Once I asked him about the enormous variety of eye colors he must see every day. It was years ago, when I'd spent the morning at the kitchen table, staring into the eyes of Kiernan's mother, Deborah, a clear watery hypnotic green. "And you must see some amazing blues, too," I'd said to my husband. "Eye color's not clinically significant," he said, bent over the newspaper.
"Kiernan gave me this," Alex says now, in the car on the way home from Ben's, holding up a key ring with a large yellow compass dangling from one end.
"When did you see Kiernan?"
"He was at Ben's. He, like, babysits for them sometimes--not babysits, because Ben is too old, but, you know, hangs out. Whatever. You know. They know him from day camp."
Last summer and the summer before, Ruby and Kiernan were counselors at the day camp at the community center. In the evenings, they sat at our kitchen table and cut out construction-paper stars and planets. They chose books for story time, and decided which rainy-day games were least likely to end in tears. Kiernan would develop grandiose ideas, and Ruby would talk sense into him. He wanted to do a production of Our Town. "K, they are five and six," Ruby had said. "They'll get it," he insisted. "People always underestimate little kids." Ruby found a dramatic version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" to do instead. Kiernan sulked through the rehearsals. Ben's brother Aidan was Jack.
"Is he your boyfriend?" Aidan asked Ruby accusingly one day staring at Kiernan.
"What do you think?"
"I think he is." Aidan didn't sound at all happy about it.
"I think you're right," Ruby said with a small smile.
My boys both like Kiernan, but I should have been paying closer attention lately when they talked about him. This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet. Behind the wheel I am invisible, a chauffeur. A month or so ago the boys were in the car, their backpacks between them, and my reverie on whether we had lettuce and which day lilies would have a second bloom had slowly given way to the muttered discussion behind me.
"All I mean is that he can be weird," Alex said.
"You think everybody's weird," Max replied in his low, almost inaudible voice.
"Remember that time he was listening to that same band over and over for, like, months? He would take off his headphones and you'd hear the same song. They weren't even a good band."
"They were an okay band."
"Okay they weren't a popular band. Nobody knew about them but Kiernan."
Ruby will not discuss Kiernan with me. She is sorry she said anything at Molly's Closet. "You make such a big deal out of things," she says. When I refer to Kiernan as her prom date while she is foraging for food with her friends, she slices fiercely through the sandwich she is making. She is not a vegetarian this year. The sandwich is turkey. Sarah is having turkey, too, and Rachel is picking at ham and cheese. Rachel has had a manicure, and her bitten nails are sad little stubs of magenta. She keeps raising her fingers to her mouth, then putting them down again.
Sarah says, "We don't really date the way you guys did when you were young." She makes our youth sound like something Glen might have seen on the History Channel. Sarah's sport reflects her character; she spends her afternoons swimming a straight line, her stroke unvarying, her body shaped like a garden spade, her hair a neat bob of silky brown that dries cleanly in place. She is Ruby's reality check. "Am I overreacting?" Ruby will sometimes say to Sarah, and Sarah will smile and say, "Yes." As in most triangular friendships, both of them feel deeply protective of Rachel because she is not the best friend of either.
"I get that about dating," I say to Sarah. "But each of you is going to the prom with a specific boy, even if you're all going together." Sarah is going with Eric, the boy she has been seeing since ninth grade. It would not surprise me a bit if I could fast-forward the film of all their lives and find Sarah and Eric married and moving into a house a block or two away from both their families. Sarah wants to be a nurse. When Nancy said, "You could be a doctor, sweetie," Sarah looked at her mother and said, "And you could be a dean, not a professor. They're two entirely different jobs."
"Well," Nancy said to me as she recounted it. "I guess I got told."
I don't know what I would see for Ruby on that film of the future. I fear that what I would see for Rachel would be unhappiness or discontent. Ruby has specific aims and desires. Rachel just seems to have a big yearning for something unnamed, perhaps never to be named.
