The Trouble with Lexie (13 page)

“Well, dang.” Amy put one arm around Lexie, and took the phone from her. She stared at the screen while Lexie cried into Amy's shoulder.

“Don.” Lexie pulled away from Amy, pulled herself together and spoke as loudly as she could. She waved her hand to get his
attention. “I'm sorry, I've lost track of the discussion. Did someone volunteer to be the dorm parent in Rilke yet?”

Before Don could answer, Janet clucked out a response like a hen pecking corn: “Jim is staying there tonight and Artie is staying the next night. Beyond that we have no idea.”

“I can stay there tonight, and I can stay for at least a few weeks.”

“Great. I'm sure the kids will appreciate having you downstairs.” Don nodded at Lexie. She had redeemed herself for whispering with Amy.

“Hold on,” Janet said. “Hang fire. We can't have a female dorm parent in a boys' residence.”

“Dot—” Lexie choked out. “Dot was a woman, Janet.” Lexie heard snickering from the front of the room.

“Dot and Beau lived there together. The only reason Dot was there alone was because Beau had passed and Dot had been there so many years by then.”

“Surely the boys are used to having a woman downstairs. They'll be fine.” Don turned his face toward Janet and stared at her in a way that froze her out and shut her down. He was one of the most boring men Lexie had ever met, but he exerted an authority that was impossible to dismiss.

“Well, let's make sure they all have Jim or Artie's number so they have access to a male faculty member for emergencies.” Janet pulled herself up straight—as if her head had been attached to a string hanging from the ceiling.

Don looked away from Janet and straight toward Lexie. “We'll talk after the meeting.” He immediately switched the discussion to the memorial service.

Lexie sniffed hard. She took her phone from Amy and then
tapped out a text to Daniel while Amy looked onto her lap, reading the words as they appeared.
Meet you at Inn on the Lake this afternoon. Can't talk until then. Someone I love died.

Your fiancé?!
Daniel texted.

No. I'll tell you when I see you.

Be strong. You can cry in my arms @3.

Lexie looked over at Amy. “I'm meeting him at three and the Yahtzee was with threes. You don't think that means something?”

“Oh honey, everything means something if you decide it does.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.” Amy leaned in and hugged Lexie. “Peter's going to be heartbroken and there's gonna be a shitstorm of anger coming your way. But no matter how crazy you act, I'm on your side.”

DON MCCLEAR WAS CALM AND DISPASSIONATE AS LEXIE TOLD HIM
she was breaking off the engagement and leaving Peter. He didn't ask why. Lexie figured if she were having the discussion with a woman, she would have asked why. But like many men she knew, Don didn't dig further than what was laid out before him. It was an admirable quality, Lexie thought. She herself had a ravenous curiosity about most people and sometimes hated her need to keep scratching at the information people were willing to give until she'd dug herself into a tomb-sized crater before their feet.

“We'll need you to move in tonight, if you can,” Don said. “I hope that doesn't feel too soon, too—”

“That's fine.” Lexie couldn't focus on what Don was saying. Dot was gone and she was leaving Peter: Those two ideas were all her brain could hold.

“And I'm sure you already know this, but I have to say it anyway: It is required that you sleep there every night school is in session. Although you could have another faculty member cover for you if you need to be away a night or two. And overnight guests are forbidden.” Don looked down at his desk, he seemed embarrassed to be discussing this.

“I understand. I remember the story about the woman who worked here who had the boyfriend in town—”

“Melanie Birkin. She was too young for . . . well, for everything that came to her while she was here. You're much more together.” Don looked at Lexie quickly and then shuffled some papers.

“Thanks.” Hopefully Don would never discover that Lexie's decision had been made by the outcome of a Yahtzee game. That alone would likely make her the loser in the Melanie Birkin/Lexie James
shit together
race.

“Oh, Janet sent me an email to remind me that the buffet belongs to the school. I think she wants it in her apartment. But you get first choice since the buffet's already in Dot's place.”

“I've never had a buffet. I'm not even sure what a buffet is.”

“Neither am I. But keep it if you want it.”

“If Janet wants it, I probably wouldn't like it.” Lexie blushed. She had never been so bold as to discuss her dislike of Janet with Don.

“I'll shoot her an email and tell her it's hers.” Don winked at Lexie in a way that made her actually smile. “I know you had a special relationship with Dot. I'm sure this is terribly hard on you.”

