Stay (30 page)

“Van.” Diane used her warning voice. She looked at me and tapped ashes from her cigarette into the sink.

I took a deep breath to try to calm myself, but then I realized that I didn’t want to calm down. I’d just let Alex walk out. He probably felt hurt and confused and vulnerable, the way I would have if I were in his shoes. I knew how bad that felt, but then I made him feel that way. And then I just let him walk out.

“Goddamnit, Diane!” I yelled, loud enough to make the chatter in the other room stop completely. “I’m sick of this. I am sick of all this scrambling around to protect Janie’s feelings. And I’m sick of no one protecting mine. That,” I gestured to the door, “that was important to me. He was important to me, and I let him walk out because you’re upset that I haven’t greeted my guests? What else can you take away from me, Diane?”

“Don’t make a scene,” Diane hissed.

“You made the scene,” I said, waving my finger in her face. “You made the scene.” I stormed out of the kitchen into the garage and slammed the door behind me.

I couldn’t drive. Even if I weren’t completely wasted, there were six or seven cars in the driveway blocking mine.

I walked back into the kitchen, trying my best to hold my head high.

Diane was leaning against the counter. She took a drag from her cigarette. Even with all the chatter coming from the other room, I swore I could hear the paper burn. “Well, that was quite a spectacle,” she said, blowing smoke in my direction.

“Fuck you, Diane.” It came out so easily. There’d been so many times I’d wanted to say it before, but the words just got tangled up in a lump in my throat.

“Excuse me?” she said, picking a piece of dog hair off her skirt with her fingernails.

“I said, fuck you, Diane.” I said it loud and slow like she was hard of hearing. The chatter in the living room quieted again. “And you heard me the first time.” I couldn’t get my voice to lower. “Why do you have to fuck up everything?” I was right in her face, yelling, and I couldn’t stop. “I don’t have that much, Diane. I don’t have that much to begin with, and you just take it like it’s yours. Like you own everything. You don’t own me, goddamnit.” I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt a tear drip down my chin. I wiped it away with my good hand. “You don’t own me, Diane.” I wasn’t yelling anymore, and I could hear in my own voice how drunk I was. “You don’t own me,” I said, one more time just to hear my words. They slid together like syrup and melted butter on a plate of pancakes.

Diane threw the end of her cigarette into the sink, still burning, and lit another one. Her hands were shaking.

The milk and Maker’s Mark was curdling in my stomach. I ran out of the kitchen, tripping twice on the way up the stairs to the bathroom.

I leaned my arms on the toilet seat and puked. My stomach burned, and I couldn’t focus my eyes. I rested my head on the side of the toilet, but I hadn’t cleaned under the rim well enough, and the sour, musty smell got me going all over again.

When I was done, I leaned back against the bathtub and closed my eyes. I heard footsteps and paws and then the bathroom door opened. Joe ran in and licked my cheek.

“Someone was worried about you,” Agnes said.

I hugged Joe around the neck and listened to him pant, changing my breath so my ribs pushed against his when we breathed out.

“Are you okay, Vannie?” Agnes grabbed my towel off the rack and ran the end under the faucet. She hiked up her slacks and knelt down next to me, groaning a little as her knees hit the floor. “Don’t get old, Van,” she said. “It’s no barrel of monkeys, I tell you.” She flopped over and shimmied herself closer to the bathtub so she could lean against it.

I pictured the yellow barrel of plastic monkeys Janie and I used to play with and Agnes in her big red hat with one arm curled like a handle and the other hooked, waiting to grab on to the next monkey.

“I’m so drunk, Agnes,” I said, letting her wipe my face with a towel. The terry cloth was rough and she rubbed hard. She rinsed the towel under the bathtub faucet and patted her leg. I leaned my head into her lap. Her thigh was like a well-stuffed pillow. Joe leaned his head on her other knee.

“I ruined everything,” I said.

“It’s your party; you’ll cry if you want to.” She smoothed my hair out of my face.

“It’s Janie’s party.”

“It wasn’t fair of them to do this to you.” She scratched Joe’s ears.

I thought about Alex, standing there in the kitchen like a deer in the high beams. “I love him, I think. Or I would have.”

