Good in Bed

by Jennifer Weiner

  Nifkin, who’d been given a little rainbow sweater, was in my lap, sleeping with one eye open, ready to bolt for higher ground should the evil cats Gertrude and Alice appear. Josh was on the couch, picking out what sounded like the theme song from Beverly Hills, 90210 on his guitar.

  “In fact,” said Lucy, “they don’t talk at all.”

  “Well, what would they talk about?” I asked. “I mean, Mom’s educated… she’s traveled…”

  “Tanya puts her hand over Mom’s mouth when Jeopardy comes on,” said Josh morosely, and switched to “Sex and Candy” on the guitar.

  “Ew,” I said.

  “Yup,” confirmed Lucy. “She says it’s obnoxious how Mom shouts out the answers.”

  “It’s probably just that she doesn’t know any of them herself,” said Josh.

  “You know,” said Lucy, “the lesbian thing is okay. It would’ve been all right…”

  “… if it had been a different kind of woman,” I finished, and sat there, picturing a more appropriate same-sex love: say, a chic film professor from UPenn, with tenure and a pixie haircut and interesting amber jewelry, who’d introduce us to independent film directors and take my mother to Cannes. Instead, my mother had fallen for Tanya, who was neither well-read nor chic, whose cinematic tastes ran toward the later works of Jerry Bruckheimer, and who didn’t own a single piece of amber.

  “So what is it?” I asked. “What’s the attraction? She isn’t pretty…”

  “That’s for sure,” said Lucy, shuddering dramatically.

  “Or smart… or funny… or interesting…”

  We all sat, silent, as it dawned on us what the attraction might be.

  “I’ll bet she’s got a tongue like a whale,” said Lucy. Josh made retching noises. I rolled my eyes, feeling queasy.

  “Like an anteater!” cried Lucy.

  “Lucy, cut it out!” I said. Nifkin woke up and started growling. “Besides, even if it is just sex, that’ll only get you so far.”

  “How would you know?” said Lucy.

  “Trust me,” I said. “Mom’ll get bored.”

  We all sat for a minute, thinking that over.

  “It’s like she doesn’t care about us anymore,” Josh blurted.

  “She cares,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Before Tanya, my mother had liked to do things with us… when we were all together. She’d visit me in Philadelphia, and Josh in New York. She’d cook when we came home, call us a few times a week, keep busy with her book clubs and lecture groups, her wide circle of friends.

  “All she cares about is Tanya,” said Lucy bitterly.

  And I didn’t have an argument for that. Sure, she’d still call us… but not as often. She hadn’t visited me in months. Her days (not to mention her nights) seemed full of Tanya – the bike trips they went on, the tea dances they attended, the weekend long Ritual of Healing that Tanya had taken my mother to as a special three-month-anniversary surprise, where they’d burned sage and prayed to the Moon Goddess.

  “It won’t last,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “It’s just an infatuation.”

  “What if it isn’t?” Lucy demanded. “What if it’s true love?”

  “It’s not,” I said again. But inside, I thought that maybe it was. That this was it, and we’d all be stuck, saddled with this horrible, graceless emotional wreck of a creature for the rest of our lives. Or at least the rest of our mother’s life. And after…

  “Think of the funeral,” I mused. “God. I can just hear her…” And I dropped my voice to a Tanya rasp. “Your mother would want me to have that,” I growled. “But Tanya,” I said in my own voice, “… that’s my car!”

  Josh’s lips twitched upward. Lucy laughed. I did the Tanya-growl again.

  “She knew how much it meant to me!”

  Now Josh was out-and-out smiling. “Do the poem,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “C’mon, Cannie!” begged my sister.

  I cleared my throat, and began to recite Philip Larkin. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

  “They fill you with the faults they had…” continued Lucy.

  “And add some extra, just for you,” said Josh.

  “But they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern, and half at one another’s throats.”

  And we joined in together, the three of us, for the last stanza – the one I couldn’t even bring myself to think of in my present predicament. “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like the coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”

  Then, at Lucy’s suggestion, we all got to our feet – Nifkin included – and dropped our knitted items into the fireplace.

