The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (7 page)
Read The Shortest Distance Between Two Women Online
Authors: Kris Radish
But what Emma doesn’t do, before she unplugs her phone, is to listen to whatever message her mother may have left her on the answering machine.
When Emma finally does hear the message, days later, she will discover that it is very detailed. But Marty’s somber words do not address the family brunch, or Emma’s avoidance of anything Gilford for the past week, or who might be sleeping with Grandma. It is a very specific list of Emma’s reunion-planning duties. Duties that were handed out at the brunch after she’d left and during a
quick follow-up meeting the next day in Debra’s backyard that AWOL Emma failed to attend. Duties that are time-consuming, necessary and absolutely critical components that will make or break this year’s GFR.
And the most important instruction is mentioned at the beginning of Marty’s message and again at the end.
Instructions that are waiting for Emma right behind Samuel’s second message on the unplugged answering machine.
5
IT IS PAST MIDNIGHT ON A WEDNESDAY and a record-setting ten days since Emma Gilford has last spoken to her usually relentless mother. When the phone she finally plugged back in rings, Emma swims through the fog of her early REM sleep to hear Stephie asking her through tears if there is any way to divorce your own family.
“What?” Emma asks back so she can have a moment to wake up, to clear her mind, to flag awake her dormant mother-like receptors, while Stephie sobs into the phone.
Stephie is on the floor of the closet in her bedroom where she has established a kind of holding pen for herself whenever she needs to escape and when she cannot bring herself to leap through the backyards and long alleyways that separate her house from that of her beloved auntie. She is curled up on her sleeping bag, beside twelve lit candles, and Emma, who has seen the closet escape hatch on several occasions when she’s made a house call during a Stephie crisis, is certain her niece is also clutching the tattered and terribly faded pink-and-blue baby blanket that continues to be her lifelong refuge when Aunt Emma or one of her best friends cannot save her.
“I am always
last!”
Stephie bellows. “Just once I’d love for this damned family of mine to do something for
me
, something that
I’d
like to do. But no—it’s all about the boys and what my stupid mother thinks is best. I am not even close to my own mother! We may as well be living a
thousand miles apart
!”
Emma sits up and turns on the light next to her bed. Saying no to Stephie has always been impossible for her, and in more than one quiet moment she has wondered if something got screwed up during Stephie’s conception because Stephie is so her heart, her mind, so her total love. And Stephie almost—just
almost
—fills the yearning Emma has clutched against her chest for so many years to be a mother.
Too late now
, Emma tells herself on a regular basis, too late now to be the mother to her own son or daughter. Too late to keep her own eggs perched in just the right fertilization lane. Too late to surrender to the yearning ache she has always felt at the tip of her uterus where the small hands and feet of her baby would slowly grow and then finally reach for the light of day at the end of her womb. Too late to wake at dawn, her breasts heavy with milk, anxious to feel the soft hands of her baby dancing against the side of her face. Too late to watch the first steps, hear the first word,
scream over the first tumble down the stairs, cry after the first word is spoken. Too late for the first day of school, for sobbing teenagers, for that last wave when her very own child would round the first real corner of his or her own life.
His or her
own
life.
“Talk to me, baby, I’m awake now. What is happening?”
Stephie tells Emma that her family is going yet again to the beach for spring break and that she’s sick of always going to the same place and simply doesn’t want to go.
“No one around here feels or does anything unless my mother approves, and I’m not like them. I feel. I am
me
. I am not
them
. I want to fly, Auntie, I just want to fly.”
Sixteen
, Emma thinks. Sweet Jesus. Was I this brazen and brave and wise when I was sixteen? When I was sixteen my mother was just coming out of the desperate, depressing stage of grief that had her manically throwing out anything remotely connected to her now deceased husband. Sixteen, when I jealously guarded my few free moments when my mother was not calling me just so she could hear my voice and know I was alive. Sixteen, when I wished I could be anyone but myself. When for the first, but not last, time I coveted the life of the sister closest to me, Debra—her flippant responses to everyone and everything, the men who seemed to appear out of nowhere and throw themselves at Debra Gilford’s feet, the way Debra always seemed to fit in, to be popular, to be the
one
no matter what I said or did or how hard I tried.
“If it helps, I hated my family too when I was sixteen,” Emma realizes and confesses.
“What family?” her niece moans back.
“Your aunt Debra. My mother. Your mother, for sure. Aunt Erika for a little while, too. It’s not easy being sixteen, honey, but neither was fifteen and neither will be seventeen. And just wait till you hit forty.”
“Careful, you are starting to sound like my mother and I so wish you were my mother.”
“Me too,” Emma whispers so softly that she wonders if Stephie can hear her.
“Well, that would ruin what we have,” Stephie says firmly. “You know that, Auntie, don’t you? Because the way the world works I’d have to hate you too until I was, what, twenty-eight? Thirty? Eighty-something? You don’t still hate Grandma now, do you?”
