I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (4 page)

ELIZA'S PARENTS LIVED ONLY THIRTY
minutes from the new house, another mark in its favor. (Funny, the more Eliza kept enumerating the house's various advantages in her mind—the trees, the yard, the proximity to her parents—the more she wondered if there was something about it that she actually disliked but didn't want to admit to herself.) She had assumed that their lives, maintained at a physical distance for so long, would braid together instantly, that she would see them all the time. But, so far, they met up no more than once a month, and it was typically a rushed restaurant meal in downtown Bethesda, at a place that offended no one and therefore disappointed everyone.

Perhaps they were all just out of practice
at being an extended family; Eliza had lived a minimum of 1,500 miles away since college graduation. Besides, both her parents, now in their late seventies, continued to work, although her father had cut back his practice; her mother was an academic, teaching at the University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. They were not, nor would she want them to be, the type of settled grandparents whose lives revolved around their only grandchildren. Still, she had thought she would see more of them than she did.

This week, however, they were having dinner at her parents' house, an old farmhouse in what had been, back in 1985, a rural enclave in Western Howard County. Their road still had a country feel to it. But all around, development was encroaching. For Inez, those new houses were like battleships in a harbor, massing, readying an attack. As for the large electrical towers visible in the distance—those made her shiver with revulsion, although she did not believe in the health claims made against them. She just found them ugly. “Imagine,” she often said, “what Don Quixote would have made of those.”

Yet the Lerners had never thought twice about relocating here, leaving their beloved house in Roaring Springs in order to enroll Eliza in a different high school. One county over, Wilde Lake High School had been far enough so a new girl, known as Eliza, would have no resonance. There was always the slight risk that someone from the old school district would transfer and that Eliza's identity would be pierced. But as her parents explained to her repeatedly, the changes were not about shame or secrets. They moved because the old neighborhood had dark associations for all of them, because some of the things they loved most—the stream, the wooded hillsides, the sense of isolation—were tainted. They chose not to speak of what had happened in the world at large, but that was because the world at large had nothing to contribute to Eliza's healing. If she had returned to Catonsville High School with her friends—and it was her choice,
they stressed—her parents didn't doubt that people would have been sensitive.
Too sensitive
. They did not want their daughter to live an eggshell existence, where others watched their words and lapsed into sudden, suspicious silences when she happened onto certain conversations. New house, new start. For all of them. A new house with an alarm system, and central air-conditioning, despite Inez's hatred of it, because that meant they didn't sleep with open windows.

Iso and Albie loved their grandparents' house, which was filled with the requisite items of fascination that grandparents' homes always harbor. But the real lure for them was the nearby Rita's custard stand. As soon as they left with their grandfather for an after-dinner treat, Eliza told her mother about Walter's letter.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Eliza said.

“Doing nothing,” Inez said, “is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.”

“I know.”

“I assumed you did.”

They were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the back of the house, a place where the view was still, more or less, as it had been when the Lerners purchased their home. They had bought it quickly, almost instinctively, a month after Eliza came home. It was actually larger than the eighteenth-century stone house they had known in Roaring Springs, and better appointed in almost every way—updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vonnie had come home for Christmas break, glum over her poor academic performance in her inaugural quarter at Northwestern, she had pitched a fit over her parents' failure to consult her on this important family matter. Vonnie had always been given to histrionics, even when she had little cause for them, and her family was more or less inured to the melodrama.

But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as the
Lerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: “It's just that everything's going to be about Elizabeth—excuse me,
Eliza
—from now on.”

The statement, delivered at the dinner table, was wrong on so many levels that no one in the family spoke for several seconds. It was factually wrong; the whole point was that the Lerners were trying to make a world in which things were neither about, nor
not
about, what had happened to Eliza. Besides, they had always been fair-minded, never favoring one daughter over the other, honoring their differences. Vonnie was their high-strung overachiever. Eliza, even when she was known as Elizabeth, was that unusual child content simply to be. Good enough grades, cheerful participation in group activities in which she neither distinguished nor embarrassed herself. Inevitably, it had been speculated—by outsiders, but also by Inez and Manny, by Vonnie, and even by Eliza—that her temperament wasn't inborn but a subconscious and preternatural decision to opt out. Let Vonnie have the prizes and the honors, the whole world if she wanted it.