  “Begone, Tanya!” Lucy intoned.

  “Return, heterosexuality!” Josh implored.

  “What they said,” I echoed, and watched the pride muffler burn.

  Back at home, I parked my bike in the garage, next to Tanya’s little green car with its “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” bumper sticker, hauled the gigantic frozen turkey out of the garage freezer, and set it in the sink to defrost. I took a quick shower and went into the Room Formerly Known as Mine, where I’d been camped out since my arrival. In between short bike rides and long baths and showers, I’d dragged enough blankets out of the linen closet to turn Tanya’s futon into a triple-lined oasis. I had also dug a crate of books out of the basement and was working my way through all the hits of my childhood: Little House on the Prairie, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Narnia chronicles, and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I was regressing, I thought bleakly. A few more days and I’d be practically embryonic myself.

  I sat at Tanya’s desk and checked my e-mail. Work, work. Old Person, Angry (“Your comments about CBS being the network for viewers who like their food prechewed were disgraceful!”). And a note from Maxi. “It’s 98 degrees here every day,” she wrote. “I’m hot. I’m bored. Tell me about Thanksgiving. What’s the cast?”

  I sat down to reply. “Thanksgiving is always a production in our house,” I wrote. “Start off with me, and my mother, and Tanya, and Josh and Lucy. Then there’s my mother’s friends, and their husbands and kids, and whichever lost souls Tanya recruits. My mother makes dried turkey. Not intentionally dried, but because she insists on cooking it on the gas grill, and she hasn’t quite figured out how to cook it long enough so that it’s done, but not so long that it’s not leathery. Mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed potato potatoes. Some kind of green thing. Stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry sauce from a can.” My stomach turned over even as I typed. I had pretty much stopped being nauseous during the last week, but just the thought of turkey jerky, Tanya’s lumpy gravy, and canned cranberry cocktail was enough to make me grab for the saltines I’d packed.

  “The food’s not really the point,” I continued. “It’s nice to see people. I’ve known some of them since I was a little girl. And my mom builds a fire, and the house smells like wood smoke, and we all go around the table and name one thing we’re thankful for.”

  “What will you say?” Maxi shot back.

  I sighed, wriggling my feet in the thick wool socks I’d swiped from Tanya’s L.L. Bean stash, and tugged the afghan I’d lifted from the family room tighter around me. “I’m not feeling especially thankful right now,” I typed back, “but I’ll think of something.”

  ELEVEN

  Thanksgiving Day dawned crisp and cold and brilliantly sunny. I dragged m yself out of bed, still yawning at ten in the morning, and spent a few hours outside raking leaves with Josh and Lucy while Nifkin kept watch on us, and on the stalking cats, from the porch.

  At three that afternoon, I took a shower, blew my hair into some semblance of style, and put on lipstick and mascara, plus the wide-legged black velvet pants and black cashmere sweater I’d packed, hoping that the cumulative effect would be both stylish and slimming. Lucy and I set the table, Josh boile
d and peeled shrimp, and Tanya bustled around the kitchen, making more noise than food, and breaking frequently for cigarettes.

  At 4:30 the guests started to arrive. My mother’s friend Beth came with her husband and three tall, blond sons, the youngest of whom was sporting a nose ring right through his septum, giving him the look of a baffled Jewish bull. Beth hugged me and started sliding trays of appetizers into the oven while Ben, the pierced one, started discreetly chucking salted nuts at Tanya’s cats. “You look great!” Beth said, like she always says. It wasn’t even close to being true, but I appreciated the sentiment. “I loved your story about Donny and Marie’s new show. When you said how they were singing with LeAnn Rimes and it looked like they wanted to suck the lifeblood out of her… that was so funny!”

  “Thanks,” I said. I love Beth. Trust her to remember the “Mormon vampires” line, the one that I’d loved, too, even if it had occasioned half a dozen angry phone calls to my editor, a fistful of furious letters (“Dear Too-Bit reporter” my favorite one began), plus an earnest visit from two nineteen-year-old Brigham Young University students who were visiting Philadelphia and promised to pray for me.

