The Distance Between Us (17 page)

From out of the blue, Bonnie and Caitlin, working in tandem, seize me from both sides and escort me, protesting, to the lobby entrance. Caitlin is wearing her coat and Bonnie is carrying mine, along with my purse.

“What are you two simpletons doing?” I demand. “Have you lost your minds?”

Neither answers. I get one last glimpse of Arthur’s splotchy, enraged face, then Bonnie pushes me through the door and out into the cold. I struggle to get away from them, but they don’t let go of me until we’re standing several feet away from the entrance. I continue to berate them even when we finally come to a stop on the
concrete steps of the fine arts building. Caitlin ignores my tirade and moves to the side, breathing hard.

Bonnie stuffs my coat in my arms and tells me to shut up. Her voice is ragged and tired.

I bridle. “There’s no need to be rude, Bonnie.”

She hugs herself for warmth and searches my face.

I’m in no mood to be scrutinized by a dull-witted harpsichordist. “Is there a problem?” I demand. “I really don’t appreciate being manhandled, by the way. I’m tempted to file a complaint.”

She shifts her weight and grimaces. “I may have to fire you for this, Hester.”

I stare at her for a long time. “I’m tenured. You can’t fire me for something this trivial.” My breath turns to mist in the air and I put my coat on automatically, shivering.

“Don’t be so sure about that.” She hands me my purse when my hands are free. “Your tenure may indeed be an obstacle to your removal, but I promise that if I decide to get rid of you, you’ll be gone, one way or another.” She kicks at a piece of ice on the top step and rubs her temples. “In any case, don’t bother to come back to work again until I call you.”

With an abrupt nod to Caitlin, she turns away and disappears into the building again, leaving my daughter and me together outside. While the door remains open I can hear the ongoing pandemonium in the lobby. Martha is still bellowing at the top of her lungs and no one seems to know what to do with her. The door shuts again, showing me my reflection in the steamy glass.

The exhilaration I was feeling a moment ago is altogether gone, banished by shock and a sudden, horrible weariness. Arthur’s apoplectic expression as I was being ushered out of the reception flashes through my mind; I don’t think I’ve ever seen such hatred on a human face.

Surely that’s not the reaction I wanted. Was it?

Surely not.

I examine myself as if I were a stranger, and my throat closes up. Dear Lord, I’m tired. From my shiny black shoes to my thin white hair, I look terribly old. Old and feeble.

I very much want to go home now.

I button my coat in silence before glancing at Caitlin’s image in the door.

She frowns at me. “You’ve looked better, Mother.”

I sigh. Good old Caitlin. I can always count on her when I’m feeling down.

“Yes, I’m well aware of that, thank you, dear.” I pat my hair and open my purse to get my gloves and car keys.

She doesn’t answer, and when I look up again her face in the glass is expressionless. Her eyes probe mine in the crude mirror, no doubt looking for a weakness to exploit.

Damn her.

I may be down, but I’m not so far down as that.

I force a smile and turn around again. “But a little wear and tear is to be expected, don’t you think?” I have to fight to control the tremor in my hands as I tug on my gloves. “After all, these formal receptions take a great deal out of me. They’re so dreadfully
boring.
”

There’s a long silence, but eventually the corners of her mouth turn up, just as I knew they would.

“God, Hester.” She shakes her head. “You really haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

She spins on her heels then and leaves me alone on the steps, wondering if I only imagined the faint note of tenderness in her voice as she spoke my name.

“I
don’t want to do this, Mother.”

Caitlin was standing by the piano, clutching her flute in front of her stocky chest as if it were a talisman against evil. Her thirteen-year-old face was twisted in misery as she glared at each of us, sitting together in a knot a few feet away from her. Arthur and I were sharing a piano bench in the middle of the room, and the boys were sprawled on the floor in front of us, leaning against each other and giggling like old drinking buddies at their favorite bar.

Caitlin was preparing for an audition with the St. Louis Youth Symphony the next day, and Arthur and I had thought it would be wise for her to play her orchestral excerpts and scales for an “audience” prior to the audition itself, to help her get over her pre-performance jitters. She had agreed with our plan at first, but now that she was on the spot in our music room, she was digging in her heels.

