Authors: Jackie Lee Miles
Sometimes when Rosa has been cleaning for hours, my mother will go around and empty all the wastebaskets. Wherever they are placed—there are many—they match the décor. It’s her way of telling Rosa she is doing a really good job, and it’s kind of a show of love. But I wonder why she just doesn’t give her some extra money and say, “Rosa, I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Rosa probably thinks my mother thinks she forgot to empty the trash, and she’ll go home feeling bad about herself, which makes me feel bad about myself, when my mother should feel bad about herself. What a circus. And then of course, there’s the issue of money on its own. People need it. But people who have a lot of it, like my mother, don’t realize how bad it is for those that don’t have any, and need to count every penny to make sure it will be enough for whatever life hands them that week, like they live on compliments or something. So, my mother should just give Rosa extra money when she sees how hard she’s working. I should tell her that, but I don’t, so I’m just as guilty. Something about when good women do nothing, nothing is the result. I read that somewhere about men and evil, but it has to include women and regular things, too, right?
For the moment, I’m doing nothing. I need to call Bridget and see if she is, too. My father is out of town on business. I know he’s not with Donna—she’s home getting the mail; I can see her out my bedroom window. I tell my mother I’m going to Bridget’s. She’s emptying wastebaskets and smiles as I walk by.
I decide right then and there, if I ever have a maid, I’m giving her a really big raise when I hire her.
I’m curled up on Bridget’s bed admiring my toenails. They look like Jelly Bellys. It took three tries before I got the right color on the correct nail, so they’d really pop out at you. That’s another reason for having a best friend. They don’t mind if you change yours after the colors are dry. Bridget just shrugs and picks up the polish remover. I did hers all in one shade, iridescent lime green.
Bridget looks like Winona Ryder, but with braces. Even so, she’s totally beautiful. And there’s not an ounce of fat on her body.
“Like my mother,” she says, then bites her lip. She doesn’t mention her mother much. She died when Bridget was eight; some kind of leukemia and it still pains her heart. Her father married Donna, his secretary, last year.
“She had these little cards she carried in her purse in a silver holder,” Bridget explains. “‘Executive Assistant’.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“No, it’s the same as a secretary,” she says, lacing cotton through my toes so the polish won’t smudge. “Except they have to pay them more money and they don’t make them get coffee.”
Bridget’s father is a stockbroker. Their house is very fancy, so he must be a good one. Or maybe he had a lot of insurance on Bridget’s mother, or both. I don’t ask. I just let Bridget talk about her mother whenever she wants and I nod my head to let her know I’m listening really good, but I don’t say anything because I can’t think of anything to say. I can’t imagine not having my mother around, even when she’s tipsy, which is a lot now that Alex is gone, except for in the morning. Mornings, she drinks coffee and juice and eats oatmeal, which Rosa brings to her on a tray, which is a big relief. Not Rosa waiting on her, but that she’s eating. I read somewhere that alcoholics don’t eat, so as long as she eats, maybe she won’t be one.
Bridget’s the only friend I can talk to about what happened to Alex. Mostly, it’s too awful, not just that he died, but the way he did. Bridget listens and then brings extra pillows to plump behind my back.
“Would you like a Coke?” she says. “It’s diet.” Which is her way of saying she doesn’t want my heart hurting as bad as her heart, which makes me love her as a friend forever, and I hope they never move and we never move. And I tell her.
“I know. That’s how I feel,” she adds, and changes the subject. “Let’s go swimming!”
“It’s November.”
“Yeah, let’s get crazy.” She opens her top drawer and tosses two swimsuits onto the bed. “Here, pick one.”
When you have a friend like Bridget, life can be hard, sure, but then there’s all that goodness out there to grab hold of.
“Yeah, let’s get crazy!” I say and choose the tank suit, which I’m sure will fit. Bridget picks up the bikini, and we’re off.
Now you know why she’s my salvation.
You probably don’t want to hear about toenails and nail color. You want to know, like Bridget, what happened the night of my mother’s birthday party when the doorbell rang.
“Tell me again!” Bridget says.
