The Smart One and the Pretty One (26 page)

“You look fine,” Ava said. “Really, Mom. You may feel awful but you don’t look it.” That wasn’t entirely true: at that particular moment, her mother looked kind of haggard. But she was pretty beautiful to begin with, so Ava figured her mother on a bad day still outshone most women her age on their good days.

“It’s petty of me anyway,” Nancy said, releasing Ava’s hand. “Wanting to impress poor Lana Markowitz. I mean, any way you look at it, I’ve
won
. I have my husband and my wonderful beautiful girls, and until this stupid and minor cancer thing, I’ve been healthy and happy. A kind person would deliberately look awful so Lana could have something to feel good about.”

“You couldn’t look uglier than Lana Markowitz if you tried,” Jimmy said.

Ava stared at him, astonished. Her father had just complimented her mother. That was a first—at least in her hearing.

“That’s not fair,” Nancy said. “Lana was very pretty underneath the clothes and makeup and that terrible haircut. We
all
looked awful in the eighties.”

“You never looked awful,” her husband said. “You haven’t looked awful a day in your life.”

Nancy minutely adjusted the blanket around her legs, a small smile on her face that Ava had never seen before. “Liar,” she said.

But Ava looked back and forth between her two parents, stunned. They were actually
in love
with each other. It had never occurred to her before. She had always thought the main relationship in the family was the one between Nancy and her daughters. To have a family, you needed a father, of course, and Jimmy had played that role perfectly well, if you were okay with an old-fashioned interpretation of the job. But the Nickerson family was all about the women and their noisy, bickering, gossiping, interfering relationships with one another.

And now it seemed that maybe she had been looking at it all wrong. Maybe she and Lauren were just the icing, and the basic, underlying cake of the family was the couple in front of her who had a shared history she knew very little about.

She shook her head to clear it and said, “You should get dressed, Mom—they’ll be here soon,” hoping to bring things back to steadier ground.

“I’ll go down and get things ready,” Jimmy said. “Help your mother get dressed,” he said to Ava before leaving the room.

Ava pulled the blanket off of her mother and Nancy swung her pajamaed legs over the side of the bed. “Pick out a shirt for me, will you?” she said as she sat on the edge of the bed, her hands gripping the mattress on either side of her knees.

Ava rifled through the tops in the dresser, then plucked out a dark green polo shirt and turned back to her mother.

“I’m going to put it on over this one,” Nancy said. She was wearing a thin white T-shirt. “I’m too tired to start taking things off and on.”

“Why not just start wearing housecoats like Grandma Ingrid used to?” Ava said. “Just a big old flowered muumuu to cover you from head to toe. Nothing simpler than that.”

“I don’t think I have what it takes to carry it off.”

“Grandma Ingrid did. Of course the blue hair helped.”

“And the support hose.” Ava handed her the polo shirt and Nancy pulled it on. When her head emerged, she said, “I can’t wait to get really old—so old I can be as eccentric and demanding as I want. I think I’ll start some kind of worthless collection that takes up a lot of space and embarrasses you girls and runs through your inheritance.”

“Like Hummel figurines?”

She shook her head. “Something worse—I want to make you both cringe.”

“Men,” Ava said. “Collect handsome young men.”

“Don’t you think your father might object?”

“All the more reason.” She arranged her mother’s hair with her fingers. The roots were starting to show, and it made her sad to see that her mother’s natural color, once a medium brown, was now almost entirely gray.

“Can you tell it’s thinning?” Nancy asked, peering up at her anxiously. “It feels like so much is coming out—I have to clean my brush every day. Do I look bald to you?”

“Not at all,” Ava said. “It doesn’t even look thinner to me. Did the doctor say it would fall out?”

Nancy waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, you know. He downplayed it all, said it wasn’t likely, but a lot of women on this online cancer forum I looked at said it happened to them.”

“Yours looks fine,” Ava said. “Really.”

Nancy looked skeptical but she dropped it. “Pick out a pair of pants for me, will you? And then help me put on just enough makeup to not look like death warmed over.”

“You’ll look like fresh death,” Ava said as she went to the closet. “Nice, fresh, right-out-of-the-oven death.”

“I did something wrong,” Nancy said. “My children don’t respect me.”

