Songs Without Words (6 page)

The shame she’d felt throughout the affair—she’d hated herself, been unable to stop herself, hated herself; even now it overlay all her memories. Did it also make them more insistent?

“Hi,” said a voice.

Sarabeth startled, then looked around.

“Up here.”

She looked up and saw Lauren leaning out a window, her shape dark against the bright room. “Hi,” she called up. “Beautiful night, huh?”

Lauren didn’t respond, and Sarabeth cupped her eyes to try to see better. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“What’s new? I missed you last week.”

Again Lauren didn’t respond, but she shifted, her silhouette moving to the left. A phone rang somewhere, inside the Mackays’ or close by.

“Want some company?” Sarabeth said.

“Sure.”

“I just have to pee first.”

Inside, Liz was at the stove, stirring something in a skillet while with one shoulder she pressed the phone to her ear. Sarabeth pointed at the ceiling and kept going. There was a powder room at the foot of the stairs, and she used the toilet, then paused in front of the mirror when she was finished. She had one eyebrow hair that liked to spring away from her brow and call attention to itself, and she wet a fingertip and leaned forward to dab it back into place. She peered into the mirror. She had lines fanning out from her eyes and etched from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, but what really bothered her were the small indentations beginning to appear in her chin. They were curled like little commas, or maybe parentheses: a full battalion of punctuation making inroads into her face. She straightened up, took a deep breath, and looked again. She was a small, elf-faced woman with wrinkles, but wearing an amusing scarf. It could have been worse, she supposed.

Lauren’s room was right at the top of the stairs. The door was closed, and Sarabeth knocked softly, then turned the knob. Lauren was still at the window, and now Sarabeth saw that in order to lean out she’d had to kneel on her desk.

“Hey, you,” she said.

Lauren looked over her shoulder, then quickly swiveled around and dropped to the floor. She wore jeans and a gray thermal henley, and her hair fell in unbrushed hunks past her shoulders. Not long ago she’d gone in for the slightly slutty junior movie-star look, three inches of below-the-button belly showing, heavy eyeliner and pale lip gloss, but evidently that was a thing of the past.

“From the patio,” Sarabeth said, “you looked like Juliet, leaning out the window.”

“Yeah, right,” Lauren said, rolling her eyes.

They came together for a quick hug.

“What are you doing up here? Plotting your escape?”

Lauren smiled, or half smiled, anyway. She seemed spacey—much as she had the last time Sarabeth had seen her. Sarabeth wondered if Lauren had a boyfriend, a Romeo she was mooning over. But Liz would have mentioned that, wouldn’t she?

“Don’t ask me how school is,” Lauren said.

“OK, I won’t.”

Lauren crossed the room and sat on her bed, which was covered by the bedspread she and several friends had made, or doctored, one summer evening when Sarabeth was over. This was two or three years ago: they were sitting around saying how bored they were, as only girls of thirteen could, until finally Sarabeth suggested they take Lauren’s existing bedcover, a plain blue coverlet, and decorate it with colored markers and glitter glue. “Lauren’s bod right here!” one girl had written. “Groovilicious Girl!” said another note. Sarabeth remembered Liz’s initial hesitation at the idea, her own worry that in making the suggestion she’d somehow overstepped.

“So how
is
school?” she said.

“Fine.”

“Amanda?”

“Fine.”

“You?”

“Fine,” Lauren said, smiling at last, though she also flushed a little, her cheeks turning pink.

“Sorry,” Sarabeth said. “I’m being an asshole. Let’s see. What’ve you been reading?”

Now Lauren brightened. Long ago, they’d bonded over books:
Harriet the Spy, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
“Actually,” she said, “my mom said I should ask you for advice.”

“Please ask me for advice. I love to be useful.”

“I need a classic novel for an independent reading project. Something good and not too long. Or boring.”

Sarabeth turned Lauren’s desk chair toward the bed and sat down. She said, “I think I should go into business advising teenagers on what to read. You’re going to pay me, right?”

Lauren fought a smile, and Sarabeth was struck by how pretty she could be, how her smile had always—since babyhood—been beautiful. She had an almost perfect heart-shaped face, with a sweet wide V of a jawline.

