Liz first heard it in the middle of the night, a sound like rice pouring into a measuring cup, an infinite stream of rice pouring into an infinite cup. Hours later, it was still pouring, the first rain of the season: blurring the windows, blackening the wooden furniture on the patio.
Grumpy because of his tennis game, Brody was hiding behind the newspaper, invisible except for his hands. There had been another bombing in Iraq, fifty-three people killed, but most of the front page was occupied by a human-interest photo of a dog leaping into the air on a beach. Liz recognized the dog as Rexy, a black lab that had been the recipient of a canine liver-kidney transplant. He’d been in the news off and on, and now he seemed to be thriving, and the Bay Area was supposed to be cheered by this.
Lauren sat at the table without eating. Liz had made french toast, and she watched as Lauren pushed hers around her plate, sliding it first to one side and then to the other, clearing a path in the powdered sugar. Her juice sat untouched, her sliced banana untasted. Liz was up and down, getting herself more coffee and then Joe another helping of bacon, and each time she returned to the table she checked Lauren’s plate for progress.
“I’m not going to school today,” Lauren said.
Brody lowered the paper and looked at Liz, and she thought: Don’t say anything. She turned to Lauren. “Are you coming down with something?”
Lauren didn’t respond — she just stared straight ahead, into the space between Brody and Joe.
“Do you feel OK?” Liz persisted.
“I’m not going,” Lauren said. “I can’t.”
Now Brody put the paper down. “What do you mean? School is required. There are truancy laws.”
Annoyed, Liz stood and moved closer to Lauren. She held the back of her hand to Lauren’s forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”
“I can’t go,” Lauren said. Then suddenly she was on her feet, her chair toppling backward with a clatter. “OK?” she shouted. “I can’t!” She ran from the kitchen, and in a moment Liz heard her on the stairs.
“What…” Brody began, but Liz ignored him and followed Lauren, then slowed so Lauren wouldn’t feel chased.
Her door was ajar. She was facing away from it, sitting cross-legged on the floor at an angle that revealed the edge of her face, the thin white cord of her iPod trailing from her ear. Inside Liz, the impulse to advance fought the impulse to stay still, retreat. Let her be, give her some space. At last, she turned and headed downstairs again. In the kitchen she said to Brody, “She’s going to stay home for a while — she might go in later.”
“Is she sick?”
Liz looked at him. She held his gaze until she was sure he’d look away, but he didn’t. Those blue eyes watching her, so stubborn. At moments like this he reminded her of her father, how steely he could be. She remembered her father saying to John once: “Don’t say you can’t. Say you don’t want to try, but never say you can’t.”
“It’s just one day,” Liz said to Brody, and he raised his eyebrows briefly but didn’t respond.
When he and Joe were gone she climbed the stairs again. Now Lauren was on her bed, still attached to the iPod. Liz went and sat at her side. “Some days are hard,” she said, and Lauren lay still for a moment and then removed one earpiece.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Some days are hard.’”
Lauren stared at the ceiling as if she felt nothing at all. Her face was so blank it could only mean she was exerting a great effort to make it blank. She put the earpiece back into place. She was somewhere Liz couldn’t see: she wasn’t in the music, but the music was part of how she got there.
“I was going to go to yoga,” Liz said, “and then to say hi to Grandma and Grandpa, but I don’t have to.”
Lauren moved the earpiece again. “What?”
Liz repeated herself, and Lauren shrugged.
Now Liz hesitated, unsure of her next move. Some days were hard; one of the great lessons of yoga was that awareness of yourself could be part of how you lived. Observing: the stretch in your hamstrings, the feelings of a hard day. “Sweetie,” she said. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”
“No,” Lauren exclaimed. Then she got up on her elbows and shouted, “Why can’t you fucking leave me alone?”
And so Liz did: left her alone, and then left the house, dashing through the rain for her car.
She started the engine but then stayed still, heart pounding. Why can’t you fucking leave me alone? The words pounded, too. The image of Lauren, Lauren’s voice: it all pounded.
Part Two
All Liz had ever really wanted was to be a mother. This had been her secret: through college, through her twenties. The secret wasn’t that she wanted kids; it was that she didn’t particularly want a career. It was the early eighties, every woman wanted a career — at least every woman who’d gone to Stanford. But not Liz. She had various jobs, but kids would be her career, Lauren and Joe were her career — her work, her life. Which meant she shouldn’t feel so entirely reamed now by what had just happened. She ought to be able to take stuff like this in stride.