“Peter’s not good enough for you,” she said. “He’s my nephew, and I love him, but the boy’s got to get his act together. He can’t go stringing-”

“Not Peter.” I shook my head, and it made her pants swish against their lining. “Alex.”

“Oh. Well, he was a looker. I’ll give you that.” She laughed and fanned herself with her hand. Her whole body shook. It was dizzying, watching her face disappear and reappear behind her waving hand. I closed my eyes. I felt like all the life had been sucked out of me and flushed down the toilet. I thought for a minute that I would fall asleep right there on the bathroom floor in Agnes’s lap, but then she said, “What say we get out of here and get you something to eat?”

She pushed Joe and me off of her lap and began the production of hoisting herself back up to standing, leaning on the bathtub, then reaching across to the sink. “I’m sure if we put our heads together we can figure out a way to get that boy back.” She reached her hand out to help me up, grabbing my elbow to avoid my burned hand. I knew she couldn’t take my weight, so I had to manage getting up with one hand and the little strength I had left.

A
gnes led me downstairs with such authority that no one questioned her. I kept my fingers wrapped tightly around Joe’s collar and my eyes down, focusing on all the feet in my living room. Brown Rockports, black wingtips, gray orthopedics straining against their laces. Then there were Peter’s boat shoes and Jane’s Kate Spades right at the doorway. I looked up. Peter was holding two large paper bags. Janie was clutching her purse with both hands.

“Where are you going?” Janie asked.

“We’re just going to run out for a bit, love,” Agnes said.

Janie let out a long guttural sigh. “You’re leaving?”

I was about to tell her that I didn’t even want to throw this stupid party in the first place, and that this party had ruined the one little foothold I had in having my own life, but Agnes pushed me past them out the door before I could get a word in. She shooed Joe out behind me, and saved me from doing something I’d probably regret later, like telling Peter where he could shove those upstate bagels.

“We’ll be back in just a bit,” Agnes said in a bright, chirpy voice like everything was wonderful.

I heard Janie say, “Classic,” and then Peter said, “Let it go, Jane.” Then they shut the door to my home and went to eat their bagels and celebrate their wonderful marriage, while I stood out in the cold with a burnt hand and a broken heart. “Classic,” I said to Joe. He leaned up against my leg while we waited for Agnes to dig her car keys out of her purse.

She found them and clicked the key fob to unlock the car. Then she helped me into her shiny black Cadillac and shut the door behind me, trapping in the thick smell of new car and fake apple pie. There was a lace bag filled with potpourri chips and trimmed with fake rosebuds hanging from the rearview mirror. The smell was suffocating. The seat leather was stiff and it creaked when I shifted my weight. I wondered if anyone else had ever sat in it.

She bustled around to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and then the back door. She spread a brown fuzzy blanket that smelled like dryer sheets over the backseat and said, “Okay, Joey.”

Joe jumped up on the seat. He sat in the middle, panting hard and looking pleased with himself.

Agnes closed the trunk with a good slam and climbed in the car. She pushed a button on the door and her seat moved up so close to the steering wheel that it touched her belly. “Much better,” she said, starting the car.

Agnes hit the gas pedal hard enough to make my head smack against the headrest. Joe lost his balance and decided to lie down.

“So what are you in the mood for, Van?” She paused at the stop sign at the end of my road and then gunned it to get out into traffic, oblivious to the brakes squealing around her. “We can grab an early lunch. Chinese? Mexican? Italian? There’s this Greek place right around the corner. Have you been? The souvlaki is too, too good. They don’t skimp on the onions.”

Onions and fake apple pie and new leather seats and fabric softener and Agnes and her Maker’s Mark and lavender perfume. My insides felt fuzzy and dizzy and raw. I leaned my head over and pressed my face against the window. I’m not going to puke in Agnes’s new car, I thought, concentrating on the cold glass against my cheek. I’m not going to puke in Agnes’s car. “Right around the corner sounds good,” I said.

We left Joe in the car with the windows cracked open. Agnes got us a table while I ran to the bathroom, trying to be discreet and failing miserably. I almost ran into a waitress carrying a tray full of rice pudding in metal dishes. We looked at each other in horror before going our separate ways.

