I'm Not Julia Roberts (12 page)

“Uh-huh,” I said. I found myself wishing for another egg disaster.

“So,” she said. “What do you do?”

“I’m a teacher. Fifth grade.”

“Really? That must be wonderful. All that positive energy.”

“They’ve got energy all right,” I said. “Kids are never so confident as they are when they’re ten and eleven. They think they can rule the world. They think they can fly.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And I guess it’s your job to ground them?”

“They still get skinned knees. They still cry. It can’t all be Batman and Catwoman.” I shuffled my feet, and I hate when people shuffle their feet. “I don’t mind. Really, that’s the best part. Fixing them up so that they can go back to being superheroes again.”

“Do you suffer from constipation, Ben?”

“Excuse me?”

“Constipation.”

I blinked. There it was, the diagnosis. Moira would have been grimly pleased to hear it, even if it was medical rather than psychological. “This isn’t usually a topic at family gatherings.”

“I’m guessing the answer is yes. Do you know why?”

“I’m very angry?” I said.
Shakti,
I thought.
Her name’s probably Susan. Or Maryann.

Susan-Maryann-Shakti gave me a small Mona Lisa. “What goes in must come out,” she said. “You can’t hold back what you really feel. Emotional holding can cause physical distress. Acne. Bad breath. Dry skin. Leaky gut.”

I looked at her pale skin, her thin hair. What had happened to her? Who was AJ’s father? Not Georgy; the boy was as brown as Shiva. “I guess you don’t suffer from constipation.”

“My name means a lot of things, but one of them is energy,” she said, “sexual and otherwise. I need release.” She lifted her chin a notch. “I don’t let things build up. I say what I need to say. I do what I need to do.”

I wondered whether this need-to-do had included Georgy, who was married at the time. “Is Shakti your given name?”

“The one I’ve given myself.”

Please.
“You didn’t answer my question. How’s
your
plumbing?”

She smiled that elliptical smile again and then held up her hands, fingers together but thumbs splayed, in two L-shapes that mirrored each other. She brought her hands up to frame her face, her chin resting on her thumbs.

I was in no mood for charades, but I’ve always been one for saying what people want to hear. “Pretty as a picture.”

Her smile broadened into a grin, then she dropped her hands. “The truth is in the toilet.”

I wasn’t much of a dater before Moira. The singles world seemed to be populated with wan, ambivalent types, endlessly analyzing if they were ready for love, for marriage, for mortgages and mommy clothes. I couldn’t help but feel an almost obnoxious smugness when we’d had Ashleigh’s boyfriend, Devin, and his parents over for dinner. Devin’s father was reasonable enough, but his stepmother, Lu, was all sarcasm and stringy muscles humming with stress and bewilderment. Watching Devin pile his plate with broccoli—and only broccoli—Lu had crossed her arms tight around her chest, as if willing her innards to stay in. “I went through a vegetarian phase, too. Every kid goes through one. I guess.”

So I was grateful for Moira, for her certitude, for her insistence that everything she does is somehow related to the fact that she is Irish, for her claims that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the demise of her first marriage, for her ferocity, and for her wit. And then the kids—evidence of that certitude—wide, frightened eyes, smooth heads I could cup in the palm of my hand. I was so hugely thankful for them, their power, which made my own heart swell, their wounds, which I could kiss away. At our wedding, in the moment I watched Ryan light a candle for us all, I was even grateful to his father, for being the kind of man who considers children merely an homage to their mother, for bowing out and letting us blend in the best sense of that tepid word.

But I guess he never intended to bow out for good, and he’d linger just long enough to do the most damage. And I was the ambivalent one, unclear, unsure. All I knew was that when Moira went out of town on business, the children stayed with him. It was Moira’s presence that made me a parent. Without her, what was I?

“Did you talk to Harry?” Moira asked me, leaning over my shoulder as I tried to wash a glass in the kitchen sink.

“I tried,” I said. I had made my way back into Harry’s haunt, wondering despite myself whether I really was emotionally “irregular,” so to speak. All I’d managed to do was murmur the word
hospital,
the word
treatment.
As feeble as he was, the look on Harry’s face would have scared the shit right out of anybody, no matter how constipated. He’d held up a finger that arthritis had clearly had its wanton way with and said: “The only thing the doctors can prescribe for me is a gun.”

“He’s not going for it,” I said.

Her lips tightened into a pinkish seam. “Then you’ve got to try again.”