Rain poured over the car, and she backed out of the driveway and headed down the street. It was almost as dark as evening, and the cars she passed moved slowly, headlights on, wipers racing back and forth. She hit a huge puddle, and a sheet of water whooshed up behind her.
The parking lot at Yoga Life was almost empty. Inside, the shop was quiet, its rolled mats and stretchy clothing and books on practice neatly arranged for the day. In the studio, Liz put her things in a cubby. Only eight other people, which was nice, though not so nice for Diane.
Diane was in the middle of the room, talking to someone Liz didn’t recognize. Diane’s short gray hair was newly cropped, and she wore a simple black unitard that hugged her long legs and revealed the muscles of her strong, square shoulders. She was like a goddess, Liz always thought. Or an Amazon. The names of certain yoga poses made so much sense, given Diane: warrior, hero. In her gentle way, Diane was both of these.
Liz took a spot near the front. Until yoga, she’d thought of exercise as a way to make her body look better; now she understood about feeling better. And yet, she was very quiet about it. Diane talked sometimes about how yoga calmed the mind, and Liz thought it had calmed hers to the point where she no longer needed to say so much.
But she was not calm today. She tried to stay with Diane, but she kept thinking about Lauren, seeing and hearing Lauren. Your teenager will use whatever is available to upset you. She’ll use what you give her. This was from a book called “How to Be Your Teenager’s Best Friend and Other Follies of Parenting Adolescents.” Liz had liked the title — she knew women who did that, tried to be one of the girls with their daughters, just another companion for shopping and gossip, and she knew it didn’t work — but the book itself was a disappointment, nothing but the usual draconian nonsense. Give orders, and expect full compliance. End of story. Chapter Two was called “It’s All About Limits.” Which limits would the author say Liz was failing to set? You can’t talk to me that way? As far as Liz was concerned, she might as well say You can’t be unhappy.
Lauren was unhappy.
After yoga, Liz rolled up her mat and returned to the car. She thought of going straight home, but she’d told her parents to expect her, so she continued to Palo Alto, to the senior complex where they’d been living for the past six years. She still sometimes ached for the old house on Cowper Street, but they didn’t seem to miss it; they were too busy living their surprising new lives of foreign travel and bridge tournaments and choral singing — the kind of retirement you might read about in a brochure. Where, Liz sometimes wondered, had these gregarious people been hiding inside the reserved shapes of her reserved parents?
The rain had slowed to a sprinkle, and when she entered the central courtyard she passed a uniformed worker sweeping puddled water toward a storm drain.
“We finished the album,” her father announced at the front door, his reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. “It’s all ready for you to see.”
A month earlier, he and her mother had taken an Elderhostel cruise up the Nile, but Liz had only seen a few snapshots. As she followed him in, she said a silent goodbye to the idea of a quick visit.
“Perfect timing,” her mother said as she emerged from the tiny kitchen. “Did Dad tell you? We just finished the album.”
They spent a few minutes talking, but it was clear to Liz that her parents needed her to look at the album now. It was happening, of course — they were becoming her children — but at times like this the transformation seemed speeded up. And in fact, the first picture was one Liz had taken herself, of the two of them and their luggage standing on the curb at the airport, looking for all the world like Lauren and Joe on the first day of school, posing on the porch with their backpacks.
She flipped through the pages. Standing in front of the pyramids, or against the rail of the cruise ship, her parents looked older than they did in life, almost frail, but so game it was touching.
“It’s all on the computer,” her father said. “If you want any copies, it’s a snap.”
“Great,” Liz said.
More photos, and she came to one of her mother fanning herself with a palm frond. Across the table, her mother leaned forward and peered at the photo, then turned to Liz’s father and said, “Remember how much water we drank that day?”
“Listen to this, Liz,” he said. “If they served you an open bottle you had to send it back. That’s how contaminated the water was.”
“Or how paranoid you were,” Liz joked, but neither of her parents smiled, and she felt bad.
“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “After Mexico we just don’t take any chances.”
