In the lap of her sweatsuit, Janice holds the bloody beach towel she’d wrapped Lizzie in for the ride, now folded neatly into a square so the stains don’t show. Lizzie is in the examining room. Janice wonders whether Lizzie’s sudden and—yes, thank God—convenient miscarriage is her reward for not finally succumbing to It. When she stopped, out in the middle of the field, was it her maternal instinct, still there despite it all, wresting control? Did she sense, as she neared the precipice, that Lizzie was bleeding in the pool and that she needed to turn back? Yes, she decides. She likes this idea.
Janice examines Margaret, who has put on weight since her return home; a softness has returned to her bony frame, something about the roundness of her shoulders and a touch of flesh under the chin. Margaret studies her magazine intently, as if truly absorbed by
Sunset
’s spring planting tips, but Janice sees that her eyes are not moving at all but boring holes through the center of the page. It strikes Janice that she has wasted the last six weeks scrubbing the kitchen in a drugged frenzy when she should have been finding out why her older daughter is so unhappy, just as she should have noticed that her younger daughter was no longer a virgin.
Margaret looks up and catches Janice staring at her. She lets the magazine sag. “Can a miscarriage cause permanent damage?” she asks. “It looked so horrible. All that blood.”
“She’ll be fine,” says Janice.
“Are you just being optimistic or do you know something I don’t?” asks Margaret.
“I had three of them myself,” says Janice. “So yes, I know.”
The magazine drops to Margaret’s lap. “I didn’t know you’d had a miscarriage. Let alone three? Three miscarriages?”
“They told me I might not be able to have another baby, after you,” says Janice. “When I gave birth to you, I ruptured my uterus. I couldn’t carry a baby to term, so eventually we stopped trying. Lizzie was a happy accident. I thought you knew.”
“You never told me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Janice knows that she never told her daughter—she never told anyone, not even her mother. Somehow the miscarriages had always seemed a failure on her part, a weakness she didn’t want the world to share. But now they feel irrelevant, such ancient history that they might have happened to another person.
“How much does a miscarriage hurt? Relatively speaking, of course.”
Janice remembers a violent smear of pain, a melancholic sense of inevitability. “It was horrible,” she says.
“I’ve never been pregnant,” says Margaret thoughtfully.
“I certainly hope not,” says Janice.
Margaret picks the magazine up, reads a line, then puts it down again. “Are you going through withdrawal? From the…” She looks around the empty room. “You know.”
“Withdrawal?” Janice thinks of the boys in the field, the one cupping the joint in his palm. “No, I went through all that already, I think,” she says, hoping that this will be true.
Margaret smiles thinly. “I guess I should commend you for at least being adventurous with your choice of substances. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”
Janice looks at Margaret, sitting across from her, and wonders if this is a backhanded compliment. But there isn’t any judgment in her daughter’s face, just a faraway look of bemused wonder. Janice lets her daughter’s strange—if misplaced—admiration settle in, feeling a bit like a prizefighter showing off her bruises. “Well,” she says wryly. “Had I known it was so addictive I wouldn’t have.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t know what it was,” says Margaret. She pauses. “Actually, come to think of it, I can.”
“Honestly, Margaret. I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you.” But secretly Janice is pleased that her daughter can joke about it. In place of judgment, she sees the possibility of an unexpected closeness.
Margaret raises her eyebrows. “Well, it’s better than what we talked about all summer, right? Which is to say, nothing at all. At least this means something. At least it’s real.” Janice considers this quietly, thinking that it is, perhaps, the wisest thing Margaret has said in weeks. Everything is in the open, all her ugliness out for display and discussion, and even though it
is
ghastly, leaving Janice feeling raw and naked, somehow it isn’t as painful as she’d imagined it would be. She smiles wanly at her daughter.
They lapse into silence. The news ticker on CNN informs them that back-to-school sales start this weekend. That New York City has broken heat records. That a cyclone in Texas uprooted six houses and left fifty-two homeless. Janice closes her eyes, and when she opens them again she asks Margaret, “You and Bart broke up, didn’t you?”
Margaret stares at the TV screen, and for a moment Janice thinks that Margaret hasn’t heard her. Then she swings her gaze to Janice. “Yes,” she says. “In the spring. He left me. He’s dating a movie star now.”
“And…
Snatch
?”
