The Violet Hour: A Novel (4 page)

Grandma, on the other hand, was a creature to be feared. She wore her red hair in historic-looking curls and was shorter than everyone who wasn’t a child—which in those days was pretty much everyone who wasn’t Elizabeth. It hardly mattered. She completely filled every doorway—and it seemed she was always standing in doorways, giving orders, issuing judgments, hurting feelings, and generally making it impossible to get by her into another room. The basement rooms especially.

L
UCIE AND
R
OB
kissed, married now, and they all rose up in a clamor. The quartet sprang to action. Elizabeth and Becca hooted and clapped. Kyle put his fingers to his lips, and pulled a sharp wet whistle from his mouth.

“Yikes.” Elizabeth pointed at a man their age standing a few rows up, his shirt so thoroughly drenched with sweat that the pink of his skin showed through. “And I thought I was dying.” Her sunglasses kept fogging and sliding down her nose.

“Amateur,” Kyle said. “That’s why you wear an undershirt.”

Chris had joined them from his seat in the back. “They couldn’t have had this thing inside? I saw the restaurant. It’s
empty
.”

“The rain plan was indoors,” Becca said. “They have it just in case.”

“Oh, why didn’t it rain? Isn’t it hurricane season?”

“Actually, there’s a massive one heading toward the Gulf.”

“Come on, they just got married,” Elizabeth said. “Happy talk.”

The crowd crawled toward the bar like scuba divers weighed down with their equipment. Elizabeth and Chris weaved in and out among splotchy shoulders and slouching backs, passing tuxedoed servers offering hors d’oeuvres.

“Hungover much?” she asked him as they waited in a clump by the bar. He was tan, a weekend surfer, but that evening he looked rather ashen.

“Actually, I think I’m still drunk.” A silver tray of mojitos came through, bailing them out of line. Chris sipped his in relief. “That’s better. You look smoking, by the way.” He placed his free hand on her hip, a gesture she allowed herself to savor because she, along with just about all of their friends, was still pretty sure he was gay. They’d hooked up freshman year, just once. The entire time she couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was doing it just to prove that he could.

Then, suddenly, there was Kyle, parting the partygoers with a lime-capped cocktail in each hand, having somehow made it to the bar. “I got you a gin and tonic.” An older woman behind him turned appreciatively to watch him pass.

“I’m set.” Elizabeth gave him a flirtatious head tilt, to reassure him, in case he needed it, that she was still very much his.

“I’ll take it,” Becca said, having reappeared beside them. “I have to admit, that was a ridiculously sweet ceremony. They looked so happy, didn’t they?”

“I thought Rob might’ve had to pee, he was bouncing around so much.” This was Hank, another med student, in from Houston.

The bride was approaching now, the glowing, tailored Lucie. They cheered her arrival. “Friends!” Lucie gave a little dip and hugged them each, Elizabeth extra fiercely. “Every single one of you has to have a wedding. Then you’ll know just how amazing I feel right now.” She glanced at Chris. “Or whatever, a huge party with everyone you love. It doesn’t have to be a wedding.” She was emanating heat, physically shaking with glee, and it was infectious. They were all laughing now, offering her drinks. “Oh God, no,” she said, “but thank you.”

“The vows were perfect,” Becca was saying. “What you said about being stronger together because you’re individuals first.”

“And that grandma!” Hank said. “She’s what my grandpa would call a pistol.”

“I know, isn’t she awesome?” Lucie was all teeth, seizing every bite of pleasure from her night.

“I kind of wanted to take her home with me,” Elizabeth said.

A tray of hefty mushroom tartlets came by, and for a moment, everyone chewed.

“And that’s saying a lot,” Kyle said, once he’d swallowed, “because we’re going to see her actual grandparents tomorrow.”

“Oh, you are!” Lucie said, surprisingly happy to talk about something other than the wedding. “That’s wonderful. In Maryland?”

“The old funeral home,” Elizabeth said, and they all made murmurs of recollection.

“Personally, I’m excited,” Kyle said. “I think it’s going to be interesting.”

