Read The Shortest Distance Between Two Women Online
Authors: Kris Radish
The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (15 page)
When the two messages end, Debra looks up first and into Emma’s eyes. Emma cannot bring herself to look away. She cannot lie. When the questions come she knows she will tell the truth. The truth has been a long time coming.
“Was that
my
Samuel?” Debra asks, her jaw wedged so tightly that Emma fears that it will shatter against her wineglass.
“It was a long time ago. You were gone. You were already dating Kevin. It just happened, Debra. It was a mistake.”
“A mistake,” Debra repeats.
“You heard me,” Emma says, trying to sound brave.
Debra turns slowly, like they do in the movies just before something terribly important happens. Then, very deliberately, she throws what is left of her wine into Emma’s face and says, “Fuck you, Emma Gilford. Just fuck you,” and runs out the back door.
11
THERE ARE STILL WINE SPLATTERS on Emma’s kitchen floor when the back door flings open and sister Joy, who has not bothered to knock or shout a warning about her forthcoming appearance, barges in and asks in a voice that is decibels above loud, “What in the hell is going on around here?”
Emma does not look up when Joy storms into the kitchen like a terribly severe late spring rainstorm, slamming the back door behind her and making a sound like a fat dog that has just dropped to the floor and prays it will never have to get up again. Her hands move without hesitation, slowly pouring what Joy assumes is some
evil liquid, slowly and so precisely into a mysterious container. Joy has to say, quite firmly, “I asked you a question.”
Emma does not answer.
“Are those drugs or something? For crying out loud, Emma, what in the hell is going on around here?”
The procedure is almost finished when Emma sets down one container, taps the tall cylinder that she filled with her fingertips, holds it up to the light, and makes small circling motions with it as if there is an invisible hula hoop around the top that she needs to balance. Only then does she finally look into Joy’s eyes.
What would Joy think if Emma really did tell her what was going on? What if she just told her about Samuel, and how she has totally screwed up the reunion, and how her relationships with all three of her sisters are in freefall, and what if she said she was terrified because their mother has changed so much? What if she said that her heart was filled with uncertainty and that what she really would like is for Joy to sit down and just talk to her like a real girlfriend, like a real sister?
But Joy’s eyes are bloodshot and she looks as if she has not slept in ten years and she now appears even thinner than she did at brunch, so Emma cannot bring herself to confess any of these things. They have both agreed to stop talking about Stephie’s serious lapse in judgment that resulted in the drunken party. This only after Emma has listened to her sister chastise her as if she were a baby for falling prey to Stephie’s lie. Because of this she can especially not now tell her about Stephie’s life dreams or that Erika has finally contacted her only to say,
“Emma, do not do a thing. I’m working on straightening out this mess you’ve made of the reunion. Do nothing,”
and then hung up.
Emma would so love to know what in the hell is going on around here herself and until she looked into her sister’s sad eyes
she was going to try having a normal conversation with her. But that apparently will not work out either.
“Emma, are those drugs or something? What are you doing? Debra tells me you have flipped your lid and I don’t even want to know what kind of trouble you got into with Stephie. What is wrong with you?” Joy whines.
What
is
wrong with me?
Emma wonders for a few seconds what Joy would do if she asked her to sit down so she could properly address that question. For starters, she’d say,
I let you walk right in here as if you owned the place. Polite people knock, you big dip. My mother has run off with a stranger and for some insane reason everyone blames
me.
I wasn’t even there and the evidence in her bedroom suggests she took off with some local Casanova, whom no one has met, but who wears a thong that would fit King Kong. Our sister Debra, who I now dislike almost as much as I dislike you, has finally found out that I had an affair with her ex-boyfriend, who is—from the look of the wine stains—someone she still carries a torch for after all these years. We are all going to be in deep shit soon because I am woefully behind in the GFR planning, which Mother probably assumes we—and
we
almost always means just
me
—are handling while she has vanished with the thongman. Since Stephie went back to you all I want to do is hide in my garden. It’s like someone cast a spell on me and I am powerless to fight it. I called in sick yesterday. I get up in the middle of the night and pick dead buds off the new flowers and I sketch gardens that belong on estates somewhere that is not anywhere near Higgins. And now here you stand shouting at me as if I am in control of the world and what I’d love to do is just sit here quietly in my garden and think about what I can plant in midsummer
.
But she says none of these things. What she does say is about as normal as a conversation gets with anyone even halfway related to a Gilford.
“First of all, Joy, stop yelling, for God’s sake. I’m standing right here. These are plant nutrients and in order for them to work I have to balance them perfectly.”
Joy looks from Emma back to the bottles and jars clustered on the table and then back to Emma.
“You work in human resources,” Joy reminds her. “For crying out loud, this house, your yard, it looks like a garden shop half the time.”
“I like gardening,” Emma explains, her voice quivering with emotion.
