39
I
thought of something,” Lauren said.
It was her birthday, and though she’d managed to come up with a dinner Liz could make—spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread, followed by chocolate cake—she had insisted that there was nothing she wanted in the way of a present, not one single thing.
Liz waited, and she saw that Brody, at the sink washing dishes, was waiting, too.
“Art books,” Lauren said. “Or an art book—I know they’re expensive.”
Liz was thrilled, beyond thrilled, ecstatic—she’d been agonizing over Lauren’s apathy. “Great idea,” she exclaimed. “Really great—that’s something that’ll give you a lot of pleasure for a long time.”
“Do you want us to choose?” Brody said, turning off the water. “Or would it be more fun to choose yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “Choose myself, I guess. But I won’t go crazy, I promise. I know they’re expensive.”
Brody winked at Liz. “Are you kidding? I don’t know about Mom, but I was afraid you were going to say a car.”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “A Mercedes SUV.”
Lauren cracked a smile—an amused, knowing smile that buoyed Liz’s spirits even further. Liz had been referring to a story of a few years back about some private school parents who agonized over whether or not to buy their daughter a brand-new Mercedes SUV for her sixteenth birthday. They went back and forth, back and forth, and finally they bought the car…but they had it distressed before they gave it to her.
“I still think that was an urban myth,” Brody said.
“It was a suburban myth,” Lauren quipped, and Liz thought her heart might burst with joy.
Later that evening she lingered in Lauren’s room, listened as Lauren told her she wanted to get a job this summer, either something incredibly boring that paid well or a nonpaying internship doing something really cool. “Just—I don’t want to be greedy,” she said. And then somehow, a little later, Liz began telling Lauren the story of her own sixteenth birthday, how all she’d wanted was a certain pair of platform sandals she’d found at Macy’s, how she’d written down the style number for her mother and then gone back and taken a picture of them so there could be no mistake. But next to her plate at her birthday breakfast was a package far too small to contain any shoes, let alone platform sandals. “Happy birthday,” her parents said together, and inside was a beautiful ring, gold set with her birthstone. “We couldn’t get you sandals for your sweet sixteen,” her mother said. And all day Liz wore the ring and tried to be happy with it, tried to love it, but in truth she was crushed. The sandals—they’d be gone for sure now. And they’d been so right, so perfect. After the birthday cake that night, John and Steve said they were going upstairs to do homework, but back down they came, carrying a wrapped package just the size of a shoe box. Which in fact it was.
“And the moral of the story?” Lauren said.
“What should it be?”
“Never give up hope?”
“That’s a good moral.”
Lauren tucked her hair behind her ears. Liz was making sure not to look right into her eyes, or to do so only briefly. I’m talking to my daughter, she thought. We’re talking, right now.
“Did you think about getting me a birthstone ring?” Lauren asked.
Liz thought of the conversations she and Brody had had about this, how in some sense they had decided against a birthstone ring, in that they’d decided against anything that would push her, preempt her.
“We didn’t know if you’d like one,” she said, not untruthfully. “Would you?”
Lauren held out her hands. She’d gotten a couple new thick silver rings lately and now wore them in stacks. “I guess not.”
“There’s always eighteen,” Liz said. “If you change your mind.”
“Mom,” Lauren said. “I might want to go to art school instead of college.”
“Really?”
“Or at least to a college where you can do a lot of art.”
Two years from now, Lauren would be about to graduate from high school. Today, for the first time, Liz could imagine it.
She was wired. Brody could tell even before she got into bed: by the way she moved around in the bathroom, the sounds she made as she closed the medicine cabinet, rinsed her mouth out, turned off the water. Pulling back the covers and climbing in next to him, she said, “I want to take her for the books tomorrow.” And then, “Did you
hear
her
voice
?” And then, “I am
so
not tired. Maybe I’ll get up. But what would I do?”
“Clean the kitchen?” he said.
“Paint the kitchen!” she said with a laugh. “Paint the whole house! Sorry, I’ll calm down in a while. I’m just—I don’t know what.”
He squeezed her hand. “You’re relieved.”
