After You (5 page)

9

T
he next morning, Sophie eats her Weetabix and then holds my hand as we walk to school. I have grown used to her being quiet by now, and I’ve found a way of talking for two; rhetorical and yes/no questions help, as does my incessant chatter.

“Still not talking, huh?”

Sophie shakes her head.

“Okay, I’ll recap the book then. By the way, just so you know, you aren’t allowed to read it without me. Once you start a book together, you have to finish it together. So we have Mary Lennox, who is, what? About nine, I think. A little older than you. And she’s ugly. Not like you at all. But isn’t it funny how the book just spells that out? She’s an ugly, miserable pain in the ass …” Sophie giggles:
You said ass
.

“I love that, because in most kids’ books, the writer always tells you how beautiful the main character is; I always picture a perfect little girl, with flowing hair and beautiful French dresses. And ribbons, for some reason. But this Mary Lennox is thin and sickly looking. And in real life, not everyone is clean and gorgeous or even nice, you know? Do you think Mary is going to stay ugly? Or do you think our friend is going to go all glam on us soon?”

Sophie considers my question and shakes her head. Our Mary will stay “true to herself,” as they say on reality TV.

“You know, I never told you why I love this book so much. When my nan died—that’s what I called my grandmother, my nan—afterward, I was a little freaked out, understandably. So that night, my mom took out
The Secret Garden
and started reading to me. And you know what happened? I forgot everything else and all I could think about was Mary Lennox and whether she was going to get fatter and whether she was going to find that lost key.”

Sophie is enraptured by the book, as much as I was when I was her age, though when I decided to read it to her, I had forgotten all about the orphaning. I hope this is helping and not scarring her further. But it seems to be working, because Sophie has lost that disinterested expression that seems to parallel her muteness, and I can tell she wants to hear more.

“I wonder if it’s good for Mary that until now she’s gotten to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants. It doesn’t seem to have made her very happy, does it?” Sophie shakes her head again, and I can tell she wants to say something out loud, because she raises her hand like we’re in class, but then lowers it again when she remembers her no-talking rule.

“Tonight we’ll read chapter two and maybe chapter three. I don’t know, though. I’m not making any promises. Let’s see how the day goes. Rumor has it you’ve been slipping out of class and reading in the bathroom. Don’t do that. You’ll get icky germs in there. Or the cooties.” I turn my fingers into spiders and wiggle them in her face, and she half-smiles, and then we are past the alley and in front of the school, among the swarm of parents again. The atmosphere is like curbside check-in, each parent and child a tiny balanced ecosystem with procedures and checklists and routines. Each one moving faster, talking faster, making sure nothing is forgotten or left behind. Sophie pecks me on the cheek, gives a wave over her shoulder as she runs into school, her backpack hiccuping behind her. A feeling of love rushes through me like vertigo, an overwhelming, sharp tilt, and then just as quickly a righting, slamming, shaming pain when I catch myself, for just a moment, pretending that Sophie is mine.

“So Mom was the one who told you they’re back together?” I ask Mikey over lunch. We are in a tiny Indian restaurant called Panjabi Grill near Carnaby Street, and we watch a man with a hairnet make fresh chapatis on a flat iron pan. Three long pikes of meat—chicken, beef, lamb—spin behind him. The panoply of carcasses makes me hungry and nauseated at the same time.

“Yup.”

“Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.”

“Yup.” My parents’ four-decade-long love-hate relationship has been a source of constant drama. Certainly my mother prefers it that way, believing her children and ex-husband see her as unpredictable and challenging, like a 1940s movie heroine, but really, at least to my brother and me, she’s fickle and domineering and exhausting. As the Brits would put it, in their enviable, spot-on fashion: a shit-stirrer.

Dr. Jane Lerner—we call her Jane to her face, as she has made us since I was the age of two—is one of those dangerous people who is satisfied only when there is excitement and novelty, and she bolts at the first sign of stasis, bolting being the only predictable thing about her. My parents were married for a tumultuous two decades of door-slamming and screaming and afternoons where Mikey and I were sent outside to play so they could have what they called “adult time,” afternoons that were more confusing for us kids than the yelling, because they sounded awfully similar when we listened at the door.

They finally split up when I was sixteen, into two houses just three doors apart, and we became a somewhat broken, but by no means shattered, family. A good move on their part to ensure one didn’t murder the other in their sleep. But now, in the last ten years or so, they’ve started this game of “getting back together” again and “breaking up,” terms seemingly too childish and at the same time perfectly accurate to describe their reunions and partings, both the former and the latter almost always at my mother’s instigation. Each time they go their separate ways, though, my mom feels liberated, my dad devastated, and then she ends up having to prescribe anti-depressants for him.

“When do they see each other?” I ask.

“Weekends. Apparently, Dad drives down on Fridays.”

