The Most Fun We Ever Had (50 page)

She wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure whether to invoke her mental ledger of all that had gone wrong in her marriage, all that had been propelled by anger or fear or ignorance. Her daughters had fanned out: to different cities, to different states; to different planets, it seemed sometimes.

“We’re all emotionally stunted because you and Dad love each other more than you love us,” Wendy added conversationally. Marilyn hadn’t noticed her standing in the doorway, and now she came to sit beside her sister at the table, twisting her limbs yogically, her gorgeous and radically unpredictable eldest, the button pusher.

“Lord, what a thing to say. Is this some kind of intervention?
Merry Christmas, Mom.
”

“Do you disagree?” Liza asked, the two of them tag-teaming her now, apparently, her two sharp-eyed, honey-haired daughters.

“Of
course
I—”

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Wendy said. “I’d rather be fucked up because my parents are hot for each other than because they’re, like, keeping me chained to a bike rack overnight and feeding me raw oats. But you have to admit that there’s a gradient of preference.”

“That’s not how love works, Wendy.”

“Who are you to say how love works, though?” Wendy asked. “Just because you’ve been married for like eight centuries and you still check out Dad’s butt when he’s mowing the lawn?”

“Who
made
you girls this way? Dad and I were lucky to find each other, but I don’t love him
more
than— It’s a whole different thing. A different ball game. An entirely different
kind
of love, your love for your kids.”

“I’m not talking about the kind, I’m talking about the amount.”

“I thought my heart was going to burst open when you were born, Wendy. Both of you girls.
All
of you girls. If you want to talk about
mag
nitude—”

“Babies don’t count,” Wendy said. “Everyone loves babies.”

“I feel—lucky, actually,” Liza said. “It made for a wonderful childhood, you have to admit. But it feels like a pretty fucking insurmountable bar to reach as an adult.”

She didn’t chastise her daughter’s language this time.

“We all
desperately
want your life,” Liza said. “And we all know we’ll never have it.”

She considered—openly, for the first time—the sheer amount of luck she and David had happened upon, and the fact that she, forty years married, despite everything, knew that he would always be her person, in some important capacity; that they were mutually exclusive.

She studied Liza, her third-born daughter, who would set all sorts of examples for her own child about fortitude and flexibility, who would someday sit before the baby in her belly like Marilyn was sitting before her now, accountable for any number of questions about how she’d made her life work. And her firstborn: tenacious, resilient, unsparing Wendy.

“Am I allowed to play the
I birthed you
card here?” she asked them. “In an effort to spare myself from further holiday abuse?”

“Are you girls giving your mother hell?” David in the doorway now; David, who’d never not been around; David, who took Wendy’s blood pressure and hummed Springsteen songs to baby Liza when he thought his wife was sleeping; David, whom she’d chosen, who’d chosen her back. “On Christmas, of all days?” He came over, put his arm around her waist, and the girls watched them. These vexatious little mysteries they’d created, imperfect and endlessly exquisite. She knew she and her husband were, then and there, reinforcing all of the accusations Wendy and Liza had just made.
Not necessarily a bad thing,
Wendy had said, though. She wove her arm around her husband, and she decided, in the moment, that she didn’t really care.

2000

One night when everyone was back for a weekend, Grace, six years old, woke up to laughter from the living room—her sisters awake together, without her, making jokes she didn’t understand. She was drifting back to sleep when she heard her mother’s voice, different but distinct.

“Well, that’s what I
mean.
” Her mom and her sisters all beside themselves about something. She tiptoed to the top of the stairs, listening. Little bits of leftover laughter. A creak of the living room floorboards. She advanced down the stairs, her nightgown brushing her legs. She paused at the bottom. Liza and Wendy were curled up in armchairs. Across from them, her mother and Violet were on the couch, her mother’s feet up on the coffee table. She had a ponytail and her dad’s old baseball shirt with the red sleeves and she looked like someone Grace had never met before; she looked like Wendy. There was music in the background—
I’m a fleabit peanut monkey and all my friends are junkies—
and Wendy bobbed her head a little to the beat.

