Live a Little (18 page)
Set the scene: I know it is not yet 1980, because the kitchen is still the buttery avocado Ma layered on in the sixties, a merciless shade that renders all but the peachiest complexions sallow and makes everything but hard-boiled eggs inedible. Through the window, I can see Dad working in the yard, fumbling with the lawn mower, which is the old-fashioned kind that relies on lots of coddling and an unruly pull cord. That year, while the rest of America watches the Iran hostage crisis with bated breath, Dad obsesses over loose rocks, finally wresting lawn-mowing duties away from me and Laurie after he is forced to replace the mower blade a third time in as many months.
Laurie is sitting at the table. Having avoided the trendy pitfalls to which teenage girls routinely fall prey, her hair hangs long and thick and golden down her back, aided only by a squirt of Sun-In she consistently denies using. (Later that summer, I find the bottle in the trash, stuffed inside a Tampax box, and am fleetingly content, a feeling so rare in those days that I am briefly tempted to renounce my great passion for the nihilistic poetry of the Sex Pistols and take up something less atonal.)
My sister is one of those rare teenagers who manage to walk the swaying tightrope between peer popularity and parental obeisance without regret, error, or misgiving. Smart, active, and prettier than the Bionic Woman—indeed, two years later, as a senior, she is voted Most Likely to Be Cast Opposite Lee Majors in a Hit TV Show— Laurie has no need to strain at the leash our parents place on her. Hers, unlike mine, is kept fairly loose and never yanked; it is merely there for show. Why would Lauren Jessica Schultz, cheerleader, National Honor Society member, varsity track star, girlfriend of brown-haired Andy Gibb look-alike Greg Meyers, want to do anything untoward? Anything that would damage her perfect record, which seems to be leading directly toward a coveted spot at a prestigious— and, ideally, fun—university?
“
This . . . what
is
this?” Ma is so upset she can barely speak. She is gripping a medicinal-looking white box. Reared in the pill-popping seventies and intimately familiar with the popular girls’ preferred methods of weight management, I immediately absorb the graphic design and call it—correctly—as the diet drug Dexatrim.
Laurie tilts her head to the side and watches Ma carefully. I have seen my little sister use this look before, like the time Christie Mueller asked if Laurie thought giving a guy a blow job counted as sex. I am pretty sure the wide eyes and swish of judgment-obscuring hair are Laurie’s idea of diplomacy. I lean against the door frame, conscious of the fact that I am witnessing something both provocative and deviant.
“It looks like cold medicine or something,” Laurie says.
“It’s a dangerous diet drug, is what it is,” Ma says with enough menace to send me backward a step into the shadows.
Laurie says nothing. Her ability to maintain composure in the face of Ma’s wrath is nothing short of legendary, a talking point among our shared friends since elementary school.
“I found it in your underwear drawer when I was putting your laundry away.” Ma grips the back of a chair with her other hand. Dad, blissfully unaware of his younger daughter’s impending demotion from princess status, kicks the mower and yells, causing the blue jays at the bird feeder to flee.
“Lauren, tell me you aren’t taking this stuff,” Ma says. At that moment, drawn by the nauseated disappointment in Ma’s voice, I move into the kitchen and meet Laurie’s eyes. I know I should feel vindicated, but strangely, I am only sorry for Laurie, the way you’d feel if you were forced to watch a beautiful yet damaged historical landmark come under the wrecking ball.
Laurie’s gaze follows mine as I stand in the doorway, the afternoon sun highlighting the thick, hated filaments of espresso hair on my forearms. I am afraid to shave them for fear the hair will redouble its efforts to take over my body. More sophisticated hair-removal methods are beyond me.
Before I can stop myself, I open my mouth. “It’s mine,” I say.
Even as I hear myself enter the fray so foolishly, I understand exactly what I am doing: tendering a test. I am waiting for Ma’s dubious reaction, the flash of admiring anger when she realizes that I, Misunderstood and Underestimated Daughter, have fearlessly leaped to my sister’s defense. How many other times has Laurie the Angel lied and failed her while I plodded on, bearing the Schultz mantle of decency alone?
