All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (26 page)

Mrs. Bint stands back, holding Lizzie at arm’s length with one hand. “Let me look at you. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Lizzie, and I can really see what your mother was saying about your weight loss. You look marvelous! Though I don’t understand why kids these days don’t feel the need to dress up. My own Zeke never wants to wear shoes either, and his feet get so filthy!” Lizzie looks down at her bare feet, her cutoffs and tank top—with dripping brown stains from her afternoon milkshake and evening sundae down the front—and blushes.

Mrs. Bint continues: “And it looks like I’m so early that your mother isn’t even dressed yet? Well, that will give us some time to catch up while she gets ready. Tell me, Lizzie, how are you? How’s school? I hear you’re quite the swimmer.”

As she babbles, Lizzie looks around wildly for Margaret and sees her standing in the doorway. Margaret mouths something incomprehensible at Lizzie, her lips churning around exaggerated silent vowels. Lizzie, alarmed, shakes her head in incomprehension. Margaret points dramatically at the ceiling and then circles a finger beside her head, seemingly suggesting that someone—herself? Barbara Bint?—has gone cuckoo.

“I’m good,” Lizzie begins, as through the window she sees another car arrive in the driveway. The doorbell rings once more. Margaret vanishes again.

“Where’s the caterer?” Still holding the basket out, Mrs. Bint looks around, as if a waiter might pop up from behind the couch or erupt out of the sideboard. “I’d love something to drink. Some sparkling water, maybe. With lime. Is there a bar somewhere?”

“I’ll get you some,” Lizzie says, seizing the opportunity to escape. She thumps out of the living room, passing Margaret, who is standing in the foyer taking coats from Martha and Steven Grouper, parents of her classmate Max. Max, the third person she slept with. On April 17, according to the bathroom scorecard. Oh, God, she thinks. They are the last people she feels capable of facing right now. She dodges them with a quick “hello” over her shoulder and trips into the kitchen.

Lizzie grabs a plastic tumbler from the kitchen cabinet, stops, and puts it back. Her mother would be appalled if she served guests with the cheap glasses. Instead, she climbs up onto the kitchen counter so that she can reach the top shelf, where the wedding crystal is kept. She grabs as many glasses as she can balance in one arm and drops back down to the ground. A glass tumbles from the crook of her elbow and explodes on the tile floor, leaving a million shards of crystal glittering on the floor.

Margaret runs into the kitchen, banging through the swinging door so quickly that it slams against the wall. She has sweat beading up on her forehead.

“What’s going on?” Lizzie asks, but she already knows. She remembers her mother clipping recipes from
Gourmet
magazine in preparation, and the pile of invitations that Lizzie mailed for her mother a month ago, just a week before her father vanished with Beverly Weatherlove.

“Mom forgot about her cocktail party,” Margaret says.

“She did!” Lizzie finds this hard to fathom. It’s like Santa forgetting about Christmas. Like her math teacher Mr. Nimroy forgetting the algebra final. It explodes the natural laws of science. “What do we do?”

“Run upstairs and get her out of bed. Quick, before these people eat us alive. I’ll man the door.”

“But Barbara Bint wants some sparkling water.”

“I’ll get it,” Margaret says. “Do we have anything to feed them? Some cheese and crackers? Any mini-quiches in the freezer?”

“There’s spanakopita that Mom made. I could make some spaghetti.”

Margaret makes a face. “Don’t think that will fly. I’m sure Mom has something she can whip together. Go get her!”

“But she said not to disturb her, right?”

“I’m serious. Go!” whispers Margaret, already slamming mineral water and ice into a glass. “Don’t leave me alone for long.”

Lizzie takes the stairs two at a time, catching sight of herself in the full-length gilt mirror that stands at the top of the landing. She is red-faced and makeup-free—she didn’t put on any after getting out of the pool—and strings dangle from where she chopped the bottom off her cutoffs.

The door to her mother’s room is closed, and Lizzie stands outside it for a minute, pressing her ear to its surface. Is her mother still napping, with all this noise? All she can hear through the door is the air echoing through her own eardrum. Lizzie taps on the wood with a knuckle and presses her ear to the door again. Nothing. She knocks louder. Still nothing.

She screws up her courage and opens the door, just a hair so that she can peek in. It takes her a minute to adjust to the dark of the room and see her mother lying on her side on the bed, wrapped in a silk bathrobe, her back to the door.

“Mom?” Lizzie asks. “You awake?”

