But then school came abruptly to an end in June, and most of the guys in her class headed out to Munich, where they were currently chugging beer as part of the freshman class annual “European Educational Adventure.” Now, once again, Lizzie’s Saturday nights are devolving into
Pretty Woman
reruns with a bowl of buttered popcorn at Becky’s house. Lizzie wonders if anyone misses her. So far, she hasn’t gotten any postcards. Not even from Justin.
today, lizzie lets margaret lead the way up the stairs. They pass the family portraits that line the upstairs hallway—one taken every Christmas, framed in carved gilt. Paul is always in a white button-down and a Christmas-tree tie, Janice in a red or green silk blouse and a collection of discreet holiday-themed earrings (sterling silver reindeer, porcelain bugle boys, miniature ceramic wreaths). As children, the girls are gussied up in frilly holiday dresses; later, they wear the annual Christmas sweaters their grandmother Ruth sent from Indiana ( hand-knitted in an astonishing array of mutated Rudolphs and demonic elves) with sullen expressions. In the final one, taken last Christmas, Margaret is mid-blink and Lizzie looks like she is about to vomit, probably because of all the eggnog she drank that afternoon.
At the landing, Lizzie pauses. The breakdown four days earlier had been an anomaly; that evening, Janice had returned to the kitchen at dinnertime as usual, pretending that nothing had happened. The news that Margaret was coming home for a visit had, in fact, sent Janice into a new flurry of activity—Margaret’s room had to be aired out, special shopping lists made up, flowers picked from the garden and arranged in the entry. If anything, Janice is more herself today than ever, almost vibrating with activity. Already, Lizzie thinks, Margaret’s return is making everything better. Lizzie still can’t erase the image from her head, though: her mother on the bed, lying as still as a corpse, with a glass of wine in her hand.
“Mom?” Margaret calls.
Janice materializes in the doorway of the bedroom that is designated as Margaret’s, despite the fact that Margaret has slept there less than ten nights in the last four years. She is dressed in a fresh shirtdress, with an apron over it, and she has rubber gloves pulled up to her elbows, a sponge in her hand. Her blond hair has been scraped back into a low chignon, and her blue eyes are pale and luminous. She doesn’t look depressed at all, Lizzie thinks; in fact, she looks like she might have just applied the same cleaning and polishing to herself that she just gave to the windows.
“Margaret!” Her mother turns toward the bedroom, then back to the foyer, trying to decide whether to drop the gloves and sponge before she approaches for a hug. “I didn’t hear your car in the driveway or I would have come down. What time is it? I wasn’t expecting you yet…. Did you leave early? Because otherwise you must have driven much too fast if you’re already here. How fast were you driving?”
“Hi, Mom,” says Margaret. And in the weariness of Margaret’s reply to their mother’s barrage, Lizzie remembers that her sister and her mother fight, have fought for years, and worries that perhaps Margaret’s presence is not going to make everything better after all.
“Just a minute,” Janice says, racing into the bedroom to drop the sponge in a bucket by the window and shoving the rubber gloves into her apron pocket. Lizzie and Margaret follow her inside. That accomplished, Janice swoops in and squeezes her elder daughter so hard that Margaret visibly winces—Lizzie, remembering the feel of Margaret’s ribs jutting from under the dress, winces along with her—and then stands back to look Margaret up and down. “Well, don’t you look pale! I’d think you were living in Alaska, not Los Angeles, if I didn’t know better.” She gives Margaret another hug, closing her eyes as she does it.
Margaret looks very tired suddenly, almost on the verge of tears, as if her mother is squeezing her like a sponge. “How are you doing, Mom?” she replies, ignoring her mother’s questions. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“Oh, please.” Janice shakes her head. “I’m fine, just fine. Well, obviously I’ve had better weeks, but I’m feeling fine now.” She pauses. “Really fine,” she says again. Her eyes dart to the window and back several times, as if she’s looking for any last errant smudges to scrub.
“Mom—” begins Margaret.
Janice cuts her off. “When you drove in did you see the new house they’re building at the end of the street? They’re putting an entire bowling alley in the basement. Who needs a bowling alley? Home theater, yes, I understand, but bowling? They’re from India…” She pauses, as if finishing the sentence in her head, and then leans forward and sniffs the air around Margaret’s face, wrinkling her nose. Lizzie just knows this is going to piss Margaret off, and she braces herself for Margaret’s reaction. “Do you smell like smoke? Have you been smoking? Please tell me you aren’t smoking again.”
“I won’t, then,” Margaret says, her voice growing more terse by the second.
