Bertrand Court (2 page)

You want to tell your father that he's not the only one hiding in the dark on a beautiful day, that Hannah is sitting alone in a matinee, eating buttered popcorn and sipping Sprite. You want to tell your parents so many things, like “Stop eating that popcorn, Hannah; you're going to have heartburn later.” Or “She doesn't mean to be such a shrew, Danny, it's the fear and the hormones talking.” You want to shout in your father's ear, “Remember when you tried to impress Hannah by letting her drag you on a rafting trip down the Colorado River and you were so scared that the only thing that kept you from fainting was watching her muscles contract with each paddle stroke and listening to her laugh?” You want to yell, “Smoother waters ahead. Don't panic. You'll drown!”

Danny's approaching Westmoreland Circle when he notices that he forgot to change out of his bowling shoes. He's careening out of control, like a balloon that escapes when you're blowing it up. He returns his shoes to the bowling alley and makes up an excuse to visit his big sister by stopping at Barnes and Noble to buy her a birthday present, an Indigo Girls live CD. Robin loves chick music.

He turns onto Robin's street, Bertrand Court, and sits in his car for a few minutes before he cuts off the engine. Out of habit, he surveys the houses. The cul-de-sac reminds him of the one where he and his sisters grew up, and he finds comfort in the tire swings hanging from oak trees, the creaky gliders nestled on big front porches, the basketball hoops planted on garages filled with cars designed to haul around lots of kids. Most of the houses are Dutch Colonials and American Foursquares — about twenty-five hundred square feet — save for the old Victorian on the corner, the show house with the bad feng shui. Two of Robin's neighbors have placed brightly colored Adirondack chairs on their front lawns. If he ever sells a house on this block, he'll buy the new owners one of those chairs. It's the kind of touch that generates referrals.

Danny's saving to buy a house for his own family, even though Hannah won't move to the suburbs right now. She claims she'll feel more pressured to fill up the rooms of a big suburban spread. She doesn't buy into Danny's “If you build it, they will come” motto (she won't even watch
Field of Dreams
with him anymore, though she's always had a thing for Kevin Costner). She used to think Danny's baseball fixation was cute, along with his perfect attendance record at his Young Judea summer camp reunions and his knowledge of the hand motions to the song “David Melech Yisrael.” She told him that he made her feel safe, but not just teddy-bear safe. Big, beefy orgasm safe, too. Or so she said. Either way, he sure doesn't know how to make her feel safe anymore.

As he walks toward the house, he hears laughter coming from the backyard. It's Justin and Marcus. Does the stomach flu make people laugh? He walks around back, and Justin is sitting cross-legged on their new trampoline, while Marcus, still built like a former high school wrestling champion, gently jumps up and down, bouncing his son's skinny little body. They both look perfectly healthy.

Robin emerges from the back door, toting Sydney in one of those front-loading baby-carrier contraptions. “Wash up, guys. The lasagna's getting cold.”

“Didn't Mom used to make us toast when we had the stomach flu?” Danny asks his sister, in the same tone he used in their youth to bust both of his older sisters for their curfew infractions.

Robin, startled, gives Danny a look as sheepish as the one Sam gave him at the bowling alley half an hour earlier.

He pictures Hannah cracking egg after egg trying to bake that cake for his sister, and he thinks he should feel angry or betrayed. But he doesn't. “So, did you put turkey sausage in the lasagna this time?” Within seconds, he's swept up into the business of dinnertime. The kitchen smells of garlic and the red wine that Robin has opened for Marcus, who is madly in love with her, and is the kind of guy who'd leave a twenty-five-percent tip on a bad meal. His sister scored big. Danny aches for her kitchen: the fridge adorned with a list of emergency phone numbers and a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday party invitation for Justin, the high chair propped against the window, the four pink pacifiers drying on a paper towel.

“I'll hold Sydney; you guys eat.” He nods to Robin and Marcus. Sydney, all cartilage and baby skin, feels lighter than a bag of groceries. She's almost four months old, but she still smells shrink-wrap new. Her mouth is shaped like the base of a pear; her skin is dark, like her father's; and her eyes are turning brown, like his own eyes, the Weiss eyes, the color of fresh mud. This is the first time he's really looked into his niece's eyes. Will his baby inherit them, too? He's never held her so close to his body that he could feel her warm, shallow breaths through his T-shirt. How could he have? Not with Hannah wincing every time he reached for Sydney. His body relaxes into his longing, and for a moment, the emotional riptide that pulls him between Robin and Hannah relents into a soft wave.

