Reunion: A Novel (16 page)

I
wish more people liked me.

I wish people liked me more.

Sometimes I steal gum at the grocery store.

Sometimes at Starbucks I take someone else’s order, even though I’ve paid for my own.

Sometimes in the middle of the day I go to the bathroom and undress completely and just stare at myself in the mirror. I always look different from the way I think I should. I am always 10 percent too tall, 10 percent too large, 10 percent not as good-looking as I want to be.

When I was fifteen and it was winter and I had sleeves to cover the evidence, I hit my thighs and my upper arms until there were bruises. I did this every day for two months straight. I was too wimpy to try cutting. Hitting was easier and cleaner. There isn’t a person in the world I’ve ever told about this.

Sometimes, after the adoption business and after Peter had fallen asleep, I’d masturbate in bed next to him. I did it quietly. Sometimes I wanted him to catch me. He never did.

In the middle of the night, sometimes I wake up and I can’t breathe just thinking of all the things Peter and I have accumulated. A whole moving truck’s worth of stuff. Not just a box or a station wagon or a van, but a moving truck’s worth of stuff. And I feel so empty and sad and weighed down by the emptiness. That home. That idea of home. Of a household. It’s suffocating sometimes. Before I agreed to marry him, before I told him about my debt and he helped me find a credit counselor and a debt-management service and promised to pay for everything while I paid off what I owed, before all that, it was the numbers that kept me awake—the numbers on the statement and the numbers on the calendar and the way the due dates seemed to come faster and the balance wouldn’t stop growing.

There was a year, maybe one entire year after we were first married, that I slept through the night. But then my brain turned back on and started looking around, looking at all the crap we’d acquired, and I stopped sleeping again. When we were talking about adopting, it was the baby that I would think about at night. Some stranger’s baby. Living in our home. One more thing that we’d gotten our hands on. One more reason I’d be stuck forever. Those nights, I’d have to get out of bed and go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet with the lid down and struggle for breath. If I ever accidentally woke Peter, I’d just say, “It’s nothing. A nightmare.” And he’d fall back asleep and I’d think,
I’m not lying at least.
Because, really, it was a nightmare.

A
ND THEN THERE IS THE SECRET
that is Billy. The secret that was. The secret that is no longer a secret. He was a way to pretend all those household belongings didn’t matter, didn’t
belong
to me—me, the woman who, when confronted with her sister’s outdoor furniture, understands what it is to covet. The human heart is nothing if not confusing and confused.

I found Billy online, on a message board. It wasn’t slutty. Or who knows, maybe it was. My judgment isn’t what it could be. He didn’t know I was married. The first time we met it was just for coffee. He brought his dog. That was probably what sealed the deal. I’ve never owned a dog. I’ve never owned a pet, unless you count the series of elephant fish that I had during Whitney’s reign. She’d always liked fish, so her one moment of support was in encouraging my father to let me have a small aquarium in my bedroom and one elephant fish. It died after two days. The next one lasted a little longer. The third one died the same day it came home. I buried them all in the backyard. Nell and Elliot didn’t make fun of me, but they didn’t help me bury them, either. I kept the aquarium filled with water but empty of fish for a year. At night, I’d lie awake and just watch the little treasure lid bubble open and closed. I must have kept it around so long because I liked the light, liked having a night-light that wasn’t technically a night-light. But then Whitney had the twins and everything old was thrown out. Anything that could carry germs. And I was moved into Nell’s room and the twins were given my bedroom as a nursery. By then I didn’t care about the aquarium. By then I didn’t need the night-light because I had Nell just an arm’s reach away.

