Barefoot (20 page)

“He must miss you.”

Melanie scoffed. “He hasn’t called once. Not once.”

“And you haven’t called him. I’m proud of you.”

“I’m proud of myself,” Melanie said. She hadn’t called Peter; she hadn’t tipped her hand. She was being patient, waiting things out. Along the back fence, the roses bloomed and the bumblebees were fat and happy. Ted had cut the grass over the weekend and it smelled wonderful and fresh. The sun was warm on Melanie’s legs. Josh would return with the kids at one o’clock; this thought alone was enough to make Melanie glad she was here and not back in Connecticut. “Thank you for letting me come,” Melanie said.

“I’m happy you’re here,” Vicki said.

“Are you?” Melanie said. Before the tumultuous events of the spring, Vicki and Melanie had talked on the phone three or four times a day; there were no taboo subjects. They excavated everything, leaving no stone unturned. Now, here they were, living under the same small roof, but they were each alone with their misery. Melanie worried that Vicki was angry at her for the things that happened the first week. Was she mad that Melanie had allowed Blaine to wander down the beach unnoticed, or that Melanie had fallen off the airplane steps with Porter? Was she pissed that Melanie had tried to leave Nantucket without saying good-bye? Did she resent having to hire a babysitter to take care of the children when her best friend should have been perfectly capable of doing so? Did she begrudge Melanie her pregnancy? Compared to Vicki’s, Melanie’s body was a piece of ripe fruit. And Melanie had done nothing to help Vicki with her chemo. Brenda had her role: She was the driver, the facilitator, the sister. Melanie was, and had been from the beginning, extra baggage. “Are you sure I’m not the worst friend you ever had?”

Vicki put her hand—which shook a little, like an old person’s hand—over Melanie’s, and instantly, the negative feelings receded. That was Vicki’s gift. Kiss it and make it better. She was everybody’s mother.

“Not even close,” she said.

Every Tuesday and Friday when she took Vicki to chemo, Brenda sat in the waiting room pretending to read magazines and she prayed for her sister. This was secret, and strange, because Brenda had never been particularly religious. Buzz and Ellen Lyndon had raised the girls as lazy Protestants. Over the years, they’d attended church sporadically, in fits and bursts, every week for three months around Easter and then not again until Christmas. They’d always said grace before dinner, and for a while Ellen Lyndon attended early morning Bible study and would try to tell the girls about it as she drove them to school. Both girls had been baptized at St. David’s Episcopal, then confirmed; it was their church, they considered themselves Christians, their pastor performed Vicki and Ted’s wedding, a full service where everyone took Communion. And yet, religion had not played a central role in family life, not really, not the way it did for the Catholics or the Baptists or the Jewish people Brenda knew. There were no crucifixes in the Lyndon house, no open Bibles, no yarmulkes or prayer shawls. They were so privileged, so
lucky,
that they had never needed religion, maybe that was it. Buzz Lyndon was an attorney in Philadelphia, he made plenty of money but not enough to cause trouble; Ellen Lyndon was a gifted housewife and mother. The Lyndon kitchen was, quite possibly, the happiest room in southeastern Pennsylvania—there was always classical music, fresh flowers, a bowl of ripe fruit, and something delicious about to come out of the oven. There was a blackboard in the kitchen where Ellen Lyndon wrote a quote each day, or a scrap of poem.
Food for thought,
she called it. Everything had been so lovely in the Lyndon household, so cultivated, so right, that God had been easy to overlook, to take for granted.

But now, this summer, in the pearl-gray waiting room of the Oncology Unit of Nantucket Cottage Hospital, Brenda Lyndon prayed her sister would live. The irony of this did not escape her. When Brenda had prayed at all growing up in the Lyndon household—if she had prayed secretly, fervently—then it was, without exception, that Vicki would die.

For years, Brenda and Vicki fought. There was screaming, scratching, spitting, and slamming doors. The girls fought about clothes, eyeliner, a Rick Springfield tape of Brenda’s that Vicki lent to her friend Amy, who mangled it. They fought over who sat where in the car, who got to watch which TV program, who used the telephone for how many calls, for how many minutes. They fought over who collected the most beach glass from their walks around the Jetties, who had more bacon on her BLT, who looked better in her hockey skirt. They fought because Brenda borrowed Vicki’s pink Fair Isle sweater without asking, and in retribution, Vicki ripped Brenda’s paper about
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
—painstakingly typed on their father’s Smith Corona—in half. Brenda smacked Vicki, Vicki pulled out a hank of Brenda’s hair. They were separated by their father, Vicki called Brenda the
c
word from behind her bedroom door. Ellen Lyndon threatened boarding school.
Honestly,
she said,
I don’t know where you girls learned such language.