“Did you stop for lunch? I have a mushroom quiche in the fridge. I could fix you up that, and a salad—”
“I had a burger,” Margaret replies. The entire room is crackling with tension. Margaret and Janice always seem to fight about stupid, insignificant things like how much coffee Margaret drinks and why the country club has a men’s-only grill and how Congress is full of reactionary fascists, and it makes Lizzie want to cover her ears and climb underneath the covers and sing a Hilary Duff song as loud as she can until they stop. Still, she realizes, there is a comfort to their vocal sparring. It’s better, at least, than the silent way her mother and father seemed to fight. That kind of fighting felt like spreading poison, whereas this is just an explosion, like fireworks, hot and violent but over quickly.
“Well, I guess that means you aren’t a vegetarian anymore?”
“Not really,” says Margaret.
“Well,
that’s
good,” Janice says, reaching out to touch Margaret’s bare upper arm. “You’ve gotten so
skinny
down there. Please don’t tell me you’re doing another one of those weird L.A. diets, with the raw food or the macrobiotic whatever or the one where you don’t eat anything but lemon juice—it’s all so cultish. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned meat? For God’s sake, we’re at the top of the food chain for a reason.”
“Have you ever seen the inside of a slaughterhouse?” Margaret asks, frowning. “Do you
know
how they treat those cows before they become your sirlion burger?”
“Margaret, please. Can we not?”
Margaret sighs and walks over to the bed. She picks up one of the plaid pillows and hugs it in front of her like a shield. Lizzie lets her breath out slowly, relieved that Margaret has decided not to take the bait. Janice follows her to the bed and starts fluffing the pillows beside her, swapping a plaid pillow for a polka-dotted pillow, then shifting them back again.
Lizzie pipes up. “I’m thinking of being a vegetarian.” She isn’t, really, but suddenly it seems like a good idea, if only to insert herself into the conversation. “Does it count if you eat shrimp?” Neither Margaret nor Janice respond. Lizzie looks down at the floor and scuffs her shoe in the carpet, making the pile stand up in the shape of a heart, feeling useless.
“How long were you planning to stay?” Janice asks.
“As long as you need me,” says Margaret, gesturing vaguely.
Janice shakes her head. “Well, of course I’d love for you to stay as long as you can manage, but I don’t
need
anything.” Something about her last words makes Janice blink and pause, and then she continues on: “Your mother is capable of holding it together, hard as that may be for you to believe.” Lizzie, sensing her mother’s lie, hopes that Margaret doesn’t take this as carte blanche permission to leave again. Not yet.
But Margaret examines their mother closely, as if gauging every line in her crow’s-feet, every tender spot underneath her eyes. She glances at Lizzie, then back at Janice. “Mother, are we going to talk about what’s going on?”
Janice just sighs, puts her fingers to her temple, and looks at the floor. She seems to be speaking to the nap of the carpet. Her voice drops three octaves. “Margaret. Please. Right now, I just want to be happy that you’re home.”
Margaret shakes her head, and Lizzie, watching her, has a comforting realization: Margaret, indomitable Margaret, has just been equally shut out by their mother. They are
both
not in the know, which means that Lizzie finally has someone on her side. She smiles to herself and pushes her toe out to smooth the nap of the rug, erasing the heart.
The two women stand there, stuck in a kind of standoff but not quite sure where to aim next. Janice buckles first. She jerks toward Margaret, opens her arms wide, and sweeps in for yet another hug, crushing Margaret into her shoulder. “I really wish you would visit more often,” Janice sighs. Lizzie watches them press together, feeling once again like the third wheel, and wonders whether she should just leave. Perhaps the only reason Janice and Margaret fight so much is because Janice loves Margaret more, anyway. But then Janice looks up and beckons Lizzie over with a quick wave of the hand. “Come here, Lizzie,” she says. Lizzie shuffles over and lets her mother pull her into a group hug. The two sisters hang helplessly in their mother’s grip like rag dolls.
“Just us girls—that’s nice, right?” Janice says. She has tears in her eyes, and one translucent drop worms its way through her foundation, exposing a trail of raw pink flesh underneath. Up close, Lizzie can see that the reason Janice’s eyes look so blue today is that her pupils are tiny and the rims of her eyes are red, as if she hasn’t slept in days. “Let’s try to have some fun, okay?”
Lizzie feels a tiny crumb of dread. She can’t imagine having much fun with her mother in this state. Her shoulder aches from where Janice’s knuckles are pressing in.
Her mother releases them. “Well,” she says, and gives them the satisfied look that a shopkeeper might give to a floral arrangement that’s just been placed in a window for display. “Why don’t we go have some tea? I made lemon cookies.” She sweeps them toward the door and follows them down the hall toward the stairs.
