Every Last One (6 page)

“Is Ruby giving you a hard time?” Sandy asked, her hand on my forearm. “Because Rachel is making my life miserable.”

“It’s a hard time,” I said. “College, the course load. They’re all under a lot of pressure. Junior year is probably the hardest year of high school for these kids.”

“Isn’t it?” Sandy always spoke as though she were delivering lines from a crucial scene in a soap opera. “It’s so hard. I don’t know if I’m going to get through it. I keep asking her, What about Sarah? What about Ruby? Why don’t they have these issues?”

“Oh, they have issues.”

“It’s my dating. She should be old enough to have come to terms with it.” After Sandy divorced Rachel’s father, she’d married a real-estate broker, then lived with the man who built pools in the area. Now she’s seeing a vice president of the local bank.

“Well,” I say, “I think that’s got to be hard on a teenage girl, you know?”

“I know she wants me to feel guilty. But I just won’t. I think guilt is a useless emotion. They need to understand that we have to have a life, too.”

I had sipped at my coffee in lieu of speaking. I was afraid that, like the princess in the fairy tale, frogs of candor would leap from my lips and I would reply: “We don’t have a life. We had children instead. Your daughter is sad and insecure and in some kind of trouble. Grow up. Stop thinking about yourself. Forget about men. Buy some appropriate clothes.”

I am a coward. Instead, I had agreed that it was necessary that someday soon we have lunch.

After the police officer pulls away, I see that I have a message from Alice on my phone. “I really need advice on potty training,” her recorded voice says. And it’s almost irresistible to call her back and say, Oh my God, it makes no difference—preschool, playdates, sharing, reading readiness. I remember Ruby and Kiernan, both of them five, playing side by side in the grass behind the little house where we lived when the children were small, squabbling, pulling toys out of each other’s hands, calling the twins dumbbells and stupid heads. Deborah was worried that Kiernan would resent the baby she was expecting. Someone had said at the time, “Little children, little problems; big children, big problems.” What did we know?

That evening I have dinner with Nancy. The girls have taught us what they call the small-town look-around: Before you begin to speak, you look all around you to make certain there is no one within earshot you wouldn’t want to overhear the conversation. Even at a restaurant a half hour out of town, we both do it.

“I have had the day from hell,” I say.

“Please,” says Nancy, rolling her eyes. “You have no idea.” Her elder son, Fred, the one in college, had his wisdom teeth out the
day before. Her youngest, Bob, fell trying for a ground ball and broke his ankle. “If Sarah pulls a muscle swimming, I’m running away from home,” she says.

Nancy’s crises always seem to trump mine, but I still tell her about the stolen plants, and about my encounter with Rachel’s mother. “Sandy says Rachel doesn’t understand that her mother needs to have a life. She says guilt is a useless emotion.”

“Oh, please,” says Nancy. “Guilt is what separates humans from animals.”

“Fries or a salad with that?” the waitress asks as she takes our orders.

“Fries,” Nancy says.

“Me too,” I say. “I’m so sick of salads.”

Nancy had Fred before I had children, and Bob before I had the twins. When we first met, we discovered that Sarah and Ruby were born within two days of each other, and that we both believed natural childbirth was the big lie of our time. (Sandy once told me that she had had an elective Caesarean to keep her tone “down there.”) Nancy learns more about Sarah from me than from Sarah, and I learn more about Ruby from her than from Ruby. Although there always seems to be less to learn about Sarah.

“I have this situation with Kiernan and I’m at a complete loss,” I say as our burgers arrive. “He’s always at the house, which was always fine, except that now Ruby doesn’t seem to want him around.”

Nancy’s mouth is stuffed with food, and she is signaling that she wants to speak but can’t. She always eats too fast. Once I had to Heimlich her in a Chinese restaurant.

“I only know this from eavesdropping on Sarah—” she finally says.

“Of course—”

“But apparently he’s been doing this routine where he bought
Ruby this ring and he wants her to make some kind of promise about how they will stay together, and they’ll go to colleges near each other—”

“Which is an idea he might have gotten from Eric and Sarah—”

“Which you know,” Nancy says, “makes me completely crazy. I feel as if I was a bad role model for her, getting married so young, and you know, ultimately, I have no regrets, but still the idea that she might wind up with someone she met when she was fourteen …” Nancy is eating my fries because she has finished her own. She and Bill met in eighth grade. Fred is twenty and still with his high school girlfriend, and Bob is only fifteen but has had the same girlfriend since high school began. They grew up with a family mythology, and they’re sticking to it.