But Billy’s dog. It was this white fluffball of a thing. It wasn’t a breed I would ever have chosen voluntarily. It was small and girly and ugly. But it had a personality! And on that very first day, it slept on my feet, just right there under the table, and I had this feeling like I was looking through a window at a different life, at a different version of my life. Who was this woman with this man and this silly white dog? What kind of place did they go home to? What kind of bills awaited them there? What kind of furniture? Did they rent, or did they own? Was there a mortgage? Were they debt free? This woman looked simpler to me, smaller, more easygoing, more carefree. She owned less than I did because she’d bought less than I had. This woman slept soundly through the night. I was sure of it. And if she didn’t, she at least had a dog to check in on.

Obviously, if these were my feelings, I should have gotten a dog. I should have put my foot down with Peter and said,
Listen, guy. We’re getting a dog, okay? A baby is too much for me. But I’m unhappy. And I see that I need something that needs me. And I see that you do, too. We’re missing something—don’t get any ideas, guy, I’m not talking about a baby, okay?—but I think a dog will help. And if a dog doesn’t help, then maybe therapy—not with you leading the sessions, okay? You could refer me to someone, though. And if therapy alone doesn’t help, then maybe some of those drugs you’re always talking about. And if not drugs, then we’ll think of something.
But of course, it was more than just the dog. I wanted the whole package. I wanted the whole fantasy. I wanted Billy and I wanted whatever feeling it was that the simple crude act of infidelity caused in me. It was the same feeling as taking someone’s drink at Starbucks, but better. Bigger. It lasted longer. Not that long, but longer. A week instead of an hour. And it infected my whole body—my fingertips, my toes. I liked it. That’s the thing. I liked it.

There is maybe even the chance—somewhere way deep down in the darkness—that I wanted to do what my father had done. It was in my DNA. The way certain babies are born with alcohol in their systems. It’s there. Everyone knows it’s there. The little baby grows up and gets married and his wife looks at him every day and every day she’s thinking,
Is today the day that he becomes his father? Is today the day?
I didn’t become my father. I did what he had done to prove I could, to prove it meant nothing, to prove that we weren’t the same. And you know? Now that I’m thinking of it, I might even have done it to prove I was different from Nell and Elliot, too.

Billy himself—Billy devoid of his body—I wasn’t as obsessed with as I was with the feeling of wrongness. The personality belonged mostly to his dog. Of course, I am saying this now. I am saying this
after the fact
. If you’d asked me then, if you’d asked me midthroe, I probably would have said he was a dish. Or something equally icky and sticky.

When I got bored, which took only a handful of months, I finally told him I was married. He didn’t believe me. He thought I was lying. Did I mention he was younger? He was. He was in his late twenties, which, for a single man, is the equivalent of being a large puppy. I laughed when he didn’t believe me. I wasn’t being cruel. What it was was that I couldn’t help but imagine all the girlfriends before me—girlfriends! You get married and you think,
Thank God, I never have to be one of those again
. But then the years go by, and you think,
Girlfriend! There’s a thing I’d like to be again. There’s a word that sounds young and unburdened and lithe
—and I imagined all these young, long-legged, tanned girls, at least one of whom had, at some point, probably claimed pregnancy as a way to keep Billy around. It was probably an ugly and hard-learned lesson for him when he found out she was lying. Now here I was claiming marriage as an excuse to break up. Of course he didn’t believe me. It wasn’t till I showed him the ring that he finally got it. And then he got mad. And then the dog peed on the carpet. (This wasn’t a new thing. The dog was always peeing on the carpet.) And then I left. He only started calling two months ago. He left me alone through the spring. I don’t know what happened. Probably it’s as simple as he’d never been broken up with before. Probably he went through a few more girls after me and they were boring and he’s since mistaken my being married for not being boring. But he’s wrong. He is wrong. I’m as boring as they are. I’m more boring. I’m doing him a favor being cruel like this. In the long run, I’m doing him and his future wife a favor. He’ll learn something from this. Exactly what, I can’t say. But he’ll learn something. That’s the guarantee. That’s what they teach you while you’re growing up. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Fact.