The loss of Dot was something Lexie could feel from her feet up. She wanted to plant Dot beneath herself; Lexie's roots would grow into her, connecting them in the way of families and bloodlines. A daisy chain that would never end.

I
N SEPTEMBER, LEXIE HAD PRACTICALLY PASSED OUT FROM ANXIETY
after flirting with Daniel Waite. And now it was October: Dot was dead, Daniel was waiting for her at the Inn on the Lake, Lexie was hours away from breaking Peter's heart, and she was still standing (or sitting, just then). Handling it all. Answering emails. Filling out paperwork. Amy, with whom she had been on and off the phone all day, said she thought maybe Lexie was in a state of shock. Was this the gentle, quiet building up of something that would soon explode? Was she experiencing a bodily version of earthquake weather? (Mitzy loved to point out earthquake weather. Earthquakes came, she claimed, on glaring sunny days when it was too bright to read a magazine outdoors. The birds would quiet and nothing moved. Not even the air. Once, after a rare shopping trip to Ralph's, Lexie and Mitzy were walking through the parking lot, each holding a bag of groceries in their arms, when Mitzy pointed out the earthquake weather. Seconds later, like magic, the blacktop beneath them shifted back and forth as if it were a giant skateboard
on which they both were standing. A booming echoed from the sky and Lexie dropped her bag; a jar of Ragu smashed on the ground. The spaghetti sauce quivered and ran like thick blood toward her feet. Lexie stepped away from it and looked toward her mother. Mitzy was beaming, so proud of herself for having predicted the quake, that she wasn't even mad about the lost sauce.)

Lexie put down her pen, pushed the papers away and shut her eyes. Dot was projecting on the screen in her head. Immediately, her brain slapped on the dress Dot had bought for Lexie's wedding. The image was so incongruent, so off-kilter that Lexie laughed. Lexie decided that Dot would not have looked like an overly decorated Christmas tree in the dress, as she'd originally thought. She'd have resembled a goat in an evening gown.

The more Lexie laughed, the more she felt Dot's presence. Dot would have loved the simile. She would have come up with something equally absurd.
Look at me! I'm a piece of broken crockery glued together and held in place with a fucking wad of satin!

Was the dress satin? Or was it silk? Lexie would see when she got into the apartment. And it was then, when she thought of Dot in her apartment, the dress laid out on the bed, that the crying started up again. She didn't worry about the noise—the only person who showed up at Lexie's office without an appointment was Dot.

Lexie straightened her desk while she cried. It was a strange impulse, but it felt right at the time. She chugged and slobbered and made odd donkey noises as she sorted papers quickly into the trash, or into
To Do Later
and
To Do Soon
files. Once her desk was clean, while the crying continued to chug out of her like a freight train with endless cars, Lexie went to her office closet and pulled out her small vacuum. She plugged in the appliance; it wailed the
way most cheap machines do. Lexie cried louder and harder while the vacuum swept over the old Persian rug, the wood floors, and even the couch. Afterward, Lexie (still crying) dusted with Pledge and a netted dust cloth she'd ordered over the Internet. When even the baseboards had been wiped clean, the crying let up. Lexie stood in the middle of her office and inhaled deeply. The room smelled like chemically created lemons. A line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem came to her, but she wasn't sure exactly how it went. It was a poem about a dying old woman and there was something in there about perfume, refueling, pulling up the droop. Of all the people Lexie knew, Dot was the only one who would have known the Brooks poem offhand. She probably would have recited it in her scratchy, metallic voice. Lexie cried a little more at the thought.

NOT ONE RUXTON STUDENT CAME TO TALK ABOUT DOT. LEXIE KNEW
it was unlikely. Once you hit sixty, teenagers thought you were old enough to die. And eighty? Yeah, they were sad. But it was okay to them. Dot had had a long life.

At ten of three, Lexie put a note on her door:
Gone to a meeting off campus. If this is an emergency, call my cell phone.
Every student she had treated had her phone number. And tonight when she moved into Rilke, every student resident of that dorm would have her number, too.

LEXIE SAT IN THE JETTA AND STARED AT THE DOOR TO THE CAFÉ OF
the Inn on the Lake. She knew it was selfish and unreasonable to see Daniel and break up with Peter on the very day that Dot died.
But she felt she could no more stop herself from these two abhorrent acts than she could have stopped Dot from dying. Maybe she'd inherited a genetic inability to properly respond to tragedy and that was why she was sitting in a car, parked at the inn.

