The Kids Are All Right Page 4

  It was Russ who held me the day Dad’s coffin was lowered into the blazing green earth of the cemetery grounds. I hadn’t been at the wake or the funeral, but Mom brought all of us up to Massachusetts for the burial. There were people crying all around, looking at the coffin, the hole, the grass, their shoes, the sky. Russ looked at the grass. My hands gripped the back of his neck and patted his puffy, prickly cheeks. I looked at his eyes, red and wet. They looked as if they hurt. I looked at his big ear and at the hairs that curled from the waxy hole.

  “Is my daddy in there?” I whispered to him in the silence. He ignored me, so I leaned in closer, my lips touching the hairs, and asked him again. Then I saw his eyes spilling and shut my mouth so hard I bit my tongue. I could taste the blood, metallic like the water from the fountain at school, licking its way to my teeth. I started to cry and put my hands to his cheeks once more, just like the cheeks I had touched in the sunshine by the pool, in the dimly lit hallways of our house, in my bed before I fell asleep.

  “You look just like my daddy,” I whispered. “You look just like my daddy.” My uncle turned his head and began to sob as some gray-haired lady took me from his arms, my hands scraping his stubble as I was carried away.

  LIZ

  DAYS LATER AND back home, the flowers had begun to wilt, and their stems turned slimy. The smell of rot made me nauseous as I gathered and threw them out. I was glad that the people and their baked ziti and tuna casseroles and spiral hams were gone. I was sick of comfort food and would be for many years.

  I was also sick of Mom and her quivering lip. More than a week had passed, and there was lots to sort out, lots to do. But Mom continued to cry long after my aunts and uncles had gone back to Boston, and we kids were the only ones left to console her. I wanted to put up a DO NOT ENTER sign on my bedroom door because Mom wandered in every afternoon, glassy-eyed and whimpering, “What are we going to do? What on earth are we going to do?” I wanted to scream, “I don’t know! Figure it out! You’re the mother! Remember?” But then I remembered that this was a woman who banged her head against the wall every Thanksgiving when her pie crust fell apart before she could flip it from the counter into the dish. If she couldn’t handle baking a pie, how on earth was she going to raise four fatherless kids?

  One day, after she had wandered zombie-like in and out of my room yet again, I was desperate. Mom was acting like she was the only one who had lost someone, like it was harder for her than for us kids. We were all in Dad’s car as it veered out of control. Instead of reaching over and grabbing the wheel, instead of trying to slam on the brakes and steer the car to safety, Mom was still buckled into the passenger seat, screaming, and I knew that if we all screamed with her, we’d crash and die. Grief had rendered Mom useless, and it was terrifying, adding another layer to my own sadness. Panic.

  I walked up the carpeted stairs toward Amanda’s room and stood silently outside her closed door for several minutes. This time Elton John was playing. I took a deep breath and knocked. No response. I knocked again, this time more forcefully. I knew she was crying. I heard the stifled sobs behind Elton’s lyrics and imagined the pool of saliva on the pillow and the stringy strands of mucus as she lifted her head to shout “What?”

  “Can I talk to you?” I said into the doorjamb.

  I heard her blow her nose and the mattress squeak as she sat up and got off the bed. She unlocked the door, looked at me with red eyes and a slight frown, and headed straight back to her bed. She flopped down and stared at the ceiling, her hands behind her head. I sat in her desk chair and listened to Elton sing “Benny and the Jets.”

  “How’s school?” I finally ventured. She had gone to school every day since Dad died. I took a whole week off and felt naked and ashamed my first day back.

  “Fine,” she said, her eyes never leaving the ceiling.

