Grand Avenue (2 page)

We see what we want to see.

So there we sit, in a kind of free-form semicircle, taking our turns smiling and waving for the camera, four beguilingly average women thrown together by random circumstance and a suddenly rainy afternoon. Our names are as ordinary as we were: Susan, Vicki, Barbara, and Chris. Common enough names for the women of our generation. Our daughters, of course, are a different story altogether. Children of the seventies, and products of our imaginative and privileged loins, our offspring were anything but ordinary, or so each of us was thoroughly convinced, and their names reflected that conviction: Ariel, Kirsten, Tracey, and Montana. Yes, Montana. That’s her on the far right, the fair-haired, apple-cheeked cherub kicking angrily at her mother’s ankles, huge navy-blue eyes filling with bitter tears, just before her chubby little legs carry her rigid little body out of the camera’s range. No one is able to figure out the source of this sudden outburst,
especially her mother, Chris, who does her best to placate the little girl, to coax her back into the safety of her outstretched arms. To no avail. Montana remains stubbornly outside the frame, unwilling to be cajoled or comforted. Chris holds this uneasy posture for some time, perched on the end of her high-backed chair, slim arms extended and empty. Her shoulder-length, blond hair is pulled back and away from her heart-shaped face into a high ponytail, so that she looks more like a well-scrubbed teenaged baby-sitter than a woman approaching thirty. The look on her face says she will wait forever for her daughter to forgive her these imagined transgressions and come back where she belongs.

It seems inconceivable to me now, and yet I know it to be true, that not one of us considered herself especially pretty, let alone beautiful. Even Barbara, who was a former Miss Cincinnati and a finalist for the title of Miss Ohio, and who never abandoned her fondness for big hair and stiletto heels, was constantly plagued by self-doubt, always worrying about her weight and agonizing over each tiny wrinkle that teased at the skin around her large brown eyes and full, almost obscenely lush, lips. That’s her, beside Chris. Her tall helmet of dark hair has been somewhat flattened by the rain, and her stylish Ferragamo pumps lie abandoned by the front door amidst the other women’s sandals and sneakers, but her posture is still beauty-pageant perfect. Barbara never wore flats, even to the park, and she didn’t own a pair of blue jeans. She was never less than impeccably dressed, and from the time she was fifteen, no one had ever seen her without full makeup, and that
included her husband, Ron. She confessed to the group that in the four years they’d been married, she’d been getting up at six o’clock every morning, a full half hour before her husband, to shower and do her hair and makeup. Ron had fallen in love with Miss Cincinnati, she proclaimed, as if addressing a panel of judges. Just because she was now a Mrs. didn’t give her the right to fall down on the job. Even on weekends, she was out of bed early enough to make sure she was suitably presentable before her daughter, Tracey, woke up, demanding to be fed.

Not that Tracey was ever one to make demands. According to Barbara, her daughter was, in every respect, the perfect child. In fact, the only difficulty she’d ever had with Tracey had been in the hours before her birth, when the nine-pound-plus infant, securely settled in a breech position, and not particularly anxious to make an appearance, refused to drop or turn around and had to be taken by cesarean section, leaving a scar that ran from Barbara’s belly button to her pubis. Today, of course, doctors generally opt for the less disfiguring, more cosmetically appealing crosscut, one that disturbs fewer muscles and lies hidden beneath the bikini line. Barbara’s bikini days were behind her, she acknowledged ruefully. Something else to fret over. Something else that separated the Mrs.’s from the Miss Cincinnatis of this world.

Watch how regally Barbara slides off her chair and onto the floor, casually securing her skirt beneath her knees while showing her eighteen-month-old daughter the best way to stack the blocks she’s been struggling with, patiently picking them up whenever they fall
down, encouraging Tracey to try again, ultimately stacking them herself, then restacking them each time her daughter accidentally knocks them over. Any second now, Tracey will climb into her mother’s protective arms, the dark curls she has inherited from Barbara surrounding her porcelain-doll face, and close her eyes in sleep.

“There was a little girl,” I can still hear Barbara say, in that soothing, singsongy voice she always affected when talking to her daughter, as I watch her lips moving silently on the film, “who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was—”

“A really bad girl!” Tracey shouted gleefully, chocolate brown eyes popping open. And we all laughed.

