The Kids Are All Right Read online

  Dad flew to Boston the next day to see his father one last time, leaving us three kids behind with Mom. Suddenly, the vacation was less fun. Mom didn’t know how to throw a perfect spiral football with Dan, and she kept telling me I was spending too much time in the sun. Worse, I had given up the chance to be in Star 80. Three days into our vacation, my agent had called to say that Bob Fosse was considering making the sister older for me and would I fly back for another audition. I had told Mom that I didn’t want to, that I was having too much fun. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  The Jeep got fixed, and the ride home seemed twice as long without Dad. He liked to play punch buggy, and he let us eat at Burger King. Mom only liked word games and made us eat soggy tuna fish sandwiches on Branola bread that Auntie Eve made the night before. Plus, we were all worried about Grampy. Mom said she wasn’t sure we’d ever see him again.

  We made it back to Bedford by nightfall. I was happy to be home, happy to see Max, our German shepherd, who jumped up to look inside the car as soon as Mom parked. We had dropped Auntie Eve off at her son’s house in Yorktown Heights, so I helped Mom unload. I already knew that I wanted to wear my white button-down shirt to school the next day, since it would best show off my tan, so I emptied all of the suitcases and started a load of whites. An hour or two later, just as I was ironing my shirt, the phone rang. It was Dad.

  “Hiya, toots,” his voice boomed through the receiver.

  “How’s Grampy?” I asked.

  “He’s a fighter,” Dad replied. “He’s going to make it.”

  We chatted a bit more, and then he said, “Tell Amanda not to pick me up at the airport. And tell your mother I’m renting a car and driving home.”

  And then, “Kiddo, don’t worry about a thing. I have everything all figured out.”

  And with that, he hung up.

  Amanda’s room was on the third floor. I walked up the two flights of stairs and knocked gently on her door. It had a sign on it that read, DO NOT ENTER UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH in chunky block letters. Supertramp was blasting on the stereo. “Take a look at my girlfriend / She’s the only one I got” wafted through the closed door.

  I pounded harder, and then heard the scratch of the record needle and a gruff “What?”

  She wasn’t going to let me in, so I shouted through the door, “Dad says don’t pick him up. He’s renting a car.”

  Instead of answering, she put the record needle back down.

  DAN

  I WOKE UP to Mom sitting on my bed, crying, her hands covering her face.

  It was a clear night. I remember the blue glow of the moon reflecting off the wallpaper and the silhouettes of my hobby toy cars and planes and my battery collection.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She told me Dad died. She said that Dad was never coming back, and that God wanted him. And I started crying. We hugged and stuff like that. And that was that.

  LIZ

  AMANDA DECIDED TO go to school the next morning, but the rest of us stayed home. Every time the doorbell rang, I’d shout, “I’ll get it!” I was grateful to have something to do besides wander aimlessly through our suddenly huge and foreign house. Even Max sensed something was wrong. He accompanied me to the front door each time growling softly, his hair on end. It was either a deliveryman with another arrangement—lilies, tulips, roses, and carnations, all in muted shades—or a concerned neighbor dropping off a tuna casserole or a pineapple upside-down cake.

  Mom remained in her bedroom all day, mostly on the phone. I eavesdropped, standing in her doorway or sitting outside on the steps going up to the third floor, and listened to her tell the story over and over again: “It was a car accident … He was on his way back home from Boston … He fell asleep at the wheel … He was only two exits from home.”

  No matter how many times I heard the words, the reality of what she was saying never sank in. I kept waiting for him to pull up the driveway, tooting the horn, laughing, “Ha! Ha! Ha! I really had you all going!” Dad was a joker. He loved a good prank. When the phone rang and he was home, he’d answer by saying “Ku-Ni-Chi-Wa” in a ridiculous Saturday Night Live Japanese accent. Or “Vinnie’s Pizzeria,” winking at whoever was nearby to include that person in on his joke.