When Sydney starts to cry, Robin attaches her to her breast with one arm and shovels forkfuls of lasagna into her mouth with the other. Strands of hair, pumpkin- colored like his and Justin's, have escaped from her ponytail, and her cheekbones hide under an added layer of flesh.

Danny's starving. He butters a slice of day-old bread from Marcus's bakery and fills half a dinner plate with lasagna. Cheese, noodles, and warm bread. Comfort food. He doesn't want to leave his sister's kitchen. Not now. Not ever.

Justin kneels next to Danny's chair with a worn copy of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
, and Danny pulls the little guy onto his lap and reads. Marcus gives him the bedtime signal. After Justin climbs off Danny's lap, he turns around and grins. A simple gesture that makes Danny's heart feel like it will explode through his ribs. The ache returns. The ache that makes him want to nap and stay late at the office, feigning paperwork.

Danny clears the plates while Sydney dozes off in her baby seat and Robin loads the dishwasher. He feels his sister watching him eye a bakery box of half-eaten birthday cake, a sheet cake decorated with pink flowers and the last two letters of “Mommy” written in red frosting.

“I almost forgot.” Danny retrieves the CD from his jacket pocket and hands it to Robin.

“Oh, Danny.” She wipes her hands on her jeans and takes the gift, shaking her head in embarrassment. “Sydney and I don't bring out the best in Hannah these days.”

“It's okay.” And it is.

“No, it's not. That was shitty of me to lie about being sick.”

He interrupts her mid-apology. “Hannah's pregnant again.” This is his second rebellion against her gag order. “I'm not supposed to tell anyone yet.”

“Can I give you a hug?” Robin's eyes are filling with tears.

Danny does not feel like a person who has just delivered good news. He betrayed Hannah's secret to Sam because he felt like his back might break from its weight; he betrayed her secret to his sister because he wants someone to call if it doesn't work out, and kind, level-headed Robin would be his first choice. Just because he can't bleed or cramp, or stick hormone shots into his thigh, that doesn't mean this doesn't hurt like hell, doesn't mean he can do this alone. Goddammit, he wants someone to prop him up, to tell him that everything's going to be all right. Does that make him a jerk?

“I better get home.” He kisses his sister's cheek. “Good lasagna.”

Robin crosses two fingers for good luck and kisses them.

When Danny slips into bed next to Hannah that night, she rolls her back into his chest and he buries his face in her hair. Words mean nothing now. Instead of offering her a pep talk about the pregnancy, he listens to the rhythm of her breaths, wrapping one arm under her ribs and pulling her into his body until they are one. They breathe in synchrony, and for the first time in months he feels a slender wedge between himself and her fear. Between himself and the insidious sense of doom that accompanied the second stripe on their last test stick.

When he wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, he finds Hannah's side of the bed empty. He stumbles into the kitchen, still warm from her baking. The counters shine, the sink sparkles, and the scent of Comet and chocolate and sugar envelops him. Against the back door she's propped a plastic trash bag bursting with empty egg cartons and cracked shells, yolks sticking to the side of the bag.

The house is so still that he can detect a slight rustle coming from the den. Hannah sits spine straight on the only hard chair in the room; the weak light from the lamp forms a nimbus around her hair. She's so pretty. One hand rests on a pressed white linen napkin blanketing her belly, and the other slides a forkful of perfect meringue icebox cake into her mouth.

You feel the warmth of Michael's angel breath in your ear, whispering something about stubborn morsels of knowledge. Call them intuition, sixth sense, or gut feelings. He speaks in an unfamiliar voice, tender and barely audible, when he tells you that your parents' instincts are right. You're not going to make it. You'll never see that fluorescent hospital light. No nurse will slap your behind or swaddle you in a striped hospital blanket or cover your head with a beige cap tied with a baby blue ribbon.

Your mother will start bleeding eight days from now. Thirteen weeks. She'll get pregnant again next January, but she won't bond with your sister Goldie for a few months; she'll be too afraid that it's not for keeps. Slowly she'll return to normal. She'll welcome Jane into the world with less trepidation.

Time will pass, and they'll forget what a wreck Hannah was when she was carrying you. They'll forget about the deals she made with God and the tarot cards she hid in a Quaker Oats tin and the “I'm sorry”s and “I love you”s she muttered to dead relatives. You'll become a war story they'll swap with other couples who had trouble conceiving, but only the ones who finally give birth to healthy children.

