The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (5 page)

When she turns to go back to her assigned seat, Debra looks at her as if just that could make her throw up, sits without letting go of her empty glass, and then starts drumming her fingers on the Gilford Family Reunion book, or bible, as they have all taken to calling it, that has been placed next to her and right in front of Marty’s plate.

The GFR bible, a gigantic tattered black vinyl three-ring binder, that is now as thick as a racehorse’s left thigh and filled with details of every reunion since 1948 when Marty’s mother-in-law started gathering notes, is always the centerpiece of the brunch table when reunion planning starts. To be the keeper of the GFR bible is to be the goddess of the Gilford clan, the monarch of the reunion, the head of a family institution that rules the days and
nights of almost half of a year, every single year, for Marty and her four daughters.

The bible is filled with reunion anecdotes, ordering details, stories from long-deceased relatives, advice for the often reluctant planners and dozens of pages of notes that Marty painstakingly organizes and works on from the end of one reunion to the beginning of the next.

On any morning but this one the GFR bible would be an anthropologist’s dream. Years and years of Southern family history, photographs that capture decades of style, changing geological formations, weather patterns and the nuance of family interactions. There are bold stars by memorable reunion events and lists of nicknames, ages of children, updated addresses, and sweet and often hilarious entries about what worked and what was a crashing disaster.

Marty, who is obviously having trouble finding more champagne, made some type of deathbed promise to their father that she would always and forever keep the Gilford Family Reunion alive even if she couldn’t keep him alive. And some years, especially the first few following his death, Emma agreed with her sisters that the reunion was a lifeboat, something to keep their mother floating, one more thing that kept his memory, and possibly even their mother, alive.

But the bible and every reunion assumption be damned this fine spring morning, for in the minutes that are left of what could have been a lovely meal and exchange of family pleasantries—minus the gasping at little Stephanie’s portable towel holder and Emma’s stolen glances at her mother to see if she could discover any signs of wild lovemaking marks on her skin, or in her smile, or on any random articles of clothing abandoned under a table or chair—it is Debra who, once again, has captured the center of attention.

“What makes you ask that question now?” Emma wants to know.

“Well, it’s finally out that our mother is the hottest widow in town, thanks to the town gossip, who I hear even had the gall to ask you in your own sacred garden if Mother is having, um, having …”

Stephanie starts laughing just as she’s about to swallow a mouthful of fruit salad and she coughs the tiny pieces of apples, bananas and kiwi into her napkin, which instantly disgusts Joy, who turns her head away in shock.

“You can’t even say the word
sex
, can you, Auntie Debra?” Stephanie manages to sputter through a cough, knowing very well that she’s pushing hard against a very tight adult-child boundary.

“Come on,” Joy says, sounding like an impatient teenager. “I cannot believe we are talking about this!”

“Haven’t you ever wondered, well, especially now with everything we know,” Debra continues, dauntless. “Daddy was sick for so long and Mother was very attractive. And don’t you remember men always hanging around?”

“Those were Dad’s friends, for crying out loud, Deb! Some of them worked with him, they helped Mom with all the things he couldn’t do,” Joy explains. But Debra isn’t buying it.

“My point exactly,” Debra insists triumphantly. “Because think of what he couldn’t do. You know—like in the bedroom.”

Hot Grandma waltzes back into the dining room with the mimosas at this astonishing moment and is greeted by a tall wall of sudden silence. Marty Gilford sets the pitcher down right in front of Debra, takes one step back, looks right at her oldest daughter and asks as if she already knows: “Now what?”

But Marty, even at her worst, has always managed to look good to Emma. Marty is old-school Southern charm and grace. She never leaves the house without makeup and has so many tubes of lipstick hidden in pockets, drawers, purses and containers that she could color a female army for a good year.

Marty can be spontaneous and have a good time but she’s always polite and kind. Even when all four of her girls were teenagers, Emma cannot remember her mother ever raising her voice, becoming overly angry or acting the way her friends claimed their mothers acted. Marty, in fact, was always there for all of her girls. She went to each and every teacher conference even when their father was ill, showed up for special events, made real dinners, and didn’t flip out when she caught one of them smoking under the backyard trees or sneaking beer from the garage refrigerator.

Emma notices now that her mother has let her hair grow and it is beginning to curl in lovely gray waves around both ears. She’s wearing rather hip green glasses that pull out the hazel of her own eyes. It’s a shade of green, Marty has always said, that she can see just behind the blue in each one of her daughters’ eyes. It also looks like Marty has been going to the gym or lifting the old weights in the garage because her white sleeveless blouse is showing off some rather buff-looking arms. And her red Capri slacks are to die for.

Emma hastily looks down and sees her cracked flip-flops, the washed-out denim skirt that is more like a uniform because she wears it about five days a week, and a blue shirt with a bird on the front that she faintly remembers buying six years ago. And she
realizes with a shock that her mother, who is decades older, looks better than she does.

She is suddenly longing to talk to Erika. Erika would know what to say right this moment. She’d stand up in that lovely way she stands up where she moves perfectly because of all the yoga and Pilates classes she takes. She would gently put her hand on Emma’s arm as if to say without speaking, “Don’t worry, sis, I’ll take care of Debra.” And then she would say something remarkable that is a total insult but an insult that sounds like something sweet.

