Four of a Kind (28 page)

“I’m not
going
home,” said Amy. “I’m hooking up with some friends.”

“It’s a school night,” said Bess, her painted-on smile starting to fade.

“So what,” said Amy, squaring off her feet (in scary black boots).

Alicia recoiled instinctively. She hadn’t been intimidated by a sixteen-year-old girl since she was that age, and every kid in school terrified her.

“We’re leaving together in five minutes, and you are coming home with me,” said Bess, holding her ground. “It’s a school night, and you have to get up early. End of discussion.”

Had any conversation really ended with “end of discussion”? It was a launch point, as far as Alicia was concerned. Amy, too.

“You have no right to tell me what to do!” shrieked the ungrateful girl. “If you cared about my homework, you wouldn’t have
forced
me to sit in there, bored to
death
for three
freaking
hours already. I need to see my friends. They actually care about me—
me
, who
I
am. I don’t give a
shit
about it being a school night or embarrassing you in front of your
friends
.” When she said “friends,” Amy air quoted.

Alicia, Robin, and Carla eyed each other frantically, unsure what to do or say. Should they step in—Alicia had several choice comebacks knocking around in her head—or let Bess deal with her daughter alone?

Two beats of wired silence. Bess said, “You’re only embarrassing yourself.”

Pretty lame comeback
, thought Alicia, but at least Bess sounded rational.

Robin said to Amy, “I thought you liked babysitting.”

“I like getting paid,” said Amy.

Robin laughed. “I bet you do.” She pushed herself up from the table, found a few bills in her jeans pocket, and handed a twenty and a ten out for Amy. The girl tentatively entered the kitchen, snatched the bills from Robin’s hand, and quickly retreated.

Amy looked at Carla and said, “Your kids are here, too.”

Carla said, “You won’t get a penny from me, young lady. You disrespect your mother and yourself. If you were my child, I’d relax my policy on spanking.”

Robin said, “What is your policy on spanking?”

“Not after age seven.”

“Lucky seven,” said Robin. To Amy, she added, “Carla’s right. Gimme my money back.”

Amy looked frightened for a second. It was hard to tell, with all that hair in her face. The girl tucked the cash into her pants pocket and ran out of the apartment. The women heard her boots stomping down the hallway.

Bess, meanwhile, had dropped her head in her hands. Alicia reached over to give her a comforting stroke on the back. As soon as her palm touched the pink cashmere of her friend’s sweater, Bess started crying, heavy wracking sobs that made her shoulders rattle.

Robin said, “Oh, thank God. I was afraid we’d break tradition and get through a game without someone crying.”

“It’s always me,” said Bess between gulps of air.

“That’s true,” said Carla. When Alicia and Robin glared at her, she added, “Well, it’s never me.”

“Black don’t crack?” asked Robin.

“You are
bad
,” said Carla. “But no, actually, it don’t.”

Bess recovered enough to speak, “I just don’t
get
it. Did I create that monster? I’m not a perfect mother, I realize that. But I’m pretty sure I’m a decent human being. Borden is a wonderful person. How could we have raised a child to turn out … like that?”

“Demon seed, you mean?” asked Alicia.

“Yes! Where did she come from?” asked Bess, looking at each woman as if she might have a concrete answer. “Maybe she did come from Hell.”

“Amy isn’t evil,” said Carla. “She’s just …”

Bess blinked and looked up. “She’s what?”

Alicia waited for Carla’s answer, too. Perhaps a pediatrician could give a reasonable explanation for why bad children happened to good people.

Robin said, “Well, Doctor?”

Carla sighed. “She’s angry and feels misunderstood, we all see
that. And resentful, I don’t know why. She’s hostile, and enjoys testing how far she can push you, Bess. She’s got a dramatic flair. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d spent the last hour on the couch in the other room mentally composing her little speech.”

“So she’s creative?” asked Bess, with heartbreaking hope.

Carla smiled balefully. “She’s destructive, Bess. The changes she’s made in her appearance seem like self-sabotage to me. And her rudeness. She’s hurting herself as much as she’s hurting you.”