Every few years, on your due date, your parents will wake up at dawn and curl themselves around each other and for a fast second let themselves imagine that dinner will end with cupcakes and candles. Throughout the day, you'll tickle their memories as your father mows the lawn or your mother reads
Harold and the Purple Crayon
to Goldie and Jane. Sometimes, your absence will crash into their consciousness like a wreck on I-95. They'll attend a party for a child who shares your birthday, and they'll think that if you'd made it, it would be you tearing the wrapping paper from that Luke Skywalker action figure or giggling in the moon bounce or begging for a second piece of cake. To quiet these thoughts, they'll tell themselves, “But then, if that baby had made it, we wouldn't have had Goldie or Jane,” and that strange logic will enable them to escort you back to your hiding place, in the crevices of their souls.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

Amy Solonsky, June 2001

A
my Solonsky didn't mind being the family fuckup. It took the pressure off. Nobody expected her to turn up on time for family events, and if she drank too much wine or showed too much thigh or lit up a cigar with Uncle Herman while the other women cleared the dishes, well, she gave her relations a reason to revel in their own good manners.

Amy arrived at her sister Hannah's birthday potluck empty-handed and two hours late. Hannah's college friend, Becca Coopersmith, was hosting the party at her home on Bertrand Court, or “White Picket Fenceville,” as Amy had nicknamed the suburban cul-de-sac located six or so miles north of her D.C. apartment. She let herself in the back door. The house was quiet, and the buffet of leafy green salads and quinoa dishes had been picked over. A half-eaten chocolate birthday cake sat on the counter.

Hannah was standing alone in Becca's kitchen opening a bottle of Chardonnay. Amy couldn't get used to her sister's gauntness. A few months ago, without warning, they'd lost their father, and Hannah had dropped ten pounds she couldn't afford to lose.

“The ladies are out back.” Hannah motioned with the corkscrew.

“Where are the kids?” Amy had been looking forward to seeing Goldie and Jane.

Hannah tapped her watch. “It's
slate
, Amy. Danny took them home.”

“Hannah, are you
slurring
?” Amy said, popping an artisanal olive into her mouth.

“You calling me a shicker?” Hannah punched the first syllable of their father's Yiddish term for a drunk. She removed the cork and giggled.

“Oh my God, what have you done with my sister?” Hannah was the designated driver, always. Amy and their brother, Eric, called her the “perfect child.”

“Beats me. I'm not even annoyed that you missed the kids.” Hannah took a few wobbly steps toward Amy. She normally moved with the grace of an acrobat.

“Careful there, party girl.”

Hannah, strong for such a sylphlike woman, embraced Amy so hard that she almost gasped.

“Happy birthday.” Amy squeezed her back.

Hannah slid out of Amy's arms and picked up a plate loaded with frosting. “Here, I saved this for you.”

Becca entered the kitchen with a handful of dirty forks. She tossed them into the sink and watched Amy scoop up a glob of icing with her finger and lick it.

“Amy, hi, and that's gross,” Becca said.

“Not gross. Major deliciousness.” Amy's siblings habitually heaped their frosting on her plate while their mother looked on disapprovingly. Amy's excesses made her parents uncomfortable. To Amy's surprise, though, tonight the frosting tasted too buttery and left an oily residue on her tongue.

“Wash your hands, and I'll greet you properly.” Becca pointed to the sink.

Amy rinsed her finger and then Becca hugged her.

“Why do you two smell like the inside of a bonfire?” Amy fanned her face.

“We've come here tonight to covet Becca's new fire pit,” Hannah said. “And play some game.”

They knew that Becca's real mission for the party was neither to show off the fire pit nor play a parlor game nor even celebrate Hannah's birthday, but to cheer up Hannah. She had been flying back to Milwaukee most weekends to help her mother sort and dispose of the remains of her dad's life. A few days after the funeral, Amy feebly volunteered to take a shift but never followed up on the offer.

“Come on, let's go outside.” Hannah grabbed the bottle of wine and walked toward the back door.

“We're right behind you,” Becca said, and then she turned to Amy and mouthed, “I'm worried about her.”

“I know.” Amy mouthed back, not sure of what else to say or how to comfort her sister either. Hannah was much better at this kind of thing. She'd offered the perfect words to every mourner who attended their father's shiva, but it was Amy who'd picked out the casket and propped up their mother while it was being lowered into the ground.

Becca scrutinized Amy. “You, on the other hand, are glowing.”

