Real Life & Liars (24 page)

THE CLOSEST PAPER HE COULD FIND WAS A TAKE-OUT MENU FROM
Wing On Lau.

He’s cross-legged on the sleeping porch upstairs in the house, the cool breeze ruffling his hair and scooting the paper around the scuffed wooden floor when he doesn’t have his pen to it, scribbling.

His guitar in his lap still trembles from the most recent chord when a creak in the boards causes him to jerk his head up.

Jenny. She’s wearing a new dress, this one rather simple compared to her usual wild patterns. It’s loose and pale gold, embroidered with something in the same color thread. From his vantage point, he can see the tattoo on her ankle, a swirly pattern of black shapes weaving around in a circle. He likes the way the breeze swirls the hem of her dress around.

“You look nice,” he tells her.

“That’s supposed to make up for you disappearing on me all morning?”

He would tug his ear, but he has a pen in one hand and the guitar neck in his other. He bites his lip instead, unable to think of a suitable excuse.

Jenny folds herself to the floor in front of him. She leans forward, balancing her elbows on her knees, and at this he gets a glimpse of the freckles on her chest and a shadow between her breasts.

He glances away.

“I have never regretted anything more in my life than what I told you last night.”

He stares at his guitar, and from his peripheral vision, he can see Jenny lean closer.

“OK, then, you don’t have anything to say. Fine, I don’t blame you. I’d undo it if I could, now that I see the feelings aren’t mutual. Because you’ve been a terrific friend to me. I’ve never met anyone so loyal and sincere, who can also quote the whole Monty Python dead parrot sketch. And now I’m afraid that’s gone since you won’t even look at me.” She stands up and looks out over the backyard and the harbor. “Then, to compound my whopper of a misjudgment, I get on your case about songwriting at the same time. So. I guess this is a rambling apology and a desperate wish I could unsay what I said. If I could have one superpower right now, I’d choose the ability to give someone selective amnesia.”

“You’d have people lining up around the block. You’d make a fortune.” Van was smiling before he realized she was being serious. He couldn’t help himself.

“I hadn’t even thought about charging. I’d just do it pro bono.” She smiled back, though her eyes were still sad. “Hey, what was that tune, just now? It was pretty.”

“I don’t know. Something I’m fiddling with. Something my sister said got me thinking.”

“Irina?”

“No, Kat.”

“About your mom?”

Mom. Van feels a thud in his chest as it hits him again. Cancer. Pulling her off the pier had felt like a hallucination, same as when he’d clocked Irina’s deviant boyfriend in the face a year ago. Not only is Mom sick, she is apparently in denial, or otherwise just reflexively stubborn about doing what other people want.

“Did you hear what happened on the pier?”

“Irina told me. She looks awful, by the way. I think she’s been throwing up.”

Van set the guitar down next to him and stretched his legs out along the wood floor. “My mother has always been the most vivid person I know. That’s the word, vivid. Doesn’t that come from the word for life?”

“La vie.
Yes, you’re right.”

“So why she won’t fight for it now is completely beyond me.”

“Maybe she hasn’t had time to let it sink in. Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

“My mother doesn’t ever change her mind. About anything.”

“That kind of certainty must be comforting.”

Comfort? He’d never thought of certainty as comfortable. After all, he was certain his days would remain much the same the entire school year and all the foreseeable years after that, and he found only life-crushing drudgery in that fact. Or did he? Maybe he’d grown comfortable himself.

Did his mother find death more comfortable than an uncertain prognosis?

“So what was it then?” Jenny asks, her gaze still out on the water.

“What was what?”

“The song. That melody, you said it didn’t have anything to do with your mother. Can I hear it?”

Van shrugs, picks up his guitar, and starts picking out the chords, humming the melody, lilting along, knocking the body of his guitar now and then where he imagines a drum.

When he finishes and looks up to Jenny, her eyebrows are up, and she’s smiling, with her whole face this time. “Van, that’s lovely. Why didn’t you sing the words?”

“Still working on them.”

“You should sing it for your family.”

“They wouldn’t be interested.”

“They might enjoy it. Give them something to think about besides your mom.”

“Nah. I’m sure it sucks as much as every other song I’ve written.”

“Your songs are good, Van, and that one’s really good. You’re just…”

Jenny stops, biting her lip.

Van finishes for her. “Not trying hard enough.”

