The Eliot Girls (23 page)

“Hmm?” Henry replied bemusedly.

“Seeta.”

“Ah.”

“I think she was expecting an encore,” Ruth laughed. “The way she wouldn't leave the stage.”

“Well, she is quite talented.”

“Of course.” She sensed that she might be violating an unspoken rule by talking about work. The longer she had known Henry, the less they had talked about school, about anything, really. Yet she pushed on. “But don't you think, really, that Seeta should give it a rest? I mean, she may be good, she may be excellent, but come on.”

Henry sat up fully and looked straight at her. “Come on what? She deserves to be harassed?”

“It's just a little bullying. Do we really lead such politically correct lives that we have to pretend to be mortally offended that some ordinary teenagers are sending mean, and frankly stupid, notes to the class loser? Is this really an unprecedented event?”

“I don't think we can reasonably call it ‘a little bullying' anymore.”

“Henry. The music was fine in the beginning, but now? Come on. It's like watching someone who's morbidly obese inhale a Big Mac. You must agree with me!”

“Why must I agree with such a preposterous—and dare I say mean-spirited—comparison?”

Ruth drew the sheet around her naked body, light-headed with mortified anger. She had always assumed that that they would be kindred spirits in this. She was not a sociopath. Of course she felt some sympathy for Seeta, but over the past month she had also grown sick of all the tiptoeing: the earnest whispers of concern, the virtuous debates. Pretending not to think what everyone knew to be true. Teenagers got bullied. It was the way of life.

“Bullying can kill, Ruth.”

“Nobody is murdering anybody!”

“How do you account for the suicides of some of these persecuted kids?”

“Henry, come on! Mentally sound teenagers endure the bullying and move on with their lives.”

“How would you feel if Audrey were the one being harassed?”

Ruth was silent. Henry regarded her with a level gaze. She felt, suddenly, as though she wasn't in a fair fight. Of course she would feel awful if Audrey were being bullied, but this wasn't a conversation about how she would react to her daughter's pain. It was flawed argumentation, surely, to broaden the scope to the personal, but she didn't know how to articulate the wrongness of it. What did Henry even know about Eliot?

Swiftly and clumsily, she got out of bed, an exit that unfortunately required her to abandon the coverage of the sheet. Two shaky steps later, she was in the bathroom with the door closed firmly behind her. She took a deep breath, willing her racing heart to settle.
The flimsy door seemed barely any separation between them. She turned the water on full blast and splashed her face, then rubbed it hard with a rough white towel that smelled intensely of bleach. What she was feeling for Henry came very close to hatred, but the real trouble was how little empowered she felt by such loathing. She was careful not to look at herself in the mirror, knowing that the dingy lighting would show her reflection to her in its true light. It would allow no romanticizing of her under-eye circles, the chafed red skin, the untidy hair. Even one glimpse could wreck her. It was imperative that she reclaim the confidence to go back into the room and be seen in the unsparing afternoon light, to make things right, to take his body into her custody with the playful aggression, the barest hint of hovering violence, that drove him crazy.

When she returned, he was dressing by the side of the bed.

“You're leaving already?” she exclaimed.

The spectral Henry was already standing at the door, jangling the keys in his pocket.

“I guess you'd prefer it if I had no opinion,” Ruth said. “If I just lay here and shut up. Well, I'll do my best to comply next time.”

“It's my dinner night,” Henry replied. “Clayton carries every other day.”

Ruth nodded vigorously. “Oh yeah, I'll bet she's just a super housekeeper!”

With his back to her, Henry swiftly pulled on his clothes. “You have no call to say anything about her,” he said.

Ruth grabbed her blouse and arranged it awkwardly over her top half. “You never say anything bad about her. But you must feel something bad,” she said, despising the sound of her own voice. “At least a little bit. You must. You're here with me.”

Henry looked at her frankly. “I'm not here with you because of her. It's because of me.”

“Of course not because of me.”

“Ruth, let's not do this.”

Was it really too much to expect the paltry accommodation of an obvious lie, the standard appeasement, however flimsily consoling?
Yes, I'm here because of you. It could only have been you.