“Moira, he’s seventy-eight years old. He doesn’t want chemotherapy. He doesn’t want radiation. He wants to watch baseball. Is that so wrong?”

She threw down the dish towel she was holding. “Yes, it’s wrong,” she said. “This is my uncle we’re talking about. And he has a chance to—”

“To what?” I asked. “To try out for the Olympics? To join chat groups on the Internet? To take up country-western dancing?”

She jabbed her finger at me. “He still has a couple of good years ahead of him.”

Doris padded into the kitchen and wound around my legs. I thought of my mother, my father. Some things are just too far gone. “Moira,” I said, her name a sigh, “this isn’t about you.”

She jerked away from me as if I had shoved her. “How can you say that?” she said. “How can you?”

I answered honestly, just as surprised as she was. “I don’t know.”

The party, such as it was, migrated to the small living room, which was painted a loud robin’s-egg blue. I was slouched in the doorway between it and the kitchen, attempting to appear relaxed and casual. Ashleigh was slumped—bored and not afraid of showing it—in an overstuffed La-Z-Boy. On the couch, Moira and Shakti sat, upper bodies tilting away from each other as if their heads were opposing magnets. AJ was crowded at the very end of the couch, wedged between a pillow and the armrest, his yo-yo still on his lap. Ryan sat at AJ’s bare feet, gazing up at him.

“Want to play a game?” Ryan asked.

AJ didn’t answer. I looked to Shakti, watched her bite her lip.

“Hey, you,” said Ryan.

“His name is AJ, honey,” said Moira.

“His real name is Ajit,” Shakti said, eliciting a peculiar low growling from AJ. “But he prefers AJ. Obviously. It means invincible. Little Buddha.” Shakti smoothed her dress over her knees, releasing energy more nervous than sexual. “He’s so invincible that he won’t let me call him invincible.”

Ryan was on a mission. “I
said,
do you want to play a game?”

AJ turned his head, blinked slowly, as if his eyelids were weighted with nickels. His fingers fluttered over the yo-yo.

A mother with a personal philosophy of self-expression raises a son as expressive as a houseplant. Who was this woman? I thought. A nurse from Indiana? A hygienist from Kansas? Who were we all kidding, anyway?

I felt a sudden tenderness toward the mute boy. “AJ doesn’t like to talk much, Ryan.”

“Yeah, Ryan, why don’t you leave the kid alone, okay?” Ashleigh said. I glanced at her, and she scowled and tried to sink farther into the chair.

“Does anyone want more eggs?” Auntie Flo wanted to know. “Or pop? I have pop in the fridge.”

“How many eggs can a person eat?” Ashleigh grumbled into her cleavage. “Mom, don’t forget Dad’s picking us up in an hour, okay? So we’re going to leave soon, right?”

Ryan stared openly at AJ, brows furrowing. I could see the rage that wormed into his expression, the embarrassment that pinkened his skin.
I’m sorry, Ryan,
I thought.
I
am.

Ryan reached out with his little fingers and pinched one of AJ’s big toes. “Hey,
you
!”

AJ jumped up from the couch, yo-yo flying, and ran right out the door before any of us could draw in a breath to speak.

I guess these things are in my blood, in my bones, because I leapt from my perch in the doorway and ran out after him. He’d made it only as far as the end of the driveway when I lunged, reaching out my arms and grabbing his elbows from behind, pulled him sideways. We fell onto Auntie Flo’s lawn.

AJ’s legs pinwheeled wildly, catching me in the shins once, twice. Pissed, I gripped harder, forcing his face into the grass,
dumb kid, another stupid, pain-in-the-ass kid.
His breaths came out in hard, almost tangible pants, and I could feel his wiry little-boy muscles bucking and straining. His goal wasn’t to surprise us. He meant to keep going.

As we struggled, I saw the group of them, my slapdash family, pouring from the house like some furious froth of insects. The knowledge that I was just filling in the holes left by someone else, that we could not keep one another safe, they could leave me, and I them, hit me and sent me reeling.

Now, years later, I see them differently, I see what I could not have seen. Ashleigh, wide-eyed and flushed, interested in something other than the mysteries of her own body for the first time in months. Ryan, his essential hurt radiating like bands of light. Moira, the terrible fear that fed her certainty.

But then, as I wrestled with this strange boy, this unknowable, unfathomable boy, I wrestled them all.
I can fix you if you let me. And in the fixing, I will be, too.
One of AJ’s elbows caught me in the teeth. My mouth filled with blood, and I shook my head in surprise. My grip around the boy’s arms slackened, broke. He rolled gracefully to his bare feet and for a moment looked down upon me like some minor god. Then he turned tail and ran. I flexed my empty hands and could only guess when—if—the spirit would move him to return.

