Why Can't I Be You (19 page)

“Susan left me,” Ernie said, gesturing toward the picture. “After the stroke. She couldn’t handle it.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s amazing,” Ernie said, “that me and Susan—both cowards—could make a man like Gilbert. He never complains, even with all of this.” He shook his hand.

“He’s a good guy,” I said.

Ernie’s mouth crinkled into a strange smirk, and I worried for a moment that he might cry. Chip got up and solemnly licked Ernie’s hand like he was trying to comfort him. Ernie took a deep breath and shook his hand up and down. “Read the word. Look it up,” he said, when he could talk again.

I used the thumb imprint at the side of the book to find the
Q
s and flipped through the pages until I found it. “Quixotry,” I read out loud. “Visionary schemes.”

“See,” he said. “It is a word.” Then he laughed. “Actually, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.”

I laughed too.

“It’s nice to see Fish happy,” Ernie said. “The old Jessie Morgan made him miserable.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling my heart beat in every single inch of my being.

He bumped his hand against the side of his nose, like the way people do to say they’re in on your secret. Or maybe he was just referring to Jessie’s supposed nose job. “I mean you’re a new girl, and I like it.”

I wished I had the courage to challenge Ernie again, to nail down exactly what he meant.

“So,” Fish said, when he drove me back to Myra’s house, “I’m thirty-one years old and I live with my dad. Do you still like me?”

“I think I like you even more,” I said.

There was a purple sedan in Myra’s driveway, next to Myra’s Honda.

“You coming in?” I asked, when he shifted the truck into park.

“No,” he said. “Heather is here. I think you guys have some girl time ahead of you.” He got out of the truck and ran around to open my door. “I promised Robbie I’d help him finish up a motor repair that’s giving him trouble. And I can’t dance to Janet Jackson to save my life.”

He walked me to Myra’s door and kissed me on the doorstep, just like the end of a date on a TV show. Myra must have seen us. She flashed the porch light.

She opened the door just enough to stick her head through. “Ooh,” she said, and then shut the door again.

Fish laughed. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“I hope so,” I said. I watched him walk to his car and drive away before I opened the door to join Myra and Heather.

I
had a sleepover
party at my house once. Fourth grade. My parents were still together then. My mom was having a good streak. We made invitations for the party on the kitchen table, and she didn’t even yell at me when I squeezed the tube too hard and got glitter glue everywhere. There was a spot of purple glitter that didn’t get cleaned up, on the seat of the chair where I always sat. I never scratched it off. It was like a reminder that it had all really happened.

The biggest problem with having my mom for a mother was that when she wanted to pretend something hadn’t happened the way it really had, she just acted as if the reality she wanted was true. So my memories were all twisted around varying levels of truth and lies. Things I actually remembered mixed with things my mother told me happened. Sometimes the lies were like looking through a piece of gauze, because I could still see behind them. But sometimes the truth was the gauze and the lies were like silhouettes. Sometimes I forgot which was which, and there were two versions of a story, but I couldn’t remember which one to believe.

But I know I had a sleepover birthday party when I was in fourth grade, and I know we made invitations with purple glitter for every single girl in my class. And I know that at the party, around midnight, when we were supposed to be asleep but were waiting until the clock struck twelve to see what would happen if we said “Bloody Mary” into the mirror three times, my parents started fighting.

What began as hushed, sharp whispers turned into my mother’s voice exploding from the bedroom, and my father yelling that he was tired of her bullshit. Some of the girls laughed, but most of them didn’t, and in the green light from the VCR, I could see the horror on their faces. Tracy Witzleben pulled her sleeping bag over her head and cried.

On Monday no one made room for me or Tracy at any of the lunch tables. We got stuck sitting together at an empty table by the smelly garbage cans. We didn’t talk. I’m pretty sure she hated me.

I didn’t work up the nerve to have friends over again until the Four Amigos, in junior high school. But when things started to get bad with my mom, I knew how hard I needed to work to keep it a secret. I never had another birthday party. Drinks and dinner with Luanne don’t count.