“Well, that makes sense, I suppose,” Ma says.
Ma’s perfidy is so horrible, so crushing, that I forget to breathe. When I summon the strength to inhale again, I emit a hiccupy sob not unlike the wet gasps of a stabbing victim. The look of irritation, anger, relief— yes, that’s what it is—on Ma’s face sends me into a spiral of despair. I want to disintegrate . . . or explode. Yes, that’s better. Something messy, something that will ensure they keep finding things—pieces—to remember me by, later on, when they’re sweeping under the fridge or flipping pancakes for Sunday brunch.
Laurie goes to the fridge and removes a can of Mountain Dew, which she cracks open before settling in to watch the show unfold. I can tell she is sympathetic. Maybe even a bit sad on my behalf. At no time do I expect Laurie to correct the misapprehension I have created. She may be to blame for spawning the situation, but I walked into it full tilt, upped the ante. The laws of both sisterhood and teen diplomacy are clear on this point: What’s done is done.
Dad slides the glass door aside noisily. “Goddamn lawn mower needs a new blade.”
“Rachel has been taking diet pills to lose weight,” Ma tells him before he can even open his can of Miller Lite.
Dad looks up at me, surprised that even I, in my chunky misery, would stoop to such stupidity. If the Schultz girls have been taught anything, it’s that there’s no easy way to earn a buck/get into college/drop ten pounds; life is tough, and you have to be tougher. Looking into Dad’s melancholy deep blue eyes—they mirror my own, with the same pale blue ring at the center— I feel a spark of gladness: Dad, at least, is on my side.
His large bony hand falls on my shoulder. “Oh, honey,” he says.
Then Dad picks up the Dexatrim box and slides out the sheet inside. Most of the pills have been used, the empty pods torn apart like spent butterfly cocoons.
“Oh, honey,” he says again.
Did he know?
I think now, sliding the spoon into the jar of unprocessed peanut butter, which somebody— what’s new—thoughtlessly placed back in the cabinet instead of the fridge, causing the oil and peanut sludge to separate.
Did Dad suspect?
I pour off the oil, spoon some, and stick it in my mouth, enjoying the sweet-savory thickness of it. Dad and I relished our peanut-butter habit together, sprinkling mouthfuls of the stuff with M&M’s or cookie crumbs or cupcake toppings while Ma wrinkled her nose in disgust.
However much I want to trust Taylor, I know I cannot give away the key to my daughter’s chastity—not to wet-haired Biter or Prince William or anyone. The possibility that Taylor has already—or will shortly—deliver her body to some callow, rutting boy in a motel room or friend’s poolside cabana in thus a manner does not bear rumination. As it is, I have little experience in such matters as young love, my own teen years having been characterized by a virginity so intractable I finally had to offer myself to an indifferent Ecuadorian bellhop on a family vacation. That Taylor will undoubtedly despise me in the short term for refusing to conspire in her ruination is, I tell myself, inconsequential, a twig crunching underfoot in the forest of life’s obstacles. Yet—and this may be the most persuasive evidence of my devastating lack of parental qualification—the knowledge that I cannot impart my greater wisdom to my daughter in a way that causes her to collapse into my arms in grateful tears, well, it rankles. The trust and validation I’d longed for from my own parents, the knowledge that they both knew and liked the real me, never really came. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe, like Dexatrim, trusting your kid to make the right decision has been taken off the market for being dangerous to your health.
A Great Success
“You look too healthy,” Sue says.
We are tucked into her gleaming kitchen, our hands shiny with olive oil and free-range chicken broth. Rows of dainty canapés and mysterious tartlets and small towers of succulent heirloom tomatoes and French cheeses and button mushrooms and prosciutto-wrapped melon balls blanket the countertops. Sue has been baking and chopping and sautéing for hours, in preparation for tonight’s opening at Saskia’s gallery.
My
opening. Without Sue, not only would we be tempting our guests with a hubcap-size wheel of Bulgarian Brie, I’d be a cowering wreck of nerves, paranoia, and bad juju.
