Real Life & Liars (20 page)

I ALREADY MISS THE LIGHT.

The special morning light, as it would weave in around the leaves of our own Big Tree, felt like magic. It would carry in golden bits of dust and you’d think they were spirits of your ancestors come to wish you good morning. It was a dappled, playful light that would dance around the room as the breeze stirred the old maple’s branches.

Out my office window now, all I can see is mud and broken roots. Her leaves rest on the porch of the house across the street. These are the last lush, green leaves she will ever wear, in fact. She can’t be put back together, after the wind ripped her from the earth.

I twist the ends of the joint I just rolled. I’m not quite the expert at this as Chip. My fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be.

What a lousy grandmother I am. My most significant contribu
tion to his life in recent memory is to provide him with drugs. Of course Katya should be furious. She has every right.

Not that fury needs permission. Fury comes when it chooses, and it can stay long past its welcome. My own anger simmers. I can almost feel my lid rattling with the pent-up force of it.

I tuck my joint and a book of matches into my bra—next to the renegade left breast—underneath my favorite blouse, silky and in the colors of peacock tails.

It takes a few good yanks for me to open the stubborn old window, but the screen pops out easily. I swing my legs over the sill with some difficulty, but my yogi says I have supple ham-strings for a woman my age.

I’m on the first floor so it’s a short drop into the muddy garden. I land smack on some yellowed tulips flattened to the earth by the rain. I’m on the other side of the tree from the main exit of the house. It’s a simple matter to walk where I choose without anyone needling me: Where are you going? What are you doing? When will you back?

None of your business, nothing, and when I damn well feel like it.

This is why I’ve never gotten a cell phone. It would be like wearing your family around your neck. I’m glad I raised my children in a time when you could leave the house and really, truly leave.

I set off toward town, walking, in no particular rush, my Birkenstocks sloshing through puddles, cold rainwater splashing over my toes. My neighbors pay me no mind as they inspect their own damage. They’re righting patio furniture, picking shingles out of the yard, inspecting tree limbs. I note some smashed porches and tree limbs poking into windows. I hope no one was hurt. The unfortunate neighbors across the street had the wind blowing the large old maples toward their homes, instead of away.

Our tree must have been more rotten and aged than she appeared from the outside.

Couldn’t have been a real tornado. The damage would have been worse. Much worse. I suppose if people make it to church this morning, they will be praising God for sparing them.

What if a tornado had hit? Would they be praising God for that? Maybe for their own survival, but what if it killed others? Is that worthy of praise?

I wonder if people will try to drag me to church, now that I’ve got cancer. I turn onto Michigan Avenue. Hardly anyone’s up yet. I cross in the middle of the street to the west side. I drop my head so my hair will fall a little, shielding the side of my face from the early-morning rays.

I grimace to myself. I can’t imagine being one of those deathbed Christians who find themselves terrified into believing. Patty always asks me, but what
do
you believe? I don’t have a good answer for her. I can’t say “nothing” because the world is too powerful to be an accident of rocks in space banging around.

Maybe I should figure that out, then. Before I kick off.

Should. I’ve never been good with “should.” I should have been more cunning and political in my dealings with university administration, but that’s precisely why I was anything but, why I threw their hypocrisy right in their faces when they tenure-tracked men at twice the rate of women. I should have dropped my old flaming-liberal, feminist leanings in the eighties, some told me, because the battle was over. The women won. Time to cut your hair short and dress like a man and fight it out on their turf.

If not for Paul, soaring past me on the career ladder, then protecting me from his position on high, I would have been teaching freshman comp forever if I even managed to keep my job.

And maybe if I weren’t so belligerent, Roxanne wouldn’t be threatening me with freshman comp to drive me out of work.

I cross the bridge, which during the day bounces with the
weight of cars that stream across. It’s only just morning, though, and the bridge is still. I walk down the concrete steps to the walk-way beside the channel and turn toward the big lake.

