After Perfect (15 page)

“How come there's only one picture of me in the whole house?” my father asked my mother, who was preparing the salad for dinner.

“I don't know, Tom,” Mom said. “Why
is
there only one picture of you?” She challenged him, wanting him to answer his own question. But when Chloe and I entered the kitchen, they dropped it.

That night, I didn't ask my father about prison. I didn't ask him about my credit. I didn't ask him about anything. I felt frozen from the jolt of his sudden presence, the tension between the words he exchanged with Mom. This was his night of “freedom.” But all I remember from that dinner was watching him—the way he chewed his steak, sipped his red wine—wondering how in those moments he measured freedom in between the hours and the days that he had been locked up. He would soon be locked up again—trapped—wondering if he, or any of us, even knew what freedom meant.

I was staring at the champagne and crudités on the table, her mother's sundress, and her father's bow tie. I'd flown back to DC with Josh for a high school friend's twenty-first birthday party, held on the top floor of a chic restaurant, and her parents were sipping bottles of Pellegrino while discussing the Duke University lacrosse team rape case. I hadn't kept in touch with most of my friends from high school, but they knew that my father had gone to prison. I never spoke about the debt, or what was happening at home with my mother and Chloe. I had the steel Tiffany watch that my father had given me clasped around my wrist, and Josh on my arm to shield me—insecure from the thought of any of them finding out.

I suppose I needed to go back there to prove to everyone that I was fine. I thought I was; so sure I was moving in the right direction. But while I sat there at the round table drinking champagne and listening to my old friends talk of their internships on Capitol Hill, at think tanks, law firms, and investment banks, their wild and hilarious stories of frat parties and sorority balls, I was beginning to see all that I had taken for granted: my education, my background, my parents' connections to the world at large. And I wondered if there was an answer to understanding privilege without having to lose everything, without having the rug ripped out from beneath you. How to become conscious of it when it's all you know, or if privilege is destined to circulate and perpetuate itself insidiously down through generation after generation—an inevitable doomed and stagnant fact of life where change within oneself and, therefore, the surrounding community, is just not possible.

I fiddled with the clasp of my watch and had the sudden urge to take it off and hide it, bury it, smash it, feeling like a fraud. But instead, I kept playing the part—good manners, looks, possessions, and charm—while asking myself: Which was it? Was I from a wealthy family? A poor family? Did it matter? For the first time, I felt the gap, lost in some kind of a divide within myself, not knowing how to be, squirming in my seat, “Pass the champagne, please, thank you,” turning to Josh and kissing him on the cheek, hoping no one would notice how uncomfortable I was. Through my new pair of eyes, my friends appeared to have everything, when before, I'd never even noticed. Were they aware of it? And it was that word again:
everything
. What did it even mean? I knew only one thing: I had taken everything I ever knew for granted, but I could never say it out loud. I couldn't admit it to myself—and certainly to no one else, not even Josh. I wanted to go back. I wanted to close my eyes and wake up in my bedroom and start over.

I
took Josh with me the next day. The foreclosure sign was still stuck in the grass, now tall, uncut, and sprouting weeds. It was muggy outside, and the swirling hiss of cicadas grew louder as Josh and I hopped out of the car. It had been seventeen years since the ugly insects merged from underground. I was only three years old and in my car seat when I saw them for the first time. My mother was pregnant with Chloe, and Mara insisted she carry them with us wherever we went, like pets. It drove my mother crazy. These giant bugs were everywhere: in between car seats, in our shoes, and crawling on our sippy cups.

We parked down the street for fear of running into any old neighbors. Lois, the mother of the boy who tried to blow up our house with a Coke can, was the neighborhood gossip, strolling the streets with her pet ferret on her shoulder. I wanted to be spared the humiliation of running into her. I looked down the street until the coast was clear, grabbed hold of Josh's hand, and led him up the stone walkway. It was more chipped and loose than I remembered it to be from years of hopscotch and jump rope. Josh stopped in the middle of the walkway and looked up at the estate. “Wow, you grew up here?”

