“God, I wish you had a hot date tonight,” she said. “Can I buy your clothes, too? No offense, hon, but you tend to play down your best feature. Your bod cries out for short white shorts and a crop top.”
“You’re the first person I’ve heard use the word bod since junior year high school.”
“Or one of those little T-shirt dresses would be nice, too. And they’re cheap. Dress Barn has them for forty bucks. That’s where I got this.” Cindy was wearing royal blue shorts and a print blouse with a ruffle down the front, white sandals, and a matching white belt.
“Can I ask you something without pissing you off?” I said.
“Shoot.”
“How come you do all this—the makeup, the clothes? Don’t you get tired of having to look perfect every day?”
And Cindy sat down heavily in the chair across from me, all the makeup piled on the glass table between us; with her face sort of sad and serious she looked like exactly what she was, a former prom queen who’d grown up, gotten married, and fought the good fight against losing her looks. “God, I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t believe I said such a shitty thing.”
“Don’t rub your eyes,” she said, “or that mascara will be all over your face. It’s okay, anyhow. You’re the only friend I’ve ever had who would ask me a question like that. Plus I think you’re the only one I’ve ever known who I’d know how to answer. You know, most people, I’d just say, well, a girl’s got to look her best, doesn’t she? or one of those dumb-ass things you learn to say.” I’d never heard Cindy swear before. I wanted to reach across the table for her hand, but she kept it curled up in her lap.
“I think it was the farm, you know it? It was just so dusty all the time, and the dirt came in the windows, so that no matter how often you’d dust there’d be this little bit of dirt that was always on the sills. And my mother would go out to make her deliveries and she’d smell so good and look nice, even though she’s a kind of plain woman, you’ll see when you meet her at Christmas. Then next morning she’d be up in a pair of men’s overalls helping my dad out in the barns, and she’d smell like manure. And after a while I think I got like Scarlett O’Hara in the movie, you know? ‘As God is my witness, I’m never going to be dirty again.’
“I fell like a ton of bricks my sophomore year for a boy named Jackson Islington, can you believe it, from some little place past Lakota. He was a senior, light-headed boy, but dark eyes, you know how nice that looks sometimes? And you’ll know how crazy I was about him when I tell you I was only fifteen and he was already putting his hand up my skirt in the car, and I was letting him. He dropped me off one day and he was talking to my dad for the longest time and then my dad came in for dinner. I can still remember we were having macaroni and cheese and stewed tomatoes, and my daddy says to me, ‘That’s a nice young man. You don’t meet too many anymore who have their hearts set on farming.’
“Lord, you should of heard that boy when I asked him about it next day coming home from school. Talking about the earth and watching things grow and the air in the early morning, making it sound like planting ten acres of feed corn was like being a priest or something. And then he started kissing me and he kissed my neck and then lower, the way he always did, I think that was what got me going in the first place, and then he kissed me on the mouth, stuck his tongue in the way he had a million times before, except I could taste the dirt, just taste it, so that I almost gagged.
“Even now sometimes I think, Cynthia Lee, what was wrong with you? Because when you’re fifteen you’re supposed to be able to just overlook those kinds of things, get all carried away and loopy in love. But I felt his hands on me and all I could think of was me all scrawny and dark the way my mother was, and dirt on the dining-room tablecloth. And that was that. That was that.” There were tears in her eyes, and Cindy dabbed at them with one carefully bent knuckle. Then she laughed, the sort of shaky gasping laugh you laugh when you’re trying to shake tears away, a laugh I’d laughed myself sometimes, talking to Grace about things.
“First date with Craig, I say to him, ‘What do you think you’d like to do for a living?’ He was seventeen, must have thought I was crazy. He said, ‘I’m going into business.’ The pool business gave me pause, with all the digging around, but he put that shower in the basement, right by the outside door, and he’s clean and smelling of Christian Dior before he ever comes up those stairs.” And with that she lifted her chin and smiled at me, the kind of brilliant smile one woman gives another that might as well be a punch in the nose, so little is it to be messed with. I looked down, fiddling with the tubes and pots on the table, looking at their labels: Terra Copper, Autumn Leaves, Sweet Peach, Sable. Almost despite myself I started to talk.
