All Dressed Up (16 page)

She’d stopped
short and decided aloud to her sister, “I don’t know why I’m
yelling. I really don’t care.”

“I’m glad I
didn’t know you were coming until you got here,” Mom said. “Please,
Emma. Start taking care of yourself.”

“I got here.
It’s okay.”

“Do you need
anything?”

“Not as long
as the bed’s still made up. Are Uncle Garth and Aunt Sandy still
here?”

“They left
this morning.”

“Okay.” Good.
Less need to pretend.

“Are you
eating the cake?”

“I froze most
of it. There’s some on the kitchen table if you’re hungry.”

“I’m not. Not
for cake. Go to bed, Mom. I might grab something else.”

Mom obediently
faded back into her bedroom. Emma could hear Billy making noises in
his sleep, through his half-open door. He laughed suddenly, having
a beautiful dream. She thought about going in there, experimented
with how she might feel and what she might do. Brush the hair out
of his eyes. Kiss his cheek. Whisper I love you. Feel her heart
hammer in terror.

And then,
before her head had made the decision, her feet carried her along
on tip-toe and she found herself beside his bed in the
grayish-dark. She was shocked at how much of the mattress space he
filled now, with his legs and arms all sprawled out, and more
shocked at how strong was her sense that she was forbidden to touch
him.

Mom and Dad
had never said it needed to be this way. They’d never put
prohibitions in place. They’d even said early on several times,
both of them, “If you change your mind…”

They’d said
that, yes, but the whole family, Emma included, had put certain
things in place which would have made that very hard to do. The
fiction given to everyone that Billy was Mom’s desperately
longed-for post-miscarriage baby, for example. The careful
manipulation of places and dates. Why had they done all that?

Billy had
cooperated by arriving six weeks early, when Emma’s long, teenage
body and baggy clothing meant that the pregnancy had scarcely
shown. In any case, she and Mom had already been hiding out in
Florida, ready for the birth.

Even Grandma
and Grandpa didn’t know – well, it was easy to imagine how
relentless their disapproval would have been, with every visit and
phone call for the rest of their lives. As it was, they’d
disapproved of Mom “having a baby at her age.” Don’t expect us to
babysit, Terri. Only five people knew. Mom and Dad, Sarah, Emma
herself, and the principal at the boarding school where Emma had
been sent afterward, to complete her junior and senior year.

Charlie didn’t
know.

Charlie, the
man she had wanted to marry.

Still wanted
to marry.

But only when
I’ve worked out what to do about Billy. Only when I’ve told Charlie
the truth.

Which she felt
prohibited from doing, and terrified of, even though no one was
making her feel this way. She was so ashamed. Not because she’d had
a fatherless baby at seventeen. That happened to all sorts of
girls. But because of the cop-out, because she’d let Mom and Dad
take him and had believed for so long that this would make the
whole problem just go away.

Okay, I’m
going to bend down and kiss him and whisper I love you.

She did it,
feeling fake and scared, waiting for a rush of something. Love.
Understanding. Resolve.

Nothing
came.

His cheek
still felt baby soft to her lips but he smelled like a boy, like
lake water and sweat and ketchup and sunscreen and bug cream.

He was a good
kid.

He was a
different species. Sometimes over the past year living back at
home, she’d caught sight of him and been physically repulsed. By
his skinny little butt, by the green snot of his colds. How could
she have grown that boy body inside her?

She hardly
knew him. She’d deliberately kept it that way for nine years until
moving back home for her internship, which she’d done for
convenience, nothing to do with Billy, not even thinking about what
living under the same roof with him might mean and how it might
confront her. Now she wanted something to change, but didn’t have
the slightest idea where to begin.

With any of
it.

With what to
do instead of being a doctor.

With her
heart.

With
Charlie.

She wished she
hadn’t asked Sarah to check for the photographs in his apartment
this morning, and didn’t know what to make of her sister’s gesture
in taking the one from the cruise. She’d brought it up here,
stuffed between layers of clothing in her bag. The idea that
Charlie might call her because of it slammed and rattled
persistently in the back of her head like the screen door on the
porch not properly closed. She could see all three photos in her
head – the champagne glasses in their hands at the engagement, the
chunky sweaters and cozy hug in the Christmas portrait, the
windjammer sails, their bare backs with the sunscreen pictures,
their white smiles, all happy and wrong.

