Names My Sisters Call Me

by Unknown

  My mother had been sad and solitary my whole life. Then, suddenly, she was all about warm hugs and smiles. I’d loved the change in her. But my sisters acted as if they’d caught Mom cheating on Dad. They behaved as if he’d still been alive, and they’d discovered her in the act of cheating on him.

  Raine had been furious with me for acting unconcerned with the intruder in our lives. She gathered all of the photographs from the sitting room into her arms, lay down, and cried with them in the front hall as Mom came home one night. As dramatic displays went, that one was a showstopper.

  Norah, meanwhile, had been furious with me for defending Mom, who, even then, she thought was a failure of a parent who relied entirely on Norah’s ability to actually get things done. Even at eighteen, she saw herself as the beleaguered martyr.

  It was one of the few times in my life I could remember the two of them agreeing on anything. They had stood shoulder to shoulder and railed at Mom. Norah had demanded to know what was next, and had shaken one of Dad’s framed pictures in the air over her head one night instead of sitting and eating her supper. Raine had sobbed. For weeks. It had so impressed Mom that she’d stopped the dinners altogether, and soon after, stopped the smiles and the hugs as well. We had all retreated back into our various places of comfort, or familiarity. I think it was soon after that I found the cello thanks to a music program at school, and I hadn’t thought of my mother’s near-miss in dating since.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said now, as the implications set in. I wasn’t angry. Stunned was more like it. “You never stopped seeing each other. And you’ve kept it a secret all these years?”

  “Not quite all these years,” Leonard said in that gruff voice I knew so well. How many times had he called the house to speak to Mom? How many times had she taken the phone into her bedroom to speak privately? How stupid was I?

  Mom moved now, swinging her legs off of Leonard’s lap, slipping on her shoes, and rising to her feet. She and Leonard looked at each other for a long moment, and the fact that they quite obviously communicated a great deal was clear to me. It wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea of Mom having a boyfriend, I told myself. It was just taking me a moment or two to adjust to the fact that she’d been having a boyfriend, for quite some time.

  Leonard also stood, aimed a polite sort of smile at me, and then looked back at my mother.

  “I’ll be in the conference room, Bev,” he said quietly, and then eased past me.

  “Come on in,” Mom said to me, looking almost rueful. “Sit down. What are you doing here?”

  I couldn’t bear to think about those glossy, irrelevant magazines and the Bridal Borg Brain to which everyone was connected except me.

  “I thought I’d show you that I was, actually, interested in wedding planning.” I walked over and sank into the couch, and watched as she settled next to me. “But now it turns out I’m much more interested in your secret life!”

  “‘Secret life’ is taking it a little far,” Mom demurred.

  “A secret boyfriend is a secret life, Mom.” I couldn’t decide if I was scandalized or intrigued. Maybe both. “When people say ‘secret life,’ a secret boyfriend is the first thing that comes to mind.” I considered. “Or a bank account, I guess. Or even serial killing. But a secret boyfriend is up there.”

  “The first thing you should know is that I never meant to have a secret life,” Mom told me. “It just ended up that way.”

  Mom really had broken things off with Leonard back when I was ten. She’d been terrified that her dating would somehow damage Norah and Raine, and she’d worried they were already damaged enough. They’d lost their father, and had spent the long years of their adolescence trying to kill each other. What if the addition of Leonard was too much?

  “You,” she told me with a faint smile, “I didn’t worry about. You started the cello soon after, and in any event, you’d seemed so happy about my relationship with Leonard.”

  Because I didn’t have a father’s memory to cling to, I thought with the usual flash of frustration and guilt, but I motioned for her to continue.

  She and Leonard had a certain chemistry. After some time passed, things happened. She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask—because, ew, this was my mother, not Verena. What they’d originally decided to keep secret only until Raine was out of the house, grew. Leonard had his own children who he saw over the holidays. Years passed. Once I left for the conservatory, they only kept their relationship secret when we returned home. Finally, they agreed that it was time to break the silence—at Norah’s wedding. Where better to announce their happiness than such a happy occasion?

