Even though Claire had actual memories of the time, she still had trouble imagining her parents married: sharing a bathroom, running errands together, laughing. They’d been divorced for most of Claire’s life, but her father had only begun insisting on visitations a few years ago, when Claire’s mother had begun dating Will. “It’s my legal right,” he said, “and besides, I’m on the wagon.”
When her mother handed her the phone, she patted Claire on the back.
“It’s your papa!” Today he was in a good mood. He’d once called her mother a fucking bitch and said she was brainwashing Claire, which Claire had found offensive. As if she wasn’t intelligent enough to think for herself. Still, even a good mood could turn. She could feel blood thumping in her neck.
“Are you having fun this summer?”
She’d learned it was best to keep her answers short. “Sure.”
“I bought your ticket. Are you excited? Do you miss your papa?”
“Sure.”
Once Claire had told him the truth, that he was scary and she didn’t want to visit and she didn’t love him, but he’d said, Yes you do, and when she’d countered, You can’t read my mind, he’d answered, Yes I can. She’d been so angry she’d sobbed in her mother’s lap for over an hour and hadn’t stopped shaking for a long time after that.
That night while Will and Emma read books in the living room, Claire’s mother made Mexican hot chocolate, crushing the tablet with the mortar and pestle, stirring milk and sugar in a saucepan. Usually, Claire loved Mexican hot chocolate, but her stomach was still unsettled and something was lodged in her throat. Sad light reflected off the kitchen windows.
“You know he isn’t really on the wagon, right?” Claire demanded.
Her mother didn’t turn from the stove when she spoke. “When you’re a teenager, the law says you can decide for yourself whether you want to visit him. Only two more years.” She poured chocolate into Emma’s two-handled frog mug and dropped in an ice cube.
“I don’t think an alcoholic is a good example for a kid. I would think that you’d agree.”
“I do agree, Claire.” Her mother sighed, strain showing on her face. “You know I do. But I have to follow the law. At least he doesn’t drive when he’s like that.”
“How would you even know?”
Her mother snapped to attention. “You’d tell me if he did, right?”
Claire shrugged. She couldn’t always even tell when he was drunk. He wasn’t always angry, of course, but Claire couldn’t help feeling that even his high spirits were threaded with danger. Last summer at the pound, the woman behind the counter had run his credit card again and again with shaking hands. Claire had never seen an adult look so frightened. She’d pitied the woman, but she’d also been amazed that the woman had let him take both Claire and the dog home with him.
“Right, Claire?”
“I guess,” Claire said, and was disheartened by the comfort her mother seemed to take in this. “Can you put lots of ice in mine? Hot drinks are bad for you.”
Her mother dipped her finger in the saucepan. “It’s not hot, Claire. Really it’s pretty tepid.”
“It doesn’t matter. Hot drinks burn your insides.”
“Sweetie, if it’s hot enough to burn your insides, it’d be too hot to drink.”
“Mother,” Claire explained, her voice rising. “It says so in the D and C.”
“D and C?” Her mother smiled to herself. “Dilation and curettage?”
“Doctrine and Covenants, Mother.”
“Ah.” She looked at Claire a moment, then cracked the ice cube tray and dropped four into the mug.
Claire took a sip. The chocolate congealed around the ice, coated her tongue in a thick, cold scum. Her stomach clenched. She set the mug on the counter. In the living room, Will and Emma laughed and shrieked.
“Don’t you like it?” asked her mother, arranging three cups on a tray. She carried the tray to the living room.
Watching her mother’s straight back, Claire was suddenly so filled with rage that she couldn’t breathe and her vision blurred. She poured the chocolate down the sink and let the mug clang hard against the metal.
WHEN MORGAN CALLED one morning with an invitation to her family’s cabin for their reunion, Claire was thrilled. She’d never been to a cabin. She pictured logs and woods, a lake and a canoe. She pictured deer gamboling, squirrels chattering, friendly raccoons sniffing a red-checked picnic blanket.
“It’s an old church,” Morgan said over the phone. “It’s really fun. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
“Please?” Claire asked her mother, hand against the mouthpiece.
