The Smart One (6 page)

Joey extricated her hand from the Cheerios and wiped it on her pants. “Hi, Bev.” She looked past me. “Clare, what are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?” Clare asked.

“I had some time to kill and thought I’d come visit Bev,” she said. “I was sitting outside waiting for her to come home and it started to rain. I didn’t have a key to get into our house, but I remembered that the Waxmans kept a key under the hammock stand out back, and voila. You guys want some Cheerios?”

“You can’t just go breaking into people’s houses and eating their food,” Clare said.

“Please,” Joey tsked. “It’s not
people’s
houses. It’s the Waxmans’. We’re practically family.”

At that point I could have asked about incest, considering what she and Kenny were doing that day in her bedroom, but fighting with Joey was one of my least favorite activities. Even when I won arguments with her, I managed to feel like I’d lost. It was the way she had of shrugging off any topic as if you had to be an idiot to even care.

“You look good, Joey,” Clare said.

And she did. Being off drugs had brought color back to her
face and life back to her eyes, which were catching the room’s light and reflecting it back. She had that smug look again, like she knew this great joke she’d share with you if she decided you measured up. I figured that was part of her sex appeal; men always wanted to be admitted to that club. No doubt Kenny would still find her hot as hell, and I wondered what would have happened if Joey had been the one to run into him instead of me. Would they have ripped each other’s clothes off and gone at it?

“You do look good,” I agreed.

“Gained five pounds,” Joey boasted, flexing her scrawny bicep as if it would prove how hearty she was.

I noticed that Clare looked grim. She’d been struggling with her weight her entire adult life, and often said how unfair it was that her sisters were naturally slim, practically assless. Joey seemed oblivious to Clare’s anguish, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was more passive-aggressive than genuinely clueless. Joey often managed to get in some digs with what passed for innocence.

“Mrs. Bianco says hello,” I told her.

“Helen?
Hunh.
She used to scream that I would get my
comeuppance
.”

“You used to get high in her backyard,” I said. “What did you expect?”

“Never. I got high with Maryanne Jackman next door and we would throw our burned-out roaches over the fence into her yard. It was hilarious.”

I rolled my eyes. “Good times.”

A crack of thunder interrupted our conversation and Clare looked out the window. Rain poured from the roof in sheets. “No way the gardener is coming today,” she said.

“Figures,” I said, frustrated that I couldn’t get that out of the way.

Joey asked what the big deal was about the gardener, and I explained about moving the industrial drum to the curb for garbage pickup.

“I bet we could do it,” Joey said. “The three of us together.”

“Too heavy,” I said.

“And it’s pouring,” Clare added.

Joey shrugged. “It’s only water.”

“What about the lightning?” Clare said. “And the thunder?”

“Storm’s moving away,” I said.

“Remember Lydia?” Joey asked. “Remember how she used to say, ‘There’s no time like the presents’?”

I smiled, remembering her gentle, if slightly ungrammatical, wisdom. “I think she was the only grown-up who listened to what we had to say.”

Clare folded her arms. “Then let Lydia move the damn drum in the rain.”

Joey flashed me her wicked grin, grabbed my hand, and headed for the back door. Her passion for fun was infectious, and giddiness tickled at me as I pulled Clare along the way.

“Forget it!” Clare said, resisting. “I’m wearing new shoes.”

I tugged harder at her hand. “You’re
always
wearing new shoes. C’mon. Marc will buy you another pair.”

“At least let me find an umbrella.”

And so it was that the three of us stood bent at the waist, under the umbrella Clare held, staring into the crawl space beneath the Waxmans’ house. I said that if we went under there and toppled the drum onto its side, we’d probably be able to roll it out. Clare refused to get on her knees, as she was wearing linen pants that she insisted cost more than two hundred dollars. Joey, of course, was game.

So Clare held her umbrella and watched as Joey and I went
to work. We got on our hands and knees and crawled under the house, where it smelled musty and squirrelly and felt uncomfortably tight. It made me understand the foreboding feel of claustrophobia. Even though I knew it couldn’t happen, I felt like we’d run out of oxygen any minute. I wanted to get out of there
fast
.