“Over and done.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Margaret looks down at her hands. “Because telling you would have made it real. And I didn’t know what would be worse—your disappointment in me, or my disappointment in myself. Plus, you hated the magazine.”
“I didn’t hate it,” Janice says. She pauses. “Mostly, I just found it frightening.”
Margaret looks at her queerly. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
Janice tries to come up with an explanation, but she can’t figure out how to start. Instead, she stands and goes over to Margaret and sits down next to her in the orange bucket seat. She takes Margaret’s hand from her lap and squeezes it in her own. Margaret leans her head on Janice’s shoulder and sighs. The sound makes the hair on Janice’s arms stand on end; she closes her eyes and feels the weight of Margaret in her bones.
“I don’t think you’re a disappointment,” Janice says. “I admire your ambition. And you’re only twenty-eight. You can still do anything you want.”
Margaret’s chest rises and falls heavily with her breath. After a minute, Janice hears her voice, muffled. “Are you lonely without Dad?” asks Margaret.
“Yes,” says Janice, realizing, though she hadn’t considered it before, that this is true. The thought of fall’s impending arrival, with Lizzie starting school and Margaret’s inevitable departure, frightens her. “But I don’t miss him,” she adds.
“We’re going to lose in court next week, aren’t we?” Margaret asks, her head still resting on Janice.
Janice smiles wanly. “Most likely,” she says. “Your father has very expensive lawyers.”
“I can’t believe he could love you so little,” says Margaret.
This stings. “It’s more complicated than that,” she says. “Your father is a selfish man, but he loved me in his own way. It’s just, I think he realized far too late that he didn’t want what he’d thought he’d wanted from me. Maybe I can’t blame him for that. Or maybe I can, I don’t know. It was my decision, too.”
“You didn’t ever think that marrying him was a mistake?”
Janice pauses, then admits the truth. “No, I knew it might have been,” she says, thinking back to college, to pills wrapped in foil, to Paul’s resigned knee sinking into the soil. “I knew it before I even married him. I just chose to ignore it because I wanted something else—I thought I wanted stability, security—more. It’s what I thought I needed. And there was you.” She looks down at Margaret, twenty-eight and single and in a financial mess but totally unencumbered, and admits to herself (even if she will never say it out loud) that what she has long felt in her daughter’s presence is envy.
Margaret squeezes Janice’s hand, once, and sits up. The ghostly impression of her head remains behind on Janice’s shoulder, where the skin tingles. “We can’t let him win,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter that much anymore,” says Janice. “I’ll have enough to live on. It will just take some adjusting to.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” argues Margaret. She rolls the
Sunset
magazine into a tight cylinder and raps it against her thigh. “And I hate to see him…diminishing you like that. Especially in public.”
“Well, it’s not
that
public,” says Janice. “No one needs to know. It’s not like we’re having a press conference. It’s not like our friends and neighbors will be visiting us at divorce court.”
Margaret turns to her mother and stares at her. She appears to be thinking very hard, and Janice wonders what on earth she said that is so difficult to comprehend. As she watches, Margaret uncoils before her, pushes herself to the edge of her seat, slaps at the chair one last time with the rolled-up magazine, and then drops it to the floor so that she can rummage in her shoulder bag. “What?” Janice asks. “What?”
Margaret has her hands buried deep in her purse. The bag, a battered brown leather thing that looks as if it lost all of its shape back in 1972, smells moldy even from where Janice sits. Margaret extricates a used Kleenex, an empty tequila bottle—Janice clucks in protest—some illegible receipts and a mesh coin purse filled with pennies, and drops them in her lap. Finally, she unpeels a small rectangle of paper, stained by dark liquid, and flourishes it triumphantly. “Can I borrow your cell phone?” she asks.
“Who are you calling?”
“I’ll tell you later,” says Margaret.
Janice hands Margaret her phone and watches Margaret slip through the automatic doors of the waiting room and into the parking lot. Through the glass, Janice sees Margaret talking, the cell phone pressed to one ear, her thumb plugged into the other to block out the noise of an incoming ambulance. Watching her, Janice envisions an alternate universe—still a viable universe—in which Margaret is a crisp and efficient businesswoman, making deals on her cell phone as she jets from city to city. She can be anything she wants to be.