“I don’t know.” Her mother looked up from the living room floor, where she was doing an animals-of-the-rainforest puzzle with Emma. “It’s really last-minute. And you haven’t demonstrated that you handle slumber parties very well.”
“Mom!” Claire wailed, then caught herself. In her most adult voice, she said, “I understand I have made mistakes in the past, but I am responsible now.”
Her mother frowned. “You’re sure? Five days is a long time, honey. And you don’t know Morgan very well.”
“I’ll be ready,” she told Morgan.
Claire packed all her coolest clothes: jeans with the flowers stitched on the pockets, her yellow and blue plaid shirt with ruched sleeves, her Swatch with six different bands you could change depending on your outfit. She brought eleven pairs of underwear and every color scrunchie she owned.
At family reunions, Claire knew, there were cousins, and some of those cousins were bound to be boys. And since she would be the only one who wasn’t a relative, the boys would have to have a crush on her. They might play Truth or Dare.
She wished she had a duffel bag or a rolling suitcase; instead she had to use her stepfather’s dusty backpack that he brought on his field trips overseas. It still smelled gamey from his last trip—the smell, Claire was sure, of Ethiopia.
WHEN THE MINIVAN pulled up, only Morgan and Patsy were inside.
Claire’s mom came out with her to meet them. Emma, in a saggy diaper and rubber pants, crouched on the sidewalk and prodded a roly-poly. Claire wished her mother had spent a little time on her appearance. She had on her giant thick glasses and a t-shirt with a hole in the shoulder.
“Good morning!” called Patsy, leaning over Morgan. Her red hair was pulled into a sporty ponytail, and she was wearing lipstick and sparkly eye shadow. She was lively, thin, with dry creases around her eyes. The skin between her neck and the top of her shirt was speckled red under a gold locket.
Claire’s mother squinted into the car. “Thank you for inviting Claire, Patsy.”
“Oh, I’m so glad she could come. We’ll have a super time!”
Claire slid open the door and threw her bag in. She turned for a hug, but her mother had squatted beside Emma, who was gumming something in her mouth.
“Emma! We don’t eat bugs.” Her mother fished around in Emma’s howling mouth.
Claire slid the door shut, and Patsy shifted into drive. “Nephi City, here we come!”
Morgan twisted in her seat and made a face at Claire. “It’s not a city,” she said. “So don’t get your hopes up.”
The cup holders in Patsy Swanson’s minivan were gunky, and the backseats were full of naked Barbies and Happy Meal toys and the plastic backings of Fruit Roll-Ups.
“Where’s your dad?” Claire asked. “And your sisters? I thought they were coming.”
Morgan put her bare feet on the dashboard. “They’ll meet us there.” She looked at her mother. “Right, Mom?”
Patsy kept her eyes on the road. “Oh, there’s going to be lots of people—my sisters and brothers, all their kids, my dad. We’ll have a barbeque and everything. It’ll be a blast!”
From Salt Lake to Sandy, Morgan played her Paula Abdul tape turned up loud. Morgan and her mother knew all the words. Claire knew only one or two songs, but she sang along anyway, a fraction of a second too la
te. This was fun, the kind of fun girls in movies had with their mothers. Claire’s mom only listened to NPR, and sometimes Will turned even that off, saying he needed quiet.
Morgan was clearly her mother’s pal, ranked above her younger sisters, and now Claire was Patsy’s pal as well. Claire was emphatically not her mother’s pal; Will was, and Emma was pal to both of them. Right now they were all probably at the shallow end of the city pool, clapping and cheering as Emma swam the three feet between her parents. Sometimes Claire felt like nothing more than a reminder of an unhappy time in her mother’s life, the unfortunate consequence of an unfortunate marriage. Claire supposed if she were her mother, she’d want to forget it all, too—the shouting, the smashed chairs—to inhabit completely this calm, fresh life with her new husband and new child. Still, it wasn’t fair that her mother could divorce her father and never see him again, while summer after summer Claire was sent to pay for her mother’s mistakes.
