Reunion: A Novel Read online

  Family. This word is getting bandied about in a way that’s making me dizzy. It’s got less meaning in this room than it does at seven p.m. on ABC, where a Chinese dude and a lovely Latina can have the world’s most beautiful black baby with no questions asked. Is this my family? Are these women, who came in such quick succession but who divorced me as easily as they divorced my father—are they my family? And these children, this rainbow of ages and heights and features—are they my family because half their DNA says they’d make good donors if and when the time comes? If this is what family is, then count me out.

  There’s an awkward silence in the room. Joyce pulls my ear down to her mouth and whispers, “Will you say something?”

  I look at her and shake my head. I mouth the words No way, José, which is what she used to say to me when she caught me looking at her liquor cabinet when I was younger.

  She squeezes my arm and in a boozy whisper repeats her new mantra: “I missed you, I missed you.”

  I squeeze her knee lightly—all bone!—and hope she’ll stop talking.

  “If nobody wants to go first—” says Elliot.

  “I’ll go,” says Sasha.

  Louise, Dad’s wife before Sasha, purses her lips into a nasty little downturned smile. She hadn’t wanted the divorce and she’s always maintained that Sasha stole him away from her. She probably thinks she’d still be married to him if it weren’t for Sasha. She probably thinks he’d still be alive.

  Sasha scoots Mindy onto Nell’s lap and stands. She brushes off her skirt in a nervous way. Her cheeks are turning crimson and she hasn’t even started talking yet.

  I turn around and spot an open but warm bottle of white wine on the console behind me. I pick it up delicately and, as quietly as possible, pour some into my glass and also into Joyce’s glass, which still has ice and what smells like scotch at the bottom of it. She doesn’t mind.

  Lucy, sitting cross-legged next to the unlit fireplace, burps, and one of her older sisters laughs. Nell shushes them and Louise shoots an ugly face in my sister’s direction. I wish I were drunker. Or better, I wish I had some of that pot from last night. This situation could be a whole new scene if I’d smoked some of that magic weed. I could bring myself to tears, perhaps. I could say a few things about my father. We’d all pee ourselves, then go our separate ways until tomorrow. After that, we’d never have to see one another again. A goodbye to Stan Pulaski and a goodbye to one another. For good.

  “He was best at mealtime,” Sasha says. She’s got her face pointed at the floor, and it’s funny to try to imagine this suddenly shy woman ever giving tennis lessons or commanding the court with her instructions.

  “He fell in love easily and often,” she says. That’s certainly one way of looking at it. “It’s what made me love him and what drove me crazy about him.” This woman is generous to a fault.

  Across from me, Louise looks bored. Whitney looks pissed. Their children—all of them but Lily—look checked out. Joyce’s head is now resting on my arm and I think she might actually be asleep.

  “You want it to make sense,” Sasha says, and she raises her face suddenly. “You want for something like this to have some meaning.” She looks at Mindy and winks. Then she looks at me. Right at me. “You get the news and the first thing you think is ‘What does this mean? What’s the significance?’” She’s quiet for a minute, but she doesn’t sit down. Lucy and Lauren start squirming. My underarms are itchy, sweaty. Joyce is officially snoring. “You want it to make sense,” Sasha says again, still looking at me, and I wish she’d look away so I could look away. “But it doesn’t.”

  Mindy makes a sniffling sound, which I use as my cue to break eye contact.

  Then, with a sort of exhaustion, as if the spirit has left the medium’s body, Sasha sits suddenly back down and, in an entirely different voice—the voice, in fact, of a tennis pro—she says, loudly, almost giddily, “Phew. That’s it for me.”

  I wonder how it happened—Stan and Sasha. Did he see her at the country club and just know? Was it love at first sight? Whatever it was, it was more than what I had with Billy.

  Nell glances in my direction and offers me a timid little smile, and—just like that—we are sisters again.

  “Anyone else?” says Elliot.

