No One Tells Everything (18 page)

She sits on the edge of the bed and gingerly dresses, moving slowly, her hands unsteady. She stands but then sits back down and drops her head between her knees. It’s too much.

She’s still muddled as she trips along the deserted thoroughfare back to the Happy House, stopping once to dry-heave into the weeds. Her mother’s car waits alone in the parking lot. She collapses behind the wheel.

When Grace finally turns into Woodland Road, relieved by its stillness, she rolls down the window and takes a deep breath. But then there is a bump under the tire and she lurches the car to a stop. She spills out in the middle of the dark street and the interior light shines on a little mound of fur and blood, claws and teeth. A squirrel. One of its legs jerks, and a dead eye holds her with an accusatory stare.

“C
harles,” your mom says. “Come now. I know you can do it. Say ball. Ball.”

She rolls the soccer ball to you and it bounces off your shins before you can grasp it. You’re too focused on the black hexagons blurring together. You are not coordinated.

“Think how proud Daddy will be,” she says, holding the ball up. “Ball.”

But you are marveling at the big coils of sod the men are unloading to cover up the dirt in the backyard. Grass comes in rolls! You giggle. Who cares about a black-and-white ball when there are huge spools of grass that men deliver. What they’ve been telling you is wrong. Grass doesn’t grow from seeds after all. It arrives on a truck. Maybe more things they say aren’t true either.

“Charles? Sweetie. Say it for Mommy.”

Your mom is young and pretty in her pink gingham dress, but she is anxious and weary and you can feel it in the space between you two. You point at the grass carpeting, hoping to distract her from her singular pursuit because you are getting tired and you want to be alone.

“Please don’t do this,” she says, lacing and unlacing her fingers. “I know you’re not dumb.”

Your dad thinks you’re dumb. He wants to trade you in for another son.

A blue jay lands on the bird feeder and you run on pudgy legs toward it, wanting to hold it in your fat little hands.

“Yes. Bird,” she says. “Charles, look at me. Bird.”

You look at her but you won’t say anything. You smile, wanting to see your mom look happy, wanting her to not push you anymore, to let you be as you are.

“Don’t get too close. Jays are mean birds,” she says.

The men with the sod have unrolled the last of the grass, covering the mud with soft green. Your mother dreams of the day when the Raggatts will be rich and you will be able to move out of this split-level house. For now she will make the best home for her family, petunias and zinnias along the walkway, meatloaf and green bean casserole in the oven.

She sighs and quickly covers a scowl with a wide-eyed smile when she sees you watching her. The blue jay has flown away. You lie on the grass and look up at the branches of the new willow tree that was delivered and set into the ground by the men. You could stay here for hours.

“Okay then,” your mother says. “If that’s the way you’re going to be. Let’s go.”

She touches her stomach, a growing hard mound, as she gets up from the grass. She tells you that you are going to have a little sister and you will have to teach her things. You can’t wait because then it won’t be only up to you anymore. Later you will wonder what would have happened if Caroline had not come along and they had had to deal with only you, but it might not have made any difference anyway.

“Charles, let’s go. Get up.”

But you don’t want to. The clouds keep coming and you don’t want to miss one. Moving, splitting, reconnecting. The thin little branches of the new tree are so fragile and they need you here to make sure they withstand the wind. You shake your head “no” against the ground.

“Now,” she says, frustrated, through clenched teeth, careful not to alert the yard workers. “Get up this minute.” Her eyes are shiny pools. She grabs your arm and pulls but you go limp, refusing. “Do not do this to me.”

Her nails dig into your soft arm and a curl of her hair falls loose across her forehead. She is crying now, stifling the sound with a red scrunched face, and although you know you could make it better, you are filling with your own fury, a knot of anger, and you pretend you are a rock and no one can get to you.

She drags you now, despite the glances she gets from the men loading the shovels onto the truck. Your arm hurts and your head bumps along but you are silent. If you talk, you know you won’t ever be able to go back to how it is inside yourself. When she gets you in the house and slams the sliding glass door, she leaves you lying on the floor, watching the ceiling. You fall asleep right there, lulled by the sound of her angry vacuum crisscrossing the living room.

———

Charles Raggatt pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect at his arraignment on first-degree murder charges in a Nassau County courtroom this morning. Raggatt is charged with drugging, kidnapping, and stabbing to death fellow student Sarah Shafer last April. Police say he was upset because Shafer rejected his sexual advances.