Liz’s father disappeared into the kitchen, and Liz fought an impulse to look at her watch. She wondered what Lauren was doing. She’d almost snapped at Lauren, had certainly felt a kind of automatic urge to snap: to get into it with Lauren, yell, the kind of thing Lorelei had done to Sarabeth every day of her life. Often without even so small a provocation as Why can’t you fucking leave me alone? Liz remembered a day when she and Sarabeth were playing glass animals at the top of the stairs, and Lorelei, passing them in her stocking feet, had somehow managed to step on a tiny elephant. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d shrieked at Sarabeth, as if the entire thing had happened according to Sarabeth’s design.
Liz’s father emerged from the kitchen with a tray of drinks — a trio of tall aqua glasses accented by orange wedges.
“Oh, good idea,” Liz’s mother said. “Wait’ll you try this, Liz, you’re going to love it.”
Liz accepted one of the glasses. The drink was cold and dark and iceless, and it tasted like a fruit drink of some kind, but oddly strong and sour, or maybe strong and sweet-and-sour, Liz wasn’t sure. “What is it?” she said.
“It’s a gaboo,” her parents replied in unison, and they both laughed.
“The Russells invented it,” her mother explained. “You make tea and chill it, then you add fresh lemon juice and peach Torani and just a tiny bit of bitters and bar sugar.”
Liz took another taste. Since when did her parents know about bar sugar? Her father was wearing an argyle vest!
Yet even the aqua glasses were very contemporary, and she wondered what had happened to the tumblers they’d always had — what had happened to them.
Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped, and through a torn place in the clouds she could see a pale, watery blue. On the other side of the sliding glass door there was a patio, but it was too small for much beyond a tiny metal table and two chairs. The big house on Cowper Street with its huge, tree-filled yard, its sunny kitchen, its rooms upon rooms — how could they not miss it? “It was so much work,” her mother had said blithely one day, as if the entire meaning of leaving were located in the extra time she had now. It had been a lot of work, of course, but Liz mourned it in a way that her parents seemed not to share. Perhaps it was a truism of life that the house you mourned was the one where you became yourself.
Part Three
Amanda had this idea, and Lauren thought she might be desperate enough to try it. Just go up and say, “Hi, I’m Lauren.” It was so insane to think she could even do that, but how insane was it that he didn’t even know her fucking name? Hi, I’m Lauren. Right, like she wouldn’t be shaking and sweating. Hi, I’m Lauren. From the library? Do you, uh, have a towel I can borrow?
It had been six months since the day at the library, half a year, and nothing had happened since then, nothing. He probably wouldn’t even remember by now. It was during midterms last spring and she was at the library downtown, sitting at a computer, when he walked up and glanced around and without hesitation took the terminal next to hers. She knew who he was, but only in the sense that he was one of the hot guys at school, though not at all the hottest. But hot, no question — tall and broad-shouldered, with pale, clear skin and lips that looked carved, like a statue’s. Her heart raced, slowing only after he’d been there for several minutes. Then, for a while, they both worked; she tried from time to time to sneak a peek at his monitor, but she couldn’t really tell what he was doing. After about half an hour he got up. Without thinking she looked at him, and he gave her a little wave and said,
“Knock ‘em dead.”
Knock ‘em dead.
She still couldn’t really believe it. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was so nice: like, he knew she went to his school, he knew she had midterms. It blew her away.
But what a joke it was now. She had done nothing but smile at him since then. And she didn’t even smile every time she saw him. He probably thought she was crazy. Or that she had some kind of spastic mouth or something. Or, more likely, he had no idea she existed.
She was sitting with Amanda on a bench in front of the office — a total loser lunch location, but whatever, sometimes it was better to just be yourself, as her mom would say. Amanda had stretched out on the bench and was lying there with her eyes closed — which Lauren would never, not in a million years, do at school. She sat nearby, zipping and unzipping her backpack like an idiot. She was getting her “Howards End” paper back in English today. She couldn’t imagine why Sarabeth liked that book — Lauren had hated it, which had made the paper agony to write. She would probably get a B and some comment about how it was well organized, as if she’d turned in her dresser drawer. What, she wondered, would it be like to get a D on a paper, or an F? You probably couldn’t get an F if you turned something in, but could you get a D? She imagined Ms. Freiberg approaching her, the stack of graded papers held close to her chest so no one could see anyone else’s grade. The look on her face as she stopped at Lauren’s desk, full of pity and worry. Lauren’s heart pounding. And then the shame. A D would clinch it, clinch everything. It would be like having a giant D on her chest for dummy, dope, making an announcement like that A in “The Scarlet Letter.”
Amanda sat up and gave her a strange look. “What?”
