Authors: Kate Rockland
“Oh, honey, he didn’t mean it. You know how he gets.” She ever so quickly glanced toward one of the cabinets, the one she’d always stored her bottles in, as if hiding them behind the spices were somehow keeping everyone from knowing she had a problem. It was the slightest of glances, just a flinch of her head, really, but Alexis caught it and sighed. Would even this moment be ruined by her drinking?
“Mom, I’m pretty sure Dad meant what he said.” She took a sip of her juice and immediately regretted skipping lunch; the acidity of the fruit went right through her and she burped.
“Say excuse me,” her mother said absentmindedly.
Alexis felt anger rising and tried to suppress it. “Excuse me,” she said sarcastically, though Bunny didn’t pick up on it.
Bunny clapped her hands together. “So, how are you, kitten? How’s life in the Big Apple?”
Can she really not tell I’m pregnant?
Alexis thought.
Don’t mothers have a sixth sense about these things?
“Well, I don’t know if you got my e-mail, but I was on
Oprah
back in December.” She stared out the window. The elementary school she and Mark had attended long ago had just let out, and a gaggle of pushing and shoving children flowed down the sidewalk like a river. One’s backpack had a zebra’s face on it, its mouth a zipper.
Bunny’s eyes widened. “Noooooo, I didn’t know. That’s so wonderful, Lexa!”
Lexa was a nickname her mother had called her as a child. Alexis had been five, and declared she no longer wanted to go by Alexis. That she would only answer to the name Lexa. Bunny had been the single family member who agreed to call her by it, and hearing it now made Alexis afraid she might cry. She took a ragged breath.
“Right. Well, I left three messages with Elsa about it, with the date and times. I even called her when they showed a rerun.”
“Oh, honey, she probably told me and I forgot. You know how bad I am about remembering things. And I’ve never watched much television.”
Right, because it’s every day that your only child is on
Oprah.
“Where’s Dad?”
“At work. He should be home soon.”
“What are you guys having for dinner?” Her stomach rumbled.
Bunny peeked toward the cabinet again, the movement ever so slight. “Oh, we just grab any old thing these days.” Her southern accent had sprung forth. “Thing” turned into “thang.” She cupped her still-pretty face in her hands. “But I want to hear more about you, Lexa, darling. Have you got a young man?”
I did. He would have done anything for me and I asked him to leave. I had a man, and now I don’t. Oh, and he’s also the father of my child, but doesn’t know I kept the baby.
“Sort of,” Alexis said. She went to the refrigerator and found an old heel of bread, and, sitting down, began munching on it. Her parents had
millions
of dollars and never a scrap of food in the fridge. How ironic.
“Tell me about sort of. Sort of doesn’t earn you a wedding ring on that lonely finger, honey.”
Alexis rolled her eyes. It had always been like this with Bunny. It didn’t matter when she was taking college-level classes while still in high school, or that she graduated in the top of her class at Columbia. Her mother had shown no interest when Alexis started
Skinny Chick,
and it
certainly
seemed to bore Bunny Allbright that her daughter had been on
Oprah
.
Alexis had an odd moment when she almost blurted out,
I’m pregnant!
but she knew Bunny’s glee would soon be followed by concern that she wasn’t married. When her father got home the scorn and contempt would be overwhelming, and she’d be right back where she started from three years ago, kicked out of the house, penniless, and alone. An image of Billy vomiting on the bus home after a particularly brutal round of chemo last week steeled her nerves. She was here for him, after all. For once, she had to focus on someone other than herself.
But her mother was waiting, her eyes bright and glassy. She lifted a hand, which was shaking with tremors, to push back a lock of Alexis’s thin blond hair that had fallen into her eyes. Alexis flinched. A look of sorrow passed over Bunny’s face, and Alexis regretted her impulse.
“I met this nice guy named Noah,” she said, wanting to rectify the awkward moment. She looked around the room, her eyes fixing on a row of lamps of different colors and shades on the console.