They fought over grades, teachers, test scores, and boys—or, Brenda corrected herself,
boy
—because the only boy who had mattered to Brenda for the first thirty years of her life (until she met Walsh, really) was Erik vanCott. Erik vanCott had been not only Brenda’s best friend, but her secret, unrequited love. However, he had always nurtured a thing for Vicki. The pain of this alone was enough to fuel Brenda’s fantasies of Vicki, dead. Car accident, botulism, heart attack, choking, stabbed in the heart on South Street by a man with a purple Mohawk.

All through high school the girls openly claimed they hated each other, though Brenda suspected it was she who had said the words more often, because what reason would Vicki have had to hate Brenda? Brenda was, in Vicki’s opinion, pathetic.
Lowly Worm,
she called her to be mean, a name cruelly borrowed from their favorite Richard Scarry book growing up.
Lowly Worm, bookworm, nose always in a book, gobbling it up like a rotten apple.

Can I invite a friend?
Vicki always asked their parents, no matter where they were going.
I don’t want to be stuck with Lowly Worm.

I hate you,
Brenda had thought. Then she wrote the words in her journal. Then she whispered them, then shouted them at the top of her lungs,
I hate you! I wish you were dead!

Brenda shivered with guilt to think of it now.
Cancer.
Their relationship hadn’t been all bad. Ellen Lyndon, distraught by the girls’ open hostility, was constantly reminding them of how close they’d been when they were little.
You two used to be such good friends. You used to fall asleep holding hands. Brenda cried the day Vicki left for kindergarten, and Vicki made Brenda a paper plate covered with foil stars.
There had even been a moment or two of solidarity in high school, primarily against their parents, and, in one instance, against Erik vanCott.

When Brenda and Erik vanCott were juniors in high school, and Vicki was a senior, Erik asked Vicki to the junior prom. Vicki was entangled in an on-again / off-again relationship with her boyfriend Simon, who was a freshman at the University of Delaware. Vicki asked Simon for “permission” to go to the junior prom with Erik “as a friend,” and Simon’s response was,
Whatever floats your boat.
Fine. Vicki and Erik were going to the junior prom together.

To say that Brenda was destroyed by this news would be an understatement. She had been asked to the junior prom by two boys, one decent-looking and moronic and the other just moronic. Brenda had said no to both, hoping that Erik would ask her out of pity, or a sense of duty, or for fun. But now Brenda would be staying home while Vicki went to Brenda’s prom with Erik. Into this drama stepped Ellen, with her belief that all aches and pains—even romantic, sister-related ones—could be cured by a little Nantucket sand between the toes. When she got wind of the predicament and confirmed it with the sight of Brenda’s long face, she took the bottle of Nantucket sand that she kept on the windowsill and poured some into Brenda’s Bean Blucher moccasins.

“Put these on,” Ellen ordered. “You’ll feel better.”

Brenda did as she was told, but this time, she swore to herself, she would not pretend that the sand treatment worked. She would not pretend that it was August and she was seven years old again, climbing the dunes of Great Point. Back then, the most important thing in her life had been her sea glass collection and her Frances Hodgson Burnett books—
A Little Princess, The Secret Garden.

“See?” Ellen said. “You feel better already. I can tell.”

“I do not.”

“Well, you will soon. Is the sand between your toes?”

As the night of the prom drew nearer, Ellen plotted a distraction. She wanted Brenda to go with her and Buzz to the country club’s annual Rites of Spring Dance, held the same night as the prom. Going to a different dance with her parents as her escorts was supposed to make Brenda feel better? Apparently so. Ellen asked if Brenda would prefer the salmon croquettes or the veal Oscar. When Brenda refused to answer, Ellen made a joke about Oscar the Grouch. The woman was a one-act in the theater of the absurd.

Brenda didn’t watch Vicki get ready and she did not get ready herself. She hid under the comforter of her bed wearing sweatpants, reading
Vanity Fair
(the novel). She was boycotting the country club dance, salmon croquettes, Maypole and all. She was going to stay home and read.

An hour before Erik was to arrive, Vicki knocked on Brenda’s bedroom door. Brenda, naturally, did not answer. Vicki, who had no sense of boundaries, tried the knob. The door was locked. Vicki scratched on the door with her fingernails, a noise that Brenda could not tolerate. She flung open the door.

“What the fuck?”

