Deep Down True (6 page)

“Do you ever miss Dad?” asked Morgan.

Miss Dad?
What was the right answer to this preteen riddle? “You don’t need to worry about that, sweetie.”

“I just wondered,” Morgan whispered.

“Well . . .” Dana stalled. She’d had two glasses of wine at Polly’s. Couldn’t she take this particular pop quiz in the morning?

“Well,
do
you?”

“Um . . . in a way.”

“What way?”

“I guess I miss having a husband.” This was true. Better to stick with the truth, or a close cousin thereof. Morgan got irritable when Dana gave what she called “Tooth Fairy answers.”

“What do you miss exactly?”

Yes, what exactly? Help with the kids, an extra hand with the house and yard work, having an escort to dinners and parties. Sex. Someone to talk to. More things than she liked to admit.

“It was nice having his help. It’s harder to do it all myself.”

“You don’t feel lonely?”

Lonely
. Dana didn’t even like to think of the word. Despite the fact that she rarely had a moment alone, she often felt she’d been sentenced to solitary confinement.

“Well, do you?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Do you think you’ll ever get married again?”

Dana could barely see Morgan in the dark. It was as if her own mind were questioning her. “Maybe someday. But I don’t think about it very much.”

“Why not?”

Because the chances weren’t good. Men her age were going for younger women. A forty-five-year-old—even without kids—was a hard sell these days. And now that she did have children, her standards were higher. Not for herself but for Morgan and Grady. What she said was, “Just too busy, I guess.”

“Is Polly your best friend?”

“She’s a very dear friend . . .”

“Is she your best, though?”

“I guess maybe she is. She’s very good to me.” What was Morgan getting at? Why all this concern with her mother’s social life?

“Do you think she’d ever, like, turn on you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t think Darby and me are friends anymore,” Morgan’s voice was lower and more strained now. “She doesn’t even, like, answer when I say hi.”

“Are you sure she hears you?”

Morgan gave a derisive little snort. “Everyone hears everything, Mom. It’s middle school. We pay attention to stuff like that.”

“Well, then maybe she’s not a very good friend, and you’re better off without her.”

A soft hiss of resignation sifted over the pillow. “You don’t get it.”

“Explain it to me, then.”

“Everyone’s like that. Everyone’s ignoring
some
one. If I’m better off without Darby, I’m better off with no friends at all.” And there it was. The loneliness dilemma. Some things could be overlooked, and some things could be forgiven. And then there were the things that
had
to be forgiven no matter how bad they were, because otherwise the choice was solitary confinement. Hard enough at forty-five. Impossible at twelve.

“It’s like Bubble Wrap,” said Morgan. “We’re all like pieces of Bubble Wrap. And every day a few more bubbles get popped. If you’re lucky, it’s only one or two. But if it’s bad, and everyone ignores you and talks about you behind your back, it’s like hundreds. Then what’ve you got?”

“What?”

“Just a piece of useless plastic. Might as well throw it away.”

Lying there in the darkened bedroom, Dana reached out to stroke Morgan’s fine, silky hair. And she could think of no rebuttal to the girl’s contention, because there was none. She was right. And the stakes seemed higher than in years past, the pressure more intense than ever to be that perfect, precisely casual girl. To be above reproach. But the mountains of societal reproach had risen so high, how could anyone manage to surmount them?

“I love you, Morgan,” was all Dana could think of to say. “Daddy and I love you so much.”

“I know,” Morgan sighed, curled in the comforting obscurity of her mother’s bed. “Thanks.”

 

 

When Dana woke the next morning, Morgan was gone. Dana had a moment of panic imagining that she’d slipped away and done herself some unspecified harm. She knew it wasn’t true, but she slid quickly from beneath the covers and got up all the same. Better to be standing when thoughts like that came. Lying down, you were just too vulnerable to their fungal spread.

She padded quickly down the hall and peeked past the half-open door of the bathroom. Morgan was there, already dressed. She was studying herself in the mirror, pressing a finger into the tiny speed bump of tummy that had sprouted up about six months ago. Dana had noticed it, too, and had started offering apple slices and carrots with low-fat dip instead of Morgan’s usual toast with butter and honey after school. Morgan maintained the silence Dana had initiated on the subject and nibbled penitently at the vegetation.

