As Good as Dead (26 page)

He said a startled, “What the—” but all that stirred up mildew was too much for me. I dropped the shower curtain and stepped back from the tub. “Sorry!” I said—and threw up in the toilet.

A few days later, while the man repaired the wall—this would have been right before Christmas—I felt something familiar:
My period,
I thought, and after he left, I checked my underpants and found a penny-size, brownish stain on the cloth. I put in a tampon. Hardly necessary, as it turned out, but, then, things were probably extra light due to my bout of flu, and hadn’t my periods always been much lighter since I had started on the pill?

And in January and February, when I would have no period at all? Then I would conclude that the lack of periods was an effect of my losing so much weight—almost fifteen pounds—since I’d come down with that lingering flu. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

The morning of Christmas Eve, I packed the presents I’d bought for my family and a paper bag holding a few essentials into Will’s station wagon and headed to Webster City.

A beautiful day. Snow sat in rills in the dark, plowed fields that rolled away beyond the interstate’s broad ditches, and the sky above was incredibly wide open—so stunning, the blue sky, so magical and unlikely that, when I really thought about it, it seemed to me like something you only could have dreamed up, something out of a fairy tale.

I felt good! Maybe I was not going to be nauseated anymore! Maybe I finally was recovering! And Will was scheduled to telephone me that night, at my parents’ house. A Christmas Eve telephone call. I’d feel even better once I talked to him.

At about the halfway point in my drive, I got tired. I tried driving with the windows rolled down. That helped a bit. At a truck stop a few miles beyond Waterloo, I braved a cup of coffee. A mistake. Shortly afterward, I had to pull off onto the shoulder.

Once I’d brought up the coffee, to clear my head and get away from the noisy buffeting of the passing semis, I walked down into the ditch.
Let the passersby honk. Let the highway patrol stop and complain
. That was how I felt. I went up to the fence that bordered the field, and I grabbed hold of the top strand of wire. The land was flatter, there, than around Iowa City, more like the land around Webster City. The snow in the field did not look so charming up close, where I could see that it was pitted with dirt. I asked myself,
At Thanksgiving, if I’d told Esmé how I felt, would that have kept me from doing what I did?
But then it would have felt so wrong to have asked her to share the burden of my base emotions! And, really, the question was moot:

I could not have borne admitting my envy of her! It made me feel too fragile, like a used piece of target paper, so riddled with holes that I was apt to tear.

And I suspected that she knew about it anyway.
She
freely had admitted to envying people. The guy from Brown who’d read all of
Remembrance of Things Past
in French, while the rest of us were towed along on a raft by Moncrieff and Kilmartin: “Imagine the richness of his experience compared to ours, Charlotte! Doesn’t it make you want to vomit?” The girl who worked at the Baskin-Robbins and had a tiny waist that the shop’s apron emphasized: “We’re going to have to start wearing aprons, too, Charlotte! Let’s start a fad!” The marathoner who whizzed by our apartment building on his regular runs around Iowa City: “What discipline!” Shortly before leaving for Chicago, she had told me—casually, lightheartedly—of a tipsy talk that she’d had at the bar called the Deadwood with a poet teaching at the Workshop that semester. Supposedly, the man had said to Esmé, “You live with Charlotte Price, don’t you? She’s a beautiful girl!” Esmé made a comic, pouty face at me over her coffee cup before continuing, “So I, in my charmingly sodden state, I asked the poor man”—she rolled her eyes and laughed at the memory—“
?
‘What about me, though?’ and he said, ‘You’re extremely pretty, of course, but Charlotte is beautiful.’
?
”

Everything about that story left me flabbergasted: How bold Esmé had been, asking the poet, “What about me, though?”! And how generous to tell me the story! Though I did suspect that the poet said what he did—and I’m not being coy—to throw lovely Esmé off-balance while he stood beside her at the Deadwood’s long bar, ready to catch her if she fell. And I suspected Esmé had the same suspicion. Her expectant air when she had finished telling me the story did suggest that she waited for me to say exactly what I went on to say, given that I viewed the secondhand compliment, simultaneously, as treasure that I dearly needed and as treasure that I’d been caught holding and better hand over, fast, if I wanted to preserve our friendship:

“Of course, that’s crazy, Esmé! Guys—it’s the flip of the way women will try to turn a guy off about some woman by putting down her looks. Like, to hook you, a guy may tell you how attractive he finds somebody else.”