“I had this nun in eighth grade who wanted me to apply to this really good private school. She kept saying that she thought I had potential. Potential. I got to love the sound of that word. It sounds like somebody shot you out of a cannon. And then I talked to my parents about it, and my mother looked at the brochure I brought home. It was on this great paper, I remember, soft and shiny and there were beautiful color pictures of the kids in their uniforms, in science labs and reading in this big library. And my mother looked at it, and then she just said, ‘Why?’ That’s all. It was like my whole life in one word. And it just stayed like that—when I wanted to go on a trip to Spain with the language club, or go to college. The answer was always the same: why? What’s the point? I knew it was because they didn’t have any money, with my father on disability and my mother working as a secretary. But it didn’t feel like it was about money. It felt defeated. I’d look at this picture of the two of them on their bedroom dresser, thin and nice-looking and all happy and smiling, and it was just like defeat had taken over the whole house, until I didn’t see the point either. I went to the local parochial girls’ school and then I went to the local nursing school and then I got married and I guess I was just grateful for anything I could get.
“I didn’t even really think about it until my sister got older. Because they did the same thing to her, except that she didn’t pay any attention to them. What’s the point, Grace? Take shorthand and typing, Grace. Dr. Edgar the dentist is looking for a receptionist, Grace. She’d just laugh at them sometimes, when we were in our room, make fun of them, even. She got herself a scholarship to private school for high school, and she got jobs and grants to work her way through college, and she rented a U-Haul so she could drive cross-country. My mother asked her why she was going all the way to Chicago for school. And she said, ‘Because I want to.’ Like it was the most natural thing in the world, to do what you wanted.
“Sometimes I’d see her looking at me and I could tell she felt sorry for me. God, that just about killed me, that little Gracie, whose diapers I’d changed, who I sang to and read to, who would yell ‘Where Frannie?’ running around the house, her diaper all droopy around her fat knees, who I taught all the line dances and how to roll her uniform skirt after school, that she would wind up feeling sorry for me. But, you know, I had no one, and Grace had me. That gave her confidence. Or at least a lesson in how not to do things.” I shrugged. “She just made herself a completely different life. Just made it up, from scratch.”
“Well, that’s what you did,” Cindy said.
“What?”
“Here,” she said. “You made yourself a whole new life here. Just like your sister did.”
“It’s different.”
“Oh, hon, that’s what we all say,” she said. “Of course it’s different. Everything’s so out of a clear blue sky that everything’s always different. Like if I’d taken French instead of Spanish I might not have known Craig and my whole life would be different. Or if I’d gone all the way with Jackson before I knew what was what, everything would have been different. Scares me to think about it, it would have been so different. And if you weren’t as nutty about Robert as I am about Chelsea I wouldn’t have run into you and that would make things different.”
�
�I am not nutty about Robert. He was in a new school, he was—”
“I know, I know. It was different than with Chelsea. That’s fine. Anyhow, now we know everything we need to know about one another. You know how come I wear foundation and powder every day, and I know how come you don’t. I thought we were just going to get our nails and hair done, and the next thing you know we’re sitting here ripping our guts out.”
“It’s the birthday. There’s something about a birthday that makes you think about your life that way. About how you got to be who you are. About whether you’re happy with your life.”
“I guess this might not be the best birthday to ask if you’re happy with your life,” Cindy said.
“I guess you’re right. What about you?”
Cindy stared up at the ceiling. It was almost as if I could watch the years roll by behind the scrim of her eyes, her thinking about everything that had been, the man, the kids. Herself.
“I’m pretty happy with my life,” she said finally. “But it isn’t exactly what I expected.”
“Amen,” I said.
She leaned over, gave me a hug, put all the makeup in a tote bag she was giving away free with every order during the holidays. “Who’s Frannie?” she said.
