The Deep End (14 page)

How different would things be for her daughters? What kind of example did Robin and Lulu have? A woman who had moved from her parents’ home to her husband’s apartment without ever having gotten to know herself? A wife who had married young and had dedicated her life to running errands and making lemon meringue pies? A mother who spent her days picking up after everyone and mouthing dull platitudes like “I want whatever makes you happy,” just as her mother had assured her? A woman who had never made an important decision—a decision that was hers alone—in her entire adult life? A daughter who had disguised her grief after her parents died so that her own daughters wouldn’t be needlessly upset; who mourned the loss of her husband in the same silent way, protecting her children the way she had always been protected as a child, trying to spare them. From what? Life spares no one, she thought.

I want whatever makes you happy, she heard her mother whisper against the soft inside of her jersey. “Well, I’m not happy,” Joanne cried out loud angrily, tugging the T-shirt across her face and pushing her arms through the short sleeves. “I’m not happy! Can you hear me? I’m not happy!” She sank down onto the floor, the rest of her clothes in a pile around her bare knees.

“Are you all right?” the woman from the scales asked Joanne—was she following her?—as she bent down and
supported her weight on muscular calves. “Are you all right?” she repeated when Joanne failed to answer.

Joanne stared into the other woman’s eyes and saw that she was vaguely frightened. She allowed the woman to help her to her feet. “My husband walked out on me and there’s some lunatic phoning me all the time who says he’s going to kill me,” Joanne replied simply. The woman’s face went totally blank.

Well, Joanne thought as she put on the rest of her clothes and left the woman standing alone in the middle of the locker room, she asked!

“I
had a phone call when I got home this afternoon,” Joanne announced, looking across the dinner table at her older daughter. Robin, a mouthful of bright orange spaghetti dangling from between her pursed lips, regarded her mother with a mixture of curiosity and ennui. “You know why, I take it.”

Robin inhaled a long breath of air, as if she were taking a deep drag on a cigarette, and slowly sucked up the straggly strings of spaghetti. She then chewed indifferently for several seconds, saying nothing, staring resolutely into her plate as if spaghetti were her life and refusing to acknowledge her mother.

“Robin … are you going to answer me?”

Robin said nothing.

“Robin …”

“Why should I answer you?” Robin demanded. “You already know the answer. You always do this. You always ask questions when you know the answers. Why?”

Joanne wasn’t sure how to respond. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I guess I want to hear the answer from you.”

“What’s going on?” Lulu asked, her eyes traveling back and forth between her mother and her sister as if she were an observer at a tennis match.

“Shut up,” Robin snapped in her sister’s direction.

“Robin …” her mother warned.

“You
shut up!” Lulu shot back.

“Girls, please …”

“Why don’t you go crawl into a hole somewhere,” Robin continued. “You’re such a worm.”

“Robin, that is quite enough.”

“At least it’s better than being a snake,” Lulu yelled. This time it was Joanne’s eyes that darted back and forth across the kitchen table.

“Worms are the lowest,” Robin sneered, “especially
fat
ones.”

“That’s enough, Robin.” Joanne fought to keep her own voice down. “Can’t we get through one meal without this bickering?” It was more plea than question. “You girls are sisters; you’re all you’ve got …”

“I wish I didn’t have anything.” Robin angrily shoved another forkful of spaghetti into her mouth.

“Yeah, well I wish
you
were dead,” Lulu cried.

“Stop it!” Joanne shouted, momentarily losing control. “Stop it,” she repeated quietly, regaining it. “Now, let’s sit here quietly and finish our meal. I don’t want to hear another word from either one of you.” She tried to twirl some noodles around her fork and failed, lowering the utensil to her plate and taking a deep breath. She felt her eyes well up with tears and hastily moved to wipe them away. “You’re going to have to help me, girls,” she told them, struggling to keep her voice even. “This is a very hard time for me. I know it’s a hard time for you, too,
but it’s even harder for me. I’m not asking you to tiptoe around me. I am just asking you to go easy on each other. At least at mealtimes. I would love to get through at least one meal without a bunch of knots in my stomach.”

“I’m not fat,” Lulu said.

“Are too,” came the immediate response.