Esmé laughed. “Okay, I’ve seen that. You’re right.” Then, playing British dowager, she leaned forward and, over the lip of her coffee cup, she said a teasing “But, of course, you
are
beautiful, my
de-ah!
”

I played along. “We’re both utterly
supreme
.” We laughed, like it was all a great joke, and then we had gone into the kitchen and downed our birth control pills with our little glasses of orange juice.

It was no joke to me, though. When you got down to it, the only times I’d ever felt
certain
that I was attractive or smart were those shiny first moments after I finished one drink and was halfway through the second, alcohol doing its cunning voodoo dance in every nerve in my body.

The giant grain silos by the railroad tracks were the tallest things in tiny Webster City. As I passed through the business district, I could see that even more stores stood empty than during my last visit, the shopping skimmed off by the opening of the big mall in Fort Dodge. Hard times for little towns.

My parents’ two-bedroom house—the house that I’d grown up in—on the western edge of town, part of a 1950s development that never had taken off. Eventually, a community college had gone up out there, but parcels of nearby land still were used for crops, and as I drove up, it seemed the pastel blue that my dad and I had painted the house just a few years before had gone gray and chalky, as if winds carrying dirt from the fields had roughed it up, worn it down.

“You’re thin, you lucky duck!” my mother called, holding open the storm door with her back while I carried my paper sacks of presents across the snowy lawn. She rubbed at her arms and said, “Cold!” I kissed her cheek before I stepped past her and into the familiar, pink-tiled kitchen.

My dad, sports pages in hand, sat looking out the window alongside the kitchen table. He turned to me and grinned. “I was hoping you might bring your pretty friend along!” he said, then stood to give me a peck on the cheek.

The house was filled with the odor of roasting turkey—too much of a reminder of that poisonous meal I’d had at Thanksgiving—and, after a brief chat with the two of them, in order to get out into the fresh air, I offered to shovel the walk.

“Not much snow there,” my dad said, “but help yourself.”

We always ate our big holiday meal around five on Christmas Eve, but my sister and her three kids arrived at one, not long after I finished the shoveling. They trooped into the kitchen, where I now peeled carrots for the relish tray (my mom was doing her radish roses). Martie’s curly hair was cut very short, and I was surprised to see how much she’d come to look like our dad in photographs from the days when he was a younger man. The spring before, she had gotten divorced and moved back to Iowa from California. That was about all that I knew of the situation. In those days, it wouldn’t have occurred to Martie to confide in me, her kid sister.

“You’re skinny,” Martie said when I went to hug her, “but you’ve still got big boobs!”

Martie’s gangly twelve-year-old daughter, Jessie—closer in age to me than I was to my sister—cried out, “Mom! How rude!” I had not had many chances to get to know Martie’s California children, but Jessie hugged me then and even held on. Her brothers, nine- and ten-year-old Seth and Alex, grinned and said hello but only let me touch the tops of their heads before they hurried off to the living room with their clutch of videos.

I was moved by Jessie’s hug. Surprised by her grown-up makeup and the crisp claw of hair-sprayed bangs standing up from her forehead.

As if she read my mind, Martie said, “Under all the gobbledygook, she looks a lot like you at her age.”

How I wished that I could shoot my niece full of self-confidence! Help her grow up better prepared for the world than I had been! “That’s quite a compliment to me,” I said.

“To
me
!” Jessie said. “Hey, do you still write stories about our family?”