“The perils of the collegiate lifestyle,” her mom was saying.

Then Liza spotted her, smiled and crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Liza was usually pretty nice unless she was in what their mother called “one of her moods.”

“There’s a ghost in the hallway,” Liza said, and everyone turned to look.

She would remember the thing that happened to her mother’s face forever. It started out one way—girlish, glowing, ready to tell a story—and turned another, melted a little in disappointment. She knew she’d interrupted something sacred—this meeting of women—and she felt profoundly left out and guilty at once, butting in when her mom looked so happy. Her mother had been a girl in one second and herself again in another; she was still wearing the baseball shirt but everything else had changed. Sometimes Grace felt like she had two moms, the one who was kind of older than other moms and the one who was about as old as her sisters. The face fixed itself quickly, turned into the face that Grace saw four million times a day, the freckled, sleepy, smiling face with big green eyes that always looked happy to see her except when she was whining.

“A goose,” her mother said, moving her legs from the table, opening her arms. “Not a ghost at all. Come here, sweet one.”

She crept in and then made a beeline for her mother lest she’d aroused this same kind of disappointment in her sisters. She didn’t want to see their faces. She crawled into her mom’s lap and tucked her face against her warm sharp collarbone.

“Hey, pumpkin. Were we too loud down here?”

“Yes, enlighten us, buzzkill,” she heard Wendy say. She felt her mother stiffen.

“She’s not a buzzkill.”

“What is that?” she asked, curiosity piqued, lifting her head from her mother’s chest.

“Someone who shows up to a party four hours late wearing an Ariel nightgown.”

“What are you doing?”

“Having a little girl time, honeybunch,” her mom said, her breath warm against the part in Grace’s hair, the waxy white line between two brown sides.

“I’m a girl,” she said emphatically, and she watched as her mother and sisters made eye contact, all of them smiling. Wendy snorted.

“Of course you are,” said her mom. “I meant my older girls. A little older girl time.”

“We’re talking about grown-up stuff, Gracie,” Violet supplied.

“It’s so late, little darling,” her mom said.

“I’ll put her to bed,” Liza said. “Come on, Goose.”

She felt suddenly indignant; her feelings were hurt and she
was
a girl, too, and she didn’t want her sisters to have this new distorted version of her mother if she didn’t get to have it as well. She rested her head defiantly again on her mother’s chest. “No,” she said. “I want Mama.”

Her mom opened her mouth, closed it again. “It’s past my bedtime anyway,” she said. “All right, all right. Up we go, gosling.” She rose from the couch and Grace tightened her legs around her waist. She regarded her sisters over their mother’s shoulder. Liza looked disappointed and Wendy and Violet both looked annoyed. “Sweet dreams, honeys. Don’t stay up too late.” Marilyn blew a kiss to the room and started up the stairs with her. Grace rested her face on her mother’s shoulder and closed her eyes, pretended to sleep so she wouldn’t have to see the aftermath of the gathering she’d disrupted.
Buzzkill
.

—

L
iza decided to get the tattoo because it seemed like it would make a good story. Dorky girl makes a bold move; is immediately noticed by all important outsiders; life changes color. She was not yet eighteen, so she had to maneuver, legally speaking. Her parents had not specifically forbidden tattoos but she knew they would say no if she asked. So she waited until her mom was going to visit Violet at Wesleyan for the weekend, yanked Wendy’s old ID from her sister’s abandoned bedroom, and went to Blue Moon Ink on Division. She was clutching a folder with the artwork in it; she had meticulously sketched the design using the Smashing Pumpkins album cover, the star, sans baby-angel. She braced herself against the leather chair as
Dirk
—at first she thought that the ironic fifties-mechanic cursive on his shirt spelled out
Dick
—seared the image onto her skin.

It took her three painful days to realize that her tattoo was infected. She discovered it on Saturday morning, when she awakened feeling feverish, and she ignored it for several hours, curled up on the living room couch watching
The X-Files.
The pain was worsening, though; the skin at the nape of her neck was swollen and tender, and there was also the undeniable earthy smell of her bandages. This was, she decided, probably something you could not will away.