Barbara laughed the loudest, although her face moved the least. Terrified of those impending wrinkles, and, at 32, the oldest of the women present, she’d perfected the art of laughing without actually breaking into a smile. Her mouth would open and a loud, even raucous, sound would emerge, but her lips remained curiously static, refusing either to wiggle or curl. This was in marked contrast to Chris, whose every feature was engaged when she laughed, her mouth twisting this way and that in careless abandon, although the resulting sound was delicate, even tentative, as if she knew there was a price to pay for having too good a time.

Amazingly, Barbara and Chris had never even seen each other before that afternoon, despite the fact that we’d all lived on Grand Avenue for at least a year, but
they instantly became the best of friends, proof positive of the old adage that opposites attract. Aside from the obvious physical differences—blond versus brunette, short versus tall, fresh-faced glow versus Day-Glo sheen—their inner natures were as different as their outer surfaces. Yet they complemented each other perfectly, Chris soft where Barbara was hard, strong where Barbara was weak, demure where Barbara was anything but. They quickly became inseparable.

That’s Vicki, pushing herself into the frame, making her presence felt, the way she did with just about everything in her life. At twenty-eight, Vicki was the youngest of the women and easily the most accomplished. She was a lawyer, and, at the time, the only one of us who worked outside the home, although Susan was enrolled at the university, working toward a degree in English literature. Vicki had short reddish-brown hair, cut on the diagonal, a style that emphasized the sharp planes of her long, thin face. Her eyes were hazel and small, although almost alarmingly intense, even intimidating, no doubt a plus for an ambitious litigator with a prestigious downtown law firm. Vicki was shorter than Barbara, taller than Chris, and at 105 pounds, the thinnest of the group. Her small-boned frame made her look deceptively fragile, but she had hidden strength and boundless energy. Even when sitting still, as she is here, she seemed to be moving, her body vibrating, like a tuning fork.

Her daughter, Kirsten, at only twenty-two months, was already her mother’s clone. She had the same delicate bone structure and clear hazel eyes, the same way
of looking just past you when you spoke, as if there might be something more interesting, more engaging, more
important
, going on just behind you, that she couldn’t chance missing. The toddler was forever up and down, down and up, back and forth, clamoring for her mother’s attention and approval. Vicki gave her daughter an occasional, absent-minded pat on the head, but their eyes rarely connected. Maybe the child was blinded, as we all were initially, by the enormous diamond sparkler on the third finger of Vicki’s left hand. Watch how it temporarily obliterates all other images, turning the screen a ghostly white.

Vicki was married to a man some twenty-five years her senior, whom she’d known since childhood. In fact, she and his eldest son had been high school classmates and budding sweethearts. Until, of course, Vicki decided she preferred the father to the son, and the resulting scandal tore the family apart. “You can’t break up a happy marriage,” Vicki assured us that afternoon, stealing a quote from Elizabeth Taylor’s résumé, and the rest of the women nodded in unison, although they couldn’t quite hide their shock.

Vicki liked to shock, the women quickly learned, just as they learned to secretly enjoy being shocked. For whatever her faults, and they were many, Vicki was rarely less than totally entertaining. She was the spark that ignited the flame, the presence who signaled the party could officially begin, the mover, the shaker, the one whom everyone clucked over and fussed about. Even if she wasn’t the one who got the ball rolling—surprisingly, it was usually the more unassuming Susan who did that—Vicki was invariably the
one who ran with it, who made sure her team scored the winning touchdown. And Vicki always played to win.

Next to Vicki’s coiled intensity, Susan seems almost stately, sitting there with her hands clasped easily in her lap, light brown hair folding neatly under at her chin, the quintessential Breck girl, except that she was still carrying around fifteen of the thirty-five pounds she’d gained when pregnant and hadn’t been able to shed since Ariel’s birth. The extra pounds made her noticeably self-conscious and camera-shy, although she’d always preferred the sidelines to center stage. The other women offered their encouragement and advice, shared their diet and exercise regimes, and Susan listened, not out of politeness, but because she’d always enjoyed listening more than speaking, her mind a sponge, absorbing each proffered tidbit. She’d make note of their suggestions later in the journal she’d been keeping since Ariel was born. She’d once had dreams of being a writer, she admitted when pressed, and Vicki told her that she should speak to her husband, who owned a string of trade magazines and was thinking of expanding his growing empire.