  “Oh no,” I breathed, covering my mouth with my hands.

  “After the scene Raine made, and how upset Norah was, the occasion wasn’t so happy.” Mom looked down. “Leonard thought we should announce ourselves anyway. I disagreed.”

  “Oh, Mom,” I murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

  Mom lifted her shoulders, and then dropped them. “Everything was a mess. Leonard and I separated for a while, in fact.”

  I wondered how we’d all managed to avoid noticing that all three of us had been reeling and wounded in the aftermath of that wedding. That it hadn’t been only Norah’s pain. But Mom was still talking.

  When they’d gotten back together, they’d promised each other that there would be no secrets. They wouldn’t lie again. As soon as their relationship was noticed and commented upon, they would admit to it.

  But neither Norah nor I noticed.

  Not when Mom brought Leonard to holiday parties, I thought now, as it all unrolled before me like a film. Not when she’d announced, repeatedly, that they were going away together. If I’d thought about it at all, I’d thought it was a business thing, or that Mom felt sorry for Leonard because he was so alone after his divorce.

  “You must be so proud of your keenly observant daughters,” I said dryly.

  “More than you know,” she replied in much the same tone. “Leonard’s children didn’t know for many years either, to be fair.” She looked at me. “Of course, they live in Arizona and Washington State.”

  I sat with it for a moment. Talk about dropping a bomb. The fact that Raine was bringing Matt home with her seemed mild in comparison.

  “I would prefer you not tell Norah at the moment,” Mom said then. “She’s having a rough time already.”

  “Don’t you think you should just make an announcement or something?” I asked. “You’ve been keeping it secret for way too long.”

  “Norah likes to think of herself as tough,” Mom said, “but she’s really quite fragile. And she’s so upset about Raine, and you . . . ” She shook her head. “I’m not sure she could handle it.”

  I didn’t want to think about that. I definitely didn’t want to explore what sounded like a rebuke in her tone, either.

  “I think it’s a good thing,” I said then. I meant it, too. I smiled at her. “I’m glad that you haven’t spent all this time mourning.”

  “No,” she said, looking down as she smoothed her skirt. “I haven’t been mourning. I’ve been living my life.”

  I would have to think about it more, of course. There was a whole, my-mother-as-sexual-creature thing I would have to deal with, or repress. But it was better than mother-as-walking-shroud. Definitely.

  “So,” she said briskly, changing the subject. “Did you say something about wedding plans?”

  After my mother’s secret life was exposed—if only to me—it was like June picked up speed. Lucas was slammed with work, and took three separate business trips, to Worcester, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. I didn’t accompany him, which made him tease me about my fair weather interest in being a business wife. In the increasingly hotter weeks that he trekked around the country, I had a lot of time to think about the ramifications of my mother’s having had a boyfriend for the past fifteen years or so. Norah and Phil went on a two-week vacation to Phil’s parents’ place in Rehoboth, so it was just Mom and me and
the countdown to Raine’s arrival. It felt a lot like it had when Norah and Raine were out of the house, I was in middle school and then high school, and Mom and I had fended for ourselves in the big empty spaces my sisters left behind them.

  Unlike women my age, Mom didn’t talk much about her relationship with Leonard. Maybe she’d never gotten in the habit, having hidden it so long, or maybe mothers who dated didn’t talk about it to their daughters. I didn’t know what the protocol was. At any rate, she was far more interested in talking about the wedding I had pretended to want to jump into, and the two of us embarked on a reception site scavenger hunt all over the greater Philadelphia/New Jersey area. We spent hours comparing ballrooms and suggested menus, until I felt I had seen all the potential rubber chicken and every possible banquet hall there was to see between Philly and New York City.

  None of this comparison shopping made me feel more bridal, though I was now conversant about things like mandatory minimums and Chivari chairs.

