The Deep End of the Ocean (3 page)

The first Christmas Beth and Pat were married, his parents and Beth’s brothers spent two nights in the newlyweds’ sordid rented house off Park Street. Beth’s brother Ben, called Bick, named Pat’s family “the night stalkers.” They stayed up late, and then they roamed. “Must be because they’re Romans,” Bick told her.

Beth had not asked Pat to the dance and dinner that would form the centerpiece of her reunion. He knew plenty of her old Immaculata crowd; he had been two classes ahead of her at the same school. He would have been seamlessly cordial to her friends but it would have been such a strain for him that he might have been sick with a cold for a week afterward. He would have drifted mentally to the stacks of history books he read obsessively, underlining good parts with a yellow marker, like a college kid. He would have been bored, thinking of acres of messy drawer space he itched to attack. He would have found the jokes stiff, the laughter forced, the opportunities for telling old stories and dishing old enemies meaningless and cruel.

Beth, on the other hand, couldn’t wait.

She turned the car off, while seven cars back a misfit honked his dismay at the delay. She looked into the rearview mirror. Ben had removed ham from the sandwiches Jill had packed and was wiping down the back window.

“Benbo,” she told him sharply, “ham is for eating, not washing.” Immediately, disgustingly, Ben popped the smeary ham in his mouth. Beth could have stopped him—but how filthy could it be? Ben picked up and ate floor food every day; he sometimes even put his cereal bowl on the floor so he could imitate the dog. Jill would wash the children. The hotel pool would wash them. Beth was not going to snap.

The traffic inched forward, and she started the car. Vincent was by then poking Ben in the neck, relentlessly, probably painfully, with a yellow rubber Indian chief. She could have stopped him; but wouldn’t he then have just done something else? Ben was not crying; and there was a certain high-register urgent tone of crying that Beth had come to regard as her cue for interrupting any atrocity. Today, she would ignore all atrocities except those that broke the skin. She inspected her haircut in the mirror—it was new, and appropriately tousled, and she’d rinsed out the gray with henna. Once the logjam moved, they’d be only half an hour from the hotel, which was near her old high school, in Parkside, Illinois.

“Sing ‘Comin’ Through the Rye,’ Mom,” Ben suddenly called to her now, ignoring Vincent’s increasingly violent pokes. How could he do it? Beth wondered; how could Vincent poke Ben, who loved him so? (She thought, guiltily, How could I squeeze Vincent’s arm? Or yell at him, nose to nose?) And Beth began hum-singing aimlessly, “‘If a body catch a body…’”

Ben asked, “Catch a bunny?”

“No, stupid, a buddy! A buddy!” Vincent cried murderously.

Beth closed her eyes and dreamed of tonight—of all the people from the neighborhood she’d see, who would all be wealthier than she, but not so “creative,” nor so good-looking, and certainly not possessed of so many lovely children. Good-looking, thought Beth. I
am
good-looking. Not pretty, but objectively speaking, a solid seven on the scale. When Beth thought about her own appearance, the word that came to her mind was “square.” She had square shoulders—a cross to her until they became fashionable—and a square chin. (One of her father’s favorite dinner-table stories was a recounting of the first time he’d laid eyes on his only daughter and commented, “That baby has the O’Neill jaw. You could use that jaw to miter corners.”) Even Beth’s hair, when she let it hang of its own considerable weight, was square, and so, to her continuous despair, were her hips. When she was twelve, her pediatrician had crowed cheerfully to Beth’s mother that Beth would “pop ’em out one, two, three with that pelvic structure.” And even though until Kerry, Beth did indeed hold the indoor record for easy labors, she still couldn’t think of Dr. Antonelli’s words without feeling as though she’d been genetically programmed to pull carts like a Clydesdale. Beth’s own looks could never hold a candle to Ellen’s, though Ellen, her childhood best friend, had spent twenty years telling Beth, “No one ever looks at your butt, Bethie. They never get past the bewitching green eyes.”

Ah, Ellen. From Beth’s point of view, the whole point of this reunion weekend was Ellen. Ellen was six inches taller than Beth, and thirty pounds heavier, the kind of stacked-up strawberry blonde who still caused men to bump into pillars at the airport.