As Janice observes Margaret through the doors, Lizzie appears in the waiting room, wearing a paper bathrobe and holding a fistful of forms. Around her wrist, a blue plastic band; her feet are still bare. She looks anemic, her tan drained away with the blood in the pool. Her first few steps into the room are unfocused and slow, and she weaves a bit as if she might collapse right there on the dirty linoleum. But then Lizzie sees her mother and her face lifts into an expression of such guileless relief that tears come to Janice’s eyes. She rises from her chair just in time to catch her daughter as Lizzie tips forward, letting the weight of her body fall against her mother and come to a rest. They stand there, pressed together, breathing in time. Somewhere behind her, Janice hears the ambulance paramedics shouting commands to each other as they burst through the automatic sliding doors and into the waiting room with a man on a gurney, a chaotic tangle of dripping IVs and plastic tubes and bloody limbs. Janice barely notices.
For the first time in longer than she can recall, she feels happy.
they catch her in the driveway, when she goes out to pick up the morning paper. “Margaret Miller?” she hears and she turns, surprised. For a hallucinatory minute, she thinks that the man striding up the drive might be an admirer—a fan of
Snatch,
perhaps, coming to pay his respects—and she instinctively smiles, despite the fact that he is not at all her readership’s demographic: male, for one, but also middle-aged and wearing cowboy boots and a baseball cap. But perhaps he’s a journalist? Could they have arrived already? She stands there, blinking in the yellow dawn, still half asleep. He walks toward her and says her name again, his voice raspy and demanding. “Margaret Miller?”
Margaret nods before she can think better of it, and he steps in, so close that she can smell the peanuts on his breath and see the graying stubble on his chin. “You’ve been served,” he barks, and his hand jerks forward until the document he holds is just a millimeter away from her chest, quivering with proximity. Shocked, she looks down at the smudged envelope—her name unmistakably typed on the front—and takes it from his hand. The man wheels around and walks back down the driveway, his boots crunching through the gravel.
She reads the summons in the kitchen as she drinks a cup of coffee. Visa is suing her for the $32,448.23 balance on her card. This is just the first of a series of summons coming her way in the upcoming weeks, she realizes. She imagines them, tripping over one another in the race to her door, hordes of process servers leapfrogging up the driveway. Looking at the September court date written there on the document, she discovers that it is a relief to know that the end is finally here. She is tired of waiting.
The kitchen is quiet. It is early, and her mother is still sleeping upstairs, compensating for a summer of insomnia. Pushing the court order aside, Margaret opens the
New York Times
and turns to the business section. There, on page C4, she finds the story she’s looking for. “Applied Pharm CEO in Divorce Suit,” the headline reads, and seeing those words gives Margaret a little jolt. Despite the fact that she knew the article was going to run, it still surprises her to see it in print, so concrete, so
final.
And so fast. It’s an impressive tribute to Kelly Maxfield’s talents, if leaking gossip can be rightfully considered a skill.
Kelly had been at a Mommy and Me music class when Margaret reached her on the phone the day of Lizzie’s miscarriage. In the background, Margaret could hear a hollow clanging and lightbulb-shattering wails and screeches. She had to yell her name into the receiver twice before Kelly—saying, “Who? I can’t hear you! Who?”—registered who it was on the line. As she stood in the parking lot of the hospital, Margaret worried that the publicist had remembered her drunken rant at the movie theater and was pretending not to recognize her name. But finally Margaret’s voice broke through the din of crying toddlers. “Margaret! Hi! I didn’t think you’d take me up on my invitation!” Kelly screamed back, and Margaret could hear genuine pleasure in her voice. Even when Margaret confessed that this was not, in fact, a social call, Kelly didn’t seem fazed. “Of course!” she said, as if Margaret’s request for help screwing her own father was the most natural thing in the world.
When Margaret told Janice her idea of going to the press with their case, Janice went pale. “It’s vulgar to be so public with your personal matters,” she said. “Nice people don’t.” It wasn’t until Margaret mentioned Kelly Maxfield’s name that Janice relented. Still, it took the better part of a morning for Kelly and Margaret to convince Janice that she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone personally or reveal anything other than the legal details of the situation, that she would, if anything, emerge blameless and righteous and deserving of justice. Still, her mother would have nothing to do with the planning, as if ignoring it meant it wasn’t happening at all.