“She is not fat,” Joanne snapped. “And I’m warning
both
of you that if you say another word until I give you permission, you’ll be grounded for the weekend.” Robin glared at her mother. “I mean it,” Joanne said, hearing Lulu fidget in her chair. The remainder of the meal—fresh pasta which Joanne had made herself—was passed in taut silence, the taste of the spicy, homemade tomato sauce lost, the fine texture of the angel’s hair noodles unnoticed. “I want to talk to you,” Joanne said to Robin as she was clearing away the plates and both girls were preparing to leave the table.

“I have to get ready for my date,” Robin protested.

“That’ll have to wait,” Joanne told her firmly. Robin let out an impatient sigh. “You can go,” Joanne said to Lulu.

“I want to listen,” Lulu protested.

“Would you get out of here,” Robin yelled.

“Try and make me.”

“Lulu, go to your room and keep yourself occupied for a few minutes,” Joanne ordered.

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Do your homework.”

“I already did it.”

“Then take a bath.”

“Now?”

“Lulu, I don’t care what you do, just do it somewhere else.”

“My name is Lana! From now on, I want to be called by my real name … Lana.”

“A worm by any other name …”

“Robin, I’m warning you, one more word and you can forget about your date tonight.”

“What did I do?”

Joanne marveled at the altogether innocent face before her and almost laughed. Instead, she took several deep breaths, silently counted to ten, and turned back to her younger daughter. “Lulu, please, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Lana!”

“Lana,” Joanne repeated, watching her younger daughter walk slowly—as slowly as she had ever seen her move—from the room. She heard the name echo in her head, and tried to fit it around her tongue. The name had been Paul’s idea; she had preferred Lulu, which he thought was better suited to a nickname. So they had compromised and named her Lana but called her Lulu. And now Paul was gone and she was stuck with a Lana, Joanne thought, pulling up the chair beside her older daughter and wondering what it was that she had started out to say. “I had a phone call from your math teacher this afternoon,” she began. Robin said nothing, staring down at the table as intensely as she had earlier studied her dinner. “Mr. Avery isn’t very happy about your work lately. He says that you’ve been skipping classes.”

“I haven’t …” Robin protested, then broke off. “They’re so boring, Mom.”

“I don’t care how boring they are. You have no choice in this.” Joanne carefully chose her next words. “He said you didn’t do very well in your last math test.”

“I failed
my last test.”

“Yes, that’s what he said.”

“Then why didn’t
you
say it? Why don’t you ever say what you mean?”

“I thought I did.”

“You
never
do.”

“Robin, we are not here to discuss my shortcomings. We can do that on another occasion when we have lots of time. We are talking about
you
at the moment. I want to know why you’ve been skipping classes.”

“I told you. They’re boring.”

“That’s not a good enough reason.” Joanne looked around the room, half hoping that someone with a cue card would miraculously appear to feed her her next lines. “You were always very good in math. If you’re having any trouble understanding anything, you should speak to Mr. Avery. He seems like a nice man.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“You’ll have to do better than that, Robin.” Joanne grabbed at some hair that had fallen into her eyes and scrunched it into a tight ball. “Robin …”

“What’d you do to your hair?” the girl asked, suddenly aware of her mother in much the same way that Joanne had earlier noticed Karen Palmer at the club.

Joanne released the hair in her fist and stared upward in defeat. “I don’t know,” she responded wearily. “I was in a hurry after my tennis lesson. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I like it,” Robin told her, obviously sincere.

“Thank you,” Joanne said, marveling at how quickly the young were able to shift gears. “About Mr. Avery …”

“Oh Mom, do we have to?”

“Yes, we have to.”

“I won’t skip any more classes. Okay? I promise.”

“He said that there was no reason for you to have failed that test because you’re a very bright girl. He also said that you haven’t been very attentive in class lately even when you do show up.”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

Joanne said nothing, feeling responsible for her daughter’s state of mind and quietly accepting the blame. They were all of them going through a very bad time, she realized. “It’s only another month and then school’s over. You can hold on that long, can’t you? I’d hate for you to mess up a good year because …” Because we’ve messed up your life, she thought but didn’t say.

“I’ll be a good girl,” Robin told her, and Joanne felt an unpleasant twinge. Would she be the good girl Joanne had always been? Is that what she was bringing Robin up to be? “Can I get ready now? Scott will be here in an hour.”