We’re wrapped up like mummies in oversized bathrobes and huddled in the sauna next to the cabana. It takes a while for the space to heat up and our teeth are rattling like dice.
“Well, she was covered in blood—” I say. Of course, I’m talking about Donna, who showed up that night and nearly caused my father to have a heart attack. It was only her finger that was covered in blood, not her entire body, but it was running down the front of her jogging suit, which was pale peach velvet and matched her lipstick to the letter.
“I was slicing a p—p—pineapple,” she wails, preparing dinner for her and Rodger, that’s Bridget’s father, who isn’t home yet, and she can’t reach him and she goes on and on between sobs. And can he help her and my father is standing there with his mouth hung open like it’s no longer attached.
“Well, of course, of course—” my father says and gently takes hold of her arm and brings her into the foyer, where she drips blood all over the marble floor. Rosa runs up with a clean towel and wraps it around her hand, but it bleeds through quickly and Rosa turns white as Casper and is rattling something in Spanish that sounds like the world is ending, which scares Donna, who seems to agree. She’s a mess—and I should be feeling sorry for her, or show some concern at least, but in my brain I’m thinking she probably cut her finger on purpose to get my father’s attention. She’s stretching her neck around Rosa to get a look at my mother and who’s at the party. My mother looks pretty breathtaking in a black velvet dress that shows off her still-blonde hair pulled back in a very stylish chignon, featured in all the latest fashion magazines, and Donna is taking this all in and frowning. Then she leans against my father and cries, “Oh Arthur, Arthur,” like they’re very close, or something, and of course they are, but my mother doesn’t know that and is now standing next to my father and you’d think she’d find the way Donna is clinging to my father and calling out his name in this over-familiar way disturbing, but she simply says to my father that it would be a good idea to take her to the emergency room and would he like her to accompany them? Very strange. Not the words, the fact my mother’s not in the least bit suspicious of the way Donna is whimpering to my father. I have this flashback to third grade when I liked this boy Stuart and I wrote him a note and asked if he liked me and he wrote back, yes he did, and I wrote back and asked if he’d like to go together, which meant stand in line to go to lunch together and maybe at the water fountain, and also meet at the front door when school started, which was about the extent of going steady in third grade. And he said yes, and we had an agreement, even though, technically, I was supposed to wait for him to ask me to go with him, but he never asked me one question the entire second grade and I liked him all during that year too, so I figured if I didn’t ask, I’d be in sixth grade still waiting and what if I still liked him? So I had no choice but to ask him. Then Darla Myers, this real cute girl who had the prettiest teeth I’d ever seen, comes up one morning when Stuart and I are meeting before the bell rings and she smiles at him—the kind where your eyes smile along with your lips, like they’re moving up and down, but they’re not, and then she covered her mouth and giggled, and I knew right then and there something was going on. I broke up with Stuart on the spot. Later I found out from Cynthia, this other friend of mine, that I was right all along. Cynthia saw Stuart and Darla in the hallway that leads out the back door where we weren’t ever supposed to be and they were showing each other, you know, that kind of showing. The point is, even at eight years old I could tell when something wasn’t right. And now Donna is falling all over my father in plain sight and wailing and calling him Arthur, Arthur in a little-girl voice. And my mother is acting like it’s nothing.
How much writing on the wall does a woman her age require?
Okay, here’s what happened to Alex. Maybe the more I go over the details, the less it will hurt. Alex decided to join this fraternity his sophomore year at Vanderbilt; mostly before then, he wasn’t interested, but then he was and he got picked to join Phi Moose or something equally silly-sounding, and part of his initiation had this drinking game where all the plebes—I think that’s short for “pledges,” because they’re not officially in the group until they pass all the tests or something—sit in a circle and drink this concoction like a triple-quadruple kamikaze that has every liquor known to man put in one glass. And they have round after round and the thing is if someone passes out or needs to throw up or can’t drink another swallow, they have to follow certain instructions. Like the throwing up part, you have to throw up to your left. And if you can’t drink another swallow, then you have to pass your glass to the person on your right. I’m not sure if they have any rules about if you pass out, but I’m pretty sure they don’t. If you’re passing out it’s pretty hard to follow anything but the direction your body heads in.