Outside Provo, Patsy pulled off at a convenience store. “Whew,” she said. She arched her back, stretching long and slow, and Claire saw a crescent of pale skin at her waist. “Let’s get some snacks.” At the door, she gave Claire and Morgan each ten dollars. “Pick what you want. I’ll get drinks.” Morgan didn’t even exclaim over the amount, just started browsing, and Claire wondered if the Swansons were secretly rich.
She chose M&Ms, then couldn’t decide between potato chips and pretzels. “What do you think?”
Morgan had already paid and was munching on bright orange chips. “Come on,” she said. “Just get it all.”
Outside, Patsy was waiting for them at the picnic table with a six-pack of fruit drinks. Claire had never had anything so delicious, sparkling and bright and fruity. They didn’t even drink soda at her house, and this was something else altogether. She took tiny sips to make it last. This was probably the kind of thing they drank in France. She sipped again and inspected the glass bottle with the bunch of fruit embossed near the long, tapering top. Fruit Coolers.
“Hey,” Claire said. “This contains six percent alcohol by volume!”
“Oh my heck!” shouted Morgan. She looked at her bottle. “How do you know?”
Patsy took a long drink, nearly emptying her bottle, then inspected the label. “So it does. I can’t believe I made that mistake.” She collected the bottles from the girls and stood.
Morgan clamped her hand over her mouth. “We just broke the Word of Wisdom.”
Claire looked longingly at her bottle—still nearly full—as Patsy carried it to the trash, wishing she’d gulped it, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. She’d probably never taste anything so wonderful again.
In the car Morgan was quiet for a while. Then she turned to Patsy. “Mom, what are we going to do? We broke the Word of Wisdom.”
The Word of Wisdom was a very big deal. At the beginning of the year, Lindsay Kimball’s dad had bought a Cherry Coke. “With caffeine,” Jessica Beckstead had reported. Listening, Claire had mirrored the other girls’ dropped jaws. When he got home, Lindsay’s mother had made him get right back in the car and return it, even though he’d already opened the can. “Did they take it back?” asked Josie Lewis, voice low, and Lindsay Kimball’s eyes had filled with tears.
But Claire never expected that Morgan would respond like this, mouth tight and worried, forehead creased. The Morgan Claire knew pocketed candy at the corner store and said, “What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks.”
Patsy sighed. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “Would you stop overreacting, Morgan? We didn’t do it knowingly. You don’t get in trouble for an accident.”
Morgan chewed her lip. “How do you know?”
“Listen, I once dated a guy who did his Mission in Peru. Someone gave him a drink, and he had a few sips before he realized there was alcohol in it. It’s not a big deal if it’s an accident.”
“I’ve had wine,” Claire offered tentatively. She’d never told anyone this. “On special occasions my parents give me some mixed with water. That’s how kids in France have it.” She paused. “Wine can actually be healthful. It’s only bad if you abuse it.”
“See?” Patsy said to Morgan. “Not a big deal.” Patsy looked at Claire through the rearview mirror. “Do you like wine? Do your mom and Will have it every night with dinner?”
Claire held Patsy’s gaze in the mirror. “No, not that much. Definitely at dinner parties.”
“Oh,” said Patsy, voice even. “They have dinner parties? Fancy ones?”
Claire’s parents sometimes had potlucks with Will’s colleagues at the U—mostly professors and foreigners who brought their precocious children and third-world food. “The ladies get really dressed up and there’s candles and stuff. Usually we have steak and lobster.” She added helpfully, “It’s called Surf and Turf.”
Patsy looked over her shoulder. “And there’s wine. And they’re not evil, right?”
“No,” said Claire, shocked. “Of course not.”
“There you go. Claire’s had wine and she’s not evil.”
Morgan faced front, but Claire could tell her shoulders were tense. In a low, hard voice, she said, “Claire’s not a member. Claire doesn’t get to enter the Celestial Kingdom.”
Claire’s face burned. She thought of how much she’d loved the fruit cooler, wondered if the longing she’d felt was a kind of evil, and then, sickened, if she was on the road to becoming her father.
“Morgan, Claire is your guest. I expect you to treat her like one. I apologize for Morgan. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”
Claire looked at the ground to avoid Patsy’s eyes in the mirror. With her foot she prodded a topless Barbie in hot pants.