Lauren turned away. She felt like crying, and she roped it, roped it, roped it back in. She hadn’t even gotten her stupid paper back yet. “Nothing,” she said.
“What’d you say?”
“No-thing.”
Amanda shrugged and reached for her pack. She unzipped the front pocket and reached inside for a foil package. “Want some dry-roasted edamame? They’re rich in isoflavones.”
“Ew,” Lauren said. Amanda’s mom was always buying weird foods; she’d had anorexia as a teenager and so was overcompensating or one of those words. “No, thanks.”
“Let’s do something this weekend,” Amanda said. “Do you want to go shopping tomorrow? I totally need shirts.”
Lauren imagined the mall, imagined herself trudging around, the place all echoey, the smell of the food court. She said, “My mom said I have to do chores tomorrow.” She often pretended her parents were stricter than they were. She sometimes even got pissed at them for what she’d told Amanda they’d said. She knew she was a horrible daughter.
“Sunday?” Amanda said. “Or next weekend? We could do the Berkeley thing.” She said this super casually, but now Lauren was mad: she’d screwed everyone by blowing off Berkeley last month, and Amanda was pretending it was no big deal? It wasn’t even fair, they could have gone without her.
Why? everyone kept saying. Why? She hadn’t felt like it, that was why. The only bummer had been missing the visit to Sarabeth. Sarabeth was so completely different from Lauren’s mom — it would’ve been cool to take everyone to her house. Sometimes Lauren imagined what it would be like having Sarabeth for a mother, how she’d be so easy to talk to. In high school, for example, she’d had a killer crush on a guy named Doug — Lauren had overheard her and her mom laughing about it once. Later, Lauren had asked her mom for details — she was just curious — but her mom had gone into her Sarabeth-and-her-dead-mother thing, and Lauren had changed the subject. She hated it when her mom talked about Sarabeth’s mother. Or Sarabeth-and-her-mother.
Lorelei. Sarabeth pretty much never talked about her–the only thing Lauren could remember her saying was that her mother had called Lauren’s mom’s family “the Castleberries” instead of “the Castleberrys.” Lauren wasn’t sure how she did this — with her tone or something–but the idea seemed to be that she was a snob. Lauren had seen a picture of her once, in an old box in her mom’s closet, and she didn’t look like a snob at all. She was standing outside Sarabeth’s old house, across the street from where Lauren’s grandparents used to live, and she looked kind of shy. She was small and pretty, and dark-haired — though her eyes made Lauren want to look away.
“Yo,” Amanda said. “Earth to Lauren?”
Lauren looked over. Amanda’s hair looked orange in the sunlight, and her freckles really stood out today, especially this big one in the middle of her chin. “What?” Lauren said.
“Next weekend? You’re sure spaced.”
“Whatever,” Lauren said, but she was impatient now, because there he was, over by the gym. He’d gotten his hair cut recently, and she still wasn’t used to it. It was dweeby but sort of cute. He was so cute. But he was so skinny. If she ever sat on his lap she’d totally squish him. She thought of her ass spreading on his lap — she was disgusting.
The bell rang, and she packed up, said goodbye to Amanda, and made her way to English. Ms. Freiberg was already at her desk, the papers in a neat stack in front of her. She waited for the tardy bell and stood up. There were still people coming in, but she started talking about how it had been a really good group of papers, people had chosen challenging books, there were some good theses, well supported, although some people, she said, eyes locked on the back wall, had not taken enough time, and they probably already knew who they were.
She began at the first row of desks. She had the papers in order, so that as she approached each person, that person’s paper was on top of her pile. Lauren’s heart pounded as Ms. Freiberg got closer.
“Lauren,” she said with a smile, and she handed Lauren her paper.
Lauren held the paper to her chest before she looked at it. The first page, two comments in red ink; the second, a long note in the right-hand margin; the third, more notes and a couple of words circled; the fourth, a smiley face on the left, near the bottom; and the fifth, the last: three inches of red ink followed by a C minus in a big red circle.
She sat still, but she was going to cry, she was going to cry in just a second. Then the feeling passed, and the inside of her body was hot, her stomach roiling. She shoved her stuff into her backpack and stood up. Her face was on fire. Ms. Freiberg was at the far side of the classroom, just a few papers left.
“Lauren?”
She couldn’t speak. She was standing there in front of the entire class, and it wasn’t impossible that she would puke right now.