———

G
race has agreed to have dinner with her parents down the street at the Chenowiths’. She would like to behave tonight, to get through it, to leave on an unfraught note and put this visit behind her. She has had enough of Ohio.

Her father wears seersucker pants and a white shirt, and her mother is in a kelly green sweater set. Take away a few wrinkles and add hair color, and it could be twenty-five years ago, the annual kickoff cookout at the club, gin and tonics all around. They walk slowly and carefully, she and her mother flanking her dad like police escorts, down the little incline of Woodland Road to the Chenowiths’ gated driveway.

Marjorie answers the door in a linen ensemble with chunky wooden bracelets. She has not aged as well as Grace’s mother, her middle large and her face heavily creased. Grace remembers when Marjorie used to sunbathe in her backyard, slathered in baby oil, her bathing suit straps tucked under her armpits, Scruples splayed on her stomach.

“Hi!” she says, kissing Grace’s dad and then her mom on the cheek. “Look at you,” she says, enveloping Grace in a hug. “Come on in, folks.”

The house, as her mother has told her, was redone a few years ago. Grace feels like she has stepped into a design showcase for country chic, complete with pine floors, distressed cabinets, and an enormous stone fireplace. Black-and-white portraits of their kids—two boys and a girl—are hung all over the house. Grace used to baby-sit them when the sunken living room had rust shag carpeting and a sectional couch that wrapped around half the room.

Their yellow lab, Louise, whom she loved as a girl, is long since dead, but a replacement, a little thinner and paler, greets them with tail-thumping interest. And then Mr. Chenowith, Harvey, appears from the back patio in madras pants and a panama hat, with wide arms and a loud “Look who’s here!”

Aside from being her mother’s maybe-paramour, he was the neighborhood flirt, always telling the women how beautiful they looked and the girls what heartbreakers they were sure to be, pulling them onto his lap, well past the age of appropriateness.

He picks Grace up in a hug and she’s afraid he might start tickling her like he used to. He is an avuncular version of his old pervy self.

“You lucky girl, getting your mother’s looks,” he says.

“Jackson,” he says to her father with mock seriousness. “We need you back out there on the course. Newton is pulling us all down with him.”

They pump hands and Harvey slaps him on the shoulder.

“Gorgeous, as usual,” he says to her mother, who shakes her head at him but smiles.

Once, when Grace was babysitting here, she found a Hustler magazine in their bedside table while snooping around after putting the kids to bed. She was twelve. Hers was not a naked household like some were. She had never seen a penis. She knew the biological basics of sex, mainly from the Where Do Babies Come From? film they showed in school, but she was still a kid.

On the cover of the issue was the face of a woman in a box with the title “Giving Head,” the meaning of which was entirely lost on Grace. Inside there was the Hustler Honey Centerfold on a chaise lounge, sitting knees up, spread-eagled. “Beaver Hunt” featured readers who sent in “snatchshots” taken by their boyfriends. There were cartoons about child molesters that she didn’t understand but made her blush anyway. Photo upon photo of vaginas, penises, insouciant bodies. She was fascinated and repulsed and confused and riveted. Each image in the magazine was etched into her memory. She felt like she had peeked through a window into the secret lives of adults.

When the Chenowiths returned that night, Grace was too ashamed to look them in the eye. She thought that when Mr. Chenowith drove her home, he would say something because he could tell. Although she only saw the magazine that one night—it was gone the next time she looked—she’s afraid that no amount of chintz and old farmhouse furniture will make her remember this place any differently.

“Okay, what’ll it be?” Harvey bellows, shaking his already empty glass of ice toward them.

He tends to the libations with expert quickness, erring on the strong side. With drinks in hand, they go out back where a plate of steaks rests next to the smoking grill.

The sun has fallen behind the western woods, filtering through the branches and new foliage. The sky above is inky blue. Fireflies begin to wink. Grace excuses herself, refreshes her vodka tonic, and takes a stroll around the expansive yard, shoes in hand, the grass cool and soft. The dog trots along somewhere behind her. The backyard slopes down with a curve—one of her and Callie’s favorite sledding places—and they have since put in a pool, not yet uncovered for the season. She hears a child cry and peers through the hedge to next door. There’s a large swing set in a state of half-installation where the Meltzers’ badminton court used to be, before they filed for bankruptcy and fled to Arizona.

