The Kids Are All Right Page 2

  “Like when we found Frodo?” I asked. Frodo was my cat. He was black and purred when you looked at him. He had gone missing for several days that winter, and we finally found him on West Patent Road, roughly fifty yards from our driveway, his skull smashed against the pavement, his fur crusted with dried blood.

  “Even sadder,” Mom urged. “You have to inhabit the character, Bitsy. Imagine if Frodo were somebody you loved.”

  I closed my eyes and replaced Frodo’s smashed skull with Dad’s, and real tears began to simmer deep inside me. They slowly began to bubble up as I read the lines.

  “Good, stay there,” Mom said as the casting director popped her head into the hallway.

  “Annie?” she said. All the casting agents in New York knew Mom. “He’s ready for her.”

  I walked into the audition room and sat on a couch facing Bob Fosse. He had intense eyes and a full beard that made up for his thinning hair. No one else was in the room. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said kindly. As I read, hot tears streamed down my face. I looked up at the end and saw that Mr. Fosse’s eyes were glistening, too. “Very good,” he said. “Very, very good.”

  I left the audition feeling, for the first time, like a real actress. Maybe duping Dad wouldn’t be so hard after all.

  Several days later, on the morning of the party, I trotted downstairs to ask Dad if he wanted to go play tennis. He was sitting at the breakfast table, scanning the Wall Street Journal, his reading glasses perched halfway down his nose. He kept his head bent toward the paper but moved his eyes so they looked over the glasses and at me.

  “So, you think you can beat your old man?” he said with a wink.

  Dad didn’t look old. The biggest difference between him at fifty and him in his wedding photos at thirty-two was that now his hair went from black to salt-and-pepper, though with the same reddish-brown highlights. His body may have thickened up a bit, but it was still athletic—cut calves, broad chest, and not an ounce of excess fat. He was only five-feet-eight-inches, yet he had been captain of both the football and the basketball teams in high school. And he watched his weight carefully, priding himself on always leaving a bite of food on his plate at the end of every meal. “Self-restraint is a virtue,” he liked to say.

  That afternoon, we both dressed in our tennis whites—Dad in shorts and a polo shirt, his arms and legs a spotty tan from freckles grown together with age. I had Mom’s skin—a spotless pale that turned golden brown in the sun. I wore a sweatband on my wrist, and as I got into the front seat of the Mercedes, I saw Dad was wearing one, too.

  “Like father like daughter,” he said with a smile, and off we went.

  We hit back and forth for two hours. I won the first set, and Dad won the second. Even though I was leading the third, midway through I started to worry about time. As much fun as it was to have Dad all to myself, I knew I had to get him back home by six o’clock. That was the whole point. “Should we call it quits, Dad?” I shouted over the net. The score was two to one, and it was Dad’s turn to serve. “I’m pooped.”

  Dad had one ball in the front pocket of his white tennis shorts and one in his hand, which he bounced several times before saying, in a disappointed tone, “Elizabeth Morgan Welch, what’s my motto?”

  “If you’re not going to do it right, don’t do it at all?” I said meekly, embarrassed that I hadn’t thought that through. Of course, we’d finish the set. Bob Welch’s kids were not quitters! That was another one of his favorite sayings. So was “The only things you have to do in life are die and pay taxes,” which I never quite understood.

  “Right,” he said. “Ready?”

  He aced the serve. And the next one. I returned the third, and we had a good rally hitting back and forth, hard. I won that point and the third set and still wonder to this day if he let me.

  By then, it was six and we were late. I kept a cool facade, but by the time we turned into our driveway, the butterflies in my stomach had morphed into slam-dancing frogs. Dad was still talking about tennis, and about how I should consider joining the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club’s junior team that summer, as we began the ascent up the narrow, quarter-mile-long strip of tired pavement that had cracked in the middle like a messy part. Dad didn’t see the cars until we drove through the opening of the privet hedge that set our house, with its gray shingles and hunter-green shutters, apart from the rest of the property. They were parked not only on the gravel circle in the front of the house but also to the right, beside the garage, and even on the lawn out toward the pool and down near the swing set. He pulled up to an empty spot by the front door, turned to me, and said, “Elizabeth, what is going on?” not in a serious way but with a smile as though he had a hunch.