Dana watched Morgan now poke at the benign layer of flesh as if it did not belong to her, as if it were some alien life-form or pale-toned leech sucking something out of her that she needed. It was the way Dana herself jabbed at her own thighs when she sat on the edge of the tub to draw a bath for Grady and noticed her legs spreading on the cold white porcelain.

Morgan poked her stomach again, and a look of hopelessness passed across her face.

Bubble Wrap,
thought Dana. Popping before her very eyes.

“
D
ID I HEAR COACH RO CALLING YOU STELLY?” Dana asked Grady that afternoon.

“Yeah,” he said, chewing on a dried apricot. It was the only way to get him to eat fruit.

“Do you like that? I’ve never heard you called that before.”

“Kinda yes and kinda no,” Grady picked a piece of apricot out of his teeth. “It’s fun to have a nickname . . . but Stelly sounds like Stella. Kinda like a girl’s name.”

“If you don’t want him to call you that, you can ask him politely to use your real name.”

Grady shrugged. “I don’t care that much. Not enough to act like a baby about it anyway.”

“It’s not babyish to want to be called by your actual name, Grady.” But he was done with the subject and went up to his room to work on his latest Lego creation.

That night, after football practice, Dana approached Coach Ro as he stuffed equipment into a black duffel. “Do you have a minute?” she asked. He had one knee down as if genuflecting before the altar of the duffel. Even from a squat he was intimidating.

“Sure,” he said, still ramming footballs and plastic cones into the bag. When he looked up and saw Dana, he stopped, the brown clipboard in his hand arresting in midair. There was a corner missing from the clipboard, she noticed, as if someone had taken a bite out of it.

“Well, first I wanted to thank you for coaching.” Dana smiled, hoping her friendliness would soften him. “You’re doing a wonderful job, and I know the boys aren’t always easy!”

Coach Ro nodded. “Some of them really need the discipline, that’s for sure.” He stuffed the clipboard into the bag and yanked on the zipper to close it. When he stood and squared himself, he was a good head taller than she. “You’re Stelly’s mom,” he said. “You’re always here.”

“Well, I try to get to the practices as much as I can. And I wanted to mention—”

“That’s good. Football’s kind of scary to some of them. Parents showing up gives them courage.”

“They’re so busy knocking each other over, they barely seem to notice.”

“They notice,” he said.

Dana glanced over at Grady, squatting on the ground apparently waiting for something. Then another boy came running up and tried to leapfrog over him but couldn’t quite make it past Grady’s helmet. He slid down off Grady’s back, clutching himself between the legs. The other boys laughed, and Dana could hear one of them say, “Right in the nuts!”

Coach Ro chuckled. “That’s why God invented athletic cups.”

Dana smiled tentatively. “I just wanted to ask . . . if you don’t mind . . . I think Grady would rather be called by his real name. Not Stelly.”

“He asked me to call him Stelly.” Coach Ro slung the duffel over his shoulder and turned toward the parking lot. Laying his free hand on Dana’s shoulder blade, he guided her to walk with him. The feel of his big, thick-fingered hand lingering on her back flustered her.

“He told you . . . ?”

“Well, you know, with a name like Grady . . .” Coach Ro said, as if it were obvious. “How come his father’s never here? Work late?”

“Well, yes . . . He’s a . . .”
What was he again?
“He’s in sales, and he travels a lot.”
And what was wrong with the name Grady?
“Also . . . he lives in Hartford now. He doesn’t . . . We don’t . . .” Coach Ro was looking at her, waiting patiently for her to knit her tangled words into actual sentences, and this, too, was distracting. “We’re divorced.”

His ears slid a few millimeters back into his sandy blond crew cut. “Huh.” After a beat he continued. “So you don’t care if I call him Stelly, right? It’s good for a kid to have a nickname.”

Yes, okay, a nickname like Buddy or Chip or even G, as Alder called him. But Stelly?

