The Trouble with Lexie (3 page)

“I have an apartment in Boston, near my office. And the house on the lake is bigger than is reasonable, so it's pretty easy for us to stay there together whenever Ethan makes it home.”

“Well, that sounds like it's working out well.” What else could she say? Lexie thought. And why was he telling her all this?

“I trust you won't bring it up with anyone. Ethan especially.”

“No. Certainly not.” How tediously overprotective. The Ethan Lexie knew was more mature than most boys his age and could easily handle an amicable separation.

“I want to tell him but his mother doesn't want him to know what's what until he's safely away at college.” Mr. Waite spoke with what Lexie had grown to think of as a
California intimacy
—a casualness that made you feel as if you'd known the speaker for years. She often encountered people like this in California.

“Not a problem, Mr. Waite.”

“Call me Daniel.”

“Lexie.”

“Can I call you, Lexie?”

“Yes. Everyone calls me Lexie. Except the students, of course.”

“No. Can I call you. On the phone. Can I see you?”

Lexie's heart thrummed with an unidentifiable emotion—she wasn't sure if she was thrilled or repelled, flattered or insulted. It was like having an itch in the center of your palm—a sensation that can't be located precisely enough to be dealt with. Lexie's eyes darted around. She and Daniel Waite were on the lawn; clumps of people stood near them, murmuring like background actors on stage; Janet Irwin was looking past Don McClear's shoulder, eyeing them as if Lexie were guilty of some sin outlined in the school conduct policy, which Lexie had never read; Ethan and Mrs. Waite were walking toward them from a distance. “I told you already. I'm engaged,” she said shortly. Again, she flapped up her left hand.

He shrugged. “No, I mean to talk about Ethan.”

“Oh.” Lexie hoped the dimming light hid her red cheeks. “His time with me is like his time with any therapist.” She tried to sound professional. Accomplished. Not like someone who had confused an interested parent with someone who wanted to get naked with her. “I'm sworn to confidentiality.”

“I get that.” Daniel Waite touched Lexie's forearm as if to tell her to relax, chill out, back up a bit. “I just want you to know what's going on with me and my wife, and how Ethan's doing at home so that . . . well, because maybe that will help you help him.”

“Okay.” Lexie wished she could go back and erase the moment when she thought he was asking for a date. Wasn't she too old to be embarrassed like this? She looked down to avoid Daniel Waite's face. His white shirt was stiff enough to crack like glass. He wore cuff links. Who wore cuff links these days? People who didn't
launder their own shirts, that's who. Someone like Daniel Waite wouldn't be thinking of romance with Lexie. She was the poorly paid school counselor. And he was a friendly guy—easygoing with that
California intimac
y—who wanted to discuss the fabulous and expansive future of his progeny.

“How about one day next week?” Mr. Waite asked gently.

“That sounds perfect.” Lexie faked confidence. “I'm usually free during second and third periods.”

“Monday? Nine?”

“First period ends at nine. So nine fifteen?”

“Great. I'll meet you at nine fifteen. How about that little café at the Inn on the Lake?”

“You don't want to meet in my office? I have a coffee machine.” Lexie was starting to feel more in control.

“I'm sure it's a great coffee machine, but I can't step foot on this campus without that hunting dog Janet Irwin sniffing me out to serve on a board or fund some film the kid from Iceland wants to make about the suicide rate back home.”

Lexie smiled. Axel Valsson had made a movie last year about suicide in Iceland. It was shot in black and white, had a deafening electric guitar sound track, and was melodramatic to the point of comedy. Dot and Lexie had had a few good laughs over it.

“You were the one who funded that thing?”

“Yup. And I had a forty-five-thousand-dollar visit to the men's room today when I bumped into Janet and she talked me into subsidizing the Russian exchange program.” Daniel grinned and Lexie laughed. After three years at Ruxton, she had acclimated to a world where the asking of a check for forty-five thousand dollars involved as little and as much coercion as Lexie and her best friend,
Betsy Simms, had used at age ten selling Girl Scout cookies outside the entrance of Ralph's.

“Okay, I'll meet you at the Inn on the Lake.” Lexie had been there only once. The place was so expensive it was as if the owners weren't aware they were in the middle of the woods where most people ordered their “good” clothes from the L.L. Bean catalogue.

