She resists this impulse.
Think of the baby,
she reminds herself. She pictures again the pink foot in her hand. “Don’t bother,” she says. “I’ve decided.”
Margaret loses her composure altogether. She bolts up from the bed as if propelled by an electric shock, her arms sticking stiffly out at thirty-degree angles. Her eyes are moist, though it’s not clear whether these are tears of anger or frustration. Margaret’s hands have balled up into tight fists, and she looks like she wants to punch someone—Lizzie?—in the face. Lizzie flinches. “Lizzie! You can’t let them do this to you!” Margaret squeaks.
For the first time ever, Lizzie is terrified of her sister. She touches her belly protectively, feeling the thick belt of flesh under her swimsuit, and wonders if the raw curling sensation in her belly is the baby moving.
“It’s my decision.” Lizzie can hear the heavy thumping of her own heart.
Blam blam blam
it rattles her rib cage. Her heart beats so loud that the windows vibrate in their frames.
Blam blam blam.
And then she realizes, just as Margaret does, that the sound comes from downstairs, where someone is banging on the back door. The doorbell rings, there’s a brief moment of quiet, and then the banging starts again.
“Go away!” calls Margaret, not moving, her hands still curled into little coils of fury.
“Who is it?” Lizzie asks her.
Margaret says nothing, but her face pinches tight as the banging continues. It is clear that Margaret doesn’t want Lizzie to answer the door—why? Lizzie’s fear of being socked by her sister is abruptly replaced by curiosity, but with a dollop of power. Lizzie is dominant: She has made her own choice, stood her sister down, and Margaret is just frustrated that Lizzie didn’t simply go along with whatever she was told to do. Knowing this, Lizzie’s impulse is to run for the door, just to spite her sister. Because she can.
“Aren’t you going to go answer it?” she asks.
“Mom can get it.”
“Mom doesn’t get anything these days.” Lizzie stares her sister down, enjoying this strange new sense of authority.
But Margaret continues to stand there. “I’m not moving until you agree to be more open-minded about this. Just
talk
to Planned Parenthood, that’s all.”
“Fine, I’ll get it,” says Lizzie. She turns and bolts for the staircase, taking the stairs as fast as she can, running her hand along the smooth banister. She hears Margaret call “Don’t!” behind her but ignores it. She hits the landing with a thud that makes her stomach twist.
Behind her, Margaret leaps down the stairs, losing her footing a few steps down and tripping unevenly through the rest. Lizzie breaks into a run. The sisters sprint through the house, bare feet slamming against floorboards that haven’t been swept in a week, leaving hot toe-shaped imprints in the accumulating dust at the edges. Lizzie collides with the frame of the kitchen door, winces, thinks of the baby. Margaret grabs at the straps of her bathing suit, stretching the fabric tight, but then loses her grip. The elastic snaps back, stinging Lizzie’s skin.
“Ouch!” yells Lizzie.
“Leave the door alone!” Margaret pleads.
“What’s your problem?” Lizzie skids around the kitchen island, which is stacked with dirty dishes and the crusts of a three-day-old pizza. She knocks a half-empty carton of spoiled orange juice to the floor with a flying hand, and the fetid contents splatter against the cabinets.
Lizzie reaches the back door first, by a matter of seconds, and flings it open. James stands on the doormat. A moldy-looking souvenir sombrero is pushed back on his head.
“Hola,”
he says. “Is Margaret there?”
“Oh, it’s you,” Lizzie says. She’s not sure who, exactly, she had hoped to find behind the door—Bart? Ysabelle van Lumis? Her father?—but it certainly wasn’t him. The presence of James—who she last saw with his pants undone in the pool shed—makes her blush. He doesn’t seem very embarrassed about it, though. “It’s just your
boyfriend,
” Lizzie says to Margaret, who has come panting to a halt behind her. “What’s the big deal?”
James looks over Lizzie’s shoulder at Margaret. “
Hola,
Margarita. Where’s your suitcase? You ready to go?”
Lizzie looks at James and then Margaret, who seems decidedly nervous. “Where are you going, Margaret?”
James adjusts the sombrero on his head, lowering it so that Lizzie can read the yarn stitching.
LA VIDA LOCA SPRING BREAK ’01,
it reads. “I’m absconding with your sister to Mexico,” James says. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“Mexico?” says Lizzie.
