Go ask fannie, p.21
Go Ask Fannie, page 21
“I’m sorry,” said Murray.
“It’s not your fault,” Ruth grumbled.
“I know that,” said Murray. “I’m just stating a fact. I’m sorry about all this. And anyway, we’re not done.”
“We’re not?” said George.
“No, we’re not. I don’t want Lizzie leaving this room still thinking the accident was her fault.”
“Oh, Dad,” Lizzie sighed. “Please.”
“Might as well dump your garbage on the table,” Ruth told her. “Seeing as Dad did.”
“I’m not Dad,” Lizzie said.
“But you’re carrying something around,” said Murray. “It would help me to know what it is.”
One reason she didn’t want to tell them was because she hated remembering the details. They made her feel unclean.
“You’re with family,” George reminded her gently.
Lizzie saw that if even George was pressing her now, she would never get out of it. Maybe she could keep it vague, though. She cocked her head. “Look, I was a brat, okay? I was teasing Daniel and let’s just say I took it a little too far.”
“How so?” Ruth asked.
Leave it to Ruth. “Trust me, I just did.”
“Like how, though?”
“Oh, come on, Ruth, really? I did something gross. Leave it at that.”
“Gross like what?”
“I’d like to know, too,” Murray said.
“How bad can it be?” asked George.
Lizzie felt herself grow hot with anger. Really? They wanted details? Fine, she’d give them details. And then they would be stuck with the image. They’d get to carry it around for the next thirty years.
“Fine,” she said. “I was in the backseat, and Daniel was sitting up front, and I kept getting up and squatting behind him. ‘Daniel and Jennifer, sitting in the tree,’ I went, ‘K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’ Remember that one? And Mom was telling me to sit down but Daniel was ignoring me and I wanted to get his attention—” She paused abruptly, remembering the sensation. Warm. Oily.
“And so?” said Ruth.
“And so I poked my little finger into his ear, Ruth. Deep,” she added. “Like Q-tip deep.”
“Oh, ick,” said Ruth.
“You want to make this as hard as possible for me?” said Lizzie evenly. “Keep judging me.”
“I take it Daniel reacted,” Murray said.
“Of course! He whipped around and shoved me, and I shoved him back, and Mom swung her arm out to try and separate us. Like a rogue turnstile,” she said, recalling her mother’s movement. “Twisting around, and then swerving, then braking, and—well, we know the rest. Satisfied now?”
“Lizzie, Lizzie,” said Murray, shaking his head. “You were just a kid.”
“A kid who didn’t mind! If I hadn’t stuck my finger in Daniel’s ear, he wouldn’t have freaked out, and Mom wouldn’t have lost control. You have to admit I played a role that night. Right, Ruth? You’re so quick to judge. Tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
Ruth didn’t reply, and Lizzie looked at the ceiling. George handed her a tissue.
“Under better circumstances your mother wouldn’t have lost control like that,” Murray admitted. “But you really can’t trace it all back to you. That’s too heavy a load for a child to bear. And you’ve thought this your whole life? Oh, I’m such a fool for not telling you all.”
Lizzie glanced at her father. Everything in his face—eyes, cheeks, jowls—sagged like Silly Putty. A queer, bruised light filled the room, a harbinger of winter skies even though it was only mid-September. Ruth had tucked her hands under her armpits, as though cold. George sat in the guest chair and cracked his knuckles. Everyone seemed like a stranger. Who was this family of hers?
Suddenly the door lever rattled. “Knock knock!” Gavin leaned around the edge of the door. “How’re you guys doing? Can I come back in?”
“Has that son of a bitch been right out there the whole time?” Murray demanded.
“No,” said Gavin, wheeling himself into the room. “I was down flirting with the nurses. Got a couple of phone numbers. Ha! Just kidding! But maybe we could switch places and you three could give Elizabeth and me a few moments.”
“That,” said Lizzie, “is the last thing I want.”
Gavin raised his eyebrows. “I think we ourselves have some important issues to talk about.”
“I’m talked out,” said Lizzie.
“Oh, grow up,” Gavin snapped. “Just because you were a brat then doesn’t mean you have to be a brat now.”
Had he indeed been out in the hall when she called herself a brat? To her dismay, Lizzie watched as George helped Gavin back into his bed and then wheeled the chair around to Murray’s bedside. He unhooked his father’s wires and Murray swung his legs down and with George’s help he wobbled into the chair. Then George wheeled him out of the room, with Ruth close behind. Lizzie started to follow, but Murray told her to stay.
“Maybe you two can get to the bottom of your differences,” he said over his shoulder. “And then we won’t have any more family members pouring hot water on the enemy’s laptop.”
Mad at everyone now for abandoning her—for not understanding that one major disclosure was exhausting enough for the day—Lizzie planted herself in one of the chairs, slouching in a manly way with her knees spread wide. She crossed her arms and glared at Gavin.
“Well,” said Gavin.
“Well yourself,” she said.
“I will admit that there are hard truths here,” said Gavin, “but ultimately I think that until you deal with them, as your father said, you’re going to be pouring hot water on the enemy’s laptop any chance you get.”
