“Girls, girls, listen up.” The woman in the jogging suit clapped her hands, bringing quiet except for the pop pop pop noise of the staple gun a guy on the stage was using to attach giant leaves to a backdrop. “Now, we have less than three weeks until this fashion show must come off, so we’ve got to get serious and get working. As the Lakeview Models it is critical that you present the best possible image to the community.”
This seemed to calm everyone down but the staple-gun guy, who just rolled his eyes at no one in particular and hoisted another leaf up on the stage.
“Now,” the woman continued, “we’re going to do it just like we practiced last week: you enter, walk down the center aisle, across the stage, pause, and then go back down the way you came in. Remember the beat we learned last week: one, two, three.” She snapped her fingers, demonstrating. One of the models, a short girl with long black hair, snapped her own fingers in time to make sure she got it. I finished my Coke and tossed the cup in the trash.
“Okay, let’s line up and do it.” The woman climbed down the small steps at the side of the stage, with the Lakeview Models clackety-clacking along behind her. Their voices and hair tossing melded into one long stream of girl, a blur of makeup and giggling and clean skin. They lined up just to the right of me and I could feel my hipbones sticking out and wanted to cut myself to half my size, small enough to fit in a corner, under a table, in the palm of a hand.
I got up quickly as they were still shuffling into order, red shirt after red shirt, curve after curve, the same white toothy smile repeated into infinity. I turned and walked back to Little Feet while the purple-suited woman clapped out the beat behind me and the first girl started down the aisle, mindful of the pace: one, two, three.
Chapter Four
Lydia Catrell had changed my mother’s life. With her tan and frosted hair and too many brightly colored matching shorts-and-sandals outfits, she had brought out a side of my mother that I believed would otherwise have lain dormant forever, never shown to the world. My mother, who had spent most of her life smiling apologetically while my father entertained and offended everyone around him, had to wait until he had stepped out of the spotlight before she finally came into her own. And like it or not (and I usually didn’t), Lydia Catrell had shown her the way.
Lydia was a widow, like all women from Florida seemed to be. Her husband had been involved in the plastic utensil business and her house was filled with more colorful plastic bins and spatulas and bathtub mats than you could shake a stick at. She moved in with a flourish of bright furniture all making its way up the driveway right next to ours; a pink couch, a turquoise easy chair, a lemony-peach divan. My mother went over the next day with a mason jar full of roses and zinnias and stayed for three hours, most of it spent listening to Lydia talk about herself and her children and her dead husband. Lydia was all color and noise, in her bright pink shorts and sequined T-shirts with fringe, zooming through the neighborhood in her huge Lincoln Town Car that seemed to suck up the road as it passed. Lydia blew in like a cyclone, altering the landscape around her, and my mother was pulled in immediately.
Within a month you could see the change. My mother was wearing sandals and even the occasional sequined shirt, frosting her hair, and going out every Thursday night to Ranzino’s, the bar at the Holiday Inn that featured easy-listening hits, dancing, and tons of paunchy men in toupees out for a good time. My mother came home with her cheeks flushed, tossing her newly frosted hair, saying she couldn’t believe she’d ever go to such a place and Lydia was such a card and it wasn’t her thing, not at all, only to head right back the next Thursday. I sat upstairs and listened to my mother pour her heart out to Lydia Catrell over coffee, thinking these were things she could never share with me. She cried and cursed my father as Lydia clucked her tongue and said Poor dear, it must have been so hard for you. Ashley had Lewis and my mother had Lydia but I was alone on Thursday nights, waiting for the rumble of the Town Car in the driveway and my mother’s key in the lock on the kitchen door. I couldn’t get to sleep until I heard her trying to tiptoe past my door in an effort not to wake me.
The newest thing was the trip to Europe. Lydia belonged to a travel club called The Old-Timers, which was a bunch of single women over forty who got a cheap group rate by taking trips together to exotic locales, usually Las Vegas. My mother had been on one of those trips a few months after Lydia moved in. I’d spent the weekend with my dad and the Weather Pet, picturing my mother playing blackjack, seeing Wayne Newton, and going to the Liberace Museum, all of which were listed on The Old-Timers travel itinerary. After three days and four nights my mother had returned with a new white shorts-and-sandals set, winnings of about fifty bucks, and a million stories about these middle-aged women taking Vegas by storm. She said it was the best time she ever had, so it was no wonder she was interested in the trip to Europe. That was a four-week extravaganza through England, Italy, France, and Spain, with stops along the way to see the bullfights, tour Buckingham Palace, and sunbathe nude in the South of France, the latter being something my mother chose to pass on. If she went, she’d be leaving two weeks after Ashley got married.
“Just think,” Lydia was saying as I came in from work one afternoon, “four weeks in Europe. It’s what you wanted to do in college but could never afford. Now you have the money, so why not go?”
“I don’t have the money,” my mother said. “With the wedding so close and Haven going back to school too, I just don’t know if the timing is good.”
“Haven is a big girl.” Lydia smiled at me. “Look at how tall she is, for Godsakes. She can take care of herself for a month. She’ll love it.”