“No, indeed” she said, shaking her head bitterly. “Let's not do any of this.”

 

AUDREY SAT IN ARABELLA'S
living room, her legs dangling gracelessly off the edge of the high, plush couch. Hushed voices drifted out from the kitchen, where Arabella was in conference with her mother. Audrey stared straight ahead of her, afraid of being caught showing too much curiosity in her surroundings. None of her imaginings had prepared her for the reality of Arabella having a home, a mother cutting vegetables in the kitchen.

The house was a small semi-detached, but the simple flair of the furnishings made the living room seem much larger than it was. With the exception of an enormous vase of sunflowers in the adjoining dining room and a piece of art above the mantel that looked like an elongated red teardrop on a white canvas, everything was black and white. The couch and chairs were white with jet black velvet throw cushions, the wood floors a glossy black, the walls largely bare. In the corner next to one of the armchairs, a cello leaned against the wall.

They had spoken very little on the bus. Audrey hoped for some indication of why Arabella had found her in the ravine. There were few things in the world she expected less than an invitation to Arabella's house. “I can make my way home,” Audrey had said with a trace of defiance, but also trying to let Arabella out of whatever atonement she felt obliged to make. Arabella had simply said, “Don't be stupid.”

Reappearing now in the hallway, Arabella looked at Audrey as though she didn't know quite what to do with her.

“I'll go get you some dry socks. Shoes I don't think are going to happen.” She looked dubiously at Audrey's inelegant feet, noticeably larger than her own, and disappeared.

The mood of liberation that had swept over Audrey in the ravine was retreating all too quickly now that she was at Arabella's. She was bewildered by her purpose, even more uncertain than usual of how to behave. Was she there for a visit or simply to replace her essentials before being sent on her way home? That Arabella was upstairs rummaging for socks was implausible. How disorienting, too, to hear a mother humming in the kitchen, to see a mantel lined with family photographs: Arabella captured in black-and-white profile, staring contemplatively at something in the unobservable distance; a young woman reading a book by a window, her hand resting on top of her pregnant belly. Audrey was startled to see Henry Winter in the lineup. She hadn't exactly forgotten that he was married to Arabella's mother; it was more that there was a realm she associated with Eliot, a universe that, though crammed and chaotic, was essentially one-dimensional. That any of these people were alive outside of Eliot was an abstraction. Maybe it was self-preservation, compensation for the fact that in every moment at school she felt locked out of a massive splendid secret. She worried about everything constantly—Arabella and her friends' mockery, the teachers' disappointment, Ms. McAllister's wrath—but there was a peculiar narcissism at the bottom of it all. They barely existed for her except in relation to what they thought of her. But there stood Henry Winter on a beach somewhere with Arabella's mother, before a sunset sky of such a deep blood orange as to give the impression of manufactured scenery, smiling in different directions, as if at separate cameras. And there they were again, in a dingy governmental wedding room, Henry blending in drably in an ill-fitting tweed jacket, the woman lambent and ethereal in a silky slip dress and a little pillbox hat with a long blue feather on top, her long, unstyled hair limply blanketing her shoulders.

Arabella shuffled halfway down the stairs in a pair of enormous bunny slippers and leaned out over the banister. “Come on up.”

Audrey paused, wondering if Arabella could be talking to her mother.

“Are you waiting for a written invitation?” Arabella threw a pair of black socks at Audrey and trudged back up the stairs.

Up in Arabella's room, the only light came from tiny white Christmas lights strung up around her window, dotting the sumptuous turquoise drapery reminiscent of a ball gown. Arabella sat cross-legged on the bed, the puffy, heart-speckled duvet drawn up over her legs. She pointed to her computer chair and told Audrey to sit, less an invitation than a command, then smiled uncomfortably, as though wanting to be hospitable but unsure how to surrender her usual persona.

On the wall above the desk were two huge bulletin boards, one covered in pictures of Arabella and her friends, the other with ones of Arabella and the woman from the mantel photographs. “Your mother is so beautiful,” Audrey said.