“Are you ill?” Ms. Freiberg said.
Lauren managed to nod.
Ms. Freiberg returned to her desk and scribbled something. “Here,” she said, handing Lauren a hall pass. “Go to the nurse, OK?”
Part Four
Lauren took the pass and headed for the door, knowing everyone’s eyes were on her. How obvious was it that this was because she’d blown the paper? Completely obvious. Her face was covered with sweat, and when she opened the door and got outside, the cool air was an astonishing relief. She stood there for a moment, trying to slow something, her breathing, the nausea. But she still felt queasy. She shouldered her pack and made her way to the office. She lay on the nurse’s cot and stared at the acoustic panels of the ceiling while the nurse called her mom. The nurse gave her a cool cloth for her forehead while they waited.
Lauren’s mom was freaked. She came bursting into the nurse’s room in her painting clothes fifteen minutes later, a totally worried look on her face. Lauren wished she’d stayed in class, but now that her mom was here she was definitely going home.
“What’s wrong?” her mom said.
“I just started feeling really sick.”
“To your stomach?”
Lauren nodded. It wasn’t so bad, actually. In fact, she wasn’t sure she felt sick at all anymore.
“Do you feel like throwing up?”
“Mom!”
“There’s a stomach thing going around,” the nurse said. “I’ve seen a lot of this.”
“Well,” Lauren’s mom said, “let’s get you home.”
She went to sign Lauren out, and the nurse took the washcloth and helped Lauren sit up. “It’ll pass in a couple days,” she said. “Maybe faster if it’s food poisoning. What did you have for lunch?”
“A turkey sandwich.”
“With mayonnaise?”
Lauren’s mom was back. “OK, sweetie,” she said, and Lauren’s face got hot again, but she stood and followed her mom out of the office. They walked to the car in silence, her mom casting glances at her every so often. At home she escorted Lauren to her room.
“Resting will help,” she said. She pulled back the bedspread on Lauren’s bed and plumped the pillows. “We have ginger ale — you could try sipping that.”
“Whatever,” Lauren said, and her mom gave her a curious look before she left. Lauren got into bed, then felt weird lying in bed in her jeans. She took them off and pulled on some boxers. She was a complete fraud. What was she supposed to do, lie in bed all afternoon? It wasn’t even two o’clock.
Her mom came back in with a tray. There was a glass of ginger ale and some Saltines, and a little flower in a bud vase. “I’ll put these here,” she said, setting the tray on Lauren’s bedside table. “Just see if you can rest, OK?”
Lauren nodded. She sort of wished her mom would sit with her.
“Do you want me to bring you a bucket?” her mom said, and Lauren felt her eyes fill.
“No, thanks.”
Liz returned to the garage, where she’d been working on the bench when the nurse’s call came. It was so strange; she couldn’t remember the last time Lauren had come home sick in the middle of the day. Maybe she did have food poisoning, since it had come on so fast. In a strange way, Liz sort of liked the idea that she was up there, not feeling well. Not feeling good, as both kids used to say. Mom, I don’t feel good. It had been all she could do not to sit on the side of Lauren’s bed just now, to stroke her shoulder. But Lauren would have no truck with that these days.
The bench was in the middle of the garage floor. She’d known from the first moment she’d seen it what she’d do: a lively plaid of yellow, green, and blue, topped by a sprinkling of tiny flowers. Fresh, pretty. Springlike. Very different from the things she’d done in the class she’d taken: the footstool she’d sponge-painted dark green over black, the picture frame on which she’d carefully stenciled a winding vine.
Why had she told Sarabeth she didn’t know how she was going to paint the bench? Maybe because she couldn’t quite believe it would work. Right now it was solid white, with lines of blue paint and other lines of blue painter’s tape running this way and that. Mondrian on a bad day, Sarabeth might say.
Liz went back to the kitchen for the phone. “How do you feel?” she asked when Brody answered.
“Fine,” he said rather briskly.
She hesitated; she hadn’t started this quite right. “Lauren came home sick. Her stomach. I was just wondering if you had anything.”
“No, no,” he said. “Sorry, I’m fine. Did she throw up?”
“No, she just said she felt queasy. She’s pretty flushed, too.”
“Maybe she has a bug.”
“Evidently.”
They said goodbye, and she stood still for a moment, listening for sounds from Lauren’s room. Nothing. She headed up the stairs: Lauren was deeply under her covers, eyes closed, fists tucked under her chin. Good, Liz thought. She’s asleep.
