Perfect Lies (2 page)

“Hey, girls, this is Cheryl,” Frank would announce at the breakfast table with a proud grin the Saturday morning after a long night out carousing. And there, across from them, would be some plump, pasty-faced redhead with smeared eye makeup and an overly revealing tube top. Sara would join them later, smiling and seemingly cordial to Frank’s conquest.

“Wow, you guys really have a good thing going here,” the clueless Cheryl would enthuse. “I’ve never met such a cool couple.”

And though the Edenic atmosphere would last until Cheryl finally pulled herself together and stumbled out the door, the trouble often began before Cheryl got her key into the ignition of her Ford Fairlane. The walls of the rented house were so thin that even from their upstairs bedroom, Meg and Lark could hear their parents fighting.

“Jesus, Frank,” Sara would say. “Where’d you find that? Under the bar at Storey’s?”

“At least I found some. What happened to your cowboy with the silver earring?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know? And let me just point out that I have a little more decency than to bring trash home and make the girls sit down and eat with it at the same table.”

“Oh, fuck you.” And Frank would slam out of the room and out of the house.

Frank and Sara claimed that what they were practicing was free love. What they ended up with, however, as far as Meg was concerned, was nothing more than cheap sex. What did it say about the family—about a marriage—Meg would ask herself, if one had to search outside it for stimulation and approval? She would look around her at the lifestyles of some of her high school friends and long for what she saw there—a placid, churchgoing wholesomeness. She didn’t care that Frank would scoff at her friends’ parents’ conservative politics, or that Sara would call the mothers “Stepford Wives.” Meg would have given anything to live the “boring, straight, repressed, and capitalistic” way that her friends did. Instead, she did what she could—learning how to cook and drive, helping Lark with her homework, shopping and cleaning—to make the household at least
look
normal. She also did her best to put a good face on their home life for her younger sister.

“Who is that man in Mommy’s room?” Lark would ask Meg during the night as they both lay awake listening to the sounds coming from the bedroom next to theirs.

“He’s a friend. Just go to sleep now.”

“Why was he yelling like that?”

“It’s a grown-up thing. But it means they’re having fun.”

“So he’s not hurting Mommy?”

“Oh no, baby, he’s making her happy.”

Perhaps Meg had sheltered Lark too much from the sordid side of her parents’ lives. She would make Lark go outside and play or go up to her bedroom when her parents fought. Later, she would drive Lark and herself to the movies or just cruise aimlessly down back roads when one of their parents’ “friends” came to visit.

“Why can’t we stay here when Carl comes to play with Mom?” Lark asked Meg once as they headed out to the car.

“Well,” Meg explained, automatically putting a soft spin on their hard reality. “Mommy doesn’t make
your
friends play with
her,
right? I mean, they’re your friends. Carl’s her special friend now. It’s just nicer for them if they get to be alone.”

“Is Carl a more special friend than Daddy?”

“No, baby, Daddy and Mommy are very best friends, no matter what. Remember that, okay?”

Meg had sugarcoated it all for Lark, making it palatable, making everything seem okay. Making it easy, natural even, for Lark to believe that what her parents shared was something to be proud of—even to emulate. If Lark had been given the time and opportunity,

Meg believed, she would gradually have come terms with the very real problems in her parents’ marriage. But Lark was only thirteen when Sara and Frank were killed in a car accident and their deaths placed them, in Lark’s mind, forever beyond reproach. For this—as for so many things about her younger sister’s upbringing—Meg felt responsible.

If Meg had often acted as a surrogate parent to Lark when Sara and Frank were alive, she stepped firmly into their shoes after they died. And like many people thrown into roles of responsibility before their time, Meg tended to be personally conservative and overprotective of her charge. With the help of a small nest egg left to her by her late grandmother, Meg put herself through Columbia University. She then insisted that her younger sister attend college as well, though Lark had found even the ultraliberal Bennington “way over-structured and stifling.” When Meg heard that Lark, in her sophomore year, had moved into an apartment off campus with an adjunct professor in the art department, she had been furious. She turned murderous when she learned that he was married and had a young child.

