Other Words for Love (4 page)

Sweet Evelyn emerged again on the way to the hospital. We’d had to wake up Kieran and leave him with one of Evelyn’s neighbor friends. We also had to take a cab because I didn’t drive yet and we couldn’t reach Patrick. I’d called the firehouse and was informed that he was out.
Explosion in a high-rise
, the guy on the phone had said.

I left a message and lied to Evelyn. “It’s just a grease fire in somebody’s kitchen.” She worried about Patrick enough; she didn’t need to be worrying then, when she was in pain and clutching my hand.

I also called Mom and Dad, who met us at the hospital. Evelyn was being wheeled from the emergency room when she started talking about Lamaze, saying she needed Patrick for that, and Mom offered to take his place.

“No,” Evelyn said. “Ari can come but nobody else.”

This made me happy and sad at the same time. It was nice to be needed, to be part of Evelyn’s inner circle—and I loved her for wanting me there—but I didn’t enjoy leaving our mother out. Mom and Evelyn were very skilled at leaving each other out.
We have nothing in common
, Mom often said.
Evelyn has never finished a book in her entire life
.

Now Mom mumbled something that sounded like
Don’t let me intrude
, but I wasn’t sure. I was following behind Evelyn and a nurse, and we were getting too far away to hear.

We went to a room on the fifth floor that reeked of Lysol. I looked the other way while Evelyn undressed and slipped into a flimsy gown. Next there was a doctor and a needle that went into Evelyn’s spine. That made me cringe and she got quiet. She drifted in and out of sleep while I watched television—a news reporter talking about the explosion in the high-rise—but Evelyn didn’t notice. She was too busy with the doctor, who kept snapping on latex gloves, sticking his hands underneath her gown, and talking about centimeters.

I wished he wouldn’t. It was all so stark and mechanical. How could soft moans behind a bedroom wall possibly result in needles and stirrups and K-Y Jelly? Even though I was still flattered to be a member of Evelyn’s private club, I kept hoping that Patrick would show up before I had to help with that Lamaze business.

Luckily, he did. He dragged the scent of ashes with him and I read his jacket as he leaned over Evelyn’s bed.
CAGNEY. FDNY. ENGINE 258
. He was kissing her cheek when he got yelled at by a nurse who ordered him to take a shower in an empty room next door and change into sanitary scrubs. I followed him to the hall and he laughed at me.

“Gross enough for you?” he asked as I studied the smears of dirt on his face. His hair dangled over his forehead and his firefighter clothes made him huge. The big black jacket with the horizontal yellow stripes, the matching pants, the thick boots. “I told your parents I’d send you back downstairs. And I’m warning you … Nancy seems pissed off.”

So did Evelyn the next day, when my parents and I stopped by in the late afternoon. We’d stayed at the hospital until Evelyn gave birth, and we were so exhausted afterward that we slept until noon. Evelyn was exhausted too. Her labor had been long, she’d lost a lot of blood, and she was in a cranky mood.

“Here,” she said, shoving the baby at a nurse. “I’m tired.”

The baby wasn’t a girl. He was a healthy boy with blond hair, a pink bedroom, and no name. Evelyn never even looked at the second half of the
Name Your Baby
book. Now she folded her arms across her chest, stared at
Days of Our Lives
, and didn’t say goodbye when our parents left to get some coffee.

“Look, Evelyn,” I said, lifting an elaborately wrapped box from Summer. There was a pair of baby pajamas inside, but they didn’t make Evelyn feel better.

“This is for a girl,” she said. “I didn’t get a girl.”

“It’s yellow. Yellow is for a boy, too.”

“Yellow is for faggots,” she said, tossing the pajamas toward her night table.

They fell to the floor and I picked them up, thinking that she was being rude and ungrateful, because Summer had spent a lot of time wrapping that gift. I knew she was disappointed, that she’d wanted a daughter to dress in Easter bonnets, to sit side by side with at the beauty salon and share secrets. She probably wanted a do-over for all the fun things that didn’t happen between her and Mom. But I was worried, too. She hadn’t looked this miserable since Kieran was born.

three

When
Evelyn had been at New York–Presbyterian Hospital five years earlier, Mom had moved into her house. She’d taken care of Kieran while Patrick was at work, and she’d taught me how to hold a baby’s head and how to change a diaper and the best type of formula to buy.