“Mexico?” echoes another voice. Janice stands with her hand clutching at the kitchen island, a satin bathrobe belted tightly around her waist. Three bodies pivot, as if on cue, to stare at her. Lizzie struggles to remember the last time she saw her mother in an upright position. It’s been at least five days. In fact, Lizzie has not seen her at all in at least two, choosing instead to tiptoe past the closed bedroom door.
You are a bad daughter,
Lizzie thinks to herself.
You don’t pay enough attention to your mother. That’s another reason you need to keep the baby.
Janice gestures at the open door. “I heard the door. Someone was banging and banging…?” She focuses her gaze on their visitor, pauses, and turns to Margaret. “What’s James doing here? Margaret, didn’t you tell him? What’s this about Mexico?”
“It’s nothing,” says Margaret. She turns to James. “Look, can we talk in private?”
“We’re going expat,” says James, talking over Margaret’s shoulder at Janice and Lizzie. “We’re moving to Puerto Escondido.”
Lizzie lets this fact sink in. Her sister is going away? Her sister is abandoning her? Her innards, steely with victory just a few minutes ago, now melt into a wobbly pool of lime Jell-O. She doesn’t want to be left alone with the baby
yet.
How could Margaret just leave her?
Her lower lip quivers, but before she can say anything, Janice speaks. “You can’t go to Mexico with him,” her mother says, her voice a razor.
“I’m not,” insists Margaret. She turns to James. “Really. I changed my mind. They need me here.”
“I mean it. I don’t like you spending time with him,” Janice says, as if she hasn’t heard anything Margaret just said.
Margaret swings her gaze over to their mother. “Why not?”
“You just can’t,” Janice urges. She comes up behind Margaret and clutches at her daughter’s shoulders. “Because I said so. And I’m your mother.”
Margaret twists out of Janice’s grip. The strap of her dress snaps under Janice’s hands, and Margaret grabs at it to keep the dress from falling down. “What the hell? Is this some kind of classist thing? You don’t want your daughter spending time with the hired help? Is that it? Christ, Mom, this is the same thing you pulled when I left with Bart—he wasn’t ‘good enough’ for me, he was a ‘bad influence’ on me because he wasn’t a Harvard grad or a lawyer-in-training. Well, you know what I think? I think you’re just scared that your daughter might be the real failure. I think you’re scared that I’m proof that all the social constructs that you’ve always believed in, that have defined your entire life, are actually empty, and that neither you nor I are any better than anyone else.” Her words get more and more choked as the speech goes on.
Lizzie glances down at her arms and sees that she’s broken into goose pimples, not from cold but from anxiety. She parses her sister’s speech and comes to the nugget of truth at the center: Her mother cares too much about what other people think. But doesn’t Margaret care too much, too? Otherwise, why would she always be working so hard to be the smartest person in the room? A new understanding makes Lizzie shudder. It’s as if a cord has drawn her and her sister and mother tightly together, all three of them trying so hard to please and yet always failing to live up to some unspoken expectations. Poor Margaret. Poor Lizzie. Poor all of them.
But Janice looks confused. “That’s not it at all,” she says, her voice strangled.
“Actually,” says James, “my dad is a pediatrician. In Great Neck. Not working-class.”
As James speaks, Lizzie has a revelation: If Margaret has been planning to leave for Mexico today, that means that she was never planning to go with Lizzie to get an abortion anyway. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you’re moving to Mexico,” Lizzie says, now imagining a different future in which she
did
go to the clinic with her sister, and her sister held her hand while the doctors in their blue paper suits put her to sleep, and after she woke up Margaret fed Lizzie chicken noodle soup and chocolate ice cream in bed until she felt better. Inside, she aches for the loss of this future, which she now realizes wouldn’t have been so bad after all. “What about that appointment you set up for me? You were going to make me go by myself?”
Margaret whirls around. “No, Lizzie, I am
not going to Mexico.
I told you. I’m staying here to help you.”
“Oh,” says Lizzie, still too lost in her melancholy vision to digest this properly.
“What appointment?” asks Janice.
“You’re not going?” says James. He leans against the door frame, takes off the hat with exaggerated disappointment, and clutches it to his chest. “You’re bailing on me?”
