Authors: Jennie Shortridge
“Hello?” Anne says, sounding wary and uncharacteristically unprofessional.
“I was going to leave you a message. I’m on my way to see Benny now, and we should know more from a test he had this morning. A really creepy one, actually. They stick this thing all the way down his throat and take some of his pancreas. God.” I shudder thinking about it. “What are you doing home?”
“I take it you don’t watch CNN,” she says.
“What? What happened?” I picture bombs, falling buildings, looting in the streets of Boston.
She sighs long and hard. “Shit,” she says, sounding angry. “My firm’s in trouble, meaning I’m in trouble. Haven’t you heard about the Dynoco case?”
“The gas station?”
“The oil company. Our biggest client. They’re suing us.”
“But why are
you
in trouble?”
“I’m their chief counsel, and I’m a partner. The media wants to eat me alive.” She sighs again. “You always hear about these things, but you never think. . . . Anyway, I’ll be hanging around home for a while, laying low. I’m trying to get some paperwork in order.”
“You mean you’re doctoring it?” I ask.
“God, Eleanor, you watch too much TV. Of course not. Whose side are you on?”
I don’t really know, without knowing the facts, but I decide to keep my mouth shut.
I’ve always vacillated between feeling that I know Anne utterly and wondering if I know her at all. She is the female version of Dad: serious as pencil lead, tall and straight and all business. She has his gray eyes, his not-really-a-color sandy hair. She lived to please him as a kid, showing him her aced math tests and asking him to help her build a weather station in the backyard when she was twelve. I’d watch them out there together, bent over the picnic table, and wonder how she did it, how she got him to come up out of the basement on a Saturday and talk to her about gauges and turbines, rainfall and barometric pressure. It seemed so intimate.
She even liked the old music he listened to. Christine and I would make gagging noises behind Dad’s back when he’d put one of his records on the stereo in the living room, but Anne would ignore us, close her eyes, and nod along to Tony Bennett or Ella Fitzgerald.
When our parents argued, she’d turn stony. She didn’t care, she’d say, and flop down on her bed with a
Reader’s Digest
condensed book or one of Dad’s
Popular Science
magazines. She read everything and she read all the time, except when she was tossing some sarcastic comment my way about my obsession with our Mystery Date game or my tendency to cry whenever Mom and Dad started yelling.
She is impenetrable if predictable, in perfect control of every aspect of her life.
Until now, it seems.
At the hospital, I step into an elevator that smells like a freshly opened box of Band-Aids. Before the doors can close, a young couple with a child in a stroller shoves through, apologizing, and then an older woman in a white lab coat and prim pumps. Passengers keep loading on until finally the alarm sounds and a trio of a sheepish teenagers steps off, and we are on our way. At my stop I say, “Excuse me,” and squeeze past a large, dark-skinned family heading for the oncology floor. I shudder and make my way past the nurses’ station to Benny’s room. The other bed that was empty last night is occupied by an elderly man who is staring out the window, and Benny’s bed is vacant.
Back out at the nurses’ station I ask a ponytailed woman where
Benny Sloan might be. “Just a sec,” she says, then calls over a divider, “Benny’s yours, isn’t he, Jess?”
A bright female face pops out from the divider, smiles at me. “You looking for Benny?” She has one of those perky blond bobs that swings when she tilts her head, which I can already see she does a lot.
I nod and she says, “What a guy! We just love having him on our floor.”
“Mm hmm,” I say, trying not to tap my fingers on the counter.
“He just went for his stent procedure about fifteen minutes ago,” she says. “It’ll probably be at least an hour.”
“Really?” I look at my watch even though I know what time it is. “I thought that was supposed to be this morning. I would have come and visited earlier if I’d known he was just going to be sitting in his room.” I want to deflect this guilt outward, to make this happy nurse feel as awful as I do.
“Oh, he was okay,” she says. “We kept him company, and he had another visitor.”
“Who?”
She shrugs. “I think she might still be in the waiting room.”
