He headed over to a group from sales, arriving in time to hear one of the guys say, “And so we rode the chairlift back down the mountain and returned her equipment, and now when I go skiing, she goes to a spa.”
This was met by much merriment.
“Separate vacations! The secret of marital success!”
“My parents spent four weeks apart every year.”
“Whether they wanted to or not.”
“Oh, believe me, they wanted to.”
Brody smiled and moved on. His parents would no sooner have taken separate vacations than lived separately. They were midwestern. His dad called his mom Sarge, as in
Yes, ma’am, Sarge, right away, Sarge.
Winking at Brody, making sure he understood it was just a joke.
“Here’s the man we need.”
Brody turned to find three of his colleagues standing in a small cluster, and he shook hands with each of them, good party handshakes.
“What’s your guess on the cost of this thing?” Bruce Sellers said.
“Who cares?” said Rajiv Chaudhari. “It’s a write-off.”
“Oiron company party,” Brody said, “sixty-five thousand dollars. Employee happiness, priceless.” He thought for some reason of last year’s party: dancing with Liz as it got late, the mingling smells of perfume and sweat. He looked over to where he’d last seen her, but she was gone.
“Rumor has it,” Bruce said, “he’s going to one of those private Caribbean islands for Christmas.”
“No, he’s buying one.”
“As a present for her?” Tony Blank said, and they all looked over at Russ’s date. “I’d buy a country,” he added, and they all chuckled.
Brody drained his champagne. What
would
Russ do for Christmas? He thought of Russ’s former house in Woodside, of a dinner party he and Liz had attended there one December, when the entire estate was strung with little white lights. There was a butler, or at least Brody and Russ had a joke about there being a butler; to this day Brody didn’t know whether the guy had been hired for the occasion, as Russ insisted, or not.
He imagined Russ driving by the house this week, looking at the lights, continuing on.
Tony said, “Hey, d’I tell you guys about my new toy? Early Christmas present from my wife? She got me a Ski-Doo snowmobile.”
Bruce said, “Screw you, my Yamaha’s better.”
“Why’d she give it to you early?” Rajiv said. “Don’t tell me there’s another wrinkle to this Christmas thing.”
“Come off it,” Bruce said to Rajiv, “we know you grew up in LA,” and Rajiv grinned.
Brody stood with them for another five or ten minutes, talking about Christmas plans and work gossip and who was skiing where. A little later, drunk and hungry, he found Liz in the hallway to the restrooms. She was studying a framed newspaper article about old Palo Alto—or was pretending to, anyway.
“Ready to go?” he said.
“Sure.” Her phone was in her hand, and she opened her purse and dropped it inside, then closed the purse with a snap.
“You called home?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Excellent,” he said, and a look of disgust came over her face.
“You’re smashed.”
“So?”
“Just making an observation.”
They made their way back to the ballroom. The dance floor had filled, and he imagined the heat, the way the music would feel in his legs.
From across the room Russ waved, then met them near the door. “Taking off?”
“We’ve got to get home,” Liz said.
Russ hesitated for a moment and then took hold of her hands. “It’s been such a hard stretch for you guys. I want to tell you again how sorry I am—I’d do anything to help.” He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, then stepped toward Brody and pressed his lips against Brody’s cheek, too. “Take care, you two. I’m glad you came.”
At the car, Liz held out her hand for Brody’s keys, and he almost gave them to her. “I’m fine,” he said instead. They both got in, buckled up. He wanted to say something—
I’ve got it covered, Sarge
—but she might scoff. He backed out from the spot, taking care to make every move as smooth as butter. He cut through Stanford, remembering the day early in their relationship when she showed him around her old haunts, and how his curiosity about her life as a college student told him he was getting serious.
He looked over at her. She was staring straight ahead, eyes so firmly on the road she might as well have been the one driving. They passed the golf course: trees on the left, trees on the right, darkness everywhere. His cheek tingled, and he brought his fingers up to touch the spot that Russ’s lips had grazed.
