Real Life & Liars (15 page)

I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW YOUNG WE LOOK.

Katya put together a wall of memories for this shindig. It’s been mostly ignored since dinner was served, and this is the first chance I’ve had to study it.

I’ve seen these photos before. Katya raided my own collection to put it together. But now I see them as part of a finite collection of memories that will come to an end. Maybe that picture, there, will be the last time I’m ever photographed wearing that dress.

Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe other sixtyish women have long been contemplating the downhill side of life. After all, cancer or not, I crested the mountain probably twenty years ago.

Maybe I’ve been fooling myself these many years by acting young. Refusing the old-lady conventions of sensible clothes and cropping my hair short. Having a late-life baby helped in that, I think, though for those middle-of-the-night feedings, I certainly felt older than the pyramids.

Maybe this same photo wall will appear at my funeral, with a few photos from tonight tacked on. Maybe a few from next Christmas, too, a few more holidays if I’m lucky.

I imagine other photos: cheerful me putting up a brave face while wearing some dopey headscarf, hollows under my eyes, a rubber boob. All skin and bones.

I hear Dr. Kevorkian just got out of prison, though he swears he’s retired now from the “putting out of misery” business.

“Reminiscing?”

Paul has appeared at my side, offering me a glass of champagne. I’m feeling not the least bit bubbly, but I take it anyway. It gives me something to do with my hands.

“How can I do anything but at my own anniversary party?”

“Max is a lucky man.”

“Of course he is,” I say with a smile. Paul and I have had this exchange at least once a week. I like to pretend it’s all in fun.

“You’re going to tell me what’s wrong yet? Or do I have to get you so drunk you spill the beans?”

“I’m sick.”

I don’t know why I just said that. It’s an immediate betrayal of Max, after swearing him to secrecy and using every emotional manipulation I could muster to get him to keep this from our children, his parents, everyone close to us. And then I go and blurt it to Paul.

“What do you mean?” Paul puts his hand on my shoulder, and I want to shrug it off, but I know that would hurt him. He’s always hated to be pushed away.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you. It’s not common knowledge just yet.”

“Mira, what is it? Exactly?”

So I stand closer, and he bends his head down so I don’t have to shout. Thunderclaps drown out my words, and now and then I have to repeat the story. Of finding the lump, ignoring it until I
found a second one. Of Dr. Graham talking of surgery, chemo, radiation. I don’t mention the fight with Max the following morning though of course it leaps back to center stage in my mind.

How I manage this all with dry eyes is beyond me. Maybe I’m well schooled in managing my emotions around Paul.

“You can do it, Mira. I don’t know many other people stronger than you. Remember when the faculty strike dragged into its thirtieth day? Remember the dissension in the ranks, the death threats?”

I wave my hand in the air, wrinkling my nose. That whole fracas was so melodramatic. “I never believed anyone would kill me over protesting a wage freeze.”

“That’s not the point. You’re tough enough to beat this, and you’ll have all the support in the world. Max, your family. And me.”

Paul squeezes my shoulder gently, and a warm shiver runs down my spine. It’s my own anniversary party, damn it, but I’ve never been able to control my physical reaction to his presence. You’d think that all those years of working side by side, of watching him get more gray and paunchy, of watching my own skin slide downward like a melting glacier, you’d think I would have gotten over it.

I bring my eyes to a picture of Max and me, clowning on the dock behind the house. He’s hoisted me up in his arms like he’s going to carry me over the threshold, only you can already see his knees buckling. Some of that was comic exaggeration, but only some. He’s no athlete, my Max. I wonder if Max appreciates how hard it has been to keep to my vows all these years. He can’t appreciate it because he doesn’t really know. What am I supposed to say? Max, you should be glad I’ve never screwed around, because I’m really horny for my colleague. That would go over well.

“Mira?” Paul prompts, and now I do shrug gently out from under his hand, unable to stand the distraction any longer.

