Reunion: A Novel (14 page)

N
ell is standing in the driveway when we get back from the grocery store. There are two other cars—cars I don’t recognize but that must belong either to some of our grown half siblings or to their mothers. My chest is still expanding, trying to escape from its cage.

Mindy hops out first and runs to Nell.

“Hey, kiddo,” Nell says. “Have fun?”

“Yulp,” she says. “Double yulp.”

“Is that ice cream on your chin?”

“Yulp,” she says. So much for secrets.

“Don’t tell your mom,” says Nell. “She’ll be M-A-D.”

Mindy holds out her hand like I taught her before things went south at the store. South, but only momentarily. We seem at this juncture to be on a northerly swing.

“Give me five,” she says.

Nell slaps her hand and looks at me.

“Up high,” says Mindy, raising her hand higher. Nell slaps it.

“Down low,” says Mindy. She lowers her hand, but moves it away too slowly and Nell has to deliberately miss. “Too slow,” says Mindy.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Nell. “Inside.” She shoos her away.

And now it is just me and Nell in the driveway. Her arms are crossed. She’s got that pissy look working on her face that always makes her appear older than she is.

“What’s up?” I say, shutting the driver’s-side door and going to the trunk for the groceries.

“You were gone three hours,” she says.

“Was I?” I disappear behind the open trunk. I could write this scene in my sleep.

“You were,” she says.

I root around in the trunk longer than I need to. Sadly, there’s really nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. The trunk offers very limited procrastination.

“Did you borrow money from Sasha?”

“Are you asking me a question or are you telling me that you know I borrowed money from Sasha?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I lost my card,” I say.

Still nothing.

“I can write her a check.”

“Peter called,” she says.

I stand up, knocking my head against the roof of the hatch. I did not see
that
bit of dialogue coming.

“Shit,” I say.

“Thought that would get your attention.”

I shut the hatch and rub my head with my free hand.

“You’re bleeding,” she says.

I look at my fingers. “I am?”

“Christ,” she says, coming over to me. She takes the groceries and sets them on the gravel. “You’re a mess.”

She removes a damp paper towel from her back pocket and wipes my forehead with it in a not-exactly-delicate way.

“What did he say?”

She pulls down on my chin to get a better view of the cut. “What do you think he said?”

I twist my mouth off to the side. “That he’s trying to get in touch with me?”

“No,” she says, and then steadies my face so that we’re looking squarely at each other. She’s so maternal sometimes. I have no idea where she’s learned all these mannerisms I equate so thoroughly with the mannerisms of a mother. It’s essentially gentle manhandling, and I kind of like it. “He wants you to stop calling.”

I nod. “Okay.”

“And texting.”

“That makes sense,” I say.

“See,” she says, and gives my forehead a final hard dab, “but it doesn’t make sense. Not to me, anyway.”

“Right.”

“Because last time I checked, he was your husband.”

“Right.”

The back door opens, and Elliot sticks his head out. “You guys coming in?”

“In a minute,” says Nell, without turning to look at him.

“Who’s here?” I say to Elliot, hoping that Nell will let me go.

“The twins and Joyce.”

“What about the twins’ mom?” I say.

Elliot takes a step toward us and stage-whispers: “We have not yet been blessed with the arrival of Whitney Somerworth, botanist extraordinaire.”

“Ah,” I say. “Too bad.”

Nell turns and looks at Elliot. “Can we get a minute?” she says. “For real?”

“Fine, fine,” he says. “Do what you want. Do what you want.” My ally disappears inside.

Nell looks at me. “Give me something,” she says. “Anything.”

“He wants a divorce,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “He told me that much. He said I should ask
you
for the reasons.”

Somewhere deep down I feel like crying. Somewhere in this corpus of mine there are real emotions at work. I know it. I can feel them. I can feel the springs moving, the gears turning, the wrenches churning. Somewhere.

I take a deep breath and just say it. “I was unfaithful.”

“Unfaithful,” she says, but not like a question.

“Yes.”

She pushes me away from the house and toward the garage. “And is that why—” She’s hissing quietly in this spit-laden, overly dramatic way that makes me want to slap her. “Is that why you said Rita should just get it over with? That’s why you think adultery is such a good idea all of a sudden?”