On the morning of September 11, while the rest of the family watched CNN from our safe academic perch in my father’s Cambridge house, frozen in that bubble comfort of vicarious pain, the repetition of images making it feel no less real as we watched bodies fall and refall and a city covered in all that damn dust, my mother got into her Volvo and drove straight to Ground Zero to volunteer. Somehow, what was supposed to be a short stint turned into a permanent move, and, to everyone’s surprise, she sold her house and opened up a therapy practice out of her new apartment in the West Village. In addition to her pro bono PTSD sessions, she caters to overworked, overanxious yuppies with too much disposable income, a comfy niche market that never bounces its checks. And, apparently, she’s good at what she does; every few years or so, she gets a free chicken dinner and an award from the American Psychiatric Association.

“Did you speak to Dad?” I ask.

“Yup. He said not to worry about him. He’ll be fine. That he’s a grown-up.”

“That’s what he said the last time she left him.”

“I know.”

“And we almost had to hospitalize him.”

“I know.”

“Damn it. So we just let them keep making their own mistakes? Again.”

“I guess so. Speaking of making your own mistakes, how are you and Phillip?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, though I’d love to have you here, I’m worried about your, you know, your marriage.”

“You’re joking, right?” My earnest brother strikes again. A beautiful quality. In the abstract.

“Not really.”

“I’m your big sister. It’s supposed to be the other way around. I worry about you.”

“Whatever. I know you’re heartbroken about Lucy. Believe me, I am too. I had a crush on her, since, like, birth. And I know you want to help Sophie, but you can’t just stay here forever.”

“I know that.”

“Okay, good. I’ll tell Phillip. He’ll be relieved.”

“Since when are you and Phillip so buddy-buddy?”

“We’ve always e-mailed.” I know my brother and my husband like each other, that they seek each other out at family holidays, like life vests, but I didn’t know they kept in touch beyond the Thanksgiving turkey. I wonder what else I don’t know about my husband’s life.

“Sounds like you talk to him more than I do.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Shut up. Let’s talk about you instead.”

“Fine. So, I haven’t gotten laid in six months. How sad is that?”

“Very. Want to hear something sadder?”

“Sure.”

“Neither have I.”

I don’t remember when Phillip and I stopped having sex. It wasn’t a conscious decision, at least on my end. We both just got busy with work, and somehow that activity fell out of our lives. Like how I stopped going to the gym last year after I got the stomach flu and never went back, even though I kept paying my membership dues. Phillip and I touch from time to time, a blot of a kiss on the lips, cheek, forehead, when running out the door, but not like we used to. We used to crawl under the covers just to be near each other, to whisper even though we were the only people in the room. We used to want to feel the other’s breath on our shoulder blades, the other’s fingertips on our bellies. We’d point to a spot—on our necks, our wrists, our temples—and we’d get kissed, right there, the exact right spot, as if by magic or secret language. We used to hold hands when we were sitting next to each other on the couch, for no reason at all.

Now I don’t crave his touch, or anyone’s touch, really. I no longer have dreams in which strange men take me home and ravish me. Or even about our frighteningly attractive FedEx guy. My sex drive had a slow leak, and now it’s empty, and the idea of sex is about as enticing as heading back to the gym. Too much effort for the payback. Just like shaving my legs.

Phillip has never bothered me about our lack of sex this past year, nor has he mentioned the fact that my body has grown lumpy, my clothing less careful, my eyebrows unleashed. He seems not to have noticed that I am letting myself creep toward middle age without a fight. This letting myself go, which is what I suppose the women’s magazines would call it, has little rational basis. If I was considering the D-word, which I do on occasion—
divorce, divorce, divorce—
surely I’d want to clean myself up and get ready for whoever else is out there?

The last time I went to New York, my mother wasn’t shy in mentioning my new look.

“Honey, let’s be honest. You’ve put on some emotional weight. Right there,” she said, and grabbed a bit of flab cresting over the top of my jeans. “See, that’s not real weight. Emotional fat. You let go of some of your pain—which is partially boredom, isn’t it?—and that will all melt away. Let me write you a prescription for Effexor or Prozac.” My mother’s solution to most problems involves a prescription, which, I’ll admit, comes in handy from time to time.

But why hasn’t Phillip, brutally direct Phillip, said a thing? Doesn’t he miss the old me? Could there be someone else? I don’t know. I didn’t even notice that my husband and my brother were friends.

And how would I feel if Phillip were seeing someone? Would it pierce my heart or would it be a relief, an answer?
You can walk away now, Ellie
. Or would that just be another cop-out?

I know how to play the victim. I’ve done that before, maybe have been doing it for almost two years, since Oliver. And after a while, playing the victim is a form of complicity too. Seems to me that marriage can spin a thousand species of betrayal. Adultery is only one of them.

“Can I give you a bit of advice?” Mikey asks, and brings me back to this restaurant, to its hard plastic chairs, and to its overpowering smell of turmeric and sautéed onions that I can feel seeping into my clothes.

“Sure.”

“We came from the same womb, so I get it. You know, I still have a scar on my left ear from when Mom pierced it with that horrible peace-sign earring when I was a baby. Who pierces their baby boy’s ear? Anyhow, I know how screwed up we probably both are—God knows I haven’t had a relationship in, what, like forever—but you and Phillip … I don’t know how to say this without sounding stupid, but you guys gave me hope. That maybe one day I would actually grow up and have a real live girlfriend that I could marry and, you know, build a life with. So, my point is, you guys might not be so good now, but your marriage is probably something worth fighting for, Ellie. And you owe that to Phillip.”

