A Soft Place to Land (7 page)

The funny thing was, when he and Naomi first started looking for houses their Realtor wouldn’t even show Phil ones in town.

“The public schools have gone to hell,” she said. She was sixty years old with the posture of a ballerina; her name was Dot and she had silver hair.

“We’ll do private,” said Phil, unconcerned. He and Naomi sat in the back of Dot’s Cadillac holding hands while she drove.

“The suburbs are really the place to be,” Dot said. “You can zip in and out of the city on the freeway and have your own acre or two just outside the perimeter. Often on a wooded lot.”

“Dot, how many times have I told you I don’t want longer than a fifteen-minute commute?” said Phil, pressing against his seat belt as he leaned forward to make his point. “Now I know you have listings in the city, so why aren’t you showing them to me?”

Dot glanced back to look at Phil before saying in the most gracious tone, “I have found that my Jewish clients tend to be most comfortable living in Sandy Springs or Dunwoody.”

Phil threw back his head and laughed. Naomi did not. She stared out the window at the other cars on the freeway.

She always said that at that moment she wondered: What in the world was she doing in this car, with this man? Why wasn’t she in her ranch house in Virden on Fairwoods Road, sharing coffee with her next-door-neighbor, Sharon?

“Dot, did I ever tell you about how Naomi and I first met?” Phil asked.

“You did not,” said Dot.

“It was at a Wesley Fellowship event at Duke. Wesley Fellowship as in John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church.”

“Oh,” said Dot, glancing back at her two clients. Giving them a brilliant smile of inclusion. “Well. I do understand your concerns about commute time from the suburbs. Why don’t we just turn around at the next exit? There might be time for me to show you a listing I just got in Buckhead, on Wymberly Way.”

Phil grinned at Naomi. She did not smile back. She was three months pregnant with Ruthie. She felt sick. She would have low-grade nausea for the entire pregnancy, a learned detail Julia used to tease Ruthie about, as if it were a mark against Ruthie’s character.

Ruthie headed back upstairs, to her room, but this time she used the back staircase. On a whim she decided to ride the moving chair. Just because it had been so long since she had. The chair was covered in cracked yellow leather and looked slightly ominous. Julia always called it the electric chair.

Ruthie sat down on it and pressed the button underneath the right arm. The button looked like a doorbell, but instead of ringing when pressed it began the chair’s slow ascent up the rail. There was also a doorbell-shaped button on the wall that operated the chair. When she was little, the only thing Ruthie’s friends ever wanted to do when they came over to play was ride the moving chair. It used to bore Ruthie to tears. It used to drive her crazy.

When the chair reached the top Ruthie hopped off, then turned the handle on the door that opened to the upstairs hall. Once in the hall she saw that the door to Julia’s room, which was catty-corner from the back stairwell, was still closed, Morrissey’s melancholy lyrics slipping through the cracks.

Looking at the closed door angered her. There was no reason for Julia to shut herself away so meanly. And so Ruthie marched up to it and knocked loudly.

A moment passed before the door opened, a crack. Julia peeked out, her long curls loose and tumbling over her shoulders.

“Is anybody else around?” she asked, her voice an urgent whisper.

Ruthie shook her head.

“Okay, come in. Make it fast.”

Julia opened the door just wide enough to let Ruthie slip in before closing and locking it again.

“I take it the solicitor is here,” Julia said. What should be the whites of her eyes were streaked with red lines.

“What’s a solicitor?”

“A lawyer. A scumbag.”

“Dad was a lawyer,” Ruthie said.

Julia shrugged. “I’m not saying Dad was a scumbag, just that it’s a corrupt line of work.”

“What about lawyers who defend innocent people? What about that guy in
Inherit the Wind
?”

Coventry had staged a production of that drama. Julia played Rachel Brown.

Julia waved away Ruthie’s rebuttals. “None of the members of Phil’s firm defend innocent people,” she said. “Believe me.”

And then, “Want to see something cool?”