  “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” started to play. We listened to the whole song without saying a word. It felt good to sit there, listening to Elton sing. I scanned Amanda’s room. The cork wall was lined with ribbons she had won at different horse shows; there were two red plastic milk crates filled with records; and George, the Steiff teddy bear Dad got her when she was born, was lying next to her on the bed. He was wearing one of Dad’s black bow ties and had concert pins stuck to his furry chest. Above Amanda’s bed, there was a window that looked out onto our yard. The swing set with its monkey bars and seesaw looked so still and sad, as did our pool, empty except for the carpet of decomposed leaves that had collected over winter. Cleaning the pool and getting it ready for summer was Dad’s favorite task. He would shovel out the leaves, then power-wash the pale blue walls, patching any cracks or holes, before filling the pool with the garden hose, a process that took several days. Then he would add chlorine, big tablets like aspirin for monsters, which came in an oversized plastic bucket. He’d throw a few in, wait a day or two, then test the water using a special kit, dipping plastic tubes into the deep end and then adding different liquids from tiny droppers. We were not allowed in until the pH balance was just so.

  “I wish it was Mom,” I suddenly blurted out.

  For the first time since I had entered the room, Amanda looked right at me startled. “Me, too,” she said quietly.

  It was the first time in our lives we had ever agreed on anything.

  AMANDA

  TWO WEEKS AFTER Dad died, his business partner went missing. He was the vice president of Dad’s oil company and had given a heartfelt eulogy at the funeral. He even broke down in the middle of it, sobbing. Then the motherfucker showed up at our house a week later and told Mom that Dad’s company was in trouble and that he needed fifty thousand dollars to get the company back on its feet. She gave it to him, he took off, and the company went bankrupt.

  Soon after, the same people who sent condolence cards started calling Mom, demanding money. Dad’s investors somehow held Mom accountable for the company’s failure. Even Uncle Buzz, her own brother, asked for his twenty-five-thousand-dollar investment back. That really pissed me off, because Uncle Buzz was such a cheapskate. I always hated that guy. When I was fourteen, Dad, Liz, Dan, and I went to the Grand Canyon with him, and we hiked seven and a half miles to the bottom because Buzz said there was going to be this great steak dinner at this ranch at the end of the trail. When we arrived, they served us some disgusting Salisbury steak. Dad and I were expecting filet mignon the way Buzz talked about it. I could tell even Dad was pissed, and he hardly ever got mad. Then, on that same trip, we all went out to dinner with some of Buzz’s friends in Flagstaff, Arizona. Buzz was being so petty about the bill—at Bob’s fucking Big Boy!—Dad just paid for the whole thing himself. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, but I noticed that Dad ended up paying for everything of Buzz’s on that trip. Mom never saw any of this, though, because she stayed home with Diana, who was just a baby. Mom loved Buzz; he was her brother. So of course she gave him back his damn money.

  Then the Bank of New York called. It turned out that Dad had taken out a loan for $250,000 six months before he died to buy an oil rig that he was going to use in Honduras. And he’d had Mom cosign for it. Suddenly, she was responsible.

  Mom had no idea Dad’s company was in such bad shape. No one did. He was good at hiding things. But there had been subtle signs. A few weeks before he died, I overheard him talking to his lawyer on the phone. He was like, “Wait a minute. Are you kidding me? How did we not know this? There has got to be a way to fix this.” Something about the oil in Honduras belonging to the government and how he was not going to be able to drill after all. He was in the kitchen talking on the phone, and he had this tall glass in front of him. He had given up alcohol for New Year’s, so I assumed it was Fresca. When he wandered out into the hallway to talk out of earshot, I took a sip from his drink and wound up spitting it out all over the kitchen floor. It tasted like turpentine.

  LIZ

  OUR MOTHER WAS convinced Honduran hit men killed our father. She was sitting at the end of our long wooden kitc
hen table, leaning toward Amanda and me conspiratorially. We stared back, arms crossed and stone-faced.

  “Two eyewitnesses,” she said breathlessly, “told police they saw a car sitting in the middle of the highway with its lights off.” She grabbed hold of the table’s edge with both hands and leaned in closer. “Your father came upon the idle car and swerved before bashing through the highway median and into an abandoned car on the opposite side of the road.”

  “That explains why Dad was heading north instead of south?” Amanda asked. At least she was trying to follow Mom’s logic. I was completely lost.

