“Wrong number,” Margaret says, and stands up so suddenly that the room begins to spin. She stabilizes herself with a hand on the table, her other sweaty palm clutching the handle of her purse.
Oh my God,
she thinks.
I just threw away my last $300—on microgreens. Three hundred dollars. At 29 percent interest! I owe a hundred thousand dollars and I spent my last buck on a salad?
“I’m not feeling so well, actually,” she stammers.
“You’re leaving? You can’t leave!” Josephine moans. “We have a table reserved at that new Russian vodka lounge!”
“No,” Margaret says, “I think I need to go home.” Without waiting for the usual formalities, she begins the long, agonizing walk toward Acqua’s front entry, back past the almost-famous starlets and the Slavic hostess and the men in their Prada suits, and feels for all the world like a convicted prisoner shuffling out of the courtroom.
by the time she reaches her apartment, in the back of a moldering eighties-era apartment complex marred by graffiti tags from the nearby gangs, Margaret is descending so rapidly into despair that she is not in the least surprised to see a note taped to her front door. She opens it carefully and reads it in the dim light of the hallway. Written on blue notepaper in spidery old-fashioned script, it reads, “Margaret—Your rent is two months late. I regret it’s come to this, but if I don’t receive the past rent by the end of next week, I’m going to have to ask you to move out. Thanks, Al.”
She crumples the note in her fist, stuffs it in her purse, and unlocks the door. All she can think of is her bed: If she can just go to sleep now, maybe in the morning everything will be better. In the dark, she gropes for the light switch and flips it on. Nothing happens. She stands in the main room—the only room—of her apartment, in the dark, listening to the traffic below. She can hear the Hernandez family in the studio apartment next door, their three children bickering, their Spanish soap opera so loud that she can make out the individual words:
¡Soy así que perdido—el amor de mi vida ha funcionado lejos con mi hermana gemela!
The night air in her apartment is hot and stale and smells like decaying cheese. The louvered blinds leak thin bars of sulfurous yellow light from the streetlamps outside.
She tries the light switch in the kitchen. Nothing. Margaret can’t even muster the energy to cry. She sits down abruptly on the kitchen linoleum, which is sticky and worn, and then crumples back and stares at her ceiling from a prone position on the floor. In the dark, the cottage-cheese ceiling of her apartment looks oppressively close, an optical illusion as if the apartment above her is coming down to smother her.
It’s all over,
she thinks.
The magazine, Bart—everything.
She is about to be homeless, in debt, and jobless, and the thought of starting over—of sleeping in Josephine’s spare bedroom, starting at zero in a new career, trying to date again—is too awful to bear. Maybe she can just run away, she thinks. Hide somewhere, far from the credit card companies, far from Bart, far from her friends and family and anyone else who might see how lost she’s become. She wants to be anywhere but here.
The cell phone in the purse, still hooked over her shoulder, begins to ring, and the first three bars of that goddamn Chopin étude are the final straw that turn Margaret’s stupor into fury. She sits up with a jerk, grabs the phone out of her purse, and is about to hurl it across the room and against the wall so that it never rings again—they’re going to turn the damn thing off tomorrow anyway—when she notices the caller ID.
LIZZIE,
it says.
LIZZIE. LIZZIE.
She stares at it for a minute, wondering if this is some kind of cosmic message. But of course it’s just her sister. Still, Margaret is so relieved by the sight of her sister’s name—so grateful that, for once, it’s not someone demanding her money—that despite her dismal mood, she flips the phone open.
“Lizzie?” she says.
“Margaret!” Her sister’s voice on the end of the line is high-pitched and childish. “It’s Lizzie.”
“I know,” says Margaret, smiling despite herself. “I just said your name, remember?”
“Oh,” says Lizzie. “Hey. Have you talked to Mom?”
“No…” says Margaret, confused by the intensity of Lizzie’s question.
Lizzie sighs, a heavy whoosh of breath, as if the weight of the world perched on her shoulders is crushing her flat. It is the kind of dramatic sound that fourteen-year-old girls often make when they consider the tragedy of their small lives, but for some reason it gives Margaret pause. The sigh sounds real. “Yeah, well. Mom needs you to come home,” Lizzie continues. “Actually she didn’t say that, but I think it’s probably a good idea because Dad’s gone and she’s, like, freaking out? Did you know Dad left? I guess you don’t if you haven’t talked to her. She’s, like, freaking out. Anyway, do you think you could come home?”