Ruthie looked around Julia’s room to see what might be new. There were the two pink lamps attached to the wall, each decorated with a pink metal bow below a white shade. Dangling from the arm of the lamp closest to the door was a card with the Playboy bunny symbol printed on it. There was the antique sleigh bed that had cost Phil a fortune and that Ruthie and Julia once broke by doing flying somersaults on top of the mattress. There were the posters of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix that Naomi had forbidden Julia to hang—for fear of messing up the paint—but that Julia had hung anyway.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” asked Ruthie.

Julia pointed to her ear, which was covered by her auburn hair.

“I don’t see anything,” said Ruthie.

Julia lifted her hair, holding it away from her face in a ponytail, her hand the rubber band. In addition to the dangly beaded earring Julia wore, there was a safety pin stuck through the middle of her lobe. Bits of dried blood crusted around the needle of the pin.

“Ew,” said Ruthie.

“Shut up. It’s cool,” said Julia. “Want me to do it to you? You just have to ice down the ear and then stick the pin in real fast. You’ll barely feel it.”

“I think it’s against Coventry’s dress code,” said Ruthie.

She wasn’t joking, but Julia responded as if she were.

“Ha. Very funny. Come on. We’ll be the only two people in the world who have them.”

“But it’s ugly,” said Ruthie. “And it looks like it really hurt.”

“No pain, no gain,” said Julia, quoting her least favorite PE teacher, a petite blond woman who favored all of the popular kids and was always eager to jump in with stories about her days as a Theta at UGA.

Ruthie looked out the window, saw Matt’s white Ford Taurus pulling into the front drive. “They’re here,” she said.

“Oh fuck,” said her sister. “Time for our execution.”

Ruthie knew what the will would say. Julia had told her. Still it was shocking to hear the words read aloud, shocking to hear the lawyer John Henry Parker decree that the girls would be split up: Julia to live with Matt and Peggy in Virden, Ruthie to live with Mimi and Robert in San Francisco. It was like a harsh sentence being handed down at a trial, though no one had yet been found guilty.

Though Ruthie had been warned, she was still shocked that she and Julia really were going to be separated. A date had even been set, June 10, a week after Coventry let out for summer break. Peggy, Matt, and Sam would drive down from Virden the day before. Early the next morning, they would load all of Julia’s belongings into their minivan and Julia would follow them back to Virginia in her Saab 900. Two days later, Mimi and Ruthie would board a plane that would take them to San Francisco.

Until then, Mimi would stay with the girls in Atlanta, supervising them as well as the sale of the Wymberly Way house. She would let her husband, Robert, take care of things at home, while her business partner, Marc, handled the interior design needs of wealthy San Franciscans.

It had been a week since the will was read. Ruthie and Julia were in bed in Julia’s room whispering in the dark. Before the accident it had been a special treat for Julia to allow Ruthie in her bed, but now the girls almost always slept together. They lay on their backs, a printed cotton sheet, soft from years of washing, pulled up to their necks, the blanket and comforter in a messy pile by their feet.

“I mean, I like Aunt Mimi,” said Ruthie. “A lot. But I don’t
really know her. And now I’m supposed to move all the way to California and live with her and Uncle Robert? I just don’t understand. What were Mom and Dad thinking?”

“They weren’t,” said Julia. “Do you think Phil ever believed—for a moment—that he could possibly die before he reached, I don’t know, age ninety-five?”

She was right. Phil had always expressed extreme confidence in his longevity. It had something to do with the fact that he was in a terrible car accident as an infant, had flown through the front windshield—he had been sitting on his mother’s lap—after another car smashed into the side of the one his father was driving on that rainy day in rural Tennessee. When the ambulance came, the medics pushed the broken baby, his blood streaked by the rain, away from the middle of the road but did not tend to him, for they thought he was dead and others could be saved.

Except Phil was still alive. His father, too. Indeed, Phil’s father walked away with only scratches, while the others, Phil’s mother and two of her cousins, were dead.

The doctors at the hospital nicknamed baby Phil “Lazarus.” Because of the apparent miracle of his recovery, he was told by the aunt who helped raise him that God had spared him for a reason, that he was put on this earth to achieve mighty things. His father went off to Korea, to fight in the war, enlisting just a few months after the car accident, perhaps hoping to die over there, too. He did not die but instead returned home with a new bride, Martha, whom he had met when he was in basic training at Camp Breckinridge, and who wrote to him faithfully while he was overseas. Martha would give Phil his sister, Mimi. Phil’s aunt argued that the arrival of Mimi—a companion for the lonely Phil—was further proof of God’s special love for the boy.

