Look at me: (40 page)

Back at the table I sat, breathing shakily. “That was Moose,” I told Irene. “Ellen Metcalf’s brother. Something happened to him.”

Irene turned to look, taking notes. I composed myself and used her phone to call Grace, from whom I learned, to my amazement, that Frank’s grudging willingness to let us photograph his home had blossomed inexplicably into an invitation to dinner. This rash of hospitality I could only attribute to the power of the
New York Post
, which Irene and I had invoked rather than try to explain what we were actually doing here. In fact, we’d resurrected the same bogus pretext she had originally used to dupe me: a story about a model with a damaged face; her background, her feelings, her struggles to adjust. And it was only now, at Aunt Mary’s, as Irene and I hammered out the final details of this lie (“Okay, we’ll say I called your agency.” “We’ll say it’s a story about identity.”), that I was struck by the fact that it was no lie—the story did exist, Irene was writing it; there was even talk of newspaper serialization!

“You know, I think maybe you’re clairvoyant,” I said, regarding Irene in real astonishment. She smiled, avoiding my eyes. “I’m serious,” I said, “Have you ever done that before, made something up and then it came true?”

“Jesus, let’s hope not,” she said, glancing out the window. Light fell across her face from one side, making deep shadows. And as she pushed the hair behind her ears, I glimpsed a catastrophic change to her shadow self: a degeneration from the dancing sylph of months ago, when we’d first met, to a lank, dreary presence—resigned to some deep unhappiness. This apparition so shocked me that I set down my glass and forced myself to look again—No, see? It’s gone, I told myself. I was staring.

Irene turned away. “Knock it off, Charlotte,” she said.

My sister’s new home, which I had seen only in pictures, was part of a brand-new development known as White Forest. “East of the interstate?” I’d exclaimed when she told me where it was. “You’ll be practically in Beloit!” But east of the interstate was where people were building these days, Grace informed me, now that the older farmers were dying off and their children were selling the farms to developers to avoid the taxes. A twinkling sign amidst the cornfields alerted us to a freshly paved road, which we followed into a saddle-shaped oasis of verdant knolls whose bright grass offset the scalding whiteness of perhaps two dozen columned colonials. There were no trees yet in White Forest, but a legion of skinny saplings no higher than my waist cowered under a scourge of wind that lashed at them from the miles of flat surrounding landscape. We nosed along a serpentine drive in search of my sister’s address.

My brother-in-law appeared first, his gut leading the way with the burly insistence of a face. In my mind, Frank Jones embodied a certain physical crudeness: hands like shovel heads, side-of-beef face, a ditch where his navel should have been, so I was always startled to behold the nearly adolescent delicacy of his features. He was a roofer, or a roofer-cum-businessman who now managed several roofing franchises to the tune of two hundred grand a year, according to Grace.

“Hiya, Charlotte,” he said, not bothering to kiss me hello, which I appreciated. He introduced himself to Irene, who greeted him with her new, inscrutable cheeriness. I had a feeling Frank would like Irene; she wasn’t stylish enough to offend him.

Grace and the kids came tumbling from the house, Pammy and Allison sealing me in their arms without quite looking at me, hesitant to behold this reconfiguration of their glamorous Aunt Charlotte; Jeremy, the youngest, whom I’d never seen in person, swerving away and attaching himself, limpet-like, to his father’s chest. The wind set upon us with a roar, yanking conversation from our mouths, making the hair leap from our heads as we fought our way into the house.

“Wind’s godawful,” Frank apologized to Irene, “but once these trees get some height, they’ll stop it dead.”

Indoors, Grace pulled me into a laundry room and stared rapturously at my face. “I can hardly believe how much better you look!” she said, seizing my hands. My younger sister was one of the few people in my experience who was genuinely capable of beaming, and she beamed at me now in her jeans and pink sweatshirt whose white decal read “Sexy Moms.” The wedding ring hung loose on her thin red hand. “You look like nothing ever happened,” she said. “It must’ve been that second operation.”

“Oh, Grace. Do you think so?” I asked, fending off the flock of acid replies I felt beating their wings against my skull:
Tell that to all the people who used to be my friends
, or
I guess that’s why your daughters can’t face me.
Instead I just hugged her, too hard, so we bumped together and Grace laughed. This hug of mine was sloppy, inexpert, prolonged (How did you end a hug? Who began the ending of it?) because I felt so grateful to Grace for believing I looked like myself, purely because she loved me.