Daniel Waite turned to watch his wife and son approach. Lexie watched with him. Mrs. Waite's face was open and warm. She looked like a woman who took care of her skin but wasn't freezing it, cutting it, or injecting it with liquefied rubber. She had to be around the same age as Lexie's mother, if not older, but looked many years younger than Mitzy. This wasn't the face of divorce or separation. It was the face of a comfortable, cozy, loving life. Maybe she was the one who had wanted to end the marriage. Maybe she was done being a wife.

“Hey, Miss James,” Ethan said, and he dropped his head a little as if to make himself smaller. Ethan was over six feet tall, maybe an inch shorter than his dad.

“Hey, Ethan.” Lexie directed her smile at Mrs. Waite.

“Jen Waite,” Mrs. Waite said, and stuck out her hand.

“Lexie James,” Lexie said, shaking it.

“Ethan said he loves talking to you during his sessions.” Jen patted Lexie's hand.

“Mom.” Ethan rolled his eyes. “I'll meet you guys in the gym. See you Wednesday, Miss James.” Ethan jogged off. His mother watched him go. Lexie watched, too. She could imagine that if you created a human like that, actually grew it in your body and then pushed it out a ridiculously small hole; if you fed it and shuffled it around like a hockey puck you were keeping from the net for years
and years, you'd feel pretty great watching it simply move like that. Precision, strength, fearlessness. Like his dad.

Lexie looked up. Daniel Waite was staring at her again. He must be a starer. Jen hooked her arm into Daniel's.

“It was so nice to meet you both.” Lexie deliberately looked at Mrs. Waite when she spoke. “I have to run to my office and get some paperwork done. If you ever need anything, please call me.”

They shook hands and Lexie hurried off. It wasn't until she was in her office, the thick oak door shut firmly, that she realized she was feeling shaky, her stomach like a shifting bubble of mercury. Lexie thought of how Mitzy used to smoke a joint at the kitchen table while staring at a lava lamp. Her mother had found the thing at a garage sale, a relic of the '70s, and bought it specifically for the purpose of getting high and staring at it.

“See, try this,” she had told Lexie, as she pushed a bong into her daughter's hand. “And then you look at this thing and
wala,
it's like you're hypnotized or something.” Lexie was twelve. She had watched the red bubble in the glass beaker but handed the bong back to her mother and held her breath as best she could each time Mitzy lit up.

Lexie dropped into the Windsor chair at her office desk. Her head felt fuzzy with static. It had been so long since she'd suffered panic attacks, she thought she was done with them. Had left them behind with red-pepper-flake acne and fingernails chewed into ragged little claws. “Accept, acknowledge, face, and float,” she said firmly. Those were the four steps toward controlling anxiety and OCD that she'd learned at Tufts.

At the time, the attacks took her completely by surprise, like getting hit in the face with a frying pan. She'd managed so much
so well on her own: college, summers in Los Angeles when she waitressed to pay the rent, getting herself into grad school fully funded by scholarships, grants, and barely any loan money. And then, six months into her master's program, Lexie felt like she was dying. Like she had previously been tethered to some mothership that had kept her bobbing in place and then one day, without notice, she'd been cut free. It was a terrifying aloneness. Lexie had suffered quietly, dreading each class, where she sat in fear of vomiting or passing out as she walked to a desk. Eventually she made it to the counseling center where she was prescribed the four steps, 0.5 milligrams of Klonopin, peanut butter, mega B vitamins, complex carbohydrates, yoga, and sleep.

After twice-a-week sessions and behavioral therapy (she went to every class even if she thought she might throw up in the middle of it), Lexie floated her way through graduate school and eventually eased herself off the Klonopin while keeping up with the other habits. Since then, she'd been carrying a bottle of the pills in her purse for episodes like this—though an episode like this hadn't popped up in over three years. Surely the prescription had expired, but Lexie didn't quite believe the pharmaceutical companies with their expiration dates. These were drugs. Chemicals. Didn't that stuff last forever? Linger in the drinking water? Change the sexual anatomy of sea life?

Lexie grabbed her sack-like purse and dug around until she found the bottle. The label was merely a gray-white smear. She popped off the top and swallowed one pill, then poured the others out into her hand and counted them. Twenty-five. If this was the start of a season of anxiety, she had twenty-five days to get over it. Assuming she took the recommended dose.

