The Invaders (5 page)

“I'll be right back,” I told her and walked up the stairs, feeling the doom of potentially finding an intruder, or something wrong with Teddy, and having to face Lori if she was still sitting in the kitchen when I came back down. Teddy's door was ajar and I peered in and saw him sleeping naked on top of his bed. I hadn't even had a chance to put sheets on. I closed the door as quickly as I could in case, god forbid, Lori had followed me up the stairs. I heard the door close as I walked down the stairs. I walked over to the window and saw her talking animatedly with Jeffrey, her swollen finger waving through the sky, his eyes following it. She went and picked up a can from where the man had dropped them and started waving that around, too. I could see her vigilante spirit awakening right then.

“Teddy's naked and passed out upstairs,” I said as Jeffrey walked in the door. He had a thing about not hitting him with anything upsetting when he got home from work, but this was worth noting.

“What are you talking about?”

He looked back down at the mail, at the J. Jill and Eddie Bauer catalogs he was holding, and sighed.

I said, “I think it's permanent.”

He stopped at a tattered envelope and pushed it my way, saying, “This one is returned mail for you. Who lives in Killingly?”

I stared at the letter, my handwriting, with a big red stamp demanding it be returned to the sender right there.

My mother. I should have never included my return address on my check for this very reason. I didn't answer him; instead I just shrugged my shoulders.

“Are you going to check to see if he's breathing?” I asked.

Jeffrey glared at me and asked what time he had gotten in.

“I don't know what time he got in, but he was begging for drinks at the fashion show and then left the front door wide open like it was no big deal.” I walked toward Jeffrey. “I think this time it's permanent.”

“I heard you the first time,” he said. “I'm sure he'll be hungry when he wakes up. Do we have anything?”

I pointed to the freezer so that Jeffrey would get the picture and he did because he said maybe the club was a better idea. He climbed the stairs to go greet Teddy and I ripped open the letter with shaking hands, expecting to find something besides what I had sent to her myself—a personal check for one thousand dollars, just like every month. She had told me about a reverse mortgage gone wrong before we stopped speaking. I didn't want her to be kicked out of the only place she still had. It was as much as I could squirrel away each month to send to her from what Jeffrey gave me. I stared at the check and the abrupt line on a grocery note: Hope you are well. Not even my name signed on the note because it was on the check, and why be redundant?

What was she trying to tell me? To stay out of her business? I was doing what I thought a daughter should do, a gentle nudge to let her know someone was still looking out for her. When I first got together with Jeffrey, she started almost immediately. Her windows needed to be replaced. The water heater was twenty years old and also needed to be replaced. My sisters were next—their children needed so many things. At first Jeffrey was kind, but it was always embarrassing. I half expected them to move in with us, tell him we were a package deal. I went to my mother's house to give her money and found that the windows still had their rotten wooden frames. Nothing had been fixed. She wouldn't tell me what she was doing with the money we gave her. She said I owed her for all the years she had given up for me. My mistake had been to tell Jeffrey, who said he was done bankrolling all of them. I had to let go of
the burden or I would lose him. Who would choose the sad trap of where they came from over the dream life that was close enough to touch?

I started sending my mother checks last year, as if that would somehow make up for the years of neglect. This one was the first returned. I thought that fixed incomes made it difficult to get the necessities in life. I was trying, but she didn't want to see me. She wouldn't answer the phone when I called. She said I had always been ungrateful. I stared at the envelope and wondered if she had even touched it. She hadn't cashed the last check and I thought it might have been some kind of message:
Stop.
She didn't need me at all.

I could hear Jeffrey and Teddy arguing upstairs.

Teddy with his eye rolls and sudden bursts of anger that later morphed into bored indifference toward us. We were morons to him, a bank that dispensed money when necessary and answered the phone to midnight-nervous calls about vague troubles. I told Jeffrey to stop giving him money, let him learn what it means to be a grown-up, but Jeffrey would not consider it until Teddy was finished with school. He had to be supported because he was Jeffrey's son. How would it look if Jeffrey didn't give him everything? It wasn't as if I had a say, anyway. It didn't matter that I had been around for almost ten years; I was still a bystander in their lives together.