###

By the time the strawberries with Devonshire cream come around for dessert, Grace is stuffed and her head swims. Marjorie is talking about her youngest, Scott, who graduated from Princeton and has joined Morgan Stanley as an analyst in Boston but she hopes will settle a little closer to home.

“Oh wouldn’t that be great if he moved back to Cleveland?” Grace’s mother chimes in.

Grace wonders if her mother ever had a secret life of her own. An affair with Harvey Chenowith, smoking cigarettes, an amorous pen pal, shoplifting candy bars, visiting the hospital nursery, writing sestinas. Something that was hers alone.

Alcohol loosens Grace’s father’s stubborn speech but he’s still not comfortable with his thickened tongue. He stares off into the dark.

Harvey takes it upon himself to liven things up.

“So, Ms. Grace,” he says. “Do you have a boyfriend out there in New York City?”

He raises his eyebrows together in quick succession.

Her mom giggles and says, “Good luck getting anything out of her, Harvey.”

“No,” Grace says, laughing a little.

She feels the breeze on her neck and she shifts in her seat, the iron of the chair now cold.

“No? Come on, give me a little something here,” he says, shaking her shoulder. “Tell us about your romantic adventures.”

“What, do you want to know about my sex life?” she asks.

“Grace,” her mother says, shooting her a stern look.

“Now we’re talking,” Harvey says, and claps his hands.

“You know the Stevensons,” Marjorie says to the table as she scrapes the remains of the desserts into her bowl. “Their son Rob is in New York, I think. He’s probably about your age, Grace. A lawyer. Not married.”

“She’s not interested in normal things,” her father slurs.

“What?” Grace asks.

He finishes his latest drink.

“Look what you’re missing out on,” Harvey says, opening his arms wide with barely veiled irony. “Don’t you want to get married, buy a house, have kids?”

“Keep Hustler in the bedside table?” Grace asks.

Marjorie drops a fork, sending a splash of strawberry-stained cream across her sandaled foot.

“I was dating someone for a while,” Grace adds. “But he was married.” Her mother’s face goes taught. “Now I just stick to casual sex.”

“Jesus, Grace,” her mother says, as Harvey laughs.

“That’s the spirit,” he says.

Her dad looks at her with drunk, bitter eyes.

“What?” she asks, sloshed too.

“Nothing,” he says, opening his palms to her. “It’s your life.”

“How about you, Mr. Chenowith? Any philandering you’d like to catch us up on?”

He laughs but stops.

“Or maybe you want to answer that one, Mom?”

“Okay, then,” her mother says standing. “Marjorie, Harvey, thank you.”

Her chair scrapes against the brick as she moves to go.

Grace lurches ahead.

“Callie would have been different, right Dad?” she asks him, quietly. “She never would have ruined a perfectly nice evening.”

He looks at her, startled. Something passes between them, imperceptible to everyone else.

“The good thing is that we won’t remember this tomorrow,” Harvey says.

“Speak for yourself, Harvey,” Marjorie mutters, getting up.

“I’ll see you two at home,” Grace’s mother says.

“Susan, I’ll walk you,” Marjorie says, pulling her sweater from the back of the chair.

The women disappear down the dark driveway.

“Shall the rest of us retire inside for a nightcap?” Harvey asks, snuffing out the last remaining lit candle nub. “Maybe Grace can enlighten us on other subjects.”

“I’m going for a walk,” Grace says, stumbling, as she catches her heel on the chair.

“Better take your training wheels, young lady,” Harvey says.

She leaves the men in the glow of the light from the kitchen.

“No one gives a shit about the truth,” she says as she nears the end of the driveway, but the night swallows her words and the men have already gone inside.

Y
ou have said to your mother, “Please don’t,” but she just smiles and says, “It’ll be so much fun,” in that hopeful, cheery voice, the same one she uses to turn down the phone solicitors who call during dinner. She has hired a caterer, and oddly, a carnival supply company, as if you are still a child and there is time to fix you, to set you straight, to make you normal. The only people you could rightly invite would be Steve and Kelly, and you could casually mention it to Hadley, but instead your mom has managed to invite your entire class as a graduation celebration. If you think about it too much it becomes a scary montage of garish faces laughing at you. Your dad is not involved with the planning except for shelling out the dough.