“No, I’m…I’m…” She chuckled. “I’m relurved.”
“What?”
“Remember that part in
Annie Hall
? When Diane Keaton asks him if he loves her, and he says ‘I don’t love you, I…I…I lurv you.’”
“I lurv you,” he said.
“Do you think we should tell Dr. Lewis?”
“That we lurv each other?”
She laughed with delight, and he brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles.
She fell silent, and he thought of how things had been between them during the worst of it.
It’s very common to feel angry when there are differences in how you’re handling things.
He said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“How guilty did you feel?”
“‘Did’?”
“Do.”
“Incredibly,” she said. “Completely, absolutely, totally. Solely.”
“‘Solely’?”
“I was
here.
Why didn’t I go back to work when Joe started school? So I could be home with my kids.”
“Liz,” he said. “It was nothing you did.”
“I don’t believe that, and I’ll bet you don’t either. About yourself.”
Brody sighed. The thing was, what could you pinpoint? And it was more about what they hadn’t done than what they had. Stopped her—that was what they hadn’t done.
Joe had scarfed his slice of cake tonight and then headed to Trent’s for an evening of poker. You had a girl who fell into misery, a boy who skipped from school to soccer to five-card stud. But that didn’t really say anything.
“What do you think you did?” he said.
She’d been on her side, facing him, and now she rolled onto her back. She lay there for a long time, and he thought maybe the question had been too much.
I don’t tell you everything.
At last, when he wondered if she would speak again all night, she began.
“I let myself get hurt when she yelled at me. I didn’t encourage her enough when she was scared to try something new—I didn’t show I believed in her. I let her see me crying on her first day of kindergarten, for God’s sake.” She paused. “I had Joe.”
Brody rolled to face her. “We both had Joe.”
“No, not really. Not really.”
He thought about this, remembered the long-ago days right after Joe’s birth, the way Lauren would ask him:
Is he drinking milk? Is he still drinking milk?
He said, “Do you really think those things caused it?”
“Dr. Lewis?” she said. “On the phone once? He said it’s easier if you feel it was your fault.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I know, it sounds crazy, but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless—you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.”
“You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what.”
She moved closer, draping her arm across his middle and tucking her hand into the space between his elbow and his side. “You’re right,” she murmured. She pressed her lips to his chest, and he leaned down and kissed the top of her head. He imagined wrapping both arms around her, holding her so close they could almost merge.
“Let’s go away,” he said, but she just nestled closer and perhaps hadn’t heard. They were moving toward the moment when one of them would fall asleep. Early in their relationship they’d enjoyed arguing over who’d gone first: “It was you,” “No, it was you, I heard you snoring.” This would be in the morning, their legs intertwined, the outside world farther away than it ever was now.
The next day, Lauren spent over an hour browsing through art books, thinking, as she pulled volume after volume from the shelves, that two hundred dollars was both an insane amount of money to spend in a bookstore and barely enough to satisfy her longings. Other customers stepped around her, but she barely noticed them, she was so taken by the smooth, heavy pages, by the shapes and colors they revealed. “Couldn’t find anything?” her dad asked when she rejoined her parents in the café next door. “More like the opposite,” she said. “I’m going to need to come back.”
“You’re excited,” Dr. Lewis said when she told him about it.
“So?”
“I guess I’m noticing that your mood seems lighter.”
It was true, she supposed. One thing was, at school she actually had a new friend. Amanda was off with Noah all the time, and Lauren was now eating lunch with this bizarre, morose-looking girl who wore fishnet stockings and tons of black eyeliner. Her name was Myrna, and she’d been new at the beginning of the year: the victim, as she put it, of her dad’s midlife crisis. “Most men are content to start fucking their secretaries. My dad has to surf the California coast.” He’d taken early retirement from his lawyer’s job and talked her mother into giving up a perfectly happy life in New York for the insane Bay Area.
“New York?” Lauren said.
“Oh, calm down—it was just Poughkeepsie.”