  Plus, he was still everywhere. His brown leather slippers were sitting at the foot of the green corduroy ottoman in his bedroom where he had last kicked them off, and his blanket-soft baby-blue cardigan was hanging on a hook in the mudroom. I couldn’t resist grabbing it, burying my face in its soft folds. It still smelled of pipe tobacco and Colgate toothpaste, Dad’s scent. If his scent was still alive, how could he be dead? In the fridge there were three cans of Ballantine ale and a half-eaten wedge of Stilton cheese wrapped in cellophane, which would stay there for weeks until someone realized, I’m not sure who, that Dad was the only person in our house who drank ale or liked Stilton cheese. And then there was the note, written in his choppy, left-leaning scrawl, all sharp angles and straight lines, pinned to the bulletin board near the phone: “Annie, I’m out in the barn.”

  I floated and fumbled through the day, lurking in hallways and listening to conversations, hunting for clues that would prove my hunch right. Dad was in the barn! That was what the note said! Or perhaps he actually took the plane and was waiting at the airport! We need to send someone to JFK! Or maybe to Newark? Or maybe the man who had died in the car crash was someone who looked like Dad. Uncle Harry, Auntie Eve’s boyfriend, identified the body. He told Mom that Dad was unrecognizable. I overheard him say that Dad’s head was so badly smashed that the only reason he knew it was Dad was because of the red, brown, black, and silver mustache smeared across his lip. I thought, lots of men have mustaches! And Uncle Harry said he was unrecognizable. So maybe it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. How could it be him?

  Later that afternoon, after Amanda came home from school, I sat midway up the stairs that led to her bedroom, listening to the conversation she was having with Mom. The DO NOT ENTER UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH sign had been ripped down from her door, but the sentiment remained, as did two paper corners beneath pieces of stubborn tape.

  “You cannot wear leather pants to your father’s funeral,” Mom pleaded. She sounded exhausted. I crawled silently to the top of the stairs and peeked through the crack where the door was ajar. Mom was sitting on Amanda’s bed, just beneath the poster of a half-naked Jim Morrison, his arms outstretched in a slacker crucifixion pose.

  I loved Amanda’s leather pants. She bought them with money she got for her sixteenth birthday, and said she was going to wear them to concerts. She was so proud of them, she even invited me into her room one afternoon to show them off. She had ripped out the lining to get them to fit, and still she had to lie down on her bed, suck in, and tuck her stomach to one side, then the other, in order to zip them up without catching any flesh. Once she was in them, she looked amazing.

  “They’re black,” Amanda said, scowling.

  She was slumped in her desk chair, arms crossed.

  “We’ll go shopping tomorrow,” Mom suggested.

  “I hate shopping,” Amanda said without moving. She was staring out the window, with her back to Mom.

  That’s when panic first struck me—I had nothing black to wear to the funeral. I ran down to my room and ransacked my closet. Dad had just bought me a cotton sundress for the eighth-grade spring dance, but that was white with purple and turquoise stripes. I also had a Gunne Sax dress, a Christmas gift, but it was pale gray calico with a white lace collar, not remotely somber, not close to black. Dad prided himself on his attire. He always dressed appropriately. Even though he didn’t like to ride horses all that much, he had a dashing red coat with a black velvet collar and a matching top hat he wore to go fox hunting with Mom. I needed a black dress.

  I ran to tell Mom, now back in her bedroom, her eyes raw but still leaking tears.

  “You’re too young to wear black, Elizabeth,” she said quietly.

  A lightning bolt of anger sho
t up from somewhere deep inside me. “If Dad were alive, he’d buy me a black dress,” I said through clenched teeth, my bottom lip stuck out at her instead of my tongue, my top lip clamped down holding back the tears whirling in my chest.

  Mom looked as if I had slapped her in the face.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Your father is not …”

  I don’t know how she finished the sentence because I was already running, my hand covering my mouth as my lips were parting against the howling pressure now in my throat. I slammed my bedroom door and flung myself on my bed. For the first time that day, I cried.

  AMANDA

  YEAH, I WENT to school the next day. I had to get out of that fucking house. Everybody was all crying and weird. And Mom was driving me crazy; she cried nonstop from the time Dad died until after the funeral. It’s like, you cry, and then you stop. You don’t cry, cry, cry, cry, cry. Don’t get me wrong; I cried. I just didn’t sit around all day doing it in front of everybody. Also, when Dad died, Mom and I didn’t have a very good relationship. I was in the middle of my sixteen-year-old angst, and she was … well, she was really annoying. That morning, I just couldn’t deal with her, so I drove Dad’s Mercedes to school.