“Oh, do not patronize me.”
“I seriously don’t mean to,” he said. “But let’s talk about what I think is really bugging you.”
“Did you not hear what I just said?”
“The problem is, you think I pressured you into it, and you’re mad about that.”
“You did pressure me! I never would have done it if it hadn’t been for you!”
Gavin shrugged. “I made my feelings known. I never said you had to do it.”
“Well, guess what. That’s the message I heard,” she said. “You explicitly said you were too old to become a father again. And you made it clear it would be unfair of me to have the baby on my own, because you’re such a saint that you’d feel compelled to be involved and then resent me forever.”
“I never said any such thing.”
“You implied it.”
“Well, you should have asked if that was indeed what I meant,” Gavin shot back. “Why are you regretting it so much, anyway? You had one when you were younger and it didn’t bother you in the least, you said.”
“I was nineteen! I’m thirty-eight now! Haven’t you heard of the biological clock?”
“Oh, pshaw, you’ve got lots of good years ahead of you, honeybunch. You know what I think? I think you’re really mad at yourself for getting pregnant in the first place, for that day up at Gravity. And you’re also angry for not having the balls to ignore me. Look, you gotta take some responsibility here. Quit making me out to be a monster. I simply told you my true feelings. You should have told me yours. And then you should have made the right decision for yourself.”
“You’re ignoring how overbearing you can be at times.”
Gavin sighed with exasperation. “What can I say? You ought to know how to stick up for yourself at your age.”
“I wish I’d never met you,” Lizzie said.
“Do you really mean that? We had a good run for the last year and a half,” said Gavin. “It wasn’t love, but we were good for each other in a lot of ways. You made me feel young. I made you feel wanted.”
She thought back to the days after Bruce left her, when she felt like such a hollow shell. She couldn’t write. She couldn’t teach. One day in class, she criticized a student so harshly for misinterpreting a passage in The Sun Also Rises that she later summoned him to her office and apologized. She would lie in bed at night full of self-pity, thinking: I will never have what my parents had. It wasn’t rational to feel that way—she knew the chances were that someone else would eventually come along—but there it was. It was a low point in her life.
Enter Gavin, who could make her knees shake.
She asked, “Are you really going to press charges?”
“Oh, Elizabeth,” he sighed, “why don’t you just admit you tried to douse me with boiling water? Then maybe I won’t feel so inclined.”
“Fine,” said Lizzie. “I tried to douse you with boiling water.”
“No, you have to say it and mean it. You don’t mean it. You’re just saying it.”
“Oh, who knows,” Lizzie groaned. “The whole thing happened in a split second. Suddenly you were trying to grab the teakettle and maybe I—I don’t know! And how was I supposed to know it was hot enough to cause a second-degree burn?”
“It had just boiled! There was steam coming out of the spout!”
And she was supposed to notice something like that, in the heat of an argument? “So are you going to sue me or not?”
Gavin regarded her with narrowed eyes. “The aggravation of a lawsuit alone would outweigh any benefit I might reap,” he said. “So no, I’m not going to personally sue you. But that doesn’t mean the law isn’t going to come after you as a criminal.”
“Ruth says they won’t, if you don’t want to press charges.”
“It’s up to them.”
“No, Gavin. It’s up to you. Ball’s in your court. If you won’t testify, they don’t have a case. Do you really feel comfortable saying it was all my fault?”
Gavin regarded his knuckles. “I will grant you that I reacted with extreme emotion when I saw you pouring hot water on my laptop.”
“Which I’ll pay for, I told you.”
“Darn tootin’.”
“But there’s still the ruined cookbook. You’re not going to be able to replace that.”
“Well, I guess I’ll regret my clumsiness.”
“‘Sorry’ not being in your vocabulary?”
“No,” said Gavin. “Or yes. Because I’m truly sorry you’re regretting what you did. I wish I could turn back the clock for you.”
He looked at her from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes then, and she saw the face of a humbler man, a face that had probably always been there but that she had refused to see because a large part of her attraction to him had been based on his always being two steps ahead of her. In life. In wisdom. But he wasn’t, really. He was just a guy with a complicated, mixed-up heart, like any other fellow. She should have seen him for what he was, all along.
“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate you saying that. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Gavin shrugged. “I’m nicer than you think.”
* * *
• • •
THE DOCTOR WANTED TO KEEP Murray overnight for observation, so Ruth, Lizzie, and George went back to the house without him. Lizzie found it unsettling, being in the farmhouse without her father. Strange places ticked. A pipe knocked. Windows rattled. His absence was tangible, from the unmade bed to the empty coat hook in the front hall.
Nobody asked her just what went on with Gavin in the privacy of the hospital room, but she did volunteer that Gavin wasn’t going to sue her personally, and that he probably wasn’t going to press charges with the police. Once home Ruth set about going through a box of their father’s papers—his trust documents and will and various codicils—and George went to take a long shower, so Lizzie sequestered herself up in the twin bedroom and read through her students’ papers. Halfway through, she found herself nodding off, so she went downstairs, where she saw Ruth presiding over multiple stacks on the dining room table, fuming that Murray as a lawyer hadn’t organized things better.