A triangle of grim looks was erected between my mom at the kitchen counter, my sister, and my dad, just returned to the kitchen with his empty coffee cup. Standing right in the center of that triangle—I suppose one reason I became a writer was that writing allowed you to edit your thoughts until you got them right—I stammered that, although there might be certain aspects of my stories that Jessie recognized as coming from life, writers always had to draw on their imaginations to make a story. “This”—I fanned my hands around the crowded pink kitchen and toward the street and grubby bits of snow and blue sky outside the window—“this, plus all of us, is life, along with everything beyond us and what’s inside our heads, too, and it’s . . . in flux. Constantly changing. With people thinking different things about it. Writers pick just
something
from all that and try to use words to make sense of it.”

Jessie looked down and fiddled with a strand of dark, knotted leather that she wore tied around her wrist. I remembered people wearing those when I was a kid. A fad that had something to do with wishes. A knot for a wish. I knew I hadn’t been clear. I wanted to be clear! I tried again: “You know how you might be in a room with other people, but you’re thinking about something that happened a long time ago or something that you’d like to have happen? Or that you worry
could
happen? At that moment, you might hardly be aware of the people in the room with you. You’ve separated something out from everything else around you so you can think about it. That’s kind of like what a writer does.”

My parents made sizzling noises of disapproval or disbelief. Martie took the peeler from me and began peeling carrots. Jessie—whether confused by what I’d said or absorbed—raised her piece of knotted leather to her mouth and, her eyes on me, chewed on the thing.

Exhausted, I asked, “Have you ever tried writing a story?”

She shook her head, no. “But I’d like to!”

“Well, cool! Let me know if you ever want a reader!”

“So, Charlotte,” Martie said, “the tall boyfriend’s still off in Italy, is he?”

“Yup.”

“Oo-la-la!” my dad said. He batted his eyes and raised his hands, fingers crimped as if he were a cancan girl, hoisting her skirt.

I looked at him as evenly as possible. “You must be thinking of Gay Paree, Dad.”

He stuck out his chin and grinned. “Don’t play dumb. You know what I meant: wine, women, and song.”

I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

I registered the details of my parents’ tidy house with a mixture of nostalgia and impatience. Near the front door, the builder had installed a wall of frosted plastic to suggest a foyer. Small pheasant feathers and sprays of pretty brown leaves had been embedded in the plastic to make it more decorative and, as a kid, I’d been enamored of them. I’d known them. They were little treasures to me. At some point, though, I realized that many of the houses in our development had had a plastic wall like ours, but people had removed them over the years. My parents’ plastic wall now was checked and yellowed with age, but I doubted that they ever would change it. They repainted walls. They made repairs and some necessary replacements, but, as far as I could tell, the house was essentially the same as when they had bought it thirty years before.

Jessie was standing in the hall when I stepped out of the bathroom. She smiled at me, but her smile was strained for a twelve-year-old. “I wanted to ask you something, Aunt Charlotte,” she said.

I loved to hear her call me Aunt Charlotte, and I smiled and said, “Shoot!”

“My mom says the women in our family have broken pickers—when it comes to men—and I should be careful. Do you have a broken picker?”

I was taken aback by this, but I laughed, “Your mom hasn’t met my boyfriend,” I said. “My boyfriend’s nice. And I’ve had other nice boyfriends, too.”

Jessie nodded. “That’s good,” she said, and I thought she looked happier when she moved past me and into the bathroom.

Because the mall in Fort Dodge had a Younkers store, I had bought the family’s gifts at the Younkers in Iowa City. “The receipts are in the bottoms of the boxes, if anybody wants to exchange anything,” I said when we gathered in the living room for our exchange.

My present for my mother was a sweater. “Pretty color!” she said. “Thank you, honey!” She held the sweater up for my dad to see. He shrugged and raised his hands:
Don’t ask me!
He already had lifted a corner of the cardboard box that held my gift for him—also a sweater—and said, “Thanks, Charlotte,” before sliding the box under his chair.