Toppling the thing wasn’t as easy as I thought. It was hard to get leverage when we were both on our knees. Joey and I put our hands against the top of the drum and shoved with all our might. I was just about to demand that Clare come in and help us when the drum finally went down with a thump and a slosh, letting us know the thing was filled with liquid. The lid held on tight.

We rolled it out, and when we at last cleared the bottom of the house, I rose to take some air into my lungs and loosen the tightness in my chest.

“Your turn,” I said to Clare. “I’ll hold the umbrella for a while.”

Instead of getting on her knees, Clare bent over at the waist so she wouldn’t be dragging her pants through the grass. Good thing too, because in another five feet they would have to push the barrel through an oval of earth that had once been Mr. Waxman’s tomato garden, but which was now simply a huge, soupy mud puddle.

Clare stopped when they got to it.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’m not going through that. I’ll ruin my shoes.”

“Your shoes are already ruined,” I said.

“And look,” she said, holding up an index finger. “I broke a nail.”

I rolled my eyes. “Call 911.”

She tried to grab the umbrella. “You take over for a while,” she said.

I held it back out of her reach. “No, I’ll take over for Joey if she wants, but you have to pull your weight.”

“Why don’t you two princesses go inside for a cup of tea and I’ll just do it myself,” Joey said as she pushed.

“You’re going to let her do it all alone?” I asked Clare.

“Are you?”

“Screw you,” I said to Clare, and handed her the umbrella so I could help Joey get the drum through the mud. In a huff, Clare walked over to Joey’s side to hold the umbrella over the two of them. The next thing I knew, the umbrella went flying through the air, carried by the wind over my head. Clare made an effort to reach it and then, in what seemed like slow motion because I anticipated the whole thing but could do nothing to stop it, she tripped over Joey’s foot, landing belly first into the mud.

Joey and I locked eyes, momentarily horrified.

“Oh my God!” Clare said. “I’m ruined!” She picked herself up and stood, dark mud covering her expensive blouse and pants from top to bottom. It dripped in slow plops to the ground.

“Ew,”
she said, looking down. “This is
so
not funny.”

Joey and I locked glances and then simultaneously exploded with laughter.

“Stop it!” Clare cried.

That just made it funnier. We collapsed into one another.

“You two are so immature,” Clare insisted, but even as she said it, I saw a smile playing around her lips as she finished the sentence. She looked down at her clothes, pulling the sticky shirt away from her body. “I guess I do look kind of ridiculous,” she said.

That’s when Joey straightened herself out and took several steps back.

“What are you doing?” I asked, but it became evident soon
enough. Joey took a running start and then dove into the mud like a baseball player sliding into first base.

“Try it,” she said, looking up at me.

I backed off. “No way.”

But Joey shot Clare a conspiratorial grin, and it was clear I had no choice in the matter.

After getting the industrial drum to the curb, I told my sisters we should go straight back to our house to get showered and changed, provided they didn’t mind borrowing my clothes. Clare insisted on retrieving our handbags first, so we went into the mudroom in the back of the Waxmans’ house and stopped.

“Now what?” I said. “We can’t exactly go traipsing through the house like this. Renee used to have a heart attack if we wore our shoes past the front door. This would kill her.”

“No worries,” Joey said, stripping to her underwear faster than most people could say hello. “I’ll get the handbags. You wait here.”

“Get us some towels too,” Clare said.

Joey nodded, left her soaked clothes and shoes in a pile on the floor, and ran upstairs toward the linen closet.

“You’re not going to want to get back into those muddy things!” Clare shouted after her. “So find something to wear while you’re up there—borrow something of Renee’s!”