“I hope Dad doesn’t disinherit me for my little number with Gavin’s laptop,” Lizzie said, looking at all the papers. “Joke,” she added.
“I know it’s a joke,” said Ruth. “I’m laughing on the inside.”
Lizzie wondered if Ruth was any less angry at Lillian, now that she’d had time to digest the news about her mother’s state that night. It had to be hard, she thought, for she knew Ruth had idealized their mother all these years. Ruth had some reckoning to do, but Ruth could bear a grudge like a Puritan, and Lizzie imagined her dismantling the shrines throughout her house. It could be another thirty years before she got over this.
But Lizzie didn’t want to delve into the issue right now. There’d been enough wrenching discussion for one day.
“What time’s your plane tomorrow?” she asked.
“Three o’clock,” said Ruth. “I’m thinking of staying another night, though. Maybe even two. Though Morgan won’t like that,” she added. “He won’t be able to get his daily bike miles in, and he’ll be required to plan some meals. Horrors.”
Morgan could be a real dick sometimes.
“But you know? Morgan can suck it up,” Ruth added.
Lizzie wondered if this attitude had been born of its own, or if Gavin’s comments about their family needing to get things out in the open a little more had had something to do with it. It was only later that evening, when listening to Ruth talk to Morgan and explain she wasn’t leaving tomorrow, and tell him that she thought there were a few fundamental things wrong with their marriage, and would he finally agree to marriage counseling, because her needs weren’t being met in more ways than one, and “No, Morgan, the fact that you cook breakfast on Sunday morning when nobody really even likes your banana pancakes isn’t enough, nor is the fact that you keep telling me to go to the gym but don’t make it easy for me to do so, and no, I don’t think a divorce is in the cards, and this isn’t about Charlene, and don’t be ridiculous we shouldn’t even be discussing custody—unless you have your own point to make—and this is why we need some counseling, and if you don’t go, I’ll go myself and the counselor will get a very one-sided story”—it was only after this that Lizzie saw Ruth as having undergone some kind of tectonic shift during the weekend.
At which point Lizzie felt like her eavesdropping bordered on snooping, so she went back upstairs. She started to walk past her father’s bedroom, with its unmade bed and piles of clothes, then changed her mind and went in. The room smelled of menthol and old leather. After gathering up yesterday’s clothes, she started straightening the sheets, and while she was doing this George joined her, and the two of them worked together to make up their father’s bed, one on each side, pulling the sheets taut the way he liked them.
“I never make my bed,” Lizzie said, giving a little grunt as she tucked in a corner.
“Waste of time,” George agreed.
“I bet Ruth does.”
“Every day. Sure as the sun comes up.”
There was a brief pause.
“I had an abortion, George,” she said, feeling a lump in her throat. “A month ago.”
George straightened up. “Jeez. How come you didn’t tell me until now?”
“I don’t know. I really wish I hadn’t, this time,” she said, as tears welled up. “I want a child.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She took a tissue from the box on her father’s bedside table. “I’ll get over it,” she said. “I just wish I’d put my foot down.”
“Gavin didn’t want it?”
She shook her head.
“We’ve all been involved with assholes, you know,” said George. “Remember LuAnn?”
“Oh! She was a bitch.”
They drew up the bedspread, making sure its hem was even all around.
“What’s happening with that woman you were seeing this summer?” Lizzie asked, in need of an abrupt subject change.
“It’s on hold.”
“Don’t be a fool, George. She was nice. She was decent.”
“It’s the kid thing. Unlike you, I’m too afraid to have one. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“No shit. Get over it.”
“How?”
“Do the math. Dad had four kids, and then there were three. You think he regrets any one of us? Worry is a fact of life, George.” She threw away the used tissues that Murray had left crumpled on his nightstand. “Did you know Mom was drunk that night?”
“No. Maybe it occurred to me later, when I was taking driver’s ed and they were making such a big deal of us not driving drunk. It probably crossed my mind. But I figured we’d have heard about it, if she were. It would have been a huge scandal.”
“Do you think she was an alcoholic?”
“If she was, she was pretty high functioning. She got breakfast. She made our lunches. She wrote all day and then fixed dinner and cleaned up and put us to bed with a kiss.”
Lizzie recalled her mother tucking her in, glass in hand. Mom’s soda. Once Lizzie took a sip, and Lillian whacked her bottom.
Now she tried to plump a pillow, but it simply folded back on itself. “Why does Dad have such ratty pillows?!”
“He’s cheap.”
“They’ll discharge him tomorrow, won’t they?”
“That’s the plan.”
“He looks so old sometimes.”
“He is old.”
“Just not old enough for the Pines,” said Lizzie.
“I don’t think he’ll ever be old enough for the Pines,” said George.
16.
Whose Business Is It, Anyway?
When the orderly came in the night to move Gavin to another room, Murray was free-floating, recalling the time that Lillian broke her ankle while skiing. She’d fallen on a steep slope and skidded most of the way down, then got up and skied to the bottom with pain in her foot, insisting it was nothing serious. Only when her ankle swelled up like a baseball that night did she agree to get an X-ray.
