Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (26 page)

I glanced at Mike during the first of these songs. He was sitting forward, drumming his fingers on the table. When he noticed my gaze, he sat back, embarrassed. Then I looked at Guy, and his expression was also private and intense.

These were two men whose offspring were graduating without debt, and they were deeply, silently proud. Neither Guy’s big house in the Hamptons nor Mike’s flashy little car meant to them what this did. They had been able to provide their children these educational opportunities.

I touched Mike’s arm. “You did good,” I whispered.

I would never have done that if Claudia had come.

Everything was easier, more fun, because Claudia wasn’t around. I was Jeremy’s mom; Mike was Jeremy’s dad. Some of the people we were celebrating with probably had no idea that we were divorced.

During the recognition ceremony, Jeremy, to our surprise, got a big community-service award. Many pre-meds do their community service by working with kids who are in the hospital. Jeremy had instead planned activities for their siblings, culminating with a Games Day that pitted, in a noncompetitive way, the siblings of the fourth-floor patients against the siblings of the fifth-floor patients. The professor giving the award cited how much that had done for the morale of the families and the patients.

Mike drew close to me and whispered, “That has your name written all over it. Was it your idea?”

I nodded, and as we watched Jeremy walk up to get the award, Mike drew my hand through his arm. “You did good too,” he said.

He would never have done that if Claudia had been there.

I had to wonder . . . what would things have been like if I hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t meet Claudia? Would we have gone on
forever as we had the first three years, not together but not really apart either, with him thinking of our old house as his family home and me still making his favorite dishes on Sunday night?

It would have been easy, but it wouldn’t have been good. Lurking beneath the comfort would have been too many unresolved issues, too much anger. I’d needed to get a place of my own; he’d needed a relationship with someone who was very different from me. Otherwise we would have simply been marching in place.

But we weren’t doing that. We were moving forward. I was, I realized, not angry at him anymore.

I wasn’t angry at Mike. This was amazing, incredible. It had probably happened gradually, but all of a sudden I felt as if it were the first day of spring, the wonderful day when you can go outside without a heavy coat.

What a relief it was, not to feel so negative about Mike, the man I had once loved, and to know that he now felt the same way about me. Jeremy was not the only one graduating this weekend. There ought to be diplomas for this too—“The Regents of the University of Marriage and Divorce hereby certify that you are no longer angry.”

As we were ripping open the bags of chips, Guy said, “And now our resident fun mom will get us started on a game.”

He was looking at me. I thought for a moment and suggested charades, something that would have been hard to make fun for Finney.

We divided into teams, and the game soon became extremely competitive, with people putting in obscure, lengthy titles. Our team, which had its share of English majors, offered up
Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World,
and the guy who got it pretended to vomit in hopes of getting the word
hurl
out of them as a soundalike for
earl.
And since he was a young man, and Annie was Annie, he chose her to pretend to throw up on.

“Not on me,” she squealed and shoved him aside. “If you’ve got to hurl on anyone, do it on Darcy. She doesn’t mind.”

As soon as she said “hurl,” he pointed excitedly at her.

“Girl . . . curl . . . burl,” his team shouted. “Earl.”

Rose was on my team, but the teams were big enough that she was sitting close enough to Annie to speak to her. “When on earth did you ‘hurl’ on Darcy?”

“Is it ‘earl’?” someone asked. The player nodded vigorously. “It has to have ‘earl’ in it.”

“
Chesterfield’s Letters,
” someone else shrieked. “He was an earl.”

“At Stone-Chase,” Annie said. “During the Spring Fling, when—” she stopped.

“But you said it was twenty words,” complained one of the players. “How can it be twenty words?”

The team started laboriously figuring out which words they knew and which they didn’t. Rose leaned forward to speak to me. “What is Annie talking about?”

“You need to let her tell you,” I said.

Annie was looking at us, worried. She got up. Her team was protesting that that title couldn’t have twenty words, and the English majors on our team were insisting that that was the real title. No one noticed as Rose and I followed Annie into Annie’s bedroom.

“You didn’t tell her?” Annie asked.

I shook my head. “Zack said that he promised you I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, but—” Either she had forgotten the promise or had assumed that I wouldn’t keep it.

“What’s this all about?” Rose asked; her voice was stern.

Annie started hesitantly, then ended up telling the story of her misdeeds with some dignity.

Rose was almost speechless. “You were so drunk that Zack called Darcy?”

Annie nodded.

“She might not have been as drunk as Zack thought,” I said. “She did vomit, but she never passed out. She was never nonresponsive.”

Rose ignored me. “And that’s why you wanted to stay for the extra day?”

Annie again nodded.

“Annie, we will not tolerate your lying to us.”

“I didn’t lie,” she protested. “I said that I wanted to stay because the girls I was with were really nice and I really liked the place—and that was true.”

“But you left out a lot. Darcy having to drive up there, your spending the night with her, Zack taking you to Baltimore . . . Annie, leaving aside the drinking, that’s a huge imposition on other people.”

“I know,” Annie mumbled.

The door burst open. “Annie! Annie!” It was one of her teammates. “We got it, but we’re filing a protest. Come on out.”