It would be freezing, but Lauren’s dad wanted to go to the beach. Lauren could tell her mom wasn’t all that into it, but she was going along, all fakely cheerful about how nice it would be. As for Joe—he just shrugged. That was pretty much all he did anymore. “Whatever”—all he said. Last night, watching TV with him while their parents were out, she’d had this feeling of wanting to say something, but she hadn’t known what, and he was zoned out, or zoned into the show—just zoned.
“How about you, Laur?” her dad said. “You game?”
Last Sunday, after going with her parents and Joe to get a Christmas tree, she’d spent the afternoon reading dumb magazines and trying to make herself call Amanda. Today would be the same. She’d talked to Amanda once during the week, but it was too weird. Amanda had told her something about Jeff Shannon, and though Lauren knew Amanda was trying to help, trying to keep her up-to-date, she didn’t want to hear about it. Jeff Shannon was probably waiting to torture her when she got back. Waiting to smirk again, make her feel like a dog. The jack of diamonds. What was the hardest thing to scratch? A diamond. Lauren felt she couldn’t scratch Jeff, couldn’t affect him. This was Dr. Lewis’s idea, and it was sort of like an English paper and sort of true.
“Lauren?” her dad said.
“Sure, OK.”
They gathered sweatshirts and blankets. In the van, her dad set two bottles of Poland Spring in the cup holders and drank them in quick succession, before they’d even reached the freeway. Lauren was behind him, Joe behind their mom, his whole body angled toward the window.
“A week till Christmas,” their mom said, looking back. “Any last requests?”
Lauren considered. She’d asked for clothes so far—and a new cell phone, to replace one she’d lost. It was kind of a sneaky request; how could they deny her a new cell phone now? But whatever.
She shrugged.
“Joe?” her mom said.
He looked up. “Yeah?”
“Is there anything you want for Christmas that you haven’t told me about?”
“Oh. Nah.”
They took 92 up the mountain, the road twisty and surrounded by forest. At the top, the Skylawn Cemetery. Today, a funeral procession blocked the way, and for a while they just sat there, waiting. At last they crossed the intersection and began the descent to Half Moon Bay. Lauren could see the ocean, steel colored under a gray sky. It was going to be ridiculously cold on the beach. What were they going to do, huddle on blankets, count the minutes until they could reasonably leave?
Down they went, slowly, slowly, slowly: there was a lot of traffic.
“Kind of late for people to be coming over here for trees,” Lauren’s dad said.
Lauren saw her mom open her mouth as if to disagree, then close it.
“Joe,” she said, turning around again, “do you want to miss school Friday and head up to Tahoe Thursday afternoon?”
“OK,” Joe said. “Whatever.”
“Hang on,” Lauren’s dad said. “I have to think about that.”
“So do I,” Lauren said. Her mom swiveled her head and went all concerned looking, and Lauren said, “I was kidding,” which she in fact had been, but she could go with it as serious—she kind of liked it, actually.
They reached the flats on the ocean side, and now they wound past nurseries and Christmas-tree farms. They passed the pony ride place, and Lauren registered it not so much as the pony ride place but as the place about which they always used to say,
There’s the pony ride place.
She remembered coming over here to the pumpkin festival once, with her mom and Sarabeth, just the three of them. Sarabeth had bought her a little wooden witch riding a broom that had bristles of real straw. In the hospital, Lauren had kind of hoped she’d see Sarabeth when she got home, but if her mom and Sarabeth were in a fight, who knew when that would happen. And what kind of weird fight were they in? Her mom wasn’t the fighting type.
At last they reached the light at Main Street. The clouds were darkening: massing over the horizon, coming inland to mingle with the high fog.