Ava looked back at her mother over her shoulder and saw her sitting there on the bed in her pajama bottoms and double top, looking small and worried and sick despite the smile propped on her face, and even though they had been joking, she suddenly wanted to tell her that she had her daughters’ respect
and
their love, as much as any mother could ever have, but hesitated, worried that the sentimentality would embarrass them both or, worse, scare her mother into thinking she was sicker than she was, and the moment passed with nothing said at all.

Ava came downstairs with Nancy after Lauren and Jimmy had already welcomed Russell and his mother into the house. In the flurry of greetings and kisses, Ava was able to avoid speaking directly to Russell, who kissed her enthusiastically on both cheeks the way he always did, although this time the kisses landed squarely on her skin and not in midair. She evaded his gaze and moved on. A moment later, he was embracing Lauren, who whispered something in his ear. He whispered back and then they separated, but not before Lauren had given him one last kittenish smile. Ava gritted her teeth and looked away.
It’s good
, she told herself.
You need to be reminded. A guy like Russell would never go for you when a girl like Lauren’s in the same room.

Soon they were all sitting around the dining room table together.

Lana Markowitz seemed happy to be there: she hadn’t stopped smiling since she first arrived, her lips curving up in a thin-lipped, bright red smile that Ava hadn’t remembered she remembered until she saw it again. There was something generally familiar about Lana, although Ava couldn’t have described what she looked like before her arrival.

Lana’s bobbed chin-length hair was dyed a brown so dark it was almost black. Her eyes had that slightly off, tilted look that a surgical lift always seems to leave in its wake, and the skin on her cheeks and forehead was noticeably tighter and shinier than that on her throat. She wore bright Paloma Picasso–red lipstick and was way too dressed up for a relaxed brunch at the house of friends: the younger generation were all in jeans—even Russell for once—and both of Ava’s parents were in relaxed, weekend clothes, but Lana wore a tight black skirt with high-heeled boots and a violet V-neck cashmere sweater that effectively displayed her still voluptuous chest.

Still
voluptuous? Ava rethought that one. The breasts were firmer and higher than the forces of gravity would normally have allowed on a woman now firmly in her sixties. Lana seemed excessively proud of them, too: she frequently arched her spine and threw back her shoulders, aiming her chest most often in Jimmy’s direction.

Unfortunately for her, Jimmy didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in Lana Markowitz’s breasts. He was politely genial to her but far more relaxed and jovial with Russell, who sat next to his mother and rolled his eyes and winced whenever she said something that embarrassed him. Which happened fairly often as the morning progressed.

“This is wonderful!” Lana said when they were all settled and served. She looked around the dining room and gave a girlish wiggle of delight. “I love that your house has hardly changed at all, Nancy. It makes me feel young again, being here, like no time at all has passed—except of course when I look around and see the grown-ups our little babies have become.” She shared her narrow smile with everyone around the table.

Nancy said, “You hardly look a day older than the last time I saw you, Lana.”

“Bless you,” Lana said. “It’s not true, but bless you anyway.” She reached out to put her hand on Nancy’s arm. “How are you, really? Russell has told me all about what you’re going through.”

Nancy patted Lana’s hand. “I’m fine. It’s all a huge pain and a little exhausting, but there shouldn’t be any long-term effects.”

“I’m so happy to hear it! I was afraid to ask at first. So often these days it’s bad news with friends and family. Did Russell tell you about my parents?” Without waiting for a response, she said with a toss of her head, “Dead, both of them. Within three months of each other. It left me reeling. As you might imagine. I’m still recovering.”

“That was over five years ago,” Russell said.

“It can’t possibly have been that long.”

“It was early 2003,” he said. “Well over five years.”

“Anyway,” she said, turning back to Nancy, “I had barely recovered from that—not really recovered, of course, but trying to pull myself together for the sake of the boys—when I get the news that Marcy has cancer. Horrible stage four lung cancer.”

“How awful,” Nancy said. Then, a little sheepishly: “I’m sorry, but who’s Marcy?”

“Oh, you remember,” Lana said. “My former sister-in-law. Sister of Lord Voldemort, as I like to call him.” She gave a little laugh.

“Poor thing,” Nancy said.

“Was she a smoker?” Jimmy asked.