  Tanya contributed green beans with the crunchy canned onions on top and a can of undiluted Campbell ’s Cream of Mushroom soup mixed in, then galumphed into the family room and built a blazing fire. The house filled with the sweet smell of wood smoke and roasting turkey. Nifkin and Gertrude and Alice arranged a cease-fire and curled blissfully in front of the flames, all in a row. Josh passed around the shrimp he’d prepared. Lucy mixed Manhattans – she’d perfected them during a stint as a bartender that followed the topless dancing escapade but preceded her six weeks doing phone sex.

  “You look lousy,” she observed, handing me a drink. Lucy herself looked great, as always. My sister is just fifteen months younger than I am. People tell us we looked like twins when we were little. Nobody says that anymore. Lucy’s thin – she always has been – and she wears her wavy hair short, so that the slightly pointed tips of her ears show when she shakes her head. She’s got full, lush lips and big, brown Betty Boop eyes and she presents herself to the world like the star she thinks she ought to be. It’s been years since I’ve seen her without a full face of makeup, her lips expertly outlined and colored, her eyebrows dramatically plucked, a tiny silver stud flashing and winking from the center of her tongue. She was dressed for the Thanksgiving feast in skintight black leather pants, high-heeled black boots, and a sequined pink sweater set. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot, or stopped in for a quick drink before heading off to someone else’s much more stylish holiday festivities.

  “I’m a little stressed out,” I said, yawning, handing the drink back, and wishing there was time for another nap.

  My mother bustled around the table with the same placecards she’d used at Passover the year before. I knew there was one that said “Bruce” somewhere in the pile, and I hoped, for my sake, that she’d discarded it rather than crossing his name off and writing in someone else’s as a way to economize.

  The last time he’d been here it had been winter. Josh and Lucy and Bruce and I had stood on the porch, sipping the beers that Tanya refused to let us keep in the refrigerator. (“I’m in recovery!” she’d bleat, holding the offending bottles as if they were grenades.) Then we’d gone for a walk around the block. Halfway back, it had started to snow, unexpectedly. And Bruce and I stood, holding hands with our eyes shut and our mouths wide open, feeling the flakes like tiny wet kisses on our cheeks, long after everyone else went inside.

  I closed my eyes against the memory.

  Lucy stared at me. “Jeez, Cannie. Are you okay?”

  I blinked back the tears. “Just tired.”

  “Hmmph,” said Lucy. “Well, I’ll just mash a little something special into your potatoes.”

  I shrugged, and made sure to avoid the potatoes at dinner. We followed my mother’s Thanksgiving tradition, going around the table and talking about what we were thankful for that year. “I’m thankful for having found so much love,” rasped Tanya, as Lucy and Josh and I winced and my mother took Tanya’s hand.

  “I’m thankful for having my wonderful family together,” said my mother. Her eyes were glistening. Tanya kissed her cheek. Josh groaned. Tanya shot him a dirty look.

  “I’m thankful…” I had to think for a while. “I’m thankful that Nifkin survived his bout with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis last summer,” I finally said. At the sound of his name, Nifkin put his paw on my lap and whined beseechingly. I slipped him a piece of turkey skin.

  “Cannie!” yelled my mother, “stop feeding that dog!”

  “I’m thankful I still have an appetite after hearing about Nifkin’s trouble,” said Ben, who, in addition to the nose ring, was irritating his parents by sporting a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt.

  “I’m thankful that Cannie didn’t dump Bruce until after my birthday, so that I got those Phish tickets,” said Josh in his deep, deadpan baritone, which went nicely with his six-foot-tall, skin-and-bones frame, and the little goatee he’d grown since I’d seen him last. “Thanks,” he stage-whispered.

  “Think nothing of it,” I whispered back.

  “And I’m thankful,” concluded Lucy, “that everyone’s here to hear my big news!”