“He owns a restaurant. It’s a microbrewery as well. It’s actually gotten pretty popular,” she said with a note of pride in her voice. “I helped him find the space and fix up the inside. He’s got these huge photographs on the walls…” She held her arms out to show how wide the pictures were and felt another nudge in her lower belly, as though the baby were reminding her it was here. “He went around the neighborhood and took pictures of some of the people that eat in the restaurant, and then had them blown up poster-sized and glossy. The space is gorgeous.” She smiled for the first time since entering her house. “Naomi Watts had a beer in there the other day, with her family.”
“Are you two pretty serious?” Bunny examined her already-perfect manicure.
“We were. We kind of had a falling-out.”
Alexis’s mother patted her arm. Again, the slight tremble. Bunny was holding out on pouring herself a drink in front of her daughter, and Alexis was strangely touched by this.
“Y’all will be making up in no time. Beautiful young girl like you? How could he stay angry for long?”
She wanted to say that she was the one who had been angry. That she’d ignored his calls, e-mails, love letters, and cards. Thrown away the most special thing that had ever happened to her because of her own stubbornness, which surely came from her father’s gene pool. That she’d called him and left a message, but he hadn’t returned it and probably never would. She wanted to tell her mother everything, and be held like she had been as a child, but Bunny was already getting up, gathering her robe around her large, still-pert breasts.
Suddenly it was as if she’d seen her daughter for the first time.
“You’ve put on some weight, darling.” She said it as a fact, not an insult, but still the words burned through Alexis. She’d done a lot of thinking since Billy got sick, and there was Noah’s encouragement that she put on weight and relax about religiously weighing herself and working out in such a harsh, exhausting way. Standing in her mother’s kitchen and ruminating about food, Alexis suddenly realized how odd it was that Bunny had always eaten like a bird, and had such an aversion and outright hostility toward food.
Alexis couldn’t have felt more different now.
Noah’s cooking brought her house together; his spicy chili, oddly enough, was the only thing Billy felt like eating when his nausea was overwhelming. Noah coaxed Vanya out of the dark depths of her black room, he fed the homeless man who squatted in front of his restaurant, who in turn washed Noah’s windows each morning. His arrival made a tornado of change in her rigidly structured life. Alexis grew up thinking food was the enemy, but something in the past few months had shifted. She had to eat to nourish the baby growing within her. That was a fact. She’d tried her old eating habits but Billy had called her OB/GYN and tattled on her, and Alexis was given a very strict and scary lecture for half an hour by her doctor. Besides, when she tried skipping meals or eating just half of what was on her plate, which was her tried and trusty rule for staying slim, she’d been hit with overwhelming sickness, almost as if the baby Noah had made inside her was echoing its father’s thoughts that Alexis should eat more. So … she ate. And it surprised her how happy that act made her.
She blinked. Her mother was still looking at her. “Yeah—yes. I’ve put on some weight.” She smiled thinly. “But the boy I was telling you about? He likes the extra curves.”
“Oh,” Bunny said, looking confused. Curves were not something valued around Greenwich, where all the wives had personal trainers, and skinny was always “in.”
“Well, sugar, I’m going to run out and pick up something for dinner, since I assume you’re staying and not running off on me again?”
“Sure. I’ll stay and see Dad. Besides, I have to talk to him.” Alexis walked over to the dishwasher and opened it, setting down her glass on one of the plastic rungs.
“That’s settled, then.” Bunny pushed her tall, thin frame away from the counter and stood. Her robe fell slightly open and Alexis could see her ribs, their ridges showing through her skin.
She’s like a dying swan,
Alexis thought.
Suddenly her mother’s arms were around her. Bunny hugged her daughter. “I’m so damn glad you’re here. I get lonely, you know.”
Alexis hugged her awkwardly, feeling the soft silk of the robe beneath her palm. “It’s nice to see you, too, Mom.” There was so much left unsaid, and the words hung in the air so heavily for Alexis that she could almost see them, typewritten letters in a dark font.
While Bunny showered upstairs, and, Alexis suspected, took a few nips of booze, Alexis walked around the entryway and first floor, remembering.