  I found that it felt kind of liberating to know the truth about Mom. It made me feel closer to her, bonded. It also made me feel a bit better about myself, because I’d suspected there was more to her than met the eye, and I’d been right. If some fifteen years late. This alternated with my feeling terrible that my sisters and I were such tyrants that my mother had felt compelled to keep her life such a big secret in the first place.

  In my more optimistic moments, I thought it was lucky we were all getting together again this summer. Lucky because who knew? Maybe we could all get to know one another again.

  And then before I was ready, it was July and Mom insisted on a Welcome Home dinner for Raine, and, by extension, Matt, both of whom would be staying with her. She was taking the Prodigal Daughter thing to its preordained conclusion, fatted calf—or, anyway, barbecued hamburgers—and all.

  Mom called to announce that she would pick Raine up from the airport, and that Lucas and I didn’t need to bring anything except ourselves to the dinner, as Norah was taking care of the salad.

  “Norah’s coming?” I asked, not believing it. She’d returned from vacation and I sort of expected that she would launch a boycott of Raine and, by extension, the rest of us. Possibly, I thought, Norah would choose to disappear for the next six years. After that it would be my turn, and by then, who knew, I might be gagging to escape these people.

  “Of course Norah’s coming,” Mom said, as if there had never been any doubt.

  “Is she mad?” I asked. “Did you speak to her?”

  “Courtney,” my mother snapped, “I don’t have time for this. My expectation is that everyone will act like an adult.”

  What an absurd thing to expect. I decided that if I was smart at all—and my cello, sitting untouched in the corner despite my full knowledge that I should practice, suggested that I wasn’t in the least smart—I would stay home.

  “I don’t want to go to this dinner,” I told Lucas when he emerged from the forty-minute shower he’d taken to wash away Buffalo to find me flopped across the sofa like an opera heroine.

  “Then don’t,” Lucas said in that maddening male way.

  “I have to.” I removed my arm from over my eyes, but couldn’t bring myself to sit up. “I feel that I have to at least try to get Raine and Norah to act like they get along since they’re really only dealing with each other for me.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Lucas contradicted me. He padded out to the end of the couch and looked down at me. His mouth twitched slightly as he took in my splayed-out pose, but he didn’t comment on it. Just as I didn’t comment on his hair, which was standing up in spikes as if he’d actually been trying to pull it out in the shower.

  “In a cosmic sense, no, of course I don’t have to,” I agreed. Foolish man.

  “In every sense,” he said.

  “I can’t let them attack each other. Raine being home is like a red flag for Norah. And Norah’s always hated Matt Cheney, so having him along is like fuel to the fire.” I shook my head. “She may never forgive me.”

  “I thought you already doubted that she’d forgive you for going to California in the first place,” Lucas pointed out. “So if she’s already not going to forgive you, who cares?”

  Stupid male logic. I didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “And how come you didn’t mention that Matt was coming, too?” he asked then, tilting his head slightly as he gazed at me.

  I blinked at him.

  “What? I told you that ages ago.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I told you. When Raine called? And told me she was coming, and let me work up to being excited about it—remember the life coach?”

  “I remember the life coach.” Lucas eyed me. “I remember the entire conversation. You know what I don’t remember coming up at all? Matt Cheney.”

  “Well, I told you she said he was coming.” I was all too able to hear that I sounded obstinate and annoyed.

  As usual, this aggressively pissy tone served only to make Lucas laugh at me.

  “You are so full of shit,” he informed me, his eyes daring me to keep going.

  As usual, I was forced to laugh myself, damn him. I struggled to sit up then.

  “I thought I told you,” I muttered, while he continued laughing.

  “Yeah, so I hear.” He studied me for a moment. “I’m not threatened by your ex-boyfriend, Courtney. But it seems like you might be.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” I practically sputtered. “Why would I be threatened by Matt Cheney, of all people?”

