The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (22 page)

Marty, Marty, Marty.

Emma realizes her mother is not just concerned but possibly
embarrassed
by what is happening, by what people might think or say, by what the town gossip Al will be spewing from one end of Higgins to the other.

“Mother, shouldn’t the most important thing now be the care of Joy and the kids? It’s pretty obvious that Rick has moved on. Why do we really give a rat’s ass about what anyone else might think? Why do we always care so much?”

“Is that what you think this is all about?” Marty not so much says as screams into the phone. “You think that is all I care about?”

“Isn’t it?”

“You, my darling, do not know the first thing about me and what I think.”

“And whose fault is that?” Emma fires back. “Maybe it would help if you stood still for twenty minutes to let me know what in the heck is going on in your life, Mother. Is there a reason we haven’t met your boyfriend? What other secrets have you been keeping from us?”

“You are going to meet him sooner than you think and I am going to come over there and spank you, young lady,” Marty vows grimly.

Emma starts laughing at the mere idea. She thinks that sometimes Marty forgets that she is a grown woman and that her son-in-law Rick, the new naughty boy of the family, is a grown man,
and this brings her full circle to the entire reason for this phone call and throws her back to her imaginary road trip where her lovely sister Erika shows up at her house with her luggage
and
her baggage, and they embrace, and she tries to figure out what to say to a woman who shares her last name, a mother, and two other sisters but whom she apparently does not know anymore.

Or maybe has never known.

Maybe, Emma tells herself as she dips even further into her chilly river of self-doubt, my entire relationship with Erika has been a fraud. Maybe we really weren’t that close. Maybe she was just being nice to me because I’m the kid sister. The baby of the family. The one who needs all the extra care and attention.

The almost ten-year difference in their ages offers Emma part of an explanation; the fact that Erika was mostly gone and resides in so few of her oldest memories offers another, and that is where Emma stumbles. That is where she thinks that if she does not say yes to this visit, this question of her mother’s, this new demand on her life and time, she may never really get to know her sister, settle the most recent score, find out why Erika has not even bothered to call her back.

Even as part of her wonders if it’s worth it.

And yet another part of her longs to jump from her office window and into the garden she’s planted below it because this is yet one more thing, one more demand, one more family allegiance to which Emma cannot say no.

She cannot say no because she is remembering the circle of her nieces standing outside of Joy’s house and the hilarious way the Gilford girls used a verbal machine gun on Uncle Rick when they totally abandoned the reunion planning. She is remembering how Marty somehow managed to get Joy to take her extra-sharp scissors and use them to soothe her pain.

Joy had no idea what to do. Her anger had always reared itself from the center of her stomach and exploded through her throat as if she were a filthy-mouthed auctioneer. Joy’s frightened world, which was filled with more self-doubt than most people realized, was paralyzed by the long-held fear that her husband would one day actually leave her.

Rick left because she is a failure.

Rick left because she put the thought in her mind the moment they were married that he would one day take off.

Rick left because she is a horrid wife and mother.

Rick left because she is a henpecking drunken fool.

Rick left because he is disappointed in the children.

Rick left because he knows there is someone better than Joy.

Rick left because of her.

Marty was the one who gathered her female tribe around the table and made certain that Joy was in the center of the fold and who ordered her to let it go. Let it go, even as Marty knew Joy had been drinking wine, which was
so
a part of the problem but almost excusable this time, and had been staggering in a dazed circle of confusion for weeks as if she was about to audition for
Dancing with the Stars
and was memorizing a difficult routine.

Emma watched her mother circle the wagons, comfort the sick and wounded and tend to the emotional victims of her oldest daughter’s evil husband as if she were a triage nurse on the front lines during a siege of vital importance. This is how Emma had always known her mother. A take-charge woman who had suffered the greatest of losses and yet managed to keep going. She’d asked her mother about that more than once, and each time her mother
had replied, “It’s what women do,” and Emma could not imagine how, how in God’s name do women do this work, for so long, forever, every single damn time, every day, always and forever.

How do you start a family and have babies and put Noxzema on your face every night thinking that the world is bright and beautiful and then wake up one morning to a nightmare the size of South America? How do you manage a household and all the people inside of it and usher your beloved through the final and most horrific days and nights of his life? How do you say good-bye and then get up to make certain that there is milk in the fridge and that someone has mowed the grass and sorted through the mail and paid bills so that the electricity stays on? How do you recover? How do you finish raising your adolescent baby and coordinate weddings and take a part-time job and maintain the Higgins social obligations and then still have time to babysit the grandkids and read every book on the
New York Times
bestseller list?

These are some of the questions that Emma so desperately wanted to ask her mother in the middle of the Siege of Joy, which should really, Emma thinks, be called the Seize of Joy because by the time Marty was done with her pep talk Joy would have taken her scissors to every penis, dishcloth and anything else that would fit between its sharp silver blades not only in South Carolina but in every state in the Union.

“Honey,” Marty prodded, “just whack something. Just let out a big old yell and let it go. Take that scissors and
ram
something.”

Joy looked at first as if she could turn at any moment and impale anyone who was standing nearby. Then there was a moment of simple panic that struck every Gilford at once because they suddenly realized they could end up with a pair of exquisite shears lodged just above the soft edge of the lovely place where their left and right collarbones meet—inches below the windpipe.