Emma sometimes misses Erika, who doesn’t always make it back to every reunion, so much she calls her at inappropriate hours and begs her to move back to Higgins. Erika then begs her to move to Chicago, which usually makes Emma gasp and instantly change the subject. She sees her older sister as nothing short of perfect, a guiding light, a true friend, someone who acts like a sister is supposed to act and not like the two nutcases who are at this very moment insulting their wonderful mother and dying to fill their glasses with more spiked orange juice.

“Well, I’m waiting. It is very quiet in here and I’d like to know what you three have been discussing,” Marty demands, standing back with one hand on her hip and the other gripping poor Stephie’s chair.

Debra quickly pours herself another mimosa. She not so much sips as inhales the entire drink, and then turns slowly to look at her mother.

“I just had this thought that maybe we all have different fathers.”

Marty does not hesitate, which is one of her gifts: her sureness, the way she moves forward without having to examine her thoughts, actions or the destination of anything she says or does.

She laughs.

This one extraordinarily beautiful thing that her mother does has always turned Emma’s heart inside out and sideways. It is the longest-held memory inside of her, a sound that she is certain she must have heard in the womb. She remembers longing to hear her mother laugh after her father became so ill, after the leukemia wandered into his blood and turned her mother’s beautiful laugh into a silent groan of loss, longing, exhaustion and heartache. There was the chemotherapy and the sudden promise of hope that was swiftly bulldozed by evil leukocytes as her father literally shrank day by day in front of all of them.

When Marty brings her head back down to earth she focuses on Debra because she knows there is more than a seventy-five percent chance that while she was dripping champagne into the orange juice, Daughter Number Three was trying to convince her sisters and the impressionable niece that their father and grandfather was not the father and grandfather. Nothing much surprises the matriarch.

“Sweetheart, have you looked into a mirror lately? Or bothered to focus on the features of your sisters who happen to be sitting right here at the table in front of you?”

“So? Lots of people look like us,” Debra tries to explain.

“Are you on something, dear?” Marty asks her as Stephie moves her eyes back and forth from Grandma to Auntie Debra as if she is a bobblehead doll. This, the teenager decides, is better than anything she ever watches on television.

“Like crack or pills or something besides mimosas,” Marty adds, tilting her head and then leaning forward to push the drink
pitcher towards Emma who has refused to drink at most family events for the past two years lest she say something wildly inappropriate.

“This is ridiculous!” Joy shouts. “Just tell her, Mom, so we can finish this meal and get on with our lives and plan this reunion.”

“Tell her what? Tell her you all have the same father you have always had and that I was a loyal and devoted wife who slept only with one man? Debra, you know I love you, but you are such an occasional pain in the ass I am beginning to wonder if you are
really
my daughter. Maybe someone switched babies when I was lying on my back with my eyes closed and ice packs jammed in every conceivable location because the baby I had the day you were born had such a big mouth they could barely get her out of my womb.”

Marty is in rare form. Stephanie is now laughing so hard that she leans over and falls off of her chair. Joy finds this funny and she starts laughing, too.

“Debra, lighten up,” Marty admonishes. “You need to stop drinking an entire pitcher of these things by yourself every Sunday. I think you are hallucinating, dear.”

Debra is not just embarrassed—she is also humiliated. She pushes back from the table and wobbles to her feet, smacks her palms on the table, and then apparently has no idea what to do or say next.

There is then a brilliant pause that in the Gilford family has not so secretly become known as the Moment of Possible Salvation. It is a moment that sometimes only lasts three seconds. It can last a lot longer, but with this fascinating blend of personalities the chance to have a quiet moment stretch for more than three seconds would indeed be classified as a modern miracle.

This moment is a very slight chance for Gilford family redemption. It’s a chance to say something like “Forget it, I was
channeling a brazen nun from the fourteenth century,” or “Did I mention that last Friday I fell and hit my head on the side of the fireplace?” or “My doctor told me if it really is a brain tumor that I could have only a few months left.”

It’s also a chance, such a brief, tiny, minuscule chance, to say “I’m sorry”—two simple and very beautiful words that for some insane reason seem to evoke near-death if anyone ever actually tries to have the Moment of Possible Salvation.

Debra is so far from any possible moment of salvation that her sisters realize in an instant she will just say something else fairly inane and then try and change the subject. And of course that is very close to what happens next.

So close and yet not close at all.

Because no one has noticed that Emma has not laughed.

Emma, who always laughs at her ridiculous family members, softly, but laughs nonetheless, could not and did not. Emma watched everyone laugh. She especially watched and listened to her mother.

Emma watched and she yearned. She yearned for two things. She yearned like never before not to be there and to be instead in her garden with her gloveless fingers wrapped around the silky throats of her unplanted flowers and plants. And she so yearned to laugh like her mother. She wanted to be like Marty and not like her. She wanted to climb down her mother’s throat during the height of the laugh so she could see how to make the exact same sound and she also wanted to put her hands around that very same spot and say, “How do you do that, Mom?”

What Emma finally did when her mother’s laugh gradually tapered to a soft sigh, and when everyone in her family acted as if nothing had happened since the mimosas had been placed on the table, was to rise up, push her chair away from the table and look into Debra’s shocked eyes. Then she spoke quietly because no one
was moving or even breathing because Emma Lauryn Gilford was doing something totally unexpected.

“I’m going now,” Emma said.

Emma
never
left first. Emma was single. She always, and always meant
always
, stayed, cleaned up, took her mother grocery shopping, and only then if there was an hour left for herself, for Emma to do maybe three things before the week started all over again, she left. She could not leave now. Absolutely not at this crucial moment. Not before the GFR planning and assignment list had even started.