by Anna Breslaw
I grunt, annoyed, and turn my head toward the wall. “So Dawn told you about that?”
“Yeah, and I think you need to do it. If you don’t, you’ll never get to say your thing.”
“Maybe.” I’m being stubborn, but it still just seems like a horrible idea, going up there and freezing like a deer in headlights. “Let’s just change the subject, okay?”
“Sure.”
“How’s Ashley?”
Ave’s answer is slightly guarded. “Fine.” Then she adds, almost despite herself, “She’s in her room most of the time. Crying, I think.”
I wonder if I look like the mean girl from where Ave’s sitting, too.
She continues. “Gideon and Ashley definitely stopped doing whatever it was that they were doing. Hooking up on the regs or whatever. If that makes you feel better . . .”
“It doesn’t,” I say.
I’m about to confide in her what happened when Gideon came over, but something stops me. For one thing, it feels like it was ages ago now, swallowed up in the bigger stuff I’m trying to work through. Or, really, sleep through. It also feels private somehow, something between me and him that I feel wrong telling her, and I get a glimmer of what it must be like to be a girlfriend.
There is a pause. It seems like she is weighing the dynamic of the conversation.
“Uh,” she says. “I . . . I had sex?” Her voice goes up at the end.
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I had sex. With Mike.”
Wow. Oh. Okay. In the ten-minute-mile run of sexual activity, she’s a varsity cross-country jock and I’m a fat kid at this point.
“Oh,” I say. “So now you’re, like, A Full Woman.”
She rolls her eyes. “Is that how that works?”
I shrug, thinking of my inability to write a sex scene.
“So, uh, how? Did it happen?” I ask.
“I don’t know. He invited me over last week, and his mom was out of town at some conference. It just happened.”
“Very romantic,” I say, and immediately feel bad for snarking.
“It was!” She sounds wounded that I’d shaded her beautiful virginity loss. “He even lit candles and stuff.”
“Mike Neckekis lit sex atmosphere candles?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. I’m impressed.”
“I was too!” she chirps.
“So, then, how was it?”
She stares at the ceiling for a second, takes a breath as she’s about to speak, then stops and thinks.
“Good,” she says. “Weird.” Another pause. “Good.”
“Did it hurt?”
“It was kind of uncomfortable at first, but no, not really.”
“Did it feel, you know, pleasurable?”
“Sort of, toward the end.”
“You used a condom, right?”
Her head swivels violently toward me. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
A minute passes. Then she sighs.
“Yeah, no, we totally didn’t. I had to go get Plan B.”
“Did Mike go with you?”
“He had wrestling practice.”
“Did you go by yourself?” I ask, alarmed.
She nods.
“You’re kidding. Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”
She looks off to the side and twists her mouth with concern.
“I thought you were mad at me or something.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve felt like that for a while. And then I read that story you wrote.”
I feel my face go red, the way it does whenever somebody brings up something I wrote IRL.
“Just because I have a boyfriend now doesn’t mean we can’t hang out and keep things exactly the way they are,” she says softly.
I shake my head, but I don’t have the energy to explain why everything’s different now, from my feelings about writing to my friendship with Ave. I feel blanched, totally drained of any cleverness or insight. Eventually we both start falling asleep.
While I’m still half-conscious, I dimly register Dawn, backlit from the hallway, quietly pulling my bedroom door closed.
Chapter 24
I LOOK DOWN AT THE SMALL CLUSTER OF FOLD-OUT CHAIRS below me, where Ruth’s family and a couple of her friends sit. From the front row, Dawn gives me an encouraging nod.
I take a deep breath.
“Okay, so the problem is, it’s impossible to write a eulogy because nobody is really honest about who they’re writing it for. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be for the person who passed away, right? You talk to them in heaven—or, if you’re agnostic, you imagine them sitting in the front row with popcorn and Mike and Ikes or something—and tell them how much they enriched your life, how kind and wonderful they were, what a joy to be around. But at their core, eulogies are selfish. They’re not for the dead person; they’re really for the rest of us, so we can say goodbye the way we would have if we’d seen it coming.
“Which is especially tough in this case because one of so many things that made Ruth special is that she wouldn’t want me to give myself that pass, to turn her into a saintly little old lady whose only interests were fresh Toll House cookies and lumbar back pillows. I think I understand now why people do that: because the pain is less acute if you blur out the idiosyncrasies and specifics of this person you loved and make it more like a generic grief template, like you’re saying goodbye to some neutral, safe stranger made out of geriatric Mad Libs.
“The word eulogy comes from a combination of the Greek words for praise and elegy. Ruth would call bullshit on both. She’d probably ask for a Viking funeral instead. You know, that kind where you put the body in a canoe and push it into the lake and set it on fire. And she’d want it to scare the crap out of the Melville Prep boys’ crew team in the next boat.