Even under the current circumstances, having a sleepover with Myra and Heather felt much safer than my fourth grade party. My mother was all the way across the country, for one thing.

Myra’s house smelled warm and garlicky. Heather was in the kitchen cooking, and something sizzled loudly in a big wok. She used a pair of chopsticks instead of a spatula. The steam from the pan made her blond curls frizz around her face.

“What are you making?” I asked, walking into the kitchen.

“Pad see ew,” she said, waving her chopsticks at me. “I found the hugest shrimp at the public market today. They’re like fists!”

“I’ve never been particularly keen on eating my hand,” Myra said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, scissors at the ready, thumbing through a magazine, with pieces torn from the pages piled in front of her.

Heather gave her a look.

“What?” Myra said, laughing. “It smells amazing, but if you were going to write it as a menu item, ‘fist-sized shrimp’ wouldn’t necessarily be the most compelling description.”

“Are you opening a restaurant?” I asked.

“I wish!” Heather said. “It’s a pipe dream. Robbie needs me at the store. And we don’t have the kind of start-up funds lying around to make it happen.”

“I keep telling her that she should get a job at a restaurant to start making the right connections,” Myra said. She cut paper dolls out of the magazine scraps. A model from one magazine, a skirt from another. The beautiful blue sky, from a perfume ad, cut into a blouse.

“But who will do Robbie’s books?” Heather said. She squirted oil into the pan, and the sizzle turned into a roar.

“They’re called accountants,” Myra said.

Heather held up her hand and gave Myra the finger over her shoulder.

“I’m just saying,” Myra said, “you’re talented. Don’t let fear stop you. You need to think about what you’d do if you knew you couldn’t fail.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Heather said. “Because, obviously, I’d fly.” She piled noodles into three bowls and brought them over to us. Myra swept her paper dolls into a pile at the side of the table, to make room.

“You would?” I asked. “Because I think I’d swim the Atlantic.”

“I don’t know,” Myra said. “Just because you wouldn’t fail doesn’t mean you wouldn’t get really freaking cold.”

“True,” I said.

“I guess I’m just saying that it’s a little different for you,” Heather said to Myra. “And it’s a bullshit mantra—‘What would you do if you knew you wouldn’t fail?’—the whole idea that passion counts for everything. Because it doesn’t. Tons of people want to be fashion designers. They couldn’t all be you. Tons of people want to be chefs. Some of them have to settle for being bookkeepers. If I’m doing the books and Robbie has a bad month, he doesn’t have to pay me. If he hires an accountant or an employee, he loses the wiggle room. It’s not the same as your business. You don’t have a mortgage. You don’t have a husband counting on you.”

I worried it was about to get ugly. I wasn’t sure it was necessarily the safest thing in the world to point out to a woman who’d just had a run-in with her married ex that she didn’t have a husband. But Myra seemed to take it in the spirit in which it was intended. There was enough history, enough love built up, that they could be blunt. They could say the difficult things.

“I know,” Myra said. “I do get it. It’s just I think you’re so talented that if you took the leap, you wouldn’t fail. Not everyone can be a chef, but I honestly believe you could. Because this”—she pointed to her bowl with a chopstick—“is like the best food there ever was.”

I nodded. It was. The noodles were super hot, with just the right amount of salty and sweet.

“And, you know,” Myra said, “I’d tell you if I thought otherwise.”

“Oh,” Heather said, sighing. “You are such a pain in my ass.” She reached into Myra’s bowl with her chopsticks and stole one of her shrimp. “Like fists, I tell you.” She smiled a crazy big smile and Myra retaliated by stealing a shrimp from Heather’s bowl.

I was quiet while I ate, focusing carefully on balancing bits of vegetables between my chopsticks. Luanne and I never had talks like this. We always skirted on the edge of trying not to offend each other. We really only scratched the surface. I wondered who I’d be if I’d had friends to say the hard stuff.

