Songs Without Words (9 page)

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 Christa Baker, talking about
drama.
If Amanda got all theatery 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.

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 farther 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 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 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.

By ten o’clock Brody was in bed with his laptop, sending off a few last e-mails. The house seemed quiet for a Friday night. Liz was upstairs saying goodnight, and he could hear her knock on each child’s door, could hear the murmur of conversation. He’d been in a meeting when she phoned this afternoon, and he’d been short with her, or so he’d felt. He hadn’t known, of course, that it wasn’t just a check-in kind of call. A guy in Seattle had said during lunch Wednesday that his wife called him from one phone when it wasn’t urgent, from another when it was. Which prompted someone else to say that when his wife really needed him, she sent him a text message.

Liz came in and kicked off her shoes, and he closed the computer and lowered it to the floor. “How is she?”

“OK. But really tired—they have so much pressure on them. Good thing we never moved to Palo Alto, those schools are much worse.”

“You know, it’s good practice for life.”

She was at her dresser, unfastening her watch, and she glared at him in the mirror. She put the watch down and turned to face him. “Maybe
managing
stress is good practice, but feeling it isn’t.”

He didn’t see how you could learn to manage it without feeling it first, but he didn’t say that. “She’ll be OK,” he said instead.

“I know.”

She went into the bathroom, and he heard the water running, the sound of the electric toothbrush. After dinner, Lauren had brought him her chemistry book, and he’d spent an hour with her, going over several chapters. She’d even made a joke, something about how much easier it would be if the element names started with “um” instead of ending with it. “Then you could just say ‘um…’ and the teacher would figure you were on the right track and say, ‘Good job.’” They’d had a nice moment together, laughing at that.

When Liz came back out, she began to undress, pulling her shirt over her head, taking off her jeans. In her bra and underwear she turned to face him, a troubled look on her face. “Will she really?”

“Yes.” He held out his hand, and after a moment she came and took it. He tugged lightly, coaxing her to sit. Her bare thigh was near his sheet-draped hip, and he lifted his fingers to her clavicle and stroked the hard bone, then moved his thumb to the soft flesh in front of her underarm. He reached behind her and unclasped her bra.

“You old pro,” she said. She shrugged the bra straps from her shoulders, and in an instant her breasts were released: their roundness, how pale the skin was compared with the dark plums at the centers. “Maybe I’ll just skip my pajamas tonight.”

He moved over for her, and she got in next to him, reaching to turn off the light.

“Do you suppose they’re asleep?” he said.

“Lauren might be by now. Joe was still knocking around.”

They lay facing each other. She touched his forehead, his temple. He turned his head slightly and sucked her forefinger; he liked the way her nail felt against his tongue. She made a little noise, then scooted her hips forward until they were pressed together. They pressed and pressed until he was fully hard. He rolled onto his back and pulled off his pajama pants and jockeys, and now they pressed again, her silky underwear wrapping around the head of his erection. This moment was a particular favorite of his: entering her a bit, pushing against her underwear, sensing the wetness. After a while she rolled onto her back and pulled her underwear off. There was a crash from upstairs, from Joe’s room, and they laughed a little. “Literally knocking around,” he said.

Sex and children, he thought. Sex was for making children and for finding your nerve endings until you were lit up and glowing. Children, meanwhile, were for sex; they were growing, not without challenges, but someday they’d start having sex, they’d have orgasms, make babies, and you and this woman would keep doing this quietly, outside the reproductive spotlight, body to body, until it was time to stop.

“There,” she said. “Oh God, yes.”

Brody and Liz fell asleep, drying slowly, coming apart slowly as they sank until only their ankles touched. They slept best when they slept naked, their bodies having climbed and climbed.

Joe was asleep, too. He slept the deep, restorative sleep of the well-exercised athlete. He wouldn’t remember his dream, but if he did he wouldn’t find it noteworthy. In his dream he was merely sleeping, Joe-the-dreamed in the very same position as Joe-the-dreamer, on his back, arms stretched wide. Joe-the-dreamed lay in a bed very like Joe-the-dreamer’s, but the bed was far from anything, in a place that was a little like endless blue sky and a little like time suspended. Joe-the-dreamer watched over Joe-the-dreamed, and Joe-the-dreamed dreamed nothing. This was a dream he would have on and off throughout his life, whenever he was worried.

Ten yards away, Lauren wasn’t sleeping. She was wide awake, lying in bed, trying as hard as she could not to move. She felt a little as she had once when she was drunk, one night last year when she slept over at Amanda’s. Amanda’s parents were out of town, and her sister, Corinna, had a friend over, too, and the four of them drank screwdrivers and watched
The Silence of the Lambs
on DVD. The room had spun that night, and it was almost as if it were spinning now.

Not moving seemed to help. Forgetting her body seemed to help. Keeping watch on the clock seemed to help, because she could tell at a glance that despite how it seemed, time really was passing.

8

S
arabeth’s motto was “A bad movie is better than no movie at all,” and while it wasn’t true that she’d see absolutely anything, she rarely went more than a week without seeing something. Once, in her twenties, she attended eleven movies in seven days, and even now she viewed this less as proof that she’d had way too much time on her hands and more as a personal best.

The Heidts had people over most Sunday afternoons, which coincidentally—or maybe not?—was one of her favorite times to go to a movie. Thus it felt very familiar to be standing as she was now, staring out her living room window at the seven or so kids playing in the Heidt backyard while the minute hand on her watch ticked toward the time when she absolutely had to leave.

But she lingered. Through the Heidts’ kitchen window she could just make out someone moving around: Bonnie, no doubt, whom Sarabeth understood to be quite the cook; she had even knocked once at Sarabeth’s door and asked apologetically if Sarabeth had any star anise she could borrow. Dumbfounded and flattered, Sarabeth went into her kitchen and pretended to look.

