Real Life & Liars (16 page)

IRINA CURLS UP IN AN OVERSTUFFED LIVING-ROOM CHAIR, A PIECE
of cake balanced on her folded-up knees, trying to replace an alcohol buzz with a sugar high by eating a piece with frosting flowers the size of brussels sprouts.

Darius laughs at a story Max is telling, one of the favorites in the Zielinski repertoire, about the time his Uncle Lukasz convinced Van at a family picnic to try the hot and spicy salsa. Van, about eight years old then, scooped up a huge chunk of it and chomped it right down. This resulted in Van streaking toward the lake, mouth wide open, as if he was going to dive in and drink the whole thing. Max’s impression of Van never fails to get a laugh, though they’ve all heard it six thousand times. Having a new face in the crowd makes the story seem new again.

Irina licks her plastic fork and watches her husband laugh. It’s a warm, smooth sound. Bass guitar in a jazz band, syncopated rhythm.

She steals a glance at her mother, who has changed into a purply pink tie-dyed dress, and braided her hair into pigtails, which might look ridiculous on any other sixty-five-year-old woman, but Irina can’t imagine her looking any other way. She’s reassured that Van and Kat are right. She seems just fine. Perfectly normal. She must not have remembered properly what Patty said.

Charles is laughing, too. His presence here is the biggest surprise of the night. Instead of his usual business suit, or Dockers-and-golf-shirt combo, he’s wearing flannel pants and a T-shirt from some road race. His feet are bare, propped on an ottoman. Irina doesn’t believe she’s ever seen the soles of his feet before. Nor his teeth, for that matter, for how little the man smiles.

Not that Katya is enjoying herself. It’s like she’s trying to hide behind her wineglass. She’s not even sitting next to her husband.

Irina squeezes Darius’s hand and tries to catch Katya’s eye. See? She wants to say. Look what I’ve got. A handsome husband who truly loves me.

Irina puts her empty cake plate down on the floor. So it’s hypocritical to gloat about a husband she intends to divorce. She doesn’t get many things over on Katya, with her big fancy house and successful business and rich man.

As she glances around again at her family, Irina thinks that everyone looks happy. Together, contented, relaxed, all that sappy stuff. It won’t last, she knows. They all know that.

“At least they’re not dull,” she murmured to Darius on the plane on the way back to Michigan, after she’d complained through a whole time zone about their various offenses. And he replied with the gravity of a guru, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“My, aren’t you profound,” she said, staring out the window at the flat glaze of white cloud.

“It’s Tolstoy,” he said, opening one of his textbooks. “From
Anna Karenina.
”

Irina catches Van staring at their mother. For all his confidence in his room about how nothing was wrong, he seems worried now. But then, when isn’t he worried? He’d worry if there was nothing to worry about, just to fill the time. Irina was just a kid, but she could remember him pacing the house, tugging on his earlobe, and holding his notes or a textbook. He liked to walk and study at the same time. How he didn’t crash into walls was a mystery for sure.

Van’s cell phone bleeps, and they all pause in their conversation. He flushes pink and looks at the screen, then the color drains from his face. He scurries from the room.

In the silence that settles after him, the storm takes up residence, crashing and roaring like a fairy-tale giant.

Katya sighs. “I wonder where the kids have got to.”

She weaves a little getting up from her chair. For someone who normally polishes every aspect of her appearance, she looks like someone mopped the floor with her at the moment. Still wearing that dress, no shoes, runs in her nylons, makeup smeared all over. Hair coming loose from its updo.

All of a sudden, Irina can’t look. Katya looks old and more than a little wrecked. Her step is heavy as she passes into the kitchen.

Bartleby the cat dozes on Max’s lap. Her father’s gaze is a million miles away, like always, but there’s something different about his face. It’s not slack, as it usually is when he’s thinking over one of his books. It’s got a tightness to it that Irina is not used to seeing.

Van appears back in the living room. His cell phone is so loose in his hand he could drop it any moment. The shock in his face exaggerates the long, gangly look of his body, and he seems almost spidery.

“There’s been an accident.”

Mira bolts straight up in her chair. “Who? What happened?”

“Jenny.” Van tugs his ear with his free hand. “I have to go get
her. She slid off the side of the road on 66. She’s not even to East Jordan yet.”

“Will you need any help?” Darius stands up, seeming very strong and tall to Irina just then.

Van stuffs his phone into his pocket and stands up straighter. “I can handle it.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t. I was just offering to keep you company. Maybe you’ll need help pushing the car completely out of the lane.” Darius stands with his weight on one leg, arms folded loosely. The picture of coolness, the flip side of Van.

