All Dressed Up (22 page)

“It’s
obviously hereditary,” Emma said. “We had proof of that in the
church.” She waved her hand back toward ten days ago. “Now,
go.”

“All right.”
Mom couldn’t hide her relief at the outcome. “Will they operate, or
monitor him, or – ?”

“I don’t know.
I don’t know.”

“Do you think
I need to take pajamas for him, and things for him to do?”

“You’re going
to call us and we’ll come down if he needs to stay there,” Sarah
said. “We’ll pack a bag for him.”

“See?” Mom
seized on Sarah’s input, emotional about it. “You’ve been like a
mother to him, too.”

“Yes, if
there’s anyone other than Mom who shouldago, Sarah…” Emma didn’t
finish, which was good, because Sarah didn’t want to hear it.
Getting credit for being good with Billy wasn’t what she needed.
She’d always had that.

She
needed…

She didn’t
know.

Acknowledgment. Closure. Stupid word.

Ten years was
a l="e time, and it was yesterday. Sisters could love each other
and fester with bottled up hurts at the same time.

They took
Billy out to the car, bringing a carry-bag with bottled water and a
couple of snacks, his game player and a book for Mom. He wouldn’t
be carried, wouldn’t lean on them, but walked gingerly, with his
shoulders lifted and his hips stiff, as if his bladder threatened
to burst. He was going to be such a heartbreaker in a few years,
you could already see it in his coloring and his body shape. He was
going to be stg="e and dark and tall. He could have been Charlie’s
son, the way he looked. Charlie’s and Emma’s. If he’d been any
darker, he would have surely looked at Mom and Dad by now and known
he wasn’t theirs.

“Will it
hurt?” he said to Mom as she settled him in the passenger seat.
Fear made him little again. Five or six years old. Which Mom
couldn’t help taking advantage of. It meant he let her hug him and
brush his hair from his forehead in a way he didn’t allow much any
more.

“If you need
an operation, sweetheart, yes, parts of it will hurt but they’ll
give you pain medication. It’s easy, the way they do it now. You’ll
be home in a couple of days.”

They left, and
the house and lake and pines seemed very quiet after the sound of
the car had died away. Emma and Sarah went back in the house. “Mom
didn’t take much food,” Sarah said as they came up the steps.
“Should we make her something if we go down later? A sandwich?
Maybe we shouldaall have gone, instead of, like, who’s going to
step back and hold the door open for who? So polite and – ”

“Billy just
wanted Mom,” Emma answered, “it was pretty simple.”

“Are youaokay
with that?”

“Some
families, it’s like a picnic in the E.R. Everyone shows up.”

“But that’s
good. That’s the right thing.”

Emma scowled
and laughed. “Ha! They take up all the space in the waiting room.
They drop a bundle of money in the vending machines, and then one
of the candy bars doesn’t come down and the admissions clerk has to
tell them there’s nothing she can do about it, because the machines
aren’t owned by the hospital, it’s an outside concession. Some of
them start kicking the side of the machine. They get upset when
they can’t all go in while the patient gets seen. They forget why
they’re even there, and start a family argument or a gossip fest.
They want to know why they can’t change the channel on the E.R.
TV.”

“Well, we
could do all of that. Together. As a family. I’m sure I can easily
stuff up a vending machine or complain about the TV.”

“It used to
scare me how much emotion we were hit with in the E.R. every day,
like toxic rays. You wanted a lead apron.” Emma wrapped her arms
around her body, giving herself that thin look she’d had before the
wedding. “You didn’t want to let all of it in, in case it gave you
bone cancer. But which families did you hold back from? Who did you
give less to? The ones whose fashion sense you didn’t like? No,
Sarah, honestly, it’s mostly not good when the whole family goes
in.”

“So we should
pass a pleasant, relaxing morning on the lake, then?”

“Yep. Want to
take out the canoe?”

“Only if we
can smoke.”

“Oh God. I
threw them away. I only smoked five.”

“You did? Good
girl. I was kidding about that.” She punched Emma lightly in the
arm and Emma leaned into the punch, turning it almost into a
hug.

