Reunion: A Novel Read online

  “Getting ready for camp this weekend. Pigpie wants to back out.” Pigpie is Ellie, the blond demon and their youngest. “But she also wants a dwarf pig for her birthday, so what does she know?”

  “Are you going to let her?”

  “Get a dwarf pig? Uh, no.”

  “Skip camp,” I say.

  Rita laughs. “Right. Well. We’ll play it by ear. The mom in me knows she needs this experience. But the little girl in me thinks we’d have a blast just the two of us with Joe and Mimi gone.”

  “I wish you were coming to Atlanta,” I say, and I think I mean this. Because she has a point about the three of us—Nell, Elliot, and me—getting to be alone together. It’s been too long. But, again, there’s something soothing about Rita that I wouldn’t mind taking advantage of right now.

  “I might,” she says. “Once the girls are off, depending on how long you’re down there. I might just come.”

  We get off the phone and I realize that I haven’t even considered the return flight. Peter bought me a one-way ticket. He was probably hoping I wouldn’t be able to afford to come back. As of right this minute, there’s nothing pressing me to get back, other than my finances. I’m off for the summer. Classes don’t begin again until September, so I’m technically free for the next two and a half months. My accountant would like me to sell another screenplay. He thinks we could bring the back taxes current and pay off the last of my debt if I make one solid sale.

  My school would also like me to sell a screenplay. They haven’t come right out and said it, but they’d like it if, for once, the screenplay wasn’t just optioned, but actually brought to life. When they hired me, I had four active scripts on the burner. I had AMC and HBO flying me to location shoots on a regular basis. Nothing ever materialized. But Hollywood is like a puppy on drugs. It’s got ADD. I was only interesting as long as there wasn’t a dirty tennis ball bouncing across the floor.

  If Peter doesn’t cut me off completely, if he’s willing to help me out for a little while, I could go back to San Francisco with Nell when this is over and renew some old film school friendships. Or do a stop in Colorado for a few weeks with the girls, check out the documentary world, and then head west to my sister’s for August. I haven’t had time to myself like this without having to consider anyone else in years, in close to a decade. The feeling is unfamiliar. Not exactly unwanted, but not exactly longed for, either. And anyway, things with Peter might still turn around. He gets angry, then he gets over it. That’s what happens in a marriage. You say the meanest, most crippling thing possible to the person you ostensibly love more than anyone else in the world, and then you sit back and wait for it to pass.

  When I was little, my dad’s form of babysitting was to plunk me down in front of the Turner Network Television channel and then leave the room. If it was a classic, then it was appropriate. That’s how his logic went. I remember sitting through the entirety of Love Story all by myself one night. The whole house might have been empty. I have no idea. The sex scene was confusing. I was too young to understand what they were doing under those covers, only that he was on top and she was on bottom and I was embarrassed. Then there was that line. That famous line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I remember sitting up. I’d heard it before. I’d heard people quoting it and now here it was, in front of me, the source. That night, sitting cross-legged too close to the television, I believed I understood the words of that syrupy-faced girl with the long brown hair. I was eleven and those words belonged to the girl, not to the actress, and I felt sure I understood them as they were meant to be understood. I felt sure my heart was pure, as her heart was surely pure, and from the other side of the screen she was looking at me and talking to me. And what she was telling me was that people in love are incapable of hurting each other; that if you’re in love then you can’t mess up, even if you want to, because love—which is a mystical, magical force—gets in the way.

  Now, twenty-some years later, a full-fledged adult, I know I was wrong. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Being in love means you can hurt the other person all you want. Being in love means having a personal punching bag. That’s why you do it. That’s why you fall in love in the first place—to be the worst you can be and get away with it. Otherwise, what’s the point?

  6

  asleep on the plane

  I fall asleep before takeoff and have one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming and you’re kind of enjoying it, but it’s also beyond your control. Like there’s this feeling of Ah, yes, I am asleep and wonderfully asleep and isn’t it funny how I feel different and even better and am somehow allowing myself to derive satisfaction from this fantasy life even as I know that at some point in the very near future I will wake up and the entire fantasy will be ripped away from me and perhaps I will even feel worse but who cares? In my dream I am directing a movie starring Matt Damon, who is, strangely, playing himself. He is playing himself and in the movie he has given up acting and is now pursuing a career as a comedian. He is failing miserably in that he isn’t funny, but he’s packing the house every night because people are mesmerized by this superstar-turned-not-funny comic. His agent is livid but likes the money. His wife, who loves him and whom he loves, is confused, especially since his now-famous punch line to every joke is to raise his voice and, apropos of nothing, shout, “And I hate my wife!” There’s one joke that has me laughing so hard—even though it’s not funny—that even as I sleep I am afraid that I am laughing out loud, on the plane, and that people are perhaps looking at me. But I’m not so afraid that I actually wake up. There’s this moment where I’m aware of giving myself the option—would you like to wake up? Would you like to keep sleeping?—and, oh my God, it isn’t even a choice. I stay sleeping because the dream, this kooky movie that I am directing, is so good and so unexpected and so very wonderfully far away from my real life. But this one joke he’s telling seems to go on forever. And everyone—the entire auditorium, me, his agent, his wife—we all know the punch line and still we can’t wait. He tells the audience that a few years ago he had an affair, and, as though we share one brain, we can all suddenly see the woman. She’s wearing a blue dress and she is a goddess and every single person understands the affair just by looking at her and instantly we have forgiven him. All we want is for him to say more. He tells us about a commercial he filmed in Germany. A commercial! Matt Damon in some extended commercial in Germany! The audience is overwhelmed. He says, “And, so, obviously, why all this happened is either because I met someone or because I love Germany or because I HATE MY WIFE.” The auditorium erupts in laughter. His wife, who is home alone in some kitchen but who I am able to see from where I sit directing, is crying. But me, I am busting a gut. I am loving it. This is my star. Matt Damon is my star. And only I understand.