Janice doesn’t move. Lizzie pushes the door all the way open and enters, then clicks the door gently closed behind her. The thick carpet muffles the sound of the party downstairs, so that only an occasional distant high-pitched squeal wafts up from the living room. Lizzie tiptoes over to the bed, lifts a pile of pillows out of the way, and sits down on the edge beside her mother. Janice’s eyes are open. She stares vacantly at the silk curtains that are pulled closed against the evening sunset.

“Lizzie,” she says, in a croak so shallow that Lizzie has to lean in to understand her. “Is someone here?”

“Yeah,” Lizzie begins. “It’s. Well.”

“Is it James?” Janice pushes herself up on an elbow. “Has James come yet?”

Lizzie is taken aback. “James?”

“The pool boy,” says Janice.

“No,” says Lizzie. “But Mrs. Bint is here.”

“Oh, no,” says Janice, and rolls heavily onto her back. She presses a palm to her forehead and leaves it there, her eyes closed. “What is she doing here? Make her go away. Tell her I can’t make it to her church meeting this week.”

“She’s here for a cocktail party,” Lizzie says. “So are the Groupers. And I think some other people. Were you supposed to have a party?”

Janice sits up quickly and exhales a sharp breath. “Oh!” she whispers. “I totally forgot. How could I forget?”

“Do you want me to run you a bath or something?”

Janice presses her index fingers into the corners of her eyes, as if she’s trying to pin them closed. There is a long silence. “No,” she says. “I can’t do it. Not right now.”

“Can’t do it?” Lizzie is alarmed; this is the first time she has ever heard her mother say that she can’t do something.

“I can’t go down there,” says Janice, shaking her head. She lies back down and closes her eyes. “Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Your mother is an imbecile, Lizzie.”

“No, you’re not, Mom,” Lizzie says, about to totally freak out. What is going on? “I forget stuff all the time. I forgot to take out the garbage just the other day, remember?”

But Janice is shaking her head back and forth against the pillow and, to Lizzie’s alarm, her eyes are filling up with tears. “I can’t face them,” she says. “I’m a wreck.”

And Lizzie has to agree that her mother does not, in fact, look her best. She has crescents of old mascara under her eyes, and her hair is dark with oil around her hairline. A tiny red sprinkling of rash has materialized under her nose, and the skin around her eye sockets looks bruised. The last time she saw her mother look this bad was when she got a nasty case of salmonella from a bad batch of oysters a few years back and almost died. She spent a week in bed with a 103 degree fever, unable to eat anything but Gatorade and Wonder bread, which Paul had to drive two towns over to find. Lizzie remembers the terror she felt then—the shock at how fragile her mother could be, taken down by just one bite of a spoiled mollusk. “All you need is a little fresh mascara,” Lizzie says hopefully.

“Don’t lie,” says Janice. “I look ghastly.” But she pushes herself upright again anyway, clutching her robe with one hand so that it doesn’t gape open. Instead of stopping when she’s vertical, though, she continues in a 180-degree arc until her forehead is touching her knees. She gulps at the air.

“Oh God,” Janice says. “I think I might throw up.” She lurches out of bed, stumbling over the hem of her robe as she bolts for the bathroom. In a few seconds, Lizzie hears the sound of her mother’s heaving retches. By the time Lizzie makes it to the bathroom door, her mother is draped over the toilet, wiping her mouth with a pink square of tissue paper. Little brown flecks of bile spot the white tile.

Lizzie is flooded with understanding—it’s just the flu. “Oh,” she says. “Do you have the stomach flu or something?”

Janice smiles wanly. “Right,” she says. “Something like that.”

“Want me to call the doctor?”

“No!” Janice says. “There’s no need.”

“Okay,” says Lizzie. “But what should I do about the guests?”

“Just tell them I have the flu. No, tell them it’s terribly contagious. Tell them it’s a bacterial virus.”

“Okay,” whispers Lizzie conspiratorially, pleased to be on the planning committee of a secret’s formation. She is also faintly relieved that her mother won’t be coming downstairs after all; Lizzie’s not at all sure she could handle seeing her mother talk to the Groupers right now. “I’ll tell them your doctor told you not to move out of bed.”