So listen. Things are getting overly polarized out here on this driveway, overly histrionic, overly black-and-white. But that’s not something I can point out to Nell. Not when she’s like this and not when she’s
technically
in the right. I say
technically
because she’s not the one I cheated on and she’s not the one I kept a secret from. But I also say
technically
and leave it at that because it’s also
technically
none of her business and
technically
not my job to fill her in on every aspect of my life immediately, as it goes down. All this to explain why I am willing, at least at this specific juncture, to give her overly simplified question an overly simplified answer.

“Yes,” I say.

“Because suddenly adultery is okay in your book.”

“No,” I say.

“What about Dad?” she says.

How did Stan do it? How did he keep so many secrets and tell so many lies? Maybe he had a notebook. He probably kept it in his back pocket. Every time there was something new, he’d just pop open the book and record it beneath the last entry. I wrote myself an email once. It said, “Thai, Himalayan, Giovanni’s.” It was a list. A list of the three places I’d eaten that month with Billy. It was a reminder not to look at Peter one day and say, accidentally, “But we just had Thai last week.”

Nell again: “You didn’t learn anything from his bad habits?”

I did! What I learned was this: It’s easy. It’s so unbelievably easy. It’s disgusting how easy it is. Until it isn’t. Until you need a notepad or an email just to keep the lies organized.

What I say is this: “You two are the ones who want to be here for this. You two are the hypocrites.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Elliot?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s all for show. This is”—I search my brain for the word Elliot used so many years ago—“horseshit.”

She shakes her head. “So your excuse for cheating is what?”

“I think—” God, I want to get this right. “I think a certain type of person can learn something from it.”

“Ha,” she says. “Double ha.” She jabs me in the clavicle and I slap her hand away.

“And what,” she says, “did
you
learn from it?”

The truth is, I hoped it would be like in the movies—where the man steps out just once and, in stepping out, realizes that everything he already has at home is all he wants, all he needs. I wanted the affair to make me feel so lousy with guilt that my love for my husband would suddenly and magically be renewed. I wanted to believe that he was right, that our lives were empty before and a baby would change everything. Instead, it appears I’ve learned that our marriage has an expiration date that we’re rapidly approaching. It appears that while I followed Bill Cunningham’s advice and didn’t take Stan’s money (and, yes, yes, I know, it wasn’t actually offered), I did take Peter’s money and help, which obligated me to him in a way that was not immediately clear to me. It further appears that there’s a very good chance that maybe I do want children, just not with Peter, but that maybe it’s now out of my hands. Maybe the choice is no longer mine. Maybe I’m on the same sad trajectory as Nell. But all this strikes me as too mean and too complicated for Nell’s black-and-white world. It strikes me as too difficult a thing to go into right now, and so I keep my mouth shut.

“For how long?” she says when she sees I’m not going to answer. “How long did it last?”

It’s a good question, actually. It’s a question I wish Peter had asked.

“Long enough for me to have learned a lesson that I didn’t learn in time.”

She’s shaking her head in this
I am so very burdened by the knowledge I have been given
kind of way.

“Pithy,” she says. “Real pithy. Good for you. You should write that down. You should use that.”

“I’m not trying to be pithy,” I say. And I’m not. I’m trying to be honest. More and more, I see that honesty is the only way out, but just because you make the realization doesn’t mean that it all of a sudden becomes an easy thing to do. Just because you trace the source of the addiction doesn’t mean the addiction magically vanishes.

I’ve lost her. It’s too late. She doesn’t care anymore. In a matter of moments, I have transformed myself from sister to stranger.

She picks up the grocery bags.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Whatever,” she says.

She gets halfway to the porch and turns around. “Do what you want,” she says. “You already have.”

Now
that
, I think, is pithy.

H
ere’s what we’re dealing with inside the house: The twins, Lily and Stan Jr., who—I was right—look to be firmly in their twenties, are in the kitchen with Sasha, Mindy, Joyce—more ancient than ever—and Elliot. Lily, who looks kind of like me in that she is tall and big-nosed and big-chinned, is playing patty-cake with Mindy, who’s sitting on the counter over by the refrigerator. Stan Jr. and Elliot are standing on the other side of the refrigerator doing their manly man catch-up. They’re each holding a glass of red wine, and I understand immediately that Elliot is attempting to school Stan Jr. on this particular vintage or whatever but Stan Jr. isn’t having it. He’s holding his own. It’s gross—being in this kitchen with all these people who grew up with money and somehow retained it. I feel like a total phony.