But Lauren was not asleep. She had gone to the bathroom, and the trek across her bedroom floor, and out her door to the wide-open upstairs landing, and on into the cold, tiled bathroom — this had gotten her feeling awful again. Her hideous face in the mirror, and she, she just couldn’t stand anything. She wished she could take some medicine, except what could she take? What was there for this? She wanted to take pills and pills of it. A wave of nausea swept over her, and she made for the toilet, but nothing happened. What if, in front of her parents, she started to rant and rave? What if she couldn’t stop?
Back in her room, she crawled into the closet and slid the door closed and sobbed. Her pack was out there in the middle of her room, the C minus paper inside it. What if her parents found out? You got a C minus? What happened?
She leaned against the wall. There was more room in here now, she’d gotten rid of a ton of stuff, but she sort of wished she hadn’t. There was too much room. She heard something and cracked the closet door, then opened it and dashed for her bed. Just in time: her mom came and stood in the doorway and looked at her. Go away, go away, Lauren thought, and her mom went away.
A C minus was worse than a D. If she’d gotten a D it would have been like, Oh, you must not have understood the assignment or something. A C minus was you suck.
She had taken in only about half the comment on the last page, and when she heard her mom close the garage door, she got up and went to her pack. Back in bed with the paper, she read all of Ms. Freiberg’s notes. “It’s interesting,” Ms. Freiberg had written at the very end, “that the paper, in its shortcomings and disorganization, reflects an aspect of one of the book’s most important themes, the contrast between Helen’s passion and Margaret’s reason. You may revise this if you’d like. Please see me — I think I may be able to help.”
Whatever the fuck Ms. Freiberg meant, there was no way Lauren was revising it. The book sucked, especially the parts about Leonard Bast. What a loser. She lay back down and began crying again. It was awful, she couldn’t stop: she was crying and crying and crying. She rolled over like that might help, but of course it didn’t.
The phone rang at some point, and a quick glance at the clock told her school was out. Was it Amanda calling? She might be wondering where Lauren was. Lauren half wanted to yell to her mom that she was awake, but it might not be Amanda; Amanda might not even have noticed that she was missing. Amanda was getting friendly with some theater people, and she might be happily hanging out with that dork Sarah Baker, talking about drama. If Amanda got all theaterey Lauren would be screwed. She could imagine Amanda being one of those tech people, doing lights or sound or painting sets or whatever. Lauren hated plays. She’d taken a theater class when she was ten, and it was the most embarrassing experience she ever had. One day you were supposed to act out being an animal, and Lauren had to go into the middle of the room and pretend to be a penguin in front of all these people. Remembering it, she almost laughed, and for some reason that made her feel worse. Tears streamed down her face.
Part Five
Liz had a chicken roasting in the oven when she went upstairs a little before six-thirty. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans: one of Lauren’s favorite dinners, in case she felt up to eating. Lauren’s door was closed now, and Liz knocked and waited and knocked again.
“Lauren?” she called. She opened the door, and Lauren jerked up to sitting, her face red and tear-streaked, her mouth wrenched downward.
“Oh, sweetie,” Liz said. She hurried to the bed and sat down, and Lauren fell against her. “Sweetie, what is it?”
Lauren shook her head, but her body heaved and heaved, and Liz felt tears running into the neckline of her own shirt. She stroked Lauren’s back. “What?” she said, and then, “There, it’s OK, it’s OK.” Something was terribly wrong, and yet how glad she was that Lauren was allowing herself to be held. This body in Liz’s arms: she barely knew it anymore.
She put her hand down on something crinkly.
Lauren pulled away, and they both looked down at a pile of papers halfway under Lauren’s pillow. Lauren pushed the papers further under and scooted back.
“What’s that?” Liz said.
“Nothing.”
Liz looked at Lauren, and suddenly she knew: it was the English paper, the independent reading project paper. Lauren had done badly. Or probably not badly, probably just not as well as she’d hoped. It was there, under her pillow, the paper she’d had to write about the book she’d hated. Liz had tried to tell her that she should read a bit of it before committing, but Lauren could never be warned, she had to hurtle forward, the consequences be damned. Why was that? Had Liz or Brody modeled recklessness? Or had they, in modeling caution, somehow encouraged the opposite?