I’M NOT JULIA ROBERTS

T
hey decided to meet in neutral territory, the diner with the neon baked potato blinking over the door. They had spoken before, of course, at soccer games and school functions, disapproving front doors where they handed off the children; but up to now, their talk was nothing more than empty, guarded. And they could have met somewhere else to break through their personal Berlin Wall, someone’s kitchen, say, or someone’s living room, but neither wanted “that woman” in her house, lurking around like a bargain-basement spy. Still, they must have clung to some belief, some vague hope of exchange or resolution, to bring them to this odd, anonymous place, where a busboy, stooped as a gargoyle, pushed a choked dust mop across the floor.

Beatrix sat on one side of a booth, nursing a cup of coffee, as Lu slid into the other side. Lu’s face and hair were peppered with droplets of water.

“I guess it’s raining,” said Beatrix.

“It just started.” Lu glanced at the busboy and his mop. “I think that guy has enough dust to knit himself a cat.” She snatched up a napkin and blotted her brow.

“All the weather reports said rain today. Did you listen to the reports?” Beatrix had a collapsible black umbrella hanging on the hook next to her seat. When Lu didn’t respond, she said, “Are you going to want coffee?”

“Do I need it?” said Lu.

“I don’t know. Do you?” said Beatrix, and looked away, out the rain-glazed window, not bothering to point out their server.

The waitress, a skinny girl-woman far too pretty for her surroundings or her brown polyester uniform, appeared at their table with a menu. Lu barely glanced at it. “I’d like coffee? And a piece of apple pie?” When Lu was really tense, she sometimes turned statements into questions, like a teenager.

“Absolutely,” said the waitress. Rather than stare at each other, rather than begin what was guaranteed to be an unpleasant or at least uncomfortable business, Beatrix and Lu watched as the waitress walked toward the counter, yanked a coffeepot off a burner, and circled back to her customers. She filled Lu’s cup and plunked a handful of creamers onto the table. “I’ll be right back with the pie.”

“Thanks,” Lu said. She opened one of the creamers and sniffed it.

Beatrix waited until Lu had doctored her coffee with three creamers and two packets of sugar. “So,” she began.

“So,” said Lu. Beatrix was armed with a notepad, a pen, and a short stack of manila folders. Ward, Lu’s husband and Beatrix’s ex, had warned Lu about the folders. He said that Beatrix kept every receipt, every letter, every Christmas card, every cocktail napkin decorated with drunken witticisms, filed in these folders. If you stupidly forgot something you’d written to her decades before, she would pull out a random valentine and read aloud to refresh your memory. Lu was glad that she’d never written Beatrix, even though she had been sorely tempted, mostly by words running to four letters.

“I guess you know why I asked you to meet me,” Beatrix continued.

“No,” said Lu. “I don’t.” Sweat prickled on her upper lip, which hadn’t yet achieved the stiffness she desired and probably never would. Out of the blue, Beatrix had decided that it might be easier to communicate with Lu than with Ward. Though it was not her job, and though Beatrix had sent some serious missiles Lu’s way, Lu found herself agreeing to try. She had gotten more and more concerned with the way Ward was handling his ex; he might as well have been writing his letters in Farsi for all Beatrix seemed to understand them. And then there was the fact that while Ward made a big manly show of putting his foot down, he seldom did. It wouldn’t have surprised Lu if she came home one day to find their stuff packed up in boxes on the lawn.
Well, Beatrix thinks it would be best for the kids if we sold our house, gave her all the money, and spent the next ten years in a pup tent in her backyard. I know it sucks, honey, but what can I do?

Beatrix tapped the pen against the notepad impatiently. “It’s about time that we stop beating around the bush and get some things settled.”

“Uh-huh,” said Lu. She took a sip of her coffee, making a show of calm.
Beating around the bush? I’ll give you beating around the bush.
She tried to employ her yoga breathing, then remembered that all the yoga training she’d ever had was the one tape, and did you really need a tape to learn how to breathe? Wasn’t this yet another sign of their disposable and frivolous culture?