“And you actually believe him when he tells you he’s going to get a divorce?” Meg had screamed into the phone from her office at Y&R. She’d been an up-and-coming junior account executive by that time, fresh out of college and wired for success. The pressurized world of advertising was the perfect conduit for her energies and ambition. She looked and acted smart, knew how to make her points in meetings, and had a knack for pleasing clients. It didn’t matter to her then that she didn’t have much of a social life, not to mention a love life.

“I’m coming up there this weekend,” Meg had announced. “And you both better be prepared to explain a few things.”

Bennington, Vermont, in February was a Currier & Ives print of snow-laden mountains and smoke-plumed chimneys. The New England college town moved at such a slower pace than Manhattan that it seemed to Meg to exist in a different century entirely. By the time Meg finished the three-hour lunch with Ethan and Lark she sensed that what bound them to each other was also of a different time and place. Even Meg, who considered herself the furthest thing from a romantic, could see they were in love. They could hardly take their eyes off each other, let alone their hands. They were constantly touching and kissing as if to reassure themselves that the other was real.

It was more than physical, though Meg at first wanted to write it off as such. No one knew Lark better than Meg—her fierce independence, her artistic yearnings. Lark had always been the “creative one"—making up poems, putting on plays, designing and building elaborate houses for her family of beloved dolls. Since girlhood, she had been determined to be an artist of some kind. She had gone to Bennington to discover her
métier.
What she seemed to have discovered instead was Ethan and the promise of more than just existing as an artist. She found she could create and sustain an entire artistic existence.

“You know who you sound like, Lark, with your talk of freethinking and self-exploration?” Meg said. “Just like Mom.”

“And nothing could be worse than that, could it?” Ethan had asked, turning to her. Meg was usually suspicious of the probing look common to certain therapists and EST devotees. Ethan’s unwavering gaze held some of that unnerving quality—intimate, demanding, and altogether too knowing.

“I don’t believe I was addressing you.”

“I know—but you were trying to intimidate Lark, and I don’t like that. Besides, this isn’t about Lark, is it? It’s about me. You don’t trust me.”

“You’re ten years older than my sister. You’re married. You have a stepchild to care for. You’re an assistant professor who makes what? Thirty thousand a year?”

“Lord, if only!” Ethan laughed. “Tell me where they’ll pay me that kind of money. But no, you’re perfectly right. I’d distrust me, too, if I couldn’t see into my heart and know—absolutely—that there is no better person in this world for Lark than me.”

“Fine. Then I suggest you file for divorce immediately.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Why? I’m sorry, but if you love my sister, you’ll get a divorce and marry her. I think that’s pretty simple.”

“You don’t know the full story.”

“Please—this is ridiculous. Lark, can’t you see you’re being taken for a ride?”

“No, I don’t see that. I feel that I’ve found the other half of my soul.”

“Oh, for heavens’ sake!” Meg threw down her napkin and pushed her chair back. “Do whatever the hell you want. Give me a call when he breaks your heart.”

I
t was hard to remember those early days very clearly—back when Ethan first emerged as a major player in Lark’s and Meg’s lives, and when Meg disapproved of him so vehemently. Of course, even then she knew that a big part of her problem with Ethan was that he had come between the two sisters. Until Lark met Ethan, Meg was the one Lark sought first, loved most, and clung to in times of need. When Ethan arrived, Meg experienced what every mom naturally feels when her daughter leaves home: the sharp, sad pain of separation. And also, like a stereotypical dad, Meg examined her little girl’s selection of a mate and found him wanting.

Tall, broad as a linebacker, and with the flowing locks of an unrepentant hippie, Ethan generated a slightly out-of-control virility. A don’t-give-a-damn charm that sprang generously from his Irish genes and that he had carefully groomed into a highly individualized charisma. When Lark met him he was thirty-five and already as much his own creation as the blown-glass sculptures he’d long believed would make him famous.

Ethan was an Artist—an artist with a capital
A.
And if there was any one thing that irritated Meg most about Ethan, it was the arrogant self-absorption of that temperament. The other thing, the overly obvious sexual electricity that Ethan gave off, bothered Meg less over time. The constant undercurrent of Ethan’s masculinity eventually faded into so much background noise.