  Up until that day, I had been trying to lose weight by walking the four miles to school and eating only every other day. I wasn’t obese, but I was fat compared to other kids. I mean: I had to rip the lining out of those leather pants because I couldn’t get my fat thighs in them otherwise. It was Mom who taught me to make up my own hare-brained diet schemes. I was seven when she first brought me to Weight Watchers. By the time I was a high school junior, we were doing the Shaklee diet together because Mom was out of work and started selling the disgusting meal-replacement shakes. I flavored mine with maple syrup extract and ended up smelling like pancakes for the entire semester.

  Then, the day Dad died, food was dropped off on the hour, like, whole baked hams and ziti, just casserole dish after casserole dish. There was food everywhere. And I thought that was so funny, like, what, our dad died so we’re not going to eat? Nobody’s going to open the refrigerator? But I guess they just wanted to do something. Anyway, when I came home from school that afternoon, I ate an entire pineapple upside-down cake. It was the best thing I had ever eaten in my life.

  DAN

  I DIDN’T GO to school for the longest out of everybody; I just hung around the house for about a week. It felt big and lonely even though there were all these people coming over to say they were sorry. Then my friends Curtis and Jeremy came over after school one day. We stood in the driveway, right in front of the house. It was awkward. We were only eleven and we didn’t really know what to say to each other, so we just hung out. But it was really nice of them to come.

  When I did go back to school, some kid made a joke about my father being dead and I started crying in class. Curtis stood up and hit the kid. And that felt good, seeing him do that for me. It made me feel less alone.

  LIZ

  AMANDA WOUND UP wearing her leather pants to the wake. I wore my gray Gunne Sax dress and sat in a folding chair, cocooned by seven or eight girlfriends who had pulled their chairs around me. Their eyes were fixed on me, but mine were set on the coffin, only ten feet away. Mom thought I was too young to wear black, but I guess she figured I was old enough to help her pick out Dad’s coffin.

  Just the day before, I sat in the undertaker’s wood-paneled office listening as Mom answered a series of questions. A man in a dark suit and white starched shirt sat behind a large desk and wrote her answers on a clipboard.

  “Do you want him cremated?” the man asked.

  “Do you have a funeral plot?”

  “Will it be a religious wake?”

  “How many people do you expect?”

  “Do you want an open or a closed casket?”

  Mom sat straight up in her seat and cocked her head to one side, confused. Now I understood why she brought me along. This man might as well have been speaking Cantonese. This was a new role for her: Dad was the one who handled practical things. He paid all the bills, filled out all the forms, hired the handymen. So she answered each question hesitantly, with a shaky voice, her bottom lip quivering.

  It hadn’t stopped quivering since Dad died. I had seen this expression before, but mostly on TV. It was her trademark: She’d bite her bottom lip and wrinkle her forehead, and then her chin would shake. It always irritated me, and I never once thought it was sincere, until now. I wanted to reach over and hold her face between my hands to steady her chin, to wipe away her tears. Instead, I just sat there, feeling useless. I was no help at all.

  Then this man asked, “What type of coffin?”

  Mom stared at him and shrugged, prompting him to pull out a three-ring binder filled with glossy photos, which he placed in front of us. I flipped through until I saw a shiny, deep purple-y red mahogany casket with a royal-blue velvet lining.

  “This is it, Mom,” I said. “This is what Dad would want.”

  In a way, it felt as though we were shopping for a celestial car, one that would zoom Dad to Heaven. He had only ever driven a Mercedes-Benz as long as I could remember, so mahogany with brass hardware and a royal-blue velvet lining seemed fitting. It was the Mercedes-Benz of coffins.

  Nodding his head, the undertaker agreed and said, “Your daughter has excellent taste.”

  Mom sighed and said, “She gets that from her father.” Then she asked for the price, and I felt instantly ashamed. How could she be thinking of money at a time like this?

  The figure he quoted was high enough to shock Mom out of her sad stupor. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, then softened. “It’s more than we can afford.”