“Clayton? Yeah, she's a hottie.”

Audrey gestured to a picture of Arabella, Dougie, and a girl she didn't recognize. “Who's that?”

Arabella broke out laughing. “So you've discovered Whit's secret.”

Audrey looked at her in confusion.

“It's Miss Oke herself,” Arabella said. “Pre–nose job. Wait. Corrective surgery, I'm supposed to say.”

“Are you kidding?” Audrey asked. She didn't understand how she could have missed that in all her ventures through Ruth's old yearbooks. The difference between the Whitney she knew and the Whitney of this photograph was astounding. The former nose dominated Whitney's face, more or less eclipsed her other features.

“She likes to tell people she broke it on the high diving board at the Granite Club, but everyone knows that's bullshit. She claims it grew wrong.” Arabella laughed again. “She had her father's nose. Anyone who knew her family knew that. I kinda liked the original, though. It gave her street cred.”

Audrey supposed that this story should have made Whitney more human to her. Anyone who concocted such an outlandish story clearly hated herself in some way, but as she thought of Whitney's aquiline new nose, its only flaw perhaps that it was a little small for the rest of her face, she felt no sympathy, no heartening recognition of a kindred spirit. She wanted to tear down the illusion, the delusion, all of these protecting lies, and expose her—but expose her to whom? Everyone accepted the new, perfect Whitney. The old man nose had been excised like a borderline mole, so cleanly that Whitney seemed to have lost all recollection of whatever pain it had caused her. Audrey studied the photograph. How had Whitney managed to bring her inner, imperfect self and her outer, purchased self into such harmonious alignment? What was the trick of it?

“Hey guys, want some veggies and dip?” came a voice from downstairs.

“Dude, I'm starving,” called Arabella.

Audrey shadowed Arabella back downstairs, where Clayton stood in the hallway, looking up at them brightly. In the dim light, she resembled a figure in an old sepia-toned photograph, an impression created not simply by the light, but by the fact that the woman herself, with her disproportionately long and slender nose, her large hooded eyes and angular bone structure, looked like a refugee from postwar Europe. She was lanky and shapeless, wearing a blue man's Oxford shirt with a spot of ink on the pocket and jeans lightly splattered with paint. She smiled, revealing a gap between her front teeth that, in detracting from the simplicity of prettiness, made her striking.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said, smiling at Audrey. “You should call your mom. She's probably worried about you. I'm Clayton, by the way.” She came forward, her hand extended.

Arabella laughed. “Audrey's still reeling from her discovery that Whitney's not quite the man, I mean woman, she used to be.”

“Arabella,” chided Clayton gently. “Are you staying for dinner, Audrey?”

The sound of keys in the door, heralding the arrival home of Henry, saved Audrey from having to reply. Bursting into the hall in a gust of cold air, he stomped his boots on the seagrass mat and coughed into his glove.

“Look who's decided to grace us!” Clayton exclaimed, reaching out her arms for a hug.

“Sorry, love,” he said, giving her a loud kiss on the cheek. “I got held up.” He looked into the living room and registered Audrey's presence with clear surprise. Setting down his briefcase, he took off his coat and took several moments arranging it in the closet. He turned back and nodded at Audrey with mock foreboding. “Young lady,” he said.

“Pappy,” said Arabella.

“My darling,” he replied.

“So we're just trying to figure out whether Audrey's staying for dinner,” Clayton said. “What did you have planned?”

“Just a simple tomato pasta.”

Audrey stood. “Thanks, but I should really call my mom to come get me. I've got tons of math homework.”

“Audrey's quite the mathematician,” Arabella said.

“Phone's in the kitchen,” said Clayton.

Audrey tried to listen to what they might be saying about her in the living room, but she could make out nothing over the whirr of the dishwasher. On the counter were rows of neatly cut vegetables and a bowl of homemade avocado dip, a small pile of skins and pits discarded in the sink. The bulletin board above the phone displayed more family photographs, Arabella in her pyjamas with a plate of pancakes before her, Henry Winter manning the barbeque.