Coach turned to go, calling over his shoulder, “Keep coming to practice. It’s good, you being here.” He turned back, gave her a smile and a wave. Then he bumped into the fender of his massive black pickup and almost toppled over. His eyes darted toward her to see if she’d noticed. Dana quickly averted her gaze so as not to compound his embarrassment.

When she corralled Grady from his leapfrogging teammates, she muttered at him, “Why did you
ask
him to call you Stelly?”

He shrugged and handed her his helmet. “Just sounded cooler than Grady.”

 

 

Morgan had gone to a friend’s house after school. Well, not a friend, exactly, but a girl who, like Morgan, played cello in the middle-school orchestra. Morgan hadn’t been able to master the piece for an upcoming concert and had been pestering Dana for help.

“But, sweetheart, I keep telling you I don’t read music!” Dana had said rather vehemently last week. “It’s like asking me to teach you . . . I don’t know . . . boxing.”

She had offered to get a tutor, but Morgan had said, “Forget it. No way is some, like, musical genius coming over here to tell me how bad I am. I already
know
how bad I am.”

Dana was stumped. It was hopeless. Then Morgan mentioned this morning that she was going over to this girl’s house to practice and could Dana drop the cello off after school. Problem solved.

“You help them too much,” Kenneth often said. But he wasn’t here to see the tears and frustration, just like he wasn’t there when some big-muscled coach started calling his son Stelly. Kenneth could just keep his advice to himself.

The silence of the house was marred by something, Dana noticed, as she pasted peanut butter and ketchup into a sandwich for Grady. There was a humming sound the house made, a faint chorus of electrified sighing from the refrigerator, the furnace, and several lesser appliances. But there was a strange vibration interjecting itself into the usual household hum. And where was Alder?

Dana walked down the hall to the TV room. Papers and books were strewn around as if they’d been tossed from a low-flying aircraft. She wondered briefly if someone had broken in. But Morgan’s and Grady’s rooms were often messy. Grady’s sometimes looked vandalized.

Still, something was wrong. Dana heard the faintest little gasping sound and discovered Alder sitting with her knees to her chest, wedged between the far end of the couch and the wall. She’d obviously been crying and was trying mightily to stop. Dana crouched into the corner with her and reached for the girl. “Alder, sweetie!” she murmured. “What happened?”

Alder fell against her and allowed herself to be hugged. “It’s stupid . . . It’s nothing . . . I’m just hormonal.”

Dana stroked Alder’s flat black hair. It was something, of course. Something had detonated this minor madness in her niece. Having curled into the smallest possible surface area herself more than once in the past year, Dana felt like the Queen of Stupid-Nothing-Hormonal. “When did this start?” she asked.

“I don’t know. An hour ago, maybe.” Alder wiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt.

“You must be exhausted, honey. Did someone call? Did your mother—”

“No, it wasn’t her,” Alder muttered. “I was doing this stupid writing assignment, and I just started thinking too much.”

“What were you thinking about?” asked Dana.

“Something I don’t want to think about. Or talk about.” Her face looked so dark. Dana was used to Morgan’s moods, but Alder had always seemed untroubled by the ordinary snares of girlhood. It was as if she’d been born with an internal Geiger counter, strangely perceptive to the difference between life’s mere surface rumblings and the real threat of a plate shift.

“Okay.” Dana squeezed Alder’s hand and helped her rise out of the tiny space that had contained her. “But if you change your mind, you can come talk to me anytime—day or night, okay? I’m always here if you need me.”

“I know,” said Alder. “You’re like that.”

 

 

On Friday, Morgan had a dentist appointment. She and Dana sat in the waiting room, each reading a
People
magazine. Morgan’s had a picture on the cover of a teenage superstar who’d passed out in the back of a limousine with a bottle of Grey Goose in her lap and the window open, to the delight of the paparazzi. The smaller inset picture showed the star and her mother retreating from a court-house. The mother held her hand up, as if her little palm and fingers could fend off the assault of shouting reporters and the rapid fire of Uzi-size cameras. The girl cringed against her mother, looking ashen.
And average,
Dana realized. This millionaire teenager, undoubtedly recognized in any tar-paper shack in any Third World country, looked like she’d been plucked at random from a high-school field-hockey team somewhere.