“So what should I do?” I ask. “I mean, in the natural order of things your daughter breaks up with a boy and afterward you see him a couple of times a year on Main Street or at a game. But Kiernan has practically lived at our house since the Donahues moved back, what, four years ago?”

“Five. They moved back the week I became department chair.” Nancy is a biology professor at the state university campus an hour north of town. She is apparently a recognized expert on some single-celled organisms. Since we are all, in some fashion, single-celled organisms, this makes her an expert on everything and everyone. My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always telling me what I should do.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “If Kiernan was a different kind of kid, he and Ruby could break up and he could still hang around. But if he were a different kind of kid, she wouldn’t have been with him in the first place. She’s moving on, and he’s not. The thing about Ruby, she’s so mature that she understands all this.”

“I don’t think you should assume that Sarah is immature because of Eric. It’s worked out all right for you and Bill.”

Nancy eats my last fry. “I suppose,” she says flatly.

Bill and Nancy will have a big silver-anniversary party next year. He runs an insurance agency and Glen thinks he’s great. I think he’s fine. Nancy and I have an unspoken agreement not to talk too much about our husbands. We tell ourselves that it’s because of the danger of disloyalty and because the two men are friends. But we also have a vested interest in making certain that the infrastructure of our lives seems more or less intact.

“I think if Ruby and Kiernan broke up, Glen would be relieved,” I say.

“I thought Glen liked him. Glen likes everybody.”

“He doesn’t like either of Kiernan’s parents,” I say. “He never has.”

“Well, they’re not Glen’s kind of people. Kevin Donahue talks big and screws around, and Deborah’s completely nuts.” I feel my face go flat. “I know you hate to hear that, but it’s true. I’ve never understood how you could have been friends with her.”

I say nothing. I’m not going to submit Deborah to Nancy’s harsh judgment, or tell her why the friendship ended.

“So what should I do about Kiernan?” I say.

“I have no idea,” Nancy says.

Neither do I.

I am in the kitchen cooking when Ruby calls me from her bedroom. Usually I find this irritating, since I know the point is that she’s too busy or exhausted or important to come down one flight of stairs, while it is simple for someone with as little to do as her mother to come up them. I’m always reminded of Alex’s question about a female judge he met on one of our rare visits to my brother Richard’s home in the New York suburbs: “But if she doesn’t have any kids, what does she do when she’s home?” His father and I had cackled wildly in the front seat, shrieking answers: Sleep! Read! Talk to her husband! When we had exhausted our sarcasm, Ruby said in a creamy tone of voice, “You both are so completely full of it the car might flood.”

Today I know that Ruby doesn’t want to come downstairs because Kiernan is sitting in the kitchen. He works on the high school paper and has just brought Alex the last edition of the year, which has a story about the soccer squad in which Alex and Ben are mentioned. “With the departure of five varsity seniors,” Kiernan
reads aloud, “including goalie Chris Argento, the Hawks face an uncertain future next year. But first years Alex Latham and Ben Cooper, co-captains of the undefeated middle-school squad, may help to fill the gap.”

“You wrote this,” Alex says.

“Dude, I didn’t,” Kiernan says, his hand over his heart. “I’m the picture guy. Strictly visual. The sports editor wrote it.”

“You lie. You wrote it.”

“I swear. I’m barely literate.”

“Mom! Mommy!” Ruby cries from her room, and Kiernan lifts his head and tracks the sound like a dog listening to a high-pitched whistle.

There are peppers in a sauté pan. I am going to finish cooking them before I go upstairs.

“This is really great, Alex,” I say. “You have to show this to Daddy the moment he walks in the door.”

Alex looks down at the paper again. “When they say ‘may help to fill the gap,’ do you think that means Ben and I make varsity?” he says.

“Dude,” says Kiernan, raising his hands palms up, a you’ve-got-it-made gesture. I give him a look over Alex’s head.