“That’s not what I meant, not really. But you’ve told me before all the songwriters are in New York or Nashville, and that to break in from way over here in Michigan is next to impossible. So why not go? Give it your best shot? Wait tables and ply your art in the great American cliché?”

“I’ve got a job, an apartment…”

“You hate that apartment, and the job isn’t much better.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me? Won’t you miss me?” Van tosses off the remark casually, like he’s joking, but he’s not, in fact. The thought of being thousands of miles from Jenny has caused his chest to ache.

Jenny looks him in the eye, softly smiling, her stripey orange hair standing out like feathers, dancing in the wind. “I’d rather miss you than have you miss out.”

Then he feels something, like something rising in his chest, something that might burst free and fly off, only it can’t, so he
stands up himself and crosses the room to Jenny, pushing his guitar behind his back as he does it, leaving his hands free.

Jenny doesn’t return the kiss for a moment, freezing in place, then she grabs his face with her hands and rises on tiptoe. Van wraps his arms around her, lifting her off the floor.

IRINA’S KNEES TREMBLE SO HARD SHE CAN HARDLY BALANCE,
awkward as her position is, poised over the toilet. She grasps the countertop for support, and the side of the tub.

It’s blood.

Just a drop or two, but definitely there, scarlet beads in the water.

“Darius,” she murmurs, wanting him but knowing he’s out with Max buying ice at the corner store.

“Mom?” she calls. Her bedroom is close, and she knows Mira is lying down, but it’s her mother she wants now. “Mom!”

Irina nearly reels with a sense of déjà vu, when she saw blood in the toilet all those years ago, more than a decade now. She’d been terrified, thought for sure she was bleeding to death, and she’d had to call out four times before her father shouted through the door. Her mother was not home from her night class, yet.

So it was Max who dug around under the sink until he came up with a maxi pad, her father who assured her it was perfectly normal and that her mother would explain when she got home.

After the fear and embarrassment ebbed away, Irina was enraged that her mother hadn’t told her. Mira apologized, consoled, made her tea, and let her stay up late, cuddled under a quilt, eating cookies.

She said, I didn’t know you would start this young, you’re barely ten years old. She said, I’m surprised your school hasn’t had “the talk” yet, I guess I’m out of practice, all those years since Katya…

And Irina shrank smaller into the quilt, reminded again that she was an afterthought, an unwelcome echo of her accomplished older sister.

“Mom!” tries Irina again, her voice breaking.

She hears light, quick steps before Mira bursts into the bathroom without knocking. Her hair is wild and ratty, her eyes shiny and face marred with red splotches. “What’s wrong?” she says, shutting the door hard behind her.

“I’m bleeding…” Irina chokes out, standing up with considerable effort, checking her panties. There are small dots there, too.

Mira moves over to inspect the toilet. “It isn’t much. A little bleeding is normal early on, it’s probably fine.”

Irina pulls up her panties and shorts, finding herself pinned to the corner of the bathroom by her mother’s position, damn these tiny bathrooms and old houses.

Mira says, “Did your doctor say bleeding was normal at your appointment?”

“I haven’t been yet.” Irina gulps at saying this aloud, realizing she’d failed her child at least once already.

Mira gulps hard. “I could drive you to emergency. If you want.”

Irina shudders. That long wait, a strange doctor poking around.

“There’s nothing they can do, is there?”

“I don’t think so, baby. If there’s anything wrong, which there probably isn’t.”

“But you don’t know that for sure. I could be…it could be…”

“No, I don’t know for sure.”

Something breaks inside Irina’s chest, she feels it giving way. “Mom,” she says, falling into her mother’s arms. “Mom, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this, but I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want the baby to die…”

Irina feels her mother sway in place, the breath of “shhh” blowing past her ear.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says again. “I’m going to screw it all up, I know it.”

Her mother whispers, “Sweetheart, we all screw up our kids. You just try to keep the screwups small and love them like anything.”

Irina pushes back from her mom, and finds herself eye to eye with her chest. “Mom, I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you this weekend.”

“It’s okay, sweetie.” Mira brushes a lock of hair behind Irina’s ear. “It’s a lot to process, and I haven’t handled it well myself.”

“I just…the thought of raising a child without you around to help me…But maybe now there won’t be one.”

“Think positive, sweetheart. I’ll brew some raspberry-leaf tea. That’s supposed to help at times like this.”

Irina gulps air, now feeling winded and claustrophobic in the airless bathroom. “Darius would be crushed. He lost a baby before this. I can’t bear to tell him because he’s already upset that I’m leaving him.”