From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good-natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vonnie pinched her, which the newly minted older sister did whenever the opportunity presented itself. But once Eliza could toddle about, she followed her sister everywhere, and not even Vonnie could hold a grudge against someone who so clearly worshipped her.

But she could—apparently, amazingly—seethe with resentment over the way her sister's misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.

“Would you rather be Eliza?” her father asked Vonnie the night of her unthinkable pronouncement.

Eliza couldn't help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously,
Vonnie had never wanted to be Eliza back when she was Elizabeth, so it would be odd to think she might want to trade places now. But what if she did? What would that signify?

“That's not what I meant,” Vonnie said, her anger deflating. Imploding, really, from embarrassment. “I was just trying to say that, from now on, so much of what we do will be controlled, influenced, affected by…what happened.”

“Well, that's true for Eliza, so I think it's fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,” their father said. “This happened to all of us. Not the same thing—there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.”

Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible—
experienced,
not
suffered,
or even
endured
. Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza's parents didn't want to define her life for her. “You get to be the expert on yourself,” her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had the knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose. They probably did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they refused to claim this power. Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.

“I was willing to defer admission,” Vonnie reminded her father. This was accurate, as far as it went. She had offered to delay entering Northwestern, but not very wholeheartedly, and there was a risk that her parents would have to forfeit part of her tuition. Besides, now that Eliza was home, her parents were still keen on making distinctions between authentic issues, as they called them—her need to know that the house was locked at night, not so much as a window open, even on the fairest spring evenings—and rationalizations, or any attempt to use her past to unfair advantage.

Yet it was Vonnie who was inclined to leverage her sister to garner attention. Oh, she didn't tell her new college friends too much. But she hinted at a terrible tragedy, an unthinkable occurrence, one that had made the national news. She was perhaps too broad in her allusions. Over the years, as Vonnie's various college friends visited, they were clearly surprised to meet a normal-seeming high school girl with all her limbs and no obvious disfigurement. At least one had believed that Eliza was a young flautist, who lost her arm after being pushed in front of a subway train.

“Remember,” Eliza said to her mother now, “how Vonnie hated this house at first? Now she has a meltdown if you even suggest you might want to downsize.”

“I think we're still a few years away, knock wood.” Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. “What do you call this?” he'd asked Eliza, but she hadn't wanted to tell him. “No name,” she'd said. “Just tea and lemonade.” “We should make up a name for it,” he'd said, “sell it by the roadside.” Like most of Walter's plans, this was all talk.

“Where will you go when you do sell this house?” she asked her mother now.

“Downtown D.C., I think, what they call the Penn Quarter neighborhood now.”

“Not Baltimore?”

Inez shook her head. “We've been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it's all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can't see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood panhandlers by name. I'm Eva Gabor
and
Eddie Albert in
Green Acres
.”

Eliza had to laugh at this image, her bohemian, unaffected mother as Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. The children burst in, faces smeared with the residue from Rita's, their favorite custard stand, whose neon letters promised
ICE
*
CUSTARD
*
HAPPINESS
. She couldn't have felt any safer, even if the windows had been closed and locked.

The windows were open
. That's what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn't imagine what it would be like to live that way.

 

ELIZA HEADED HOME ALONG
the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver's ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: “You see that Roy Rogers? That's where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn't play any
sports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn't kill. Why do you think that was?”

“Mommy?” Albie said from the backseat. “You're driving on the wrong side of the road.”

“No, honey, I'm—” Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.

“What was that?” Albie asked.

“A deer,” Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.

“But it was white.”

“That was the tail.”

A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn't sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, running for her life.

1985

“WANNABE,” HER SISTER SAID.