  “I would just add,” says Nell, “that he’ll be missed.”

  “Absolutely,” says Elliot. “How about we raise our glasses?”

  He raises his in the air.

  “I just want to know—” It’s Louise talking. Louise, the ultimate baby maker. “I just want to know why there isn’t going to be a proper funeral.”

  “Like I said,” says Elliot, lowering his glass. “He didn’t want one.”

  “Says who?” Louise is sitting up straight now. She’s holding her hands in the shape of a little ball in her lap, and I can see from here, from across the room, that she’s gripping herself so tightly that her veins are popping up and down. And I realize she’s probably been planning this tiny explosion all day. She’s been holding it in and holding it in until just the right moment. She thinks she’s setting an example for her girls. Showing them how to fight the godless in a morally triumphant way. She has come to defend her dead ex-husband’s honor. Or something like that. God, I wish I were high.

  “Dad,” says Nell.

  “Dad,” says Louise. “As if you have the right to call that man Dad. As if any of you heathens have the right to call that man Dad.”

  Well, okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. I too take issue with our use of the word. I might even agree with her. But I also take issue with the word heathen. I think, perhaps, I would like to hear more about this word. I’d like to hear her God-fearing evidence. I sit up a little straighter and accidentally knock Joyce to attention, which in turn knocks Joyce’s glass to the floor.

  “Oh dear,” says Joyce, genuinely embarrassed. Sasha is kneeling in front of us almost immediately with a dish cloth in her hand. She’s rubbing Joyce’s knee, telling her it’s nothing while simultaneously dabbing up the spilled wine-and-scotch mixture.

  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she’s saying.

  “I’m old,” says Joyce. “You can’t take me anywhere.”

  “This is a sham,” says Louise, standing up. “This is a disgrace.”

  Nell starts laughing, which makes Elliot start laughing, which makes Mindy start laughing.

  Joyce grabs my wrist and says, “Are they laughing at me?”

  This makes me start laughing and I grab onto her other hand, which is grabbing onto my knee, and say, “No, Joyce. No. They are not laughing at you.”

  Louise is gathering her girls together like a woman scorned.

  Joyce says, “Who, then? Who are they laughing at?” She is like a blind woman asking to be shown the way.

  Sasha is still on her knees, still collecting the little pieces of ice and doing a once-over on the Oriental.

  I point at Louise so Joyce and everyone else can see me. “Her,” I say. “We’re laughing at her.”

  Louise and her gaggle of girls don’t even bother turning around. They’re out the living room door and soon out the front door, and soon after that, they are out of our lives for good.

  35

  after the party, doing dishes

  I’m standing at the sink doing dishes with Sasha. Mindy is to my right, standing on a kitchen stool. I hand her a dish; she takes it, dries it, stacks it with the others. Nell and Elliot are sitting at the kitchen island behind us, drinking wine and watching us clean. Normally I would mind, but they did the undesirable tasks of seeing Whitney and the twins to their cars and calling Joyce a cab. I’m happy to do some manual labor if it means I’m not required to participate. I’m happy to stand at the sink and watch the suds form and dissipate. Mindy and I can eavesdrop just fine from over here.

  Nell is saying, “You know what I think about? I think about that cabin we used to go to before Mom died, where we’d all play Monopoly and wait for the snow. Mom would ma
ke bread and Dad would cook some huge meal and you and I would shake cream until it turned into butter.”

  By you she must mean Elliot, because I have no memory of this cabin or these happy idyllic times, and so I break my self-imposed stupid vow of silence and say, “I don’t remember this.”

  “Because you weren’t born yet,” says Elliot. “Or maybe you were just a baby.”

  “I remember this one time,” Nell continues, “maybe the last time—it seems more romantic that way—”

  Elliot groans. He’s a million miles away. My beautiful brother. He is on autopilot and his life is shit.