“Are you?”

Irina looks away from her mother, not sure what she’ll think. “I
thought I didn’t want the baby, so I told him he could divorce me and keep the child. He got very upset; now if he thinks the baby isn’t coming, either…”

Mira searches out Irina’s gaze until she has no choice but to look at her mother, right into her reddened eyes. “Tell him how you’re feeling, Reenie. Tell him you are scared for the baby and you are not sure about anything yet. Tell him you spoke rashly because you’re not sure, are you? You don’t want to give away your baby so much as you want to hit the panic button and reset everything back to normal.”

Irina nods. How easily her mother can read her.

“There’s no panic button. But there can be a new normal, and you might love that new normal.”

Irina wonders if her mother speaks from experience, if she was reaching for the panic button twenty-two years ago when Irina was conceived. She decides not to ask. Not today.

Mira pulls her into an embrace again. “Call the doctor on Monday, see if they’ll see you, see if they’ll reassure you the baby bean is just fine.”

Irina nods into her mother’s shoulder, clutching her hard, and finds herself praying that her mother is right.

A CHAIN SAW WHINES OUTSIDE, AND IT MAKES THE HAIRS ON MY
neck stand up.

I’ve retreated back to the bedroom, to our double bed with the snail’s trail quilt handed down by Max’s mother. I’m feeling loopy and wrung out from being yanked out of my nap by Irina’s desperate cry for me. How that brought back memories, hearing that plaintive call of “Mom” that sets you running. Because it’s a different tone, the “Mom” called out from genuine need as opposed to the persistent whiny demand.

The chain saw makes me wonder if they’re going to work on our big tree or the one that crushed Katya’s car, but the noise is too distant for that. Some other neighbor cutting away the debris.

Trying to shake off the high, and it’s proving more difficult than usual. My eyes don’t like to stay focused. But I should go downstairs for brunch with a semblance of dignity after my display on the pier this morning.

Must remember to flush any remaining pot in the house.

At the time it felt wonderful, to flee my family and this house and go commune with the lake, it felt freeing to be hanging over the water, eyes on the horizon. To think I almost jerked myself right off the edge when Max and Ivan tried to pull me in.

It was their hands on my arms that did it, made me want to pull away from them because it made me think of that day, after we talked to Dr. Graham.

As soon as we stepped into the kitchen after the long drive home, Max tried to fold me in his arms, and I shook him off like a sodden raincoat.

“Mira, I know you’re afraid…”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

I’d forbidden him from talking to me in the car, and he obeyed, probably because he could barely concentrate on the road. I could tell that by the way he clutched the steering wheel. His hand shook when he flicked on the turn signal.

All the way home from Traverse City, I’d watched the highway reflectors along the side and in rhythm with their passing thought “no, no, no.”

So the minute we got in the house, he tried to hold me, but to me it felt grasping and aggressive.

“Why did you leave? Why won’t you listen to the doctor?”

“She says I have to let them mutilate me, and I won’t do it.”

“Mutilate?” Max repeated the word, his jaw hanging open and his voice strained by an effort not to shout. It was an effort that would soon fail. “And what do you think the cancer would do? Anyway, did you hear her say you could get reconstruction? They can build you a new breast, you’d look perfectly normal.”

“How happy would you be if they said, ‘Mr. Zielinski, we have to cut off your penis, but don’t worry, we’ll bring around a flap of your ass and you’ll be good as new.” And yes, I laughed. “Flap of ass” struck me funny somehow, and I was feeling a little crazy. It
was all wrong, me in a doctor’s office, being told I was sick when I felt just fine, and Max ordering me around like a child, like his little obedient wife.

“This isn’t fucking funny!” he screamed, and it felt like a punch. My insides crumpled up, and tears sprang to my eyes. He ripped off his glasses and threw them to the floor at my feet. “Will you take your life seriously for once!”

“What do you mean, for once?”

“You’ve gone your whole life with your hands off the wheel, trusting someone would always steer you back to center, like your precious Paul protecting your job even when you pissed off the wrong people, me picking up your slack at home while you were at meetings half the night…”

“You’re a fine one to talk about picking up slack! When you’re writing, you’re barely alive to the rest of us, and that doesn’t count the occasional book tour. And don’t you dare mention Paul to me in that tone. You have nowhere to go with that argument.”

“I have never been flippant about our family.” Max pushed his hands into his eyes and looked at me again, his mouth hard. “You know what that mistake cost me. Costs me, still.”