“I don't know about that, Bec, but thanks.” Amy wrapped a long black curl around her finger. This morning her new boyfriend, Leon, had washed her hair with lemon-scented shampoo. He was an architect fifteen years her
senior, and like Amy, who was a graphic designer, he thought in shapes and pictures. Leon was still a secret. If Hannah knew about him, she would theorize that Amy was dating an older man to replace her father. Amy had met Leon on the flight to Milwaukee for the funeral. Unlike her father, Leon worshipped her, and she found herself welcoming this new kind of love, which seemed to be changing her a little bit each day.

“Come covet my fire pit.” Becca led Amy through the mudroom, cluttered with her sons' cleats and backpacks.

It was an unusually cool night for June, too cold for the lightning bugs. Amy hadn't thought to bring a sweater and shivered in her halter top and shorts. The sky was clear, but the air rippled with smoke. Becca walked past her prized hydrangeas toward ribbons of orange flames contained in a knee-high circle of cement and exquisite stone.

“Ta-da!” she said, thrusting her arms up like Mary Lou Retton sticking a vault. “What do you think?”

The fire pit sat in the center of a carpet of pebbles. Hannah and two other women, swaddled in a rainbow assortment of Becca's Pashmina shawls, were settled into Adirondack chairs around the pit. Hannah was talking quietly with her sister-in-law Robin. On her other side sat Maggie, their brother Eric's wife. They all were drinking wine out of mason jars while their husbands were home getting the children ready for bed.

Becca leaned down and picked up a pebble. “Adam collected many of these from the Dead Sea.”

“Very nice,” Amy said neutrally, trying not to invite Becca to opine about West Bank settlements or related topics, or really any topic. The sooner they played the game, the sooner she could go home, or to Leon's. She'd told him that she was going to sleep in her own bed tonight, but now she didn't want to, and she didn't have to. He'd just given her a key to his house, a grown-up abode a few 'burbs over, with a garage and a washer and dryer.

“Come sit.” Robin patted the chair next to her with her delicate hygienist's hand. Robin was her favorite member of the Bertrand Court posse. Amy didn't have dental insurance, and every six months, Robin cleaned her teeth for free after her boss left for the evening.

Amy wrapped herself in the soft red shawl Becca handed her, sat down, and hugged her knees to her chest, her silver rings, one on each stubby finger, glinting in the firelight.

Hannah thrust a bottle of tequila across Maggie's chair toward Amy. “Look, it's even got the worm. Becca bought it just for you.”

Amy accepted the bottle and put it on the ground. “No thanks.”

“What's got into you? Our Amy would put a dent in the bottle,” Becca said.

“And get so snockered that I'd have to drive her home, but first . . .” Hannah waved her index finger in the air. “She'd make me drop her off at a hipster bar to meet up with her hipster friends.”

“Maybe I'm not the Amy you know,” Amy said quietly.

“Since when?” Hannah demanded.

“Since I'm the one driving your drunk butt home tonight.” Maggie and Robin lived on Bertrand Court, but Hannah lived one suburb over.

“Well okay, then.” Robin changed the subject. “What's this game of yours, Bec?”

“It's called Two Truths and a Lie. You have to tell three things about yourself, and two of them have to be true, but one is a lie, and we have to guess which.”

“We play this at our retreats all the time.” Maggie squared her shoulders, channelling her diversity-trainer affectation. “It's a highly effective way to force a vulnerability that creates community.”

Amy reminded herself that Maggie only acted like an ass when she was nervous, her episodic sanctimoniousness making her an easy mark for the family gossipers. It didn't help that she was abnormally pretty.

“How true do these truths have to be?” Robin asked. “True true or embarrassing true?”

Amy wanted out of this forced fun. The light from the flames flattered the women, who sat with their hands in their laps as if they were meditating or praying. They gazed into the fire, perhaps scouring their pasts for truths and lies. Dating Leon had made Amy realize that she was exhausted from the truths of her life. Exhausted from making booty calls to hot, noncommittal men and working sixty-hour weeks. Exhausted from the adrenaline highs that fueled her, followed by the crashes, during which she'd escape to Hannah's for a warm meal and movie night with Goldie and Jane, whom she adored. Hannah would send Amy home with Tupperware containers of hearty stews. But now Leon cooked for Amy, and last Sunday, after a long morning in bed, she made him a quiche. She burned the frozen crust she'd bought at the Safeway, but it was a start.

“Okay, you begin, Becca.” Hannah took an enormous swig of wine straight from the bottle. “This is your show.”