It was bigger than I remembered. Overgrown ivy weaved around each window in between shutters, and along the gutter, and the once white Corinthian columns framing the front door were now faded, chipped, and weathered, paint peeling away with the wind. In my mind, it all still belonged to me, not the bank. Every brick, every stone. I turned the knob of the front door to see if maybe it was open. No luck. Josh stood back while I pressed my face up to the beveled glass. The house was empty, even the dining room chandelier had been ripped from the ceiling, loose wires poked down toward the floor. It must have sold at the estate sale, and I wondered how it was for my father packing up the house all alone. I wondered which door he walked out of on the last day. The front? The back? The garage? I needed to get inside the house. I wasn't leaving until I did.

“Follow me.” I grabbed Josh, remembering the garage doors. My parents always kept them unlocked, even when we went to Nantucket for the summer. Josh and I shuffled down the green hill to the three-car garage beneath the house. A frequent act I did in high school when I'd come home late from a party after forgetting my keys. I could see through the windows that the alarm was off.

I yanked on the garage door handle. It was locked.

“Oh, wait.” I searched my purse.

“What are you doing?” Josh asked. I could see the paranoia growing in him as he looked left and then right.

“My key. I still have my key.”

“Yeah, right. You don't think the locks have been changed?”

“It's worth a shot,” I said with a shrug.

I pulled out the key, dangling it at him. “I haven't taken it off my keychain yet.” What was I supposed to do with such a key? The key to every childhood memory I desperately wanted to hold on to? Just throw it in the trash? Give it away with everything else? By holding on, I could at least assert some form of control over something, over the nightmares, the dreams, the memories. I ran back to the front door. Josh kept watch behind me. I stuck the key in the keyhole, and with a quick
click
to the right, the front door popped open.

“Holy shit.” Josh laughed. “It worked.”

I was home.

I
t was hot and musky, the odor reminiscent of the way it smelled when we arrived home from Nantucket at the end of August. It was as if the air, our air, had been trapped for all these years, waiting for the right moment to be released. I inhaled as much as my lungs could take. Josh strolled ahead of me through the foyer, taking in the high ceilings, crown molding, and arched doorways. I had never noticed those details before. I followed him through the loggia, the marble corridor with a dozen French doors still wrapped in lace curtains that opened up to the limestone balcony and our garden full of weeping willow trees.

“This is where we used to dance with Mom and slide in our feety pajamas,” I told him.

The pink rug still covered the front hall staircase. I walked Josh through the vacant living room and into my father's library. His entire encyclopedia collection was still in its alphabetical order, abandoned in the mahogany bookshelves to the right of the fireplace, covered in dust. I sat on the floor and opened one of the bottom cabinets along the wall where he kept his BusyBox documents. It was empty. Then I opened the cabinet next to it where he kept our arts and crafts. I peered into the empty cabinets, making sure no memory was left behind. I thought about Kate, my best friend in middle school. I remembered the first time she came over for a playdate.

“Is your dad a judge? Is he in the Mafia?” She was the daughter of two psychiatrists.

“He's a lawyer,” I told her.

“He sounds like a mystery man.” I had never thought about it before.

Josh walked over and said, “Let's keep going,” sensing I was on the edge of a spiral. I was putting together the pieces.

“Show me your bedroom.”

It looked exactly the way it did before I left, except empty. The walls a faded yellow, and my blue and white striped rug was still there. I showed Josh where I keyed my name into the edge of my bathroom sink when I was eleven, and the window perpendicular to the window of Mara's bedroom, where when we got in trouble we'd talk to each other, sometimes throwing CDs back and forth.

I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. The sun was setting and thunder rumbled in the distance, silencing the cicadas. A summer storm was coming. I closed my eyes and asked myself, what if none of this had happened? What if I was just in a terrible nightmare? I wanted to open my eyes and be sitting on my floral bedspread staring at my dresser against the wall, my bulletin board hanging next to it with my prom corsages and my bumper sticker collection, and I wanted to hear Popsicle, our yellow cockatiel, chirping in the kitchen, and my father banging around the pots and pans preparing for Sunday morning pancakes. There were holes growing inside of me with every passing memory.