I heard the rumble of footsteps and looked up. Jeffrey was staring down at me and told me to get ready to go. I told him that maybe it wasn't such a good idea. I told him I could run out and get something for us to eat. Steamers and lobsters. Or something celebratory.

“To celebrate what?” Jeffrey asked.

“I don't mean celebrate. I mean, he doesn't seem to be in the right headspace to handle a meal.”

“He's just tired.”

Teddy had been consistently tired or out of sorts or under the weather since we found him on the beach at age twelve, drunk and
stoned. Jeffrey had many variations of ailment choices for Teddy, but the symptoms were always the same.

“I'll be ready in a few,” I said. Upstairs, I passed the bathroom and heard Teddy retching in the toilet. I listened through the door and it seemed like he might have even been crying. I heard the flush and quickly made my way to the bedroom, quietly closing the door behind me. I didn't want him to know I was there and make the indignity worse.

I went to my closet and stared in. I was at a loss. The sherbet tops made me wince, but my navy dresses seemed too dour. Red was calling attention unnecessarily. What did shorts say about a person?

All of a sudden I felt like everything was coded. What did big, obnoxious polka dots say? It was too exhausting to think about. I picked a pink top with a yellow pony on it, my go-to, because it would set off my tan nicely. It also said happy and youth. Pick me next time. I had stockpiled clothes from the outlets that would last me and Jeffrey for years. I looked at myself holding the shirt up, making sure it was okay, and didn't like what I saw.

I didn't need to be picked. I grabbed a melon top that I saw buried deep and put it on. Screw Mary Ann and her anti-citrus rule.

“Cheryl, are you wearing that?” Jeffrey asked me when I went downstairs.

“Yes,” I said with hesitation.

I looked down at myself. I thought the melon looked great. I applied pink lipstick with a small mirror in my purse and tried to keep busy while we waited for Teddy to come down. As I stared at my lips in the mirror, I thought that if my mother had moved, there was no way to find out where she had gone. The women in my family were all so stubborn. There would be no call to say she was relocating. No notice from my sisters. We all had run from the same home and away from one another. The only contact I'd had with my mother had been seeing the monthly withdraws from my checking account.

“Should I go check on him?” I asked.

Jeffrey screamed Teddy's name louder than I had ever heard and asked, “Was that so hard?”

“My voice doesn't carry like yours,” I said. I felt like playing up my sense of fear during this afternoon's debacle with Lori. Perhaps if he felt like I was somehow fragile it would make him be nicer to me.

“Do I look okay?” I asked.

“You look fine.”

“That's it? I know I'm not a model, but still.”

“What is it you'd like me to say?” Jeffrey asked.

I thought for a moment and then shrugged my shoulders. “How about something a little more exciting than ‘fine'?”

“All right, I liked it better when you looked vulnerable,” he said. “How does that sound?”

“I think I don't like what you mean.”

“If you don't, be sure about it,” he said.

I looked at him as he shook his head at me, bored. He was still slim, tanned. Almost slight. He liked it better when I looked vulnerable. I let the words roll around in my head. It was hard not to count the number of days since we had last had sex or the other long pauses before. He hadn't wanted me vulnerable in all that time, but that's how he liked me best. Jeffrey looked old. I knew that. But men could be without the necessity for any nips or tucks. My mother had told me that twenty years would seem further and further apart the older we got, but I hadn't listened. She had always said that one day I would feel that certain kind of loss, of someone not needing you anymore. Once, I saw her entwined with an old man from down the street, whispering in his ear. It was a sense of intimacy that I had always strived to achieve. The way a man's face looked when my mother leaned into him. That's what I wanted. I learned the allure of secretive intimacy from her and it's what sustained me and Jeffrey in the beginning. We loved
each other and couldn't keep away from each other. How could it have just floated away? I couldn't reconcile now with then, when everything seemed possible. I thought I would always feel Jeffrey's need, his want. My mother would just smirk at me as if I were more foolish than anyone she had ever known.