The chips in the tiles of the bathroom floor were filled in with dirt and toilet paper lint. It smelled like stale cigarettes and the smoke detector hung from the wall on a wire. I stared at the toilet for a minute. I felt hollow and empty. My stomach groaned, but nothing came up. I flushed the toilet anyway, and was thankful I didn’t have to put my face too close.

I ran my burnt hand under cold water. It stung, and I wanted to cry, hard and loud. I wanted to throw that kind of tantrum kids throw when they fall off their bike and skin their elbow and their mom is all out of Spider-Man Band-Aids. I wanted to scream and cry and have someone carry me home and tuck me in bed and press the back of a cool smooth hand to my forehead and kiss my cheek and tell me it was all going to be okay.

Instead of pitching a fit, I dried my hands and checked for messy mascara in the mirror. My eyes were droopy and tired and made me think of my mom after chemo. I tried to ignore the rest of my face. I couldn’t bear the picture as a whole. I did a quick wipe under my eyes with my index fingers and made a silent promise to myself to stop drinking, or at least take a breather for a while. Diane and my mom always joked that a little bourbon fixed everything, and a lot made you forget there was ever anything to fix. Their prescription clearly didn’t work for me.

“I ordered you tea,” Agnes said when I got to the table. “I asked for chamomile, but this was all they had.” She fingered the Lipton tag hanging out of a little metal teapot.

“Thank you,” I said, sitting down across the booth from her. I scooted over, past a rip in the red vinyl seat, and leaned up against the wall. Maybe, I thought, I’d already thrown my tantrum, back at the house, and I guess Agnes was taking care of me, but it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t my mom.

“I don’t get out to the west side very often. And none of my ladies are into
ethnic
food.” She whispered like it was some sort of scandal. She emptied two packets of sugar into my teacup, poured, stirred, and slid it over to me. “The sugar will rehydrate you.”

I took a sip and burned my tongue. The cup was small and the tea was syrupy.

Before I could even pull a menu out from behind the sugar dish, our waitress brought food to the table. She put a souvlaki plate in front of Agnes, and a bowl of chicken soup and a plate of French fries in front of me.

“Hangover food,” Agnes explained. “It’s just what you need.”

I wasn’t hungover, I was still drunk, but I just said, “Thank you.”

The soup burnt my already tea-burnt tongue. My hand was still throbbing. I wrapped my palm around my water glass and took a long drink. The water tasted like chlorine. I thought about Joe, by himself in the car, and wished I’d just sucked it up and hid in my bedroom. We could have locked the door, climbed into bed, and watched TV until everyone left. We could have called the cops on the party and let them clear it up. I pictured Diane yelling at Rochester’s finest.

“What are you grinning about, lady?” Agnes was cutting her souvlaki and pita bread into uniform squares. She pulled her napkin up from her lap to wipe her mouth after every bite. “Thinking about that tall blond cowboy of yours?”

The second she said it, I pictured Alex’s face. He was standing there with that Christmas tree and he looked so horribly sad. I didn’t turn out to be the person he’d hoped I’d be. I knew that disappointment. I didn’t want to be that disappointment. “Oh, God, Agnes. What am I going to do?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“He left.”

“Maybe he just needed to cool off.”

“It’s too early for cooling off.”

“He’ll come back.”

“Why would he?”

“Sweetie, if you don’t know why, you can’t expect anyone else to.” She shoveled another forkful of souvlaki into her mouth. “Eat up, dear. It’ll help.”

The next time the waitress came by, Agnes borrowed a pen and scribbled her phone number on a Sweet’N Low packet. “You’ll have to keep me apprised of the situation, lady,” she said, smiling, as she slid the packet across the table to me.

B
y the time Agnes polished off her souvlaki, at least four cups of coffee, a shot of Sambuca, and a bowl of rice pudding with raisins, we were sure the party had cleared out.

She dropped Joe and me off in the empty driveway. “Call me if you need anything,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “This too shall pass, sweetie.”

She waited until we unlocked the door to drive away. As I closed the door behind us, I heard tires squeal.

I was expecting a big mess: an overturned lamp or two, some crushed blue plastic cups spilling cheap keg beer into the carpet, like the remnants of a frat party.