“Do I tell him?” I ask.
Laurie ponders. “Depends what your goal is. Do you want to use this as a jab at Phil’s competence as a parent or really figure out together how to best help Micah?”
“How to best help Micah while jabbing Phil,” I say without thinking.
“Why?” Laurie’s eyes bore into me. I am nearly squirming.
“I caught our son
having sex
in
our house,
for chrissake. Okay, I was supposed to be gone, but my God . . . I guess I feel like why should I get stuck holding the ball, like always, just because Phil decided to screw Tate Trimble and decamped to a hotel? I mean, I get that Micah is gay. I can deal with that. But he’s so
angry,
Laur. At both of us, I think. Or, oh shit. . . is it just me?” My thoughts erode into a mist of confusion. What
do
I want? Micah to be happy and safe, right? How do I achieve that? Is Micah supposed to tell Phil himself, or am I obliged to initiate this little sit-down? Am I so angry at Phil that my own judgment is compromised? Why does everything have to be so complicated?
Laurie eats a spoonful of fat-free salad, a meal she professes to like. “We can’t help whom we love,” she says, her words as bitter as the arugula on her plate.
We can’t help whom we love.
Here’s the thing: While it’s inarguably factual, doesn’t it feel a little less true when you are the one abandoned for the One True Love? It’s all well and good when you’re the object of his affection, but try this nugget of wisdom on for size when your heart hurts so fiercely that the mere act of opening your eyes to daylight seems to have been mandated by the Antichrist. You might think,
Well, perhaps you
can
help it,
or, more succinctly,
He’s mine, bitch.
Even if there’s no third party involved, no femme fatale in diamond studs and a polo shirt, it hurts. Look at Sue. After her pregnancy and her confrontation with Arlo and his defection, she found herself rootless, homeless, and helpless. Her home, she said, was tainted by betrayal; she couldn’t sleep there. So she and Sarafina moved in with me, where she proceeded to drown herself in yogurt-covered raisins, Chinese soap operas—she claims to know what’s going on, but I suspect she just likes the boys’ genial, sable-haired prettiness—and knitting. In spite of the fact that Arlo Murphy has been a complete cad about the pregnancy— he refused to even discuss her decision to keep the baby— the mere mention of his name sends Sue into black despair laced with tears.
We can’t help whom we love.
Laurie’s comment sticks with me after I leave the restaurant. It floats, pesky and gnatlike, above my left ear as I storm through the parking garage, memories buzzing. When I hand my nine dollars to the parking attendant, instead of seeing his round Filipino face, I see Ren White’s college-age visage, his aristocratic nose and floppy forelock, his broad tan chest dusted with fine white sand as he hoists me onto trembling legs. I grit my teeth and the image dissolves, only to be replaced by one of my parents’ house, circa late November 1982.
Ma and Dad are waiting for us in the vestibule with the front door open wide, making it patently obvious that the prospect of their eldest daughter bringing a man home for the holidays is extraordinary enough to warrant a new waxy-leaved potted plant and a receiving line. As we shut off the car, I launch into a lengthy list of warnings about my family that I’d not only written but memorized. Ren interrupts me.
“Quel,” he says, reaching for my hand in that loose, teasing way that makes me think of Scott Glenn luring Debra Winger onto the mechanical bull in
Urban Cowboy.
“Stop worrying. It’ll be fine. They’ll love me.” He releases my hand, hops out of the car, and inhales the cool, damp northern California air. “Do all the homes have fenced yards here?” he asks.
Later. Inside.
Ma has placed a bowl of pistachios and cheap green olives studded with pimentos directly in front of Ren, her idea of sophisticated aperitifs. Ma and I are drinking fizzy water, the kind Dad picks up at Walgreens with the horrible lime-green label that says
GENERIC
in large block letters. Ren and Dad have delved into Ren’s offering, a bottle of elderly Scotch from Ren’s father’s liquor cabinet. I take their tacit acceptance of his slightly underage drinking as a sign of approval.