Morgan turned away, and for another hour no one spoke.
MORGAN WAS RIGHT: Nephi City was not a city. It was a town surrounded by flat grassland at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. The houses were small, some single- and double-wide trailers, with dry lawns and neat flowerbeds. The cabin was just off Main Street, across from 5 Buck Pizza and King’s Hardware.
When Morgan had said the cabin was an old church, Claire had pictured a creaking bell tower and an overgrown cemetery. The Swansons’ church was flat and built of long orange bricks. Instead of a steeple, there was an A-frame vestibule with cracked white trim. This building should have been tolerated, or torn down, or added onto with some equally hideous addition. Not bought. Claire pictured the person—Patsy’s father—who passed by and thought he saw potential.
Inside, the church was dim and forbidding. Dwarfed by the space of the sanctuary was a cluster of orange institutional couches with hard blocky cushions. Dark paneling printed to resemble wood lined the walls; that and the brown carpeting made the room dusky, even in the heat of the day. Sunlight penetrated the gloom only at the far end of the sanctuary, where a vinyl accordion door was folded to reveal a yellow-tiled kitchen.
“Hey,” said Morgan, apparently only now realizing the place was empty. “Where is everyone?”
“They’ll be here soon,” said Patsy. “Tomorrow, maybe.” She dropped onto a couch.
The bedrooms were the offices and classrooms, ten down a hallway.
“We call the end room!” yelled Morgan, flinging open the door to reveal two single beds. The bedspreads were thin, one pink, one orange, the nubbled chenille stripes grimy. A window between the beds looked out on a dry lawn with picnic tables and a concrete basketball court. Beyond was a chain-link fence, and beyond that the yard of a small house, littered with faded toy trucks.
“I call the pink bed,” said Morgan. “I mean, if that’s okay. You’re the guest.”
“That’s cool,” said Claire, sitting on her bed. She smiled so Morgan wouldn’t notice how disappointed she was by the cabin. It smelled like the dust on a window screen.
The hall was lined with shut doors. “Ta-da,” said Morgan, pushing one open. “Wanna go in the boys’ bathroom? We can.”
Inside, instead of three bathroom stalls, like in the women’s,
there was only one, plus two urinals along the wall.
“Weird, huh?” said Morgan.
They peered into a urinal.
“They see each other’s thingies when they go. They just pull them right out in front of each other. Gross, right?”
“Have you ever seen one?” asked Claire.
“Doy, on my little cousins.”
“I mean on a grown-up. Like on your dad.”
“No,” said Morgan, shocked. “Have you?”
Claire’s father walked around naked. He said it was natural. He even opened the front door naked, beer in hand. “You don’t mind, do you?” he’d asked the neighbor who came to borrow jumper cables. The man had laughed nervously. “No problemo.” Claire minded. A lot. She had to pretend to be absorbed by the television or her book, all the while being so aware of his hairy red penis swinging around.
“Of course not.” Claire pressed the flusher on the urinal. As the water surged and swirled, it splashed Morgan’s arm.
“Nastaroni!” yelled Morgan and ran out.
“MAKEOVER TIME,” Patsy announced.
At the drugstore they put whatever they wanted into the cart. Mud masks, glitter polish, a massive bag of Laffy Taffy, a glass bottle of Jean Naté each for Claire and Morgan. Claire felt rich and glamorous. The three of them laughed and called to each other across the aisles, while all around them dull-faced townspeople were buying toilet paper and laundry detergent, sweat suits and packs of socks.
Claire picked up a package of barrettes.
“Put them in,” Patsy said. She considered the blow dryers, then placed the most expensive model in the cart. “This is our vacation. We deserve quality.”
Back at the church, they spent a long time in the bathroom, makeup and brushes and creams spread on the counter. Claire didn’t know when she’d last been so happy. Shimmering teal eye shadow reached Morgan’s eyebrows and her cheeks were nearly purple with blush. Patsy had given herself Cleopatra eyes and lined her lips in dark red.
“I could do your hair,” Claire offered Patsy.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 13