“I'm not,” Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn't know what Vonnie meant, and Vonnie pounced on that little wriggle of doubt, the way their family cat, Barnacle, impaled garden snakes.

“It's a term for girls like you, who think they're Madonna.”

“I don't think I'm Madonna.”

But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vonnie a lot of leeway—no curfew, although she had to call if she was going to stay out past mid
night, and they trusted her never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking. But this summer, Elizabeth had suddenly discovered that there were all sorts of things
she
was forbidden to do. Dye her hair, even with a nonpermanent tint. Spend her days at the mall or the Roy Rogers on Route 40. (“Watch all the television you want, take long walks, go to the community pool, but no just
hanging,
” her mother had clarified.) And although she wasn't actually prohibited from wearing the fingerless lace gloves she had purchased when a friend's mother took them to the mall, her mother sighed at the mere sight of them.

Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vonnie left for her job at a day camp for underprivileged kids, checking herself in the mirror. She had a piece of stretchy lace, filched from her mother's sewing basket, tied in her reddish curls, and a pink T-shirt that proclaimed
WILD GIRL
, which even she recognized was laughably untrue. Although it was a typical August day, hot and humid, she had layered a bouffant black skirt over a pair of leggings that stopped at her knees, and she wore black ankle boots with faux zebra inserts worked into the leather. She thought she looked wonderful. Vonnie was jealous.

Vonnie simply didn't like Elizabeth, she was sure of it. Her mother said this wasn't true, that sisters were never close at this age, but it was an essential stage through which they had to pass. Her mother sounded hopeful when she laid this out, as if saying it might make it true. Elizabeth was fifteen years old now to Vonnie's soon-to-be eighteen and all her life she had carried the distinct impression that she had spoiled a really good party, that Vonnie had been miserable from the day the Lerner trio became a quartet.

And Elizabeth couldn't figure out why. Vonnie still got most of the attention, excelling in everything she did, whereas Elizabeth was always in the middle of the pack. Vonnie was a good student, she had gone to the nationals in NFL—National Forensics
League, not National Football League—and placed in extemp, short for extemporaneous, which meant she could speak off the cuff. That was no picnic, having an already combative older sister who was trained to speak quickly and authoritatively on any topic. Vonnie was going to Northwestern in the fall to study with Charlton Heston's sister. Of course, Charlton Heston's sister was simply another teacher there, in the drama school, and she had to take whoever signed up for her classes, but Vonnie managed to make it sound like a very big deal:
I'm going to Northwestern in the fall. I'm going to study with Charlton Heston's sister.
Although barely two years older than Elizabeth, she was three years ahead in school because her September birthday had allowed her to enroll in school early, whereas Elizabeth had a January birthday. Elizabeth didn't mind. It meant Vonnie went away all that much earlier. She was looking forward to seeing what it was like, being home alone. Maybe once Vonnie was gone, Elizabeth might discover what she did well, where her own talents lay. Her parents insisted she had some, if she would just focus. So far, all focus had brought her was the uncanny ability to ferret out dirty books in the houses where she watered plants for people lucky enough to go somewhere in this long, boring summer. Erica Jong and Henry Miller and—in one house, hidden behind the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
—the complete set of Ian Fleming.
The Spy Who Loved Me
—wow, that was nothing like the movie.

She left the house, with no particular destination in mind, but then—the only places she wanted to go were the ones that were explicitly forbidden. Her parents thought their neighborhood, Roaring Springs, was a big deal, but Elizabeth thought it was boring, boring, boring. Roaring Springs was nothing more than a bunch of old stone houses, remnants of a nineteenth-century mill village not even a mile from busy Frederick Road. But because their house backed up to a state park, thick with trees, no one could ever build near them. The isolation suited her parents,
and even Vonnie never complained about living in this quirky stone house among other quirky stone houses, filled mostly with people like their parents, only childless. Everyone in Roaring Springs was proudly, determinedly eccentric, indifferent to trends and what was popular. They all professed to hate television, too. They might as well hate television: The county had yet to extend the cable system out here, which meant that Elizabeth saw MTV and VH-1 only when she went to friends' houses after school. She wondered, in fact, how her mother even knew enough about Madonna to find her objectionable. Her father had glossy magazines in his office, for the parents who waited while he consulted with their children, but she didn't imagine there were magazines in her mother's office. Of course, she had never been allowed to visit there, given that it was in the state prison.