  I shrugged and said, “Let’s go find out.” I had practiced that moment in my head and was impressed by how coolly I pulled it off.

  As we got out of the car, I could hear the hushed silence of the people waiting inside. Several silhouettes flickered across the drawn window shades in the living room. One shadow was hunched over, perhaps a person crouching down, another was walking toward the front door, and another looked like a four-headed blob. I walked ahead and flung open the front door. The lights flicked on, and “Surprise!” resounded throughout the house.

  Mom rushed toward us wearing a floor-length chiffon gown the color of lemon meringue pie and pale peach high-heel sandals, the ones I always wore to play dress-up. Her hair was swept back off her face with two tortoiseshell combs. “Happy birthday, my darling,” she said as she threw her arms around my stunned and smiling father.

  Everyone who was important to Dad was there—his sisters and brothers and old college friends. My siblings stood in a line in front. Diana was dressed in green velvet. Her unruly red curls had been coaxed into two ponytails that bounced off her tiny shoulders as she shouted “Surprise!” in her sweet four-year-old voice that sounded more like a Sesame Street puppet than a human being. Dan stood next to her, and they looked like twins, despite the six years between them, with their red hair, freckles, and dimples that pierced their cheeks whenever they smiled. Everyone in the packed room was smiling, even Amanda, who usually wore her scowl like a badge of honor. A chubby sixteen-year-old with a Pat Benatar shag haircut, she hated dressing up, preferring her ripped jeans and concert T-shirts. Tonight, she was wearing a skirt.

  I turned and looked up at Dad, who was beaming. “Nice job, toots,” he winked, before being swallowed whole by the crowd of outstretched arms. I went upstairs to change, and when I came back down, the party was in full swing but Dad was gone. He then reappeared dressed in tartan slacks and a crisp white button-down shirt, a bow tie, and navy-blue blazer. Mom burst out into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and the whole crowd joined in.

  An hour or so later, Mom clinked a champagne glass to get everyone’s attention. It was time for presents, she said, Amanda and Dan’s cue. They entered the living room holding a large rectangular gift between them, which they handed to Dad. He was seated on our gold brocade couch, and the whole party gathered around to watch as he neatly untied the bow and then slid a finger beneath the taped corners, careful not to rip the paper. It was a family tree. Ever since she saw Roots on TV, Mom was obsessed with genealogy. She had spent the past six months in the New York Public Library working on our family history, unbeknownst to Dad, who thought she was going on auditions. She used gold and silver pens to painstakingly mark each name, birth date, and place.

  At the top of the two-by-four-foot sheet of thick ivory paper, Mom had written “Ann Morgan Williams married Robert Daniel Peter Welch on September 19, 1964,” in her near-perfect curly cursive. Our names and birth dates: “Amanda Gordon Welch, August 15, 1965,” “Elizabeth Morgan Welch, February 3, 1969,” “Daniel Merryman Welch, March 24, 1971,” and “Diana Rebecca Welch, September 30, 1977,” floated above our parents’ names like tethered balloons. Dad beamed. On the bottom right, you could see that his family came to Boston from Ireland in the early 1900s. On the left, in a
longer entanglement of roots, you saw that Mom’s family came to Maryland from Scotland and Wales in the 1600s. One ancestor, Mary Ball, married Augustine Washington. They had a son named George.

  “Bob, your children are descendants of the first president of the United States,” Mom boasted as Dad studied the tree.

  “Not from your side, Bob,” Aunt Barbara shouted out above the crowd. She was Dad’s older sister, and she pronounced his name with a thick Boston accent so it sounded like “Bab.”

  “You got that right,” Uncle Russ, Dad’s brother, chimed in, and all his siblings laughed their distinct Welch laugh that sounded like a drunken, jolly Dracula.

  Aunt Gail, Dad’s youngest sister, gave her gift next. It was a potato that she had written a poem on with a calligraphy pen, decorated with small green shamrocks and shellacked.