They took their usual access road to their usual parking area. Outside the van, the wind was ferocious. They ducked their heads, rounded their shoulders, shoved their hands into their sweatshirt pockets. At the path, Joe took the lead; Lauren was in the rear, just behind her dad. The water was vast and dark, edged by a long, wide stretch of beach. They were at the top of a cliff, and Joe picked his way through beach grass and shrubs until he came to a steep, narrow trail down to the sand.
Her mom was afraid of heights. Or no: of falling. Without a look back, Joe skipped his way down, but her mom only glanced back over her shoulder and then hesitantly took a single step. She waited, then brought the other foot after her and stopped.
Help her, Lauren thought, but her dad didn’t move.
Again, her mom moved one foot, and then, very slowly, the other. There was a turn in the trail now, and Lauren couldn’t see the angle of descent, but her mom’s stillness told her it was getting steeper. Her dad put his hands on his hips.
Her mom stepped down again, but now she slipped a little and gasped, and she reached a quick hand to the ground to steady herself. “Ow,” she exclaimed, and she pulled the hand right back and looked at it, then clapped her palm against her jeans and stared straight ahead.
“Dad,” Lauren said in a low voice.
He turned.
“Help her.”
“She’s OK.”
She couldn’t stand it. She stepped past him and said, “Want a hand? I can go ahead of you, you can hold my shoulder.”
“Just go on down,” her dad said in a nice-enough voice, but it was like that was it, no choices, Lauren had to go. Her mom smiled at her—
it’s OK
—and Lauren shrugged and made her way down. From the beach she looked back up. Her dad was in front of her mom now, her mom’s hand on her dad’s shoulder.
Joe came up. “What are they doing?”
“They’re coming.”
With the toe of his sneaker he lifted a piece of seaweed and flung it away. He looked straight at her with a question he’d never ask, and she felt her face warm and looked up again. Her parents had taken another step or two, but they had a ways to go.
“Come on,” she said, and she and Joe started toward the water, as if there might be something to see in it that they couldn’t see from where they were now.
To Brody, Liz’s hand felt light—as if she didn’t want to trust him with her weight. He took a step, then waited for her to follow. Another, and she hesitated and then came, too. He remembered a time, maybe twenty years ago, when she had ridden him piggyback. “I’ll make you fall,” she’d laughingly warned him, but he’d turned his back and reached for her thighs, and she’d gone along with it. They were south of Carmel, cypresses black against the blue sky, a cold wind freezing Brody’s ears. Were they married yet? He didn’t think so. She was heavy. At the steeper parts it took all his leg strength to brace them against falling. Point Lobos, that’s where it was. On her back was a little knapsack of food, and once at the water’s edge they sat on a high rock and ate sandwiches and Oreos, bought—the Oreos—by him because she’d said at some point that she couldn’t stop eating them once she started, and he wanted to see this, evidence of a ravenous appetite. On the rough rock, she proved it. She ate twelve Oreos, sixteen. Then she lay back and groaned happily, and he bent over her and licked the black crumbs from the corners of her mouth.
“Thanks,” she said now, as they reached the beach.
He turned back to face her. “Sure.”
“Cold?”
“You bet.” He offered her his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation she took it. The kids weren’t in sight. They crested the high point of the beach and stopped, looking at the ocean. It was not so dark from here—more foamy, green-gray. Two men and a young woman—a girl?—walked away from them, to the south. In the other direction, Lauren and Joe headed north, paralleling the waterline, Joe several feet ahead of Lauren. As Brody watched, Lauren bent to look at something in the sand, and, without turning around, Joe paused, too.
Liz seemed about to speak and then didn’t. They stood there watching their children, hands still together. This trip to the beach, Brody thought, this day in the cold air. Couldn’t it help them all?
25
L
ike most of their cohorts in the choral group, Liz’s parents had dressed in Christmas colors, her father in a dark green sweater with reindeer on it, her mother in her red velvet pants and a sweater appliquéd with a Christmas tree. Though held at a church, the program had been billed as multicultural, and hanging above the singers was a banner reading
CELEBRATE YOUR HOLIDAY
in a dozen languages.