“Oh, honey,” I say, pushing peppers around in the pan. “I think a lot depends on who else is playing and what positions need to be filled. Besides, if you play JV you get a lot more playing time when you’re a freshman.”

“Mo-meee!” Ruby shrieks.

“Shut up,” Max mutters. He is on the window seat, eating cherries and reading a comic book.

“You’re a jerk,” Alex says. “Just because no one ever mentioned you in the paper doesn’t mean you have to act like a jerk. Jerk.”

“What?” Max says.

“Dude, I think he was remarking on your sister’s banshee wail,” says Kiernan.

“What he said,” Max mutters again.

When I’d called Max’s drum teacher, he said he thought Max was seriously depressed. “That guy can’t even stand up straight, and he’s qualified not only to teach music but to do psychological analysis?” Glen said as we talked in bed. There were four panes of bright light aslant on our ceiling from a white June moon. The light through this window, the smell of the air, the witchy line of a tree branch that has insinuated itself into the sight line of my side of the bed: this is how I track the seasons. I can’t say why, but when I see those squares of light on the ceiling I feel as though all will be well.

“We should find another music teacher,” Glen had said. He was really annoyed, mainly because he is as worried about Max as I am. Two of his teachers say they will fail him for lack of class participation. One of the two says she has never heard his voice.

Upstairs, the house smells like hot olive oil and gym socks. When I open Ruby’s door, a puff of incense mixes with the other two and makes me feel faint for just a moment. The dog is lying at the foot of the bed. Ruby is sitting cross-legged at the head, tapping at the keyboard of her computer.

“I called you, like, ten times,” she says without looking up.

“I am cooking dinner and talking to your brothers. And Kiernan. Who is waiting downstairs for you, I assume.”

Ruby lets down her hair, winds it around her hand, puts it up in a bun that looks identical to the one she just dismantled. Her reconfigured prom dress hangs from the back of her closet door. It’s beautiful, a swirl of primary colors with a deep U-neck and trumpet sleeves. No one will have anything like it.

Above her bed is a photograph of the hands of a girl wearing dark nail polish holding an ornate silver pen. Ruby writes, and Kiernan takes pictures. There were many reasons that they became a couple, including the fact that he has always been in love with
her, with the specificity of her appearance and her personality. “That’s so Ruby,” Sarah says sometimes about a movie, a book, a dress. But Kiernan finally won her with a series of black-and-white photographs. She had written a short story about a high school student undone by writer’s block, and Kiernan gave her a series of photos to accompany the story—a close-up of a hallway locker, a half-erased blackboard covered with a plot outline of
Anna Karenina
, Ruby’s own hands as she wrote in her journal. The last had run in the literary magazine alongside the story, and by that time Ruby’s hand was most often woven tightly into one of Kiernan’s, on the street, in the lunchroom, in our den, where the hands told a story Ruby and Kiernan’s decorous public behavior belied. If Kiernan thinks in pictures, Ruby thinks in stories, and I can imagine her making up one in her mind now—one that begins, “When I was in high school I had a boyfriend.”

“Can you just tell him I’m surfing the crimson wave?” she says. “He knows not to bother me then.”

I find it astonishing how open my daughter and her friends are about menstruation. Ruby, Sarah, and Rachel talk as though there is no reason the world shouldn’t share in their moods, cramps, and back pain. It’s not that they’re insensitive: I remember one afternoon at our kitchen table when Sarah started to weep because of some fairly mild criticism from Eric, and Ruby and Rachel put their arms around her, draped themselves over her the way they do, and said, “Oh, honey, we’ll make you some hot chocolate.” It’s just that they are open to knowledge and immune to shame. The other day I found the box for a pregnancy test in Ruby’s bathroom. I’d hesitated and then held it up wordlessly. The air seemed to vibrate. It’s so odd that, depending on the circumstances, pregnancy is either the thing we embrace most wholeheartedly or the thing we fear most. Ruby’s eyes had narrowed. “Rachel,” she’d said flatly adding, “It’s fine.” I’d stood in the doorway, holding the jamb with
one hand. “It’s. Fine,” Ruby said without looking up, in a voice that told me that was as much as I was going to learn.