The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (8 page)

“I’m a fashion guy,” Luke said. “But I don’t think I can stand one more model tantrum. From now on I want to be all about inanimate objects.”

“I don’t blame you. Anything I can do—” I started to say, but the loudspeaker interrupted to announce that our flight would be delayed—by how long the plummy voice didn’t say.

After Luke returned to gather a second round of drinks, I reported in to Barry, as a wife is supposed to do, even when she’s begun to realize she’s in a continual state of low-grade anger iced with disappointment. I doubted he’d be home, but I planned to leave a message.

He answered on the first ring. “Really, Molly?” Barry said, and seemed to listen attentively to my tale of transportation inconvenience. “How about I pick you up and take you to dinner?”

Suddenly Barry was acting like an ideal husband while I was guzzling wine with a guy who was looking better by the sip, someone I’d be working with across an ocean for six days. Into what alternate reality had the airport limo deposited me? “You would do that?” I asked, incredulous.

“Why not?” he said. “I’ll hop in the car—get there in, say, forty minutes? Tomorrow’s my day off. I can afford to get to bed late.”

I felt like a horse’s ass. Who was this spouse so concerned for my well-being? I wondered as Luke returned with more wine. “Barry, I love you for offering, but they aren’t saying when my plane will leave. You could drive all the way out here and I’d take off before you even parked.”

He waited a few seconds before responding. “Got it,” he said.

“It just seems better this way,” I said. That sounded feeble. “But it would have been … fun.” Feebler still.

“Well, good luck,” he said. “Love you.”

“Love you, too.” I said it loudly, as much to remind myself I was married as to alert Luke in case he’d missed my rings.

Eventually, the two of us boarded and were seated side by side. I debated whether to proceed with dabbing Neosporin in my ears and above my lip, my preferred retaliation against the germ warfare that is airplane air.

The Neosporin stayed in the bag. Luke and I continued to chat, and somewhere above Greenland I discovered that he, too, was a twin, an identical twin. His brother, Micah, taught English at Dartmouth.

“Maybe we should fix up your brother with my sister,” I said.

“I think not,” he said. “My brother’s married. But why not me? That is,” he added, “if your sister’s anything like you.” The fourth glass of wine—or maybe it was the fifth—had erased the shy guy I thought I’d met earlier in the evening.

It’s not as if the Virgin Mary appeared in my window to announce that this companion would ever be anyone important in my life, but at that moment I realized that even though I didn’t know what to do with Luke, I didn’t want to regift him, to my sister or to anyone else.

“Why not, indeed?” I said. “I’ll get on it as soon as I’m back.”

My first lie.

Luke was dovetailing far too perfectly with my doubts. I needed to shut down, despite the fact that I would have happily jabbered all the way to England. “Better get some sleep,” I said. “Supposed to meet my staff tomorrow at eleven to go over two hundred shoot details.”

“I’m a babbling idiot,” he said. “Sorry.” Still, he pulled out an eye mask and put it on. “Do I look like Zorro or just a pathetic perv?” he asked, turning toward me and speaking in a low Jeremy Irons growl. “Are you scared?”

In my wine-addled haze, he looked cuter than a panda with an extra helping of testosterone. “Terrified,” I admitted as I burrowed beneath my pashmina tent.

When I woke at dawn, I discovered Luke’s legs under the shawl, his feet—in red socks—touching mine. I faked sleep until the flight attendant rocked my shoulder to make sure I was alive.

Those were the days.

y mother, my father, and Lucy are gathered around the pine farm table in the kitchen, sipping their second cups of black coffee. Light snow stencils the patio and yard, and whatever sun shines over Illinois cowers under menacing clouds.

Since my death, no one in the family has slept past dawn, even after Ambien—which, unfortunately, Costco does not sell over the counter in jars the size of buckets. Lucy took the commuter train north last night and slept in our childhood bedroom—a circa 1985 homage, lilac for me, aqua for her, Madonna posters, now faded, for both of us. She’s made this trip for the last two weekends and believes she’s here to console my parents, but it’s more the other way around. Lucy is alone; my parents have each other. They speak their grief wordlessly—in the car, while my mother massages my father’s neck; as he brings the morning newspaper to their bed; when they spoon through cold, fitful nights.

“Don’t pick the crumbs off the crumb cake,” my mother says.

“Don’t treat me like I’m ten.”

“Don’t start, you two.”

Don’t, don’t, don’t, you two, you two
. The Divine family anthem.
Doo-dah, doo-dah
.

“So, should I call Barry?” Lucy asks. She asked the same question last night at dinner. “I want to know if anything’s happened with the case that he hasn’t told us.”

“No, honey,” my mother says. “Dad should do it.” I hear her worry that if Lucy asks, Barry will get his back up. Lucy can turn a chat about seasoning hamburger patties into a military engagement.

“It’s too early to call New York,” my dad says, eyes on the sports pages. He dreads speaking to Barry.
Putz
, he’s thinking. My father, I have learned, is not quite the gentleman he presents to the world, but he tries hard to see Barry’s side. “Poor guy may be full of himself, but he’s still just lost his wife and has to raise a daughter alone,” he says to the women in his family, though I suspect it’s to convince himself to treat Barry with decency.

The Divines are determined to have Annabel visit for Passover. For the last three years, Barry, Annabel, and I spent Thanksgiving with Kitty and Passover with my parents, so my parents and Lucy feel they own that holiday. Since shiva ended, they call Annabel every night on the dot of seven, but the conversations are as unsatisfying as tickling an insect bite.