Susan smiled, her daughter tickling her feet as she played happily with Susan’s bare toes, and changed the subject, preferring to talk about her courses at the university. They were more tangible than dreams, and Susan was nothing if not practical. She’d quit school when she got married to help put her husband through medical school. Only now that his practice was established and going strong had she decided to return to school to finish her degree. Her husband was very supportive
of her decision, she told the women, and her mother was helping out by looking after Ariel during the day.

“You’re lucky,” Chris told her. “My mother lives in California.”

“My mother died just after Tracey was born,” Barbara said, eyes instantly filling with tears.

“I haven’t seen my mother since I was four years old,” Vicki announced. “She ran off with my father’s business partner. Haven’t heard from the bitch since.”

And then the room fell silent, as was so often the case after one of Vicki’s calculated pronouncements.

Susan glanced at her watch. The others followed suit. Someone mentioned the lateness of the hour, that they should probably be getting home. We decided on a group picture to commemorate the afternoon, and together we managed to prop the camera on top of a stack of books at the far end of the room and arrange ourselves and our daughters so that we all fit inside the camera’s scope.

So there we are, ladies and gentlemen.

In one corner, Susan, wearing blue jeans and a sloppy, loose-fitting shirt, balancing daughter Ariel on her lap, the child’s wiry little body in marked contrast to her mother’s quiet bulk.

In the other corner, Vicki, wearing white shorts and a polka-dot halter top, trying to extricate daughter Kirsten’s arms from around her neck, small eyes mischievously ablaze as she mouths a silent obscenity directly into the lens of the camera.

In between, Barbara and Chris, Chris wearing white pants and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, straining to
prevent her daughter, Montana, from abandoning her yet again, while Tracey sits obediently on her mother’s skirted lap, Barbara manipulating Tracey’s hand up and down, as both mother and daughter wave as one.

The Grand Dames.

Friends for life.

Of course, one of us turned out not to be a friend at all, but we didn’t know it then.

Nor could any of us have predicted that twenty-three years later, two of the women would be dead, one murdered in the cruelest of fashions.

Which, of course, leaves me.

I press another button, listen as the tape rewinds, shift expectantly on my chair, waiting for the film to start afresh. Perhaps, I think, as the women suddenly reappear, their babies in their laps, their futures in their faces, this will be the time it all makes sense. I will find the justice I seek, the peace I desire, the resolution I need.

I hear the women’s laughter. The story begins.

1982–1985

C
hris lay in her queen-size brass bed with her eyes closed. Crisp white cotton sheets pulled tight against her toes and stretched up across her body, stopping under her chin. Her arms lay stiff at her sides, as if secured by shackles. She imagined herself an Egyptian mummy entombed inside an ancient pyramid, as hoards of curious tourists flopped about in worn and dirty sandals above her head. That would explain the headache, she thought, and might have laughed, but for the incessant pounding at her temples, a pounding that echoed the dull thud of her heartbeat. When was the last time she’d felt so lost, so afraid?

No
, fear
was much too strong a word, Chris immediately amended, censoring her thoughts even before they were fully formed. It wasn’t fear that was immobilizing her so much as dread, a vague disquiet trickling through her body like a poisoned stream. It was this ill-defined, perhaps indefinable, sensation that was keeping her eyes tightly closed, her arms pinned
to her sides, her body rigid, as if she’d died in her sleep.

Did the dead feel this invasive, this
pervasive
, sense of unease? she wondered, growing impatient with such morbidity, allowing the sounds of morning to creep inside her head: her six-year-old daughter, Montana, singing down the hall; three-year-old Wyatt playing with the train set he got for Christmas; Tony opening and closing kitchen cupboards directly below. Within minutes, paralyzing fear had been reduced to mere unease, which was much more manageable, and ultimately much easier to dismiss. Another few minutes and Chris might actually be able to persuade herself that what had happened last night was all a bad dream, the product of her overheated—
overwrought
, as Tony might suggest—imagination.