Who to call, though? Liza wasn’t
un
popular in high school so much as she was
a
popular; she got by each day with few peer interactions and left in the afternoons without any inkling of being disliked. But she had no one upon whom it would be normal to call in a time of crisis—when, for instance, you’d developed an infection after you went by yourself to get an illegal tattoo. She knew her father would come home from work in a heartbeat, furious and mildly cursing (“sonofa
bitch,
Lize”) but present nonetheless. But then Wendy appeared in her head, materialized like an irritating swami, her older sister who was just across town in her swanky new Hyde Park townhouse with her ancient boyfriend. She took a deep breath and dialed the number.

“Liza,” Wendy exclaimed, sounding strangely excited to hear from her. “Thank God. I need some advice.” As though Wendy had been the one to place the call. “We’re having this party tonight for a bunch of terrible people from Hong Kong and I’m freaking out about what to wear. There are some Asian people in Oak Park still, right? Are any of them not totally prudish?”

“What?” Liza sank into a chair by the phone.

“Can I wear something that’s above the knee? Or are all Asians super-conservative?”

“I don’t think all of them?” Liza squeaked, incredulous.

“It’s black, so it’s understated,” Wendy said. “We got it in Milan. It sounds okay, right?”

“I don’t…”

“Thanks, Lize. Shit, they’re going to be here soon. I have to get ready. Did you need something, or were you just calling to say hi?” No one in their family called
just to say hi.
That was not how they operated. She swallowed a few times to prevent herself from crying.

“No, just calling to say hi.”

“You’re sweet. Thanks for your help, Lize. Wish me luck tonight, huh?” And then she was gone, the line dead. Liza chewed the inside of her lip and picked up the phone again.

—

Her father came into the living room and sat beside her on the couch. She was crying but trying not to cry, staring at her toes and refusing to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and that seemed to break the spell; he shifted back a few inches and lifted her ponytail. He seemed just to be staring at her neck for what felt like several minutes.

“It’s definitely infected.” He didn’t quite touch the area and she stiffened involuntarily. “It’s painful, I take it?”

“Yeah,” she said. Then: “I mean, kind of.”

“Turn around.”

She faced him and he cupped his palm over her forehead, frowning.

“I can’t tell if you’re warm. Come here.” This coveted maternal gesture: David sometimes felt their foreheads in the way that Marilyn did, bowing his face down to rest his cheek above their eyebrows. He hadn’t done this to her since she was a child. “You’re not too warm, but you’re warm. I’ll call in a script for an antibiotic and we’ll go pick it up.”

“Thanks.”

“Liza,
why
?” he asked, still holding up her hair, still studying the inflamed ring. “Do you realize how close this is to your spinal cord? How dangerous that is?”

“I wanted to,” she said, still trying not to cry, trying to sound petulant and careless instead of like the most pathetic, lonely person in the world. “It’s my body.”

“For Christ’s sake, Lize, this is such a cliché.” Something in his voice sounded sad, which made her feel a trillion times more terrible. “Just talk to us. It’s much less contrived.”

She, though quite sarcastic herself, could not appreciate her father’s humor. She scowled.

“What can I do?” he asked gently. “Tell me what I should be doing.”

“Nothing.” She spun away from him, ran up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door.

The next morning he came into her room early. She felt him sit next to her on the bed and as she awakened she became aware of the hot ache on her neck.

“How much does it hurt?” he asked. Their father had been employing the pain-scale method on all of them since they were tiny. They had learned early not to abuse it when ten-year-old Violet declared her sore throat a 9.5 and David sat them all down and talked to them about terminal illnesses, about how lucky they were, and about how if they had to think about whether something was a 9.5 or not then it was definitely
not
a 9.5. That morning she considered, weakly, the pulsing at the back of her neck. It was unpleasant, yes, but was it as bad as a third-degree burn? As bone cancer? She decided that this, however uncomfortable—and likely exacerbated by her shame—was probably no more than a 4.