B
y six p.m. Sasha has somehow gotten everyone to move into the living room. The A/C is running full blast, but so many bodies are making the room thick and a little bit funky. What’s funny is that for the most part, the half siblings are at the sides of their mothers, which gives the occasion a
Family Feud
feel, as though questions will begin soon and the teams will have to fight to stay in the game. We should have done this when Dad was alive.

Joyce is back at my side, smelling boozier than I am.
Ellio
t, Nell, and Sasha are teamed up on the sofa beside mine, Mindy sitting half on one of Sasha’s knees, half on one of Nell’s. I have no idea what Sasha wants to talk to me about, but the anticipation feels like Christmas Eve.

“So listen,” Elliot is saying, leaning forward now so his elbows are resting on his knees. “We thought it might be a nice thing to take a few minutes and let people say a few words about Dad.” Lily, across from me, sniffles, and Whitney puts an arm around her. Whitney, who is wearing a leopard-print halter top and has obviously had some work done, is not about to cry over Stan Pulaski, man of the hour, but it gives me a little bit of joy seeing that her daughter might genuinely have cared for the guy.

“He didn’t want a funeral, per se,” says Elliot, and I’m not so sure about this. Stan Pulaski was a maudlin man. He liked speeches. He liked speechifying. But Elliot’s got the floor and God knows I’m not about to push for something more intense than what’s already happening. “He didn’t want anything formal,” Elliot’s saying. “So tomorrow there won’t be speeches. There won’t be prayers. It will just be a time to say goodbye. Today, though, we thought he wouldn’t mind if we remembered him together, casually, as a family.”

Family.
This word is getting bandied about in a way that’s making me dizzy. It’s got less meaning in this room than it does at seven p.m. on ABC, where a Chinese dude and a lovely Latina can have the world’s most beautiful black baby with no questions asked. Is this my family? Are these women, who came in such quick succession but who divorced me as easily as they divorced my father—are they my family? And these children, this rainbow of ages and heights and features—are they my family because half their DNA says they’d make good donors if and when the time comes? If this is what family is, then count me out.

There’s an awkward silence in the room. Joyce pulls my ear down to her mouth and whispers, “Will you say something?”

I look at her and shake my head. I mouth the words
No way, José
, which is what she used to say to me when she caught me looking at her liquor cabinet when I was younger.

She squeezes my arm and in a boozy whisper repeats her new mantra: “I missed you, I missed you.”

I squeeze her knee lightly—all bone!—and hope she’ll stop talking.

“If nobody wants to go first—” says Elliot.

“I’ll go,” says Sasha.

Louise, Dad’s wife before Sasha, purses her lips into a nasty little downturned smile. She hadn’t wanted the divorce and she’s always maintained that Sasha stole him away from her. She probably thinks she’d still be married to him if it weren’t for Sasha. She probably thinks he’d still be alive.

Sasha scoots Mindy onto Nell’s lap and stands. She brushes off her skirt in a nervous way. Her cheeks are turning crimson and she hasn’t even started talking yet.

I turn around and spot an open but warm bottle of white wine on the console behind me. I pick it up delicately and, as quietly as possible, pour some into my glass and also into Joyce’s glass, which still has ice and what smells like scotch at the bottom of it. She doesn’t mind.

Lucy, sitting cross-legged next to the unlit fireplace, burps, and one of her older sisters laughs. Nell shushes them and Louise shoots an ugly face in my sister’s direction. I wish I were drunker. Or better, I wish I had some of that pot from last night. This situation could be a whole new scene if I’d smoked some of that magic weed. I could bring myself to tears, perhaps. I could say a few things about my father. We’d all pee ourselves, then go our separate ways until tomorrow. After that, we’d never have to see one another again. A goodbye to Stan Pulaski and a goodbye to one another. For good.

“He was best at mealtime,” Sasha says. She’s got her face pointed at the floor, and it’s funny to try to imagine this suddenly shy woman ever giving tennis lessons or commanding the court with her instructions.