She went to
tip-toe out of the room again but Billy made some more noises, so
she turned and watched the little movements of his mouth. They
fascinated her, for some reason, while the rest of his alien body
was safely hidden beneath the covers, and she had a miniature
moment of hope when she thought, Maybe this is how I do it, this is
where I start, with moments this fragile and private and small.

By the time
she reached the kitchen, she’d lost the clarity of the insight. It
was a piece of fluff in the air that she couldn’t grab. She
clutched at it and it eddied away. She made herself some hot
chocolate and took a May Cause Drowsiness allergy tablet to make
her sleep.

She wrote a
note to Mom. “Don’t wake me in the morning. I resigned at Park. I’m
giving up medicine. I’ve expensively discovered that I went into it
for the wrong reasons. I am going to owe you guys money you’ve
wasted on me over my bad choices for the rest of my life. Which I
promise I will actually pay, even if the tennis money is only for
something important. Love, E.” They liked their humor dark in the
Dean family, like 70% chocolate, semi-sweet.

The allergy
tablet worked pretty well. She woke at ten-thirty the next morning
and felt so groggy that she could manage to stay in bed and doze
for another hour and a half without her shattered heart chasing her
into a scalding shower the way it had done for the past three
mornings.

Charlie.
Charlie. At ease in his own skin. The cleverest fingers in the
world. Running through Central Park on a Sunday morning. Laugh like
a waterfall. Pirate eyes.

Let it go. Let
it go.

At intervals
during the doze she opened her eyes and looked at the light coming
in the window. She’d left the curtains open and the sash raised,
and as she grew more awake she could hear sounds drifting up from
the lake. Splashes and voices.

Summers here
used to be so good.

Years ago.

Before.

What did she
used to do? Hard even to remember. Sarah would have been at ballet
camp for the final six weeks of their stay. She used to take it so
seriously, making sure all her practice outfits and ballet slippers
were in perfect condition two weeks in advance, rigging up a barre
and floor space on the porch and doing plies and entrechats and
jetés for three hours a day, wearing her thick flesh-pink tights
and her pale blue spandex leotard.

She even
stretched when she was in the lake, pushing her legs against the
drag of the water because it was good for a dancer’s strength and
control. She did ballet leaps off the swim dock and into the water.
She hadn’t begun to worry about her body shape at that stage, and
in Emma’s memory her elastic, beautifully trained figure was still
indeterminate, with a pre-teen waistless torso and softly skinny
thighs.

So Sarah did
ballet, and I probably never thought enough about how serious it
was for her, how much it was the love of her life and she really
thought she was going to make it as a ballerina, but what did I
do?

Read. She
read.

A book a day,
curled up in the old armchairs on the porch or lying in the sun on
the dock. She used to somehow swim out to the dock with one hand
holding her book and her towel in the air. And the books were so
important and wonderful, whether they were great literature,
children’s classics or paperback best-sellers. And the lake was
important and wonderful, every ripple, every turtle, every color at
sunset.

And I used to
try to draw.

Terribly. No
clue. Water-color pencils, where you colored your page dry like a
regular drawing and then softened and blurred it with a
water-dipped brush. Charcoal, to produce smudgy pictures of black
tree trunks and soaring birds. Collages using found materials from
the woods. Log cabin roofs made of pine needles, dirt stuck to the
page with flour-and-water glue. She’d loved anything creative.

Oh God, and
fairy houses.

Until she was
really quite old, twelve or thirteen, she used to make secret fairy
houses out of moss, down by the creek, with little fairy gardens.
She’d actually made a water wheel once, out of an empty thread
spool and wooden craft sticks, and she’d diverted a trickle of
stream water through her fairy garden to make the wheel turn.

And I used to
get the canoe and paddle across the lake almost as far as ballet
camp.