No,
she thought. I’m
a sign of that disposable and frivolous culture.
Shake a broken family long enough and out falls the trophy wife. Except that wasn’t technically true, either. She was too old, too dark, too thin in the lips. But that didn’t stop people from jumping to their own salacious conclusions. Glynn, Lu’s new friend, had hinted that perhaps if Lu had had an affair with Ward, and perhaps if this was what broke up Ward’s first marriage, it explained why Beatrix seemed so hostile.

“No!” Lu had shouted. “I didn’t!”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Glynn had said gently.

“But I didn’t!”

“I’m sorry. I was just trying to find a reason.”

Now, Beatrix removed a piece of paper from one of the folders. She slid it across the table to Lu. “This is for Ward.”

“What is it?”

“A doctor’s bill.”

“I see that,” said Lu. “Which doctor? I don’t recognize the name.”

“A specialist. For Britt. I don’t like his eye.”

“Pardon me?” said Lu.

“His eye. Haven’t you noticed that his right eye floats into his nose when he looks to his left?” Lu’s own eyes widened, and Beatrix sighed. “He has a lazy eye. There’s something wrong with the muscle. He probably needs surgery.”

“Is that what the doctor said?”

Beatrix hesitated. The doctor had said that while Britt’s eye was a bit wonky, he didn’t think surgery was necessary.
Wonky.
Suddenly the whole stupid world was talking like Harry Potter. “I’m getting a second opinion,” she told Lu. “Anyway, Ward needs to pay half this bill.”

“Okay,” said Lu. She folded the bill and laid it at the end of the table, next to the condiments. “I’ll give it to him.”

“See that he pays it immediately,” Beatrix said.

“I’ll give it to him.” Lu opened another creamer and dumped it into her cup. “Whatever happened with Ollie’s leg?”

Beatrix stiffened. “There’s a technical name for how his legs are shaped.”

“A little knock-kneed?” Lu offered.

“No. Something else. Severe cases sometimes require—”

“Surgery. I know.”

The waitress came with Lu’s apple pie, crumb topped, and the two women leaned back in their seats, grateful for the brief respite. Beatrix watched Lu pluck a fat crumb from the top of the pie and pop it into her mouth. She had to force herself not to slap the woman’s hand. Here was the reason her sons’ table manners were going to hell. And why had she ordered
pie
? What was this, snack time? Weren’t they meeting to talk? To get things settled?

Because there
were
things to settle. Many things. Like, for instance, why Ollie, her youngest, had suddenly refused to go to his father’s house, why an eleven-year-old boy lay down on the floor and wailed like a starving newborn when Ward came to pick him up. Loopy—the stupid pet name her boys called Lu—looked at him funny, Ollie had confessed to Beatrix. He didn’t want to go to places where people looked at him funny. It made him think they hated him. It gave him weird dreams.

The waitress hadn’t left yet. “This a business meeting?”

“Sorry?” said Beatrix.

“You two. You look like you’re all business.” She tapped the pile of manila folders with an enthusiastically manicured fingernail. “We don’t get many like you in here.”

“Oh?” Lu said politely. “What do you usually get?”

“I don’t know,” the girl-woman said. “All types. Families, mostly.” She gestured vaguely to the next booth, where a man and a woman were eating cheese omelets in silence, a small boy gleefully ramming a butter knife through his paper placemat.

“That’s nice,” said Lu, not looking at Beatrix. She had read a book that said that first and second wives have to make a huge effort to get along, as they are, in a sense, kin, a new kind of family. Lu had found this book rather disturbing. Though she herself had married a man with children, she still wanted to believe that families were little more than crazy, unavoidable accidents—
Whoops, there it is!
And then there was the fact that peacekeeping was always up to the women. Why was everything always up to the women? Fathers and stepfathers grunted at each other, perhaps bellowed at each other once or twice over the phone or brawled on somebody’s lawn, but they never had to meet for coffee. Lu had wanted to shout at the book: Men don’t drink coffee??

The waitress held up the coffeepot as if there might be more cups to fill. Then she said, “Well, just call me if you need anything else. My name’s Heather.”

“Heather,” said Lu.

“Okay,” Beatrix said, staring at Heather till she stalked off, the pot banging into her hip as she walked.

“I’m concerned about Ollie,” Beatrix said.

Lu wiped her hands on her napkin. “Yes. Me too.”

“You,” Beatrix said with reptilian flatness. “What are your feelings for my child?”