"Kiernan is obsessed with prom," says Rachel, opening the fridge to get the mustard. "Just obsessed."
"He needs to grow up," says Ruby. "It's just a dance. Big deal."
Sarah's mouth is full. The swimming coach once figured out that Sarah needs five thousand calories a day just to stay at her current weight. Around a mouthful of bread she says, "Eric only cares about prom so he can get to breakfast, and the lake. French toast and tanning. Doesn't that make me feel special? I think you should be nicer to Kiernan, Rubes," she adds, cutting her eyes sideways toward me to make certain she is not giving too much away.
"I am nice to him," Ruby says.
I start to fold towels in the adjacent mudroom, hoping that they'll become talkative when I'm out of sight, but instead they begin a serious conversation about pedicure colors. Kiernan found a sky-blue tuxedo at the thrift store at which Ruby struck out on a dress. It came with a ruffled shirt, a cummerbund, and an enormous bow tie. Ruby says the bow tie looks like a butterfly. I know exactly what Kiernan will look like. He will look like James McGhee, the boy who took me to my prom. He wore that selfsame tuxedo. I remember finding an old photograph of the two of us posed in front of two freestanding Styrofoam Corinthian pillars that had been set up in the hotel hallway and thinking what a good thing it was that the classic black tux had come back into style, and that the sort of Empire-waist dress I was wearing had gone out of fashion. Now Kiernan is wearing the blue tux, and Ruby and all her friends wear dresses with Empire waists. I am trying to learn to take nothing for granted.
It's raining hard and I am parked at the curb, waiting for Max to be finished with his drum lesson. I'm so tired that I can't tell whether my foggy vision is the rain, or lack of sleep. Through the fine mist thrown up by the water hitting my hood I can occasionally see a strange woosh of movement in the picture window on the second floor of the hardware-store building. Weeks ago I had to park across the street, and from there I could tell that the odd blur of movement was Max's shaggy head. It's why he doesn't want to cut his hair. He hurls it around when he plays the drums, and a small smile pops the dimples I've seen so rarely in the past year. When Max's voice began to change, so did his mood. Both are low most of the time. The students moving up from middle school to high school were asked to fill out a questionnaire. "Describe yourself in one word," one of the questions said. Ruby said Max left the space blank. "Maybe he couldn't come up with just one word," I'd said. "Mommy, be real," Ruby replied, shaking her head.
"He looks like a homeless guy," Glen says sometimes after Max has cleared his plate and put it in the sink, his bare feet silent on the kitchen floor. "I try to be tolerant." Glen believes this, but it's not really true. He confuses silence with tolerance. A young man came into his office to interview for a job as a part-time bookkeeper, and Glen almost didn't talk to him because he had a shooting star tattooed on the back of his hand. He has turned out to be a hard worker, but most of the time, when Glen mentions him, he adds, "I hope he's socking away his salary, because it's going to cost him a couple thousand dollars when he decides to have that thing removed."
One night Ruby put down her fork and said, "Daddy, he probably has more than one. You just don't see them. Most people who get inked have a saying: not where a judge can see it."
"You'd better not have any thoughts along those lines," Glen said, his chin set sharp as an arrowhead.
"Oh, Daddy," Ruby said airily, twirling her spaghetti. "My body is a temple."
Max and Alex laughed in uniso
n, the way they had when they were little. It made me happy to see them of one mind again for just a moment. They were never alike, even as infants, one bald and moonfaced, the other all eyes and long parentheses of legs, but when they were small they complemented each other. Max would build with Legos, and Alex would hand him the blocks. Alex would kick the soccer ball around the yard, and Max would go back into the woods to retrieve it. Alex only began to be unkind to Max when other kids did. They would look at the baroque doodles on the front of Max's notebook and say, "What's that supposed to be?" and Max would say, "It's a microscopic organism found in the water on Mars. It glows in the dark." The ones I secretly called the Polo Shirt boys would make a face. And the girls would go where the Polo Shirt boys went. And Alex became one of the Polo Shirt boys himself.