She was waiting for Beth at the hotel. Ellen, who lived in the same westside neighborhood where all of them had grown up, a street over from the house Beth’s father still owned, had booked a room for the two of them and a room for Jill and all the kids. She’d left her husband, her son, and a thawed tuna casserole up at her northern-suburban mini-mansion and bought a fancy black rayon dress. She’d sent Beth a drawing of it in the mail. The prospect of the weekend had reduced both of them to seventeen: “I think if Nick asks us to sit with them, we should,” Ellen wrote on the bottom of the drawing. “His wife won’t mind—after all, you fixed them up.”

Beth’s first love, the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, before or since, the memory of whom could still make her abdomen contract, often ran into Ellen and her brothers, and occasionally worked with Ellen’s husband on development contracts. Beth had not seen Nick for ten years; they had met last at the funeral of a mutual friend, a boy who’d gone to Vietnam twice and later committed suicide by driving his car into the path of an oncoming freight train. Under the circumstances, though Beth still longed for Nick, thought of him in a syrupy way that had nothing to do with her real life, they had only touched cheeks near the casket. And Beth had wondered then, as she often did, if she should have married him.

Nick Palladino had long been a tough, no student, the kind of kid who seemed headed for life as a knockout shoe salesman who pumped iron and dated Bunnies from the Playboy Mansion downtown. But ten years later, Beth was a newspaper photographer who could barely afford cigarettes, and Nick owned his own business. Fifteen years later, Beth was a magazine photographer who no longer smoked, and Nick had sold his construction firm for more than it would have cost to buy Beth’s whole neighborhood in Madison. He was married to Trisha, his cool, slight homecoming-princess wife, who had lived across the hall from Beth at college. On that floor in Kale Hall, Beth used to write to Ellen, she felt marooned on the planet of the Nordic blondes. And Ellen had written back that no matter what happened, Nick would never love anyone else, that he would forgive Beth anything if she’d go back with him.

In her car, Beth hummed, and remembered Trisha.

Trisha was from Maine, and she had never seen anything like the street feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Pat and Beth took Trisha to the parade, during which supplicants carried the figure of the Madonna, covered with ten-and twenty-dollar bills affixed to her ceramic robes, through the streets. They bought Trisha a paper cup of cold lupini beans and stood with her next to the bandstand, where Beth suddenly sensed Nick before she ever saw him. He’d had on the most beautiful coat, leather the color of honey; and he danced with Beth first, while Pat stood by, radiating tolerance, his ring on Beth’s finger. And then he danced with Trisha; he was a good dancer. Beth was sick with envy; they didn’t make caramel-haired, light-wristed girls like Trisha on the west side of Chicago. After an hour, there was no turning back. When Trisha married Nick, Beth stood up in the wedding, got drunk, and threw up on her beige organdy dress.

“‘Everybody has somebody—nay, they say, have I…’” Beth sang, swerving across three lanes to head into the home stretch of Interstate 290.

“I love that part,” said Ben.

“I hate that part,” said Vincent. “Actually, I hate the whole song.”

She would not throw up anymore, but Beth wanted to get drunk with Ellen, get drunk and giggle and whisper and rush to the bathroom as if they had important things to conference about in there. She wanted to forget until Sunday that she had had children and a recent Cesarean scar.

Beth had weaned Kerry, though she hated to give her last, least one such short shrift, for the reunion. She’d had her ragged nails shaped and lacquered. Shaved an inch off those square hips with leg lifts.

By the time Beth had eased the wagon under the portico of the Tremont Hotel on School Drive, Ellen was on her, tugging her shoulders, trilling, “You’re here! You’re here!”

“You will not believe it,” Ellen whispered now. “Diane Lundgren is here, and she must go three hundred pounds. I’m serious.”

“Who else? Who else?” Beth cried, easing Kerry out of her car seat. But Ellen was by then all over the baby, offering Kerry her necklace of silver filigree balls to chew, sniffing the crown of Kerry’s head.

“I’m your godmama, Kerry Rose Cappadora,” Ellen cooed, reaching out a hand to each of the boys in turn, pulling them to her with her strong arms and soundly kissing them. The boys, who had grown up believing they were her nephews, didn’t struggle; they never failed to regard Ellen, who was as vivid and confident as Beth was dark and unsure of herself, as a sort of natural phenomenon, like rainbows or an eclipse. “Vincent, can you swim? Where’s your tooth?” Ellen all but shouted. She kissed Jill—whom she still called “Jilly,” Chicago fashion—and shouldered half a dozen of Beth’s various satchels and bags. “Let’s stow everything, okay? And then Jill can take the babes for a swim or lunch or something, and we’ll have a drink.”