“I know you don’t want to, dear, but it’s for your own good,” I told her. “And there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. We’re your family.”

Arthur nodded. “Besides that, we’ve all been through this sort of thing more times than you can count, and you couldn’t ask for a more sympathetic set of ears.”

She rolled her eyes.

“That’s right,” Paul chimed in. “Just play, Caitlin. Jeremy and I promise not to make fun of you.”

I reached down and ran my fingers through his clean brown hair. Arthur and I had spoken to both boys about being kind to their sister when it came to her musical endeavors, because we all knew how sensitive she was about her modest skills on the flute and the piano.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “We’ll just smirk behind our hands. You won’t even notice we’re doing it.”

I jabbed him in the kidney with my toe. “Ignore him, Caitlin. There will be no smirking.”

She held her flute tighter. “I said I don’t want to.”

Arthur’s well of patience, never very deep, was quickly drying up. “For God’s sake, child. Just be a good girl and trust that your mother and I know what we’re doing, okay? It will only take ten minutes, and you’ll feel much better about your audition when you’re done.”

I didn’t know why she was being so obtuse, but thus far I wasn’t taking her behavior too seriously. It was a superb spring afternoon outside, and the sun coming through the windows was lighting up the forest painting on the sides of my piano. Every time I looked at this imaginary forest, I saw something new. This morning I’d found what appeared to be the tail of a black squirrel, hidden in the crook of a tree.

I tried to jolly Caitlin along, so we could be done with this and enjoy the rest of the day. “The sooner you get through this, darling, the sooner you can go back to reading in your room and pretending none of us exist. Why don’t you just start with a few major scales? You’re quite competent at those.”

“No,” she said, adamant. “This dumb audition was your idea anyway, and you never even asked me if I wanted to be in the stupid symphony in the first place. You’re just worried I’ll play badly tomorrow and embarrass all of you in front of the whole world.”

I blinked. “That’s an absurd thing to say. Of course we want you to do well, but the only way you could possibly embarrass us is by doing what you’re doing right now.”

She stared at the floor. “No.”

Jeremy spoke up.” If you’re nervous, just picture Mom and Dad in their underwear. You’ll be so traumatized you won’t have to
worry about anything else.” He shuddered. “Oh, shit. Forget I said that, okay?”

The corners of her mouth quirked up, in spite of herself.

Paul laughed. “Yeah, that’s good. Think about Dad in a pair of tighty-whities.” He cackled. “And wearing one of Mom’s bras, too, while you’re at it.” He glanced over his shoulder at Arthur. “You’re starting to get man-boobs, by the way, Dad. I’ve been meaning to tell you that a bra might be a really good idea.”

Arthur leaned over and gave Paul a shove, causing him to lose his balance and topple into Jeremy. Jeremy fell over, too, and both boys ended up flat on the floor, chortling.

Arthur glowered down at them. “I don’t have ‘man-boobs,’ as you call them. I’ve simply been doing push-ups lately, if you must know, and my pectoral muscles have been getting larger as a result.”

The boys laughed harder. Arthur’s physical vanity was an easy target, and the children dearly loved to wind him up. I had to bite my cheeks to keep from laughing, too. The only push-up Arthur ever did was when he lifted himself from our mattress each morning on his way to the shower. He loathed exercise of any kind, and his sedentary lifestyle was beginning to catch up to him.

Jeremy rolled out from under his brother, fighting for oxygen. “Oh, I see. Those are your pectorals, then. Thank God. I thought they were silicone implants.”

Paul howled and held his stomach. “Yeah, same here. I’m really relieved to know you’re such an athlete, Dad. I was worried you might have been playing around with hormone therapy instead, so you and Mom could have a lesbian relationship.”

Jeremy buried his face in Paul’s side, choking with mirth.

“All right, all right,” Arthur growled. “That’s enough.” He spoke with wounded dignity, but it was mostly an act. He knew quite well that both of them adored him, and he loved watching our sons have fun together, even when their silliness was at his expense. “Let’s settle down. This nonsense isn’t helping your sister to focus.”