Joyce, who is—at this exact moment—the first to officially notice and acknowledge me (hug, hug; kiss, kiss; oh my goodness her skin is saggy and cold and loosey-goosey), pulls me to her side and escorts me to the stove, where she’s been watching Sasha cook. Nell is nowhere in sight.

“Look at this one,” Joyce says, fawning all over Sasha while holding tightly onto my elbow. “Look at this beauty your father got his hands on. Can you believe he was ever married to me?”

Joyce has a point. There’s a forty-year age difference between the two of them. It’s pure lunacy that one man would have had both these women. Pure lunacy that the man who pulled it off wasn’t a Hollywood exec but was Stan Pulaski, late-in-life hoarder and breeder of babies. Stan Pulaski, adulterer. Stan Pulaski, suicidalist. Stan Pulaski, my father. What must it have been like in that brain of his?

I take a slice of carrot from Sasha, who gives me this conspiratorial look that kind of melts my heart and wins me over all at once. She’s lucky. She gets to hang out with Mindy whenever she wants.

“Wine?” says Sasha.

“Yes,” I say. “Please.”

I suspect, from the camaraderie Sasha is showing me, that Nell has not yet told her about my marital shortcomings. Although, who knows? Maybe she’ll come down all hip and forward-thinking on my side. After all, she married Stan. E
llio
t, judging from his goofiness in the driveway a few minutes ago, doesn’t know either.

Lily pries herself away from Mindy long enough to give me a hug, and it’s hard not to wonder if other people are as freaked out hugging me as I am hugging Lily. It’s off-putting when women are our height. It’s hard to know where to put your head. You always end up doing a kind of chest-to-cheek-to-chest press. It’s ugly.

I start to walk over to Elliot and Stan Jr. to do the right thing, to say hello to the only other male in the litter and, as far as I’m concerned, the haughtiest of all the half siblings, when he—Stan Jr.—holds up his hand and gives me the
just a minute
signal, and I think,
You know what? Forget you.
And maybe I’d even have said it aloud—or worse—but Sasha saves me by putting a glass in my hand and giving me a wink.

“You and I,” she says, “need to talk later.”

“Do we?” I say.

She nods and winks again. “Oh yeah,” she says. “We do.”

“Did Nell say something to you?”

She cocks her head and puts a hand on her hip. “Did she say something to
you
?”

“Wait,” I say. “I’m confused.” Maybe they really are lesbians! Maybe they’re about to make my day! Why have I not been taking notes already?

Sasha bites her lip and scratches her head, which is something I thought only monkeys in cartoons did when they were confused. I’m not being catty. I’m not comparing Sasha to a monkey. I’m just genuinely surprised to see a cliché used sincerely. It’s charming, actually. It’s sweet, unexpected.

Joyce sidles up next to me again. She grips my wrist with her knobby hand.

“We’ll talk later,” Sasha says, and gives me a toothy grin. If it weren’t for the grin, I’d say she somehow knew I didn’t lose my credit card. But she’s being all loopy and goopy, which is not the way to behave when you’re about to introduce the discovery of a lie. No way, no how. What on earth could this woman want to tell me? The meaning of life? The secret to happiness? I’d take it. I’d gladly take advice from anyone just now.

“I missed you,” says Joyce.

Sasha slinks away from us.

“Come sit with me,” says the second woman to call herself my stepmother. “Tell me about yourself. Tell me about being young.”

She’s a skeleton, this one is, but she’s got a grip, and she pulls me with uncanny ease to the kitchen table to sit.

“Golly, you’re young,” she says. “And so tall.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I missed you,” she says again.

It makes sense—that Joyce would latch onto me. Nell and Elliot never lived with her. She never got to know them like she knew me. And now she’s here without children. She’s come by herself to remember my father, her onetime husband. It’s touching in some ways. But also a little wacky. It makes me think she must be very lonely, which makes me think that being very lonely must be very sad and, if possible, avoided.

“You did not,” I say. “You couldn’t stand me.”

She slaps her thigh and cackles.

“Battle-ax,” she says. “That’s what I always called you.”

No
, I think.
That’s not what you called me, but fine.
I was a lousy daughter and my father was a lousy dad. But maybe there’s still time to be a decent stepdaughter.

“Want some booze?” I say.

“You read my mind,” she hisses, and grips my arm like she means it.