"People at school don't believe me and Max are twins," Alex said one day.
"Max and I," I say, and then, "I was there, sweet pea. You absolutely are."
"Just fraternal," he said, as though that wasn't the same, perhaps not even closely related.
I can see Max's hair going back and forth, back and forth, like a wheat field in a windstorm; can very faintly hear some thumps. I don't think Max plays the drums very well yet, but I'm not sure exactly how you recognize good drumming. If he continues, we will build him a soundproof room in the unfinished space above the garage and buy him a set of drums. For now, he takes his sticks and plays on the surface of his bed, the kitchen counter, the dashboard of the car. When he drums he seems happier, or at least less sad. The rest of the time he seems absent, as though he's gone somewhere else and left his body behind. "Earth to Max," Alex says sometimes to get his brother's attention. At least they are beginning to reach puberty at the same time, caught in some odd middle ground of metamorphosis. Their legs have become long and muscled and suddenly covered with hair. The bones beneath the skin of their faces have come into sharper relief. Ruby says I should pay no attention to the porn on their computers. "It's the tech version of Playboy under the bed," she told me.
"When my mother found Playboy under your uncle Richard's bed, he was grounded for a week," I said.
"I dunno, does that make sense to you? Plus, are we suddenly going to decide that Nana was the perfect mother?" Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as being too honest with your children, or at least your daughter. My boys wouldn't think to pass judgment on my upbringing unless I told them I'd been beaten in the basement. But Ruby has parsed my childhood stories and come up with a fairly accurate portrait of a mother who believed clothing and feeding were the same thing as loving. At least, unlike Glen's father, my mother didn't believe in corporal punishment.
The plans for a terrace garden are on my lap. "Hyssop," I write in the margin, then erase it. I put my head back and close my eyes. After a few minutes, I force myself to open them again. "Bee balm," I write, and then say aloud, "Jesus God." How can I make a garden for a woman who has told me she hates bees? When I asked my client how she felt about butterflies, she made a rocking motion with her hand. "I'm not a big bug person," she said.
Ruby left the house early this morning, said it was to work on the literary magazine. I think she wants to avoid being alone with me. In the middle of the night on Saturday, I awoke to a sound from downstairs and realized that it was the teakettle whistling. Ruby and Sarah were moving swiftly around the kitchen, taking milk from the refrigerator, reaching for the sugar. I stood in the doorway watching them before Ruby saw me and startled slightly. "Go back to bed," she'd whispered to me.
"Pearl," wailed a voice from the den. "Pearl, I'm gonna puke."
"Oh, God," Sarah said as I pushed past her.
Rachel was lying on the couch, covered with a blanket. There were twigs and some leaves snarled in her long dark hair, and I pulled them off. "I hate myself," she whispered, and then louder, "I hate myself."
"Shh," I said. When Rachel opened her eyes and saw me standing over her, she wailed and rolled onto her side, hiding her face in the cushions. I could see a smear of dirt on her shoulder, and what looked like a bruise on her throat. It reminded me of a night in college when Alice had staggered in at dawn and fallen onto her bed opposite mine. "So many men, so little time to go to the arboretum with the wrong goddamn one," she'd muttered. It was the one time I'd taken care of her rather than the other way around.
"Please go away," Rachel cried into the cushions.
"Mommy," Ruby hissed from the kitchen.
"Where were you tonight?" I said, standing between Ruby and Sarah at the stove.
"At Tony's," Sarah whispered, picking up a tray with the tea and some crackers.
