The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (18 page)

Several days of blissful time have passed without phone calls from hateful siblings or breaking headlines of Marty’s wild romp through tropical islands. Unfortunately, though, there have also been no answers to what to do about the botanist’s phone calls, or
offers of help with the unfinished GFR tasks that she can recall that need completion such as planning children’s games, finding a brave photographer, checking out the liquor store discount and locating more decorations—because there can never be too many decorations.

“One quiet late afternoon,” Emma carps out loud, glaring at her computer screen, “that’s all I wanted and instead I get attacked by an email in the privacy of my own home.”

Emma is more than a bit crushed by Erika’s nonsupportive tone and she’s not just hurt that everyone is assuming things about her and her mental and physical capabilities, she’s … angry.

A power walk to Marty’s house doesn’t do much to erase Emma’s new anger. She figures she’s old enough to be a grandmother—if she hadn’t wasted her youth (according to her sisters) by not reproducing—and yet she once again feels as if she’s the ten-year-old baby sister. And there seems to be no end in sight to the dysfunctional family nonsense that is swirling like one of those out-of-control windstorms that recently blew through the South.

When she turns the last corner and sees the edge of Marty’s yard, Emma is momentarily distracted from the tempest of Gilford family troubles by weeds. Her compulsive gardening disease grabs her by the throat and she begins tugging the small shoots from the flower bed by the far side of Marty’s yard and in seconds she is lost. That is why it takes her more than a few minutes to hear the voices. When she looks up it’s already too late to hide. Too late to run. Too late to try and find a weapon besides the handful of weeds she is clutching.

Debra and Joy spy her about the same time she spies them and they all but charge her.

“What are you doing here?” Joy demands to know, acting as if she hasn’t recently told Emma the infidelity secret of the century.

“No, really,” Debra wants to know. “What
are
you doing, Emma?”

Emma has no idea why she bothers to explain to them that she came over to see if there were any packages delivered to their mother’s house that needed to be put inside but she does it anyway.

Joy informs Emma that she has everything covered and that Debra has listened to Marty’s answering machine to see who had called and if there was anything urgent that needed attention.

“What? That’s an invasion of privacy. Did you show her the thong in the bathroom too, Debra?”

When Debra doesn’t answer Emma knows that’s exactly what she did and Emma laces into her with an unforgiving litany that includes the fact that Marty could have her arrested for trespassing, is fully mentally capable to pick up her own messages from even a foreign country, and that their sudden burst of free time must mean the two sisters are going to take over not just the reunion, but half of the country as well.

For some reason Debra tries to change the subject by not-so-subtly asking Emma if she did something or said something to make Marty run off with a stranger.

Emma may have recently let off some steam by telling one sister she is not very fond of her, by walking out of a family brunch, by rethinking some of her past life choices and, well, yes, by screwing up the Gilford family’s most important yearly event, but she’s really never let loose on her sisters the ways she’s wanted to let loose at this moment in her life.

She’s never brought up all the stupid mistakes they have made, how they used her when she was growing up, how she still feels as if she’s being pushed around in a stroller. While Debra wails on,
Emma can only think,
You are a drunk and you have a problem
. And when Joy takes over, she can only decide,
You are a control freak with an unfaithful husband whom you drove away by acting like a Nazi
.

What she chooses to say next is everything but that. However, she does say a lot, and while she says it she strangles the weeds so tightly that it will take a bleach washing to get the stains out of her own hands.

First she tells them both to shut up and they take a step backward, which Emma kind of likes. Their slight movement away gives her a sense of power, which she seizes like a free plane ticket. Emma brings up the money Debra stole from her in high school, the way she lied through her teeth about everything from sex when Marty wasn’t looking to that one shoplifting incident and how she cannot seem to get through three hours without drinking.

And neither, come to think of it, can your bosom buddy Joy here.

Debra’s mouth forms a complete and very wide circle as Emma launches into Joy.

“You’ve treated me like a slave since the moment I was born,” Emma says, a bit more calmly because she is now in the center of her power. “You have called me so many times at the last minute to pick up everything from preordered pizza to your kids at daycare that it would be impossible for me to count them all.”

Debra just says, “Fuck you, Emma.”

Emma replies very calmly, “You already said that.”

Joy looks a bit bewildered, like they are in a play and Emma forgot her lines.

“Well,” Joy finally manages to say, “you’ve been the favored daughter your whole life, baby sister. You don’t have a clue what it’s like to try and please a mother and then never be quite good enough because you are being compared to everyone else’s daughters and to your own damn sisters. And how would you feel if your own daughter loved her aunt more than you? How would you like it if it felt like you were hanging on by one fingernail?”

“No matter what I say, it always comes back to everyone else: which totally proves my point. To use the words of one of my brilliant older sisters, ‘fuck you.’”