He returned his attention to our daughter, who was watching her siblings writhe about on the floor with an odd, bruised expression.
Their closeness was something she was seldom part of, and her anger now seemed to be tinged with sadness, too.

When the boys were younger, they invented an asinine game called “Donkey Butt,” which required four things—a Nerf ball, a basketball hoop, a piano, and the ability to make oneself belch. The rules of the game were as follows: Player One would shoot a basket, belch, and play a note on the piano. Player Two would follow suit, but play two notes—the first being the note Player One had played, the other of his own choosing. Player One would add a third note on his next turn, and so on, until a player at last bungled the notes in the sequence and lost the game. The real “catch” was that neither player was allowed to look at the keyboard as his opponent added a note. This posed no real obstacle in the first rounds (both boys were blessed with perfect pitch), but their impromptu “melodies” could sometimes exceed twenty notes, and were all over the keyboard, so eventually it became quite difficult, even for them.

And for Caitlin, it was impossible.

Her memory was more than equal to the task, but her musical “ear” was not. Nor did she have any inclination to grossness, or horseplay, which were both at the heart of everything her brothers did together. I don’t believe Paul and Jeremy ever intended to exclude her from their relationship, but games such as these were exclusive by nature. In short, there was very little overlap between their world and hers, and though I knew she often felt like a third wheel around them, I could see no way—aside from asking the boys to give up the things they enjoyed doing together whenever she was around—to make her feel more welcome.

“I don’t need to focus,” she now blurted. “What I need is to be left alone. I’ll be fine at the audition tomorrow, okay?”

Arthur ignored her. “Start with something really easy, sweetheart,” he coaxed. “How about a ‘C’ scale?”

She stomped on the rug. “Why are you guys making me do this? What’s the big deal?”

I put a hand on Arthur’s arm. “We’re only doing this for your sake, Caitlin. It would be good for you to earn a spot in the Youth Symphony.”

She snorted. “You mean it might make me feel like less of a failure.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that. She was right, and we both knew it.

Arthur and I wanted so badly for her to succeed at something musical, because we saw, daily, how it hurt her to be so overshadowed by the rest of us. In any other family but ours, she would have been the golden child, due to her exceptional talents in many other fields. But with us, she could only see herself as the runt of the litter.

“You are not a failure.” Arthur put his elbows on his knees and stared into her eyes. “And you can do this audition, if you’ll just try.”

Jeremy and Paul had finally sobered and were sitting upright again. Jeremy was watching Caitlin closely.

He cleared his throat before speaking to Arthur and me. “Don’t make her do it if she doesn’t want to, okay?” His voice became gentle. “It’s just a stupid audition, Caitlin. It doesn’t matter at all.”

There were sudden tears on her face. “That’s easy for you to say.” She waved her flute at the rest of us. “It’s easy for
all
of you to say. There’s not one of you who’s ever been anything less than Wolfgang
Fucking
Mozart.” She brushed away her tears with impatience. “It’s not fair. I’m sick of being the house retard.”

Paul, too, was looking at her with concern. Unfortunately, tact was not one of his strong points, even when he was attempting to be kind.

“You’re not a retard,” he said. “You’re just … I don’t know. You’re just musically challenged.”

Caitlin flinched and Jeremy tried to shush him.

“Don’t be an ass, man,” he muttered. “That makes her sound like she should be in special ed courses or something.”

Paul took umbrage at this. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” He turned back to Caitlin. “I just meant that music isn’t your thing. We all know you’re smarter than shit at everything else.” He looked away. “Hell, you’re smarter than all of us put together.”

This was the first time I’d ever heard either of the boys acknowledge Caitlin’s superior intelligence. The balance of power among
the three of them was a tricky thing, and it was only her exposed vulnerability that allowed him to make this concession.

But it didn’t help.

“So what?” she snapped. “Do you think that matters with this family?” She gazed with grief into the music on the stand in front of her. “I could win a Nobel Prize, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t even notice. They’d just say, ‘Caitlin, who?’”

Arthur and I were both stunned by this announcement. But while he just sat there in bewilderment, I was on my feet in an instant, enraged.

“That is the single most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard,” I fired off. “Why in God’s name would you say such a thing?”