L
EXIE STARED AT THE PAPERWORK ON HER DESK. SHE WAS FLOATY
and formless from the Klonopin and couldn't properly focus; the Waites played on repeat in her brain. Lexie was never jealous of the Ruxton students, but she often reflected on how lucky most of them were. Ethan Waite was a perfect example: A kid whose biggest gripe with his mother might be that she complimented the school counselor in front of him. As for his father, what could Ethan Waite ever say to impugn Daniel Waite?

Lexie's father, Bert, had been a bartender at a cinder block pub called Swallow at the Hollow. It was a name that had confused Lexie for years; she had always seen the bird when she said those words, not the bobbing Adam's apple of a drinker in action. Bert usually didn't get home from Swallow at the Hollow until three in the morning. He'd walk into the apartment, turn the TV up loud, and lie on the couch and smoke cigarettes until he fell asleep. When she was little, Lexie would come out of her room at the sound of the TV and lie on the couch with her father, falling back
to sleep to the smell of menthol Kools and booze, and the blaring, whiney sound of an old movie. As she got older, Lexie stopped going out to join her father, but she would listen to the TV, trying to see in her mind images that went with the sound. When she got up for school, the TV was still on and her father was always asleep, a cigarette butt either hanging from his open mouth like a giant white cold sore or sitting on the edge of the beer can he used for an ashtray. A small pile of ash often sat beside his fallen-cake-looking face, and at least six or seven other empty beers cans would be strewn across the flattened brown carpet (no more plush than a car's floor mat). Lexie always picked up the beer cans and put them in a paper bag that she left in front of the door of their neighbor, Mr. Gordon. Mr. Gordon cut the cans apart with a pair of thick, beak-tipped scissors. He used the aluminum to make mobiles of flying birds and beady-eyed bats that he sold at the flea market on Sundays. In Lexie's mind, the idea that the cans were used all over again, in a way that allowed Mr. Gordon to pay his rent, made up for the sheer number of them.

A few days after Lexie's fifteenth birthday, Bert went to work and never returned. When Lexie asked her mother where her father was, Mitzy answered, “Hell if I know and hell if I care.” Mitzy had been only seventeen when she'd had Lexie. She and Bert rarely slept in the bedroom together, and although there were times when her parents made it unfortunately clear that they were about to have sex, Lexie had no recollection of ever seeing them kiss or hold hands.

Lexie and Betsy Simms rode their bikes to Swallow at the Hollow a couple nights after Bert's disappearance. Lexie was told by Randy, the owner, that her dad had quit and said he was leav
ing town. The rumor was that he had moved to Reno. That night, when Lexie reported this to her mother, Mitzy suggested Lexie take a bus up to Reno to live with Bert.

“But I don't even know if he's there,” Lexie had said.

“Well, Ronnie's moving in tomorrow and there isn't room for the three of us.” Mitzy produced a guilty, pinched smile and crushed out her cigarette on a dinner plate.

An hour later, when Lexie told this to Betsy, Betsy suggested that she move in with them. The Simmses had a two-story house with four bedrooms and only one kid. Mr. Simms called Lexie The Twin since she and Betsy did everything together and even looked alike with their blue eyes and charcoal eyebrows.

“You think your parents would mind?” Lexie had asked anxiously. Betsy had yelled in a muffled voice (hand cupped over the mouthpiece, maybe, but Lexie could hear),
Mom! Lexie's mom's moving a boyfriend into the apartment and her dad disappeared, can she come and live with us?
There was silence as Mrs. Simms must have made sure Betsy obscured their conversation. Betsy came back on the phone and said, “Yeah, she's putting sheets on the guest bed. She said you can stay until you go away to college, and if you go to Ohlone College you can stay until you graduate from there.” Lexie's throat had throbbed with embarrassment and gratitude.

When Mitzy claimed she couldn't come to Lexie's wedding because she couldn't afford a plane ticket, the Simmses bought her one as a gift to Lexie. The only reason Lexie accepted this gift was to save herself the embarrassment of having to explain why her mother wasn't there. An absentee father was nothing to explain—it was something people naturally understood. An absentee mother, however, made as much sense to most people as cannibalism.