  “And I’m definitely interested in the fact you hid that he was coming to Philly.” He shifted his weight, standing there in just his towel.

  “I thought I told you,” I said again.

  “Makes me wonder what else you think you told me,” he said quietly.

  Which, of course, I couldn’t answer.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “Very funny.”

  “I’m getting dressed,” he said with a hard look at me, and then he walked away.

  Terrific, I thought, scowling at the ceiling again. This is already going well.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Walking into my mother’s house a few days later was like walking into the past. From the sound of Matt’s laughter back in the kitchen to Raine’s unmistakable voice to Norah’s more measured tones. I could hear all of them the moment Lucas and I walked in the door, and it catapulted me backward into another time.

  “This is weird,” I whispered.

  Lucas looked at me as we stood there in my mother’s brick foyer. His presence grounded me very much in the here and now. I concentrated on that.

  “This is what you wanted,” he pointed out. Unhelpfully, I thought, but then, he was probably still pissed about the whole Matt misunderstanding.

  “I thought I told you,” I said for about the seventeen zillionth time.

  “So you keep saying.” He just stood there with that cool look in his eyes. It made me crazy. And the truth was, I really did think I’d told him.

  Or anyway, I didn’t remember deciding not to tell him.

  “Okay, then,” I muttered, and headed for the kitchen. I could hear him follow me. I stopped at the threshold and peered inside, apprehensive.

  It wasn’t a Rockwell painting, but on the surface at least, everything was fine. Raine was cooing over little Eliot, while Norah looked on, a smile frozen on her mouth and her arms crossed over her torso. Phil was making awkward, mutually monosyllabic conversation with a surly-looking (though thankfully fully clothed) Matt Cheney over by the refrigerator. Mom bustled around at the stove, with an incongruous green apron tied over her shorts.

  Everybody seemed tense, but as if they were trying. Exactly as they should look, in other words. It was nice to see everyone making so much of an effort. More of an effort than I could remember anyone making before, that was for sure.

  Matt was the only one who looked up to see us standing there. His eyes met
mine across the span of my mother’s kitchen floor. It took me back years. Then his lips tightened slightly, and he looked away. I squared my shoulders, as if he’d already pushed me off balance.

  “Hey guys, check it out,” Matt drawled from his position of extreme leaning near the fridge. “It’s the happy couple.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lucas murmured in my ear. “You thought you told me.”

  I had time for only the smallest of glares before Lucas transformed himself into Happy, Easygoing Guy—the Lucas he presented to all of his clients, all of his future in-laws, and anyone else who he felt would benefit from perceiving him as a laid-back, relaxed sort of guy.

  He hugged Norah and then Raine, kissed Mom on her cheek, and then went over and did the whole handshaking ritual with Phil and Matt. He was good at it, too. The fact that he could be depended upon to make any social event easier was just one of the many reasons I loved him. Even when I was annoyed with him. And why was I annoyed with him? Because he was annoyed with me. There it was, the sum total of my emotional maturity.

  For my part, I exchanged a warm smile with my mother, a frostier one with Matt, and then inched over to watch my sisters interact with each other.

  “I can’t believe how much he looks like you!” Raine was cooing, smiling at Eliot, who shrugged away from her and started shouting my name when he saw me. I snatched him up in a hug when he reached me, just in time to hear Norah’s reply:

  “That’s funny,” she said coolly. “We think he looks like Phil.”

  “Hi, guys,” I said brightly.

  And so it began.

  “It’s actually really nice to be back home,” Raine said a few hours later, stretching a bit against the back of her chair. “I’m so glad you invited me, Courtney. Although I forgot how humid it gets here in the summer!”

  How anyone could forget the omnipresent Pennsylvania humidity was a mystery to me. It defined summer in the Mid-Atlantic region, as far as I knew. In defiance of this, we had had dinner outside on Mom’s patio, with the full heft of the Pennsylvania summer all around us.