Myra insisted on doing the dishes. She wouldn’t let me or Heather help. “Cooks and guests don’t clean,” she said, shaking her head.

Heather and I refilled Myra’s huge green glass goblets with wine and sat out on the back steps.

“Where did you learn how to cook?”

“My mom taught me,” Heather said, taking a sip of her wine. The goblet was so big it looked like she could drown in it. “She cooked so well, remember? I never bothered to learn. But then after I married Robbie . . .” She stopped and held her breath. Her face was pinched, her lips pressed together until they were almost white.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, but she took a minute to collect herself, taking another sip of wine. “After I married Robbie, I had her teach me.” She made a funny sound, like a cross between a gasp and a squeak. I thought she was going to tell me that her mom had died. I searched my brain for the right thing to say. My attachment to my parents wasn’t the same as other people’s. I didn’t want them to die, but sometimes the idea of them simply not existing anymore calmed me. I’m sure that wasn’t the way Heather felt about her mother. I’m sure her death left a hole, a space that couldn’t be filled. I wondered what it was like to have the kind of mother who made life easier, who taught you how to cook. I couldn’t imagine having a wonderful mother and losing her.

But then Heather burst into tears and said, “I wanted to be the kind of mom she is.” She sobbed so hard that her wine sloshed over the edge of the goblet and splashed on the steps. I took the goblet from her and set it down next to me. I put my arm around her and hugged. I didn’t know what else to do.

“We’ve been trying for a really long time,” Heather said into my shoulder. Her voice was muffled and wet.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

She sniffed and pulled away, wiping her face with her hands. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She took a few deep breaths. “You don’t need me crying all over you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s really okay.”

Heather laughed. “You spend high school being terrified of getting knocked up, you know?” She reached across me and grabbed her wine.

I nodded, but I was so far from knowing. In high school I’m not even sure I thought sex was a thing that actually happened. I didn’t kiss anyone until I got to college. And even then it wasn’t like it was a frequent occurrence.

“Now we’re actually trying and it just never happens. I went to the doctor a couple of months ago.” She looked like she was going to say something more but didn’t. She put her wine down and picked at a splinter on the railing of the steps.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Everything is fine.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “Maybe it’ll just happen when—”

“Do you think,” she said, “since you’re here . . .” Her voice trailed off. She pried the splinter loose.

I thought for a moment that she was going to ask for one of my eggs or wanted me to carry a child for them. I took a big gulp of wine.

“Do you think you could talk to Robbie?” she asked. “He listens to you. All my tests came back fine, so now Robbie is supposed to go, you know, give a sample.” She smiled awkwardly. “But he won’t.” She used the pointier end of the splinter to poke at the pad of her opposite thumb, watching as her skin yielded to the pressure instead of breaking. “He’s missed two appointments. He says he’ll go, but then he doesn’t.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, it’s been a long time since—”

“I know, I know!” Heather said. “But to Robbie . . .” She sighed. “To Robbie it hasn’t. He still talks about you all the time. He still thinks about you.”

It made me wonder what Heather thought of Jessie. What she was thinking about me now. The fact that she said that Robbie still felt close to Jessie made me feel like she didn’t. Like there might be old wounds or bad feelings. I felt a twinge of rejection.

“I’ll try,” I said, desperately wanting to make up for everything Jessie Morgan had done.

“Thank you,” Heather said, squeezing my arm.

“Hallelujah!” Myra sang from the kitchen in a fake operatic voice. “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

“Are you done with the dishes?” Heather called from the step.

“Righto,” Myra said.

“Movie time!” Heather yelled, standing up.

“Right again!” Myra said.

We were all hanging out in the living room in our pajamas—mine borrowed from Myra—watching
The Breakfast Club
and eating popcorn with hot sauce and melted American cheese on it, reciting lines along with the movie, when we heard tapping on the window.

“What was that?” I asked.

Heather smiled.