“Yeah, I wish
I hadn’t,” she said. “Almost bought some more. We should go now,
Sarah, if we’re canoeing, so we’re back by the time Mom calls. I
don’t know if there’s cell phone reception in the middle of the
lake.”

“I never take
my phone out there. I know I’d drop it in the water.”

They changed
into swimsuits, put shorts and T-shirts on top, slathered
themselves in sunscreen, barely spoke. Grunted a bit and gave each
other orders as they carried the canoe across the beach to the
water. It was awkward, involving bumped hips and crooked posture.
The question of Billy hung over them like an eclipse of the sun,
giving an eerie quality to the passage of time.

I am going to
talk to her, Sarah decided. It’s been hanging in the air l="e
enough. All of us, we keep nibbling around the edges then backing
off.

They dumped
the canoe on the edge of the sand and pushed it into the water. Its
hollow belly made music from the scraping and slapping sounds. It
rocked as they climbed into it, Emma in front and Sarah behind. She
followed Emma’s rhythm as Emma began to paddle.

“They’d be at
the hospital by now,” Emma said over her shoulder, after a while.
“Seeing the triage nurse.”

“You said he’d
saved my life…”

“If you tell
me that’s a cop-out on my part – You can tell me that if you want,
it’s probably true.”

“I’ve been
thinking about it and I’m wondering – it never occurred to me –
Emma, did you even notice what had happened to me the day you told
Mom and Dad you were pregnant with Billy?” She added quickly, “I’m
sorry. Notice is a l=aded word. Did you know? Were youatold?”

Emma slid her
paddle into her lap where it dripped. She twisted around, wary.
“The day? That day?”

“I arrived
home, racked, and there you were – ”

“Start
earlier. You’re right, I was sixteen and a half, I was incredibly
self-absorbed. It’s been nearly eleven years. Tell it right.”

“If I can tell
it at all. If you decide it’s trivial… It wasn’t trivial,
Emma.”

“Okay.”

The canoe
rocked gently and they drifted slowly toward the northern end of
the lake – the ballet camp end – while Sarah talked.

Chapter
Ten

Emma and Sarah
both hated London at first. Sarah hadn't wanted to go from the
beginning – she was always more conservative about new experiences
– while Emma expected such instant miracles from the place that she
could only be disappointed when they didn’t materialize within an
hour of the Deans stepping off the plane.

In the days
before their departure she smiled in a mysterious way when Sarah
demanded to know why she thought it was going to be so wonderful.
Only later did Sarah begin to guess that Emma must have had some
magical, fantastical mix in her head of cute boy bands with exotic
accents, outrageous royal wealth, fabulous mansions, unsuitable
guys in hot clothing, nightclubs and notoriety…

None of which
manifested themselves at first, in the very pleasant suburban
Ealing street, where Mom and Dad had rented one of the red brick
Edwardian houses.

Meanwhile,
Sarah had just finished her last triumphant summer at ballet camp –
it hadn’t yet drifted into view as she and Emma talked – where in
the lavish final production she had danced Swanilda. She was so
good, and she knew it.

Having seen
the photos again on Saturday with Lainie, she knew even now that
her confidence hadn’t been naïve. Her body had been an instrument
as fine as a Stradivarius violin. She’d marveled at what it could
do, at the feelings it could convey, and at its memory for long
sequences of precise movement. Her limbs could recite dance poems
off by heart.

Madame
Tarantovie gushed about Sarah’s maturity of performance and wrote
an arrogant letter to Sarah's New Jersey ballet teacher, ordering
her to do more to nourish Sarah’s talent. Despite the off-putting
nature of the arrogance, Sarah’s ballet teacher agreed and started
talking about auditions in New York City, at which point Sarah had
to tell her, “Except we’re going away.” She was fourteen and a
half, to Emma’s nearly sixteen.

In London,
they were enrollled at an international school to give them access
to tertiary education back home. They had all the wrong clothes and
many of the wrong opinions. Emma gradually rectified these problems
with astute shopping and eavesdropping over lunch, but Sarah was
too busy hating her nasty suburban ballet classes four evenings a
week to care one way or another about school.

It must have
been two or three weeks into the school year when Mom and Dad
announced, “We didn’t want to say anything in case it didn’t pan
out, but you’ve got a place at the Greater Metropolitan Ballet
School.” There, they fitted academic work around dance classes and
took classical ballet so seriously that you pretty much had to show
proof of the blood in your pointe shoes.