Now I took Mom’s place, because she’d caught a stomach virus and Evelyn was still in the hospital. We weren’t sure if it was because of all the blood she’d lost or if the doctors thought she was getting crazy again, and Evelyn wouldn’t tell us. We only knew that there was a new baby in the family and Patrick couldn’t miss work. He had two children and a thirty-year mortgage with a ten percent interest rate, after all. And his family couldn’t help. They were in Boston and his mother had little kids at home. Patrick was the oldest; his youngest brother was in the third grade.

So the baby was my responsibility. His name was Shane, only because he couldn’t leave the hospital until Evelyn came up with something to put on the birth certificate. She’d gotten the name from a soap opera and I wasn’t sure she even liked it.

I held my nephew on a warm afternoon in his nursery, which wouldn’t be pink for long. Patrick had already bought two gallons of blue paint because we couldn’t let Evelyn come home to a reminder that she didn’t get a girl.

Patrick joined me in the nursery that evening, freshly showered after a rough day at the firehouse. He settled into a rocking chair to feed Shane, while I stood there thinking that he was a good father. Not a distant one, either. Patrick changed diapers, and he knew to be careful of the soft spot on a baby’s head. He also spent tons of time teaching Kieran how to throw a football and watching televised Red Sox games with him, which Dad didn’t appreciate. He was horrified that his grandson was being raised to hate the Yankees and the Jets. It was blasphemy, in Dad’s opinion. Brainwashing, too.

“You’re doing a good job, little sistah,” Patrick said. He also told me that I should take a break and go to the public pool with Kieran.

“I’ll just stay for an hour,” I said. “Then I’ll make dinner.”

Patrick rubbed Shane’s cheek with his thumb. “I can’t wait.”

He loved my dinners. The night before, I’d made pork roast and broccoli with hollandaise sauce. The night before that it was stuffed peppers and zucchini in peppercorn vinaigrette. I took the recipes from a cookbook I’d found under the kitchen sink. Someone had given it to Evelyn as a Christmas gift and it was still wrapped in plastic.

Tonight we were having southwestern burgers and twice-baked potatoes, but Patrick didn’t know that. I kept the menu a surprise. Then I changed into my bikini in the bathroom. I slipped a pair of denim cutoffs over it and stared at myself in the mirror, stuffing the right side of my top with tissues. But it didn’t look realistic and I could just imagine the humiliation of Kleenex floating in the crowded pool if I decided to swim. Kieran banged on the door after a few minutes, and I pulled a T-shirt over my head to hide my deformity.

I kept the shirt on at the pool, where I sat on the edge and soaked my feet while Kieran played with his friends in the shallow end. I had only been here a few times before, but Evelyn was a fixture from Memorial Day to Labor Day. She and her friends spent each summer gossiping and chomping on the salty Goldfish crackers that were supposed to be for their children.

“Are you Evelyn Cagney’s sister?” a voice asked.

I looked up and nodded. A vaguely familiar woman was standing there; I recognized the excessive eye makeup and the clear braces on her teeth. Angie, Lisa, Jennifer, what was her name again? It had to be one of these, because almost every woman who lived in Queens and was between the ages of twenty and forty was named Angie, Lisa, or Jennifer.

“So how is everything?” she said. “I heard that Evelyn’s having problems.”

And I heard that you took a crap on the table when you were squeezing out your fourth baby, I thought. Then I looked at the other end of the pool, where Kieran was splashing around with his friends, whose mothers were talking and glancing at me. They all knew about Evelyn’s first meltdown and were probably dying for another one. The phone lines must have been sizzling with discussion of poor Evelyn Cagney and her pathetic relapse.

“No,” I said. “That’s not true. Evelyn’s fine.”

“But I heard she’s still in the hospital.”

“Only because she had some complications with the delivery,” I said, which might have been the truth.

She nodded and changed the subject. “You know, I can’t believe you’re Evelyn’s sister. You don’t look anything alike.”