“No,” Lana said with some satisfaction. “Never smoked a day in her life. What do you think of that?”

“Kind of messes with your mind, doesn’t it?” Russell said to the girls across the table from him. “We all want to believe that if we’re good little boys and girls and don’t smoke or hang out with people who do, we won’t have to worry about lung cancer. Apparently it doesn’t actually work that way.”

“You mean we can’t blame the victim?” Ava said. He smiled at her and she looked down at her plate again.

“Not even a little bit,” Russell said. “And, by the way, Marcy ate all organic foods and did yoga every day.”

“I’m going back to eating Twinkies.” Ava poked disdainfully at the slice of melon on her plate.

“That’s the obvious lesson here,” Russell said.

“I never stopped,” Lauren said.

“How’s she doing now?” Nancy asked Lana.

“Oh, she’s dead,” Lana said cheerfully. “They caught it too late. We all went to the funeral. It was only right, even though it meant we had to see Lord Voldemort with wife number two and their sons. He’s old enough to be their grandfather, of course.”

“What’s really weird,” Russell said, again addressing himself to the sisters, “is that he named them Jonah 2.0 and Russell 2.0. It bothered us at first, but in the end Jonah and I decided that it’s really a tribute to us. An
homage
, if you will.”

“He’s joking,” Lana told the Nickersons. “They’re actually named Brendon and Farley.”

“Yuck,” Lauren said. “They should have gone with the 2.0 thing.”

“More original,” Ava agreed. “Plus there’d be all those free upgrades.”

Russell laughed, but again she avoided his eyes. He looked handsome this morning in a dark blue oxford shirt that was unbuttoned enough to show how much tanner the skin on his face was than his usually covered throat. Looking at him made her remember how closely he had held her the other night, and it seemed to her no good could come out of that since she was resolved not to let it happen again. What kind of guy secretly went after two sisters at the same time? It was, for want of a better word,
icky
.

“From what I’ve heard, they’re very wild boys,” Lana said. She pointed her breasts toward Jimmy, who was cutting a cheese Danish in half and didn’t seem to notice. “Completely undisciplined.”

“They’re perfectly fine,” Russell said.

His mother raised her penciled eyebrows. “That’s not what I hear.”

“I’ve spent a lot more time with them than you have,” Russell said. “They’re good kids.”

“Oh, right,” Lana said. “You always spend the holidays with them. Leaving your poor mother alone, I might add.” She gave another little laugh.

Russell didn’t seem to share her amusement. “I spent one Christmas with them,” he said. “One Christmas. And that was two years ago. Every other major holiday, I’ve either spent with you or on my own.”

“Are you sure?” Lana said. “Two years ago?”

“Yes. I remember because I was with—” Russell stopped. “Someone,” he finished lamely, with an uncomfortable look at the girls across the table.

“Did you all know Russell’s been married
twice
?” Lana said, opening her eyes wide. There was a bit of mascara detritus under the left one that Ava’s fingers itched to wipe away. “Can you believe it? He’s been divorced two times and he’s not even forty yet. Sometimes I wonder whether Lord Voldemort and I set a bad example for our kids.” She shrugged and her cleavage stayed put while her shoulders moved up and down around it. “Fortunately Jonah’s marriage is holding steady at the moment, so maybe the fault lies”—her gaze fell on her son again—“elsewhere.”

“Sounds like you’ve had some bad luck,” Nancy said gently to Russell. “But they always say third time’s the charm.”

“There won’t be a third time.” Russell was jogging his knee up and down rapidly. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

“The only woman a man can trust is his mother,” Lana said. “That’s what my mother told my brothers, and I’ve come around to thinking she was right.”

“Ahem,” Nancy said. “As the mother of two girls and a woman myself, I’d have to disagree with that one.”

“Oh, it’s an exaggeration, of course.” Lana waved her hand breezily. “But I will say that I’m horrified by some of these younger women today. They’ll say anything to trap a man as wealthy and handsome as—” She indicated her son.

“Hey, she sounds just like you,” Lauren said to Russell, who shot her a dirty look in response.

“To be fair,” Lana said, “it’s hard for anyone to make a marriage last, even with the best intentions and all the love in the world.” She waggled her finger back and forth between Nancy and Jimmy. “You two really beat the odds, you know. I’d love to know your secret.”