Lexie thought of Derek Clifford the newscaster who was on the local news from the time Lexie could talk until the summer after seventh grade. When Derek sat in Mitzy's station at Heidi Pies, Mitzy would later report to Lexie everything he'd said, what he'd been wearing, how much tip he'd left, and how his brown-sugar-colored hair looked that day. It seemed a relationship so intimate that Lexie, at age eight, often bragged at school that her mother was best friends with Derek Clifford. She didn't think it an exaggeration when she told Tammy Lunden, who was brand new to the school, that she called him Uncle Derek.

Then, when she was thirteen, Lexie and Mitzy went into a gas station mini-mart to splurge on Dr Pepper and pink Sno Balls, a combo Mitzy swore gave you enough energy that it was the only meal you'd need all day (and would, therefore, be the only meal Mitzy would provide that day). Derek Clifford came in, picked up a bottle of water, and stood behind them in line. Water was a luxury Lexie wasn't allowed to buy. (
Why pay money for something that comes free from the tap?
)

Lexie had smiled up at Derek.
Uncle Derek
. She waited for Mitzy to say something, to hug and kiss him hello, to at the very least mention the last meal he'd had at Heidi Pies. But not a sound issued from Mitzy's mouth. Lexie wasn't even sure her mother was breathing; she stood so rigid, so flush-faced, that Derek was the first one to speak. “You're up,” he said, and he flipped down his sunglasses from where they'd sat on top of his head and then
pointed toward the cashier. In the car, as they drove away, Mitzy happily reexamined the encounter. “He said, ‘Your turn, Mitzy,' didn't he?” she said. “He knows my name!” As young as she was, Lexie knew better than to disagree.

A few months later, when Derek Clifford's taxi-yellow convertible was hit by a truck, Derek suffered brain damage that wiped him as clean as a wrung-out sponge. He had to learn life all over again. This time, however, he was missing the personality-molding experiences of dodge ball games, first love, underage drinking, and heartbreak. According to Mitzy, his new personality was identical to that of his caretaker: a woman the shape of a soft ice cream swirl who held each of Derek's hands in hers as they dropped their head in prayer before each meal at Heidi Pies.
It's a damn shame,
Mitzy would say.
A tragedy.
And then she'd light a cigarette, smile real big, and say, “Remember, before he lost his marbles, he knew my name!”

Mitzy's blitheness sat in Lexie's mind like a snapshot carried in a wallet. It was filed beside another thought snapshot: her father's behavior following the death of his parents. That had always seemed to be about the importance of a bag of Bugles chips on a road trip to Omaha.

“At least I've been crying,” Lexie said aloud. But wait. Did the sobbing in her office count, since she had simultaneously vacuumed and dusted like it was a game-show competition? Lexie needed to escape her own mind. “Onward,” she said, and she reached into her purse, pulled out her phone (holding it high to avoid neck wrinkles), and quickly worked her thumbs for a text to Peter.

Dinner duty tonight. Dot passed away at her sister's house last night. I'll be staying in her apt. for a bit. It's so sad. Let's talk when I'm home packing my bag.

She knew it was wrong to tell Peter about Dot's death in a text. But she also knew she couldn't speak to him until she told him she was breaking up. It was too cruel to have any other conversation in light of what was next to come.

A text buzzed in from Peter:
Shocked. Talk when you get home. Yours, like the sun.
Lately Peter had been signing off his emails and texts with a poorly bastardized line from an old Jefferson Starship song he had been teaching Lexie on the guitar. The only kind of music Peter listened to other than classical and jazz was '70s rock. It was the stuff her mother used to sing around the house or in the car, belting it out in a way that made Lexie suspect she was imagining herself on stage in a sold-out arena.

Lexie turned off the phone, dropped it in her purse, and got out of the car. She pushed both her palms into her cheeks to stop herself from smiling. She couldn't help it. The anticipation of seeing Daniel erased all decorum.

Daniel was waiting for her at the same table they'd had the other two times they'd been there. He stood, walked to Lexie, and hugged her so tightly she could feel his body heat through his dress shirt.

“You okay?” Daniel pulled back, held Lexie by the shoulders and stared at her.