In the sweltering dark, on the filthy kitchen floor, Margaret smiles.
by the time margaret’s car turns up the driveway, at dusk on Monday, Lizzie has been sitting in the living room window, waiting, for nearly three hours. During that time, she has worked her way through eleven rice cakes smeared with peanut butter, two trashy magazines, a liter of lemonade, and one forbidden Snickers bar stealthily purchased that afternoon from the local 7-Eleven, which she wolfed down only when she was 100 percent sure that her mother, upstairs cleaning Margaret’s room for the second time today, wouldn’t catch her eating it. When Margaret’s Honda finally crunches through the gravel and ticks to a stop, Lizzie is so giddy with sugar and anticipation that she wrenches open the front door before her sister has even unbuckled her seat belt. She flings herself at the car, tripping on her cork platform sandals, so that Margaret, extricating herself from the front seat, is nearly knocked backward by Lizzie’s embrace.
“Hey,” Margaret says, her voice muffled and small from inside Lizzie’s curtain of hair. “Hey there, Lizzie. Hey.”
Lizzie rests for a moment there, catching her breath, her head buried in Margaret’s shoulder. Her sister smells like French fries. Then Lizzie straightens herself and tugs on the bottom of her cutoff shorts. “God, I’m so glad you’re home,” she says, her words tumbling out uncontrolled. “Things are really weird here. Mom is kind of freaking me out. I thought I was going to have to give her a Valtrex or something…”
“Valtrex?” Margaret looks confused. “The herpes medication?”
“No, the stuff that makes you all chilled out,” says Lizzie.
“Oh, you mean
Valium,
” Margaret laughs.
“Whatever,” Lizzie says, and sighs. Margaret always has this effect on her—unintentionally reminding Lizzie how stupid and naïve she really is, as if she’d only yesterday shoved her Barbies into the shoe box in the back of her closet. As Margaret extricates a duffel bag from the passenger seat, Lizzie cups her hands on the dusty glass of the windshield so that she can peer into the back of the car. It’s full of cardboard boxes. “What are those?” she asks.
“Oh, just…nothing,” Margaret says. “A few things I thought I’d store here. Where is she, anyway? Mom?”
“She’s upstairs,” says Lizzie. “Cleaning. Again. It’s been weird. First she was in, like, denial about Dad, kept setting the table for him and everything, and then she suddenly got depressed, and then two days ago she went all psycho and started cleaning. All night long, even. Like I said, it’s kind of like she needs a
Valium.
”
They pause in the driveway, the unspoken subject hanging heavy between them. Lizzie glances up at the window and, deciding that Janice isn’t watching, leans in close. “So, have you talked to Dad at all?”
Margaret looks at Lizzie, measuring her up. “No, but I got an e-mail from him. Saying it was all going to be okay. A total cop-out, if you ask me. He really should have called.”
“I got one, too!” The e-mail had arrived in her in-box two days after her father had left: “I’m sure that by now your mother has told you that we’re going to be divorcing. I know this may be hard, but we’re going to be fine. I’m going to be giving your mom some space while we get used to these changes and I’m going to be traveling a lot in the next month or two for work, but you and I will spend some time together later this summer. Maybe miniature golf?” This had given Lizzie pause, especially since her father had never taken her miniature golfing in his life. She suddenly had a vision of a future filled with custody visitations, and was boggled by the implausibility of going to the movies with him alone, or visiting the zoo together, or doing whatever kids do with their divorced dads. “Regardless, there’s no need for you to worry,” the e-mail went on. “I’m sure you won’t need to testify. And no matter what your mother may say, this isn’t all my fault. Be good. Love, Dad.”
Lizzie had read the e-mail a dozen times, trying to figure out what, exactly, it meant. Don’t worry about
what,
specifically?
What
was whose fault? And what did he mean by “good”? But mostly she had wondered to herself why he hadn’t just called her instead of writing an e-mail. What, he didn’t even want to
talk
to her anymore? Somehow this small detail was far more painful than the fact that her father had left them at all.