“I’m just kidding,” Sarabeth said. “Let’s see. You definitely can’t go wrong with Jane Austen.
Pride and Prejudice
?
Emma
? Though if you’re anything like me you’ll end up in a funk, wishing you’d lived back then.”

“No way.”

“Way. They had it made. The big decisions were, you know, ‘Upon whom shall we call today?’ I mean, walking around the room counted as doing something.”

“What?”

“They’re always in the drawing room after dinner, going, ‘Shall we take a turn around the room?’ ‘Oh, no, I prefer to play the pianoforte.’ ‘I would do my needlework, but I must rest my eyes.’ I mean, think about it. They had it good.”

“You’re weird,” Lauren said.

“I know. But how about it?”

Lauren shrugged. “Half the girls in the class are doing Jane Austen.”

Sarabeth considered. She remembered struggling with Dickens at Lauren’s age, struggling with Hardy. Perhaps what she’d struggled with was struggle itself.

“OK,” she said. “I can see this is going to call for deep thinking. What is ‘classic,’ anyway?”

“Old.”

“Probably ‘good.’ What did your teacher say?”

Lauren sat still for a moment, then got off the bed and went to her backpack, on the floor in a corner of the room. She dug around in it and pulled out an orange binder. “It’s just supposed to be something ‘good for you,’” she said, making air quotes with her fingers.

“A spinach book,” Sarabeth said, and Lauren gave her a mischievous look.

“You mean broccoli.”

“Brussels sprouts! Actually, you know what’s weird? This is more true of movies, maybe, but sometimes you’ll hear about some book, and it’ll be a total chocolate-cake book, and then you won’t read it for a long time, you’ll sort of put it off, and all of a sudden you’ll realize it’s become a broccoli book. Like, overnight.”

Lauren smiled, but after a moment color rose up into her face, and she looked away.

“What?” Sarabeth said.

Lauren shook her head. She turned and stuffed the binder back in her backpack. “Excuse me,” she said, and she left the room, and a moment later Sarabeth heard the bathroom door close.

What had just happened? Was she supposed to wait? She heard the water go on; she heard the muffled sounds of Brody’s game, coming from the little TV room at the end of the hall. She looked around the room. Next to Lauren’s door was a grid of wooden shelves holding CDs, and just above that, drawn directly on the wall by Lauren, was a colored-pencil picture of a big-eyed girl playing guitar. If there were a spectrum of girls’ bedrooms, this one would be at the opposite end of the one Sarabeth had had on Cowper Street. Her mother had hired a decorator, for one thing, and she remembered being shown the finished room after school one day when she was about six: the violet-sprigged wallpaper, the fan-backed wicker chair, the silky purple curtains that she’d been told in advance she should try not to touch. She remembered knowing what her mother wanted, standing next to her in the doorway, and how she still somehow couldn’t manage to say it, that the room was pretty. “Do you love it?” her mother cried at last, and Sarabeth nodded quickly and said she did.

She moved to Lauren’s door and made her way down the stairs. Liz had taken a huge, flame-colored casserole from the oven and was ladling beef and vegetables onto a serving platter.

“I thought this was supposed to be a simple dinner.”

Liz looked up and smiled. “There you are.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “I got inspired, what can I tell you?”

Sarabeth reached for the cheese roll bag and held it up for Liz to see. “Hey, I went to the Cheese Board. Got some you-know-whats.”

“Oh, that is so nice,” Liz said. “We’ll die.”

Sarabeth set the bag down and found the aluminum foil. She tore off a piece and laid it on the counter, then removed the rolls from the bag, setting aside the one she’d been eating. Except…here was another she’d been eating. Now there were two rolls with gouges, which meant someone—she, of course—would have to have one with dinner. But then, no, there were
three
rolls with gouges—she’d ruined three of the rolls.

“I’m such a jerk!” she exclaimed.

“What?”

She gestured at the rolls. “
Ta da.
What kind of guest snacks on her contribution to the meal before she presents it to you? Jesus.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“It is!”

Liz left the ladle in the casserole and came over. “Now, now.” She gathered the rolls onto the foil, turning the torn ones ripped-side down and wrapping the foil over them. “See?” She patted Sarabeth on the shoulder, then put an arm around her and pulled her close. “They’ll be perfect with the stew. OK? I’m so glad you’re here.”