“Excuse me?” Lu gave a little laugh. “What do you mean?” She’d recently been thrown off an electronic message board, secondwivesspeakeasy.com, for suggesting that not every stepmother falls madly in love with her stepkids on sight, and vice versa, and that she couldn’t quite believe the women who said that they did. At least, that was the excuse the moderators used. The real reason they threw her off the board, Lu believed, was the fact that she had dared to mock the movie
Stepmom,
a wildly unrealistic and weepy favorite with the second wife set. Lu thought that it was because Julia Roberts had played the beleaguered stepmother, and didn’t every stepmother secretly aspire to be Julia Roberts, well scrubbed and well-meaning, the girl next door with the big smile and bigger heart? “First of all,” Lu had posted in a particularly weak moment, “the movie is set in some fantasy New York Cityland where there is
no traffic.
Ever. Second, the bio-mom gets cancer and DIES in that idiotic movie. Who here is going to get that lucky?”

“It means you need to explain your feelings for my son. He seems to think that you hate him.”

“He what?” Lu said.

“Do I need to write it down for you?”

“You asked me to come here. I can leave if you’d prefer to be alone.”

Beatrix exhaled through her nose. “I just want to know what’s going on. He told me that you look at him funny, that you don’t like him or want him around. That’s why he refuses to go to your house.”

Lu’s mouth dropped open. “That’s what he told you? ’Cause he told me that he didn’t want to come over because we don’t have a Sony PlayStation.”

Beatrix didn’t speak for a full ten seconds. Then she said, “Are you saying my son’s a liar?”

“I’m saying that he might be telling you what you’d like to hear.”

“Maybe that’s what he’s telling
you,
” Beatrix snapped.

“Okay,” said Lu.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, okay,” Lu said. “It’s obvious he’s telling you one thing and telling us another. And that’s not the worst of his problems. He’s a big boy—”

“He is not!”

“I meant that he’s
not
a little boy,
not
a baby, and he’s still throwing temper tantrums that would make a toddler green with envy. If you hadn’t whipped him out of therapy—”

“I didn’t
whip
him out,” said Beatrix. “Who said I did that? Ward could have taken him if he thought it was important. Anyway, that therapist was a quack. He had us all doing homework, for God’s sake. Like I don’t get enough work at work! I don’t need to be filling out charts and handing out bribes. It’s ridiculous.”

“So much for discussion,” Lu muttered. With a fork, she stabbed at her pie, not caring that the crumbs showered into her lap. It had been years now, and sometimes, sometimes, the boys were alien to her, like some lost tribe who’d never seen a wheel or a spoon, like bugs with which you could speak. As soon as it seemed that they were lurching toward something real—if not love, then something like it, a delicate affection, a shy sort of fondness—they moved into another possessed-by-demons phase and Lu felt the ground shift beneath her.

Avoiding Beatrix’s angry, splotchy face, Lu observed the people at the next booth. There, the mother and the father continued to chew as placidly as ruminants as their son bloodied his torn placemat with giant blobs of ketchup. She wondered what those parents felt about their son, if, at that very moment, they were thinking of him as an infant, how his little baby head had smelled of powder and musk, how his laughter had sounded like the distant chime of bells.

The waitress floated by again, a spray of silverware in one hand. “That’s a nice shirt,” she said, nodding at Beatrix. “Where’d you get it?”

Beatrix frowned even more deeply than she had been, fingering the cloth of her shiny green blouse. “A catalog.”

“Oh yeah? Which one?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Oh,” said the waitress. “I’d like to get a shirt like that. My mom got engaged, and we’re having a party for her. Just a house party, but me and my sister want it to be nice. Dressed up, you know?”

“Congratulations,” Lu said.

The waitress looked at her. “For what?”

“On your mom’s engagement. I mean, if that’s a good thing. For her or you or anyone.”

“Yeah, thanks,” said the waitress, tucking a fringe of bleached hair behind her ear. She glanced from Lu to Beatrix. “You want a piece of pie? It’s good. They make it fresh every morning.”

“No, thank you,” said Beatrix.

“Watching your weight, huh?” Heather the Waitress said. “Me too.”

Beatrix stared at the skinny, skinny girl. “I don’t like
pie.
”

“Oh,” said Heather, looking as if she had just been hit in the face by a cobweb. “Well. I’ll be at the counter if you want me.”

“Good for you.” Beatrix flipped open one of the folders and paged through her notes and letters. The smell of the pie was driving her nuts; she’d just started Atkins, and the coffee alone was a huge no-no. She couldn’t afford to eat pie, too. It made her furious that Lu was eating it. She wasn’t so thin, either. At least, not as thin as she’d been when Ward started parading her around as if she were the prom queen.