Lexie pushed aside her paperwork and googled Daniel Waite. As expected, he showed up at Museum of Fine Arts fund-raisers, a who's who list of Boston lawyers, and a few articles in the
Boston Globe
. There was also a profile in
Forbes,
and a cover interview with the
Harvard Law Review
, of which he had been editor when he was a student. In addition, there were countless mentions of him in newspapers from the
New York Times
to the
Globe and Mail
in Canada
.

She was about to google Jen Waite when her office phone rang. It was Peter.

“I thought you were going to get out of there as soon as possible,” he said.

“I was, but I stopped in my office and did some paperwork.” Lexie squinted and gave herself a little slap on the forehead. She'd never had to lie to Peter before.

“I'm so glad I never have to do paperwork.” Peter lived outside the world of paperwork. His father, an accountant, did his taxes. Peter never saved receipts or filed for anything, not even a rebate when he bought a new sander.

“Wait. I didn't do paperwork. I was going to but I ended up on the computer, googling one of the parents. I'm sorry I lied.”

Peter laughed. “Well, that was a waste of a lie.”

“Can we not count it since I confessed right away?” Lexie asked. “Can we say that we've still never lied to each other?”

“Yeah, that one definitely doesn't count. You think I haven't googled everyone I've sold a guitar to?”

“Okay, so we're holding strong!” Lexie felt buoyant, unburdened. “I'm going to leave right this second.” She erased her history and shut down her computer while she spoke. “I'll pick up a surprise dinner on the way home.”

“I thought you had dinner with the families. The orphan table.”

“I did, but you didn't have dinner, did you?”

“No.”

Lexie knew that would be his answer. Peter usually only ate if someone else reminded him to, or handed him something. When he cooked, it was because Lexie had asked him to. He knew how to use a Crock-Pot, and whether it was a humid summer day or they were snowed in like a couple adrift on an ice floe, every meal Peter made was in that one pot.

“Should we do a guitar lesson when you get home?” Peter had been teaching Lexie guitar for months. Lexie had no natural talent or inclination, but she went along with the lessons because she knew Peter would love it if one day they could play together.

“I'm kinda tired, babe. Can we do it tomorrow?”

“Whatever you want.”

They hung up. Lexie picked up her purse and rushed out the door. She took the long way to her car, walking along the pond and avoiding the spired, Gothic castle of a dorm in which Ethan Waite lived. At the end of these events parents could always be found near the dorms, lingering as they said good-bye to their kids.

Lexie's seventeen-year-old brown Saab was parked alone. After three days of parents' weekend, most of the faculty who didn't live on campus had fled as soon as dinner had ended. Teaching kids in a boarding school was great—there was an intimacy about it that you didn't get in day schools. But doing it with the parents around was a whole other social skill. For some, it took the same kind of effort as, say, pretending to be in love, or sitting through a monotonous three-hour play. A silent, ruminating exhaustion.

Lexie threw her purse onto the passenger seat and turned the key. As had happened a couple days ago, the engine wheezed, sputtered, and coughed. Saabs, especially ones from the previous century, were expensive to repair. With Lexie and Peter's savings being spent on the upcoming wedding there wasn't a dime for car-care. Lexie waited a minute as if the car needed to come around to starting in its own time. She spaced out in that Klonopin-headed way and almost forgot what she was waiting for. And then, as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, she blinked back into alertness and turned the key again. The car started. Lexie pumped her fist and gave a little
woot
. Now that the anxiety had been quelled and the lie had been cleared, she was feeling nearly giddy. It was almost like she'd forgotten the panic had even happened.

THE PARKING LOT AT JAMBOREE RIBS WAS FULL. LEXIE DOUBLE-PARKED
behind a pickup with the license plate
EAT RIBS
. She assumed the truck belonged to someone who worked there, if not the owner. No need to worry about blocking them in.

Smoking indoors was illegal in Massachusetts but they did it here anyway. Smoke sat in the carpeted room like a sweetened fog—barbecue mixed with tobacco. Patsy Cline's “Crazy” played out of fuzzy speakers, making even the music sound smoky. Lexie went to the cash register where a girl with bright blue eye shadow stood, staring and waiting. “Can I place an order to go?”