5

L
iz first heard it in the middle of the night, a sound like rice pouring into a measuring cup, an infinite stream of rice pouring into an infinite cup. Hours later, it was still pouring, the first rain of the season: blurring the windows, blackening the wooden furniture on the patio.

Grumpy because of his tennis game, Brody was hiding behind the newspaper, invisible except for his hands. There had been another bombing in Iraq, fifty-three people killed, but most of the front page was occupied by a human-interest photo of a dog leaping into the air on a beach. Liz recognized the dog as Rexy, a black Lab that had been the recipient of a canine liver-kidney transplant. He’d been in the news off and on, and now he seemed to be thriving, and the Bay Area was supposed to be cheered by this.

Lauren sat at the table without eating. Liz had made French toast, and she watched as Lauren pushed hers around her plate, sliding it first to one side and then to the other, clearing a path in the powdered sugar. Her juice sat untouched, her sliced banana untasted. Liz was up and down, getting herself more coffee and then Joe another helping of bacon, and each time she returned to the table she checked Lauren’s plate for progress.

“I’m not going to school today,” Lauren said.

Brody lowered the paper and looked at Liz, and she thought: Don’t say anything. She turned to Lauren. “Are you coming down with something?”

Lauren didn’t respond—she just stared straight ahead, into the space between Brody and Joe.

“Do you feel OK?” Liz persisted.

“I’m not going,” Lauren said. “I can’t.”

Now Brody put the paper down. “What do you mean? School is required. There are truancy laws.”

Annoyed, Liz stood and moved closer to Lauren. She held the back of her hand to Lauren’s forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”

“I can’t go,” Lauren said. Then suddenly she was on her feet, her chair toppling backward with a clatter. “OK?” she shouted. “I can’t!” She ran from the kitchen, and in a moment Liz heard her on the stairs.

“What…” Brody began, but Liz ignored him and followed Lauren, then slowed so Lauren wouldn’t feel chased.

Her door was ajar. She was facing away from it, sitting cross-legged on the floor at an angle that revealed the edge of her face, the thin white cord of her iPod trailing from her ear. Inside Liz, the impulse to advance fought the impulse to stay still, retreat. Let her be, give her some space. At last, she turned and headed downstairs again. In the kitchen she said to Brody, “She’s going to stay home for a while—she might go in later.”

“Is she sick?”

Liz looked at him. She held his gaze until she was sure he’d look away, but he didn’t. Those blue eyes watching her, so stubborn. At moments like this he reminded her of her father, how steely he could be. She remembered her father saying to John once:
Don’t say you can’t. Say you don’t want to try, but never say you can’t.

“It’s just one day,” Liz said to Brody, and he raised his eyebrows briefly but didn’t respond.

When he and Joe were gone she climbed the stairs again. Now Lauren was on her bed, still attached to the iPod. Liz went and sat at her side. “Some days are hard,” she said, and Lauren lay still for a moment and then removed one earpiece.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Some days are hard.’”

Lauren stared at the ceiling as if she felt nothing at all. Her face was so blank it could only mean she was exerting a great effort to make it blank. She put the earpiece back into place. She was somewhere Liz couldn’t see: she wasn’t in the music, but the music was part of how she got there.

“I was going to go to yoga,” Liz said, “and then to say hi to Grandma and Grandpa, but I don’t have to.”

Lauren moved the earpiece again. “What?”

Liz repeated herself, and Lauren shrugged.

Now Liz hesitated, unsure of her next move. Some days
were
hard; one of the great lessons of yoga was that awareness of yourself could be part of how you lived. Observing: the stretch in your hamstrings, the feelings of a hard day. “Sweetie,” she said. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

“No,” Lauren exclaimed. Then she got up on her elbows and shouted, “Why can’t you fucking
leave me alone
?”

And so Liz did: left her alone, and then left the house, dashing through the rain for her car.

She started the engine but then stayed still, heart pounding.
Why can’t you fucking leave me alone?
The words pounded, too. The image of Lauren, Lauren’s voice: it all pounded.

