymore.
Or maybe has never known.
Maybe, Emma tells herself as she dips even further into her chilly river of self-doubt, my entire relationship with Erika has been a fraud. Maybe we really weren’t that close. Maybe she was just being nice to me because I’m the kid sister. The baby of the family. The one who needs all the extra care and attention.
The almost ten-year difference in their ages offers Emma part of an explanation; the fact that Erika was mostly gone and resides in so few of her oldest memories offers another, and that is where Emma stumbles. That is where she thinks that if she does not say yes to this visit, this question of her mother’s, this new demand on her life and time, she may never really get to know her sister, settle the most recent score, find out why Erika has not even bothered to call her back.
Even as part of her wonders if it’s worth it.
And yet another part of her longs to jump from her office window and into the garden she’s planted below it because this is yet one more thing, one more demand, one more family allegiance to which Emma cannot say no.