The girl slowly pulled out a greasy, laminated menu. “We got everything but the Billy Basket.”

“What's the Billy Basket?” Scarcity bred desire in Lexie.

“A basket made of onion rings and filled with chili fries.”

“Holy moly.” Lexie laughed, relieved that it wasn't something she or Peter would want. Would the cuff link–wearing Daniel Waite ever eat something like a Billy Basket? Probably not. His stomach was as flat as his son's. His jaw was cut to the bone.

Lexie placed her order and waited near the register. She watched as groups of two or three moseyed up to pay their bill. No one moved too fast. Maybe the ribs were laced with some kind of hypnagogic.

When she finally had her bag of food, Lexie hurried out to the double-parked car. She put the bag on the floor of the passenger seat in case the grease soaked through, and then turned the key. The engine sputtered and died. Lexie waited and watched two tall men in cowboy boots amble to a truck and roar away. She turned the key again. Nothing.

Lexie picked up her iPhone and played Yahtzee. She had downloaded the game shortly after she had started working at Ruxton, where she found herself entrapped in twice-weekly meetings that had the same prickling effect as sitting in completely stopped city traffic. Try to remain undistracted through an hour-long discussion of the school library's computers' printing system. Try not to roll your eyes when the lacrosse coach talks about school spirit and the importance of faculty attending games—even, and especially, away games. Try to sit through a ninety-minute debate about school uniform policy and the ever-expanding definition of a white button-down. Is cream
white
? Is the palest yellow
white
? Lexie couldn't even force herself to care.

Since her engagement to Peter, Lexie had been playing the game more and more compulsively. Every task connected to the wedding demanded a certain amount of meeting/traffic-like wait
ing; Yahtzee was the plug that filled the gaping hole of each wait. Lexie had even started making decisions according to what she thought of as the Yahtzee Gods. The wedding cake she'd ordered (vanilla cream with a vanilla cream icing) had been decided by the Yahtzee Gods when a roll of five aces pushed Lexie's score over three hundred and into the space in which the chocolate cake was a clear and decisive loser. Lately, Lexie had been playing so voraciously that she'd devised a system that brought her repeatedly high scores, scores she insisted on showing Amy (who usually refused to divert her attention to Lexie) during meetings at Ruxton where Lexie concealed the phone under her notebook.

Lexie glanced up at the
EAT RIBS
license plate, then looked back down at the phone and worked her thumbs with the same half-paralyzed fervor as the old women she'd once seen lined up on stools in Las Vegas. (Those women had reminded her of giant mushrooms that had grown there—their eyes more lifeless than the spinning bars on the machine six inches from their faces.) When she ended on a low score, Lexie closed the game and dropped the phone onto the passenger seat. She tried the starter again. And again. Once more. And then a fourth and fifth time. Nothing happened.

Lexie called Peter. She wanted this problem to not be hers. Weren't nights like this half the reason to get married?

“I've got your dinner from Jamboree all hot and ready but my car won't start.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Maybe you can come down here and figure it out? Give it a jump?”

“If it's doing that whining thing again it's not the battery. At least I don't think it is.”

Lexie turned the key again. “Yeah, it's doing that whining thing.”

“Why don't I drive down, pick you up, we'll leave the car there and deal with it in the morning.”

“I'm double-parked. We can't leave it.” Lexie couldn't help but hone in on the picture in her head: Daniel and Jen Waite cruising down the highway in a sleek, six-month-old German car that would never, ever, not start while double-parked outside a rib joint.

“What'd you get me to eat?”

“Ribs. Biscuits. Cole slaw.”

“Dang. Well, call Triple A and I'll drive down there, eat the ribs in the car, and keep you company while we wait for the tow.”

Lexie's gut tightened. She didn't want to wait for a tow. She didn't want to be a person who owned a car that needed to be towed. The life of towed cars, and cars running out of gas on the center lane of a six-lane freeway, and dented-door cars with windows that were stuck open, and cars with the
check engine
light continually on, and cars with a rearview mirror hanging from a wire like a loose tooth, was exactly what she thought she'd left behind in childhood. Lexie knew it was entirely irrational, but she was starting to feel as if this whole bad car situation were entirely Peter's fault.