For better or worse, Kyle was interested in everything. He always seemed to be lucking into behind-the-scenes tours of power plants and major-league ballparks, where he invariably asked dozens of vigorous, probing questions. He’d snorted lines with a pair of
Saturday Night Live
comedians, one of whom still occasionally left him voice messages pretending to be his Russian mail-order bride. He had bungee jumped. He had volunteered at a retirement home. He’d shot a deer in his native Wisconsin. All of it, he said, was experience, life experience, which was invaluable to him as an actor.

“Well,” she said. “I hope you’re bringing other things to do. It can get pretty lifeless in that house.” Everyone groaned, and then another tray of hors d’oeuvres was before them.

“P
LEASE
, M
OM?
please
can I see the bodies?” she had finally begged on a holiday flight to Washington. She had turned seven and was due to receive a Lego hospital for Christmas. On the other side of the metal armrest, her mother had responded with the mildly alarmed expression she usually reserved for strangers on the phone.

“You don’t want to see them,” she said. “
I
don’t even want to see them, and I’m a grown-up.”

“But shouldn’t I see them eventually? Doesn’t everybody?”

“Oh, sweetie,” her mother parried, pulling her across the armrest for comfort she didn’t really need. “I hope you
never
have to see them.”

Clearly, asking was not the best strategy. She was going to have to take a more direct approach. Later, after the Lego hospital and countless other presents had been unwrapped, Elizabeth marched into the room with the Christmas tree, where her mother and father were reading in matching chairs.

“If you don’t let me see the basement, I’m never going to believe anything you ever say again.”

Both her parents looked up from their books, then at each other, and then back at her for what felt like an abnormally long duration. Were they expecting her to say something else? It was maddening, the way they looked at each other, evidence that they had been talking about her, which was normally a good thing, but not if it meant they’d somehow colluded to tell her no again, after she’d gotten herself all worked up.

To her surprise, then, it worked. Gradually, her mother’s expression melted from inscrutable ice to acquiescent water, the faintest rim of tears forming on the lower lids of her eyes. Her father was probably making an expression of his own, but her mother’s was all Elizabeth could see.

Sensing victory, she added the coup de grâce. “I mean it. And I’ll never talk to you again.”

“Don’t say that,” her mother said. “That’s a terrible thing to say. If it means that much to you, of course. All you had to do was ask.”

Elizabeth flushed. Hadn’t she asked already? Had her mother really forgotten so soon? Or perhaps she’d misunderstood the question. Maybe she thought Elizabeth only wanted to see the basement rooms, body-free. She needed to make sure they were talking about the same thing.

“I mean the bodies,” she said. “That’s what I want to see.”

“We hear you.” Her dad snapped his book shut. He leaned for
ward on his elbows, shifting his weight from one knee to the other. “You have to be sure, though. Once you see them, you can’t take it back. You’ll have the memory with you forever.”

Her mother flung her arm out. “Why tell her that?”

“If I don’t like it, we can just come back upstairs,” Elizabeth said, eager to demonstrate that she’d considered every contingency.

“That’s what I’m saying, sweetheart.” He was crouching down in front of her now, trying to prevent her from looking anywhere but at his face. “You can stop looking, and you can leave the basement. But the brain holds on to things the eye sees—sometimes forever. You can’t erase it. So you have to be sure you’re prepared to handle whatever it is you’ve allowed yourself to see.”

His eyebrows were thick with crisscrossing hairs, and one arched downward more severely than the other, an asymmetry she’d never noticed before. She looked down at her feet, then back at his eyebrows, which were, despite their misalignment, easier to settle on than his actual eyes. “How am I supposed to know what I can handle when I haven’t even seen anything yet?”

He exhaled sharply, clearly not expecting her to protest. “How can you know,” he muttered while he worked out a proper response.

“I’m looking at the Christmas tree right now. Are you saying I’m never going to forget
that
?”

“Please, Abe,” Cassandra said. “Just take her.”

Elizabeth turned to face her mother, who was sitting on the edge of her armchair, her legs angled under and bouncing, like she might spring from the room at any minute. She was so alive, she could rarely, if ever, sit still.

“No, Mommy,” Elizabeth said. “I want
you
to take me.”

I
NSIDE THE DINNER TENT
, theatrical lengths of white fabric trapezed above them, heralding the great new life Lucie and Rob were to share. In lieu of favors, they had donated to an education charity, according to the cards at everyone’s place. Though actually there were favors as
well. Tiny chocolate truffles had been set in boxes shaped like clothbound books.