I did toe the line with some of the “shoulds.” I stayed with my husband even after he cheated on me. Katya would be shocked. She’d say,
Mira, the original feminist, stood by her man after he had an affair?

What can I say? I loved him. The kids loved him. He was sorry. He’d been lonely and drunk on a book tour, heady with recent success. He confessed and tortured himself with his mistake for far longer than seemed reasonable.

It hurt anyway, oh, did it ever. I’d been in meetings all day, then went out after work for a drink with the faculty, and the crowd dwindled down to me and Paul, and we flirted and smiled and toyed with the electric current that ran between us, letting it zap us, then retreating. It took everything to pull myself away and go home, chaste, and later I discovered Max was, perhaps at that very moment, screwing some bookstore clerk who wore cat’s-eye glasses.

I kept the family together. I gave up working on my poetry, which I’d abandoned decades ago in the crush between children and paying work. I gave up spontaneity and stayed home from more than one protest march or petition-gathering session because I had babies to raise.

I’ve outgrown shoulds. It’s my time, now.

I kick off my Birkenstocks and pick them up loosely in my fingers.

The sand of the beach is pockmarked by the hard rain, and it resists my step the same as hard-packed snow. I pause by the swing set and look out over the lake, which rests languid against the beach, looking exhausted after last night’s excitement. The brilliant sun warms my back, but my face is brushed by a cool breeze.

I pull my feet through the sand and settle down against the stone wall that separates the beach from parking. I grind my toes into the sand. A couple of inches down, my toes find the smooth grains untouched by the storm.

It’s not Irina’s place to tell me what to do, nor is it anyone else’s.

Even poor Van will have to learn to grow up. I wish I hadn’t had to tell him separately from the others, watching his face crumple inward like it always did when he was a boy. In some ways he’s the youngest of the three, with none of Irina’s fierceness or Katya’s resolve.

I’ve given them the best start I can, and they have to go on without me. I will not cut myself apart for them.

I fish the joint out of my brassiere and light it up, breathing in the smoke and holding my breath against what everyone else expects of me.

KATYA’S PENCIL SKIMS THE PAGE, AND THE TREE APPEARS BEFORE
her. It’s beautiful in a terrible way, on its side like that.

She breathes fast as she sketches, having forgotten what it was like to pour out everything through the tip of her pencil. She has shifted her position from the porch steps, where she mainly saw roots, and gone around to the far side. She’s sitting on an old bath towel in the yard, recording the side view: now she is working on the knots in the bark, the splits where the tree grew wider than its old skin, then grew more to replace it.

If only her mother could just grow a new breast after surgery, maybe she’d go ahead and let them operate.

Katya feels a cramp of regret in her stomach for all the time she’s fought with her mother this weekend, this year, this life. Was it really worth it? It always seemed so at the time, so critically important.

“It’s just a dress!” her mother had yelled, in that week before
the prom, when Katya was a sophomore in high school and had been invited by a handsome senior named Danny Morrow.

But it wasn’t just a dress, as any normal high-school girl would tell you. It was never just the dress.

Kat was shopping in Traverse City with the popular girls, friends of Danny’s, who’d invited her along after they’d heard she was going to prom with him. She’d been plotting how to cobble together a reasonable dress given Mira’s hippie sensibilities. She could use something handmade by Patty, but time was running short, and she had other sewing projects. Kat had yet to find a pattern she liked at the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, anyway. She could troll secondhand stores or garage sales in fancy parts of town, where the styles might not be so out-of-date yet. But she hadn’t had the time between her schoolwork and the National Honor Society volunteering, and her after-school job at the corner grocery.

Bottom line: Mira didn’t believe in shopping as recreation and thought buying old clothes was a good way to recycle.

Also, a good way to commit social hara-kiri.

One of the girls that day in Traverse City had complimented Katya’s denim skirt and asked where she got it. Katya paused for half a beat before making up the name of a store. They looked at her quizzically, and she said, “It’s a boutique in Chicago.” Patty had made the skirt.