“Annabel would be up now,” my mother points out. “She’d be watching cartoons.”

“But Barry might have gone back to sleep,” my father counters. “It’s Saturday. Give the guy a break.”

“A break?” Lucy shrieks. “What about my sister?”

My mother groans. “We can live without the melodrama, Lucy,” she says, looking down at her newspaper and pretending to read. Fatigue mutes her voice. “Dan, call at eight our time.”

With deep affection, he salutes her. “Yes, Sarge,” he booms.

My family returns to their breakfast, but after a minute Lucy pours her coffee down the drain. “I’m going for a run,” she announces, and bolts upstairs. From her small duffel, she plucks out sneakers and several layers of winter-ready sports clothes. While I left behind a wardrobe of girly gear—lace, chiffon, clingy cashmere, low-rise thongs, numerous garments constructed of fabrics better suited to gift wrap, and an unworn pink wool jacket trimmed in lace—Lucy believes in
fibers built to withstand a trek from Kathmandu to Everest. If our father were president, her Secret Service code name would be Patagonia.

Lucy pulls her curly hair, the color of dark maple syrup, into a ponytail that bobs beneath a snug knit cap. Its string ties dangle over her ears like the
payes
on a Hasidic rabbi. In a flash of black and purple, without saying goodbye, she’s out the door.

Lucy’s completed several marathons, which is probably why my equally competitive husband has started training for one. Barry doesn’t especially like to run, but what he likes less is my sister outdoing him, and Luce loves to run—in any weather, at any time of day, her gait long and lithe. At a distance, under her gear, a casual observer wouldn’t know if she is male or female but would admire her grace.

Sadly, the effect ends as soon as she stops, not so much because her walk is a sturdy clomp but because Lucy is the only person I know for whom exercise becomes foreplay to aggression. After a workout, when most people seem ready to nap, Lucy appears ripe for a fight. The more she runs, the less mellow she becomes.

At least we can dismiss suicide
, she thinks.
No one would ever think my sister would or could kill herself
. As she hits her stride, she synchronizes every thought with a footfall.
Loved her Annie-bell too much
. She repeats my daughter’s nickname in exactly the too-sweet voice I said it in.
A lot to live for
. She starts up a hill.
But Barry could have driven her to it
. She pushes harder.
He’d drive me nuts—he could make any woman ride her bike into the water
. She turns.
Or off a cliff
. She reaches the top.
All marriages are like that
. Picks up the pace.
Men … morons
. She’s going strong.
Douche bags. Cretins. Fuckers
.

Wind whistles through bare trees as Lucy runs six miles, her mind circling in and out of possibilities. She whips past the diner where our parents treated us to blueberry pancakes every week after Sunday school. Two former high school friends wave—they’re continuing the Country Kitchen tradition with their own kids. Lucy looks through them.

“We sent a hundred-dollar fruit basket,” one of the young matrons says. “She could at least stop to say hello.”

“Run your butt off, Moosey,” the other one hisses softly. “If her sister hadn’t just died, I’d shout it,” she says to her friend.

Lucy is in her own head and wouldn’t have heard.
Pills, maybe
. She
starts to pant a bit as she begins her last mile.
Or carbon monoxide
. She catches her breath on the home stretch.
But not this way
.

Lucy charges back into the kitchen.

“Where were you?” my mother asks. “You were gone almost an hour.”

My sister ignores her as she unlaces her shoes and strips, layer by sweaty layer.

“You’ll never guess who called,” my father says.

Molly?
Lucy thinks.

“Barry’s mom,” my mother says. “Inviting us all to New York for the seder.”

Lucy skewers our mother with a stare. “You declined, obviously.”

“I thanked her. Said we’d let her know.”

“Mom,” Lucy snaps. When her face contorts like a gargoyle’s, my sister must give her tiny students nightmares. “Why are you such a sucker? It’s manipulation. Can’t you see that? If Annabel doesn’t visit now, a precedent will be set and—”

“Lucy, apologize,” my father interrupts, wishing he could be playing poker or listening to his vinyl LPs—Odetta, Buddy Holly, early Bob Dylan—or getting a massage at his golf club, and curses the fact that it’s closed through March. He’d like to be anywhere but here, with the difficult daughter, the daughter who rips and rumbles through life, no matter how much she means well, which she usually does.

“Dan, calm down,” my mother says. “Lucy has a point. But Kitty claims the trip would upset Annabel. She thinks it’s too soon for her to travel, that it will disrupt her schedule. I want what’s best for our granddaughter.”

“Barry!” Lucy bleats my husband’s name as if it’s profanity. She’s down to her silk long johns and the sports bra that compresses her DDs. My dad looks the other way. “What a wuss. Has his mommy call.”

Lucy can’t get a rise out of my parents, who’ve seen it all before. My mother walks to her only living daughter and begins to stroke her matted hair. Lucy shakes off her hand. “I’m calling him myself,” she says.

n London, I loved that Luke was far more attentive than your usual photographer. He wasn’t afraid to ask my opinion, courtship more subtle and effective than roses or the occasional deep, meaningful gaze. “How do you want the shot set up?” “Here or there?” “Think we got it, or do we shoot another roll?” As he picked my brain he would casually touch my arm, the electric whisper of flesh brushing flesh ending almost before it began. He had to notice that I never pulled away.

True to his word, Luke wasn’t a partier. Every night he bowed out early. Whether he took dinner in his room or got together with friends—or a woman—he’d never say, and only on the last night did Luke join our posse. “To Molly!” he toasted as the evening began. “Who allowed me to pass through this firing squad barely bruised.”