Liz and Brody and the kids were in a pew about halfway back. Brody and the kids seemed to be on autopilot, but when the sing-along part of the program started, Liz tried to hum along and then actually joined in on her favorite, “Deck the Halls.” To her surprise, the mere act of singing lifted her, and as the verses continued she raised her voice. She remembered one Christmas when she was a very little girl, standing with her family on the porch of their house in Swarthmore and listening as a group of caroling neighbors filled the night air with song. Afterward, back inside the house, she took hold of Steve’s hands and did a ring-around-the-rosy with him, she was so happy.
Cookies and cider were served in the community room once the concert was over. Liz’s parents rushed to say hello, and again her mother couldn’t look at Lauren. “It was wonderful,” Liz said. “Didn’t you think so, Lauren?”
Lauren nodded. That afternoon the two of them had gone to get Lauren an outfit for this occasion, and she looked pale but pretty in the long-sleeved lacy black dress she’d chosen, in the pointy-toed pumps Liz had bought despite the high price and the fact that they looked like something Carrie Bradshaw would wear.
Liz’s father commandeered Joe for a raid on the refreshments, and when they were gone, her mother said to Lauren, “Grandpa’s so glad you’re here, dear.”
What was she thinking, saying something like that? Why not
I’m so glad you’re here
? Liz glanced at Brody, but he seemed not to have heard. He saw her looking, though, and he leaned close and murmured that he was going to get some air. “Go for it,” she murmured back. Since Sunday at the beach, things had seemed better between them. They’d decided to leave for Tahoe on Thursday, which—their having made a decision together—had felt like a step in the right direction.
She told her mother this now.
“But that means you’ll have to open the house,” her mother said.
“I think we can manage.”
“But Dad and I were going to drive as far as Auburn Thursday night and then get up there Friday morning to open it for you.”
“Is that your preference?”
“Well, no, but I thought it would be yours. You always used to like to come into a house with heat. You said it was hard to arrive with kids and groceries and presents and have to get the house in order before you could do anything else.”
“That was when the kids were little,” Liz said, and then she stopped herself: there was no point to this. “Festive sweater,” she remarked.
“Isn’t it fun?” her mother said with a big smile. “There’s a wonderful shop in Los Gatos that has all kinds of things like this. I could go back and see if they have one in your size.”
“That’s OK,” Liz said. “I mean thanks, but I seem to have a ton of holiday clothes already.”
They stood for a long moment without speaking. Lauren looked bored, but also as if she didn’t dare venture away.
“So we’ll be ten,” Liz said.
Her mother looked surprised. “I thought eleven.”
“Where’d you get eleven?”
“Isn’t Sarabeth coming?”
Liz felt Lauren looking at her. “Actually, I hadn’t invited her.”
Her mother’s eyes widened. “No? After Thanksgiving I would have thought—”
She broke off talking, and Liz smiled at Lauren in what she thought was an encouraging, don’t-mind-her way, but Lauren remained impassive.
“The goods are good,” Liz’s father said, rejoining them with a plate of treats in one hand, a Styrofoam cup of cider in the other. “Cookie?” he said to Lauren.
“No, thanks. Actually, I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Liz said.
“Mom,”
her father said, and he elbowed Lauren for a smile she didn’t give.
Liz watched as Lauren navigated her way through the crowd, then she forced herself to turn back to her parents. They were old: they were old and grief stricken and trying. At the moment, however, she could not spend another minute with them.
She said, “I think I’ll check out those goods myself.”
Plunging into the crowd, she squeezed past white-haired singers and well-dressed men and women her own age and doted-upon young children with sticky fingers and the kind of excitement that would make bedtime difficult.