Clare turned to me, her face looking lovely even smudged in black mud. In fact, the contrast of her glamorous cheekbones against the gritty filth was striking. And the colors were an inspiration, as if all the browns and blacks of the scene paid
homage to her cinnamon irises, standing out against the white of her eyes. Suddenly, I had an itch I hadn’t felt in a long time. The itch to paint, to capture a very specific aesthetic thought on canvas. I wondered if I could experiment with transposing the concept that beauty is only skin deep by putting the grotesque on the surface and letting beauty shine through from beneath, turning the whole into something glorious. Had that already been done? Probably. And anyway, I wasn’t nearly talented enough to pull it off, so it would be a useless exercise.

“I need to ask you a favor,” Clare said. “I was about to bring it up in the store, but the sight of Mrs. Bianco in that oven mitt knocked it out of my head.”

“Shoot.”

She held a tip of hair in front of her face and shook off the mud. “You can say no. I don’t mean to put you on the spot.”

“Just spit it out.”

“I enrolled in a continuing-ed class this summer. Modern American Lit. But it’s only offered in the afternoon and I’ll need someone to watch Dylan and Sophie for a few hours.”

“What about Marta?” I asked, referring to her Salvadoran housekeeper.

“She’s taking a little time off,” Clare explained. “Next week she’s going back to South America to visit her family.”

I could have explained to Clare that she got Marta’s continent wrong—that El Salvador is in Central America, which is part of North America. I sensed, however, that it was a bad time to correct her, and let it go.

“Continuing ed? American Lit? Where did this come from?”

“You think my life is all PTA luncheons and shopping.”

“It isn’t?”

Clare’s lower jaw tensed. “If you can’t do it, I understand. I can probably hire a sitter.”

I sighed, guilty. Why was it so hard to predict when Clare would institute her zero-tolerance policy for good-natured teasing?

“No, I’d love to do it for you, Clare. And you know how I feel about your kids.”

She thanked me and got busy trying to rub the mud from her hands.

I folded my arms and looked at her. As far as I could remember, Clare never showed any interest in literature beyond keeping abreast of the trendiest bestsellers. Something was going on that she didn’t want to tell me about. Why the sudden desire to broaden her horizons?

“Everything okay at home?” I asked.

“Fine! Why does there have to be a problem for me to want to take a lit class? You think you’re the only one in this family with an IQ for God’s sake.”

I apologized and changed the subject, saying I thought our little sister was doing well. She agreed that Joey seemed clean and on track. We both wondered when we could stop worrying that she’d backslide and wind up on drugs again. Those dark days were so recent, so fresh, that it was hard not to feel terror at the thought of revisiting them. Joey herself said it was by the grace of God that she wasn’t the one who wound up dead on the floor of a friend’s house, a truth that followed us around like a storm cloud on a string.

A few minutes later we heard Joey’s quick footsteps coming back down the stairs, accompanied by a curious rustling sound.

In a moment, she was at the door of the mudroom, no longer in her underwear. My voice caught in my throat as I took in what she was wearing: a rose-colored ball gown, with a glittery beaded bodice and billowing skirt.

“Joey!” I said. “For heaven’s sake!”

She seemed quite pleased with herself. “Isn’t this a pisser?” She threw towels to me and Clare, then twirled around.

“That’s the gown Renee wore to Kenny’s bar mitzvah,” Clare said as she wiped the mud off her face. “Why on earth did you put that on?”

“I can’t believe you remember where she wore it,” Joey said.

Clare rolled her eyes. “Who could forget? It was ridiculous then and it’s ridiculous now. Looks like a cheesy pink wedding gown. Take it off, Joey.”

“But I
like
it,” she whined.

“Hate to be a…
er
…stick-in-the-mud,” I offered, wiping off my own face, “but you really
shouldn’t
be wearing Renee’s couture gown.”

Clare snorted and rolled her eyes. “Couture, right.”

“Fine,” Joey said, all attitude. “Hold this.” She planted a box of tampons in my hand and started to unzip the dress.

“You have your period?” I asked.

“No.” Joey dropped the gown to the floor and stepped out of it. “I found that in Renee’s lingerie drawer and knew she had to be hiding something in it.”

“How did you know that?” I asked.