Emma edged backward too, but she was mostly watching, which is something she realized at the very moment that she did a lot of—watch. Watch and then tentatively respond and then think about it and then if she feels like it, jump in and join, especially if Marty is prompting her with hand gestures, or one of her famous dirty “get going” looks, or maybe a ruthless shove against the small of her back.

This time Emma knew that Joy was going to harm a nonhuman object. She knew that even though Joy was a loudmouth reactionary, she was also in a world of hurt. She needed to make some kind of physical gesture to pry the lid off of her anger. Even as Joy knew that Rick would most likely leave her one day and then the Gilford women would gather round her table and hold her and talk to her and listen and then do something that in any other arena might be considered violent and unacceptable.

Which is exactly what happened.

Joy took the scissors off the table as if she were a paramedic and the call had just come in to save forty-five people trapped in an overturned tourist bus. Everyone had taken at least one, if not more, steps back by then and the Gilford girls were ready for whatever in the hell it was that Joy was about to mutilate.

Joy looked around wildly. She thought about the planning notebooks and about the napkins that she had not so long ago placed alongside of the graham cracker cake that she had baked that afternoon and then covered in a layer of tears as she cried into the frosting. She looked towards the sink and saw three new hand towels that matched the blue and gold tile on her wall and she imagined slicing them up and then making a long distress ribbon to hang from the front porch light.

Marty’s hair, that she had finally let go gray and was allowing to grow until it touched her shoulders and that Joy was now actually admiring during her pre-cutting frenzy. Why hadn’t she ever noticed how absolutely lovely it was, soft, long gray hair? Why hadn’t she ever seen how her mother’s skin was still so tight above her cheeks from all those years of using the Avon products that some woman in a red convertible always brought to her front door?

The hair could not be cut with the avenging scissors because it was way too beautiful. And then Joy turned her eyes back to the table and saw the perfect tablecloth. The one that she always saved for reunion meetings and gatherings where something important was about to happen or where plans were being made for another huge gathering. She tried for a second to remember where she had gotten the hand-stitched tablecloth that she had ironed so many times the edges were stiff and always standing at attention the moment she took it out of the wash.

Could it have been a wedding gift? How perfect would that be? A glorious reminder of a time when her marriage and the life ahead of her was as beautiful and clean and lovely as the tablecloth itself.

And then, before she could think of anything else, Joy moved, pushing past Emma, Marty, Debra and Stephie. Joy rested both hands, including the one holding the scissors, on the edge of her antique oak table.

Then Joy smiled sweetly, a smile that none of the Gilford women could ever remember seeing before, and she began cutting
her beautiful tablecloth in half. She pulled it towards her as she sliced the handles up and down and then everyone looked at Marty, expecting her to say something or do something, but Marty only nodded her head up and down twice and everyone knew, somehow, what to do next.

The Gilford girls took a step forward. Stephie, Emma, Marty, Debra, Chloe, Kendall and probably the spirits of about a thousand swirling deceased Gilford female spirits—they all seized the ends of that tablecloth and pulled so that the cutting would be swifter, straighter, and so that Joy could make a clean and lovely split right down the center of the pure white cloth.

When Joy was done, Marty quietly gathered up the two pieces, folded them together, laid them down on the counter right next to the coffeepot and gave everyone in the room a hug, starting with Joy, and then the women continued to minister to Joy, forgetting, or so it seemed, about the huge list of things yet undone for the reunion planning. And then they all ate the graham cracker cake, which was delicious.

And this is why Emma, who is swirling around her mother’s request that Erika stay with her, rests her head against the cool glass of her office window and wishes she could tell her mother and Erika to shut up and go away.

“Well?” Marty says a bit impatiently. “Are you still there? Are you okay?”

“Who knows, Mother,” Emma asks back, with just a hint of challenge in her voice. “Who really knows who is okay and who isn’t and what is going on in anyone’s head but our own?”

Marty is silenced by this question, which is really not a question. Before she can respond, Emma starts talking again. She lays the fingertips of her right hand against the glass, tapping lightly, and asks her mother if sometime soon they can just meet and talk.

“Talk?” Marty asks, bewildered.

“You know me, dear,” Marty says, softening her voice.

“Not really, Mom. I know there are things you have never told me,” Emma says, as if she knows what she is talking about.

Marty is silent.

Emma taps her fingers again and then says, “Please, Mom.”

There is a weight resting on Marty’s chest that feels like a truckload of used books. But she thinks that Emma needs something and there is no way she can say no to her little Emma.

“Okay,” she concedes. “But first you must promise me that Erika can stay at your house.”

“The bed is hers, Mom.” Emma drops her hand so it rests on her desk and wonders how in the world she will get through what she has just promised without committing a felony.

“I’ll call you when she gets in, okay, sweetheart?”

“And then we can just go someplace and talk?”

“Yes,” Marty answers and then hangs up so quickly Emma doesn’t even get a chance to ask her what day Erika is arriving.

The part that Emma also does not know is that her recently estranged older sister is already in Higgins and that Emma is the only Gilford sister who doesn’t know.