Frank and the girls were leading Irene on a tour of their new house. A kitchen spangled with fresh appliances, a spotless living room. Irene wore on a strap around her neck the Nikon Thomas Keene had lent us, having heeded my advice that she should get what pictures she needed immediately, in case Frank and I blew up and we were banished thereafter from his house. My history with my brother-in-law was a barren vista of enmity punctuated by occasional monuments of horror: the time I accidentally knocked him off the deck of his powerboat into Lake Michigan; the time he found out I’d slept with his best man on the eve of his wedding to Grace; the time he called me a bitch at the country club—shouted it, after too many Canadian Clubs—inciting a voluble exchange whose dreadfulness, in my memory, issued not from the public embarrassment we’d caused, not from our forcible ejection from the club or even the fact that we made my sister cry and my nieces cower beneath the table, but from the verbal constipation that had stricken me at that crucial juncture. “You …,” I’d begun, and whole minutes seemed to float past before I heaved up, “dope!” with a monstrous effort, the sheer volume of devastating truths I wished to unleash having clogged my throat, “You dumdum!” “You g-g-g—.” Hours drifted past, seasons changed, children grew up and had children of their own. “—goofball!”

Even after our ejection from the club, I persisted in my anguished ravings as Frank hustled his sorrowful family into the car, convinced that if only I could loosen this momentary constriction, I would give silver-throated voice to my loathing for him, its textures and filigrees and chiaroscuro, but at that point I lost altogether the power to make words. “You gagrraglegh! You msnnnsgulums,” I bawled, aiming these wads of gibberish at a car window flecked with the sputum of my exertions, Frank shaking his head behind it as he drove away with his family, with Grace and the girls, leaving me alone in the parking lot with a panicky teenage attendant.

The following summer, being no longer welcome in my sister’s home, I persuaded her to bring the girls to New York. We spent the weekend in what the three of them perceived as a swoon of decadence, sleeping until ten, ordering stacks of pancakes at Delphi, the Greek diner, Rollerblading to house music in Central Park in the arresting company of some very attractive black men. On Sunday night, Grace called Frank to say she was extending their visit by two days. I brought the girls to a shoot, where they curled their hair in my electric rollers and availed themselves of my various lipsticks; I let them eat popcorn in my bed while they watched MTV. I didn’t have to suggest a second deferral; Allison and Pammy did it for me, Pleasepleasepleaseplease, they keened, and that time, Frank’s objections were audible across the room. But Frank had lost his hold; they were mine, I thought greedily, I’d won, pried them from his shovel-handed grasp, and that night we used an extension cord to cheat the blender onto my balcony—frozen margaritas, virgins for the girls—we danced on my couch to the Jackson Five, and at last the girls fell asleep watching
Murder by Death
in my bed. I slept between them, a drugged sleep thickened by opiate smells of their hair and skin, a sleep so entangled that I never even heard the phone; it was Pammy who answered when the doorman called shortly after dawn to announce that Frank was downstairs (having driven through the night). Allison shook me awake with terror in her lovely eyes—
oh no, oh no, Daddy’s here
, and I barely had time to yank on my silk kimono and light up a Merit before his fat finger was trouncing my doorbell. I admitted him without a word. Frank made a spectacle of himself, hurling Chrysler building key-chains and Statue of Liberty mugs into suitcases, Grace hovering near him, swerving between guilty consternation and giddy explosions of laughter. I sat on my balcony and smoked in a state of deep calm. I barely heard their commotion, so attuned was I to the silence they would leave behind.

Allison was almost fourteen now, with long amber hair, freckled skin that would age terribly, poor thing, but at present was flush with succulent youth; small breasts enhanced by what looked to be a mildly padded bra, light green eyes and a whooping laugh. Leonardo DiCaprio’s feline visage squinted from the walls of her bedroom, and from her closet she pulled a dress she would wear to a school dance the following week: a short-sleeved sheath with black and lavender stripes.