So, Alex has a guy on his left that passes his glass to him after only two rounds and Alex keeps drinking that guy’s drink and his own drink and on and on, and to make it worse the guy on his right is one of those who should pass his glass on to the guy on his right, but keeps drinking it instead, and then promptly throws up each and every round—remember, he has to throw up to his left, which is where Alex is sitting. So Alex is covered in this guy’s vomit—I know it’s totally gross—and Alex just keeps drinking glass after glass along with this other guy’s glasses and before you know it, Alex conks out. He’s out cold, really cold. Of course the guys in charge notice, but just drag him out of the circle to sleep it off, but they can’t wake him up later when it’s all over, so they decide to take him to the hospital, which they do, but they just leave him at the emergency door, ring the buzzer several times and then drive away. Then later, they get to thinking—this all comes out in this preliminary hearing where they’re deciding whether or not to have a trial—what if when he wakes up, he tells what was going on and the fraternity gets suspended, so they go back to the hospital and after Alex is settled in his room, they disconnect his IV and sort of kidnap him back. Alex wakes up and says, “Hey, buddy, what’s up?” That’s what the president of the fraternity says at the hearing. His name is Conrad York III and he has blond hair that’s precision cut like a soap-opera star and he is so good-looking you catch your breath. His father is sitting in the first row. He’s pretty handsome, too, except now his face is the color of fresh-poured concrete.
So, after they take Alex out of the hospital, Alex passes out again, and they can’t wake him up no matter what they do and they try everything: a cold shower, artificial resuscitation, ice packs under his arms, a coffee enema—don’t ask—so they take him back to the hospital. These guys are like really retarded. For the second time that night, they leave him at the emergency room door and they ring the buzzer and leave just like before. The emergency technician who found him said, “He was deceased when I got to him, your Honor.”
Conrad jumps up and says, “He was alive when we left him. We rang the bell three times. You should have got out there sooner!” And the judge tells him to sit down and be quiet. But he won’t; he just keeps yelling at the guy on the witness stand that he killed Alex, he let him die. So they have to remove him from the courtroom—not the witness, Conrad III. His lawyer says he is having some kind of breakdown and requests a continuance so he can have a psychological work-up completed on his client before proceeding.
I’m thinking all of them should fess up like men. But then, I realize they aren’t men or even close to it, or they wouldn’t have done something so stupid to begin with. I joined Y-Teens one year and we had an initiation too, but all we had to do was squat and quack like ducks all around the square—downtown—during rush hour. It was very humiliating, so why didn’t they just do something equally stupid like that, is what I want to ask.
Maybe their attorney is right, it’s all a tragic mistake, “Let’s not sacrifice their entire lives. There was no intent, Your Honor,” he says.
The judge simply calls a recess and orders background investigations on all those involved. Everybody files out of the courtroom. We head to the funeral home and pick out a casket.
Here we are, three months later. The lawyers are still fighting over when to start the trial, or if there should even be one. My father said the charge would be felony hazing. But punishing them won’t bring Alex back, so mostly I don’t care, but then I remember it might keep others from doing the same, so now I think there should be a trial and some kind of punishment, but what kind? That’s the problem, because these are Alex’s friends and he’d be the first one to say, “Hey, haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
Well, sure—we all have—but this is a pretty big one.
“There’s no easy answer,” my father says. He hangs his head and turns to go into his study. His eyes are glassy and the edges are beet red. I want to wrap my arms around him really tight. I’m just about to, when he quietly shuts the door.
I check on my mother. She’s sprawled on top of her bed with her clothes on. There’s an empty bottle of Clos du Bois sitting on the nightstand. She’s snoring softly, a nice little feminine snore. Spittle is dribbling down one side of her face. There’s no way to tell if she’s passed out or just sleeping normal. There’s a part of me that wants to think it’s just normal sleep, but this other part jumps in and says, yeah, right.
I slip the empty bottle into the wastebasket and tiptoe out of the room.