  A hand on my shoulder startles me awake. It is the stewardess from before takeoff.

  “Ma’am?” she says. She is smiling, like she is amused with me. Like I’ve done something embarrassing and therefore charming and even quasi-adorable in my sleep.

  I breathe in and sit up straight and try to widen my eyes as a way of answering. Matt Damon is slipping away from me too quickly and I feel that familiar sadness filling up the void he’s leaving behind.

  “We’re here,” she says. “We need you to deboard.”

  I look around and it’s true; we are on the tarmac and the plane is empty. Outside my tiny window it is full-on night.

  “ATL is waiting for you,” she says. And then, almost too sweetly, as if she knows the reason for my flight down here and is sorry for me but also relieved that it is me and not her and so all the kinder as a result—her kindness a thank-you note for taking the sadness from her life and injecting it into my own—she adds, “We’ll be clearing out the trash for at least five more minutes. You can take a little bit of time.”

  Is it wrong, is it so utterly wrong, that this generosity reminds me of everything I hate about the South? And about Atlanta s
pecifically? It’s not that I don’t think her sweetness is genuine—though, that said, why would it be? It’s that it reminds me of all that is fake about the sweetness of the South. It reminds me of my father and his family—the family he came from and the family that he kept growing after his first three children finally left the state.

  “Thanks,” I say, already standing, already brushing off my slacks and straightening my blouse and returning fully to consciousness.

  “You take care,” she says.

  Yes, I think. Take care. But take care of what, exactly?

  7

  concourse to concourse

  The first thing I do is check the monitors. Nell and Elliot’s flight is delayed. They’re two concourses away from me and so I make my way somewhat wearily down the escalators in the direction of the airport train.

  This place, Atlanta, this place where I grew up, it is instantly the same and instantly different. The airport seems both smaller and larger. It is brighter and sharper and louder. It is definitely more crowded. Still, I can’t help it; I look around as I wait for the next train and wonder if it was here, or maybe there, or maybe even just beyond, that my mother and father paused, returning home from a trip to Italy, and snapped a photo of me asleep in my narrow stroller, two years old at most, my head bent off to the side, my tiny khaki peacoat buttoned completely up the middle. The thought is so maudlin that it embarrasses me, but I let myself indulge in it anyway. In part because even though it really is a possibility that the stroller was right there more than thirty years ago, it’s also a reality that this place is not the same. Too many people have traveled over that stretch of terrazzo—too much wax, too much trash—for it to be the same, for it to be the place of anybody’s memories, much less mine.

  The train comes. I enter. This hollow feeling inside me, it is not sadness for my father. I do not want to mistake it for what it is not. I do not want anyone to mistake it for what it is not. But what then? Is it Peter? Is this feeling really for Peter? Is it for Atlanta? For my childhood? The uncertainty of my future? Do I really suffer from all the same regrets that every other person on this space-age train is suffering from? I never wanted to be so common. I never wanted to be so obvious. Stan Pulaski would be furious.

  My phone buzzes. I didn’t turn it on after the flight, which means that I forgot to turn it off before takeoff. Sometimes I really do hate breaking the rules. Other times it’s a fleeting moment of proof that the world has gone crazy with regulations. But that sort of confirmation is ultimately flat. Ultimately not that great a reward. You mean we really have gone too far? Huh. Big surprise. Maybe it’s just this sort of haphazard back-and-forth that got me into trouble with Billy. If I’d just been more casual with my feelings on adultery before committing it, then maybe when it presented itself it wouldn’t have felt so big, so bad, so fresh and new. If I hadn’t adopted my siblings’ (the family’s) hardball theory—you cheat, you die—then maybe I wouldn’t have been so tempted. What a strange and unexpected discovery to have made: not that I am disappointed with my life, but that I am disappointed with myself.

  I look at my phone. It’s Rita, not Peter, and I get this homesick gush in my belly and I know, with utter certainty that at least for my immediate future, whenever the phone rings I will have to contend with the disappointment of it not being Peter. This is beyond my control.

  “Rita,” I say. “I’m on a train. Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you,” she says. In the background, there are the giggly voices of her children, my nieces.

  “They haven’t landed,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “I know. I was calling to tell you they’re delayed.”

  The train stops at their concourse. I wheel my bag off and head now toward the upward escalators.

  “This place is a maze,” I say. “I go down to go up to go down.”