Josh wrapped his arms around me and then let go, grazing his hand along my neck, his thumb caressing the bottom of my jaw. He kissed my forehead, then my cheek, my eyes, my nose, my lips. His eyes never left mine after we undressed each other, and I had to remember to breathe, breathe, as he swayed into me, my bare back against the dusty rug, the rain suddenly showering like the pitter-patter of stars falling from the sky. And I held on to him tighter this time, with my eyes open, and our lips loose, exchanging heavy breaths, louder and then softer each time the carpet burned my back. The room grew dark with no electricity, we were sweating and laughing, and he came and I came, relieving me from all of my memory as though each hole in me now was just a blip in time.

Suddenly a loud bang jolted us.

“What was that?” I whispered.

“It sounded like a door slamming.” Josh reached for his boxer shorts.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I grabbed my scattered clothes, getting dressed as fast as possible, using our cell phones as light.

“If we get arrested, it's all your fault,” Josh grumbled.

“What is your problem?”

“I'm just saying. This was your idea.”

We tiptoed down the hallway and into Chloe's old room, the windows of which overlooked the street. I saw a familiar car parked out front. A blue Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“Wait, I think I know that car,” I said.

Holding our breath, we tiptoed down the front staircase, when I heard distant laughter coming from the basement.

“This is so fucking scary,” Josh whispered. “We are
so
going to jail.”

“Shut up!” I whispered back.

We finally made it to the front door, when suddenly the back door opposite us swung open, and crashed into the wall.

I spun around. A body stumbled into the hallway, shining a flashlight on my face.

I squinted with my hand above my eyes. “Chloe?” She wore an old bikini top and shorts and held a Miller Lite in her other hand.

“Dude!” she said, just as shocked as I was. Then she took a swig of beer. “What are
you
doing here?”

Her ex-boyfriend and a group of his friends came around behind her, reeking of cigarettes and pot.

“What am
I
doing here? What the fuck are
you
doing here?”

I had forgotten that Chloe would be in DC visiting her best friend from high school and that our trips would overlap a few days. Given the way we hardly communicated, it wasn't surprising we each forgot.

Chloe pulled out a gold Baldwin key and dangled it in front of me like a carrot. Stumbling forward, she bragged, “I still have my key.”

I paused for a moment. Of course she did. So did I.

C
hloe and I sat at the grand piano, pretending to be concert pianists, when my mother turned on the surround sound.

“Walkin' on, walkin' on bro-ken glass . . .”

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I could smell the macaroni and cheese and hot dogs cooking in the kitchen.

My father was off flying his airplane for the afternoon.

Mara was in the family room, wearing her headgear and reading
The Baby-Sitters Club
.

Annie Lennox's “Walking on Broken Glass” blared through each room. I could see my mother from where I was sitting, dancing in the kitchen as she grilled our hot dogs.

“Mom! Turn it down!” Mara cried from the couch. My mother didn't care; she turned it up and kept dancing. Then she ran out into the loggia to find Chloe and me, pretending to pound on the piano keys to the song's rhythm.

My mother picked up my red feather boa, threw it around her neck, and then pulled me up from the piano bench to dance with her.

We strutted across the marble floor together, doing twists and turns. Chloe slipped into our mother's red high heels, which we'd stolen from her closet earlier, and as the song crescendoed, my mother grabbed Chloe's hands and sang at the top of her lungs. Mara came into the loggia, and my mother tossed the book out of her hands and pulled her in to dance with us.

“I'm living in an empty room with all the windows smashed . . .”

Mara let go, and sang, in full headgear and pointing her finger with attitude while I sang at the highest pitch possible. And then the four of us threw our hands up in the air—free, singing, slipping and sliding—like superstars.