“Well, all right.” Becca stood and placed her hands on her ample hips. “Number one,” she said, snapping the waistband of her flowing skirt, “I go commando every day.

“Number two, I got poison ivy in my hoo-ha after eating shrooms and galloping around naked in the woods at the summer camp where Adam and I met.”

“Honey, you might regret this tomorrow,” Robin said gently.

Becca ignored Robin. “Three, I flushed Isaac's betta down the toilet, but I think it was still alive.”

Hannah blurted, “You do so wear panties, Becca. The commando thing is the lie.”

The women turned toward Hannah. Her elbow slipped off the wide arm of the Adirondack chair, and she tried to relocate it. “What? We do hot yoga together,” she said, inciting a round of laughter. “I've seen the panties. I've seen the hoo-ha too.”

“I'm cutting you off.” Amy reached for Hannah's bottle, but her sister clutched it to her body. Amy was more startled by Hannah's drunkenness than she was by Becca's statements about her lower regions. Becca was a seeker, and over the years she'd persuaded Hannah to study Kabbalah and irrigate her colon, and she was already planning their fortieth-birthday trek to Nepal, even though the milestone was three years off.

“Your turn, Robin,” Becca said.

Robin stood and unraveled herself from her Pashmina, a muted amber that matched her hair. “Past my bedtime.”

“Wimp!” Hannah bellowed.

“I've got a patient coming in at seven tomorrow morning,” Robin said.

Without Robin, Amy thought, things are going to get a little wild and mean. The scent of the smoke in the air was beginning to feel cloying.

“We'll fill you in on everyone's dirt.” Hannah leaned back in her chair and held out her arms to Robin.

Robin kissed each of the women on the cheek and then walked over to Hannah, squatted down, and placed her palm on Hannah's cheek. “Happy birthday, sweetie.” She turned to Amy. “Will you make sure she gets home?”

“Of course.” The role of the responsible sibling felt like the puffy down coat her mother had bought her last year for Hanukkah —matronly, but deliciously warm on those cold January walks to the Metro.

“Your turn, Hannah,” Becca said.

“I'm not ready.” Hannah was watching the fire as if she couldn't tear her eyes away.

Becca pointed from Amy to Maggie until she stopped triumphantly at Maggie.

“No, I'm going last,” Maggie said.

“All right, I'll go,” Amy said. “Give me one second.” She wanted a cigarette. She thought about revealing that since her father died she couldn't shake the image of him standing behind her, guiding her through the motion of throwing a baseball. The memory of his hand cupping hers barely loosened the tight knot of tears that she would not, could not, release.

Amy adjusted her glasses. Here's the truth she wanted to say: Since their father's death, she awakened every day feeling freer than ever before. She looked directly at Hannah and opened her mouth.

“I don't floss every day.”

“Don't let Robin hear you say that, Amy,” Maggie said.

“Not after all the free cleanings.” Hannah chimed in.

Becca tapped Amy on the knee. “You can do better, Amy. I told you about my hoo-ha.”

Amy opened up her mouth to confess: She had a new lover, and he was sweet and solid, and this monogamy thing was kind of nice. Instead: “Two, in high school, I hid my weed in the basement, in one of Hannah's ice skates.”

Becca rose from her chair and picked up a poker from behind the pit. She stoked the fire until it spit out a fresh wave of flames.

“I've known that for years, Amy,” Hannah said. “You're giving us nothing. Nada.”

The hell with them. She'll tell them about Leon. That the sex was quiet but deeply satisfying. That they laughed over nothing. “Three, I'm in love with a widower who owns a WeedWacker.”

“A widower who owns a WeedWacker! Sounds like the punch line to a joke,” Hannah said.

Amy glared at Hannah.

Hannah fake-glared back and imitated Amy folding her arms across her chest. “Prunella.”

Prunella the witch. Amy cringed at the nickname their father used whenever she used to throw a tantrum or gave the stink eye to a relative she didn't like.

“The not flossing is the lie,” Becca said. “Has to be.”

“Amy never used to floss. It's the WeedWacker boyfriend,” Hannah said.

“I floss plenty,” Amy muttered.

Hannah nodded knowingly. “You'd eat WeedWacker man alive.”

Eat him alive, Hannah? Nice. Real nice
. The Solonskys made a sport out of teasing Amy, and she no longer wanted to serve as their chew toy. “Whatever.”

Hannah cleared her throat loudly. She removed a rubber band from her wrist and put her hair in a messy bun. “I'm ready. Number one—”