Deep Down True (5 page)

Grady’s jaw began to move, a look of amused horror on his face. He grabbed at his throat and squeezed his eyes shut. After a dramatic show of swallowing, he smacked his lips. “Not bad!”

Alder stabbed another meatball and waved it at him. “Round two?”

“Nah, I’m full.”

Dana shot a smile of thanks at Alder. “I’m going down the street to Polly’s after dinner,” she told them. “She’s having a little get-together.”

“Do you have to?” Morgan groaned.

“Can I stay up?” said Grady.

“Well, no, I don’t have to, but I want to. It’s nice to have a little grown-up time every once in a while.” Grown-up time was in drastically short supply since her divorce. She no longer had a husband to go out with, and it soon became clear that invitations from other couples had evaporated as well. Gatherings of women seemed to be the only social interaction she was entitled to anymore. “And no, you cannot stay up. I’ll tuck you in before I leave.”

“But I need help with homework,” Morgan insisted.

“Bring it into the kitchen, and I’ll talk you through it while I load the dishwasher.”

“It’s English. You have to read it and pay attention.”

Dana sighed. Even when Kenneth still lived there, Morgan wanted Dana near—not necessarily to spend time with, however. Morgan spent a good portion of her evenings texting her friends or watching shows like
America’s Next Top Model
. For reasons that neither of them fully understood, Morgan just wanted Dana in the building.

“I’ll load the dishwasher,” said Alder.

“That’s so nice of you, sweetie,” said Dana, “but you don’t have to.”

“I don’t mind,” said Alder. “Besides, Meatball Man here will help me, right, G?”

“What?” Grady was horrified. “I can’t load the dishwasher.”

“Just bring the dishes in from the table. I’ll load them.” No one said anything for a moment. It was as if Alder had suggested they build a wide-body jet in the backyard and fly to Greenland.

“Don’t I need a bath or something?” Grady asked desperately.

“Jeez,” muttered Morgan. “Somebody mark
this
day on the calendar.”

Alder stood, picked up her plate and utensils, and waited for Grady to do the same. He blew a huff of resignation and followed her. Morgan excused herself to go to the bathroom, and Dana met her in her room. The English homework was not that hard, but Morgan was fidgety and irritable, sucking loudly on a LifeSaver and moaning that she didn’t have a wordy brain. It was not cozy mother-daughter time. When they finished, Morgan murmured, “How long will you be gone?”

“Not that long, honey. And Alder’s here if you need something.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes. “Does Alder being here mean you’re going out more?”

“No.” But did it? Dana hadn’t considered that Alder might be a benefit to the household. And yet her presence had so far had a positive effect. She’d gotten Grady to eat meat—a minor miracle (unless you counted hot dogs). And she’d gotten him to help clean up.

“She’s not you, Mom,” said Morgan.

“I know, sweetie. Don’t worry.”

 

 

Dana shucked off the wrinkled jeans and the long-sleeved T-shirt that was now speckled with tomato sauce on one sleeve. She had already planned to wear her boot-cut jeans to Polly’s, but with what? What shirt would be flattering but comfortable—nice enough but not so nice as to make her look like she was trying too hard? What magical shirt would give off that elusive scent of happy-busy-smart-fun while masking the fact that she was still a bit stunned by her single status even after almost a year, that she worried about her children, particularly Morgan, and that she sometimes cried for no reason she could name? Where could she buy that perfect shirt, and what would it cost if she found it? She would pay any amount for a shirt like that. She would give her right arm.

As Dana adjusted her jewelry in the hall mirror, she caught sight of Alder sitting on the TV-room rug holding a paperback book, her gaze unfocused.

“I won’t be gone too long. And I’m just up the street.”

“Okay,” said Alder without looking up. “Nice shirt.”

Dana let herself in Polly’s side door as she always did. When she walked into the living room holding a bottle of merlot, no one noticed her at first, and in that moment she was unsure. Polly was her closest friend in Cotters Rock. Of course she had other friends—college roommates, women from her old job whom she still had lunch with occasionally. These women had known her longer. But now Polly knew her best.

And possibly that made Polly her best friend, though Dana was hesitant to assign such a designation. After all, Polly, with her fiery personality and unfathomable talent for not caring what people think—Polly had loads of friends in Cotters Rock. Many were right here in this room. And not one of them happened to notice Dana as she stood in the doorway, wearing a sage linen blouse, the best shirt she could come up with for the occasion.

“There you are!” said Polly, skirting around a taller woman. She hugged Dana tightly and kissed her on the cheek. Dana handed her the merlot, and Polly grinned. “Thank God!” she whispered. “You know how I hate that crappy chardonnay they all bring.”

Conversation among the women ran from politics (whether that narrow-minded member of the Board of Education could finally be voted off) to books (mostly fiction set in foreign countries governed by misogynistic regimes) to the latest bad behavior of the town’s teenagers. The story that had them buzzing was that of an eighth-grade girl who’d been caught half clothed and performing oral sex on a nineteen-year-old she’d met at the Buckland Hills Mall. They were discovered in his car in the dirt parking lot at Nehantic Woods, empty bottles of hard lemonade rolling around the car floor.

The girl was known to have a somewhat troubled home life. She lived with her chain-smoking, battered-Camaro-driving mother. No father was known to be in the picture. This was immeasurably comforting to the women gathered at Polly’s. This mother was not like them. They didn’t smoke. They didn’t drive rusty sports cars, and their children had on-site fathers, or at least fathers who took custody of them every other weekend.

And yet . . . their daughters certainly loved to spend time at the mall and were newly driven to seek out male attention of even the most appalling variety. The Internet drew them into ever-widening circles of friends of friends. They were technologically sophisticated yet naïve as slender blades of grass, oblivious to the predatory growl of the lawn mower.