Van cringes, still yanking the earlobe like he’s going to pull it right off. “Sorry. No, it’s fine. From what I gather, it’s completely out of the lane and halfway in some guy’s yard. She was calling me from some gas-station convenience store. She’d walked up the side of the road.”

Irina chews on her tongue, wanting to say, “Told you so, moron,” but she’d sound like her big sister, and, anyway, Van has figured out his mistake all by himself by this point.

“Take it easy,” she says instead. “We don’t want to have to come rescue you, too.”

Their father shakes himself out of his reverie. “Is she okay?”

Van pulls on his ear again, and Irina feels like yanking his hand away from it. “She says she’s fine, but she sounded…I don’t know. I think she’s okay.”

Mira stands up to give Van a hug. “Let me get you Max’s old raincoat. I wonder why she went out in this storm, anyway? She would have been welcome here.”

Van slides his eyes over to Irina. She gives him a pitying smile and looks away. She can’t be too hard on him. Considering.

Max jumps to his feet, and Mira drops something in the hallway when Katya screeches from upstairs, “Mother! Come see what you’ve done to my kids!”

OH, BOLLOCKS.

In my office, I see exactly what has got Katya screeching and grabbing fistfuls of her own hair.

Chip is cross-legged on the floor, head lowered like a kindergartener sitting in the corner. His eyes are bloodshot, and despite his mother’s raving frothing anger, a dreamy smile keeps floating to his lips. Taylor is next to him, similarly bloodshot, but looking distinctively gloomy.

And the place reeks of pot.

“I’m raising to try…trying to raise…two, er, three young people in this crazy stupid world, and giving them all the ‘just say no’ speeches and making them sign their little DARE pledges and where do I catch them getting high? In my own mother’s house. With her very own weed.”

Kat’s disgust radiates like heat from a sidewalk in August. She thinks she’s standing up straight, in her usual position of indigna
tion, but she’s drifting in place and has to keep moving her feet to stay upright.

“You’re so drunk you can barely stand, and you are going to lecture me about substance abuse?”

Taylor gasps, and Chip stifles giggles with his hand.

Kat wipes at her face, smearing more makeup. “Fine. Keep getting high like it’s 1968, keep wearing the same old ratty clothes like you’re still twenty-two years old even though you look insane. I couldn’t care less. But when you leave it lying around so my kids can get to it, in fact so they’ll not only get to it but think it’s cool because Grandma does it…”

“It wasn’t lying around.” Chip lifts his head to his mother. The vapid smile has gone for now, but his voice has a lazy, syrupy quality.

“Yeah,” chimes in Tay. “We had to really work to find it.” He points over his shoulder at a stack of books they piled on a chair to reach the top shelf of my closet. The little jade box where I keep my pot—the box was a gift from Paul after one of his overseas trips—is open on my desk.

“Ask them why they were snooping in my study.”

“My kids are in here getting high, and you’re concerned about your drugs?”

“I’m not concerned about the drugs. I’m wondering why they thought it was okay to rummage in the farthest reaches of my closet.”

I haven’t had to put on a stern look for a small child in many years, and I’m not sure I can remember how to do it. My own high has long faded, but even so, the most I can manage is to look sad. And I am.

Chip is staring at the floor again, fascinated by a pattern in the carpet. Taylor is the one who gazes up at me with a quivering chin. “Don’t be mad, Gramma.”

“I’m the one who’s mad, Taylor Richard. I’m the one you
should be worried about.” Katya starts to tap her foot, then leans on my desk for support instead.

Taylor darts a quick glance at his mother and turns back to me. Tears tremble at his eyelids, threatening to fall. “We went into your purse. You left it on the table, and Chip wanted to see what was in it.”

Chip giggles some more. “We found a
joint.
I mean, wow. A joint.”

My emergency escape hatch, I’d thought that morning as I slid it into a lipstick case and dropped it in my purse. It was still there last I looked.

Now it’s Katya’s eyes that are shiny with tears. “Go downstairs.” She enunciates each syllable, whether out of anger or because she’s trying not to slur, I don’t know. “Talk to your father. This is going to be one long summer for you two. And where is your sister?”

“Taking a bath,” Chip answers, pulling himself off the floor like he’s climbing out of a tar pit. “Don’t worry, Mom. We wouldn’t have let her do it. She’s too young.”

“I’m so glad you have standards,” Katya chokes out, as they pass. Chip is nearly as tall as she is, and Taylor not far behind. Katya closes the door behind them and turns back to me.

The smell in the room and the expression on her face make me want a joint in the worst way.

“I can’t believe you.”