There was a small, old-fashioned family bakery on Frederick Road, and she stopped there, inspecting the various treats on display. Vonnie had said the other day that Elizabeth may be straight-up-and-down skinny, but she was prone to having a potbelly and she better watch it. The problem with Vonnie was that she said some things merely to be mean, but she said other things that were mean and true, and it was hard to sort them out. Elizabeth turned sideways, smoothing down her T-shirt, trying to assess her stomach. It looked okay to her. It would look better if she had boobs, real boobs instead of these A-cup nothings. Real boobs would balance her out. But she was okay with how she looked, today. Gazing in the bakery window, she thought about going in, but the problem was that she wanted
everything
: the lacy pizelles, the cunning pink-and-green cookies, the cannolis, the éclairs. Lately, she never felt satisfied, no matter what she ate. Theoretically, she could buy one of each, eat them all, then throw them up, but she had failed repeatedly at the throwing-up part, no matter how her girlfriends coached and encouraged her.

She continued up Frederick Road, trying to catch her reflec
tion in the windows she passed along the way. Elizabeth wanted to know what she looked like when no one was looking. She wanted to stumble on herself unawares, sneak up on her image, but she had yet to master that trick. She was always a split second ahead, and the face she saw was too composed—mouth clamped in what she hoped was a shy, and therefore alluring, smile, chin tilted down to compensate for her nose, her nostrils, which she found truly horrifying. “Pig snout,” Vonnie had said, and that one had stuck, although her mother said it was a “ski jump” nose. Elizabeth had asked her mother if she could have a nose job for her sixteenth birthday, and her mother had been unable to speak for several seconds, a notable thing unto itself. She was a psychiatrist, but a really interesting one, who worked with criminals at the special prison for the insane. She could never talk about her work, though, much to Elizabeth's disappointment. She would love to know about the men her mother met, the things they had done. Right now, she was pretty sure that her mother was working with a boy who had killed his parents, his adoptive parents, just because they asked him how he did on a test. He was actually kind of handsome; Elizabeth had seen his picture in the newspaper. But her mother was careful never to speak of her work. Her father, also a psychiatrist, didn't speak of his work, either, but all he did was sit in an office and listen to teenagers. Elizabeth was pretty sure she already knew everything her father knew, probably more.

Elizabeth's friends thought it was weird and creepy, what her parents did. They thought the Lerners could read minds, which was silly, or see through lies more easily than “normal” parents. “They're not witches,” she told her friends.

In some ways, her parents were easier to fool than others. This was because Elizabeth told them so much that it didn't occur to them that she ever withheld anything. Of course, what she mainly told them about was her friends—Claudia's decision to have sex
with her boyfriend while her parents were away one weekend, Debbie trying beer and pot, Lydia getting caught shoplifting. Each time she shared one of these stories, her parents would ask, gently, if Elizabeth had been involved, and she could always say “No!” with a clear and sunny conscience. This made it easier to keep what she needed to keep to herself. Trying to make herself throw up after eating too much, for example. She knew it was bad, but she also knew it was a problem only if you couldn't
stop
. Given that she never got to the point where she actually threw up, she couldn't see how there was anything wrong with trying. Claudia said she should use a feather or a broom straw if she couldn't force her finger far enough down, but—
gross
. The idea of a feather made her want to throw up, yet the
fact
of a feather didn't. Was that weird? It was probably weird. Elizabeth worried a lot about being weird. Unlike Vonnie, she didn't want to stand out, didn't want to attract too much attention. She wanted to be normal. She wanted just one boy to look at her like, like—like that way Bruce Springsteen looked in that video, when he rolled out from under the car and he knew he shouldn't want the woman who was standing there in front of him, but he just couldn't help himself.