“I’m not going,” Vicki said. She was wearing her dress—a strapless black sheath—and her blond hair was in a bun. She was wearing Ellen’s wedding pearl on a gold chain. She was as glamorous as a soap opera star to Brenda, but this fact only served to piss Brenda off. Vicki pushed into Brenda’s room and threw herself facedown on the bed, as though she were the one with a broken heart. “He wants to meet up with all these people I don’t know at the Main Lion. Lame. And afterwards, he wants to go to a breakfast party that some kid in the marching band is having. Lame.” She lifted her head. “I just don’t feel like making the effort.”

“You don’t feel like making the effort,” Brenda said. Now here was a classic Vicki Lyndon moment. She had a great dress and an even better date to a dance Brenda would have murdered to go to—and she was threatening to stay home . . . why? Because it wasn’t cool enough for her.

“You should go with him,” Vicki said. “He’s your friend.”

Yes, Erik was Brenda’s friend. However, in the universe of proms and prom dates, this mattered little. “He didn’t ask me,” Brenda said.

“Well, he’s out of luck,” Vicki said. “Because I’m not going.”

“Mom will make you go,” Brenda said. “She’ll say it’s rude to stand him up.
And in very poor taste
.”

“She can’t make me go,” Vicki said. She eyed Brenda in her sweatpants. “She’s not making you go to Rites of Spring.”

“She hasn’t started trying yet,” Brenda said.

Vicki unzipped her dress and wriggled out of it, like a snake shedding its skin. “We’ll stay home together. Rent a movie. Drink Dad’s beer.”

Brenda stared at her sister. Was she being serious? Vicki didn’t like staying home, and especially not with Brenda. But maybe . . . well, if nothing else, Erik would see Vicki’s true colors. He would realize he should have asked Brenda instead.

“Okay,” Brenda said.

Vicki called Erik at home to spare him the indignity of showing up at the Lyndon house in his tux with a gardenia in a plastic box.

“Sorr-eee,” she said. “I don’t feeeeel well. I have really bad men-strooool cramps. I’d better stay home.” She paused. “Sure, she’s right here.”

Vicki passed the phone to Brenda.

“I just got dumped,” Erik said. “What are you up to tonight?”

“I’m supposed to go out,” Brenda said, though she did not tell him where or with whom. “But . . . since Vicki’s not feeling well, I might stay home and keep her company.”

“Can I come over?” Erik asked.

“Come over?” Brenda said.

“Yeah. To hang out with you guys.”

Vicki sliced her hand across her throat.

“Sorry,” Brenda said. “Not tonight.”

In the end, Erik went to the prom by himself, and when word spread that he’d been stood up by Vicki Lyndon, his popularity swelled. The band let him sing a Bryan Adams song. It was the best night of his life. The next day, he called Vicki to say thank you. Brenda and Vicki had stayed home and made popcorn and drunk warm Michelobs and watched their favorite movie,
This Time Forever,
which made them both cry. They fell asleep on either end of the sofa, with their legs entwined in the middle. Brenda sat in the oncology waiting room pretending to read
People
magazine, but in truth she was praying fast and furiously, her lips moving while she crossed herself with her right hand.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Dear Lord, please let Vicki live. Please, Lord, please, I beg you, please: Let. Her. Live.

It became usual that, at some point during Brenda’s waiting-room vigil, her phone would ring. Brenda always checked the display with a mixture of hope (for Walsh) and dread (of Brian Delaney, Esquire)—even though it was almost always her mother. After a while the nurses who wandered in and out from behind the administrative desk knew to expect Ellen Lyndon’s call. They thought it was cute—the call from mama. Brenda vacillated between gratitude for the calls and annoyance. Ellen had had her left knee replaced just after Easter—
all that skiing caught up with me
—and she was still recovering. Otherwise, she would have been right there—either living in Melanie’s room instead of Melanie, or renting Number Twelve Shell Street, where she could monitor all developments herself. Ellen Lyndon was more frantic about Vicki’s condition than Vicki was, and thus it was left up to Brenda to placate her mother, to assure her that yes, everything was going along as expected, Vicki’s blood count was holding steady, and the kids were fine. This gave Brenda a sense of empowerment and calm control. But Brenda became increasingly irritated by her mother’s anxiety. Twice a week it became Brenda’s responsibility to talk her mother off the ledge. Brenda found herself saying the same phrases over and over until her mother became hypnotized and repeated the phrases back to Brenda. Never once during these phone calls did Ellen Lyndon ask about Brenda. Brenda tried to ignore the fact that her mother had ceased acknowledging Brenda at all, except as a messenger. Now, Brenda took the call, saying, “Hello, Mom.”