  “Listen,” she says. “It was hunting season and Dad was out hunting and Mom made us stay inside all morning until the gunfire stopped. You and I”—again with the you, and I feel I am being made acutely and deliberately aware that this story is for Elliot, not for me, and that I am being allowed to enjoy it only as an audience member, as someone no different from Mindy or Sasha—“stood at the window looking at the snow, waiting for the quiet. We kept sneaking on our coats and every time Mom passed through the kitchen she made us take them off so we wouldn’t burn up.”

  “I remember this,” Elliot says. Perhaps he is closer than I think. Perhaps he is merely far away from me.

  Mindy is as quiet as a mouse, entranced by potentially inappropriate adult material.

  “There was a series of volleys,” says Nell, “and you pointed and a hunter in the distance walked out of the far woods toward three little mounds.”

  “The hunter was Dad,” says Elliot.

  “Don’t ruin my story,” says Nell. I imagine her elbowing him in the side, but I don’t turn around to see. “But, yes, the hunter is Dad. He passes the first mound and you say, ‘It’s a goose,’ but I say no. He passes the second mound and you say again that it’s a goose. He gets to the third mound, the one closest to us, and by this time I can tell that it is a goose, because it’s moving a little bit.”

  I hand Mindy a dish. She is standing dead still, staring at the cabinet in front of her. She is waiting to learn the fate of the goose, and I wish I could tell Nell to stop, to remind her that a child is in the room—a child who might have nightmares about dead geese—but I can’t tell her to stop, because I don’t want to tell her to stop, because I want to hear what happens next. I want to hear if, at some point, I, as a little baby maybe, become part of this memory after all.

  It occurs to me that Nell might finally be drunk, which would be a kind of relief to me. But who knows? Maybe she’s just feeling maudlin.

  “I’m watching, really watching,” she says, “because I’m curious what the hunter will do.”

  “Dad,” says Elliot.

  “I’m curious what he’ll do. I know I was young and naïve, but I really didn’t know what to expect. I think I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d picked the thing up and hugged it.”

  I glance at Mindy. She’s come back to life enough to take the dish from me, but I can see her focus is entirely on the story being told behind us. Little kids must love hearing stories from adults about their time as children. It must be a way to compare and contrast what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. They’re probably always listening, waiting for an adult to accidentally offer a possibility or an adventure they’d never thought possible.

  “He gets to the third goose and Elliot turns away.” Elliot, not you; I look over at Sasha and see that she is now facing away from the sink and listening to Nell’s story, which Nell must also have observed because now she’s telling it for more than just Elliot’s benefit. “Elliot says, ‘I can’t watch,’ like he knows what’s coming, but I don’t know what’s coming, and the next thing, Dad is digging his heel into what I’m assuming is the neck of the goose. Dig, dig, dig. Elliot yells for Mom but still I keep watching. Dad goes to the middle goose, walking now toward the woods again, the one goose already in his arms, and does the same to it, and he goes to the last goose—the one closest to the woods—and repeats the motion. Heel into neck. Heel into neck, over and over. What economy he had! The way he walked past the first two birds. The way he came back, one by one, so he’d have to carry them only so long and so far.”

  There is a pause in the story. I turn around and see Nell take a sip of wine and I think, Definitely, definitely she is drunk. She says, “That’s what I think about.”

  “You think about the economy of your father, of the hunter,” says Sasha, smiling. “Dark.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” says Nell. I’ve never liked when she sees her own charm, when she’s aware of her own oddness. It’s like watching her watch a mirror. It’s disconcerting.

  “Those four years,” I say, and hand the last dish to Mindy, who takes it carefully and dries it lovingly, her attention now returned to her chore. “Those four years extra that you guys got because you were older, and all the living that got done before I was old enough to be aware of it—it seems like some of the greatest living Mom and Stan ever did.”

  “Give me a break, okay,” says Nell. “I’m just telling a story.”

  She’s taken my comment as a jab, as sarcasm, which isn’t how I meant it. This is why sincerity trumps everything else. This is why a person should never turn to dissembling and lies. When you’re ready to come out of it, when you’re ready to stop being cynical, people don’t know how to read you.