“It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, Ellie!” Beth told her, embarrassed even in front of Jill.

“But we’re free!” Ellen reminded her. “We’re allowed to be irresponsible. We’re not going to drive. We have no kids.” Beth glanced at Vincent, who glowered. He did hate her. Guiltily, she reached down and pulled him against her side.

“I don’t even know if I got connecting rooms,” Beth told Ellen.

“You did. I stuck it all on my card.”

Beth was horrified. “Ellen! You can’t do that!” Ellen had money—everybody in construction was loaded, as far as Beth could tell. And though it was Pat’s dream to someday own part of the restaurant, and Beth’s to someday run an actual photo business with real employees, they were lean now. They had been lean as long as they could remember. Once, when her brother Bick offhandedly told Beth that he and his wife had been in financial trouble, that they’d been “living paycheck to paycheck,” Beth felt a stomach thump of panic. Wasn’t that what everyone did? Were she and Pat supposed to have a reserve, a cushion, already? In their early thirties? Did other people?

The economic gap between Ellen and Beth usually didn’t matter. Ellen sent Beth crazy things in the mail—sheets from Bloomingdale’s, pounds of chocolate, five hundred dollars once, when Beth had gone crazy on the phone and cried because she couldn’t buy the boys new clothes for Easter. Beth sent Ellen gallery-quality prints of her best photos; they were framed, expensively, all over Ellen’s house. Ellen paid at restaurants when they ate together; she sent Kerry savings bonds as if the country were at war.

But there were times Beth balked.

“You can’t pay for me,” she told her friend now.

“It’s, what, it’s seventy bucks or something,” said Ellen. “Who cares?”

“I care,” Beth replied, tempted, trying to seem more genuinely proud than she actually was. “I think I can write this off, anyhow, because I have a job on Sunday. I’m shooting the antelope statues at the zoo for a brochure.” Ellen’s attitude reversed instantly. She was part-owner of her husband’s business, after all; a write-off was a write-off.

“You’re going to have to go up there in that mess and rearrange it, then,” Ellen told her. They straggled into the lobby. It was jammed; virtually all the out-of-towners who’d come back for the reunion were registered there. Beth almost gave up. Dozens of people she recognized milled past her; it was like watching a movie peopled with stars from a previous era—all familiar faces, all altered, with names she couldn’t summon to her tongue. Did she really want to spend fascinating moments negotiating a credit-card transaction with a twenty-two-year-old in mall bangs, who, Beth already realized, would mess the whole transaction up anyhow?

“Elizabeth—the fair Elizabeth Kerry!” The tallest man in the lobby lifted Beth off her feet. Wayne Thunder was both the first American Indian and the first homosexual Beth had ever known. “I’m gay because of you,” he told her once. “Because you didn’t regard me as a sex object.” Wayne was a management trainer for the phone company; he was madly successful, lived in Old Town, came to spend every Thanksgiving at Beth’s house.

“You have brought some children….” Wayne intoned. “Who are these children?” Ben and Vincent jumped up and down. They were crazy about Wayne, who brought them boxes of illegal fireworks; Beth and Pat had been asked to leave the neighborhood association after Wayne set a neighbor’s hedge on fire. Holding Ben in one arm, Wayne told Ellen and Beth conspiratorially, “I saw Cecil Lockhart. She looks just like Gloria Swanson now. She has white hair—on purpose.” The antique flicker of annoyance Beth still felt at the mention of Cecil Lockhart’s name took her by surprise. She realized that she had been hoping that Cecil—the swanlike, gray-eyed girl who grew up next door to Ellen, the chief and constant rival to Beth for Ellen’s best-friendship—would skip this occasion. Cecil (whose real name was Cecilia) was, Beth judged, the only of the Immaculata graduates from her year to have made more of herself as a creative soul than Beth had. And it rankled.

Cecil was an actress. She had taught acting at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and at the Goodman in Chicago—she was very much married. Cecil was, Ellen told Beth now, still a size six, with a belt. Ellen knew; she’d seen Cecil last year at an arts ball. Cecil had had the distinction of being the first of them ever to have sexual intercourse—at fifteen. She’d liked it. She couldn’t imagine, she told Beth once, in junior year, ever going a month without doing it.