Annie looked at her mother.

Rose made a little gesture with her hands. “We can’t deal with this here. It’s not fair to the others. We’ll talk about it at home.”

Desperately relieved, Annie left the room, carefully easing the door almost shut.

Rose and I were alone.

“Darcy, why didn’t you tell me?”

I didn’t have a good answer to that. I sank down on the bed. I was tired, my drink had been too strong, and my medication had worn off ages ago.

“You must know how worried we are about her, how we feel that we know nothing about what she’s doing or feeling . . .”

I had been so happy a few hours earlier, so relieved to be without the burden of anger, but now it was like my mother was talking to me:
Darcy, why?
She would have been bewildered, disappointed, hurt. And I would not have known how to answer. I would not have been able to explain myself. As Annie had said yesterday, there was this little nugget inside you that you could never explain.

“They asked me not to tell.” That was all I could say in my defense.

“Don’t you know that I would have protected you? I wouldn’t have let them know you told me. I would have figured out some other way that I might have gotten the information. Why couldn’t you trust me?”

“I don’t know . . . but honestly, Rose, it didn’t feel like a trust issue.”

“It seems like one to me.” She sat down on the other bed. “It’s bigger than just this one thing, Darcy. You don’t trust anyone, do you? Not really. You never talk about yourself. You’re so afraid that someone will feel sorry for you that you act like nothing ever bothers you. You’re always making me read between the lines, trying to figure you out.”

“No . . . no,” I protested. I didn’t want to be difficult. She had felt betrayed by so many women—her sister, Jill Allyn, all the
women in her neighborhood who had stopped being her friend when she was of no use to their careers. I had wanted to be the one who made that up to her. I had wanted to be her sister, her friend.

“I give up, Darcy.” She sounded more exasperated than resigned. “It’s too hard. I know you’ll change sheets, load the dishwasher, make corn-free ketchup, but ultimately I can pay people to do that. I need more than that from a friend. Managing you, reading you, anticipating you, never having you say what you feel—I could accept that because I believed that we had the mother-to-mother thing, that we would help each other do what was right for the kids.”

There was nothing she could have said that would have hurt me more. Nothing. I loved her children, each one of them— Finney, so sweet and vulnerable; Cami, so determined to do what was right; and Annie . . . honestly, of them all, I think I loved Annie the most. She was as vulnerable as Finney. She wanted to love and be loved on a level beyond that of a cognitively disabled eight-year-old. Like Cami, she wanted to do the right thing, but Cami had tasks a person could do. Annie had set impossible tasks for herself; she wanted to save her parents.

I knew what it was like to have a perfect older sibling. I knew what it was like to feel that you didn’t understand yourself,

Then suddenly, without thinking, without being aware of having an impulse that I might need to control, I blurted it out. “Rose, have you ever had Annie tested?”

“Tested? Tested for
what
?”

“Oh, God, no, I didn’t mean that, not STDs, but for learning issues. Don’t you think there’s a chance that she has ADD?”

Was I saying this? Was this me talking? I hate people who make amateur diagnoses, who once they find out that someone in their family has ADD, alcoholism, codependency, anything, they
start seeing it everywhere . . . and they don’t shut up about it either.

“Of course,” Rose answered. Her voice was tight. “We took her to an educational psychologist when she was in fifth grade. She underperforms, that’s all. She isn’t motivated.”

“But, Rose, some of the tests have changed, they’ve gotten better, and people are understanding girls more and more—”

“Don’t you think it breaks my heart to see Annie squandering her potential when she has so much and Finney doesn’t? Don’t you think I’ve done everything I possibly could? Are you saying that I care more about this wedding than the welfare of my other child?”

I had not said one word about the wedding. I hadn’t even been thinking about it. But that’s what Rose had heard. She thought I was judging her for spending so much time on the wedding.

What had I done? After months and months of keeping my mouth shut, why had I opened it now?

I know that you’re supposed to say that ADD or any other disability is something that you “have,” not something that you “are.” But right now that seemed a meaningless distinction. ADD wasn’t something I had; it wasn’t a new handbag. It was who I was.

I should have never spoken now. This was the first time Rose had traveled any distance without Finney. She had to be worrying about him constantly. At a time like that, she didn’t want to hear about what she had failed to do for another one of her children. My timing had been terrible.

Nonetheless, I did believe that I was right: Annie should be reevaluated in light of the improved understanding of various conditions in girls.

I stood up. “I’m sorry, Rose. I really am. I was wrong not to call you, and I certainly didn’t mean to criticize the way you’re raising Annie. She’s a wonderful girl.”

Rose said the right thing—that she knew I meant well, etc. etc—but she wasn’t looking at me. She was not accepting my apology.

Rose was leaving as soon as the ceremony was over, not even trying to find Cami and Jeremy in the crowd. She needed to get home for Finney. The rest of us were on red-eye flights.

I felt guilty as I nestled into my spacious first-class seat. Guilty and sad.

All year long Rose had been reaching out to me, trying to have a real relationship, and I had never responded. “Keep your mouth shut” had been terrible advice. Why had I ever listened to it? Why had I had so little faith in myself?