Heaven!

Emma stayed on
at the international school where – through sheer force of will –
she began to turn London into the place she wanted it to be. She
hung with a clique of bright, creative, cynical girls who liked to
use their brains in the line of scholarly duty only at the last
possible moment, like stunt pilots joysticking their screaming
aircraft out of a tailspin seconds before it hit the ground.

The rest of
the time they focused their energy on getting away with anything
they could. Emma had a blast sneaking out at night, learning how to
pass for eighteen, and gate-crashing opera and charity benefits
instead of the more predictable rock concerts and clubs. They
weren’t bad girls. There was an artistry to their wildness and an
intelligence at work in their yearning for something important,
though they had no idea what it was, Emma least of all.

Occasionally,
they even said nice things about Sarah’s ballet. “Is that your
costume for the Christmas show? Oh, it’s gorgeous. Do you have a
good role? Aurora? Oh, is that you on the front of the program?
God, you can get your leg that high?”

Mom was
pregnant again. Sarah remembered the previous time, four years
earlier. That one wasn’t so bad. It was spring then and the miss
had come early, after just a couple of weeks of Mom walking on
eggshells and lying down a lot. This time it came in January, in
the middle of a wet English winter, an ocean away from home and
friends and American health care. Mom was farther along, too,
fourteen weeks, and it was twins, which brought her total of missed
babies up to five.

Mom really
lost heart after this. She dropped her coaching. When Dad was away,
meals sank to the level of a hand waved toward the kitchen and the
mention of toast. Emma and Sarah tried to cook sometimes, while Mom
lay on her bed re-reading the “Anne” books and the “Emily” books
that she’d loved as a child and had always used as her emotional
hiding place.

Dad was sent
on pharmaceutical company trips to Europe or back home to the U.S.
and when he returned to London Mom usually brightened and promised
she was okay now. He would spoil her and be extra tender with her,
but then she would lapse again. She was erratic about it, as
always. Sometimes she’d find some energy and clean the whole house,
polish the rented indoor plants with leaf shine, hit tennis balls
against the brick side of the house like an eight year old.

She would
bring Emma to meet Sarah after ballet school and tell them, “We’re
in London, we have to do something English,” and they’d find a
concert in a medieval church or take a chilly boat trip down the
Thames. She’d announce, “I’m better now. I think I’ve turned a
corner.” A couple of days later she’d be back with Louisa May
Alcott and L.M. Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Once, she had
spent a night in the hospital. “A gastric upset,” Dad said. “She
hasn’t been taking care of herself.” He didn’t do any business
travel for several months after this, and they had family weekends
out of London instead – the jolly ones in Devon and Cornwall, in
search of enough blue sky to make a sailor’s pants. Dad worked so
hard to get Emma and Sarah to enjoy those weekends, giving them
money to spend, letting them do anything they wanted.

Meanwhile, in
February, a month after Mom’s miscarriage, Sarah turned fifteen and
her still-growing body gave the first hints that it was going to
betray her. She began to fill out in the wrong places. Over summer
she managed to stave off the inevitable with obsessive early
morning exercise and caffeine tablets, but the caffeine made her
dizzy and she lost her dancer’s balance.

She tried
laxatives. They were good, she lost some weight, but Emma noticed
how many she was getting through and made sly, critical comments,
and this stopped her. She couldn’t bear for anyone to know what she
was trying to do to her traitorous body. Even the other girls at
ballet school who were doing it – the laxatives, the calorie
counting, the binge and purge – she couldn’t talk to them. They
scared her with their almost religious aura of ill-health and
fragility and martyred obsession.

She didn’t
want to share this with them.

She didn’t
want ballet to be an illness.

Ballet wasn’t
about how she felt or how she looked. It was whirling, free,
ecstatic – not tight and sly.

She had known
for a while that Emma secretly smoked, so one day she bought her
own pack of the same brand and lit up, too. Coolly, as if she’d
been doing it for months. Defiantly, so that Emma wouldn’t dare
impose one of the big sister double standards she’d been guilty of
once or twice before.