  “Or was killed,” Mom replied, her voice deep and dramatic. She continued the story in a throaty whisper as if someone might have been listening, hiding in the rhododendron bushes just beyond the breakfast-room windows. “One eyewitness told the police that the car was filled with four Hispanic men,” she went on. “After your father crashed, the idle car sped off into the night.”

  This theory was in stark contrast to our father’s obituary, which had run in the local paper only a week before. According to The Patent Trader, Dad had fallen asleep at the wheel and smashed into an abandoned car on the other side of the road.

  On the actual day of Dad’s funeral, however, there were other rumors.

  “Wasn’t he in terrible debt?” a blond woman in a black velvet headband asked another woman in a black cashmere twinset. They were standing at our kitchen table, picking at a platter of cold cuts when I came up behind them.

  “I heard his company was near bankruptcy,” the twinset lady said before spotting me and quickly changing the conversation.

  That happened more than once. People would be speaking in hushed tones, chins pinned to their chests, eyes nervously darting from right to left. The word “suicide” was never actually spoken, but the notion sucked any oxygen from an already claustrophobic room. Time and time again, I heard “poor Ann” and “those poor kids.”

  The Honduran story was better than falling asleep at the wheel, certainly better than suicide, and it made some sense, considering Dad’s mysterious work. He called himself an entrepreneur. At thirteen, I had no idea what that meant. I knew that he had been to Honduras several times, and that every time he came back he brought us presents. We’d all gather around him in our parents’ bedroom, wiggling like puppies waiting to be fed. He’d plop his suitcase on the king-size bed and unzip it slowly, then pretend that the zipper was stuck or that he had forgotten to get us anything. But we knew he had something special for each of us inside. Then, with the dramatic flair of a magician, he’d pull one present out at a time, handing each of us a gift with a smile and a wink. On his last trip to Honduras, only two months before he died, he had given Dan a small wooden carved Inca statue, Amanda a leather bracelet, Diana a small doll with black braids, and me a carved wooden jewelry box lined with red velvet. I still have that box.

  We also got stories. Dad had loads of them. Usually they were funny, about strange food or trying to pronounce the name of the capital city—Teg-u-ci-gal-pa—and always getting it wrong. But this time his stories were scary.

  “There’s gunfire in the streets,” he said that night at the dinner table. “It’s mayhem.” He had hired a bodyguard. Someone had tried to shoot him on his way to the airport. It was dangerous, and that night he told us all that he did not look forward to going back. He never did.

  While I was sitting at the kitchen table several weeks after Dad’s death, Mom’s theory tumbled through my brain as Amanda tried to connect the dots out loud: “Did the Hondurans not want Dad to take their oil?” “Did he ever find any oil?” “Why on earth would anyone want to kill him?” Then Mom dropped another bomb.

  “Girls,” her voice dropping to an even quieter whisper. “Your father worked for the CIA.”

  “The CIA?” I repeated, flabbergasted.

  “Shhh. You mustn’t tell anyone,” she continued. “It’s top secret.” Diana wandered in, hungry for a snack. Mom looked at us and pressed her finger to her lips and opened her eyes wide. We never spoke about it again.

  DAN

  THIS WAS WHAT I took as fact: There was a car parked on the highway, and Dad was speeding. He didn’t see it until it was too late. But then there was the rumor that he was assassinated, something to do with the rebels in Honduras. Supposedly there was oil down there that would set us up for life. That’s what Dad told me. There were rumors that the Honduran government seized his oil well after a huge strike. Then there was a rumor that he was supplying guns and technical support to the guerrillas in El Salvador. I didn’t know what to believe. I still don’t.

  But this one afternoon, I was running errands with Dad when a car slammed on its brakes right in front of us. Dad grabbed me, swerved, and sped off, tires screeching. He seemed scared, and when I asked him what was going on, he said that just as the car stopped in front of us, another car was speeding up behind us, like a trap or something. That happened right before he died.

  After Dad died, I found this box in the attic that kind of looked like a tackle box, but from the World War II era. There was an old gas mask inside it. I was looking for evidence that Dad was a spy, and I convinced myself that this box was his Morse code–type telegram machine. I kept it for years and played with it when no one else was around.