They started trying on prom dresses as a lark at first, claiming they were not seriously shopping. They’d do that later, with their mothers.

But then Katya had tried on a royal blue dress, with a short flouncy skirt, an acre of sequins, and a ruffled, one-shoulder neckline. All the girls had exclaimed over the way it showed off her legs and made her eyes sparkle.

Nowadays it would be ugly and kitschy, but in the eighties it was the height of fashion.

They started urging her to buy it, as she stood in the fitting room, wearing the dress and thick cotton socks. Katya shrugged. She didn’t have enough money on her, and hadn’t expected to buy anything, she told them. That was true, but she was skating over the real heart of the matter. Mira had other plans for Katya’s dress, involving consignment shops or a sewing machine. She would never permit Katya to buy the polyester faux-satin ruffly dress.

That’s when Tiffany stuck out her hand with her mother’s credit card. “I’ll buy it,” she said. “And you can pay me back whenever. You have to have that dress. You are gorgeous in that dress.”

Katya couldn’t miss the significance of her phrasing. “Gorgeous in that dress” meant “Not gorgeous without the dress.”

Katya’s palms were filmed over with dampness when she got home, the dress wadded into a ball in her oversize purse. She took the stairs two at a time to make it to her room before Mira came out of her office to say hello. She shook the dress out, smoothing the wrinkles as much as she could, and hung it in the far-distant reaches of her closet, where old, ill-fitting clothes silently yellowed away.

She wiped her hands on her denim skirt and stashed the plastic bag from the store in her underwear drawer, also shoved toward the back.

Katya knew she couldn’t very well hide the dress from her mother if she intended to wear it. She just didn’t want to fight that battle just yet.

Days went by, and Katya held hands with Danny in the hall and sat on his lap at lunchtime, and laughed with the popular girls at the poor idiots like Peggy Mae, who could politely be called “heavyset” and looked like she wore her mother’s clothes from the seventies.

Katya rehearsed her speech to her mother when she was supposed to be paying attention in algebra, and as a result, got only a C on the exam that covered the quadratic equation.

She walked in the house after getting off the bus and surprised her mother in the kitchen. She’d come home early from university that day. It was exam week, and her hours were all jumbled up. They never knew if she’d be there or not.

“Katya! You’ll never guess what Imelda just gave me. You’re going to love this.”

And Katya knew already what it would be, and knew with a desperate, cold certainty that she would hate it.

Mira flourished a satin-and-tulle cream-colored dress, with orange satin trim on the bustline, wide shoulder straps, and a cascading lace appliqué in matching orange, a floral pattern. Mira turned it over, and the appliqué reached around the back of the dress and trailed off.

“Isn’t it stunning?” Mira hadn’t yet looked at Katya. She carried on, “It’s a 1950s dress, just gorgeous, like a glamorous film star would wear. Ava Gardner, maybe. You’re going to really stand out in this.”

Kat threw her backpack on the floor. “Of course I will, because everyone will be laughing at me!”

“Don’t be silly. It’s a beautiful dress, and it’s a good thing that it isn’t what everyone else is wearing. Trust me on that.”

“My God, do you live under a rock? Don’t you know what it’s like for me in school, always wearing these hand-me-down clothes and trying to pass them off as new? I’m barely hanging on to a social life now, and if I show up in that, they’re going to laugh me out of the dance, and I might as well drop out.”

Mira placed the dress over the back of the couch. “Now you’re just being melodramatic. I suppose you want to spend $200 on some designer piece of trash you’ll wear once and never want to see again? So you can be like everyone else?”

Katya stormed up to her room and grabbed her blue dress out of her closet. She yanked off her school clothes and stepped into the dress, stealing a glance at herself in the mirror. She looked like
something from MTV, and the dress really did do wonders for her eyes, not to mention her legs, which were not swathed in tulle and could actually be seen.