“In fact, though, in Judaism, it’s sinful to eulogize the dead with attributes they didn’t possess. It’s considered mocking them. I’m Jewish, so I’m really not allowed to bullshit about her unless I want to be infested with locusts or become a pillar of salt or whatever. So here’s the no-BS truth. Ruth was old, and weird, and sometimes super-cranky, and not a lot of people in the neighborhood understood her. Honestly, not a lot of people close to her did, either. I sometimes didn’t, for sure. She had a way of knocking people off balance, and if you didn’t fall down like most other people, if you rode the wave and kept standing, you were in forever. If you didn’t fit in anywhere else, it’s almost like she had a you-shaped hole just waiting.
“She was a lot of things to a lot of people who meant more to her than I did. Before I met her, she was a rebellious daughter and a brave friend. If Ruth’s life were a book, I only read the last chapter, except it was upside down and in Esperanto. And she seemed like she was losing it, sometimes. Last year she came over to my house at, like, eight A.M., knocked on my door, and told me, “I’m going to talk to the president.” It was her way of trying to tell me that everything would be okay, and I shouldn’t worry. She was handling it. But to just tell me that, plainly, like everybody else was telling kids—that everything would be okay—felt like the lie to her. And if she had chosen you as a person in her life, she knew you’d see through it too.
“That was another one of the amazing things about Ruth: She never underestimated anybody around her, even when it would be so easy to. And when you’re as smart as she was, that’s a really incredible, rare way to be.
“It’s a little devastating to think about this now—devastating is a melodramatic word, I know; I tried a bunch of other ones: sad, depressing, disconcerting, but none of them felt as right—because I wrote off so much of what she said when she was still here without really listening to her, when the whole time she was really telling me everything. She just refused to do it in the
typical way. She knew, or at least hoped, everybody she knew was better than that. And we were. But some of us probably didn’t know it until now. This isn’t fair of me, but I’m mad at her. She was supposed to sit in the waiting room and feel bad for herself and let the rest of us have a proper goodbye. But just because she knew she was about to get called into her appointment, she wasn’t about to waste the years she had left. If she didn’t, nobody should. And yet, here we are. Right? Using our valuable time just to sit in the waiting room and complain about how bored we are.
“This is the part that she would hate, and I know she’d hate it because during our first-ever conversation, she told me that she didn’t want to be thought of as some wise old person, only still alive to teach us all valuable lessons. But maybe the most valuable thing Ruth taught me is the importance of trying to understand people who are different from you, even though it’s so much harder than writing them off, because it might make you admit something to yourself that’s painful. Sometimes you won’t be able to understand, and that’s okay. It’s the trying, and realizing the importance of trying, that makes a person really special.”
I finish reading, my paper blowing a little in the wind at its well-worn crease. To my surprise, almost everybody is in tears, including some of Ruth’s family that I’ve never met and Dawn. Even Avery looks a little tearful.
I flinch when I see my dad in the very last row, sitting straight up like he knows he’s in trouble and doesn’t want to make it worse. As I climb down from the podium, it’s over. Everyone disperses. I stay to help fold and stack the chairs.
Dad jumps in front of me as I carry some chairs to a van, saying, “Scarlett, I know you’re furious with me, and I completely understand why.”
I say nothing.
“I was just . . . I was a different person. I was really unhappy. So was your mother. And it just happened. I swear I tried to take those lines out, but the editors insisted I leave them in, keep everything as pure and raw as the original manuscript was at the time.”
Puuuuuuke.
“I really . . . I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Please, you need to forgive me. I’m devastated.”
There are a lot of things I could say to him. Like: Yeah, you were devastated when you got a book deal. You were devastated when it got optioned by a major movie studio. And you were really devastated in that online magazine profile that included glossy photos of your apartment and your new wife and daughter, in which I was not mentioned once. But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that life is short.
“You’re not a good writer,” I say and then walk away.
In the car on the ride home, I feel like a raw nerve. Once the floodgate opens, it turns out it’s hard to shut it off. It’s begun to rain. Dawn keeps looking at me nervously, like she has for the last few days, checking to see that I haven’t disappeared or died or something.
“I really hope this doesn’t ruin your relationship with your dad,” she says tentatively.
“Wha—give me six months and maybe a frontal lobotomy, then tell me that.”
She nods. We drive in silence, and I flip the radio on. “Fire and Rain,” James Taylor, in case I wasn’t already in the mood to weep.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“I asked Dad once, but it occurred to me that I never asked you. . . . Why did you marry him?”
She says nothing and keeps driving, for a second making me think she didn’t hear me.
“He was different than other men I’d dated.” She sighs. “Smart. It made me feel special that he picked me.”
I feel my heart break more, if possible.
“You didn’t need Dad to make you special,” I whisper.
She shrugs. “I was working all the time, just so we had money, and I mean any money at all, and I guess I couldn’t really understand why he couldn’t go out and get a job too, just to help me, instead of sitting in there writing every day. But I never said anything, you know? I’d just come home in a really bad mood, and I was angry a lot.