She trailed her hand on the cool wall her mother painted a dark, muted silver, the color of a thunderstorm rolling over the ocean. Nearly all the walls were painted in this color, which gave a visitor the feeling of weightlessness.
Photographs of her and Mark were diagonally hung on the winding staircase off the entrance leading to the second floor. She walked up three steps and leaned her spine against the base of the banister, where it curved into a snail’s shell. Mark never went through that traditional teenage ugly stage; he’d had twenty-twenty vision and the most metal he’d had to put in his mouth was a small retainer he’d worn at night for a year. There were many shots of him coming off the football field, his helmet (number 23) thrown up in the air triumphantly, his sandy blond hair sweaty and pushed off his forehead, his smile huge and infectious, his muscular body throbbing with life.
Alexis’s pictures told a different story of adolescence. She’d been a gangly, slightly chubby, awkward teenager, not getting her period or (small!) breasts until three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. She knew this was often the story of famous supermodels and celebrities, that the very sleekness they were now famous for had once been unattractive to others. Tyra Banks often commented on how skinny and ugly people had thought she was.
She peered closer at a picture of herself in an unflattering J.Crew striped sweater that made her long neck look like a bird reaching for a worm from its mother. Her smile looked strained. The look in her eyes was,
Please like me!
She scoffed now, but stopped when she saw that all the pictures of Mark were shiny. She could see her own reflection, as if she were the ghost standing beside him instead of the other way around. When she straightened and surveyed the rest of
her
pictures—ten years old with buck teeth and pink Coke-bottle glasses, thirteen with a full set of braces (but at least wearing contact lenses now), midstride on the lawn at Columbia accepting her college diploma, sitting at a desk and looking serious at her law firm summer internship—the frames with pictures of her were dusty. The old familiar sick feeling rushed over her, and she had to literally put her hand on her lower stomach to catch her breath. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t love her; it was that they loved Mark more, always had, even with him dead.
He’d been the golden boy. It had been that way when they were kids; Mark the easygoing charmer who was always throwing a football in the backyard with their father, or willing to go to the mall and shop for a dress with Bunny. Alexis was the brooder, her bedroom door closed, her nose stuck in a book night and day.
He’d had dyslexia, which had forged the bond between him and Bunny, who had spent countless hours side-by-side with him playing books on tape, helping him write his papers all the way through middle school and even high school. If Alexis had one image from her childhood burned into her retinas it was Mark and her mother’s butterscotch heads bent as Bunny helped him with homework, the warm golden glow of his desk lamp casting shadows over their bodies, the sounds of easy laughter as they worked through
Hamlet,
or the scratching sounds of pencil on paper while figuring out algebra.
She’d excelled on her own, earning straight A’s without a lick of help, though both her parents had offered. She was in all honors classes, she was the head of the cheerleading squad, and she got into Columbia with a small scholarship. She’d done very well at the law firm internship, earning high praise, which, if it made its way up to her father, he’d never acknowledged.
Looking at another picture of Mark in uniform, taken when he’d completed boot camp, Alexis remembered before he’d died they’d spoken of taking a road trip together. He had been to Iraq earlier that year, and this second tour was going to be his last. She’d sat on his bed cross-legged, tired from studying for finals, and asked him what he planned on doing after he came back home. “Meet some nice woman and make her my wife,” he’d said, grinning. What a a wicked smile he had! It could calm any tense situation. “I was actually thinking it might be nice to drive across the country, see the South, and the West Coast, then start classes, cause the Marines will pay tuition. Would you want to come with?”
She’d thought about it, playing with a twenty-five-pound weight he had resting on his dresser. They’d been eating bowls of chicken soup, slurping and talking. She could still remember the rich smell of the broth. “You know Dad would never let me,” she’d said. “I’m supposed to be studying for the LSATs and then starting law school.”
“You’ll have the rest of your life to study for the LSATs,” Mark had said. He chucked her on her chin. “I’ll talk to Dad. Promise me when I get back you’ll come cross-country with me. We’ll rent some shitty motor home and eat beans for all three meals and just drive and fart all day, it will be awesome.”