Emma rolls forward so her head almost touches her knees when Stephie asks her this question. She feels a cramp just the long side of a menstrual pain seize the edge of her stomach like a claw hammer. Stephie and her questions are going to kill her.
“Oh, Stephie, of course I love her! But truth be told, sometimes I want to grab her and shake her until she shuts up and leaves me alone. I suppose a part of me wishes I’d been taken someplace I wanted to go when I was sixteen, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
Emma drops her head into her hands and thinks what it must be like to be around Joy, Stephie’s mother, and her manic and obsessive ways all of the time. Joy, who for as long as Emma can remember has acted more like the reigning queen than a nice older sister. Joy, who probably keeps detailed records on everything from her children’s and husband’s eating habits to what she does for the family reunion—which is mostly order people around. Emma has been absolutely biting a hole in her lips for thirty years to keep from telling Joy that her nickname, even among her so-called friends, is “Her Bitchiness.”
Her Bitchiness when Joy always dumped her laundry off at their mother’s house and Emma had to do it.
Her Bitchiness when Joy stood up her best friend and left with
the rest of the gang for a road trip just before she finished college and Emma had to tell the best friend.
Her Bitchiness when Stephie and her brothers were babies and Joy simply assumed Emma would babysit without pay.
Her Bitchiness twenty years ago when she handed off almost all of the reunion planning to Emma the one time Emma could not make it to the initial planning session.
Her Bitchiness now when Stephie should be allowed some young adult choices.
And then Emma is temporarily saved by the sound of her sister’s voice. “Stephie, Stephanie, are you in the darn closet?” she can hear Joy yelling and then Stephie’s hilarious and very teenage response, “I wish I was in the closet, Mother, I wish I was a lesbian so you could tear your hair out and put me in some kind of reindoctrination program, which would mean that at least I could be sent away and get the hell out of here!”
“Stephie,” Emma pleads into her phone. “Don’t yell at her. Stay calm. Just tell her you are talking to me.”
“What?” Stephie yells back into the phone, forgetting who is who, and which person she is supposed to be angry with at this specific moment.
“Honey, please be quiet. Just tell her we are talking. Do
not
get angry, especially if she has been drinking.”
But Stephie cannot be quiet. Many parts of her are really, really, really sixteen—almost seventeen—and she cannot help it. There are hormones upon hormones stacked up in every corner of her terribly beautiful body. Beyond the piercings and the hair and the interesting selection of mostly secondhand clothes, Stephanie is a natural dishwater-blonde, hazel-eyed beauty who has inherited the light Scandinavian highlights of skin, hair and eyes from her Gilford mother and the delightfully dark undertones of the same features from her paternal ancestors. Stephanie and her
bright yellow hair are about to pass from that gawky almost-woman stage where she constantly finds herself tripping over nothing, spilling everything, and always bruising her thighs on pieces of furniture, to the graceful “Have you seen my legs and breasts?” young woman who does not so much walk as float.
“Auntie Em, my mom hates it when we talk. She gets jealous.”
Emma’s heart stops in total amazement. “What?”
“I didn’t want to tell you but Mom thinks you are like brainwashing me and every time I do something she doesn’t like, well, she blames you. Did you hear how she yells?”
“I have been hearing her since the day I was born, my sweet girl.”
“She’s crazy.”
“We are all crazy sometimes. Is she still there?”
“No, she left, I think, unless she has a glass to the door and she’s listening. If she thought I was on the phone with you for a long time, she’d break down the stupid door.”
“Come on—”
“She’s done it twice.”
“Serious?”
“More
like serial
for God’s sake. Is she on something?”
Emma cannot believe that even Her Bitchiness would be jealous of a lovely aunt-niece relationship.
“Auntie?” Stephie asks with just a wobble of terror in her voice.
“I’m here, sweetie.”
“Sometimes I
really
think she is crazy, Auntie Em.”
“Well …” Emma holds on to the word
well
so long it’s almost like a song because she is trying to figure out how to dispute her very smart young niece. “I think it’s hard to watch a child grow up and to know they are going to go away,” she finally says. “She loves you and I think there is some unwritten rule that says mothers and
daughters are supposed to hate each other and stay as far apart as possible during this specific period of time.”
“Does it ever frigging end?”
Hell no
is what Emma thinks she should say.
Absolutely no damn way
. Your mother is a fruitcake who freaks out too much, can’t let anyone else—child or otherwise—think or be or do or live, and it is, yes, quite possible that she is on something. Booze. Drugs. Sex. Rock and roll. A hard blow to the head. Something an evil neighbor slipped into her drink when she was your age. A wrong turn twelve years in a row. Your mother is certifiable, sweet Stephie, and you should run out of that closet, jump out the window, and get the hell over here before she kills you in your sleep.
But what Emma manages to say, even though she is bewildered by the jealousy she never before knew her sister feels, is tender and true. She tells her niece that mothers get tired and that they forget they were once sixteen and in need of space and time and attention. She tells Stephie that yes, her mother drinks a bit too much, but it would be hard to imagine that she does anything else. No drugs. Probably not sex at all, which she does not tell Stephie.