  She continued flipping through the book, her hands shaking along with her lower lip, tears splashing onto the laminated pages, and I wondered if that was why they were laminated. She finally settled on an oak casket with no lining—a waste of money as, even the undertaker agreed, Dad’s face and body were so badly smashed up that a closed coffin was the only way to go.

  Sitting in the funeral home staring at the casket, I wished it were mahogany. But then I saw Mom, standing an arm’s length from her husband’s body, thanking people for coming, nodding her head as they told her how sorry they were, and agreeing with others about how awful it was. I realized it simply didn’t matter.

  I spent most of that night comforting my friends, especially Adrianna, the girl who addressed all notes to me throughout seventh grade as “MBF,” short for My Best Friend, and signed them “YBF.” We were no longer close friends, but Adrianna was crying so hard that her face was slick with tears and snot, her wailing mouth webbed with saliva. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her, over and over. I didn’t mind, though. It gave me something to do.

  My siblings were like zombies. Dan stood with two friends, kicking at a spot on the floor, his hands shoved in the pockets of his gray flannel slacks. Amanda sat with her best friend Anna in one corner, stony-faced. And Diana stayed home. Mom thought she was too young for such sadness and instead brought a photograph of her and Dad to place on the casket. It had been taken the summer before: Dad standing in the shallow end of our pool, waist deep in water, with Diana on his hip, her pale arms wrapped tightly around his neck, her freckled face smashed against his as if she wished she were clay and wanted to mold into him. They were both smiling so hard, it was surprising the frame could contain the happiness of that moment, surprising that it didn’t shatter into a million pieces, floating all over the funeral home like dust.

  DIANA

  I REMEMBER WHEN that picture was taken, the one that took the place of both Dad and me at his funeral. It was a sunny day, and we were by the pool. I was wearing a hand-me-down bathing suit that I had inherited from a cousin, a brown calico number with large circular cutouts that left one vertical strip of material to cover my belly button and one to cover my spine. I had put it on that morning, all by myself, in the bathroom I shared with Liz. All those holes made the suit diffi
cult to negotiate. Bare ass on the cool tile, I stuck my feet through the wrong holes and yanked the suit up my thighs. I had to get up and sit down three times before I got it right. I thought it was the coolest thing until my sisters told me it was hideous. This was after Dad, towel slung over his shoulder, had scooped me up for the camera that Mom held beneath the wide brim of her straw hat. I squeezed his neck, smushing my cheek to his. He laughed and said I was getting big. Then he threw me up in the air and into the pool.

  DAN

  DAD NEVER CRIED. I cried a lot when I was little. I was a momma’s boy, always hiding behind Mom’s legs because I was scared of a bunch of things: cats, horses, geese—you name it. This one time, Dad and I were walking down the driveway, and I was crying and acting spoiled. Finally he said to me: “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to really cry about.” He never told me that men shouldn’t cry, but it was implied.

  Like in the movie The Great Santini, there’s a moment where Santini’s wife has died. He and his son are in the hospital, and he says to his son, “Okay, you have fifteen minutes to go cry. And that is it.” The son went into the hospital room and cried for fifteen minutes and that was it. The mourning was over. That stuck out in my mind. I thought, “That’s what I should do. That’s what men do.”

  When the pallbearers walked down the aisle, each holding a corner of Dad’s coffin, I saw a tear roll down one man’s face. For the first time, I thought it was okay for men to cry.

  DIANA

  I DON’T REMEMBER much else about the four years I spent with Dad. I now know he was one of seven, born in Quincy, Massachusetts, three girls and four boys, raised by a widower. He was the quarterback for North Quincy High, making the local paper a couple of times for his handling of the pigskin. He worked, got fair marks in school, and teased his sisters mercilessly. My grandfather, known to us as Grampy, was a drinking man born to a long line of drinkers, and after school, our father and his brothers were often greeted in the kitchen by their surly and slouching dad, his bottle half empty on the table in front of him. The unlucky son who was ordered to the basement for a bout with his old man would glumly descend the wooden stairs, strapping on some gloves. Uncle Russ, an artist and interior decorator who died of liver failure in 2003, got it the worst.