Insult. For sure. Whether it was directed at me or Evelyn, I didn’t know. She could have meant that my face wasn’t as pretty as my sister’s—that my top lip didn’t have a Cupid’s bow and there wasn’t a natural arch in my eyebrows. Or she could have meant that Evelyn couldn’t possibly fit into size-four shorts.

“Well,” she said. “It was nice talking to you. I really have to go and pee.”

I really have to go and pee
. I hated when grown women said that. They all did, though. All my sister’s so-called friends who were waiting for Kieran to leave so they could rip Evelyn to shreds. They were no different from those hyenas on PBS nature shows—standing in a circle, tearing a carcass apart. I could almost see fresh blood dripping from their chins. And I thought it was sad that some women were still as mean as they’d been in high school. This was their new clique, the housewives who just loved it when one of them couldn’t measure up and got cut from the team.

Evelyn called from the hospital that night to say she was coming home in two days. I wanted everything to be perfect, so I stayed up late even though Patrick told me not to. He didn’t want me to knock myself out, but I did anyway. I scrubbed the bathtub and cleaned out the hall closet. It was filled with cobwebs and shredded wrapping paper that had been there since Evelyn’s first baby shower.

The next morning, Patrick refused to let me help him paint the nursery. “Just take it easy,” he said. “You’ve been killing yourself.”

I didn’t take it easy. He painted and listened to the radio while I changed the contact paper inside the kitchen cabinets and rearranged the dishes. I was almost finished when Summer rang the doorbell. I answered it in my cutoffs and a shabby shirt. I was completely disheveled, but of course Summer wasn’t. She’d taken the subway to Queens after an appointment at a ritzy hair salon in Manhattan and she looked fantastic.

“You look pretty,” I made myself say as we walked into the kitchen.

She thanked me and stood on her tiptoes to peer into a cabinet. “It’s so neat around here. I bet Evelyn will be happy when she gets back.”

“I did a lot of work,” I said. “I hope she’ll like it.”

“Well, she
ought
to. She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a sister like you.”

I smiled. “You can watch TV if you want. I’ll be finished with the cabinets soon.”

She settled into the couch in the living room and turned on
General Hospital
, but she didn’t watch it for long. Ten minutes later I found her standing in Shane’s nursery, leaning against his crib, twisting a lock of newly highlighted hair around her finger.

She was talking to Patrick. Flirting with him, the way she did with every attractive man who crossed her path. She seemed to think she had to do this to find out if she really was beautiful, or if she was still that mousy girl with the lazy eye and the crooked nose.

I was used to her flirting, but not when it came to Patrick. She rarely saw him, and when she did, Evelyn was always around. Now Evelyn was in the hospital and Summer was wearing a short skirt. She kept sliding her foot out of her sandal and rubbing her heel against her calf. She reminded me of a hooker I’d once seen on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan.

Patrick was painting the closet door. Painting and talking but not flirting. Then he noticed that the knob was loose and he turned toward me. “Go get my toolbox,” he said.

“ ‘Go get my toolbox,’ ” Summer repeated. “Don’t you know how to say
please
?”

He looked at her, his hair dripping over his forehead, his sleeves rolled to his shoulders. “This is my house. I don’t say please to nobody here.”

“Well,” she said. “Somebody needs to teach you some manners, young man.”

Unbelievable. Shameless. I saw her staring at Patrick’s arms and it made me sick. She was so nervy to flirt with my sister’s husband—in my sister’s house—right in front of me and Evelyn’s baby! At least I tried to hide my stares. But her comment made Patrick laugh, which annoyed me even more. I stood still until he reminded me about the toolbox, and I rushed to get it from the garage because I didn’t want them to be alone for long.

“Can I touch your tools?” Summer asked after I came back and Patrick was rummaging through the box in search of a screwdriver. “I’ll bet you’ve got some really big tools.”

He nodded toward the door. “I’m busy, kid. Go play.”

She smirked. “Will you play with me, Patrick? Or should I play with myself?”

The radio was still on. A screeching guitar, pounding drums, Eric Clapton. Patrick shook his head and went back to the doorknob, and Summer followed me to the living room. We sat on the couch and I gave her the cold shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I spoke in a harsh whisper. “He’s my sister’s husband. Leave him alone.”