“I don’t want to be tough. I don’t want to be one of those poster-
child cancer patients with the yellow bracelet and the bald head with the funny hats, trying to make light of dying.” My voice is getting louder, even though Paul is close by and the band isn’t all that noisy in this part of the hall. “I’m getting old, too old to put on a brave face and go through all that shit.”

“Stop talking like an eighty-year-old dowager. You’re as young as you’ve ever been. I’ve seen you wheeling around campus on your bicycle while the rest of us slobs drive an eighth of a mile to our next lecture. You have to fight this.”

“Don’t tell me what I have to do!” I push him at this. I actually put my hand on his arm and push him. Paul is much larger than me, but the surprise of it makes him stumble back.

“You’re not making sense,” he persists, stepping back to the space I just shoved him out of.

“It’s my body, and if I choose not to have parts of it chopped off, irradiated, that’s my choice.”

“Think of your children!”

“My children are adults and stopped caring about what I think round about the time they hit puberty.”

“What about Max?”

“He doesn’t own me!”

Paul gingerly sets his champagne flute down on the memory table, near an album of pictures from the university years. It’s open to a newspaper clipping of the strike, where I’m leading the picket line, my mouth open in a most unflattering fashion, like I’m about to swallow a zeppelin. I drain my own glass quickly and put it down next to his.

“So that’s it?” Paul crosses his arms and juts his chin forward. “You’re going to stamp your foot and tell the whole world, ‘You’re not the boss of me.’”

“If you think belittling me will change my mind…”

“I don’t care what it takes. I just want you here, on this planet, for as long as possible.”

“No matter how sick I get or how miserable I am? Now you sound like the child. You want what you want, no matter what the cost.”

“When it’s this important, yes, I do.” Paul steps in close, and this time puts both hands on my shoulders. “I love you, Mira.”

I’d like to answer him, but my lungs have frozen, and I can’t find my tongue.

He says quickly, “You’re my oldest friend, and I love you dearly.” This he says more quietly, and he lets go of my arms, casting a glance over my head. He must also be wondering if anyone else heard him, if Max has witnessed our exchange.

He would go on, I can tell, but Katya has borrowed the microphone from the singer. She’s telling us that the storm has worsened, and now the weather service has declared a tornado watch. She calls off the party, recommending that everyone get to a hotel if they have a long drive.

This launches a flood of partygoers coming up to me to say good-bye, or say hello if they haven’t done so earlier. An impromptu receiving line forms, during which Paul melts from my side before we can exchange another word. Max walks up to take his place, pecking my cheek between handshakes with guests.

I don’t hear what any of them are saying. I can see their smiling, nodding faces, receive their enthusiastic hugs and kisses on my cheek. Several of them I might never see again, barring another family funeral or wedding in the coming months.

I practice my
uijayi
breathing like my yogi taught me, or else I might fly apart in all directions like an exploding star.

THE SIBLINGS MAY MAKE FUN OF KATYA’S SUV, BUT SHE NOTICES
that none of them complain when it’s time to go back to the house in a rainstorm, and she’s the only one who drove to the party. Even so, there was not enough room for the whole family. Paul gave Max and Mira plus Darius and Irina a lift back to the house in his own SUV.

Charles taps his fingers on the steering wheel, staring fixedly out the window, though there’s nothing to see but darkness and streaming rivulets of water. He worked the room, glad-handing and small-talking, after their spat, resuming his typical distance both physical and emotional. Katya curses herself for not taking advantage of this rare display of spousal availability, but then, why should she have to “snap to” just because he decides to be husbandly for once in a decade?

Maybe Tara is out of town this weekend.

“Oh Charles?” His head inclines slightly, silhouetted in the
light of the parking lot. “I think I’ll stay with the family tonight, instead of at the hotel.” He doesn’t reply.

Katya massages her temples. The sudden interruption in the flow of martinis has resulted in a sensation of billiard balls rolling around in her skull.