“Yeah, I think I am.” Lexie willed herself to think of Dot so that her mouth would close and her face would convey the appropriate emotion.

“Who died?”

“Uh . . .” She realized Daniel probably knew Dot. Had likely known her for years. While Lexie and Daniel were intimate enough to have sex, she didn't feel close enough to him, yet, for her to comfort him over a death. She had no idea how he'd react. Or
how she should react to his reaction. If he cried, was she supposed to hug him and rub his back? Or was she supposed to patiently and dispassionately wait through it as she did when students cried in her office?

“I have a room tonight. Should we go there and talk?” Daniel lowered his head so it was even with Lexie's. He appeared to be examining her as if to make sure she wasn't going to collapse on the floor wailing.

“Yes.” Again, Lexie saw Daniel flipping her, naked, from her back to her front. What was wrong with her that her mind jumped straight to sex when she was minutes from telling Daniel of Dot's death?

“We can get Frito pie delivered.” Daniel cupped Lexie's elbow and escorted her out of the restaurant and into the lobby of the inn. While they waited for the elevator, Daniel leaned in and kissed Lexie. Gently. Like a whisper.

They kissed again inside the elevator. This time it was more intense. A real kiss. They kissed in the hallway outside the elevator; the hallway outside the door to the room; inside the room on the other side of the door; next to the bed; on the bed; and, finally, in the bed. Amy had once taken Lexie around the Ruxton chapel and explained the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The kiss parade felt the same: stops on a journey to a divine end.

An hour later, Lexie and Daniel were naked, lying side by side, holding hands like a cutout paper train of people. They turned their heads toward each other at the same time and laughed, although there wasn't anything to laugh at.

“I'm ordering food.” Daniel rolled over and picked up the phone on the night table. From the back, undressed, if you didn't
look at the pencil scratches of gray in his hair, he didn't look much older than Peter. Lexie propped herself up on her elbows and examined her belly, which the past couple of years had been rounding in spite of her weighing the same she always had. It wasn't fair the way men's bodies barely shifted with age.

“Will you get me ice cream or a milkshake?” Lexie pushed her fist into her belly, sucked it in.

“No Frito pie?” Daniel covered the mouthpiece with his massive hand like he was a pitcher holding a baseball.

“No. I want something cold. And something chocolate.” What she truly wanted was something sweet and indulgent. She was at once completely relaxed and high from the sex, and also wound up, contracted, ready to explode. She needed something to balance the two: sugar and fat. Currently, the only two food groups from which she would eat.

Daniel placed the order. He sat back against the headboard. “So . . .”

Lexie pulled the sheet under her armpits and sat upright beside him. “Dot died.”

“Dot?” Daniel squinted his eyes into two wide slits. The named didn't appear to trigger any memories.

“She was an English teacher. I thought you might know her from . . . I don't know, from all the fund-raisers and things you do with the school.” As she said this, Lexie remembered Dot saying that she'd rather go to a “fucking herpes convention” than sit through any fund-raiser for Ruxton.

“Is that a real name? Dot? Like, does she have a twin brother named Dash?”

Lexie laughed. And then she groaned. “I can't believe I'm
laughing at Dot's name. She was my friend. I loved her!” She gave Daniel a playful slap on the arm.

“How old was she?”

“Eighty.”

“Wait. Are you talking about Mrs. Harrison?”

“Yes! Dot Harrison. Her real name was Dorothy. She was born Dorothy May Tavis.” Saying the name made Lexie gasp for breath. She looked at Daniel, and all was okay again.

“Yeah, she and her husband were my dorm parents. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. They were sweet.”

“Not sure I'd call her sweet.”

“Maybe not.” Daniel turned his head toward Lexie. “She used to sing in class. And she had that crazy voice—like someone who'd smoked unfiltered cigarettes since the age of five. Oh! And she'd tap-dance, too.”

“She tapped something from
Forty-Second Street
last night. Then she felt dizzy, so she lay on her sister's bed and never got up again.”

“Great way to go. . . . Are you sure she was eighty? I mean, I knew her thirty-five years ago and I thought she was eighty then.”

“The students probably look at me and think I'm eighty.” Lexie was relieved Daniel wasn't crying, or going into some soulful daze like what had overcome Peter the day his former guitar teacher, a man he called Spondee, died.