One day, she’d
gone ashore there and spied on all the structured activity of Barre
Class and Adagio and Coppelia rehearsal and Costume Workshop and
Free Activity Hour. Sarah had been in rehearsal, playing Swanilda,
the starring role. Emma had snuck into the theater. The auditorium
was dark. The whole space smelled of sweat and dust and talcum
powder. Sarah listened to the voice of the ballet mistress. Nodded
with such a serious chin, out of breath, hands propped on her hips.
She repeated the steps, body held so perfectly, breathlessness
schooled out of sight. Did them again. And then again. Serious. No
complaints. Serious.

After paddling
home, Emma had made herself some outrageous snack involving
pancakes, banana, strawberry syrup and whipped cream at four in the
afternoon, and gloried in her own freedom compared to Sarah’s
passionate, incomprehensible slavery to the dance.

And I used to
write in my diary that last summer, after the teenage restlessness
and hormones kicked in, about how I couldn’t wait to go to London
in September when something might actually happen, and I used to
sneak off into the woods to smoke.

When she’d
finished the cigarette, she would scrape the dry pine needles aside
and squash the butt into the black, half-rotten stuff underneath.
She would disguise the smell of smoke from Mom and Dad with a lake
swim, filling her mouth with the peaty water as she swam and
letting it spill out again like drool.

A lake
swim.

Emma jumped
out of bed, managed a bathroom turn-around time of less than a
minute, dragged her black swimsuit up over her body and ran down
there in bare feet, head swimming and dizzy, stomach empty. She
didn’t care.

Charlie.
Charlie.

Sarah
sun-bathed on the dock and Billy floated in the water. Emma
splashed straight in. The cold tingled her skin. The sand felt
gooey on top when her toes first hit but crunchy underneath when
she squirmed them in. Whoever had put out the dock, she thought,
had anchored it too close to shore.

Sarah sat up,
alerted by her noise. “Hi…”

Emma filled
her mouth with water and squirted it out the sides. “Hi.” She
splashed Billy, dumping a big, unheralded arc of spray on his head
and shoulders.

He yelped and
stepped back instead of splashing her in return and she thought,
No, I did that wrong, he doesn’t think to expect kid games from me,
or even conversation, but that’s okay, mistakes are okay, I’m
finished with being perfect, I’m not going to beat myself up over
it.

Except she
did, of course. She couldn’t just leap into Billy’s life like an
adolescent puppy, and she should have known it. The incident
throbbed away inside her for a while. But she ignored it, gritted
her teeth against it, swam around the dock and back to shore, and
said, “The dock’s not far enough out, this year.”

“No, it isn’t,
is it?” Sarah agreed. “The Tuppers put it out. You don’t even have
to swim to get to it. There’s a lot of chain left, shall we let it
out further?”

“Yes!” Billy
said. “Right to the end of the chain.”

It turned out
to be harder than they thought. This beach and the floating dock
were shared by several families, and the Tuppers were for some
reason almost always the family who put out the dock after its
snow-covered winter sojourn on the sand. It was like un-beaching a
whale. Finally, they floated it almost as far even as Billy wanted
it, and Emma enjoyed siding with him and telling Sarah, “Another
two feet, there’s still enough chain left to wrap around the rock,
isn’t there, Billy? And anyway we’ll drop the anchor down, too, it
won’t drift away.”

The rest of
the day wasn’t so good. Spitting out the familiar taste of the
water and the almost illicit siding with Billy over pushing out the
dock probably counted as its two highlights.

“Mom found
your note,” Sarah told her. They lay on the dock side by side,
while Billy put his T-shirt back on and made constructions in the
sand, all elbows and butt and knees. Beneath their sun-warmed
bodies, the wooden structure rocked faintly.

“And everyone
is alarmed and panicked.”

“Pretty
much.”

“I’m not,
however,” Emma said.

“So what are
you? You burned your boats already? You actually told the hospital
you’ve dropped out of the program?”

“Are you
alarmed and panicked, Sar? I mean, yes, I burned my boats. I’m
trying to work backward one step at a time to the last time things
weren’t totally fucked up.” She didn’t use the expression often,
but it felt right on this occasion. “Do you think I’ll have any
support?”