Joy is totally distracted now. She trails Emma outside without saying another word.
Then there are at least five minutes of blessed silence when Emma kneels down as if she is in front of an altar, gently caresses a group of flowers with wilting, deformed, brown buds that might be weeping if they could actually do that, and not so much pours as anoints the stems with the magic potion she has just concocted in her kitchen.
Joy is spellbound. She watches Emma like a medical school student might watch a great surgeon remove a heart and replace it with a new one. Emma’s fingers dip the brown, seemingly half-dead buds into her potion again and again. She is precise, patient, extraordinarily focused, and Joy, thank heavens, has the good sense not to say another word until Emma sits back on her heels, rotates her neck from side to side to release the tension, and places the container on the ground.
“There,” Emma declares. “If this works I may want to get some kind of patent on this because it will blow Miracle-Gro off the shelves.”
“What is it?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“Really?”
“Totally. I’ve been working on this for a long time.”
“Gee, Emma, I never knew all of this. I thought you were just, like, futzing around back here because … Well.”
Emma imagines what Joy wants to say and almost, just almost, does not want to hear it because she is beginning to realize that her entire life has been running on the leaking fumes of assumptions.
“Don’t be mad, Emma, but I thought you focused on your plants because you’re not married, and you rarely date, you know? I guess, well, sometimes I think we don’t know very much about each other anymore.”
Joy gets up. She walks carefully between the rows of flowers and she sits down close to Emma’s bent knees, right where Emma’s feet might be if she stretched them out from under her body. Emma prepares herself for some kind of physical or verbal assault.
Emma can count on one hand the number of intimate and emotional moments she has shared with her seemingly switched-at-birth oldest sister during the past twenty-five years.
Sisters should be more than just passing acquaintances at family gatherings, even if there is a thirteen-year age difference between them. Sisters should be open, and not demanding, and stop and listen to each other, and be kind and caring. They shouldn’t drink so much and yell at each other. There should be give-and-take and not what seems to be a distance the size of fifty Grand Canyons between them.
Emma now is certain that either her or Joy’s Moment of Possible Salvation has passed and she is about to get blasted for exposing her niece to the underbelly of life during the past week.
“Well?” Emma asks impatiently, wanting her penance to begin. “You asked me what in the hell is going on around here. Why did you storm my fort?”
Joy is surely not used to quiet emotional encounters. Somehow she has turned into one of those extraordinarily obnoxious life coaches whose main job is to humiliate, scorn, frighten, and generally intimidate everyone she comes into contact with. Joy Gilford who once upon a time managed to win the heart of nice guy Rick, a handsome but extremely quiet lout, who has always deferred to his wife, who has rarely spoken up to defend his sisters-in-law, or his own children, and who has been disappearing physically and emotionally more and more as the years have passed. Emma cannot remember the last time she had a conversation with Rick.
Emma feels her heart pick up speed as Joy lifts her head and starts to talk.
“I was coming over here to talk to you about Stephie,” Joy begins, “because I know she told you I get jealous. I was also going to yell at you again for the party mess. Maybe it’s the plants or talking nice like this, but I think I want to talk about something else.”
Emma is too astounded to reply. What in the holy hell?
Joy wants to have a
real
conversation? She wants to sit in the yard and talk with
me?
Maybe I should just confess
, she thinks,
and get it over with
.
“Let me explain about the club and college and whatever else Stephie might have shared with you,” Emma begins.
Joy’s head shoots up as if someone has hit her in the center of her spine with an ax.
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” Emma stutters, stunned.
Joy, surprisingly, lets it go.
“Whatever it is, it’s okay,” she says, to Emma’s astonishment. “I was out of line to yell at you and question the fact that you could take care of Stephie. For crying out loud, she should be your daughter. I have no idea what I am doing.”
Here is when Emma really wants to snort the few drops of what is left of her plant medicine. She wants to lie back on the small lush tract of grass she has planted in between this wide row, hold the funky cylinder to her lips and lick the minerals and vitamins and the secret concoction of herbs she ordered from Mexico so that she can levitate herself right out of her own backyard and into orbit.
“Joy, you know I love Stephie so much even when she’s a little shit,” Emma manages to say, wondering as she says it what in the world will come out of Joy’s mouth next.
Joy doesn’t pause. When she speaks it’s as if something inside of her is pushing the words out and she has no control over what she is saying. She speaks so fast and what she says is so astounding that Emma leans forward and almost touches her sister’s forehead with her own because she doesn’t believe what she is hearing.
“Emma, there’s no other way to say this but I think … not think … really I know … Rick is having an affair.”
For a moment so brief it might be impossible to measure it, Emma shuts her eyes, and behind her eyelids sees nothing but the aqua blue ocean she has dreamed about on some unknown tropical island over and over again for what now seems like years and decades. But when she opens her eyes she sees that Joy has started to cry.