In the rush to escape the rain, Ivan ended up in the front passenger seat next to Charles. With the three kids in the back, that left Katya sitting next to Ivan’s silly date, Barbie. To Katya, she looks like a Barbie with a drugstore dye job. Barbara smells aggressively like Calvin Klein’s Obsession. Katya is baffled as to why this girl—who only yesterday had rebuffed Van completely—was riding back to the house with them like a proper sister-in-law. How had she gotten her hooks in so deep, so quickly? And what happened to the disappearing Jenny? Weird-looking girl, but nice enough. She’d ask Van later.

“Are we all loaded in?” Katya has to shout over the rain lashing the car.

Barbie’s cell phone trills, and she jumps on it like a heart patient waiting for a transplant. Then her face lights up, but she keeps her voice even. None of them can help hearing her, trapped in her conversation by the storm.

“I didn’t think you’d call me back after the last time we talked…. Yes, well, after you said you didn’t want to see me…Oh, I see, you feel differently now…”

Katya can’t hear the words on the other end, but the voice is distinctly male. Ivan is slumped against his armrest, his tall frame curved over like the letter C. And still she keeps talking.

Katya snatches the phone out of her hand and punches buttons until it stops. It feels good, and she decides to have martinis more often.

“Hey! That’s my phone!” Barbie snatches it back, cradling it to her chest like an infant.

“And that”—Katya points to Ivan—“is my brother, and I’m not
going to sit by while you humiliate him.” Katya stretches across Barbara, nearly prone in her lap, to reach the door lock on her side. She flips it open and sits back up with some effort. “Maybe you’d better get your car. Just across the street is a motel. Once you get past the shag carpet and fake wood paneling, it’s quite a cozy place.” Katya smiles into Barbie’s searing glare. “I’m sure there’s a vacancy.”

Barbara cries out to Van. “You can’t just send me out in this rain! Are you going to let her talk to me like that?”

Van rouses himself from his slump long enough to say, “It should be perfectly clear by now that no one has control over what Kat does and does not do.” Katya leans again to slide the Escalade door open. The furious rain sends a damp mist into the car. Barbara looks around, as if searching for an ally, and is greeted only by silence and muted giggles from the children. So she releases a disgusted snort and jumps out into the downpour. Katya slams the door.

Katya catches Van’s eye just long enough to see a faint, sad smile before he turns back to face forward.

No one pushes around Kat Peterson, nor her family, thank you very much.

“Mom?” Kit says, her voice sounding smaller and more girlish than usual. Katya prepares for her to ask for something outrageous.

“What, honey?”

“Can we come to Grandma’s, too?” Too? For a moment Katya forgot that she decided to stay at the house instead of the hotel.

Katya turns to face her daughter. In the darkness of the car, she can only see her in silhouette. But Kit’s shoulders are hunched around, and she’s sitting close to her big brothers.

“We? All of you?”

“Yeah,” says Chip, without elaborating.

“Well, of course, if you want to.” Kat can’t keep the skeptical
note out of her voice. Since when do they want to spend time at Grandma’s?

Kit might be afraid of the storm, but she doesn’t know why her boys want to hang around.

“Charles? You going to stay at the hotel, or are you coming to the house with the rest of us?”

A silence falls. The noise of the rain has almost disappeared in the way that constant noise does. Now, the
whap-whap
of the wipers is discernible. In the rearview mirror, Katya catches a reflection of Charles rolling his head around, stretching his neck. Considering his answer. What is he weighing? In one hand, family togetherness, in the other hand…what? Solitude. Work. Maybe a porno flick on the pay-per-view. He’d pay the bill, and she’d never know.

Katya shakes her head. Her mind does wander after a bit of liquor.

“I’ll just drop by the hotel to pick up my stuff. Meet you back there.”

Katya rests back in the seat. Tonight seems to be the night for family surprises.