She flew down the stairs and stood behind her mother, who had gone back to preparing dinner. “There. This is what I am going to wear.”

Mira turned slowly, distracted. She froze, and her mouth set in a hard line when she saw Katya. “And when did you get that?”

“When I went to Traverse City.”

“And with what money?”

“I’m going to pay for it.”

“With what money, Katya?”

“Tiffany paid for it. I said I’d pay her back.”

Mira smacked the knife flat side down on the cutting board. “So one of the rich girls tells you to buy a dress, and you just say ‘Sure, whatever you say!’ You are not wearing that. Leave the tags on, you’re taking it back.”

“What?” Katya hugged herself as if Mira were about to rip it off right then. “You wouldn’t!” She knew her mother wouldn’t like it, she knew she’d get a lecture and probably have to pay for the dress herself over several weeks of reimbursing her mother. She never expected this.

“You lied to me and sneaked around to buy this dress behind my back. You will not wear it.”

“I will not wear that thing!” Kat jabbed a finger at the fifties dress, in a heap on the couch. She imagined looking like Sandra Dee at the prom, and she started to cry.

“So Patty will sew you something, but you’re not wearing that one.”

“You’re being so unfair! You’re going to ruin my life!”

She turned back to her vegetables. “You’ll survive.”

“I’m not going then. I will not go to the prom if I can’t wear this dress.”

Katya crossed her arms, tapping her foot and staring at her mother. Mira’s black hair was escaping from the loose braid she wore over a tunic and long floral-print skirt. She was barefoot, as usual. She turned slowly to face Kat and leaned back on the counter, her face still, except for one fine line across her forehead.

“I guess you’ll have to call Danny and tell him to find another date.”

In the end, Katya feigned a stomach flu at the last moment, when she couldn’t bear the sight of herself in the fifties dress, and Mira did not relent about the blue dress. Mira returned the blue one and gave her the money to give to Tiffany, who never knew about the fight.

“I’m so sorry you missed it!” she’d told Katya at school the following Monday. “But I’m sure you can wear the dress next Homecoming.”

Next Homecoming, Danny took Tiffany to the dance. Katya sold concessions at the football game and watched a video Saturday night.

Katya shivers in the cool breeze off the lake as she smudges parts of her sketch where the line is too heavy and dark.

She wonders if teenage Katya would have done anything differently if she’d known that in just over twenty years, her mother would have cancer. Maybe she would have smiled indulgently and worn the stupid dress.

“Kat, when are we getting out of here?”

Charles stands above her, wearing some jeans and a polo shirt, his hair combed, face clean-shaven.

“What’s the rush?”

“There’s no power. I have to get to the office, or at least to an Internet connection. I can’t get through to the insurance company about the truck, and we’ll have to rent a car, which will take time. There’s…I just need to.”

Katya slaps her sketchbook shut and shoves the pencil into
the spiral binding. She struggles to a standing position without Charles offering her a hand.

“You need to tell me what’s going on,” she says, brushing a piece of hair out of her face. “Are you having an affair?”

“What? Jesus,” he looks around, but no one seems to have heard. She sees his jaw clench and wonders if she’s gotten it right. He really is screwing somebody. “I told you, it’s just business. A work crisis.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m not a drooling moron. Try me.”

“You wouldn’t be interested.” Charles shifts his weight from foot to foot, looks over her head, and chews on his lower lip. Anything but looking her in the eye.

“I have never been more interested in your business. I demand to know what’s happening that is of such critical importance that we have to leave my mother’s house the morning after we find out she’s got cancer.”

“It’s just…We’re having…”

“Out with it.” Katya throws her sketchbook at the ground. “Out with it, damn you!”

“Stop shouting and be reasonable.”

“I’m fucking sick of reasonable!” Her shriek startles a man who had been sawing off a tree limb across the street. He stops in midstroke and openly gapes.