It was a friendship that shouldn’t have been, except Lauren had something Myrna needed: school-wide indifference. For months Myrna had been an outcast, an East Coast freak, but once she started hanging out with Lauren, the bitchy whispers ebbed, and she could, as she put it, just kick. She said, “We don’t even have to like each other, you know? It’s like, hanging out as camouflage.” They were at lunch, and she dug in her backpack and pulled out a spotted banana. “I mean, I do like you,” she said as she began to peel it. “But that’s just sort of a bonus.” She lifted the banana to her mouth and took a bite, and Lauren almost choked on her sandwich. No one ate a banana that way at school. Then she realized Myrna was right: as much as she helped Myrna blend in, Myrna helped her disappear. Who would notice the girl who slit her wrists when another girl was giving a public blow job to a piece of fruit?
It turned out Myrna didn’t know what Lauren had done—which Lauren didn’t know until one day when Myrna started talking about a girl she’d known back home who’d actually done it: killed herself. Lauren was all, “It’s OK, don’t worry,” but Myrna didn’t seem to get it, so Lauren finally said, “You know about me, right?” and Myrna’s eyes widened. Then Lauren told her, and Myrna turned purple and almost started crying. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m such a fucking asshole.”
“Why?” Lauren said. “Because you didn’t know? How were you supposed to know?” She felt almost like Dr. Lewis saying that, and it actually calmed Myrna down a bit.
“So we’re the freak and Sylvia Plath,” she said the next day.
“I’m not Sylvia Plath!” Lauren said, laughing a little. “She stuck her head in an oven, for one thing.”
“Then someone else. Who slit their wrists? What did you use, anyway—a razor blade?”
“An X-Acto.”
“That’s cool, that’s very artsy. Aimee Berman would use a nail file.”
They were united in their hatred of Aimee Berman, which was fitting, since it was Aimee who had united them—chosen every other girl in PE to be on her volleyball team. Well, half the other girls; her friend Sierra—her bitch, as Myrna put it—had chosen the other half. “I don’t care,” Aimee had said when confronted at the end of the selection process by the sight of Lauren and Myrna still waiting to be chosen. Sierra said she didn’t care either, and then the entire class stood there until at last the teacher woke from her daze and assigned Lauren to one of the teams and Myrna to the other. “Serve into her head,” Myrna whispered as Lauren headed for Sierra. “I’ll do the same with Little Miss Cunt.”
“Wow,” Dr. Lewis said about Myrna.
“What? She’s just this girl.”
“Six months ago,” he said, “I’m not sure you’d have been able to start a new friendship.”
“I didn’t know her six months ago.”
He smiled.
“What?”
“You may have a future as an attorney.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, but now she was fighting a smile, and she gave up and laughed.
“You’ve got a pretty persuasive argument that you’re not
feeling
better—life is just suddenly better.”
“It is,” she said, but now they were both laughing, and she had to bite the inside of her lip to stop.
She bought a book: Richard Diebenkorn. He painted sort of geometric abstractions in soft colors, and they reminded her of maps and also of quilts—modern quilts like she’d seen once at a shop, without patterns. Looking at one of his paintings, she imagined lifting up the edge of a pale blue rectangle and lying down underneath it.
She kept the book in the guest room, and maybe because she was in there a lot she started using the guest bathroom—she even moved her stuff in. It was about like her and Joe’s bathroom, but the tiles were light blue instead of peach, and it had this sort of clean-hotel feel to it. Plus, obviously. She wasn’t sure why it had taken her so long to see that she really never had to go back into her and Joe’s bathroom again.
One Sunday afternoon she sat on the counter and shaved her legs. She’d brought along a bar of Ivory, but she used the special guest soap instead, its rose smell opening up as the bathroom filled with steam. After she rinsed, she dried off and chose some honey-almond lotion from inside the medicine cabinet, where there was a whole range of fancy stuff that her mom kept there for guests—which basically meant for Sarabeth. Or had.
Lauren’s grandparents came for dinner that night, and it reminded Lauren of long ago: her grandma brought these addictive spiced pecans she used to always make, and her grandpa got her dad talking about some new company he’d read about in
Wired
magazine. He’d worked in the computer industry himself, back when there barely was one.