Joey stood with her hands on her hips, more comfortable in a skimpy bra and panties than most people are fully dressed. “Please,” she said. “Renee hasn’t had her period in years. Why would she still have a tampon box?”

“Your mind works in mysterious ways,” Clare said.

“All those years as a druggie,” Joey explained. “I spent a lot of time thinking up hiding places for my stash.” She pulled the box from my hand and opened the lid. “See?” she said, showing us the contents. “Looks like a letter or something.”

“Put it back,” I said.

“Nuh-uh,”
Joey said. “No way. Not until I’ve read it.”

“Joey,” I said, trying to grab the box from her.

She turned her back to me and extracted a thin blue page that looked like it had been folded and refolded many times. “It
is
a letter!” she exclaimed, staring at it.
“Dearest Samuel,”
she stopped and looked over her shoulder at Clare and me, her mouth wide open. “A love letter to her husband!”

“Samuel?” I said. “But Mrs. Waxman always called him Sam or Sammy.”

“Maybe it’s not from her,” Clare said, moving toward Joey and looking over her shoulder. “Maybe Mr. Waxman had a
lover
.”

“C’mon, put it away,” I said. “This is none of our business.”

“If you don’t want to hear it, go stand in another room,” Clare said. “I
have
to know what this says.”

I tsked and crossed my arms. This was wrong, a terrible invasion of privacy. But if Clare and Joey were going to hear the letter, I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it.

“Get on with it,” I said to Joey.

She read,
“Today I am happy because I know that you love me. If we cannot be together, God has His will and I have grace so accept. Your love is precious gift I will forever keep. In this life, we can only be happy if we open our hearts to know what is a blessing.”
Joey looked up at us. “Philosophical,” she commented, nodding in assent, and continued reading.
“As maybe you guess, God has given me another gift. Your life grows within me now and that is more glorious even than what we have beetwing us.”

“Beetwing?”
I asked. “She sounds foreign.”

“She sounds pregnant,” Clare said.

Joey squealed with glee and went back to reading.
“I understand if you want me to go away now. I will never wish to be a burden to you or to your family. But know that I love you,
and already I love this child, and will be devoted to you both forever and ever.”

Joey stopped and looked up at us.

“Is that it?” Clare asked.

“That’s it.” She looked down at the page. “It’s not even signed.”

“Let me see it,” I said, and Joey handed it to me. I looked down at the curly European script and a chill danced up my spine. Could it be Lydia’s handwriting? It looked so very much like the script I saw her write that day at the kitchen table.

But my brain didn’t want to process what that meant. I was stuck seeing Mr. Waxman the way I did when I was ten. He was an old man, somebody’s dad. He couldn’t have had an affair with Lydia, could he?

But it made sense. If he got Lydia pregnant, he might have forced her to leave. It would explain why she disappeared so suddenly from Kenny’s life. Sam Waxman might have paid her for her silence.

“We should show it to Kenny,” Joey said.

“No!” I said. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“First of all, it’s none of our damn business. We shouldn’t even have read it. Second, he doesn’t need more fuel for hating his father.”

Clare looked over my shoulder at the letter. “I wonder who it’s from.”

“Maybe somebody who worked in his factory,” I said, feeling only slightly guilty about throwing them off with a red herring. After all, the situation didn’t need more drama, and it was going to be hard enough to keep Joey from telling Kenny. If she knew I suspected the letter was from Lydia, I’d have to gag her and bind her and lock her away.

“Maybe a neighbor,” Joey said.

Clare lit up. “Like Mrs. Bianco!”

“Dawling,” Joey said, imitating Helen Bianco’s smoker’s rasp. “I can’t keep my hands off your pepperoni. You make me so hot I could…” Here she pretended to succumb to a disgusting smoking jag and Clare laughed in delight. I was too distracted by the terrible thought of Lydia’s predicament to join in the fun. What had happened to her? She was a poor immigrant in a strange country with no friends or family. Where did she go? Who did she turn to? Did she go back to Hungary?