It was such a shock, but I didn’t show a thing in my face. Besides, she wasn’t looking at me, was looking down at the tools of her trade.
“What?” I said.
“You said your little sister called you Frannie. That she said ‘Where Frannie?’ all the time.”
“It’s an old nickname,” I said, my breathing still ragged from talking, and listening, and feeling.
Cindy held out the tote bag, red with black patent trim. My mother-in-law would have loved it. “Well, Frannie, honey,” she said, and just the word, that one word, sounded so good in her mouth. “Here’s your new face. Happy birthday again. You’re a new woman, swear to God.”
“What happened to Jackson Islington?” I said.
“I haven’t a clue,” said Cindy. “What happened to your eighth-grade nun?”
“She left the convent, got married, and became a social worker.”
“How about that?” Cindy said.
The sweet potatoes in the casserole dish on the kitchen counter looked like a photograph from some recipe in a magazine, if I do say so myself. The secret’s in the bourbon, boiled down with butter and brown sugar until the whole mess is as thick as maple syrup. It was one of my mother’s recipes. One of my mother’s only recipes, unless you count the ones she read off the back of the can of cream of mushroom soup. At my mother-in-law’s, where we always had Thanksgiving dinner, the sweet potatoes were tolerated, not welcome. The turkey, too, was more centerpiece than main course, filled with sausage and aniseed, surrounded by platters of lasagna and artichokes stuffed with cheese. At Ann Benedetto’s I used to eat the sweet potatoes myself, so that my casserole would not sit untouched on the sideboard, even though the food she served was always better. In the battle between turkey and lasagna, turkey doesn’t stand a chance.
The bourbon, that’s what my mother always said. And the pecans. They were expensive, the pecans, almost three dollars a bag. The bourbon I bought in one of those tiny bottles they serve on the airlines. I was afraid of having booze in the house. The second week we were in Lake Plata I bought a bottle of cheap chardonnay, rough and vinegary on the back of my tongue, yet somehow it only lasted two days. After that, no more. Every bit of the bourbon went into the saucepan.
“Sweet potatoes are weird,” Robert said, poking them with his finger the night before as they sat steaming on top of the narrow stove. “But they smell good.”
They were crusty, brown and orange, and still fragrant if you put your face close enough, even stone cold on Thursday morning as I listened to Cindy on the phone, my heart sinking. Her voice was ragged, the static on the car phone in Craig’s van like pebbles rolling around in the receiver. It was Thanksgiving, but instead of putting the turkey in the oven the Roerbackers were rolling south, down the spine of the state to the retirement village where Craig’s parents lived and where, the night before, his father had had a stroke. And the Thanksgiving plans of the Crenshaw family, such as they were, were rolling away with them.
“I am so sorry,” she kept saying. “I am just so sorry.”
“Cindy, stop,” I said, poking the potatoes. “Things happen.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
“We’ll make other plans,” I said. “The Castros, maybe.”
“Oh, I forgot about the Castros,” she said, and her voice sounded a little lighter, the static a little more raucous, until somewhere along the highway we lost one another with a rattle, a strange sonic shriek, and a still pool of dead and empty air.
But of course I knew that the Castros had gone away, too, to celebrate Thanksgiving with some cousins in Orlando who had been, Robert told me, billionaires before they found it necessary to come to America and be reincarnated, driving cabs, cleaning motel rooms, another brace of people who’d been somebody else once. That morning, when I had stepped into the quadrangle of the Poinsettia complex, just to see the sky, to sniff the air, it had had the atmosphere of a place that had been evacuated, as though someone had forgotten to tell us about the coming storm, the floods, the tornadoes. But the only natural disaster was the holiday; our shabby little horseshoe of low-ceilinged duplexes was the sort of place to leave for a family gathering, not a place in which to have one. And we were leaving, too, leaving for the Roerbackers, with Cindy’s family, and Craig’s. Until Cindy and Craig and Chelsea and Chad—it almost makes me smile to give all their names together like that, and I still mocked Cindy from time to time—had gotten on the road at daybreak to travel to a hospital intensive care unit 250 miles away.