“And the truth is—I’m not just saying this to make you feel bad, because I really don’t want you to—when you got older, it was hard because you two were so much alike. You could talk about books, and you had the same crazy imagination and even talk in a similar way, and I just . . . couldn’t keep up. I didn’t even have the energy to, if I could. I guess it felt sometimes like he was always the good one. And I was always the bad one.”
We just drive for a minute, letting it hang there. What can you say that’ll make up for years? Nothing adequate.
I just mumble: “It’s not like that. I can see now, I was really little, and I was just, I was dumb. I didn’t realize.”
She nods and says quietly, “I know.”
We sit there for a minute, and she says, “He called to explain about the book.”
“How could he possibly explain that?”
“I understood. He was mad at me when he wrote that, Scarlett. I was mad at him too, obviously. It wasn’t a good situation.”
“And you just said it was okay? Is it okay?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer, really.” She keeps her eyes steady on the road. “I mean, yeah, it’s fine. I guess there’s a lot I have to worry about that’s more important than some character based on me ten years ago in a book I won’t read. I’m much more upset that he’d do that to you.”
I stare out the window.
“You’re wrong, though,” I say. “I’m more like you than like him.”
She shakes her head.
“I am! I work really, really hard. Not at school, but at the stuff I like to do. My eyes are gray like yours. Our voices sound exactly the same on the phone too. Even people we’re really good friends with can’t tell the difference.”
My voice wavers a little bit as I see her start to tear up, but I keep going.
“And I know now how important it is to try your best to understand people. Even people you don’t like, or people you don’t have anything in common with. And that’s all from you. All of that stuff? That means you’re smart as hell. Dad’s the stupid one.”
She swallows hard.
“I’m really sorry, Mom.”
A tear rolls down her cheek, and she brusquely wipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara.
“You don’t have to apologize for anything,” she says. “I’m so proud of you—exactly who you are, every single day.”
When I get home, for the first time since Ruth died, I feel like writing. But not the way I have been. I always rush through stuff. When I read the old installments now, everything seems so flippant, surface-y. Especially the first fic: I cringe when I reread it. How could I have been so catty? And if I stop writing like that, can I even write at all? It’ll be hard, but I have to try.
Chapter 25
The Ordinaria
The Mullens had no language for it until this year. Its anniversary, if you’d call it that, was coming up—six years—and they’d suddenly begun to discuss it for reasons that Sheila did not like. That night, for instance, over their usual haphazard dinner schedules. She ate at six, then he came home and ate at ten; sometimes she sat with him and had some wine.
Steve sighed heavily, put down his fork down, and said, “It’s been . . . you know . . . so long that we’ve been trying to come to terms with the thing.”
They referred to it as “the thing,” as in the drive-in movie or some as-of-yet unidentified bumps you’d anxiously notice on your body.
They hadn’t said her name in the house for four years. They’d never verbally agreed outright not to, but to say it out loud to each other seemed crude, like an unexpected emotional slur tossed at the other person.
Steve had become a workaholic, spending fifty-five hours a week at the lab developing and then overseeing the global rele
ase of the Miss Ordinarias. But, blind with grief he hadn’t adequately dealt with, he’d accidentally wound up giving the new products dangerously high levels of empathy, feelings, and life, to somehow make up for the fact that his daughter’s had been taken away. Some he focused on more than others.
Sheila mostly just cleaned. She tried to drink enough to develop a problem but wasn’t very good at it. After she gave up on that, she’d sometimes go sit by the lake that their daughter used to hang out at, drinking and crushing PBR cans with her friends. In fact, that’s what they did that night. In fact, that is why it happened.
She would be twenty-four now, but she made it to only eighteen. For Sheila, the clock stopped right when they saw how slowly the paramedics were walking to the car. She remembered thinking: They should at least fake running around, moving quickly. We shouldn’t have to know before someone tells us who’s a professional at telling people.
This year, though. Almost regularly, with everyone from acquaintances to relatives, The Thing arose. Last weekend it did at Sheila’s book club. They were discussing Jodi Picoult, after Sheila was warned that it was a “triggering” book, and a friend of a friend named Gabrielle had too much pinot grigio.
“This is probably inappropriate,” slurred Gabrielle. “It’s definitely inappropriate, actually, but you’ve just been so . . . it’s been, you know, bad for a really long time.” Gabrielle took a deep breath. “I’m not trying to say this way is the best way, but your husband could probably get a good deal on—”
“Do not.”
So Sheila wasn’t in the mood when Steve said, out of nowhere, even though they both knew exactly what he was talking about, “Sheil, I’m not saying we have one custom-made.”
“‘Made’? Jesus, do you hear yourse—”
“Look. There’s a surplus right now of about ten thousand, and a lot of them are in need of a good home.”
“In need? Steve, they’re like . . . blenders.”
“Well . . . they’re . . . we went a little too far on this one with the ‘human qualities.’” He purposely did not say “I,” even though it was utterly his fault and he’d probably get canned any day now.