“Don’t turn her into a depressed mental patient,” said Robin. “Amy is just a confused sixteen-year-old with enough intelligence to question authority.”

“Like you were?” asked Carla.

“Yes!” agreed Robin. “I mellowed with age.”

“Like cheese?” asked Alicia.

Carla said, “You also hated your parents, blew up to over three hundred pounds, had indiscriminate sex with men you barely knew, and the smoking …”

Robin shushed her. “Stephanie is in the next room.”

Bess said, “Amy didn’t ask me once about my lump. Or my surgery. She didn’t come to the hospital, or to my room during the recovery. Amy does not care if I live or die. I doubt she cares about anything, except her mysterious friends, a roving pack of teenage lesbians for all I know. She acts like nothing matters!”

“Doesn’t care about anything. Nothing matters,” said Alicia. “That’s sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Is she reading Nietzsche, too?”

Bess wiped the tears still streaming down her cheeks. “Maybe I was inspired by
her
,” she said. “I used to be able to feel her feelings. Maybe that’s where my apathy came from. Amy’s attitude infected me. I kept thinking, ‘nothing matters.’ But what I really felt was, ‘nothing
I do
matters.’ I can be strict or kind, patient or impatient. It’s immaterial. Amy detests me. I have no idea why. I can’t make her like me or talk to me. I ask if she’s okay. I offer to help. But she screams at me to leave her alone and slams the door. I have to keep trying,
though. Which is not easy. Honestly—this is horrible and frightening to say—I kind of hate her right now.”

“Me, too,” said Robin.

“Same,” said Alicia.

Carla said, “We have to remember that her brain isn’t fully formed. She looks like an adult—”

“A dirty, scary adult,” corrected Bess.

Carla continued, “But she’s still a kid. That said, I agree: Amy is not a great advertisement for teenage girls.”

“What am I going to do?” asked Bess, crying again, harder. “Have any of you lived with someone who despises you? It’s awful.”

Alicia looked at her hands. She’d been spared that sorry fate. For all her problems with Tim, the distrust and neglect, her cheating, his suspected flirtations, she didn’t actually hate him. He didn’t hate her, although he might if he found out about Finn. She dared to look up at the other long faces around the kitchen table. Robin seemed contemplative, for once, short on words. Carla gazed at Bess with professional compassion.

Pricking up her ears, Alicia realized that the house was quiet. Too quiet. The hum of the TV was gone. Little ears had been listening. But for how long?

Alicia said, “I think we have spies.”

“Kids!” bellowed Carla. “Get in here!”

Stephanie, Zeke, and Manny waited for a second, and then showed themselves. They’d been listening from right outside the kitchen doorway. They might’ve heard everything.

“Get your coats, boys,” said Carla. “It’s time to go home.”

The two boys nodded and went to the TV room to get their things. Zipped up, they returned to the kitchen. Carla and Alicia rose, too, readying to depart.

Carla said to Bess, “Call me. I can give you some names, counselors, teen specialists.”

Bess nodded, trying to seem happy in front of the children.

Alicia said to Robin, “Thanks for inviting me.”

Robin said, “The pleasure is all mine.”

They moved to go, but Zeke stepped into the kitchen and went over to Bess. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, “I think you’re a very nice person, Mrs. Steeple.”

Bess smiled at the ten-year-old and pulled him into a tight hug. She held on to him for a few seconds too long. From the clench, Zeke glanced over at Carla, his mom, as if to ask, “What now?”

Finally, Bess released him. They all left Robin to console Bess further by herself.

Alicia waited until she and the Morgans were on the street, safely out of the building, to say to Zeke, “That was excellent of you to say.”

Carla said, “It was very sweet of you, Zeke. But you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping. I’ve half a mind to punish you both.”

The boys drooped slightly. Alicia caught Zeke’s eye and smiled at him. Carla had to be so proud of these quiet, polite children. The others mocked Carla for her strict rules, but she was doing something right.