Pilar had brought outside with her a zoo’s worth of stuffed animals, and Sarabeth watched as she arranged them on a blanket, with a refreshing disregard for potential interspecies problems: giant floppy lion next to fuzzy pink flamingo, T-shirted Babar surrounded by little yellow chicks. Her hair was in braids today, short little braids that stuck out just below her ears.

The back door swung open, and now Bonnie stepped outside. She wore an orange polar-fleece vest over a red turtleneck, a lot of color even for her. She was the type of fortyish woman whose sexless personal style owed as much to kindergarten as to spinsterhood, and Sarabeth wondered what she’d been like at the time of her romance with Rick, if even then she’d clothed herself in brightly colored, shape-hiding garments; eschewed makeup; air-dried her hair. What would a person like that have worn for a wedding dress?

Liz had worn her mother’s gown, but with the sleeves removed and the neckline altered to expose her gorgeous shoulders. Sarabeth had had so much fun with her in the months leading up to the wedding: racing around the city looking at lace, flower arrangements, who-knew-what-all. It was during that time that the idea of making things had really taken root in Sarabeth.

She had to get going. With a nod at Bonnie, she hurried down the driveway and out to her car, then sped through the orangest of traffic lights toward the theater.

Nina was there ahead of her, waiting with her hands in the pockets of her leather trench coat, her strawberry blond hair framing her face in ringlets and waves. She shook her head indulgently as Sarabeth ran up.

“You do know you’re two minutes early.”

“Leave me alone!” Sarabeth panted, only half kidding.

They made their way through the empty lobby and on into the darkened theater. It was a sunny afternoon outside, and there were only six or seven other people in the place.

The lights went down, and Sarabeth felt herself sink in as she waited for the first preview. That wide grass-green preview screen—she gladdened each time at the sight of it. Six previews, seven, there could never be too many. She liked the fact that, during the previews, she often forgot what movie she was going to see.

Which was what? Oh, right: the Canadian film about sibling incest, or at least that was what the press was all about—maybe they were just being sensationalist.

“Remind me to tell you about Mary and Mark Murphy,” Nina whispered, just as the first preview started.

Sarabeth turned to her. “What?”

Nina shook her head. “After.”

Sarabeth opened her mouth, then closed it again. What about Mary and Mark? What? She found her heart was pounding, and she was glad she’d seen this preview before. She thought of Mark and the canoe, a few weeks ago, and his odd, pained smile as he said,
Mary does. Mary likes canoeing.
What was up? Mary was a law school friend of Nina’s, but whereas Nina had gone to work for the state, Mary was in private practice. She and two other Boalt graduates had their own firm, and she specialized in divorces. “Berkeley divorces” was the phrase in Sarabeth’s mind. Meaning enlightened. Was Mary going to have her own Berkeley divorce? Impossible, Sarabeth thought, but of course nothing was impossible. And Mark had seemed odd, with the canoe. Preoccupied.

Two and a half hours later the lights came up, and Sarabeth and Nina turned to each other with their mouths agape.

“Oh, my God,” Sarabeth said.

“The thing with the ax.”

“And he was so
gross
at the end—that noise he made.”

The press had been scant preparation for the movie. About an hour in, after they’d had sex on every surface imaginable, the brother had chopped off the sister’s hand with a wood ax. Things got worse after that, and at the end, the sister finally murdered, he wandered naked through the house, pulling on his penis and emitting a sound, half screech and half growl, that no human should be able to make or have to hear.

“Watch those taboos,” Nina said with a mischievous smile.

“Stop,” Sarabeth said, but she smiled, too: Nina had a pet theory about the reducibility of all narrative art. At their book group, Sarabeth usually figured it was time to wrap things up when Nina started throwing out possible summarizing slogans.

They made their way up the aisle and through the lobby. It wasn’t until they were standing outside the theater, trying to decide where to eat, that Sarabeth remembered what Nina had said just as the lights went down. “Wait, wait,” she said, pulling Nina out of the way of the passersby, “what about Mary and Mark?” Her heart was pounding again, and she was annoyed with herself for being so eager, or looking so eager—whichever, she was annoyed.

“Oh,” Nina said, eyes wide, “I completely forgot. This is so amazing. They’re leaving for China on Wednesday.”

“China?” Sarabeth said, and then she remembered: they wanted to adopt a baby. They were going to adopt a baby, evidently. “You mean it’s happening? Mary must be so happy.” She herself, on the other hand, was strangely sad; or perhaps she was simply moved, given the long story of infertility, drug treatments, failed IVFs, and despair that she’d heard, in installments, from Nina. Mary had been through the wringer. Sarabeth sluiced a tear from under her eye and forced herself to smile.

“It’s intense, isn’t it?” Nina said. “She’s taking at least a year off work.”

“I’d better make some lampshades,” Sarabeth joked, “or they’ll go broke.”

They stood on the sidewalk, people walking past them: full of purpose, or so it seemed.

“So dinner,” Nina said at last. “Do you want to go to Frisée? I could go for one of those little pizzas—maybe they’ll have the goat cheese and sun-dried tomato.”

This struck Sarabeth as inordinately funny, and she laughed a nervous, giggly laugh she feared would get out of hand.

“What?” Nina said.

Sarabeth shook her head and laughed harder. It was just…goat cheese and sun-dried tomato pizza. It was…Mark and Mary going to China to adopt a baby. It was…a movie about sibling incest, dismemberment, and murder. It was a yard full of children, and the idea that she might have star anise!

“What?” Nina was saying, her hair surrounding her face like a flame. “Sarabeth, what? Are you OK?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Sarabeth said, but she had imagined herself in Bonnie Heidt’s kitchen, and a feeling of intense unhappiness overcame her.