I turn without replying and walk quickly back the way I came, thinking the miraculous has happened and my mother has broken her vow of silence. I stop suddenly in the doorway to the small waiting room, gazing instead upon the miracle I should have expected.
“Hi, honey,” Yolanda says, looking up from a magazine. The long hair she always kept wound in a braid on the back of her head has been cut short, but otherwise she is the same, from her soft mocha-colored eyes to her silver-ringed fingers and wrists. She pats the seat beside her, bangles chiming the way they always have, and says, “I was wondering when you’d get here.”
After Benny married Yolanda, we didn’t see them for a long time. When I asked Mom why, she gave me a look that made me never ask again.
Dad quit taking his business trips. Mom still threw her parties, inviting neighbors, people from her new life-drawing class, but not Benny. She still seemed the perfect hostess at these occasions, but it was as if
she were forcing it, a not-very-good actress playing the role. Her makeup would be too thick around her eyes, the beer would be warm, she’d lose track of conversations.
One winter evening she served dessert to a group of Dad’s coworkers and their wives, using our new microwave oven to warm the brownies she’d baked from a mix earlier in the day. They smelled delicious beneath melting vanilla ice cream as she passed plates around the dining room table.
Never shy about digging in, I stuck my fork down through the soft ice cream, hoping to create the perfect bite with just the right balance of warm, chewy chocolate and creamy vanilla. The fork stopped dead at the top of the brownie, though, no matter how hard I pushed. I looked around and saw my sisters and our dinner guests all doing the same thing, a mixture of confusion and determination on their faces.
Oblivious, my mother sipped her coffee, talking with the woman next to her about drawing the female form in all its glory. The woman looked appalled, but it wasn’t apparent if it was the word “nude” or the rock-hard status of her dessert that caused it.
I wasn’t going to say anything. I scooped ice cream into my mouth before it could all melt into a puddle on the plate. Dad looked nonplussed and set down his fork. Christine managed to get her fork partway into her brownie and picked it up, turning it over like a lollipop.
Aghast, Mom barked, “Christine!”
“But it’s too hard to cut,” she said, setting it back down and crossing her arms over her chest to pout. She was allowed to get away with such behavior, even though Anne or I would have been sent from the table for it.
Mom picked up her fork, tried to cut her brownie with the edge of it, then tucked her lips together and set her fork down. “They were just fine when I cut them five minutes ago,” she said.
The woman next to her said, “How long did you heat them in the microwave, dear?”
“Just the five minutes,” Mom said, annoyed to be proven imperfect in front of company. In front of anyone.
The women tittered around the table, and Mom set her lips tight.
“Oh, don’t worry, Bebe,” the woman said. “We’ve all made the same mistake. I’ll never get used to those darned contraptions. They’re just so powerful. You probably only needed a minute or so.” The other women nodded, giving Mom sympathetic smiles, but she would not meet their eyes. She was silent the rest of the night.
One evening not long after, Mom announced that she was inviting Benny and Yolanda over the following weekend. Dad gave her a look. I could almost feel his body slump against his chair.
“There just aren’t that many people I can relate to in this town, Richard,” she said before he could utter a word. “You know that. No one here cares about art, music, poetry.”
Dad shook his head, rolled his eyes, but remained silent. That night after we’d gone to bed, though, I heard their loud voices in the kitchen.
I sneaked out of my room and sat on the stairs, the carpet cool and scratchy beneath my bare calves and feet.
“I can’t believe you’re throwing it in my face,” Dad said, voice angry but anguished in a way I didn’t recognize.
“There’s nothing to throw, Richard. I’ve told you that.”
“For Christ’s sake. You can’t expect me to live in this fantasy world of yours.”
It was quiet then except for a long sigh, my mother blowing her nose.
“Fine,” Dad finally said, “we’ll do this your way. But only for the sake of the girls.”
A chair scraped, my father’s oxfords hit the linoleum. I crept quickly back to bed, heart beating as if I’d witnessed a murder and couldn’t tell anyone about it. I wanted to talk to Anne, to ask her what she thought it meant—what was Mom’s fantasy world, what was Dad doing for our sakes—but I knew I shouldn’t. Instead, I added it to the scrap heap of secrets I’d probably never figure out.