Alicia tried to picture Joe making such a kind gesture, being empathically attuned to someone else’s sadness or fear. Would he truly feel Bess’s pain, or merely witness her having it? The latter, Alicia decided. Her son was stuck in his own head.

Just like Mommy.

“It’s too tight,” said Stephanie. She and Robin were in a tiny dressing room at the Old Navy at Atlantic Center, near the future location of the long-threatened Atlantic Yards development. If the overlords didn’t run out of money, the Nets basketball franchise would soon call this part of Brooklyn their home court. Only two miles from Brooklyn Heights, the proposed development—basketball arena, shops, housing—was causing quite a commotion in Robin’s neck of the borough. Residents were concerned with increased traffic, parking problems, human congestion. Robin believed, in her cynical heart, that when Brooklyn Heights people complained about the advancing horde of car and foot traffic, they weren’t talking about white people. Black people would come to see the Nets. Black people would occupy the low- and middle-income housing. Black people had already swarmed to Atlantic Center’s discount stores, Pathmark, Target, DSW. Robin and Stephanie had been browsing and trying on
outfits at Old Navy for an hour already. Not a single white face in sight.

Bess had never been to Atlantic Center. Her brood shopped at Old Navy (these days, even the rich buy cheap), but Bess took them to the store in Manhattan. “The Soho store is much bigger,” claimed Bess. Robin didn’t think Bess was a racist. More a classist. Bess would buy the same shirt at the same chain store, as long as the store was in a ritzy zip code.

In Brooklyn, you couldn’t buy a pair of jeans without it having racial overtones.

“Are you sure?” asked Robin, tugging at Stephanie’s waistband. They’re a size twelve.”

“Mom, that hurts,” whined Stephanie. “Can we just go? We’ll order online.”

“We’re here already,” growled Robin.

The girl grew out of clothes faster than she could wear them. Robin bought Stephanie six new pairs of pants in September, and now none of them fit. She’s apparently blown right through size twelve and needed fourteens. Robin swallowed a gulp of shame. She’d been forcing her kid to walk around in confining size tens for months.

“Wait here,” said Robin. “I’ll get more stuff to try on.”

“Don’t leave me here alone,” said Stephanie.

Oh, God, the memory of Robin’s mother leaving her alone in the communal dressing room at Bloomingdale’s hit her like a train. Her worst Mom moment. For a split second, Robin sympathized with her mother. She understood the frustration, the harried annoyance of not being able to throw a wardrobe together for her daughter. At the time, Robin interpreted her mom’s behavior as hateful and cruel. But perhaps she’d just been frustrated, like Robin was now.

“I won’t leave you alone,” said Robin quickly. “I’m sorry I said that. I’m sorry I was impatient.”

“Mommy,” said Stephanie, starting to show signs of despair. “I feel bad. Nothing fits.”

Robin got on her daughter’s level. “That’s the clothes’ fault. Not yours. Okay? You are
fine
.”

“Am I fat?” whispered Stephanie, her eyes round and hungry.

Robin’s heart broke in half, right there, in the dressing room at Old Navy. How old had Robin been when her fears of being fat kicked in? Younger than ten-year-old Stephanie. Robin’s mom put her on a diet at eight. She was in second grade when her mother insisted on Robin’s first weigh-in, a weekly event that continued until Robin left for college at eighteen. Several times a day, lest Robin forget, her mother reminded her only daughter that she was “heavy,” that “the kitchen is closed,” that if Robin served her own portions, or fixed her own lunch, she’d “be big as a house.” (As it turned out, ironically, despite—because of?—her mom’s efforts, insults, criticisms, enforced diets, and weigh-ins, Robin got bigger than a house. She was a mansion when her mother died.)

Robin’s mom couldn’t watch her 24/7, of course. During her hours of freedom, Robin ate to her heart’s discontent, each bite a rebellious “Fuck you” to her mother for being heartless, and to her father who did nothing to protect her. And to her taunting classmates who called her “beast.” Robin had many “Fuck yous” to dispense, many spiteful Twinkies to consume.