“She’s only fifteen,” my mother said, and I could tell by the way she was biting her lip that she hadn’t made up her mind yet. I felt bad about it but there was some place in me that didn’t want her to go. Europe seemed too far away. I couldn’t picture her anywhere there, except standing in front of famous landmarks from my history books. My mother and Lydia, in front of the Eiffel Tower, Westminster Abbey, the leaning Tower of Pisa. My mother and Lydia, topless in France—the landmarks were easier.
I watched my mother from across the table as she talked with Lydia. Now and then I’d catch her eye and find her smiling at me, that same smile I remembered from when times were better and my father looped an arm around her waist, pulling her in closer the way I so often wanted to do now. To scoop her away from Lydia and the rest of the world and have her all to myself—if only for a while.
Meanwhile, the wedding continued to take over our lives. It hung over the house like a storm cloud, refusing to budge, promising possible disaster at any second. Every surface from the coffee table to the top of the television seemed to be filled with small scraps of paper detailing wedding reminders in my mother’s small, neat hand.
Bridesmaids: orders in by?
Ashley meets with caterer again July 30
Haven shoes, pantyhose, hair?
RSVP list, final version
Europe???????????????
She left them around like clues, a way I had of keeping up with her concerns from day to day. Just like I’d sat in my bathroom and listened through the vent to her crying to Lydia all those mornings. I was only able to share my mother’s concerns from a distance, unknown to her at all.
Meanwhile my father had returned from honeymooning for a week in the Virgin Islands, with a tan, more hair, and a grin that seemed pasted on that my mother noticed even from the front window when he dropped me off after my weekly dinner with him. She tossed her hair and kept whatever sarcastic comment was twisting her face to herself before she headed out again with Lydia, the Town Car’s horn beeping three times to summon her off to the Holiday Inn.
And then there was Ashley, who after dealing with Carol’s on-again-off-again participation in the wedding (now back on, after many tears and much long-distance wrangling and a promise that she could leave immediately after the wedding pictures were taken) was on to another crisis, this
being her first sit-down dinner with Lewis’s parents, the Warshers. I sat in my room and listened to her tearing through her closet, hangers clanking, until I was summoned in to judge which dress was best.
“Okay,” she said from inside the closet, where she was busy bumping around, “this is the first option.” She came out in a red dress with a white collar, tugging at the hem to make it appear longer than it was.
“Too short,” I said. “Too red.”
She glanced at herself in the mirror, then gave up on the hem and headed back into the closet. “You’re right. Red is the wrong message to be sending. Red is a warning; it just screams out. I need something that makes me blend. I want them to welcome me into the family.”
Ever since Ashley had met Lewis, she had taken to using what my mother called Oprah phrases. Lewis talked the same way; he was a placater, a peacemaker, the kind of person who would hold your hand on an airplane if you were scared, able to quote verbatim the statistics about how it was the safest thing, honestly. I could only imagine what an entire Warsher clan would be like. They were from Massachusetts: that was all we knew.
She came back out in a white dress with a high neckline and a long flowing skirt that rustled when she walked. “Well?”
“You look too holy,” I told her.
“Holy?” She turned and looked in the mirror, to judge for herself. “God. This is awful. Everything is wrong.” She sat down beside me on the bed, crossing her legs. “I just want them to like me.”
“Of course they’ll like you.” This was one of the rare moments since her engagement when Ashley and I were just talking, not yelling or discussing the wedding or exchanging the odd nasty look on the stairs. I talked slowly, as if one wrong word might end it altogether.
“I know they’ll pretend to like me; they have to do that.” She lay back, stretching her arms over her head. “But they’re normal people, Haven. Lewis’s parents have been married for twenty-eight years. His mother teaches kindergarten. What are they going to think of Daddy if he gets all loud at the wedding and starts doing his Wizard of Oz thing? Plus I already told Mom she’s got to keep Lydia under control because they just won’t know what to make of her. I don’t even know what to make of her.”
“She’s Mom’s best friend.”
“I guess so.” She sighed, bouncing her feet against the edge of the bed.
“Do you think she’ll go to Europe with her?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She sat up and looked at me. “It would be good for her if she did, though. All this stuff with Daddy has been harder on her than she’s let on to you. She deserves to treat herself.”
“I know,” I said, wondering how much she’d let on to Ashley. With that one sentence, I could feel the five years between us again. “I just think with the wedding and all ...”
“Haven, you’re in high school now. You should jump at the chance to stay alone for that long. I would have. God, I would have been wild.” She stood up and went behind the screen, tossing the holy dress over the top a few seconds later. “But you won’t, and that’s good. You won’t be like me.”
I thought back to Ashley’s long list of boyfriends from high school, all their names and faces running together until they ended with Lewis’s skinny nose and constant look of concern. I thought of Sumner again, suddenly, and saw him clearly in my mind on the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, the sunset fading pink and red and purple behind him. I heard the doorbell sound from downstairs and Ashley said, “Get that, will you please? It’s Lewis.”