Phil told his daughters that for a long time he believed in the divine specialness that his aunt attributed to him. As a teenager he even considered going to seminary. But during college Phil traded in his religiosity for skepticism. He still attended events sponsored by the Wesley Fellowship, in an attempt to meet girls,
but he no longer believed. It was enrolling in a class on the history of the Holocaust that did it. How could he have faith in a God who would choose to snatch one baby in Tennessee from death but would turn a blind eye to the tens of thousands of babies snatched from their mothers’ arms by Nazi soldiers and killed in front of them? Still, Phil held on to one steadfast tenet or, rather, one steadfast superstition: having faced death so early, he would not face it again until he was an old, old man.

“At his core, he didn’t believe he was vulnerable,” said Julia. “He might not have believed in God, but he sure had a God complex. Remember that dream he told us about, his dream of driving through Atlanta in a bright, white car?”

Ruthie did not remember, so Julia—whose ability to recount past events was almost creepy—told it to her in exacting detail. It was several years ago, and they had all been in the kitchen, eating a breakfast Naomi had prepared of soft scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and hot buttered toast, when Phil told them he had a dream to share.

In the dream, Phil found himself on the open road, speeding along, until suddenly and unexpectedly he came upon miles and miles of stopped traffic, six lanes wide. Phil had no choice but to stop, too. People honked their horns and shook their fists out their windows, but not one car moved, not one inch. Phil was frustrated, annoyed, until he realized that he and his car were somehow shrinking, shrinking until they were both so small that he was able to drive underneath all of the other cars stalled in traffic, just drive right through, until he was past the traffic jam and once again on the open road, where he sped off.

“What do you think it means?” Phil had asked his family.

“I think it shows an inferiority complex,” said Julia. “I mean, the fact that you were smaller than everyone.”

They all knew that Phil did not have an inferiority complex. Julia was just goading him.

“Wrong,” said Phil, as if Julia were a contestant on a game show and he, its host, had access to all of the answers.

“It means you really like cars,” said Ruthie.

“That’s part of it, squirt,” said Phil. “But go deeper.”

“What it means of course,” said Naomi, after swallowing a bite of egg, “is that deep down you believe that you have the ability and agility to get out of tough situations that others can’t.”

Phil beamed. “You girls have a smart mother,” he said.

The girls did have a smart mother, or rather, they
had
a smart mother, and her interpretation of Phil’s dream stuck with them.

Their father could get out of anything.

“Which is why,” Julia explained to Ruthie in the dark of her bedroom, “the instructions in the will are so absurd. They’re like . . . they’re like a recipe for a cake no one will ever bake. They don’t need to work.”

“But what about Mom?” asked Ruthie. “She worried about everything. And she was always giving us her little ‘cautionary tales.’ Like if I told her I was going to walk to Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, she’d tell me about the girl who just the week before was kidnapped while walking there. How a van pulled up to her, and a lady leaned out the passenger window and asked for directions. How the girl couldn’t hear what she was saying and so she stepped closer, and suddenly someone jumped out of the back of the van, grabbed the girl, and whisked her inside before the van took off at a hundred miles an hour, never to be seen again.”

“But think about it, Ruthie. Mom never worried about her own death. She worried about ours. She probably worried so much about ours that she forgot that she could die, too.”

“I still can’t believe she’d send you to live with Peggy.”

“I don’t know what choice Mom had. Peggy’s married to my dad.”

“But you don’t even know him,” said Ruthie. “Not really. I probably know Robert and Mimi as well as you know him.”

“That’s not really Dad’s fault. Mom’s the one who left.”

“But Peggy is so—so awful. Think about the first time you met her.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Tell the story,” Ruthie demanded. “About that first time.”

It was a horrible story, deliciously so, and one that Julia told well.

“I’ll tell it only if you’ll tickle my arm while I do, and scratch my back afterwards.”