“Well, what am I supposed to do, eat somebody’s dirty Kleenex?” I say.
“You could drink cod-liver oil or something.”
“How about arsenic? I mean just a little bit. Not enough to kill me.”
“Food poisoning is always hell on the complexion,” Sue muses, glancing at the bowl of sun-dried tomato aioli as if to determine its maximum shelf life.
At some unidentified point, Sue became fully complicit in the farce that has become my life, a condition I have delayed pondering until some unspecified and distant point in time.
In my experience, these sorts of matters don’t disappear; they come back at the worst possible moment to haunt and compromise your friendships, your life. I will pay for luring Sue Banicek to the dark side, I know. It’s just a question of when. And how.
Before I can up the ante further, Sue carefully sets down an enormous butcher knife she is using to section smoked salmon and moves briskly to the sink. I am expecting her to execute some graceful act of chef’s wizardry, a ninja slice-anddice move or a quickie method of turning water into wine. So I am surprised—no, shocked—when my friend leans over and vomits noisily and violently into the deep stainless-steel basin.
“My God, Sue.” I touch her back lightly, feeling the muscles convulse under the purple tissue T-shirt.
Sue finishes, then splashes her mouth with water. Her face is the exact hue of avocado in cream, the rust sprinkling of freckles popping out like specks of mud. I wait while my friend leans against the butcher block, willing her stomach to calm itself. After a moment Sue’s gray eyes meet mine, broadcasting what ails her in loud, clear silence.
“How many weeks?” I say, already reaching for a packet of salty table crackers and fizzy soda.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I say, scooching away from the toilet. Someone has had too much to drink and overshot the bowl. Instead of grossing me out, the pool of piss is exciting, proof that I have officially abandoned the world of boring seat-cover users and entered the Pee Freely Zone, where anything—fame, fortune, STDs—can happen.
I find refuge against a rattan stand stuffed with rolls of TP and topped with burning incense. Saskia and I click glasses and gulp our wine. The incense sticks out of the fat, happy Buddha’s mouth like a joint. No wonder he is happy, in spite of the fact that he is carrying a few extra pounds.
“The
Bay Guardian
sent someone. That woman with the gray bob,” Saskia says.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I say again. Outside, through the slit of sidewalk-level window, four feet appear and kiss, red stilettos mounting Doc Martens in a rough dance.
Saskia shrugs. “You tapped in to the zeitgeist. Women are tired of being written off as damaged goods because they had their tits lopped off,” she says in her customary blunt way.
“It just seems so . . . I don’t know. Sudden, I guess. I never had so many people interested in my work before. I feel like a fraud.” Unexpected tears burn my eyes as I fiddle with my fake-pink-diamond breast-cancer-awareness pin. “All those wonderful women, they’re the ones who should be getting the attention.”
Saskia tilts her head so that her red cap of hair cuts across her cheek, and stares at me. As I watch impatience glisten behind her frosty green eyes, it occurs to me that she knows I am a little frightened of her and dislikes me for it. A not insignificant part of me will be glad, when Shiny Pony informs me that the last check comprising that oh so needed $245,325-plus has cleared, to confess the hospital’s ineptitude and my own sins and disappear back into obscurity. (This is my plan, in any case.)
“There’s nothing fraudulent about it if the right people think you’re good,” she says.
The show is a great success.
Not just a success. A
great
success.
Such a difference between the two, don’t you think? Success, measured in accolades and glad awareness; in the kind, congratulatory words of friends who spare a moment to stroke your arm in passing or slap your back, to share your pleasure. Success brings you closer to people, real people, at least.
But
great
success, that’s a whole different ball game. You can see it not in the inexorable pull of others into your orbit but in the opposite effect: In the face of your accomplishment, affection dissolves into deference, connection into distance, overture into seizure. People you don’t know want pieces of you, while people you do know put their need of you in abeyance, preparing themselves for the cold day, not too distant, when you no longer have time for them. The difference between garden-variety success and greatness is the difference between people wanting you for their team and being given the mandate to start your own.