“I am not sure what I owe to Phillip.”

“Then to yourself.”

“I am not so sure what I owe to myself either.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Yeah, well, I am my mother’s daughter, after all.”

10

N
ope, not a peep. Sorry, Ellie.” Claire, Sophie’s teacher, tells me this when I come to pick Sophie up from school. “But she didn’t hide in the loo. I reckon that’s an improvement.”

Sophie spends her days in a place that seems more like a house than a school. Situated on one of the white-mansion blocks of Notting Hill, it is distinguishable from its identical, freshly painted, Ionic-columned residential neighbors only by the discreet sign, the paved front with a bike rack for pedal scooters, and the slew of parents wandering over for the afternoon pickup. The place has a garden-party atmosphere, civilized and orderly. Everyone knows who belongs to whom. The adults are all women, well dressed enough that I presume they are mothers, not nannies, and, to my surprise, very few of them are British. Instead, I see sleek and scarved and perfumed French ladies who do-not-get-fat, their casual and slack-bottomed American sisters, and diamond-encrusted, red-lipsticked Russian oligarchs’ wives. Somehow, all of these women seem to have given birth to well behaved—my mother would argue a little too well behaved—British children.

I’m getting to know Claire—Ms. Walters to Sophie—from this new world, where parent and child part and reunite for morning drop-off and afternoon pickup, and where she makes sure, depending on the time of day, everyone gets shuffled in or out in an organized fashion. She is a petite and pretty woman, what my father would call an “English rose,” with straight, delicate brown hair and a Zen-like evenness to her voice. She’s probably just shy of thirty, blessed with that milky skin of the British, the lucky by-product of a lifetime of never seeing the sun. Her warm smile, kind and soothing, is a welcome contrast to the exaggerated pity or social awkwardness that seems to have colored most of my interactions lately. She’s different from the women who came to the funeral, Lucy’s “friends,” who sat coolly, watchful and appraising, as if they were in the front row of a fashion show, who had the nerve to say, over and over again, “It’s such a pity she fought back,” as if by assigning blame they could reassure themselves that their families were safe, that our tragedy was not, in fact, contagious. The proceedings merely an event to make them feel better about their own lives, not to honor one prematurely lost.

Claire and I look over at Sophie, who is sitting cross-legged on the stone wall, with Nancy Drew this time, and again ignoring the other children swirling around her. I am not sure why she loves the Girl Detective more than Harry Potter, but that seems appropriate for Sophie, to revel not in a fantasy world but in a preppy one.

“The good news is, I’m sure this not talking is a conscious choice. Today I purposely asked the class some questions that I knew she would know the answer to, and, each time, she would start to raise her hand and then remember herself. My guess is it’s only a matter of time.” Claire’s eyes are filled with compassion. I suddenly have the urge to be one of her students. I want to be eight years old again, sit in a desk that wraps around on the right side even though I am a lefty, and I want to store my already made lunch and floppy school-books in its belly. I want to laugh when my teacher gets chalk on her back and get called on to recite my multiplication tables. I want my responsibilities clearly laid out: to go to school, to do my homework, to go to bed at bedtime, and to brush my teeth twice a day. I want to surrender all of my decision-making power, the cruel weapon of too much freedom, and hand in my adulthood badge. I don’t want to keep falling up.

“So, I’m not sure how you and Mr. Stafford will feel about this, but here’s the number of a psychologist mate of mine for Sophie. He’s an expert in this sort of thing. He spent a lot of time studying children in violent circumstances, mostly in Sudan. Really interesting guy. I think he and Sophie would be a perfect match.”

The thought that Sophie, insulated and privileged Sophie, who claims her favorite food is sushi, would have anything in common with children in the midst of war—something that sounds like an oxymoron, children and war—makes me want to cry. I picture African babies with machine guns and bloated bellies, an image foreign and dehumanizing and heartbreaking. One that takes me as far away as I can get from that little girl in her uniform.

But Claire is right. Though she may not have lived through a genocide, Sophie has seen more violence by age eight than I have in my whole life.

“Thanks. I’ll talk to Greg.”

“No problem. The thing is, Sophie was having a tough time at school before all this happened. So, not that there ever could be good timing, but I reckon this wasn’t it.”

“I thought Sophie was a great student. Lucy always brags—bragged—about how advanced she is.”

“She is definitely the most advanced student I’ve ever had, but she’s eight going on forty, as they say. At her age, kids don’t usually notice when they aren’t that popular—that’s a distinct pleasure reserved for adolescence—but Sophie can sense that she doesn’t really fit in. The other kids don’t like to play with her, and, bless her, she doesn’t really like to play with them either. She can’t be bothered, I guess.”

I glance at Sophie. She has taken down her ponytail and is now sucking on the strands as she flips through the pages, embroiled in Nancy’s mystery-solving shenanigans. She does not look up. Not once.