“No! I am not going! Not! Going! For God’s sake, is no one listening?” shouts Margaret. She smacks her temples with the palms of her hands,
hard,
a gesture that startles Lizzie. “I was going to go, Lizzie, and then when I found out about your situation I decided to stay. To
help.
To
do something.
” She seems to be talking to herself. The strap of Margaret’s dress tumbles, exposing the top of one pale white breast. Lizzie wonders if she is aware that they can almost see her nipple. She wants everyone to just be quiet—all the yelling is making her stomach hurt. The scene in this room is so
wrong,
she doesn’t even know how to start fixing it. She wishes there were a “Rewind” button on life, so she could reverse everything until they got to a point where life at home was normal again. They might have to rewind all the way back to the beginning, but wouldn’t they do it all better this time?
“But I still don’t want you spending time with
him,
” Janice repeats.
Margaret turns around furiously and yanks the dress back up. “And why not? It somehow offends you that your darling Ivy League daughter is fucking the pool boy? Did you know he went to Columbia?”
“You were…?” Janice seems unable to finish the sentence. She stabilizes herself on the granite edge of the kitchen island. “You are…?”
James’s calm seems finally to desert him. He jams the sombrero back on his head. “Dammit, Margaret. That has nothing to do with it. She doesn’t want you hanging out with me because I’m her drug dealer, that’s why.”
Lizzie’s first thought is
James, a drug dealer?
She’s never seen a drug dealer before, but she certainly didn’t think they looked like him. And then, as she analyzes his sentence and realizes that this implies that her mother has
bought drugs
from him, she grows light-headed with confusion. What? No. Huh? Her brain churns up half thoughts. Apparently, she is not the only person in the room who is stopped cold by James’s statement. The room has grown so quiet that she can hear the finches splashing in the garden fountain, an airplane flying by overhead. Both Lizzie and her sister turn to stare at their mother, who seems to sway slightly from the impact of their gaze. As Lizzie watches, Janice feels behind herself for a stool and collapses down onto it.
“Drug dealer?” says Lizzie, turning back to look at James, who is now edging away from the doorway, toward his car. Her head feels like it is about to explode. Does not compute. Alert. Alert. “You’re kidding. Mom does drugs?” She turns to Margaret, then back to James, somehow incapable of looking at her mother for the answer. “Like, what? Pot?”
“Look. I tried to tell you, Margaret. Your mom’s a meth addict, and you should probably get her some help,” says James. Lizzie is unsure what exactly meth is, but the word “addict” makes her feel even dizzier, as she thinks of the slide show at Smash! and the pictures of toothless crack whores with empty eyes. She looks at her mom again, who maybe doesn’t look her best but certainly doesn’t look like
that.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
“Oh, James,” says Janice, her head in her hands. “Did you really need to do that? You were supposed to just
leave.
”
“Meth?” says Margaret. She is frozen. “You gave her
meth
?”
“Is meth like crack?” asks Lizzie, feeling left out and utterly confused about absolutely everything. No one answers.
James shrugs. “She begged for it,” he says. “I was just trying to make some cash. It’s what’s selling these days. And then I tried to stop her, but she threatened me.”
“You studied to be a
chemist,
” Margaret says. “That crap
kills
people. I thought—but, meth! And—you!”
“Don’t be a hypocrite, Margaret. You’ve been smoking pot with me all summer.” This new revelation is anticlimactic, and doesn’t come totally as a surprise to Lizzie, who smelled the evidence in the pool shed yesterday. But as she considers it all together she realizes that a whole other world has existed at this house all summer, one where her sister and mother secretly did drugs and had sex and Lizzie was lying around in the pool without a clue. As usual. She feels like crying.
“That’s different,” Margaret continues. “Meth is
addictive.
”
“You’d be surprised how many people around here do it. At least a quarter of my pools.”
“I already stopped, Margaret,” protests Janice. “I quit almost a week ago. After the club party. I’m fine. That’s why I fired James. That’s why I’ve been such a wreck all week, if you really need to know. But it’s all
fine
now.” She reaches a hand toward Margaret, who stands, stunned, on the other side of the kitchen island. “I stopped taking it.”
Lizzie senses that she has grown invisible, just an anonymous audience member of the theater performance taking place before her. Nothing seems quite real at all, except the lurching in her stomach. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she announces, but no one pays attention.