Margaret steps aside to let their mother go down the stairs first and grabs Lizzie’s arm as she starts to follow, pinching it hard. She raises one eyebrow until her face freezes into a semispastic contortion and then flares her nostrils at Lizzie. After a moment Lizzie nods, sagely, as if she knows exactly what Margaret intends to say with this curious expression, but she hasn’t got a clue.
there is nothing so comforting as the produce aisle of a gourmet supermarket. Janice pushes her cart briskly past the bins and marvels at the feats of engineering around her. Towers of oranges, each one a perfect miniature sun. The summer peaches, gently fluffed by a loving grocer until their fuzz stands on end. The eggplants, tumescent and purple, jury-rigged into stacks that defy gravity. Janice can’t help but admire the symmetry, the smartly contrasting colors, the little chalk signs that denote the contents of each bin: “Organic frisée, imported from Peru, $6.99 a pound. Woody and delicious.”
When she was in college, organic produce looked nothing like this. It was sold out of dark little stores that smelled powdery and rancid, like wheat germ, and the produce was mealy and spotted and full of bugs. When she’d first arrived on the West Coast in the 1970s, she had shopped at a co-op near the campus, both because it was cheap and in the spirit of adventure. She remembers cooking Paul an apple pie a few months into their courtship and the horror she felt when he paused and stared down at a tiny, ossified worm on his fork. “Death by sugar,” he said before folding the worm into his napkin. “Not a bad way for a worm to go.” He kept eating anyway, but Janice couldn’t force down another bite.
She stops in front of a display of fresh McIntosh apples, polished until Janice can see a thousand tiny reflections of herself in their ruddy cheeks. That’s an idea: She will bake an apple pie, a dessert so banal and rudimentary that she hasn’t made one in years, maybe even decades (she usually gravitates more toward the culinary fireworks of a coffee-walnut mousse torte or a cherry Armagnac Pavlova); right now the idea of a good old-fashioned American dessert sounds almost therapeutic. Janice deftly picks out ten of the largest, roundest, most brilliantly streaked fruit—careful not to upset the precarious tower—and sets them down on the bottom of the cart, on top of the frisée, so that they won’t bruise. She notices that her hands are trembling and she shakes them to make it stop.
She trots the cart down past the fresh herbs in the refrigerated bins, just as the sprinklers hiss on. She pauses for a brief second and—she can’t help it, it looks so cool and enticing, and she feels just a tiny bit wobbly—tips her head in, just over the dill, tilts it up, and lets the mist come down over her face and neck. It feels marvelous, as soft and delicate as a feather, dampening the top of her blouse, catching in her hair. She is reminded of a trip she once took to Hawaii with Paul—a walk in a tropical rain forest, a waterfall that she longed to step under but didn’t dare, lest she ruin her sundress and sandals. Only now can she sense the bliss that comes with that kind of abandon.
“Janice?”
The voice seems to come from a thousand miles away. Janice steps back with a jolt, realizing with alarm what she has done, and opens her eyes. Water is in her lashes, she can’t really see, but she recognizes Barbara Bint by the throatish rasp of her voice.
“Barbara,” she says, as she frantically mops the water from her face with the sleeve of her blouse, patting her cheeks dry in a vain attempt to cover the damage. “How are you?”
Barbara Bint stands in front of her, blocking the path to the leeks with a cartful of Slim-Fast and Diet Coke. Janice can’t think of a person she’d less like to see. There is nothing really
wrong
with Barbara, it’s just that she is a bit too enthusiastic. Like a puppy that won’t stop licking your foot, no matter how much you discourage it. If there is a charity planning committee Barbara will undoubtedly volunteer for the most demeaning tasks no one else will touch; if there is a Thanksgiving church feed for the poor, Barbara will be stuffing the donated turkeys at four
A.M.;
if there’s a death in the neighborhood, Barbara’s the first person to arrive with a casserole and a tear-stained face. And then there’s Barbara’s overt religiosity, an acquisition after the death of her husband (a fall from a ski lift, right before Barbara’s eyes, horrible) five years ago and a slightly gauche novelty in a neighborhood of understated religion. Barbara now talks about God in the same familiar way poor people in the Midwest did: as if he lived in the double-wide next door and was coming over that night for a Hamburger Helper dinner. Janice doesn’t much go for religion, but if she did, she would do it in a discreet, pious sort of way. She wouldn’t, for example, pray under her breath for God’s hand to guide her club before she tried to sink a putt on the fourteenth hole.