  My mother and I exchanged anxious glances. Lucy’s last big exciting news had been a plan – thankfully aborted – to move to Uzbekistan with a guy she’d met at a bar. “He’s a lawyer over there,” she’d said con-fidently, gliding smoothly over the fact that he was a Pizza Hut delivery guy over here. Before that, there’d been the plan for the bagel bakery in Montserrat, where she’d gone to visit a friend in medical school. “Not a bagel to be had down there!” she’d said triumphantly, and got as far as filling out the papers for a small business loan before Montserrat’s long-dormant volcano erupted, the island was evacuated, and Lucy’s bagel dreams died a hot molten death.

  “What’s the news?” asked my mother, looking into Lucy’s shining eyes.

  “I got an agent!” she trilled. “And he got me a photo shoot!”

  “Topless?” asked Josh dryly. Lucy shook her head. “No, no, I’m done with all that. This is legitimate. I’m modeling rubber gloves.”

  “Fetish magazine?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

  Lucy’s face fell. “Why doesn’t anyone believe in me?” she demanded. Knowing my family, it was just a matter of time before somebody launched into Lucy’s Catalogue of Failures – from school to relationships to the jobs she’d never kept.

  I leaned across the table and took my sister’s hand. She jerked her hand back. “No unnecessary touch!” she said. “What’s with you, anyhow?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We weren’t giving you a chance.” And that’s when I heard the voice. Not God’s voice, unfortunately, but Bruce’s. “Good,” he said. “That was nice.”

  I looked around, startled.

  “Cannie?” said my mother.

  “Thought I heard something,” I said. “Never mind.”

  And while Lucy prattled on about her agent, her photo shoot, and what she’d wear, all the while evading my mother’s increasingly pointed questions about whether she was getting paid for this or what, I ate turkey and stuffing and glutinous green bean casserole, and thought about what I’d heard. I thought about how maybe even though I’d never see Bruce again, it might be possible to keep part of him, or of what we were together, if I could be more openhearted, and kind. For all of his lecturing, for every time he was didactic and condescending, I knew that he was basically a kind person, and I… well, I was too, in my private life, but it could be argued that I was making my living by being unkind. But maybe I could change. And maybe he’d like that, and someday like me better… and love me again. Assuming, of course, we ever even saw each other again.

  Underneath the table, Nifkin twitched and growled at something chasing through his dream. My eyes were clear, and my head felt cool and ordered. I
t wasn’t as if all of my problems were gone – as if any of them were gone, really – but for the first time since I’d seen the little plus sign on the EPT stick, it felt like I might be able to see myself safely through them. I had something to hold on to, now, no matter what choice I made – I can be a better person, I thought. A better sister, a better daughter, a better friend.

  “Cannie?” said my mother. “Did you say something?”

  I didn’t. But at that moment I thought that I felt the faintest flutter in my belly. It might have been all the food, or all of my anxiety, and I knew it was much too early to really feel anything. But it felt like something. Like something waving at me. A tiny little hand, five fingers spread like a starfish, waving through the water. Hello and good-bye.

  The last day of my Thanksgiving break, before I was going to make the trek back into town and pick up the pieces of my life where I’d left them, my mother and I went swimming. It was the first time I’d been back to the Jewish Community Center since I’d learned that it was the scene of my mother’s seduction. After that, the steam room had never felt quite the same.

  But I’d missed swimming, I realized, as I stood in the locker room and pulled on my suit. I had missed the tang of chlorine in my nose and the old Jewish ladies who’d parade through the locker room completely naked, completely unashamed, and swap recipes and beauty tips while they got dressed. The feel of the water, holding me up, and the way I could forget almost anything but the rhythm of my breath as I swam.

  My mother swam a mile every morning, moving slowly through the water with a massive kind of grace. I kept up with her for maybe half of it, then slipped into one of the empty lap lanes and did a languid sidestroke for a while, thinking of nothing. Which I knew was a luxury I couldn’t afford much longer. If I wanted to get things taken care of (and that was the phrase I was using in my mind), it would have to be soon.

  I flipped on my back and thought about what I’d felt at Thanksgiving dinner. That tiny hand, waving. Ridiculous, really. The thing probably didn’t have hands, and if it did, it certainly couldn’t wave them.