“You can’t say that! You never talk that way!” Joy is staring at her.

And now Debra, who truly cannot be silent more than five minutes, decides to tell Emma there are things she
doesn’t know
.

“What are you talking about, Debra? Are there
more
family secrets? What do I not know?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Emma snorts as Joy looks at Debra sideways.

“Well, why don’t you two just stick pins in my eyes? Or tie me up in the backyard like you did when I was little?” Emma asks them. “This is ridiculous. Just keep your dumb secrets. Snoop around Mother’s house all you want. I hope you both have a really stupid day.”

What if it always stays like this? What if there is some kind of internal family conspiracy that will change the family dynamics forever? What if she blew it more than she thinks she’s blown it by messing up some of her reunion duties?

Ms. Gilford Daughter the Fourth half thinks that maybe she should just run to the two sisters she just left and to her mother and confess. Run and confess and then maybe string popcorn, or make three tons of ice cubes, or bake twelve thousand cookies for the reunion or something—anything—to try and make amends for her family-orientated sins.

As usual Emma takes ownership for this latest confrontation and claims it as her own. Maybe if she had simply taken a breath and not run away then whatever secret Debra and Joy are now holding would have tumbled out like sweet honey instead of hot acid.

For a moment she actually considers calling Al, the town gossip, who probably knows more about her family than she does. But this also makes her realize how desperate she has become, how she has sunk to a new level of personal hatefulness.

Really, she feels about as sweet as one of her dead plants. She cannot believe that she has fallen into an almost catatonic state over finally being able to tell the truth to her sisters.

And now, more than at any time in her life, except perhaps when Samuel went into the jungle, she so needs a sister, two sisters, three sisters.

But after all that has happened Emma also does not even know if she ever wants to see Debra or Joy or Erika again, or even talk
with them, for the rest of her life. How wonderful it would be if for just a week or a month or five seconds everything in her family would run smoothly and without disruption or controversy. …

How wonderful if she could walk out of her backyard and go talk with Debra in a sane, nonviolent, open way …

How wonderful if her mother would have told her about the attorney, the carpenter, the tiger-striped thong, or everything else that has apparently been a secret …

How wonderful if Joy could have come to her sooner with her broken and raging heart and if Stephie was living in the back bedroom all of the time and if Samuel could have just said one thing in explanation …

How wonderful if the Erika she knows and loves had not seemed to desert her when she needs her more than ever …

How wonderful if she didn’t realize that with all this crap going on she will somehow have to gather up the reins of the family reunion before hundreds of Gilfordites descend on Higgins and annihilate the city …

How wonderful if she didn’t have to worry about any of this chaos and could actually sit in her garden and inhale a potent cocktail like the rest of her family seems to do on a regular basis. …

Emma stands in her kitchen gazing out of her back window at her gardens so long that her ankles begin to hurt and night starts yipping at the backside of a day she wishes she had somehow been able to totally erase.

For all of her recent bouts of seemingly spontaneous yelling and emotional spewing, Emma feels helpless and alone. She’s never felt more like the younger sister that she is and has always been.

She imagines Debra and Joy sipping wine someplace, plotting against her and occasionally taking breaks to email Erika to keep her apprised of Emma’s most recent lapse into insanity.

And even Susie Dell is probably laughing into her cocktail napkin with her closest friends as they all try and devise a plan to save Robert Dell from a life of certain madness and mayhem if he keeps hanging out with anyone Gilford.

Emma so wants to go lie down in her gardens and feel something warm, alive and accepting. She wants someone to open their arms to her, forgive her, tell her she’s been in the middle of a nightmare for the past few weeks and that when she wakes up there will be a knight on a horse, her adoring mother, and three sisters ready to fetch her a cool drink, straighten her bangs or read to her from a fabulous novel.

The garden, though, is way too lovely and she has been not-so-lovely.

So she thinks.

And Emma punishes herself by just looking and not touching until her phone rings yet again. Her phone that is attached to the answering machine where a vipers’ nest of messages lie as if they are waiting for her to make a move so they can rise up and bite her.

Emma picks up the phone without thinking and the phone crackles in her hand as if it is a firecracker.

“Hello,” she says innocently.

“Excuse me so much, miss, but this is an international interconnect call from Honduras and we are needing to know if a Miz Emma Gilford is now at this number?”

Emma has never really wondered what it would feel like to have your heart pass through your throat and into your mouth while you are still alive and breathing but that is exactly what happens as she hears the woman with the thick and beautiful accent ask her if she is Miz Emma.

And she cannot even bring herself to say no or yes or maybe.

She cannot.

So Emma hangs up the phone and continues to stare out of the window at her gardens as if nothing unusual has happened.

Nothing unusual at all.