At last she reached the food. There were thick squares of dark molasses-heavy gingerbread, butter cookies decorated with red and green sprinkles, powdered-sugar pecan balls, and fudge with walnuts. Someone had made tiny Christmas-tree cakes, iced in green and finished with silver dragées, and Liz helped herself to one of these. She took a big bite: the cloying sweetness of canned frosting. How poignant it was to think of these elderly people providing treats for their families and friends. She thought of Esther, the old woman who brought Sarabeth bad cookies and old postcards. Last year at Christmas Sarabeth had made dozens of little books to give as gifts, each with a loop of golden thread so it could be hung on the limb of a tree if the recipient desired. She gave them to Esther and her other listeners at the Center, to her friends, to her clients. She used scraps of lampshade paper supplemented by several sheets she went out and bought for the occasion. Liz’s was in the shape of a leaf, the cover cut from red leather. When Liz opened it, she saw that each page was made of a different color of tissue paper, reds going to oranges to yellows, to lovely spring greens at the very end.
It was too warm in this room. Brody had been right: air was what was needed. Liz chucked the cake and made her way to the door, pulling her coat on and rearranging her scarf to swathe her neck and throat. The church was in south Palo Alto, just off Middlefield. She followed a path to the front but didn’t see Brody. The neighborhood was festooned with Christmas lights—on trees, fences, rooflines, several herds of wire reindeer. She took her cell phone from her purse and turned it back on. She had bought a very snazzy new one for Lauren, and for a moment she rued her own, twice the size it needed to be, scuffed from sharing space in her purse with keys, pens, the metal clasp of her wallet.
She found the number and pressed
CALL
, and the phone rang three times and then switched to Sarabeth’s recorded voice. Was it the same message as ever? The words were the old words, but they seemed different somehow: tinged with dullness.
After the concert, Joe went to his room to do homework while Lauren lay on her bed and did nothing at all. She had some assignments for school, but there was no hurry. That there was no hurry was actually how she felt a lot these days. Time was surprisingly slow.
She pulled up the left sleeve of her dress and moved her fingertip along one of her scars. She was worried about Jeff Shannon, worried and freaked out about seeing him, no matter what Dr. Lewis said about how you never knew what another person was thinking. She wondered if she could hide from him somehow once she was back at school, and if she could successfully
make
herself hide if that was what she decided to do. It would be just like her to decide to hide and then change her mind at the last minute, or not even really change her mind—more change her feet, her legs, go where she hadn’t intended to go. She was worried about school in general, and as she stroked the next scar she thought of it: the first view you got of the main building facing the street, the loadies and other class cutters hanging out on the curb, already gone; then the inner terrace, where the jocks and cheerleaders stood near the big oak tree, all of them smiling all the time, like they were in some group toothpaste ad; then the library, the science wing, the gym. She didn’t want to go back, didn’t see how she could when she was so ugly. She stroked the next scar: she was so ugly. Her mom had bought her this dress and it was like, why bother when she was so ugly? She was so ugly and she was such a loser. Such a loser, such a loser: it was like a line from a song, and she hummed it over and over as she stroked the last scar. The scars all felt the same, almost silky, the only difference their lengths. The third one was the longest. She didn’t know which cut she’d made first, but she kind of thought it must have been the third one. She touched the scars again and thought of: Jeff Shannon, school, how ugly she was, what a loser. The Jeff Shannon scar was about an inch long, starting at the base of her thumb and angling diagonally down her wrist. The school scar was a little longer. How ugly she was—that was the third one, almost two inches long, more sideways than diagonal. The last was barely half an inch, but at times it had been the most painful because the cut was so deep. They went: Jeff Shannon. School. How ugly she was. What a loser. The scars were raised and paler in color than they had been. She stroked them again and then switched hands, pulling back her right sleeve to expose what she’d done there. Not as much—just the two cuts, and with her already damaged left hand, so they weren’t very deep or long. She ran a finger over the first scar, then the second. She pushed the sleeve back over them. She touched the scars on her left wrist again, keeping her fingertip slow, keeping the pressure light. Jeff Shannon, school, how ugly she was, what a loser.