We have a steak house, and a pizza parlor, but the kids like Tony's, an ice-cream place two miles outside town that puts its picnic tables out in May and stores them away in October and has a menu of microwave breaded things to supplement the sundaes in waxed paper cups. The kids sit on the picnic tables--not on the benches, atop the tables themselves--and call comments to one another and make one root-beer float last until it's just a muddy puddle in the bottom of the go-cup. One girl after another pulls a friend aside, into the filthy ladies' room, behind the storage shed, to whisper. They broke up. He's home from college. Her period is late. He got suspended. Like a broadcast in another room, we mothers hear about some of this after the fact--in overheard calls, or conversations at the kitchen table. The kids know we will keep quiet, not out of tact but out of shame. We know that our children are having sex, smoking pot, drinking beer, but it is easier to say nothing. "Ruby looks good!" some of the other mothers said when my daughter began to eat again, the closest they ever came to acknowledging that there was a time when Ruby looked terrible. Even when we're honest with one another, we tread carefully; the quickest way to lose a friend is to suggest that she is a bad mother, or to suggest that her children have problems, which amounts to the same thing. (Well, maybe not the quickest way to lose a friend. I know the quickest way.)
"Since when does Tony's serve beer?" I asked Ruby in the kitchen.
"Mom, let us handle this."
"Make her leave," Rachel cried from the other room. "I don't want her to see me." I could hear Sarah's quiet murmur. Sarah will be a good nurse. Even I felt a little calmer at the sound of her voice, until Ruby suddenly leaned toward me and closed her eyes. We swayed together like slow dancers at a high school mixer.
"Oh, Mommy, she's so messed up," she whispered.
"How bad? Do we need the police?"
The moment had shattered. "What?" Ruby said. "Oh, God, no. God. She just makes ... bad decisions. Really bad decisions." She'd shivered then. "Please go back to bed. Let us take care of this. I promise I'll call you if we need you." Back upstairs, I lay awake until the sky lightened. By morning Ruby was asleep in her own bed, and Sarah and Rachel were gone, the mug on the counter and the blanket on the floor the only signs that I hadn't had a nightmare. If they had made coffee instead of tea, if I had not been awakened by the whistle of the kettle, I might never have known that anything had happened.
I lean back in the car and will myself to stay awake. Perhaps tonight I will take a sleeping pill, just to catch up. "Boxwood," I write on the plans. Main Street is almost deserted because of the weather and the time of day. It's just after 6 P.M., and while the city fathers have done what they can, with the historically accurate streetlamps and the free parking, no one stays in town once evening comes. The small Middle Eastern restaurant that opened two years ago, run by an immigrant couple with two sons who are already poised to be the valedictorians of their respective classes, gets a couple of tables of diners on weekday nights.
I see a woman in a glistening yellow macintosh pass in front of my car. Her hood is up, she's holding an umbrella, she looks like an altogether generic person hurrying to an errand in a heavy rain, but I'm certain that it is Kiernan's mother, Deborah. There is a particular lilting motion to her walk, as though her toes were turned out and she were on the balls of her feet even in rubber rain boots. Deborah was once a dan
cer. We were once the closest of friends. I'm fairly certain that in the downpour she has not noticed or recognized my car, which is a dark heavy hatchback like those belonging to half the mothers in town. But it may be that she has and is refusing to look my way. This happens with some regularity Deborah pretending to see nothing but air where I'm standing. It always makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. Last year I was at a backyard party for the Lawrences' twentieth anniversary and Deborah came through the patio doors, and there I was, facing her. Without a word she was gone, as though she had been a hologram of herself, projected for an instant and then dissolved.
"Give my love to your mother," I used to say to Kiernan, and then "Give my best to your mother," followed by "Say hi to your mother," until one day Ruby said, "Mom, that's beyond pathetic. Just stop."
I wonder what Deborah will think if Ruby breaks up with Kiernan. I wonder if it's even possible for Ruby to break up with Kiernan. It's not just that Kiernan is in love with Ruby, although I know he is; sometimes he looks as though his eyes are going to begin to spin in his head as she moves around the room, picking up the phone, picking up a magazine. He would like it best if Ruby stayed still and talked to him, but since that's not how Ruby is, especially these days, he takes second best, asking Alex about soccer and Max about some animated movie he's seen, Glen about the local minor league baseball team, me about whatever I have cooking on the stove. Kiernan is not just in love with Ruby; he's in love with our family.