“So you think I’m flippant, then? Careless?”

“Show me how you’re not when the doctor says you have cancer, and in the middle of telling you how you can fight it, how you can win, you throw your hands up and walk out, and now you’re telling me you won’t do it. Boom, just like that, with practically no information at all. All the while those tumors are growing…Mira, you have to do this. For the children. For me.”

“For you!”

He stepped toward me and I thought he was going to pick up his glasses but he grabbed my shoulders and put his face in front of mine, such that I couldn’t look away, and there he held me.

“You have to do this. I won’t let you die!”

“That hurts!” His fingertips bit into my arms and I tried to
squirm away but he wouldn’t let go. I scrunched up my face and turned it away.

In my ear, he yelled, “Mira, are you listening to me?”

My mother used to say that, as she stood above me, looking down her long nose, ticking off my failures as a daughter and a human being.

And then something inside me shut off, and I felt Max’s heat dissipated by a coolness sprung from within me, and his voice seemed to echo and grow distant. It was from this place of coolness that I felt him let go of my arms and retreat.

I went to my studio to meditate, watching the gulls tease the harbor as I did so. It might have been minutes or hours later I don’t know, but Max came back, positively soaking with apologetic tears. I accepted his apology but told him I considered the issue closed.

He shrank away, assumed his deferential, attentive pose, and that’s the way it’s been for the past nine days.

Until this morning on the pier.

My door creaks open. I lift my head off the pillow, and it’s Max, his face crinkled up like it always does when he’s worried.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“You won’t have to lock me in to keep me from throwing myself off the pier.” I push down the urge to giggle because none of this is actually funny. That’s clear enough by the look on his face. He’s aged a year since this morning. Ten years since ten days ago.

This has hurt him, too. I’ve failed to see just how much until just now. I’ve failed to realize how the fear of loss can turn outward, so panic looks like rage, love turns to screaming and demands.

I prop myself up and hold out my arms. “I could really use a hug about now.”

He comes to the bed with surprising alacrity for a sixtysomething man who spent all night on a half-deflated camping mat
tress. He folds his arms around me and nuzzles the top of my head with his chin.

“You know,” my voice comes out in a whisper, though I didn’t mean it to. “I’m scared shitless. Absolutely out-of-my-mind terrified.”

“Oh, Mira. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Katya, probably. She’d probably already be under the knife, telling the doctor to hurry up because she’s got a meeting.”

“She’s as human as anyone, she just tries not to show it. Not unlike someone else I know.”

“I don’t know what I’d be like without both breasts.” I didn’t even know I was going to say that. It just popped out into the air. I can tell by a shift in Max’s position that he’s surprised, too.

“Why, Mira. What do your breasts have to do with how wonderful you are? Don’t get me wrong, they’re good breasts.”

I laugh and wipe my eyes. “Good breasts? Is that all? And you call yourself a writer.”

“Round orbs, glowing like the moon.”

“Okay, go back to ‘good’ then.”

Max scoots down on the bed until he’s eye level with me. “I’d miss it.” He strokes the wicked left one lightly, making my nipple perk up. “But not as much as I’d miss you.”

My sweet, adoring Max. As I’m kissing him, his reading glasses fall from the top of his head and bop me in the nose. We giggle because it’s not the first time that’s happened, and he takes them off, tossing them carelessly so that they slide off the end table and clatter on the floor. That’s happened before, too.

I need more moments like this, like hearing my husband’s glasses hit the floor before we make love. I need many, many more moments like this.

He nudges my bathrobe off my shoulders.

Moments just like this.

I run a brush through my hair and wonder how I’d look without it. Maybe I have a weird-looking head. I try to remember baby pictures. Did I have a nice round one or a funky-looking potato shape?

Max has gotten dressed and gone off in search of brunch provisions in the pantry and to rally the troops.

Hair and breasts. Do I really need them? And anyway, the hair grows back, I think. Assuming I don’t die.

A coldness snakes down my back because I can see the scalpel hovering over me, and I shake it off.

It’s not that easy, like my family would have me believe. It’s not that easy to let them cut you apart.

I smack the hairbrush down and go in search of a dress to wear. Must get out of this room and this brooding. Time to be with my family before they all scatter again.

In the kitchen I find Katya, wearing the clothes she wore on Friday, business-meeting clothes, expensive and chic, if a bit wrinkled.

“Dad’s got the camp stove out,” she says, glancing at me before turning her eyes back to the contents of the counter. “So we should be able to manage a brunch, though we’ll have to eat in shifts, with such small burners.”