Slowly and with obvious determination, Ethan won Meg over. Two years after Lark and Ethan first met, he obtained a divorce from his first wife. The complications Ethan had tried to explain to Meg in Bennington were very real: Ethan’s ex, Mimi, was an alcoholic with a young daughter Ethan had adopted. The courts ruled that the girl was to stay with her mother. According to Lark, Ethan was torn about leaving Lucinda, a difficult seven-year-old at the time of the divorce, in the hands of her unstable mother. But Meg’s concerns were for Lark, so when the divorce came through, she paid little attention to Lark and Ethan’s long discussions about how to get custody of Lucinda.

That sort of talk died down soon enough when Lark found out that she was pregnant herself. The marriage ceremony was quickly moved up three months. They’d hoped to hold it outdoors in June at the farm they’d just bought in the small upstate New York town of Red River, but opted instead for a chilly indoor affair at Red River’s First Congregational Church. Meg remembered being impressed by how many people attended—how many friends Ethan and Lark had already made in a town they’d so recently adopted.

At that point Meg could count on one hand the people she considered her real friends in Manhattan. She may have wanted a wider social life, but she just didn’t have time for it. The same year Ethan and Lark married, Meg was promoted to account supervisor—the youngest woman to receive that title in the history of the agency. It was an honor that brought with it fourteen-hour workdays and almost weekly trips to Chicago.

Meg was somewhere over Illinois heading to the Windy City the morning Lark gave birth to her first daughter. The parents named her Brook Megan McGowan in honor, they told Meg, of the two people who meant the most to them in the world: Ethan’s mother and Lark’s sister. With Brook’s birth, one of the last layers of concern Meg felt about Ethan melted away. Now it was not so much a question of Meg allowing Ethan into her life as Ethan welcoming her into his and Lark’s growing family. And he did, with open arms.

It probably didn’t help Meg’s love life that she spent every other weekend in Red River. But Brook’s birth was followed two years later by Phoebe’s, and Meg took such pleasure in her towheaded, laughter-prone nieces that she had a hard time staying away. Actually, Meg herself didn’t do much to help her love life. She was certainly pretty enough, and many men told her she was beautiful. They took one look at the soft, honey-colored blond hair; the reflective green-and-gold-flecked eyes; the slim, well-cared-for body; and mistook Meg Hardwick for someone who needed their protection. It never took long for the steel resolve, the take-no-prisoners ambition shimmering just beneath her surface loveliness to shine through.

“May I get a word in edgewise here?” The magazine sales representative (a dead ringer for Richard Gere) had asked her on their second date. “You know, I’ve had a day, too.”

Well, that was always the problem—Meg had little interest in sharing. She wanted to be admired, desired, and then pretty much left alone. For the first five or six years of her sister’s marriage Meg went through men faster than she did pantyhose. After one or two dates, she’d simply lose interest and find a way of disposing of the relationship. She was never less than kind, and often stayed friends with her growing cadre of former boyfriends; it was just that her heart never seemed to be in it. Sometimes she felt that most of her emotional life resided at her younger sister’s upstate household, and she didn’t really have enough left over for her time in New York City.

Meg founded her agency the year Phoebe was born. With her small savings, the profit-sharing proceeds from Y&R, and a carefully monitored line of credit from the bank, she opened up a one-room, two-person agency with one fashion account—a disgruntled ex-Y&R client who’d always liked her chutzpah. For the next year or two, so much of her energy was taken up with getting Hardwick and Associates off the ground that she barely realized how solitary her life had become, though she never felt lonely. With the exception of Lark and a few close friends, she had no one with whom to share her life, and her growing success. Before Fern was born, it didn’t matter. And then, for reasons Meg couldn’t rationally explain, even to herself, it suddenly did.

Lark and Ethan’s third daughter was born six years after Phoebe and, while not a mistake, she was certainly a surprise.

“Meggie, I’m pregnant again. Can you believe it?” Lark had confided one weekend when Meg was visiting. One long look at her glowing younger sister made Meg wonder why she hadn’t noticed Lark’s condition herself. Lark never looked lovelier than when she was pregnant.