IVAN RESTS SPREAD-EAGLED ON HIS CHILDHOOD BED, IN HIS CHILDHOOD
room, doing the math on his weekend. Friday equaled “no date.” Saturday dinner equaled “two dates.” Saturday night was back to “one date” but here, in the real nighttime hours, he’s alone.

Again. Stop the presses.

His eyes trace a crack in the plaster ceiling from the corner of his room, wandering across the middle like a river on a map. The river seems to be longer and wider than he remembered from his childhood habit of gazing at the ceiling. The house is getting older, along with everyone and everything else. Little Reenie getting married, soon to be a mom. Mira is a little slower in her step these days, his dad even more distracted.

Katya was seemingly born old, though. Always so organized with everything color-coded and filed and lined up. Even had her colored pencils arrayed in the color spectrum. What kind of artist is so anal retentive?

And yet, here’s Van. Still operating on a school-year calendar, still single, still plucking away at his guitar. Still getting upstaged by his domineering older sister with the fabulous home and beautiful family and successful business of her own.

Bartleby saunters in through the door he left cracked open and meows beseechingly. Van pats the quilt, and the old cat backs up on her hindquarters, wriggling her little cat butt, taking all the time in the world to gather up her strength, then pow! She unfurls and lands lightly next to him. Then she turns her butt to him and plops down, as if she couldn’t care less he was there. Her and every other woman he knows.

In the SUV on the way back to the house, Van slumped into the seat, wanting to throttle Katya for butting into his life, yet collapsing with gratitude that she’d solved his problem for him. The call Barbara took in the SUV from some other guy was just the topper. Any illusion that Barbara genuinely liked him had already flaked away by the third time she tried to drag him across the dance floor to accost his father.

Barbara must have had other plans with some other guy, and they fell through, and still Van was not appealing enough until she decided he could help her get her stories published. He was just a pawn. Not even a pawn. The chessboard? Lower yet. The little felt feet that keep the chessboard from sliding across the counter.

Only, marginally less useful.

A soft tapping at his door. Must be his mother or Irina. Katya would pound. Even when she tries to knock softly, Katya pounds.

“Come in.”

“Hi.” Reenie slips into the room. She’s changed from the yellow dress into a tank top and pajama pants with pink stripes. It’s like she’s leapt backward in time to her preteen years, and Van half expects a gaggle of girls to follow her in, slumber-party style. Then Van is surprised to see Katya slip in behind her, carrying a plastic
cup, still wearing her party clothes. “Got a minute?” Reenie asks, closing the door.

Ivan snorts. “Gee, lemme see if I can fit you in between, hmmm…No One and No Body.”

“Isn’t that a poem?” Katya mumbles, squinting as if the light is glaring from the small forty-watt bedside lamp, which it’s not.

Van looks back at the crack on his ceiling. “‘I’m Nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too?’ Emily Dickinson.”

The rain has eased up outside, but lightning flashes come so close together, the effect is strobelike. Once everyone made it back to the house, Mira had sent Max and Charles off to search for flashlights and candles. The Big Tree’s branches has taken out power lines more than a few times in its long life.

Irina perches on the edge of Van’s bed, almost teetering off. She strokes Bartleby absently. Katya leans against the door and folds her arms. “Reenie said she wanted to talk to us.”

“Reenie, what? What’s on your mind?”

“I think Mom has cancer.”

Van props himself on an elbow. “What? That’s crazy.”

Katya nods. “Yeah, nuts.”

Reenie tells them about Patty and the conversation, including her tipsiness. Kat just rolls her eyes and sips from her cup.

Next to her, Van sits all the way up. “She must have gotten her wires crossed. She always was a little daffy.”

“Wires crossed how? How do you imagine that your friend told you she has cancer? That doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense that Mom has cancer,” jumps in Katya, her voice dripping with irritation, as if no one could be so stupid. Van thinks she’s probably right, but he could do without her nasty tone. “Has she seemed sick to you at all? Has she even seemed worried? If anything, she was in a better mood than usual.”