All Liz had ever really wanted was to be a mother. This had been her secret: through college, through her twenties. The secret wasn’t that she wanted kids; it was that she didn’t particularly want a career. It was the early eighties, every woman wanted a career; at least every woman who’d gone to Stanford, as she had. But not Liz. She held various jobs, but kids were going to be her career, Lauren and Joe were her career—her work, her life. Which meant she shouldn’t feel so entirely
reamed
now by what had just happened. She ought to be able to take this kind of stuff in stride.

Rain poured over the car, and she backed out of the driveway and headed down the street. It was almost as dark as evening, and the cars she passed moved slowly, headlights on, wipers racing back and forth. She hit a huge puddle, and a sheet of water whooshed up behind her.

The parking lot at Yoga Life was almost empty. Inside, the shop was quiet, its rolled mats and stretchy clothing and books on practice neatly arranged for the day. In the studio, Liz put her things in a cubby. Only eight other people, which was nice, though not so nice for Diane.

Who was in the middle of the room, talking to someone Liz didn’t recognize. Diane’s short gray hair was newly cropped, and she wore a simple black unitard that hugged her long legs and revealed the muscles of her strong, square shoulders. She was like a goddess, Liz always thought. Or an Amazon. The names of certain yoga poses made so much sense, given Diane: warrior, hero. In her gentle way, Diane was both of these.

Liz took a spot near the front. Until yoga, she’d thought of exercise as a way to make her body look better; now she understood about feeling better. And yet, she was very quiet about it. Diane talked sometimes about how yoga calmed the mind, and Liz thought it had calmed hers to the point where she no longer needed to say so much.

But she was not calm today. She tried to stay with Diane, but she kept thinking about Lauren, seeing and hearing Lauren. “Your teenager will use whatever is available to upset you. She’ll use what you give her.” This was from a book called
How to Be Your Teenager’s Best Friend and Other Follies of Parenting Adolescents.
Liz had liked the title—she knew women who did that, tried to be one of the girls with their daughters, just another companion for shopping and gossip, and she knew it didn’t work—but the book itself was a disappointment, nothing but the usual draconian nonsense. Give orders, and expect full compliance. End of story. Chapter 2 was called “It’s All About Limits.” Which limits would the author say Liz was failing to set?
You can’t talk to me that way
? As far as Liz was concerned, she might as well say
You can’t be unhappy.

Lauren was unhappy.

After yoga, Liz rolled up her mat and returned to the car. She thought of going straight home, but she’d told her parents to expect her, so she continued to Palo Alto, to the senior complex where they’d been living for the past six years. She still sometimes ached for the old house on Cowper Street, but they didn’t seem to miss it; they were too busy living their surprising new lives of foreign travel and bridge tournaments and choral singing—the kind of retirement you might read about in a brochure. Where, Liz sometimes wondered, had these gregarious people been hiding inside the reserved shapes of her reserved parents?

The rain had slowed to a sprinkle, and when she entered the central courtyard she passed a uniformed worker sweeping puddled water toward a storm drain.

“We finished the album,” her father announced at the front door, his reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. “It’s all ready for you to see.”

A month earlier, he and her mother had taken a Penn alumni cruise up the Nile, but Liz had only seen a few snapshots. As she followed him in, she said a silent goodbye to the idea of a quick visit.

“Perfect timing,” her mother said as she emerged from the tiny kitchen. “Did Dad tell you? We just finished the album.”

They spent a few minutes talking, but it was clear to Liz that her parents needed her to look at the album
now
. It was happening, of course—they were becoming her children—but at times like this the transformation seemed sped up. And in fact, the first picture was one Liz had taken herself, of the two of them and their luggage standing on the curb at the airport, looking for all the world like Lauren and Joe on the first day of school, posing on the porch with their backpacks.

She flipped through the pages. Standing in front of the Pyramids, or against the rail of the cruise ship, her parents looked older than they did in life, almost frail, but so game it was touching.

“It’s all on the computer,” her father said. “If you want any copies, it’s a snap.”

“Great,” Liz said.

More photos, and she came to one of her mother fanning herself with a palm frond. Across the table, her mother leaned forward and peered at the photo, then turned to Liz’s father and said, “Remember how much water we drank that day?”

“Listen to this, Liz,” he said. “If they served you an open bottle you had to send it back. That’s how contaminated the water was.”