“That’s my baby,” says Janice, and puts her hand out so that Lizzie can help her up from the tile. She is surprisingly light, and when her robe accidentally gapes open, Lizzie can see her mother’s breasts. She averts her eyes from the blue-veined flesh, tucks Janice back into the bed, and moves a wastebasket within arm’s reach—just in case Janice vomits again—before slipping back downstairs.

there is a crowd in the living room now; lizzie counts at least two dozen couples, including the Groupers, the Gossetts, Luella Anderton and Barbara Bint, the Maxfields, and Dr. Brunschild from around the corner. To her alarm, the Bellstroms (parents of Justin) and the Franks (parents of Johnny, 6/9 and 6/18) have also arrived. It’s almost as if her mother invited only the parents of classmates Lizzie had sex with—what a terrifying thought! She looks around at the faces of her classmates’ parents, faces she has seen at endless summer barbecues and holiday cookie-decorating parties and Labor Day pool parties and winter ice-skating weekends and more birthday galas than she can count, since she was old enough to walk—and reads nothing but burning condemnation in their gazes even as they smile and wave at her. How can they not know about her reputation? The
whole school
knows!

The room is warm despite the air-conditioning, and the volume keeps rising as the guests attempt to outtalk one another. A jazz CD plays on the stereo. She can hear the rich clink of jewelry against stemware. Margaret has raided their parents’ wine cellar, and a half dozen dusty bottles of Château Lafite are sitting on the sideboard beside the crystal. A plate of olives is arranged next to the wine, along with a bowl of peanuts and a plate with pita bread cut into triangles and a tub of hummus. Lizzie admires her sister’s industriousness:
She
would have just made spaghetti.

Margaret is backed up against a wall with Steven Bellstrom on one side and Barbara Bint on the other, her nose buried in a glass of wine. She has an expression on her face that reminds Lizzie of a stray dog that’s been cornered by county animal services. Lizzie can hear only bits and pieces of their conversation from across the room—“academic pursuits” and “the age of affluence” and “potential in wireless networking.”

Margaret catches her eye from across the room, and Lizzie shrugs. “Sick,” she mouths at her sister. “The flu.” Margaret narrows one eye and nods, without stopping her conversation.

Lizzie feels a hand on her arm and looks up to see the Franks, Linda and Jeffrey, standing right next to her. The Franks. She recoils, but there’s nowhere to run. Linda Franks reaches over and pats her on the head. Lizzie thinks she might pee her pants.

“So
good
to see you, Lizzie,” says Mrs. Franks. “I hear you’ve joined the swim team! Good for you. I’m sure your mom is very proud.”

“Right,” says Lizzie warily. “I got third place at the last meet. Sort of.”

“Good for you!” continues Mrs. Franks. “You heard that Johnny won the all-league MVP for soccer this year, right?”

Lizzie remembers this fact vividly, since she let Johnny talk her into giving him a blow job in the Franks’ guest bathroom one evening as a “celebratory gift,” when the Franks were at the opera in San Francisco. She nods, unable to trust her voice.

“Well,
of course
you probably knew, didn’t you. I actually heard—through the grapevine, since Johnny never tells me
anything
anymore, such a
boy
he is—that you have been spending some time with Johnny lately.” She sips from her wineglass. “My neighbor saw you going into the house a few weeks ago—and Johnny
knows
he’s not supposed to have friends over when we’re out, but when I heard that it was you I forgave him. I know your mother has raised you as a proper little lady, but next time, only when we’re home, okay?” She shakes a finger in mock admonishment. “You know, you kids are almost getting to the age where we need to worry about you. I keep forgetting you’re not in junior high anymore.”

“Oh, Linda,” says Jeffrey Franks. He pokes his wife in the arm. “Leave Lizzie alone. I’m sure she doesn’t want to talk about her social life with her friends’ parents. I don’t think the kids would think that’s cool, would they, Lizzie?”

“Um,” says Lizzie. “I’m not sure what the kids think.”

Linda Franks keeps smiling while she shakes her head. Lizzie is struck by her resemblance to a polished hazelnut: brown skin stretched so high and tight over her cheekbones that it looks like it might crack if she smiled. Mrs. Franks tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Jeffrey, you have no idea,” she says. “I’m sure that Lizzie doesn’t mind talking about Johnny. I’m sure she’s popular with
all
the boys these days.”

“Popular!” says a voice right near Lizzie’s ear. She looks over her shoulder in alarm and thinks her heart might thud straight out of her chest when she sees that it is Joannie Cientela, mother of Brian. Brian, 5/24. Brian, a pale boy, blond to the point of albino, has a crooked ballpoint-ink tattoo of a snake on his hip that he carefully re-inks every night before he goes to bed. He showed Lizzie this tattoo and swore her to secrecy before he got her stoned for the first time a few weeks before school got out. They had done it twice, once in his parents’ bathroom, which Lizzie doesn’t think counts because Brian ejaculated prematurely in the sink, and once in his bedroom, which had
Star Wars
sheets on the bed. He told her he thought she was really nice, and she thought that meant he wanted her to be his girlfriend, but then he never spoke to her again.
Slut.