Joanne nodded, remaining in her seat as she heard Robin scramble up the stairs. She was almost on her feet when she heard Robin’s voice reverberate through the household. “Fatty!” the voice cried shrilly.

“Fucking asshole!” came the quick, bitter response. Joanne lowered her forehead to the table, her arms lifelessly at her sides, as from upstairs came the sound of two doors slamming.

When he finally appeared at the front door, Scott Peterson was a distinct anticlimax. As lean as a sharpened pencil and not very tall, in the manner of many current rock stars, he cut a distinctly unimposing figure. His hair was short and dark blond. There were no purple or orange streaks—was that passé?—and no earrings or eyeshadow. He wore tight white jeans and a bright, oversized
red shirt. His face, while thin and pale, wasn’t any more emaciated than the currently acceptable social norm. He looked more like a local garage mechanic than he did a future Elvis Presley, but then he was barely old enough to remember Elvis Presley.

Joanne tried to imagine a world of young people to whom the name Elvis would be simply another icon from the past, a shadowy curiosity from a time that didn’t concern them, the way Glenn Miller had been for most of her generation.

Turn off that noise, she remembered her father yelling, and Joanne would grumble but do as she was told, silently reassuring herself that she would never get too old to appreciate the genius of Little Richard and Dion and the Belmonts. But at least that was music! That was rock and roll! The kids still listened to some of the oldtimers of her day—Mick Jagger and Elton John. My God, Joanne thought as she stepped forward to be introduced, I’m older than Elton John!

“Scott, this is my mother,” she heard Robin say.

“Hi,” Joanne and the boy said together.

Scott Peterson stared directly at her, but she recognized that he didn’t—couldn’t—see her. What he saw was Robin’s
mother
, not a person at all. He looked through Joanne as if she were invisible, the way young people often look at their elders, the way she, herself, she realized with a slight shock, continued to see those of the previous generation. The image of Eve’s mother—unannounced and uninvited, the way she often appeared in life—suddenly came before Joanne’s eyes.

Scott Peterson continued to stare at her as if he were blind. I’m not really any older than you are, Joanne tried
to communicate with her expression. Inside I’m the same age as you. The difference isn’t with me; it’s in the way you
perceive
me. Again, Eve’s mother bullied her way into the forefront of Joanne’s imagination. How hard it must be for her, Joanne suddenly understood, to be thought of as old, to be categorized and restricted, ultimately discarded. Is that how she would end up? Joanne wondered, the image of Eve’s mother superseded by that of her grandfather, asleep in his bed. Old and alone, in a home or in the way?

“Ahem,” came the loud coughing noise from the foot of the stairs. Lulu stood twirling her long brown hair between nervous fingers.

“This is my sister,” Robin said reluctantly, and then pointedly,
“Lulu.”

“Lana,” came the immediate correction.

“I kind of like Lulu,” Scott said, smiling. “Little Lulu and the Lunettes. Great name for a group.”

Lulu said nothing, her face frozen in admiration.

“We’d better go,” Robin announced, putting a preemptive hand across Scott’s arm.

“I’ll have her home by one, Mrs. Hunter,” Scott assured Joanne without the need for prompting. “Nice meeting you. You too, Lana.”

“Lulu,” the child said quickly.

“You liked him?” Joanne asked her younger daughter after the front door closed. Why was she asking that? As Robin informed her earlier, she already knew the answer.

“He’s neat,” Lulu said, floating through the hall. “Robin doesn’t deserve him.”

“Can’t you ever say anything nice about your sister?”

“She called me a worm.”

“And you called her a f … you know what you called her.”

“There’s a good movie on TV tonight. You want to watch it with me?” Lulu asked, changing the subject.

Joanne followed her daughter downstairs to the family room. Lulu plopped down into the gray leather chair, her feet pushing the matching ottoman a comfortable distance away as Joanne hastily adjusted the vertical blinds on the windows and sliding glass door. It was still light out and would stay that way for perhaps another hour. Still, Joanne didn’t like the idea of people being able to see into the room, to know that she and her daughter were alone in the house. “What’s the movie?” she asked, sitting down on one of the two gray corduroy sofas that stood at right angles to each other in the center of the large room.