“Except when I brought Darius home.” Irina juts her chin at Katya.

Van says, “Well, even Mom has her limits. That was a bit of a shock.”

Irina rubs her bare arms and hugs herself tight. Van slides over and wraps his own bony arms around her. “Hey, look, she’s fine. If anything I bet it’s a skin cancer or something. A spot on her nose. They never used sunblock back then, you know.”

“She sounded pretty sure. I think we should ask her.”

Van stands up and crosses the room to the window. “No, definitely not. If she has something to say and hasn’t told us, there’s a reason. We need to respect that.”

“Yeah, don’t hassle her, Reenie. Not tonight,” Katya says, already edging toward the door.

“Even if she’s dying?”

Van catches his breath. In the yellow lights along the harbor’s edge, he can see boats and yachts pull away and slam back into the docks. Thunder growls, the next crash beginning before the first one dies off.

“She’s not.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“You can’t be sure…”

“Look, Reenie. Don’t ask her. This is her anniversary. She’s trying to have a good time. It must be minor, whatever it is, or she would have told us. Don’t bug her with it.”

“Van…”

“Promise.”

“OK, Jesus. I guess you’re right. Patty was probably being a bit dramatic, being drunk and all. God, I could do with a drink right now. Or six.”

“There’s wine downstairs.”

“Speaking of,” Katya says, looking into her cup and slipping out of the room.

“Hello? Pregnant? Bun in the oven and all that? My fun is over.”

Van returns to the bed and nudges her with his shoulder. “Ah, come on. It’s not over. You’ll have fun again. And anyway, the baby will be fun.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure she and I will be doing Jell-O shots in no time.”

Van lets himself fall backward across the bed. “Jell-O shots. Grow up, Reenie.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve had your fun.”

Van props up on his elbows and squints at her. “Oh yeah, that’s me, living the high life. Eating pizza straight from the box alone, six out of seven nights.”

“Don’t dump your hang-ups on me because you wasted your twenties.”

“Shut up.”

“Where did Jenny go, anyway?”

“Home.”

“All the way home? That’s like a three-hour drive!”

“She left a while ago.” Van looks at his watch. “She’s probably halfway home by now.”

“In this?” Irina gestures to the window. “You let her leave in this? Your head is so far up your ass.”

Ivan puts his indignation on pause to think about Jenny struggling down the road in her fifteen-year-old Cavalier.

“Well, she said she wanted to go, I didn’t think she needed my permission.”

Irina stands up and rakes her fingers through her hair. “You are one piece of work, you know? This Barbara chick so much as hints that she likes you and you’ve got stars in your eyes and you’re drooling down your chin. Jenny, who you say is your best friend, goes out into a monsoon to drive three hours home, and you’re like, ‘Bye, have fun!’” Irina goes to the door and pauses with her hand on the doorknob. “You better call and check on her at least. Dumb-ass.”

Irina leaves him alone, and a guilty flush creeps over Van’s ears at the ring of truth in her words. No one can spell out his screwups so vividly as his angry sisters. He looks for his phone and speed dials Jenny.

Ringing. Still ringing. Ringing some more.

Jenny’s voice mail. Van hangs up because he can’t think of anything to say. He pulls on his earlobe and tries to remember other times he might have shoved Jenny aside for the interests of a fickle girl. Might have? Must have.

Now there’s pounding on his door.

“Come in, Kat.”

She stands in the doorway again. Her hair has gone all askew, and her makeup is smeared or faded off. She’s still in her linen party dress, but barefoot. “There’s a tornado watch, still. ‘Conditions are ripe’ they’re saying on the radio, and advising everyone not to drive. Just thought you should know. We’re all going to have some more cake downstairs. You coming? Might as well, no sense in hiding up here all alone.”

She leaves without an answer, with full confidence that he’ll do her bidding. And of course he will because otherwise he’ll lie in the dark thinking about Jenny white-knuckling her way home.