She sank into the couch as if I’d hurt her feelings. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Ari. It was nothing.”

Later on, after Summer left and Patrick and I were cleaning up from dinner, I found out that he didn’t think it was nothing. “Your friend is wicked bold for a high school girl,” he said as I organized dirty glasses in the dishwasher.

She was
wicked bold
. He didn’t approve of her. I loved that. “Do you think she’s pretty?” I asked, staring down at the glasses, bracing myself for his answer.

“She’s fake,” he said. “Bleached hair and shit. And don’t you get influenced.”

I looked up. “What are you talking about?”

He dried his hands on a towel. He had big hands.
You know what they say about men with big hands
, Summer had told me repeatedly.

“She’s not a nice girl. But you are. So stay that way.”

“She’s a nice girl,” I said automatically, because I was so used to defending her. She always gave people the wrong idea. A girl in her neighborhood even called her a dumb blonde to her face. Summer and I laughed at that because we knew better. Tina and Jeff had her tested once and found out that she had a very high IQ.

Patrick raised an eyebrow. “You know what I mean, Ari.”

I knew what he meant. I nodded and he left the towel hanging from the sink, all wrinkled and lopsided. I straightened it when he went into the living room to watch the Red Sox with Kieran, thinking that he loved my cooking and he said I was a nice girl, and if he wasn’t my brother-in-law I would have kissed him. I was sure
he
wouldn’t say that I opened my mouth too wide.

Later that night, I went to the basement with a basket of laundry. The basement was unfinished, with a concrete floor and two tiny windows. A washer and dryer stood against a wall and Patrick’s barbells were lined up across the room. He was there now, on his back, bench-pressing God only knew how many pounds as I dropped stained bibs into the washing machine. I did everything slowly because I didn’t want to go back upstairs. It was nicer here, with the smell of fabric softener and the sound of Patrick grunting and groaning.

I was filling a plastic cap with Tide when he finished. He stood up, took off his shirt, and used it to wipe his sweaty face. He threw it at me as he walked toward the stairs.

“Toss that in,” he said.

“I’m not your maid,” I answered, even though I didn’t mind being his maid.

When he was gone, I looked at the shirt. It was navy blue with
FDNY
printed across the front in white letters, and it smelled of him—of beer and charcoal and cologne. The smell made me want to keep it, so I smuggled it into my overnight bag before tucking Kieran into bed. I adjusted his pillows and he mumbled something that I couldn’t understand.

“What was that, Kieran?” I asked, sitting on his New England Patriots sheets. Brainwashed, I thought, hearing Dad’s voice. Blasphemy.

“You’re better than Mommy,” he said with a sleepy smile, and I felt good for a second. He probably noticed that I was a more talented cook than Evelyn and that I never yelled at him the way she did.
You have no idea what you’re talking about
, she’d said last year when I asked her not to raise her voice because it could hurt Kieran’s self-esteem.
All you know is what you see on
Phil Donahue.

But the smug feeling quickly changed into guilt. “I’m not better than your mommy,” I said. “I’m just different. So don’t say that to her because it would make her sad. Understand?”

He nodded and I was worried that he didn’t understand. But he fell asleep before I could be sure.

The next morning, Kieran went with Patrick to pick up Evelyn at the hospital. I hung a new set of curtains on the kitchen window while dressed in my cutoffs and a sleeveless blouse that I knotted under my chest, and I didn’t have time to change before everybody came back.

“You could’ve asked me,” Evelyn said, about the curtains and the cabinets and everything else.

We were standing in the kitchen with Patrick and she didn’t look good—there was a bumpy rash on her chin and her hair had frizzed in the humidity on the way home.

“Sorry,” I said, disappointed that she wasn’t grateful. “I was just trying to help.”

She scratched her chin. “There’s a difference between helping and taking over. This is
my
house, not yours.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Ari,” Patrick said in a warning tone that shut me up and annoyed me. I hated when he took Evelyn’s side over mine, but of course he did—she was his wife, she’d just given birth to his baby. I assumed she was rightfully exhausted and grumpy, so I offered to take Kieran to the park.