Ren, I realize, is indeed a parent’s dream beau. He reveals enough about himself to appear forthcoming without ever hijacking the conversation. A few choice tidbits about our time together exhibit that he has made a careful study of me. His inquiries, about both Dad’s work and Ma’s causes, show maturity unusual in one so young. He takes off his jacket, a navy sport coat whose intimidating preppiness is undercut by a frayed charm. He grins rather than smiles. Judging my parents’ tolerances correctly, he makes none of the obvious mistakes (flirting with Ma, talking lacrosse with Dad). He just seems himself. Engaging. Lucky. Real.
I sense, rather than see, my sister enter the room. There is something about Laurie’s hair that captures scent—light, flowery, cotton-candy scent—and magnifies it so that you are enveloped by her before you meet her. She wafts in on a wave of spring blooms. Laurie is wearing worn jeans and a pale blue polo shirt. Her hair shines, pulled back in a messy half-knot, half-chignon whose effortless chic should, by rights, be beyond the province of a high school girl. The pinprick diamond earrings our parents gave her for her sixteenth birthday glint in her small ears. My hand goes to my own ears, the already long lobes tugged downward by bobbly, vaguely Indian gold hoops that seemed so appealing in the shop on State Street. Now they seem big, gaudy, obvious.
Dad hugs her. “This is Rachel’s sister, Lauren. Laurie, meet Rachel’s friend Loren White. Ren White.”
Ren shakes Laurie’s hand gravely. My mouth is full of olives. Later, I find I cannot relive the scene without registering the trenchant sting of brine in my mouth.
Laurie sits down at the table, maybe eats some pistachios. The phone rings six times; after the fifth ring, Laurie sighs and tells Ma to say she’ll call them back. Collectively, we bemoan the curse of the insanely popular. We laugh. Conversation shifts to the refugee camp killings in Beirut.
Skip ahead two days.
Laurie, Ren, and I are hiking the Santa Cruz Mountains to escape our parents.
“Have you decided where you’re applying?” Ren asks. We have been comparing college notes for the last half hour.
“I’m thinking Smith,” Laurie says into the foggy chasm of the deep canyon. The private school tuition will be twenty times that of my public institution, a fact I don’t think Laurie finds unjustified, given her potential.
Ren pauses to pluck a pinecone off the loamy ground. “Both my sisters went to Smith.”
Fear—red, raw fear—floods my gut. I don’t know then (and don’t know now) how I know, but something about that exchange, so minute, so encapsulating, terrifies me. I stumble on the brambles that crisscross our path. My lungs fail me so that I have to roll down the window on the way home over Laurie’s protests, unable to get enough air. That night I go to bed early and wallow in conscious nightmares, my childhood twin bed groaning under the weight of my thrashing.
In the morning, the day Ren and I are slated to make the long drive back to Santa Barbara, Laurie is conspicuously absent, her nonattendance at breakfast a warning siren that sends my self-assurance plummeting. Present, she might have done something, made some small error, to snuff out the ever brightening stars in Ren’s eyes. Absent, her presence is as powerful and devious as a poltergeist. I sag under the weight of it. Ren and I pack the car. I hug Ma and Dad. Ren shifts into neutral. We are two hundred miles away, approaching the seaside town of Santa Maria, when confirmation comes.
“The way you described her, I expected Paulina Porizkova or something. Laurie’s pretty but, you know, girl-next-door pretty, not centerfold material,” Ren says, as if centerfold material is what the Whites want for their only son.
Ren and I see each other two more times, each date a paler, more anemic version of the last. Then the inevitable unpleasant conversation, conducted by telephone, peppered with words like “space,” “bad timing,” and “great girl.” Ren disappears onto campus. I open my mouth like a motherless baby bird and let Sue feed me jelly beans. On a campus of twenty thousand students, I employ complex measures to make sure I don’t see Loren White’s face again that year. That summer he transfers to Amherst so that he and pretty-as-the-girl-next-door Laurie can have sex on his varsity lacrosse jacket while the New England leaves fall amber and crisp against their faces. I don’t see Ren again until Laurie’s wedding day nine years later. That afternoon, despite the efforts that have been taken to spare me needless suffering, I vomit into the azaleas outside the synagogue. Thus, my violet matron of honor gown bears a spray of dark seltzer spots fanned out like blood spatter.