I saw my mother's power over men when I was a child. When they'd first come around, they were insatiable. The gifts were always best, the perfumes and lotions and fancy clothes. My sisters and I would ransack the bounty when she went out. Later, I'd channel her when I felt the need for attention. The sweet lilt in her voice transferred into mine like magic; a quick flick of my index finger along a man's broad shoulder while whispering my want always worked. These were just dates, though. Nothing permanent. I wanted to keep moving, until I found Jeffrey. Already soured by the lengths she would go to as her attractiveness waned and she aged, my mother changed her focus: it became less about the gifts men gave her and more about the necessities of living they provided for with their cash. When I met Jeffrey at thirty-four, he had made me feel that those impermanent early-on-in-the-relationship feelings could indeed be permanent, the gooseflesh rising with the simplest touch forever. I forgot that those thrilling feelings were still possible.

I smiled at Jeffrey. I poured myself some gin, threw in a few cubes, and didn't even bother to top it off with tonic. Jeffrey raised his eyebrow. I went over and rubbed his shoulder and he jumped away from me as soon as Teddy barreled down the stairs. Teddy didn't even look at us as he went to the fridge, pulled out a beer, and took a swig.

“Already starting, huh?” Jeffrey said.

“You want to do this now? I figured we'd wait until after dinner,” Teddy said.

Jeffrey stared at him as I kept sipping my gin, hoping I would never reach the bottom. Jeffrey made one for himself out of anger or maybe
defeat. Teddy had messy hair but was still handsome, golden-haired and fresh-faced. And I could understand that girls probably cried over him for hours, because he did not give a shit about anyone at all. I saw the older women at the club looking at him, and not as though they admired him for their daughters. They wanted him all to themselves, even at their age. Did they really think we still existed to boys his age?

“I found pants, Cheryl,” Teddy said.

“Good, I'm glad.”

“He was walking around without pants?” Jeffrey asked.

“No, jeans. Don't worry about it.”

Jeffrey eyed us both as if we were the same. A problem for him. “Maybe you want to brush your hair,” he said to Teddy.

I was sure that Jeffrey would take him to his barber and cut off the length, make him nip it to right above the ears so he could go to corporate meet-and-greets. This was just a phase, a last sigh of careless independence before it was time to be a man and follow his father. Maybe. I just hoped he would let us live in peace while the last bit of wildness seeped out of him.

Jeffrey finished off his drink and I knew that he'd be switching to scotch at dinner. It was going to be just like that all night.

Teddy pulled a rubber band from his pocket and tied his hair back. Jeffrey watched him do it and then studied him. He was taller than Jeffrey and he looked dirty and mean to me. Like the kind of men I once liked but now steered clear of.

“You look like a woman,” Jeffrey said.

“What do you know?” Teddy asked.

Teddy turned to me and looked me up and down, making me instantly uncomfortable.

“What?”

“Did you buy that at the fashion show?” Teddy asked.

“No, I didn't. Why, is it bad?” I asked, looking down at myself.

He shook his head and said, “You're looking more and more like the rest of them. All you're missing is that leathery tan and a fluorescent onesie like old Elaine.”

“I think I'll change.”

“Don't change. Come on, I'm kidding,” Teddy said, laughing.

“I'm not like them,” I said. Why was I even arguing with him?

“Jesus Christ,” Jeffrey said, already halfway out the door.

I drank the rest of my gin in a rush and followed Teddy out.

•  •  •

“I hope you aren't doing this on my account,” Teddy said at the table. “I've been sick since I got here. Can't eat.”

Jeffrey lowered his menu and took a large sip of scotch. I could hear Teddy's leg bouncing under the table. It was making me nervous and I wanted to put my hand on his knee to make him stop.

“Isn't that the friend you used to play golf with sitting over there?” I asked.

Teddy turned to look, then turned back quickly and said, “Nah, I wasn't his type.” Jeffrey nearly spit out his scotch and I stared down at the menu with newfound fascination, trying not to laugh. There had always been rumors.