Pammy, two years younger, still had the star-shaped hands and mushroom haircut of a little girl. She eyed the dress warily, as if knowing instinctively that it portended her neglect. I remembered how frantic Grace had been when I’d first begun to exclude her out of some notion I had of a more grown-up life, how afraid she’d been to face the world without my protection. And I had felt no sympathy at all—just impatience, resentment at the idea that I would hold myself back for her, for anyone. Ever in my life. “What about the movie?” she would plead. “The movie starring us?” Finally, weary of the question, I’d told her (the lepidopterist advanced, chloroform in hand, wearing her exterminator’s smile), “You’re not
in
the movie anymore. The audience liked me better.”

“Here!” Frank called to Irene in the next room over the staccato of the Nikon. “If you go out onto this balcony, you can get the whole room,” and, “Wait, let’s move this vase—oops, hold on, pillow’s crooked!”

I put my arms around little Pammy, and she folded against me. “How would you like it if I trimmed your hair?” I whispered in her ear. “If I cut it like mine?” She looked up at me, solemn bird’s eyes blinking, and nodded.

At seven we fought our way back through the gauntlet of wind to our cars. The girls rode with Irene and me, windows down. The wind shook a wet, musky smell from the fields around White Forest, the smell of early summer as I would always remember it. Heading west on Squaw Prairie Road, we passed dilapidated barns, a pen full of sheep whose velvet black faces I could actually see.

“You know,” Irene said, “this is really sort of beautiful.”

I’d been thinking the same thing, exactly. But I said, “Don’t get carried away.” One for the quota basket.

Giovanni’s, my favorite restaurant in Rockford, was a flat, windowless behemoth fronted by a capacious parking lot that the girls and I crossed arm in arm to the flash of Irene’s Nikon. Inside, a carpeted foyer gave onto a piano bar in one direction and several dining rooms in the other: tables the size of small dance floors girded with engorged diners who made instantly credible the nation’s statistics on fat. I saw wonderment in Irene’s face as she stood in the lobby, holding her notebook. “It’s like another country,” she said.

But another country was precisely what it was not; I had fled to other countries to escape the gigantism of these dining rooms. Yet each eyesore, routed through Irene, now emerged as a triumph of picturesqueness. See? I found myself thinking, as I watched my brother-in-law jawing with the hostess, rocking on the balls of his feet.
See?
Frank Jones was the avatar of authenticity—he was an ordinary person! I felt something perilously close to admiration.

At the table, the aproned waitress took our cocktail orders: hard liquor, Cokes for the kids, white wine for Irene, a mistake first-time visitors to Rockford occasionally made. When the booze arrived, Frank raised his glass. “To Charlotte. For guts in the face of adversity,” he said, and tears swelled in my eyes—not because a tribute from my nemesis meant anything to me, not because I had always secretly sought Frank’s good opinion, not even because I believed I was courageous and wanted my courage acknowledged. Because I understood that with my new face, I was no longer a threat to him.

“Charlotte and I’ve had our battles over the years,” Frank told Irene.

“Battles over what?” she asked, in a winning impersonation of ignorance.

Frank and I exchanged glances, caught together under a net of shyness. “Just your basic dislike, I guess, wouldn’t you say?” he asked me tentatively.

“I guess that’s really it,” I agreed.

“I don’t remember a beginning.” He rattled the ice in his glass. “Just seemed like it was always there.”

“I loathed you on sight,” I concurred amiably.

Like taffy pullers, we worked back and forth until our topic acquired texture and resistance. “She pushed me off a boat,” he told Irene. “Right into Lake Michigan during a storm watch.”

“That was an—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving the waitress for another Canadian Club. “Like those guys they find in cement shoes are accidental drownings.”

“What happened was,” I explained loudly, “I turned around suddenly—”

“Holding a tray!” Grace jumped in.

“Exactly. Holding a tray of sandwiches, and I hit him
accidentally—”

“In the stomach. With the tray. Food all over my shirt.”

“And for some—”

“Pastrami on my feet.”

“—for some reason, maybe having to do with the twelve or thirteen Michelobs he’d drunk that afternoon—”

“Now hold it there—”

“His balance was a teeny bit off,” I said, “so he somersaulted backwards into the lake. Feet right over his head.”

A shining silence while everyone waited. “Pastrami and all,” I couldn’t resist adding.