“Sweetie, we have a problem,” I called upstairs to Robert, trying to keep the sound of bad news out of my voice. There was no answer and I trudged up, looked in at him on the bed, reading a magazine that Bennie had given him, an expert’s guide to video games.
“Remember the game I told you about, that you said was way too expensive?” he said. “If I could get a used one for half-price, could I buy it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and dancing my fingers up his leg. “That was Cindy on the phone. She and the kids had to go to Mr. Roerbacker’s daddy’s house. He had a stroke last night and they had to go right away to see him. So we can’t go to their house today.”
“So where are we going to go?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I have to write a composition about Thanksgiving,” Robert said.
“You don’t have to write it today.”
“I know. But what will I say if we don’t have Thanksgiving?”
How had I forgotten what it would be like, to go to a cheap restaurant on that day of all days? I knew, knew in the way a person with scars can remember the pain of surgery. The first Thanksgiving after I met Bobby he’d invited me to his mother’s for Thanksgiving. Grace and my mother and father had gone off to my aunt’s house in the Catskills, carrying a cheesecake and a bottle of rosé wine, and I had set my hair, shaved my legs, ironed a dress that didn’t need ironing.
I didn’t know that Bobby hadn’t told his mother until that morning, and I suppose he didn’t know that she would fall entirely apart at the suggestion that there was a strange girl who expected to sit at her table, that white phony French-provincial table with the centerpiece of wax grapes in a silver basket, the table where only family sat. He sprung it on her; that’s the way Bobby put it, as though I was a small animal with sharp teeth waiting to leap at the crepey white skin around Ann Benedetto’s neck. I can imagine now what she must have been like that day: cold, affronted, then tremulous, a shaking hand to her only child’s cheek, begging, begging, not today, not today. And so Bobby had changed my plans. I should have had some vision of the future then, as I listened to him talk on the phone. “It’s no big thing,” Bobby said. “
I shouldn’t’ve sprung it on her like that. She’ll get used to the idea. You know, only child, all that. It’s no big thing. She’ll meet you at Christmas. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t eat too much turkey.”
I could have stayed at home, heated up a can of soup, read a mystery novel. Instead I’d gone up to the Boulevard, to a Greek luncheonette, and had turkey with all the trimmings at a stool at the counter, two stools down from an old man with emphysema who smoked all through his meal.
“How was it?” Gracie said when they got home, carrying leftover turkey wrapped in tinfoil.
“Nice,” I said.
“They put out a good spread, those people,” my father had said, wheezing, falling into his chair and breathing into his oxygen mask as though it was the Fountain of Youth.
And still, remembering that, I took Robert to The Chirping Chicken, the two of us trudging along the shoulder of the highway because there were no sidewalks, there was no need for any, everybody rode in cars except for us. The linoleum and the fake leather on the booths was the color of the sun, so that you felt blinded when you walked inside. The gravy was the color of the sun, too, bright yellow with flecks of black pepper swimming on its oily sheen. At least it was not gray. That was what I remembered about the food in the luncheonette in Brooklyn, that the gravy was the color of cardboard, and I cried in the bathroom and blew my nose on a square of gray toilet paper, rubbing off the foundation and the powder I’d put on to go to Bobby’s. I told Robert that story at The Chirping Chicken, and somehow I made it sound innocuous, even amusing, like something from one of the sitcoms, something that would have a laugh track. That’s how I always tried to make life sound for Robert. I couldn’t bear for him to feel pathetic, to see me as pathetic, too.
“These are really good mashed potatoes,” he said. “They don’t have one single lump.”
“Did you not really want to go to the Roerbackers?” I said.
“No, it was okay. But it’s like Grandmom didn’t want you to come when you weren’t her family. I think Thanksgiving shouldn’t be with someone else’s family. I think it should just be with your family.”
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