Her father’s departure hadn’t really come as a surprise to her. At breakfast the day after he left, when Mom had fed her that line about Dad “taking some time,” she’d known immediately that he was gone. His leave-taking, in a way, had been pretty gradual: he’d been around less, and less, and less, until it seemed normal to not have him around at all. He spent most of the spring on the road for the business thing he was doing. On the weekends, if he wasn’t attending a conference someplace, he was at the golf course or off at “business dinners.” But mostly it seemed like he was avoiding them.
The only reliable time to glimpse him had been at breakfast, and even then she was afraid to speak to him: The unspoken rule for years had been that no one should speak to Dad until he’d finished his coffee. While Lizzie and her mother chatted, he would retreat behind his
Wall Street Journal,
randomly interjecting terse commands—rarely more than five words at a time, never lowering the paper. “Fire her,” he’d say, registering Mom’s complaints about the cleaning lady who was supposedly drinking their booze. “Just
sell
it,” about the unreliable Porsche. “Not while I’m still breathing,” regarding Lizzie’s desire to go to Mexico on spring break. His patience, Lizzie sensed, was finite and had probably been entirely used up years ago.
She isn’t happy that he’s gone—after all, he’s her
father
—but it is, in a weird way, a kind of relief. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been holding her breath in anticipation of the moment when Dad just never came back from a business trip at all. And now that he hasn’t, she can stop wondering whether he never will. Maybe life without him won’t be so bad. It could just be her and her mom. And Margaret, now that she’s back.
Except that, the truth is, it feels pretty horrible to be dumped like an old pair of tennis shoes, left by the curb. And then there’s the Beverly issue, which makes everything even weirder and more complicated and upsetting. Lizzie tugs on a chunk of streaked hair and tries to read the expression on Margaret’s face. “So…did Dad mention anything about Beverly in his e-mail?”
“Beverly?” Margaret looks confused.
“Mom’s friend. Beverly Weatherlove. Her tennis partner. Remember?”
“What about her?”
“I guess…” Lizzie pauses, looking for the right words. “I guess he left us to be with her.”
Margaret stands there blankly, her mouth hanging slightly open, as if she can’t quite understand what Lizzie has said. “You mean, ran off with her? As in, an affair?”
Lizzie nods. “I think so.”
“Holy shit,” says Margaret. “Mom told you this?”
Her mother had not, in fact, told Lizzie this. The person who had decided it was her sacred duty to fill Lizzie in on the lurid details of her father’s sex life was Susan Gossett. Susan—the swim team record holder in the 200-meter backstroke, the first girl in class to get her hair professionally highlighted, in possession of a perfect pair of 32C breasts that every guy in class lusted after but only a rare few were allowed to touch—had filled Lizzie in after summer swim camp at the rec center last Thursday, just three days after her father had left. She had timed her locker-room assault perfectly, waiting until the exact moment when Lizzie was prying the damp swimsuit from her goose-pimpled behind and feeling particularly vulnerable.
“Hey, Lizzie, I heard that your dad is, like, totally doing it with Beverly Weatherlove,” Susan had told her in a voice coated with sugar, twirling the gold locket around her neck. “They’re staying in a hotel together in San Francisco. A
suite.
My mom heard it from Leslie Beck’s mom, who heard it from Mrs. Baron. It’s
such
a scandal. Are you, like, totally upset?!”
Lizzie’s brain had frozen solid at Susan’s words, incapable of absorbing this nugget of information. Her father? Beverly Weatherlove? Beverly with her Clairol-blond bob and puckering brown cleavage? Her mother’s tennis partner and clone? It was unfathomable. As Lizzie stood there, wordlessly churning, dripping chlorinated water on the locker-room floor, Susan took one step back and said loud enough for the whole locker room to hear, “Didn’t you do it with Mark Weatherlove? So wouldn’t that be, what, incest or something? That’s so disgusting.” All pretense of sweetness gone, Susan gazed at her with the beady focus of a hawk about to claw a field mouse to pieces.
Lizzie’s fingernails cut sharply into her own palms, leaving small raw crescents.
Don’t cry,
she thought,
that’s the kiss of death.
She followed the thin wire of pain back to the center of her chest, coiled it into a deep wobbly breath. Mark’s face swam into view: the sprinkle of acne across his forehead, the strange juggy ears that made his hair stick out on the side. Mark, her classmate, the son of her mother’s best friend, the dork with whom she had been saddled for years at family barbecues and pool parties and group campouts.