“He fell in love easily and often,” she says. That’s certainly one way of looking at it. “It’s what made me love him and what drove me crazy about him.” This woman is generous to a fault.

Across from me, Louise looks bored. Whitney looks pissed. Their children—all of them but Lily—look checked out. Joyce’s head is now resting on my arm and I think she might actually be asleep.

“You want it to make sense,” Sasha says, and she raises her face suddenly. “You want for something like this to have some meaning.” She looks at Mindy and winks. Then she looks at me. Right at me. “You get the news and the first thing you think is ‘What does this mean? What’s the significance?’” She’s quiet for a minute, but she doesn’t sit down. Lucy and Lauren start squirming. My underarms are itchy, sweaty. Joyce is officially snoring. “You want it to make sense,” Sasha says again, still looking at me, and I wish she’d look away so I could look away. “But it doesn’t.”

Mindy makes a sniffling sound, which I use as my cue to break eye contact.

Then, with a sort of exhaustion, as if the spirit has left the medium’s body, Sasha sits suddenly back down and, in an entirely different voice—the voice, in fact, of a tennis pro—she says, loudly, almost giddily, “Phew. That’s it for me.”

I wonder how it happened—Stan and Sasha. Did he see her at the country club and just know? Was it love at first sight? Whatever it was, it was more than what I had with Billy.

Nell glances in my direction and offers me a timid little smile, and—just like that—we are sisters again.

“Anyone else?” says Elliot.

“I would just add,” says Nell, “that he’ll be missed.”

“Absolutely,” says Elliot. “How about we raise our glasses?”

He raises his in the air.

“I just want to know—” It’s Louise talking. Louise, the ultimate baby maker. “I just want to know why there isn’t going to be a proper funeral.”

“Like I said,” says Elliot, lowering his glass. “He didn’t want one.”

“Says who?” Louise is sitting up straight now. She’s holding her hands in the shape of a little ball in her lap, and I can see from here, from across the room, that she’s gripping herself so tightly that her veins are popping up and down. And I realize she’s probably been planning this tiny explosion all day. She’s been holding it in and holding it in until just the right moment. She thinks she’s setting an example for her girls. Showing them how to fight the godless in a morally triumphant way. She has come to defend her dead ex-husband’s honor. Or something like that. God, I wish I were high.

“Dad,” says Nell.

“
Dad
,” says Louise. “As if you have the right to call that man
Dad
. As if any of you heathens have the right to call that man
Dad
.”

Well, okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. I too take issue with our use of the word. I might even agree with her. But I also take issue with the word
heathen
. I think, perhaps, I would like to hear more about this word. I’d like to hear her God-fearing evidence. I sit up a little straighter and accidentally knock Joyce to attention, which in turn knocks Joyce’s glass to the floor.

“Oh dear,” says Joyce, genuinely embarrassed. Sasha is kneeling in front of us almost immediately with a dish cloth in her hand. She’s rubbing Joyce’s knee, telling her it’s nothing while simultaneously dabbing up the spilled wine-and-scotch mixture.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she’s saying.

“I’m old,” says Joyce. “You can’t take me anywhere.”

“This is a sham,” says Louise, standing up. “This is a disgrace.”

Nell starts laughing, which makes Elliot start laughing, which makes Mindy start laughing.

Joyce grabs my wrist and says, “Are they laughing at me?”

This makes me start laughing and I grab onto her other hand, which is grabbing onto my knee, and say, “No, Joyce. No. They are
not
laughing at you.”

Louise is gathering her girls together like a woman scorned.

Joyce says, “Who, then? Who are they laughing at?” She is like a blind woman asking to be shown the way.

Sasha is still on her knees, still collecting the little pieces of ice and doing a once-over on the Oriental.

I point at Louise so Joyce and everyone else can see me. “Her,” I say. “We’re laughing at
her
.”

Louise and her gaggle of girls don’t even bother turning around. They’re out the living room door and soon out the front door, and soon after that, they are out of our lives for good.