“Or how paranoid you were,” Liz joked, but neither of her parents smiled, and she felt bad.

“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “After Mexico we just don’t take any chances.”

Liz’s father disappeared into the kitchen, and Liz fought an impulse to look at her watch. She wondered what Lauren was doing. She’d almost snapped at Lauren, had certainly felt a kind of automatic urge to snap: to get into it with Lauren, yell, the kind of thing Lorelei had done to Sarabeth every day of her life. Often without even so small a provocation as
Why can’t you fucking leave me alone?
Liz remembered a day when she and Sarabeth were playing with glass animals at the top of the stairs, and Lorelei, passing them in her stocking feet, had somehow managed to step on a tiny elephant. “What’s
wrong
with you?” she’d shrieked at Sarabeth, as if the entire thing had happened according to Sarabeth’s design.

Liz’s father emerged from the kitchen with a tray of drinks—a trio of tall aqua glasses accented by orange wedges.

“Oh, good idea,” Liz’s mother said. “Wait’ll you try this, Liz, you’re going to love it.”

Liz accepted one of the glasses. The drink was cold and dark and iceless, and it tasted like a fruit drink of some kind, but oddly strong and sour, or maybe strong and sweet-and-sour; Liz wasn’t sure. “What is it?” she said.

“It’s a gaboo,” her parents replied in unison, and they both laughed.

“The Russells invented it,” her mother explained. “You make tea and chill it, then you add fresh lemon juice and peach Torani and just a tiny bit of bitters and bar sugar.”

Liz took another taste. Since when did her parents know about bar sugar? Her father was wearing an argyle vest! Yet even the aqua glasses were very contemporary, and she wondered what had happened to the tumblers they’d always had—what had happened to
them.

Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped, and through a torn place in the clouds she could see a pale, watery blue. On the other side of the sliding glass door there was a patio, but it was too small for much beyond a tiny metal table and two chairs. The big house on Cowper Street with its huge, tree-filled yard, its sunny kitchen, its rooms upon rooms—how could they not miss it?
It was so much work,
her mother had said blithely one day, as if the entire meaning of leaving were located in the extra time she had now. It had been a lot of work, of course, but Liz mourned it in a way that her parents seemed not to share. Perhaps it was a truth of life that the house you mourned was the one where you became yourself.

At the end of the day, Brody stood below the baseline of a tennis court at the Peninsula Club, waiting for David Leventhal’s first serve. The courts were barely dry enough to play, but in Brody’s view barely dry enough was plenty dry enough; he didn’t let much get in the way of tennis. And yet, crouched and ready, he felt oddly delinquent, as if he were playing hooky from something. Why, when he played every Tuesday at exactly this time? Then he realized: it was the darkness. Daylight savings time had ended Sunday, and he and David were starting under lights for the first time in months.

“Long,” he called of the first serve.

On the opposite side of the court David grimaced and practiced his toss again: once, twice.

The second serve was in, and Brody hit it down the line, a stretch for David’s backhand, but David was fast and he made it. No chance now, pal, Brody thought, and he charged the net and pounded the ball past David’s feet.

“Nice,” David called.

Brody moved to the ad court. He’d taken off his sweatshirt, but he wasn’t quite warm yet, and he danced a little from side to side.

David slammed in a serve he couldn’t return. “Speaking of nice,” he called back.

His shoulder hurt, but he tried to ignore it. The only thing to do was give it up for a time—give tennis up—and he wasn’t going to do that. Tennis was beautiful, it was so pure: the connection, over and over, with the ball. It was hit and hit again, your heart pumping blood—as if it were wellness itself—to the farthest reaches of your body. He had run for a while, but running was so boring. Tennis was the thing. Had been since he was thirteen. He could still remember his first few times playing, in junior high, how it just felt right, the racquet in his grip. Other guys he knew said the same of golf: the clubs just felt right. His first racquet, the sweat-curled leather wrap. Andrew Drayson, his best friend. They played and played, got better and better. In the space of three or four months they went from absolute beginners to the best in their grade, then their school. In high school they fought over and over again for the number one spot on the singles ladder. Every match was vastly different yet superbly recognizable. Every match, every set, every game.