She heard the dishwasher go on downstairs: her mom was heading for bed. Soon, when her mom was asleep, her dad would sneak out to play tennis. Lauren heard him almost every night: leaving or returning, the sound of the garage door, his steps in the empty kitchen. Her mom didn’t know about it, she was sure. Her mom, who had always known about everything. She never went to yoga anymore, never talked on the phone. Joe hardly talked at all. She wondered again: Had he been like that before? Leaving the church tonight, he’d said, “Bye, Grandpa,” and for some reason it had made Lauren want to cry.
She sat up slowly. What she knew now was that she had low blood pressure. Well, that was one thing. She had low blood pressure, so she couldn’t stand up too fast. She thought of it as a kind of secret, a valuable secret she’d keep hidden from anyone who might enjoy the sensation, that spinning, the yellowy light.
At her closet she took off her new dress and hung it back on the store hanger. She peeled her nylons over her hips and butt and thighs. She hated the way nylons looked after you’d worn them, lying on the floor with all the roundness of your ass preserved. It made her want to throw them away.
She did love her new shoes, though. She pulled on a nightgown and then sat in front of her closet and brought one of the shoes to her face. The smooth black leather, the beautiful new-leather smell. They were so pointy. They totally squished her toes, but that was OK. They had straps and narrow, high heels—they were actually very
Sex and the City,
though she hadn’t said that to her mom.
On her way to brush her teeth she paused outside Joe’s room. His door was ajar, and she could hear his pencil tapping on a book. She pushed the door open a little. She thought he’d notice, thought he’d say something, but he didn’t—probably too into his homework, maybe even listening to his iPod. She pushed it a little more. Just a little more after that, and she could see his feet at the end of his bed. She waited. It was weird that he hadn’t said anything. She pushed it open all the way, thinking she just wanted to see what he was doing, just wanted to see if he was reading or what, listening to music or what, and he was sitting there staring right at her.
“Oh, sorry.”
He shrugged. A textbook was open on his lap, and the pencil he’d been tapping was still in his hand.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Math.” He sat there for a moment, then he held up the book for her to see.
She remembered when she was in eighth grade, when she’d had that algebra book. Sitting at the kitchen table, her dad trying to help her, and how she couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t get it. “I hate math,” she said.
Joe kept his eyes away from her. At her grandparents’ concert, coming out of the bathroom a little before her dad found her and said it was time to go, she saw Joe standing by himself across the room, hands in the pockets of his khakis, looking like he could stand there forever if he had to.
He’d changed out of his nice clothes, into sweats. His hair was long for him, dark.
“Are you going to ski?” she said, though it was a stupid question; of course he was.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess. Are you?”
“I guess. Kelly and Mom won’t.”
“Probably not.”
Ski mornings in the Tahoe house, everyone walking around in long underwear and sweaters, waiting until the last minute to put on their wind pants. Her mom and her aunt in their bathrobes, holding cups of coffee. And her grandma, too. Her mom and her aunt used to ski, but not her grandma. She would stay at the house and make stew for dinner, or layer cakes because the twins loved them. It was going to be weird to see her aunt and uncle and cousins after what had happened. She wondered what they’d done for Thanksgiving instead. If they were mad at her.
Joe had the same look on his face as earlier, at the church: he could sit like this forever. He wouldn’t have to say anything. He wouldn’t care if she did. She wasn’t like that at all. She had to say something, felt it as if the words, whatever they might be, were accumulating pressure inside her, until she—or they—would burst. This made her think of Lucas, and she wondered, for the zillionth time, what was going to happen to him. “What are you giving Dad?” she said.
“I don’t know. A sweater.”
“I’m giving him a tennis shirt.”
Joe tapped his pencil once, then two more times. Still his face was blank. She felt ridiculous all of a sudden. Left his room and went into the bathroom, where she closed the door and turned on the water. Why was she here? She stared at the mirror as the water began to warm and steam. She couldn’t figure out if she looked like herself or not.