I went downstairs and opened the door. Sure enough, there was Lewis in one of his trademark skinny ties and oxford shirts. He was holding a bouquet of bright purple flowers with yellow eyes surrounded by some creepy kind of fuzzy foliage. It was easy to get a complex from bringing flowers to my mother’s house, so Lewis usually stuck to exotic ones: orchids, tulips out of season. He wanted to bring Ashley things she couldn’t get at home; with my mother’s obsessive gardening, that left very little to choose from.
“Hey, Lewis,” I said. “How are you?”
“Good.” He leaned forward and pecked me on the cheek, something he’d taken to doing as soon as the engagement was announced. I was taller than him, and this made it awkward. He still did it, though, every time I saw him.
“You want me to put those in water?” I nodded to the flowers.
“Oh, sure. That’d be great.” He handed them to me. “Is she upstairs?”
I watched him go up, taking the steps two at a time. He moved through our house now with the ease of someone who no longer considered himself a guest, no sidestepping knickknacks and perching on the edges of furniture but walking easily across the floors as if he belonged there. It hadn’t taken long for Lewis to feel at home; he’d come along when we needed a man in the house. With my father gone and the three of us struggling to fill up the spaces he’d left behind, it was only natural that Ashley would find someone to hold her together, to take care of things. Maybe it was the very thing I hated about Lewis—his absolute dullness—that attracted Ashley most to him. After the divorce and all the craziness, she’d needed something normal and steady to ground herself. Maybe by then she didn’t want any more surprises.
Ashley always turned to a new boy when things got sticky or hard, or lonely. But she was never alone. She called the shots, easing people in and out of our door and our lives with the wave of one hand. The ones I liked and the ones I hated, they came and went at her whim with little or no explanation to the rest of us other than a slammed door or a muted sniffle that I could only hear late at night. Ashley kept it all to herself, even when she wasn’t the only one who was affected.
Ashley dated Sumner all that Virginia Beach summer and into the next fall, speeding around town in the Volkswagen and laughing all the time, filling the house with noise whenever they came breezing through. Whenever Sumner was over, everyone came out of their respective hiding places: my mother from the kitchen, my father from in front of the TV, all of us migrating towards his voice and laughter, or whatever it was that made everyone want to be around him. He and Ashley celebrated each month they’d spent together; he bought her a silver bracelet with a slender heart that dangled off of it and brushed against her watchband. I could hear them in the driveway just after curfew, their voices rising up to my window, and then the putter of the VW engine as he pulled away, that low, steady murmur that filled the entire street, humming. Ashley was happy and nice to me and things were good that fall as the days turned crisp and sharp and the weather on channel five was still being done by Rowdy Ron the Weather Mon, who was overweight, more than a little crazy, and no threat to my parents’ marriage whatsoever. A new family moved in down the street and Ashley had a new best friend, a girl named Laurel Adams, with freckles and a long drawl. Ashley and Sumner gave her a ride to school every day that fall after Virginia Beach and introduced her around; pretty soon she was breezing in the back door with them. Sumner imitated her accent and she and Ashley traded clothes and I hung around the edges of rooms watching them, listening to their voices through the house. Sumner would always look up and see me and call out, “Miss Haven, stop hiding and show yourself,” and Ashley would put an arm around me and tease Sumner about two-timing her with me. Laurel Adams would toss her long honey-blond hair and just say “Lawwwwd” the way she always did when she had nothing better to contribute. The weather turned colder and colder and my mother packed up all my summer clothes, shaking the sand of Virginia Beach from my shorts and tank tops before whisking them off to the attic until Memorial Day.
Halloween came and Sumner carved a jack-o’-lantern that was supposed to look like Ashley but turned to mush. Ashley’s had one of Sumner’s awful ties hanging off of it and dangling over the porch rail. Ashley went as Cleopatra, Sumner as a mad scientist, and Laurel Adams as Marilyn Monroe in a peroxide wig and a dress that I could tell my mother thought was entirely too tight. They took me around the neighborhood, house to house, and ate my candy; I felt like I was r
eally doing something, being somebody, with them all around me. Afterwards they dropped me off at home and Ashley kissed my forehead, which she never did, and then they were gone, puttering down the street with the light catching the blond in Laurel’s wig and turning it silver, I sat up and watched my father scare the hell out of all the trick,or,treaters with his monster mask until everyone had gone home and I got sent to bed and ate candy in the dark. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard them outside.
First the car coming up the street and pulling into the driveway, and then Ashley’s voice, harsh. “I don’t care, Sumner. Just go, okay?”
“How can you do this?” He sounded strange, not like himself. I sat up in bed.
“It’s done.” A car door slammed. “Leave me alone.”
“You can’t just walk off like that, Ash.” His voice was bumpy, breathless, like he was moving around the yard after her. “At least let’s talk about it.”
“I’m not talking.” Her feet were stomping up the front steps. “Let it go, Sumner. Just forget it.”
“‘Forget it.’ Shit, I can’t forget it, Ashley. This isn’t something you can just wipe away like that.”
“Sumner, leave me alone.” I could hear her fumbling with the key. “Just go. Please. Just go.”
A pause, long enough for her to have gotten in the house, but she was still out there. Then, “Come on.” It was Sumner.