The Last Good Day of the Year (6 page)

Summer 1985

Before she became a beauty, Gretchen was a fat girl. Our mother was horrified by my sister's weight but tried not to show it. She did her best to reassure my sister that lots of kids are chubby, but her daily reminders that everything was going to be fine someday only reinforced the idea that Gretchen wasn't fine to begin with. It didn't help that Abby was so petite (“Lilliputian,” our mother called her), making Gretchen seem even bigger in comparison.

Even after Gretchen's awkward days were long behind her, our mom still talked about how much it had pained her to watch the two girls play together. “I'd see Abby flitting around like a little whisper of a child, so sweet and dainty; and then, hulking along behind her, would be Biiiiig Gretchen.” She even did an impression of my sister, stomping across the floor with her arms held straight out like Frankenstein's monster and her faced fixed in a
dumb stare. Our mother seemed to assume that, just because Gretchen was no longer oafish, the comparisons weren't hurtful, which was stupid of her. But she had no way of understanding how it felt to undergo the kind of drastic metamorphosis that her oldest daughter had experienced during puberty. Our mother did not know how to be anything but beautiful, and she believed that Gretchen must have shared her disdain for the younger, less attractive version of herself, as though the fatness was an unflattering outfit that she'd simply decided to strip off one morning.

My sister's first few years at school were spent trying to blend in well enough that none of her classmates had reason to single her out for ridicule. The strategy was less than successful, because kids don't need a reason to make fun of one another. Just as Abby put up with her fair share of teasing for being so tiny, Gretchen went through elementary school as one of the token fat kids. Some of the older boys on the school bus even made up a song about her, which they sang every morning as she walked to her seat as though it were as mandatory as the Pledge of Allegiance. It was only one line, repeated over and over for as long as it took for my sister to either bury her head between her knees or start crying: “Too many Twinkies … oink, oink!” (They were cruel, but not all that creative.)

During the summer between seventh and eighth grade, Gretchen's body decided that enough was enough. Over those few months, she morphed into a young bombshell with such alarming speed that our dad insisted she see a gland specialist, even though we couldn't afford it. It was as if she were molting, wriggling a little farther out of her old skin each day, not from effort so much as intuition:
This is what I am meant to become
. She didn't have to
put herself on a diet or exercise every day like other girls; she needed only to surrender herself to the genetic lottery whose check had finally cleared. Her unflattering lumps shifted themselves into sleek, symmetrical curves. Her hair grew fast, as thick and long as unspooling silk. Her legs stretched, her shoulders broadened, her spine corrected itself from a slouch to an arch. Twenty extra pounds seemed to dissolve as easily as snowflakes in hot water. When school began the next fall, people whom she hadn't seen all summer didn't recognize her. The Twinkie song was all but forgotten (until two years later, when poor Donny Levin started sixth grade).

It didn't take long for Gretchen to understand that what had once been impossible for her—physical beauty—was now effortless. She was thirteen but looked seventeen. She rarely wore makeup, but it didn't matter. Her knowledge of these facts brought power, and with great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, because she was still a thirteen-year-old girl, my sister had the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old girl. She believed she knew everything about life, when in fact she knew virtually nothing. In short, she was the complete opposite of responsible. And while our father understood that much, our mother wasn't as quick to catch on. Because she'd been born beautiful, she'd had plenty of time to grow into an understanding of what such a role required from a person. Gretchen didn't have the first clue.

But she had plenty of opportunities to practice over the next few years, and by the time Steven Handley strolled into our yard to build a retaining wall one hot June morning in 1985, sixteen-year-old Gretchen had been through a handful of boyfriends who
had barely managed to unclasp her bra without hyperventilating. They were nice enough—she stayed away from the ones who had teased her most mercilessly—but they were all disappointments in their own way: Ben the soccer player had acne all over his back (bacne); Michael the dentist's kid seemed to have no idea what to do with his tongue besides shove it in her ear; Scott the drummer desperately wanted a mustache but did not possess the necessary ability to grow facial hair, so he constantly looked like he'd forgotten to wipe his mouth after drinking chocolate milk; Greg the future flight attendant had issues he hadn't even begun to acknowledge; Adam mysteriously smelled like hush puppies all the time; and Hank always wore the same shirt as though he thought nobody would notice.

Put anybody under a microscope and their flaws will become unbearable. What Gretchen didn't realize was that none of those boys made her happy because they were all so
eager
to make her happy. Nothing is more unattractive than desperation, and the boys at her high school reeked of it—especially around Gretchen. By age sixteen, Gretchen was bored with them. She set her sights on Steven, thinking he would be a challenge.

She was right. At first he didn't pay much attention to her. It was part of his job description: Lenny gave all his employees explicit orders not to screw around with any of the clients' underage daughters.

“What's the matter with him?” Gretchen asked Abby Tickle, the two of them peeking into our yard from my sister's bedroom window, studying every move of the landscaping crew with an intensity befitting Official Retaining Wall Construction
Supervisors. “It's like he doesn't know I'm alive. Maybe his sex drive got damaged when he split his head open.”

Abby was still tiny, but she wasn't a sweet little girl anymore. Lately she'd been cultivating a wild streak that sent occasional flickers of manic instability across her face. The words tasted good in her mouth as she spoke them, like a swig from the bottle of peach schnapps that Darla kept in the linen closet for emergencies. “There's nothing the matter with him,” she said, her eyes shining with all the sordid possibilities. “It's because he's a
man
.”