I’d anticipated my family’s not-so-organic eating habits and purchased old-fashioned hearty breakfast food. Pancake mix from a box, fatty bacon. Syrup in a bottle shaped like an old woman. I’ll have some muesli and juice, most likely. Also, I need to find that tea for Irina.

Katya rummages in the cupboard above her head. She’s tied her hair back in a sloppy twist speared through with a pencil. Her face is drawn into a tight mask of anxiety.

I move to her side. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Fine.”

“How are the boys?”

“Grounded all summer.”

I toy with the ends of my hair, which I’ve woven into a braid and pulled over my shoulder. “You know how sorry I am. I’ve already flushed the pot that was left.”

It’s a through-the-looking-glass moment. The mother apologizing to the child for poor behavior. When did this happen to me?

The others start filing in, wearing their traveling clothes, casual stuff that will get wrinkled from hours in the car. Darius and Irina come down the steps, hand in hand. She looks pale and clutches her husband’s hand. I notice he walks as close as he can to her without getting tangled in her feet, eyes on her, always.

“Hi, Mom,” says Ivan, with a bashful smile, one arm slung over Jenny’s shoulder. His T-shirt says,
I MAKE STUFF UP
. She has her arm wrapped around his waist, and she fits snugly next to his chest. They look like puzzle pieces. What was that Shel Silverstein book called?
The Missing Piece,
that was it. Ivan loved that story. But Jenny was never really missing. It was Ivan, missing the point, as usual.

“Hey, Van,” says Katya, eyes on the mixing bowl. “Whatever happened to Barbie? Did she make it home in the monsoon?”

“She sent me a text this morning about what a bast—” Van stops, noting his nephews and niece. “What a jerk I am. So I’m assuming she survived the night. Oh, and Kat? She sends her love.”

A ripple of laughter flutters across the kitchen. I notice that for once, Van isn’t pulling his ear.

Chip and Taylor approach me, eyes downcast.

“Grandma,” Chip says. “We’re really sorry.”

“Yeah,” adds Taylor. “We didn’t mean to get you in trouble with Mom.”

I try to hide my smile with my hand. They obviously believe the
wrath of Katya is something not to be trifled with. “I appreciate that, boys, and while I don’t like that you went through my things, I’m the one who’s sorry. I had no business bringing that stuff in the house when you were coming.”

They start to shuffle away, and I stop Chip by his shoulder. In a low voice I tell him, “It’s not all fun and games, you know. I saw some kids get pretty messed up in my day, and saw some bad things happen to them. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a joke because it’s not.”

I have no idea if what I said meant anything to him, because he only nods and gently extracts his shoulder from my hand before turning back to the living room. He pours an orange juice from the carafe that someone set out and stands next to his father. The resemblance is startling. If not for the buttery amber color of his hair, like Katya’s, he’d be the very image of his father.

Charles looks like he’s about to throw up.

“Thanks for trying,” Katya says, energetically whipping the pancake batter. “If he doesn’t listen to me, he’s not going to listen to you. Especially when you do it yourself.”

“I had to say something.”

Katya stirs a few more times, and I say, “You’re going to whip it into a mousse if you keep that up.”

“How are you feeling, Mom?” She doesn’t take her eyes off the batter, but tilts her head in my direction.

I go back to playing with my braid. “Okay for now. Hard to believe there’s anything wrong with me.”

“There is, though. You know that, right?” Katya abandons the pancake batter and regards me with a hand on her hip. “You can’t pretend it’s not happening. And you know”—she drops her voice low so the children won’t hear—“it’s not like you’ll go gracefully if you just let it run wild inside you.”

My breathing feels too shallow suddenly, and I clutch at my
heart. I consciously slow it down, deepen my breath,
uijayi pranayama,
my yogi would say.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. But I can’t feel good about you making these decisions until I know you have all the information.”

The family is talking in groups of two and three. The boys are asking Darius about the BMWs he sells. Kit and Reenie are talking about babies, Kit carrying on about how much she wants a baby cousin, preferably a girl, and suggests a name that sounds like Areola. Max works away trying to light the camp stove, which he finally does, putting on a pot of perk coffee.

No one’s talking to me at all.

“Do you ever wonder why you’re here?” I ask, not really to anyone in particular.

Katya has been washing her hands at the sink. “What?”

“I sometimes wonder what I’m really doing here, anyway.”