  “Sounds like life,” she says. Sometimes I forget that Rita isn’t just a mom, that in another world, in another life, before Joe was born and even for a little while after, she was an investment banker with a job and a brain and a checking account all her own. Is it the fate of all mothers—no matter how much they love their children—to look occasionally at their offspring and think, Why? It’s not a question I plan on asking Rita, but it’s a question I think about. It’s a question I thought about more than once after that midsummer evening in the kitchen with Peter when he handed me the pamphlet and I said okay.

  “Ha,” I say. “You said it.”

  There’s static and Rita says something I can’t really understand and that I’m not really listening to. I’m looking at the monitors, trying to find the correct arriving flight for Denver.

  Now there’s a pause. Now silence. Then, “Kate?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you okay?”

  I find their flight and gate number and realize they’ll be getting off right next to the Ruby Tuesday, so I wheel my baggage in the direction of the bar, my phone still shoved between my chin and shoulder.

  “I am,” I say. “I’m okay. But I don’t really know what we’re doing here. I don’t really know what any of us are doing here.”

  Rita is more loyal to Elliot than she is to me, and rightfully so: I am not her husband. But because of this she will not flat-out agree that this trip is total BS in the way that, for instance, Peter would once have admitted to me that this trip and all it implies—like, for instance, that we were once a truly happy, committed family, which we were not, at least not since our mother’s diagnosis and subsequent premature death—is BS. Rita won’t admit it, but deep down she knows it. She is a smart woman. I have seen her glances. I have noticed the twitches in her cheeks when Stan Pulaski, our father, is mentioned. She does not—did not!—care for him and had even less to do with him than Elliot did, but she is a loyal wife and therefore she supports this trip (at least in theory) because her husband needs her to and doing so is part of her job as a wife.

  She says, “It’s the right thing,” which I doubt, though I understand how she means it. “If nothing else,” she says, “your brother needs you there. Nell needs you there. You’re younger, but you’re a rock.”

  “Hmmm,” I say. These days, I am more rocky than rock solid.

  “You are.”

  “Do you know what the plan is?” I say. I’ve wheeled my bag over to the countertop bar of Ruby Tuesday and pulled out a tall, heavy chair. I dig around in my front pocket and pull out two twenties and a five. I put them on the bar in front of me, then mouth the phrase G and T to the bartender. She looks too young to be serving alcohol, but what do I know? My students look too young to be let out of the house alone, much less let to live in a city by themselves or pay bills without assistance or, for that matter, receive credit card applications in the mail.

  I take my seat and switch the phone to my other ear.

  Rita is saying, “To his house, as far as I know.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Your father’s,” she says.

  “Who’s going?”

  “You are,” she says.

  “When?”

  The bartender slides the gin and tonic in front of me and I tap the lime wedge and mouth the word More. She nods, but I can tell she’s annoyed—annoyed that I want more lime wedges and annoyed that I’m on the phone. But, listen, I’m also annoyed. I’m annoyed with myself, so there’s really nothing to do about it except to continue doing it—continue being me.

  “Are you even listening to me?” says Rita. “Kate? Hello?”

  “I am, I am,” I say. “It’s just—I meant, do you know what the plan is for tonight? Do you know what Nell and Elliot have in mind?”

  “But that’s what I’m saying, Kate. I’m saying that the plan is to go to your dad’s house. Tonight. That is the plan. To spend the night.”

  I have the straw to my lips as she delivers this news. I have the straw to my lips and nearly half the gin and tonic in my mouth. It had never—not once, not for a single moment�
��occurred to me that my brother and sister, my own reasonably rational flesh and blood, would even think to go to that man’s house. At night. With me. To stay. To sleep. I put my hand on top of Peter’s cash. My fingers start to shake.

  This, I realize, is what it is to be truly speechless.

  “Nell talked about you guys staying with Sasha,” says Rita. “But Ell thought it made more sense to stay at Stan’s. He says you’ll have things to go through. Stuff to divide.”

  “Stuff to divide?”

  “Family stuff,” she says.

  “Family stuff?” I say and I know, I really do, that I am being something of a dim-witted cow with the vaudeville repetition, and even deliberately so, but I can’t help myself.

  “Photos,” she says, and now I hear it, the exasperation. I’ve pushed her too far; I have behaved like one of her children. Her patience has worn thin. “Photos, jewelry. Your mother’s jewelry. It’s all still there.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, and I don’t. Sasha is my father’s fifth wife, and even if she’s the most decent of them all—which is like calling Brutus the most noble of Caesar’s murderers—there’s no chance in hell that my mother’s jewelry hasn’t been divvied out to, or even stolen by, the women who followed in her footsteps and shared my father’s bed over the years. All those half siblings, all those daughters, my half sisters, there’s no way their mothers didn’t convince themselves of their rights to my mother’s pearls, to her few diamonds, to her watches and earrings and cuffs. There’s just no way. And money? Money to divide? Not a chance. I won’t even cross my fingers, that’s how little chance there is of an inheritance.

  “Listen,” Rita is saying, “what do I know? I’m not there. I don’t know. I have no idea. I’m just telling you what Ell said. Take it up with him.”