  “To keep you connected to your roots, Bobby,” she said.

  The room grew quiet, someone murmured “How sweet,” and then Barbara gave him her gift. It was a book called Sex After 50. All the pages were blank. The room filled with laughter again.

  AMANDA

  I HAVE OUR family tree hanging on my wall in my house in Virginia, where I have most of our family heirlooms—the two grandfather clocks, the hand-carved wooden Etruscan trunk, even the unfinished oil painting of some cows on the beach that our great-aunt did when she was at the Corcoran Gallery of Arts in Washington, D.C. It’s funny, because back then, when I was sixteen, I couldn’t have cared less about our genealogy. I didn’t even like the family I had. Why would I care who came before them?

  That was around the time I stopped going on family trips. A month after Dad’s birthday everyone went to Myrtle Beach for spring break, except me. I used the animals as an excuse. Mom was a sucker for strays. In addition to the three dogs, two cats, and a litter of kittens, we had a stable full of horses. “Who’s gonna feed the horses and muck out their stalls?” I argued.

  But really, I just didn’t want to do any of that family bullshit. I was a junior in high school, a fat misfit who wanted to ride my horses, listen to my records, and smoke pot with my friends. I certainly didn’t want to go on a family vacation. To do what? Play miniature golf and go to the beach? I hated the beach. What do you do at the beach? Get sand in your bathing suit and up your crack?

  So Mom and Dad agreed to let me stay home alone. It was great. I had a party. We drank gin and tonics and did shots. It was the first time I ever blacked out.

  LIZ

  MOM AND DAD may have been sad Amanda wasn’t coming to Myrtle Beach, but I was relieved. Amanda hated me. She called me Big Shot and a dumb blond and tattled on me for talking on the phone with my friends, which I would do for hours on end. A week in Myrtle Beach without her meant I could work on my tan in peace and quiet, and put lemon juice in my hair without her sneering at me or putting her finger in her mouth and pretending to throw up. Or singing that Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain.”

  Auntie Eve was coming instead. We all adored Auntie Eve. She used to be our live-in nanny, but when Diana turned two, she moved to Yorktown Heights, twenty minutes from Bedford, to live with her son and his family. She still came twice a week to clean the house and do the laundry since Mom wasn’t keen on house work. “It’s not my forte,” she’d say. Auntie Eve was in her seventies, I think, but if you asked her how old she was, she’d always answer, “Old enough!” Dad joked that between Auntie Eve and Mom he had the perfect wife.

  “Why aren’t we flying?” I asked Dad as he strategically stacked Mom’s golf clubs on top of a cooler in the back of our Jeep Wagoneer. “Isn’t it far?”

  “Road trips are fun!” he bellowed, rearranging two suitcases to fit the last duffel bag, this one full of beach toys. “Plus, we’ll get to see a bit of the East Coast.”

  Dad hopped in the driver’s seat, and I sat directly behind him. Mom took her place in the front seat, and Auntie Eve took hers, behind Mom. Dan was squished in the middle, and Diana bounced from my lap to Eve’s to Mom’s before crawling in the back and making a nest on top of the luggage, where she fell asleep, her pale cheek smashed against Mom’s leather golf bag, forcing her lips into a pucker. By the time we crossed the George Washington Bridge and entered New Jersey, I was bored stiff. We’d only been driving one hour and had thirteen more to go. Dad started a game of punch buggy, and then Mom suggested the capital game and we all moaned. Then Mom started singing, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be,” and everyone sang the part that sounds like human horns, “eh eh eh eh eh,” before she finished the line, “a bumpy night.” It was the song she had a one-line solo in when she did Applause on Broadway with Lauren Bacall. The solo went, “She’s laughing a bit too loudly, that’s how the last one began.”