“And what’s with the blow job?” Jeannette with the off-kilter nose and satiny red lipstick wanted to know. “It’s not enough to make out and feel each other up anymore? They have to get so . . .
personal
?”

“At least they can’t get pregnant,” said Polly.

“Yes, but it’s just so . . .
intimate
,” persisted Jeannette. “Way more than sex is. Sex you can just . . . you know . . .
do.
But putting your mouth down there . . .” Dana wondered briefly how Jeannette’s marriage was doing. But she did have a point—what was normal these days? Were you supposed to read those articles in
Cosmopolitan
with titles like “The Sixteen Sex Acts That Will Make Him Thank God He’s a Man” and actually follow the recipes? How hot was hot enough, and at what point did it just get weird?

The conversation about the drunken middle-schooler was winding down, but the women weren’t quite ready to bury the juicy bone of scandal. Dana had had enough. She slipped off to the bathroom. Away from the relentless patter of opinions and exclamations, she leaned against the sink counter and hugged her arms across her chest.

It’ll be all right,
she told herself. Morgan would weather the storms of adolescence just as she herself had. Morgan might be immature at times, but she wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t possibly wander so far from what Dana had tried to give her, a list of which might take up several typed pages but basically boiled down to . . . a sense of herself . . . the knowledge that she existed, and that this was a good thing, and that she should make all reasonable attempts to continue doing so. It was the basis of motherhood, after all, to keep one’s offspring from ceasing to exist.

Dana checked her mascara and found herself thinking for the millionth time since her own adolescence that if her vaguely hazel eyes had some actual color—a definitive brown or green or blue—maybe that would distract from what was wrong with her. Which was nothing, really. Her nose was straight, her skin was clear. Yet she couldn’t seem to forgive herself the colorlessness of her eyes, the pallidness of her hair, or her no-longer-teenage figure.

And there had always been some small, irrational sense she had of waiting. That if she were patient and good and responsible, someday she would wake up and everything wrong with her would have been replaced—with real colors or more delicate proportions. Dana sometimes had to remind herself that no different corporeal form would magically emerge some day . . . This was it.

 

 

When the last guests left, Dana helped Polly tidy up. “Denise finally fired that horrible nanny,” Polly reported, gathering damp cocktail napkins and sticky dessert plates. “Don’t know why it took her so long.”

“It’s hard to fire people. Whenever I had to, I nearly had a nervous breakdown.”

“Let me guess. It was usually some secretary who was . . . oh, like embezzling from the petty-cash box, right?” Polly smirked. “You’re so nice it’d have to be something that bad or worse!”

“I’m not that nice,” Dana said defensively, knowing that Polly generally used the word to mean nice-boring, or nice-pushover, or nice-but-not-too-smart.

“Right. Can you take this bag of trash out to the garage? Be careful, I think it’s leaking.”

Dana held out her hand for the trash. Polly laughed and let the bag drop back into the can. “See what I’m talking about?”

And maybe Polly was right. Maybe if Dana’s best friend in Cotters Rock asked her to handle a leaking garbage bag, Dana should say,
Carry your own damn trash.
But she loved Polly, and she felt that Polly loved her. And what was a little garbage between friends?

When the cleanup was finished, Polly reached up to give her a hug. Polly’s hugs were tight and serious, and Dana had the sensation of being claimed for Polly’s tribe, a ritual of belonging that was both comforting and a bit alarming in its finality.

“Thanks for staying,” Polly said. “I guess this is what it’s like having a sister.” Then she laughed and released her arms. “Well, maybe not
your
sister . . . but the kind I always wished I had.” Polly was like that. She could go from who-cares to I-love-you in the flutter of an eyelash. Dana let the sweetness of the comment fill her and keep her warm for the brisk walk home.

D
ANA HAD LEARNED TO SLEEP ALONE LONG BEfore her divorce. Kenneth had frequent sales trips, and early in their marriage she worried that something would happen to him. On his occasional overseas trips, she wouldn’t sleep a wink, imagining his plane crashing into the ocean, his broken body floating facedown in the darkened waves. The nightmares about her father were always worse then. But Kenneth invariably returned, and over time Dana learned to relax.

She could almost pinpoint when the affair had begun—two years ago the sales trips had gotten longer. Before then, he’d made a much bigger deal of how good it was to be home, sleeping in his own bed, with his wife and his favorite pillow. He had a thing for that pillow. Dana had been able to overlook most of Kenneth’s idiosyncrasies—his intense aversion to amusement parks, for instance.

But the bliss that settled the features of his face as he laid his travel-weary head on that pillow . . . it got under Dana’s skin in the strangest way. As if he were happier to see
it
than
her
. She tossed it in the closet when he traveled but always had it back on the bed when he came home. Stupid pillow. Stupid her for wasting energy hating an inanimate object.

That pillow was long gone. It had left with the first carload of Kenneth’s things when he moved out. Dana was happy for that at least. She’d been having some sugar-free lemonade when that pillow went out the door, tucked under her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s arm. She raised her glass to it, and for a moment she actually smiled to herself, enjoying the pointless victory as she lost the war.

 

 

Dana was awakened by motion in the house. There was no actual sound, but the air seemed to flow in the wrong direction under her bedroom door. Then the doorknob turned and a faint glow from the little plastic night-light in the hallway spilled around the shape of a figure. Too large to be a child but too short for an adult.

Morgan. She slid under the covers on her father’s former side. “Dreams?” murmured Dana.

“Haven’t slept yet.”

“Oh, honey,” Dana sighed. Why couldn’t Morgan just lay herself down, let her body rest, and descend into blankness? No one needed blankness more than Morgan these days and no one was getting less of it than her.