They slurped preset chilled soup and selected breads, receiving champagne and chardonnay. Elizabeth, still on her second cocktail, struggled to find a spot for it amid the full flight of stemware already at her place.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, flagging down the nearest waiter. “Can you just take this extra glass? I’m afraid I’m going to knock them all over, and that would be extra stupid, since I don’t even plan on drinking red.” He smiled, a skinny boy with dark, longish hair he had to tuck behind his ears. He reminded Elizabeth of a greyhound, and she pictured him sitting on his haunches like a dog, awaiting permission to take off and run.

“Plans can change,” he said. “You sure?”

“I mean look at this. Five glasses for one person. It’s ridiculous.”

“Excuse me,” Kyle shouted, raising his arm. “Can I get another gin and tonic?”

“He’s not our waiter.” Elizabeth lowered her voice instructionally.

“It’s all right,” the waiter said. “We’re all in this together.”

“All hands on deck, right, buddy?” Kyle pointed at him as though they were old friends. Because he was also a waiter, he saw himself as being exceptionally cool to fellow tradesmen, tipping well and treating them with the respect and appreciation they so often failed to receive on the job. But Elizabeth thought he was actually more of a bully, forcing fraternity in a manner that bordered on condescension.

“What?” he said when he noticed her looking at him. “It’s a wedding!” He shook her shoulder in mock desperation. “We’re
having fun
!”

“Elizabeth!” She leapt to her feet at the sound of her name. Here was Lucie’s psychiatrist mom, Joan, in a taffeta toga of mother-of-the-bride beige. She hugged Elizabeth, told her she looked smashing, and demanded to know where she was doing her residency. Across the table, Hank leaned in, his face slashed by a knife of evening light.

The volume under the tent had risen so raucously that Elizabeth felt compelled to answer in as few syllables as possible. “Here. Dermatology. I hope!”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hank nodding sympathetically, as though she’d already failed to match. He knew as well as she did that dermatology was the golden stag of specialties, the most money, the best life, a long shot even for someone as well-credentialed as she was.

“I love New York!” she said, louder this time, hoping to crush his doubts, and her own. “I really don’t want to leave!”

“Well, we don’t want you to leave
either
!” Joan proclaimed, gripping her hands before another guest dragged her away.

Sitting again, Elizabeth put her hand on Kyle’s leg. She’d been in New York three years, long enough to set herself to its standards and rhythms, to feel she was meant to stay. It was her city, not some wilderness she fell into randomly through her parents. California had always felt like that—an accidental place no one knew how manage. But in New York she knew what things cost, where her perfect apartment would be. She knew too many people to ever grow bored. She even knew the people she didn’t know, the ones she saw online or on the street. The bankers, whose French cuffs and pleated-front trousers masked alarming, shape-changing moles. The models suddenly crusted with psoriasis who feared for their careers. These were the people she wanted to treat, people who needed her, perhaps even desperately, though mostly just to lead nicer lives. It wasn’t an ambition that would endear her to a selection committee—for that she had her grades and scores, her strategic research on pigmentation loss, and her Columbia mentors making calls behind the scenes—but it was her ambition nonetheless. As a premed she’d had nobler dreams. She saw herself traveling the world in rolled-up sleeves, administering shots to children in Africa, India, and Latin America. She wasn’t quite sure where that old idealism had gone—perhaps it had been sucked up by some true activist who wanted and needed it more—but now she just wanted New York. She wanted to live as well as she could, looking closely at every kind of skin.

“Good thing you don’t have acne,” said Hank, who did.

A lull fell across the party as the entrees began to appear. The dagger of light crossing Hank’s face thinned, and thinned again, as though some would-be murderer were slowly developing a conscience, until suddenly, all at once, it vanished, the sun having at last slipped below the horizon. A cheer went up from the now-reprieved eastern end of the tent, and in the new, dusky light Elizabeth looked around at all the well-washed hair and flowing table silks, the nubile peonies anchoring each table. Everything had regained its color with the shade, and in the drowsiness of drink, it looked like a movie, a lavish scene she’d watched so many times as a child that it was all she could do not to speak aloud the lines she knew were coming next.