  After that song, Mom tried to get me to sing “Tomorrow” with her, but I refused, having sworn never to sing that song ever again, not after auditioning for Annie on Broadway the year before. The casting director asked me to do the part that goes, “When I’m stuck with a daaay that’s graaay and lo-onelyyy, I just stick out my chiiiiin and griiiin and saaay …!” They were the highest, hardest notes in the whole song. My voice strained to reach them and then cracked when I got there. The director yelled “Cut!” before I could even sing the refrain. “I’m sick of that song,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  Mom caught me doing it out of the corner of her eye and frowned. “Don’t be a bad sport, Bitsy,” she said. “It’s unbecoming.”

  DAN

  MYRTLE BEACH WAS like a carnival, with all these rides along the boardwalk in town. After standing in line forever to ride a roller-coaster, I stood on my tippy-toes to pass the height requirement. I was so excited until I got in the seat and realized I was going to fall out for sure. As the ride started, I held on for dear life, and when it turned upside down, I closed my eyes and fought hard not to cry. When it was over, I felt sick, like I was going to puke. I had eaten an ice cream right before and told Mom I had a stomachache from that, but really I just didn’t want to go on any more rides.

  So Mom took me to the Ripley’s Believe It … Or Not! museum. I loved that kind of stuff: my favorite TV show was In Search Of … with Leonard Nimoy. I loved seeing all these photographs of impossible-to-believe things that actually existed in the world, like those African tribes that wore rings to elongate their necks. I also liked all the gory stuff, but it scared Mom. She couldn’t even look at it. But she did like this grain of rice that someone had written a poem on so tiny you had to use a magnifying glass to read it. And her favorite thing was a matchbook that a man had taken and cut into a long, one-hundred-foot strip without breaking it.

  We stayed at a condo right on the beach, and Dad taught me how to throw a perfect spiral football there on the sand. He told me to use my left hand to point to the sky in the direction I wanted to throw the ball. With my right hand, I was to keep my fingertips on the laces at all times, breaking my wrist just as the ball passed my face and then letting go. I tried really hard, but I couldn’t do it. My hands were too small. Dad didn’t make me feel bad about it, but I never wanted to disappoint him. I wanted to grow up to be his carbon copy.

  The next day we all got into the Jeep to go to this sculpture garden. As we pulled up to the entrance to the parking lot, there were these two giant statues of fighting stallions. They were up on their hind legs, lashing at one another with their front hooves and biting each other’s necks. I was the only one in the family who didn’t like horses. I’d been terrified of them ever since Rascal, my Shetland pony, rolled over with me on top of him when I was eight. He nearly crushed me to death. It was awful, but Dad made me get back on him right away. I did what he asked because I wanted to please him. Still, I’ve hated those beasts ever since. As we drove beneath the statues, I looked up and saw their huge marble testicles, and I just knew: This was not going to be fun.

  LIZ

  AFTER SPENDING FOUR hours looking at boring statues, I was desperate to get back to the beach to work on my tan. We got back into the
car—Mom in the passenger seat, Dan and I in back with Diana strapped in the middle. Auntie Eve had stayed at the condo, claiming statues were “not her thing.” Dad started the ignition without any cause for concern, but as soon as he put the car into drive, it lurched forward, then groaned, and then we all heard a gigantic thud. Then the car let out a big sigh and went completely silent.

  Dad quickly got out of the car and down on his knees to look beneath it. We heard him mutter, “God damn it.”

  “What is it, Bob?” Mom called from the passenger seat.

  “It’s the drive shaft,” he shouted back, still under the car.

  Mom turned in her seat and looked at us quizzically, “The what?” she asked, unsnapping her seat belt and opening the door.

  “The thing that holds the car together,” Dad said quietly as he got up off the ground and brushed gravel from his hands and knees.

  As he went in search of a pay phone, I climbed out of the car and sat on the pavement, determined to get some sun before it set. I pulled the bottom of my T-shirt up through its neck to make a bikini top, rolled the sleeves up on top of my shoulders, and leaned back on my arms with my face and body lined up with the sun. Eventually, the cab came, taking Mom, Dan, Diana, and me back to the condo while Dad waited for the tow truck. The following day, while our car was still at the shop, Aunt Barbara called Dad to say Grampy was in the hospital. He had pneumonia; his lungs were filling with liquid. His doctor gave him only a few more days to live.