I glanced back at the letter to see if there was a date, but there wasn’t. I did some quick math and figured it had been about twenty years since Lydia left. If the letter was indeed from her, Kenny might have a grown-up brother or sister somewhere.

The thought gave me a shiver, compounded by the fact that I was still wearing wet clothes. I started to tremble.

“You look cold,” Clare said.

“I’m freezing.”

“Let’s go home and change,” she said. “Joey, go borrow something more appropriate from Renee’s closet so we can go next door and get showered and cleaned up.”

“I’m on it,” Joey said, dashing from the room.

“Wait!” Clare shouted after her. “Put the gown back! And the letter!”

Before Joey could answer, the doorbell rang.

Clare looked at me. “Who could that be?”

I shrugged.

“I’ll get it!” Joey shouted, her footsteps trampling back down the stairs.

“Not in your underwear!” I called, knowing full well Joey wouldn’t listen. I quickly folded the letter and stuck it in my
bra—the only dry spot on my body—then pulled off my shoes and socks and rushed from the mudroom, but it was too late. By the time I got to the front door, it was wide open and Joey stood there, in her panties and bra, talking to the Goodwins.

“Look,” she exclaimed, “midgets! Aren’t they cute?”

At that moment, I wished I had the power to disappear. Or spontaneously combust. Anything but have to endure the chagrin of seeing the Goodwins suffer such a horror of insensitivity.

“Joey!” I admonished. “I’m so sorry,” I said to the couple. “She doesn’t always think before she speaks.”

Mrs. Goodwin waved the comment away. “Nothing we haven’t heard before.”

“Besides,” her husband added with a wink, “we think she’s cute, too.” He looked from me to Clare, who had followed me from the mudroom, and said, “You two, however…”

Clare covered her mouth with her hand, horrified. “God! I can imagine how we must look!”

I explained what we had been doing and why we were caked with mud. All the while, Mr. Goodwin stared quizzically at Joey.

“I just realized why you look so familiar,” he said, pointing at her face. “You’re Joey Bloom from Phantom Pain!”

Joey ran her hands through her mud-caked curls and nodded.

“I knew it!” he said. “‘Tiger Attack’ was a monster hit. I loved that video—must’ve watched it a hundred times!”

Joey barely smirked. “Thanks.” She shrugged.

Mr. Goodwin stuck out his hand. “I’m Teddy Goodwin,” he said, “and this is my wife, Alicia.”

“Teddy works in the video business,” Alicia Goodwin said. “He’s in postproduction.”

“Cool,” Joey said.

“In my spare time I’m also a songwriter,” he added. “Kind of a hobbyist, but I have some edgy rock tunes.” He fingered the fringe of hair that extended just past his collar, as if he were suddenly conscious of this modest symbol of hipness. “Do you still sing?”

Joey took a step back, planted her feet apart, and belted out the beginning of “Tiger Attack,” her band’s one-hit song, in a voice so strong I was momentarily stunned:

“We didn’t go to Paris or on any damn plane ride, but I showed him how to sweat when the radiator died!”

Man. If Joey’s drug habit had taken its toll, you’d never know it by her singing voice. She still had that haunting tone and seismic force, but her control was better than ever. And there was something else there, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Powerful,” Teddy said.

“Jeez, Joey,” I added. “That was amazing.”

Clare agreed.

“Would you sing the whole thing?” Alicia asked.

That was all the encouragement Joey needed. She ran to living room, which was right off the foyer where we stood, and jumped onto the coffee table. Teddy pulled a tapered candle from a holder on the shelf and handed it to her, standing on his tiptoes. Grasping it upside down, she used the candle like a mike and launched into the song from the beginning, gyrating her hips and swinging her head like she did in the video. I could almost hear the drum beat, the guitars. Her charisma was undeniable. But there was a layer there that didn’t exist when she sang with the band. It was an emotional connection to the song, a willingness to go to the deepest part of herself and put it out there. It was riveting. Best of all, everyone seemed enthralled by the performance—they were connecting with her magic.