“What I do on my own time is my own business. I didn’t ask them to go through my purse and my closet.”

“I should not have to worry about their finding illegal drugs in their grandmother’s house.”

I grab my jade box and put the lid back on. I swipe the books they used to reach the closet onto the floor. “It’s not like they’ve never seen pot before.”

“I’ll have you know we live in one of the best school districts
in Michigan. Their friends come from some of the best families in the city, thank you very much.”

I put the box back where it goes, and I know I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t throw this in her face, but Katya can’t keep living like she’s in the pages of
Better Homes & Gardens.
I step down from the chair carefully.

“Did you notice they were smoking joints? Already rolled? I didn’t leave any joints in here already rolled. Just the papers and the weed, loose.”

Katya just stares. She’s so drunk she can’t follow what I’m saying.

“They, or at least Chip, already knew what to do. He expertly rolled that joint.” I picked up the roach from my ashtray. “Yep. He’s done this before, you can bet your big fancy house on it.”

“He does not know how to do drugs. You left a joint in there, and you just don’t remember.”

“Run down there and ask him, quick before he comes down and realizes how much trouble he’s in. Did you see how high he was? He didn’t have that much time in here after he found the weed. He got right down to business. At the bare minimum, he’s seen it done. Seen it enough times to do it himself.”

Katya’s face has gone pearly white under the remnants of her makeup. She can only shake her head. “That still doesn’t resolve the question of why you think it’s okay to have illegal drugs in the house?”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

Katya’s face is pulled into a sneer. “I know marijuana is illegal. I suppose next you’ll tell me it’s medicinal. What, are you dying of cancer?”

The noises of the house ring loudly in my ears. Bartleby’s paws click across the kitchen floor. The spirea bush outside scrapes the window in the gale-force winds of the storm. The grandfather clock, an heirloom and the only thing of my parents I kept in the
house, ticks sedately in the hall. Katya thinks she’s scored quite a rhetorical coup. Her eyes gleam with malice and victory, having momentarily forgotten her shattered illusions of her perfect sons.

“It just so happens that yes, I am.”

Katya laughs, a harsh barking sound. “Oh, very funny. You’re such a card. That’s what everyone loves about you. Isn’t Mira charming? Isn’t she funny? Isn’t she so wacky?”

“I’m not kidding.”

Her laughter spirals down. “This isn’t funny.”

“It damn well isn’t funny, no.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Very.”

I should have eased into this announcement, but then, I didn’t expect to be spilling it this way, in my office, which reeks of hash smoked by my grandchildren.

“What kind?” Katya sinks against the edge of my desk and grips with both hands. “What can they do?”

“Breast cancer. And they can do things, but I don’t want them to.”

“Don’t want them to what? What things won’t you do?”

Katya shakes her head. She always used to do that when she was a girl, struggling over a vexing math problem. She’d sit there over her homework, squinting at the paper and shaking her head as if she could shake out the correct answer.

“I’ll talk to the family. You’d better get everybody together.”

“They don’t know?”

“Your father knows. Go get them all together. Well, except Van. He’s driving to get his friend off the side of the road.”

“I can’t believe this,” she says, drifting out of the room, one hand on her head like she’s checking for a fever.

I can’t believe this, either. Any of this.

The girls look like members of a jury. Their bodies are crossed and locked in positions of judgment and anger. Only Max is in
motion. He paces the perimeter of the screened-in porch, stopping now and then to peer outside at the storm, which has let up a bit, the thunder more like a low hum than destructive crashes. Kat has finally changed out of her fancy dress and is wearing a huge nightshirt, which reaches to her knees, and flip-flops. She’s also finally washed off that makeup, but I see she hasn’t laid off the wine, yet.

Can’t say as I blame her.

The grandchildren lounge on pillows in the center of the room, seemingly unaware of the reason for the meeting. Chip keeps chuckling about God only knows what, Tay is eating a bag of Cheetos that must have come from Katya’s stash of snacks, and Kit strokes Bartleby, who lies splayed out on her back.

I raise an eyebrow at Katya, gesturing with my head at the kids. Does she really want them here? She merely glares back at me.

With the wind dying down, we’ve opened the windows and the night breeze slips in. Still muggy, but at least it’s moving.

The still inside air was choking in its closeness.

Katya and Irina are sitting side by side on a wicker love seat. Katya pats Irina’s hand, and Irina lets her. That’s surprising, but then, crisis is supposed to bring solidarity, so I’m told. Darius leans against the door to the outside, as much on the fringe as he can be. He inspects his cuticles, his face passive.