Lauren wiped her sleeve over her face. Her lips were as red as if she’d spent the afternoon kissing. She stared at Liz and then sighed. She lifted the pillow and threw it past Liz to the floor. She made a little gesture of pushing the papers toward Liz, and it took all Liz had not to reach for them.
“Is there something you want to show me?” she said instead.
Lauren pushed them closer. She stared at Liz. Finally she picked them up and held them out for Liz to take.
“Your paper?” Liz said, because she’d been right: “Two Sisters in Howards End,” read the title on the top page.
“I failed it,” Lauren said.
Liz glanced through the pages, taking in the quantity of red ink more than the content. On the last page, below a long comment, there was a big red C minus in a circle.
“Is this what you’re feeling bad about?”
Tears streaming again, Lauren nodded.
“You hoped for a better grade?”
“Duh,” Lauren said, and then she bowed her head and sobbed again.
Liz hesitated and then put a hand on Lauren’s shoulder. “I think you had high hopes for it. And you worked hard on it.”
“Mom,” Lauren cried. “I’m probably going to get a C in chemistry!”
She was struggling in school. That’s what it was. Liz felt the lifting of a huge burden. Lauren was having a hard time with her schoolwork. Academics had always been easy for her, but they weren’t this year.
Liz said as much, and as she talked Lauren settled into a peaceful kind of listening that suggested she was actually taking in what Liz was saying: that it was especially hard to be challenged when you weren’t used to it, that struggle in one part of life could affect confidence in others.
“I hate to see you put so much pressure on yourself,” Liz said. “It’s OK if you don’t get good grades, you know.”
Lauren nodded, and after a while she wiped the tears from her face with the edge of her sheet. The color in her face had bled away, and she looked pale and composed, except for her ruby lips.
“I’m roasting chicken if you think you might be able to eat,” Liz said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I hope you’ll feel like coming down, honey.” Liz reached out a hand and ran it down the back of Lauren’s head. “About twenty minutes,” she added, and she left the room and headed downstairs.
The potatoes had begun to boil. From outside, Joe banged into the garage, and she heard him huffing as he shucked off his cleats and shin guards. He came into the kitchen and inhaled deeply.
“Chicken?”
“You just have time to shower.”
She opened the oven door and pressed a cooking fork into one of the chicken’s thighs. The juices were clear already, but she doubted it was done. So many of her mother’s rules had turned out to be untrue. Perhaps the significant thing was that Liz had expected otherwise. She wondered how Sarabeth was; they hadn’t spoken in a few days. Was it thinking of her mother as fortyish and the queen of a family kitchen that had brought Sarabeth to mind? There was a memory that Liz returned to often, a summer afternoon in the Cowper Street kitchen a year or two before Lorelei’s death. She and Sarabeth were sitting at the table, drinking Tab with lemon, when Liz’s mother came in with groceries. She moved around putting things away, and Sarabeth watched, and it was the first time Liz understood how alone Sarabeth was: watching her watch the incredibly ordinary actions of a woman taking care of her family. At the time, Liz hadn’t really understood what was going on, only that she had an urge to distract Sarabeth with conversation and an equal urge to remain silent. Around the room Liz’s mother went, paper-wrapped meat into the refrigerator, fruit into a colander to wash, a box of cake flour set aside for later. And quietly, almost reluctantly, Sarabeth following her every move.
Brody came in, and Liz turned to greet him.
“How’s she feeling?”
“She wasn’t sick — she was upset about a grade.”
A look of compassion came over his face, and she realized she’d been worrying about what he’d say. Brody was a good father, though. The snapping, the occasional rigidity — they were not the true him, they were sparks flying off the stress of his work. Of course he would feel for Lauren.
“Poor thing,” he said, and he kissed her and then, surprisingly, kissed her again, his hands on her back pulling her close. They parted and then she moved forward and kissed him, taking his upper lip into her mouth and massaging it with her tongue.
“Well,” he said when the kiss was over and he’d pulled away and was looking at her.
“Well yourself.”
They stared at each other, and then Liz laughed and said, “Isn’t life funny?”
Brody went into the half-bath to pee, sounding like he hadn’t peed all day. After, he would change his shoes, taking off his oxfords and putting on the soft moccasins he wore around the house. Soon they would all appear, Brody, Joe, and Lauren — Liz knew Lauren would come. The kitchen with its food smells would draw them. They would sit down, and the food on the plates as they gathered together would say: Yes, this is OK, we’re all OK.