It’s true, I think, you can’t help whom you love—any more than a diabetic can be blamed for consuming that final candy bar.
Sue clicks the remote, muting her—our—televised morning victuals. In recent days, we have descended from the somewhat justifiable
Good Morning America
to less defensible reruns of
The Nanny.
It’s all a time-killer until we get to celebrity chef Rachael Ray at nine
A.M.
, so that I can finally learn how to cook and Sue can vent her life’s frustrations on a chef perkier than she.
“So, I’m having it,” Sue says.
I put down my to-do list. After work, Duke Dunne and I are heading south on a motorcycle ride along Highway 1. The plan is to sample the view, the artichoke soup at Duarte’s Tavern, and maybe, you know, other stuff. In a weird, testy, unanticipated little way, I am addicted to the . . . other stuff. To call what I feel for Duke—for Duke’s body—an addiction is surely to overvalue its importance. Yet I find myself thinking about him—it—in a slightly compulsive, somewhat exhaustive, definitely creative sort of way.
Okay: minor addiction.
Sue’s words jar me out of yet another replaying of Duke and me romping around in one or another beachy paradise. I don’t have to ask what Sue is talking about. “Are you okay?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Are you relieved?” I press.
“Yeah.” Sue scratches her stomach. “It was the weirdest thing, how I decided, I mean. I’d just dropped Fina off at school and was walking to the car, and there were these teenage girls with babies in strollers walking by, and they stopped to talk to these boys. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew they were the fathers—what do they call them?”
“Baby daddies.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, when I saw those little girls and their baby daddies and those sweet babies all enveloped in white lace like they were going to their baptisms, and none of them was in school, and God knows how the poor things are getting by. I just had this overwhelming feeling of peace and acceptance, like, if they can do it, I
know
I can. And I knew that even if Arlo doesn’t come around, we’ll be okay.” Sue’s eyes shift to the TV screen, which has churned onward into Chef Rachael’s realm in silence. “Why are you putting the soy sauce in so early, you idiot!” Sue yells out of nowhere.
“Isn’t it good to get it over with?” Personally, I like Rachael Ray’s approach, which seems tailored toward culinary bunglers like me whose conception of sauce is limited to that which you can dump on the finished product in the hopes that it will mask whatever damage came before.
Sue’s face crumples. “No, no. . . it’ll curdle. It’ll burn. It’ll all burn straight to hell!”
“You seem full of peace and acceptance,” I say.
The rush of wind at my face seems to dispel any inhibitions I may have had about . . . well, anything. I experiment with singing a Dylan song that pops into my head, but the lyrics are ripped away before the melody ripens. Eyes stinging, I bury my face against Duke’s shoulder. It smells of pot, sweat, and a hint of starchy detergent. I like it, the triumph of dirty over clean, nature over artifice.
Naughty over nice.
I slip my hand under his T-shirt. His abs have intervals between them, gullies. I strum them like a guitar, switch to a Rolling Stones standard—
Hot shriek of wheels. Ocean and mountains flip-flopping, crazy ripping yell from person and thing.
Crash.
The Machine That Goes Ping
I awaken to the rustle of my family setting up camp at the foot of my bed.
The last time I spent the night in the hospital, almost sixteen years ago after Taylor was born, the height of excitement was the ice pack the nurse gave me to stuff in my underwear every three or four hours. That and the free cranberry juice.
Things change.
“Oh my God, weird—is that what’s-his-name, Dude? Duke?” Taylor asks point-blank about five seconds after she, Micah, Sue, and Sarafina arrived in Sue’s much maligned, cloud-covered VW bus.
Sue grimaces and shifts Sarafina off the small swell that’s just starting to poke out beneath her shirt. “Guys, your mom’s really tired right now. Why don’t we wait until after the doctor comes back to nail her to the cross?”
Duke Dunne, whose knack for performing oral sex vastly outweighs his motorcycle-driving acumen, hangs his head and skulks out of the room. Good. I close my eyes. The walloping mallet in my head downgrades to dull throbbing. Better.