  “No,” I say. “I mean it. I’m jealous that you had four more years with them when they were younger and happy. I’m jealous Elliot had five more years.” I look at Sasha. “I hope it’s okay that I’m talking about Dad being young and happy. I’m really not trying to say anything inappropriate.”

  Sasha touches my forearm, gives it an itty-bitty squeeze, then says to the room, “When did everyone get so sensitive?”

  The pink outside the windows has faded finally. The street has filled with cars belonging to people coming home from work. It’s Saturday night. They still have half the weekend ahead of them. The streetlight at the foot of the driveway hesitates, then glows thick and steady. The ginkgo in the front yard seems all of a sudden brighter, more golden in the light. We are at the peak of summer. It is nearly three days since my father walked onto his back porch and bit down on a loaded gun. But it feels like an eternity since then. An absolute eternity.

  36

  things come to a head in the kitchen

  I walk into the kitchen. It’s after midnight. Mindy and Sasha went upstairs hours ago. Only the stove light is on in here, and Elliot and Nell are on opposite sides of the island, leaning toward each other, whispering. Elliot’s got his cell phone in his hand.

  I hear Nell say, “I don’t know what to tell you. She’s gone too far. I agree. But still.”

  I flip the overhead switch to let them know I’m there. Elliot stands up and rubs at his eyes. “What the fuck?”

  I correct him. “We say ‘aphid’ in this family, young man.” I’m trying to be playful.

  “Turn the light off,” says Nell.

  I turn it off. Nell is still leaning over the counter, but Elliot is standing there, looking at me with his arms crossed. Neither of them makes a move to speak.

  “Listen,” I say.

  Now or never, I’m thinking. Now or never. Tell them.

  “Kate,” says Nell.

  “I have something to tell you guys.”

  “Not now,” says Nell.

  “Yes, now,” I say. If not now, when? Life is now. Life is right this second, whether we like it or not. What changes later? What changes tomorrow? Nothing. Peter needs me to stop calling him. He needs me to stop texting. He needs his space and his time. But to what end? Decisions have been made. Let’s get on with it already. Let’s face the facts and move on.

  “The funeral’s tomorrow,” I say. “The next day we’ll all go home. This isn’t a conversation I want to have over the phone.” In fact, I have no idea where I’ll be going the day after tomorrow. Not home. But Elliot will go home. Nell will go home. I’ll go back to Chicago
and begin the grave task of separating my things from Peter’s, of figuring out how to pay my impossible bills.

  Elliot looks like he wants to punch something. He looks, in fact, like he wants to punch me. Probably I should take Nell’s advice. I should turn around and slink back upstairs. I should get into the top bunk, fall asleep, and in the morning go to the funeral with everyone else. I should call a cab from the funeral home and have it take me to the airport immediately after. I still have forty dollars and some change. I can make it stretch if I have to. So, yes, we all agree then: I should keep my mouth shut. But I don’t. Like I said, life is being lived right now. Right this very second.

  “Six months ago—” I say.

  “Don’t,” says Nell, standing up straight suddenly.

  “—I had an affair.”

  “Fuck,” she says, and stoops over again, so that now her head is resting on her arms, which are resting on the kitchen island.

  “You did what?” says Elliot.

  “I had an affair.”

  Nell isn’t even looking at me. She’s exhausted.

  Elliot, though, is at full attention.

  I say, “Peter wouldn’t stop talking about adopting. Nobody was listening to me. I had an affair.”

  Elliot takes a step toward me. “Is this why—?”

  Nell says, “No.”

  “Are you going to hit me?” I say. The whole thing reeks of melodrama, like something one of my freshmen would come up with as a substitute for a real climax: the three of us standing in the dark at midnight in a near-stranger’s kitchen—our father’s funeral looming, me finally sharing my secrets, Elliot considering violence, Nell trying to keep the peace.