  AMANDA

  I’M SURE IT was one of Dad’s crazy siblings who started the assassination stories. And the suicide rumors that ran through the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club crowd? Those people didn’t know us, and they certainly didn’t care about us. They just liked a bit of good gossip. Dad never really fit in with that crowd anyway; he always seemed more comfortable joking with the caddies and the staff than socializing with the actual club members. Mom was the reason we went to that club in the first place. She loved to play golf and was really good at it. Her name is engraved in gold letters on some plaques that still hang in the club house. She was ladies’ club champion in 1975, 1978, and 1980.

  I hated that club. When I was younger, Mom and Dad made me go, but by the time I was a teenager, I refused to spend all day sitting by a pool with preppy assholes. But I do remember going to one dinner several summers before Dad died. Something pissed Dad off, and he threw his napkin down and stormed out of there. I think Dad hadn’t paid his dues that summer, and the manager pulled him aside and asked him to pay or leave. So we left.

  Screw them. It was a car accident. End of story.

  LIZ

  ONE AFTERNOON, MOM called Amanda and me back to the breakfast table. “Girls,” she said in a deep and dramatic voice. “I have something to tell you.”

  Amanda and I slouched in our seats, wondering what on earth it could be now. I doubted anything could shock me. It was late May; Dad had been dead for one month exactly. I had finally wrapped my head around the notion that he was not going to drive up the driveway, that his seat, at the opposite end of the breakfast-room table from where Mom sat now, would remain empty, and that the pool probably wouldn’t get cleaned out and filled that summer. Dad may have been a CIA agent, he may even have been killed while doing secret work for the government, but that did not change the fact that he was never coming home. But I didn’t expect what came next.

  “I have cancer,” Mom said.

  “What?” Amanda seemed to spit the word rather than say it.

  What happened next is fuzzy, but I think Mom said that the tumor was the size of a grapefruit. She also said it was in her uterus. I’d just taken health class the year before, so I understood what that was. It was the fruit analogy that bothered me the most. A grapefruit? I had only just gotten my period that spring and was still uncomfortable with the size of a tampon. Plus, we were sitting at a table where we had eaten many grapefruits, a family breakfast staple. We even had special spoons with serrated edges that doubled as short knives to carve out the sections once the fruit had been sliced in two.

  “A grapefruit?” I asked.

  Perhaps the phone rang, or Diana came home from school, but I rememb
er Mom getting up, leaving Amanda and me sitting there stunned.

  Our mother was healthy, or so she had always seemed. She never smoked and rarely drank. She played golf and mowed the lawn and rode horses. She even owned a juice machine and made us all drink celery-carrot-apple-and-beet cocktails, claiming they were “good for us” as we held our noses and gagged down the pulpy purple swag.

  “Could it be chocolate?” I wondered aloud.

  Amanda squinted her eyes and thought hard before agreeing, “Well, it’s her only vice.”

  It was true; our mother was a self-confessed chocoholic. She claimed hot fudge sundaes were the reason she put seventy pounds on her five-foot-nine-inch frame while pregnant with Amanda, topping the scale at two hundred pounds. Snickers were to blame for the ninety pounds she gained with me, and it was a family debate as to whether or not they had in any way contributed to the fact I weighed eleven pounds at birth, so fat that Dad’s first words upon seeing me were “When will the swelling stop?”

  Our mother’s affair with chocolate always resurfaced when she was between jobs. She’d go on binges, eating not one but six chocolate-glazed donuts without shame. She loved devil’s food cakes and could eat whole bags of Hershey’s Kisses in one sitting. It was a catch-22: She’d get depressed that she had to be thin for work, which made her want to eat, and then the more she ate, the more fleshy and dimpled her thighs and upper arms became. Then her chin would grow a twin, and she’d dread going to auditions. In 1981, after Margo was killed off The Edge of Night, Mom put on twenty pounds. She was still trying to lose the extra weight when Dad died. She had tried every kind of diet—Scarsdale in 1976, juice-fasting the summer of 1978, and that horrid Shaklee diet that she and Amanda did in the fall of 1981.