When Benny arrived with Yolanda the next Saturday night, Anne and I held back, but Christine ran and jumped into his arms. He loudly smooched her cheek, and we realized it was the same old Benny. Yolanda stood behind him, smiling nervously. I was struck by how much she looked like my mother—a fuller, younger, darker version—but I’d never dare mention it. She’d brought my sisters and me hand-crocheted
vests in vibrant colors, yellow and turquoise and fiery red. Mom declared them very hip, and took Yolanda by the arm into the kitchen.
I was torn between wanting to follow them and going into the front room with Dad and Benny. My heart beat with trepidation at the thought of either of those two strange couplings alone. I toed the carpet for a while in the hallway between the two rooms, trying to keep up with both conversations at the same time. Finally, laughter drifted from the kitchen along with the sound of pots and pans banging. I decided the women were fine and drifted toward the front room.
The two men sat stiffly opposite each other, Benny on the couch and Dad in his chair with his hands planted firmly on his thighs, as if at any moment he might launch from his seat. Benny looked more casual, with his arm across the back of the couch, but the muscles in his jaw jerked once or twice. Neither of them noticed me to the side of the doorway.
“I just hope we can put the past behind us, is all,” Benny was saying, stroking the couch back, his wedding ring shiny on his finger.
“How do you propose I do that?” Dad asked, his knuckles almost white from his clenched grip on his legs. I looked at his hands to see if he wore a wedding ring; I’d never noticed before that he didn’t.
“Well, I don’t rightly know, Richard.” Benny’s voice changed, taking on a steely edge. “But I’m prepared to try, for everyone’s sake.” He must have seen me then, because his friendly voice came back. “Like Ellie here.” He patted the couch beside him, his slow, easy grin coming back. I shuffled past my dad, feeling like a traitor, but pleased to have been noticed and summoned.
Dad stood then and said, “Believe I’ll catch the Blazers game in the family room. Anyone else?” I knew this signaled that everything was okay, at least for the moment, and I exhaled; I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.
“Nah, I’ll just catch up awhile with little Miss Eleanor Roosevelt.” Benny winked at me, and when I looked back toward Dad’s chair, he was gone.
From that time on, Uncle Benny and Aunt Yolanda were just part of the infrastructure. They never had children of their own, though they were desperate to, and eventually we sewed them into the seams of our
family. Any holiday party or family celebration was incomplete without them. Mom and Yolanda would perform an almost syncopated dance around the kitchen, checking steaming casseroles, stirring pots, and smoothing back errant strands of hair with the crooks of their arms. They seemed like sisters, the way they chatted and rolled their eyes at private jokes, and Aunt Yolanda became an even closer confidante than our mother as we grew older, especially when it came to advice about pimples, friends. Boys. We could tell her anything and never suffer the repercussions we would have had we told Mom.
Benny usually played cards and board games with my sisters and me while Dad read the paper or watched television. Anne, Christine, Benny, and I made a perfect foursome until Anne decided she was too grown-up and sophisticated to play with us.
I asked Dad to join in a game of Monopoly one night when Anne refused to participate. He lowered his newspaper and raised his eyes to a point above my head. “Oh, I don’t think you need me, do you?” he said, but it didn’t seem he was talking to me. I turned to see Uncle Benny behind me, returning Dad’s stare just as coldly. I felt clammy with hurt and embarrassment as Dad left the room, newspaper tightly tucked underneath his arm.
Uncle Benny sighed and patted my shoulder. “It’s okay, kiddo,” he said, then hugged me to his side. He smelled like cloves and soap. “We’ll be all right without him.”
The pieces clicked neatly into place, though they’d been that way in my heart since I first met Benny that long-ago summer night. I knew never to talk of it, of my shifting alliances, but I felt better loved under Benny’s and Yolanda’s affectionate gazes than I ever had before.