Charles is out of his laconic pose in the recliner and sitting up straight now, ankle crossed over his knee, hands gripping the sides of the chair.

“So. Tell them, Mom,” Katya says, her voice hard like the crack of a whip. “Tell them how you’re dying.”

Irina jabs a finger at her sister. “You make it sound like a personal attack. Like she arranged to be dying just to mess up your life. God, you’re self-centered.”

“I suppose you’re glad she hid this from us? Maybe that suits you just fine. Ignorance is bliss, right, Reenie?”

So much for solidarity.

From his post at the window, Max turns to face the room. “Girls. Stop.”

He didn’t raise his voice, but his speaking up at all in such a way is enough of a surprise. The girls fall silent, glowering at each other. Irina leans on the arm of the love seat, aiming her body away from her sister.

“I found a lump, then I found another. Dr. Graham says I have breast cancer. She says I need surgery. Probably chemo and radiation, too, depending how much it’s spread.”

“So when is the surgery?” Reenie bites her lip, tucks her feet underneath her on the love seat. “You’ve scheduled it, right? Mom?”

Katya slurps her wine audibly.

“Reenie, listen…”

“You’re not going to do it?” Irina nearly shrieks this, mouth open and her eyes glassy with shock.

“When did you learn about this?” Katya interjects, not willing to let me off the hook for keeping the secret.

“Ten days ago.”

Max says, “Your mother says she’s given this a lot of thought.”

His voice comes out strangled and forced, the use of “your mother says” signaling that he doesn’t believe this himself.

“I’ll bet,” Katya spits out. “When has she ever given anything a lot of thought?”

“Mom,” Reenie persists. “Are you really going to let yourself…die?”

“Honey, I know it’s hard to explain…” In my effort to be gentle about something that hurts, I flash back to removing a sliver from a tiny finger, using a needle to probe the top layers of skin, all the while cooing,
Almost there, it will be all right, almost got it…
“But it’s not like this surgery and all that is a walk in the park. And it might not even work.”

“You look fine.” Irina now slumps back, drumming her fingers on the love seat armrest, taking in her air in quick gasps.

“So far, yes.”

“It can’t be that bad, then.”

“It is, sweetie.”

“How could you do this to me?” Reenie curls up even farther, and starts chewing on a thumbnail, an old habit I haven’t seen in years.

“Now who’s self-centered,” Katya says.

“I have a baby coming,” Reenie shoots back. “I need your support, Mom.”

Katya, predictably, takes offense. “Oh, and I’m a potted plant? I’ve been around that block three times.”

Reenie acts as if she hasn’t even heard. “You have to fight this, Mom.”

A crushing weight is settling on my chest again, pressing me down in my chair.

“Don’t tell me what I have to do,” I say, before I realize the words are out of my mouth. “When your doctor looks at you and tells you to get parts of yourself lopped off and you just say ‘Roger that, Doc, whatever you say’ then you can get on your high horse about what I should or should not do. As it is, none of you know a damn thing about this. If I’m going to shuffle off this mortal coil, it’s my own damn business.”

Katya tries to smack her wineglass down on the end table but misses, spilling it on her nightshirt. Since it’s Shiraz, she looks like a stabbing victim. “We almost made it through the whole weekend before quoting Shakespeare. And
Hamlet,
of course. Why don’t you arrange for some sort of duel so you can go out like a true tragic hero?”

“I didn’t expect any of you to understand. Why do you think I didn’t want to say anything?”

“Mira…”

“Leave me be, Max.”

“Gramma?”

I’d almost forgotten about the kids, sprawled on the floor, below my line of sight.

“Yes, Kitten?”

“Are you really going to die?”

I crouch down, though my knees give me a punishing jab of pain. “Not right away or anything. But it looks like, well…Not years and years, either.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

Her big brown eyes search my face in awe. I don’t see fear, or grief even. As precocious as she is, it probably hasn’t dawned on her what I’m really saying. The only death in her tiny world has been a goldfish.

“You know, I’m not. I’ve had a good time, and it doesn’t last forever for any of us.” This makes her flinch, so quickly it’s like a firefly flash. “But honey, you’ve got decades and decades. Ages. So have your mom and dad.”

The boys haven’t moved from their sprawl. Tay seems to be asleep, with his hand in the Cheetos.

“Is there anything we can do?” This is from Charles, who fiddles with his watchband. Fastening, unfastening. Action-oriented, my son-in-law.

“Thanks for offering, but I don’t really think there is.”

Standing seems like too much effort, so instead I sit back, cross-legged, rooting my tailbone to the earth like my yogi taught me. I join Kit in stroking Bartleby.