None of her friends lived close by. They lived on the other side of Frederick Road, in the kind of houses where Elizabeth's mother would not be caught dead, to use one of her favorite expressions.
I would not be caught dead living there, I would not be caught dead shopping there, I would not be caught dead going on vacation there.
Finally, Vonnie had said: “Do you get much choice, about where you're caught dead?” and it had become a family joke. They had started naming the places where they
would
be caught dead. Still, their mother was pretty serious in her dislike of modern things. She had wanted to stay in the city, in their town house, which was almost right downtown, on a pretty green square built around the Washington Monument. But, about the time Vonnie turned fourteen, Elizabeth's father had seen a chance to build a practice
in the suburbs, where more parents were inclined to seek help for their children. And could pay for it, too, no small consideration. Roaring Springs was a compromise, thirty minutes from her mother's job at Patuxent Institute, not even ten minutes to her father's office in Ellicott City. It was his daytime proximity that gave Elizabeth her freedom on these summer days. But it wasn't much of a freedom, when one was alone, with all these rules.

She tracked back to the park and began walking along the stream known as the Sucker Branch. If she followed its banks, she would come out at Route 40, not that far from Roy Rogers, maybe a mile or so. At least, she thought she might come out there. She wasn't allowed to walk to the Roy Rogers because it was a hangout, and her parents believed that being idle was what got most kids in trouble. But they liked the idea of her being outdoors on summer days, so if she explained that she was simply following the stream and found herself there by accident and she was terribly thirsty after the walk, that would be okay. If they asked, and they might not even ask. She would go to Roy Rogers, see if anyone was there. If no one was around, she could still get a mocha shake, maybe some fries. Then—she was resolved—she was going to throw it up, she would learn how to throw up today. Her worries over her body were secondary; she didn't need to lose weight, only the potbelly, if she really did have one, and she still wasn't sure. What she needed was something to tell her friends when they were reunited as high school sophomores in two weeks. She wanted to have
something
to show for her summer. Unlike Claudia, she didn't have a boyfriend. Unlike Debbie and Lydia, she wasn't daring enough to shoplift, and she had no interest in her parents' booze. She had to do something in these final weeks of summer that counted as an achievement, and learning how to throw up was her best bet.

Following the stream, high in its banks after the weekend's heavy rains, turned out to be much harder than she expected.
Mud sucked at her boots, and when she came to the spot where she needed to cross, she couldn't. The unusually deep water covered the rocks she had planned to hop across, and it was moving quickly. She paused, uncertain. It seemed a shame to turn back, after making it this far. She thought she could hear the traffic swooshing by on Route 40. She was close, very close.

Then she saw a man on the other side, leaning on a shovel.

“It's not so swift you can't wade through,” he said. “I done it.” He looked to be college age, although something told Elizabeth that he wasn't in college. Not just his grammar, but his clothes, the trucker's hat pulled low on his forehead. “Just go up there, to where that fallen tree is. The water won't go above your shins, I swear.”

Elizabeth did, taking off her boots and tucking them beneath her armpits, so they were like two little wings sticking out of her back. Zebra-patterned wings with stilettos. He was right, the current was nothing to fear, although she worried that the water itself was dangerous, filled with bacteria. Luckily she'd had a tetanus shot just two years ago, when she stepped on a rusty nail. And the man was nice, waiting to help her scramble up the banks on the other side, taking hold of her wrists. He wasn't that much taller than she was, maybe five seven to her five three, and his build, while muscled, was slight. He was almost handsome, really. He had green eyes and even features. The only real flaw was his nose, narrow and pinched. He looked as if the world smelled bad to him, although he was the one who smelled a little. B.O., probably from shoveling on such a hot day. His T-shirt showed sweat stains at the armpits and the neckline, a drop of perspiration dangled from his nose.