“Mark? Nasty,” she said, trying to capture just the right note of bored nonchalance as she grabbed a T-shirt to pull over her head. She thrust her head through and met Susan’s blue eyes again. “You must really have a sick mind if you think
that.”
Inside, though, her mind raced: Had Mark told Susan that they’d slept together? Why had he lied? What else had Susan heard, anyway? Were people talking? What did they
know
?
Her cheeks were so hot she could practically hear the water sizzling as it trickled down the edges of her face. Lizzie had given up trying to figure out the logic of Fillmore High’s social atmosphere: Why some people got to eat lunch on the grass on the main quad and others were banished to the patch of dirt behind the science room, why only certain music (Bobby Masterston: yes; the Hurly Burly Boyz: no) was acceptable to blast from your car stereo in the parking lot, why girls who wore Abercrombie & Fitch were so resolutely opposed to those who dared show up in Tommy Hilfiger. There were rules, and Lizzie had furiously studied them, even if she’d never been given the guidebook that explained why they existed in the first place. For years, of course, she hadn’t been in play at all—she wasn’t exactly
losing
the game, but she was irrelevant to female classmates like Susan, which was almost as bad. Only lately had she entered the field, to discover that she had become a focus of their hostility, and she was still unsure what that meant in terms of score.
That Thursday, though, it seemed clear that she had lost a round. Susan stepped away, edging back toward the door. “I only report what I hear,” she said, then vanished before Lizzie could formulate another response. A low din returned to the locker room as the rest of the girls returned to their swimsuits and hair dryers and mascara. This felt like that recurring dream, Lizzie thought miserably, the one where she showed up at a party and realized, when everyone began to lob water balloons at her, that she was wearing a cowgirl costume and it wasn’t a costume party. She wanted to run to the bathroom to release the tears of humiliation that had welled up under her lashes, but that seemed like a bad idea. Instead, she glanced around; almost everyone averted their eyes, except Becky Jackson. Becky screwed up her nose, crossed her eyes, and mouthed the word “bitch,” thumbing her finger toward the door. Lizzie felt a quick stab of gratitude: Becky was a friend who could always be relied upon. Her only friend, actually. Kind, solid, earthy Becky, always good for an extra Snickers bar or a ride to the mall, even if she sometimes seemed kind of, well,
young.
Lizzie went straight home after swim camp, her heart still thudding uncomfortably in her chest, her skin itching from the chlorine. She ached indefinably, not quite upset enough to cry, but hollow like a Russian nesting doll. Her father? An affair? How come she hadn’t known? She felt she’d been given a glimpse into a secret world of adults that she’d never known existed, one that was perilously close to her own world, and couldn’t quite put a handle on what it all
meant.
She had a flash of her father doing it with Beverly (where? in a cheap hotel? in the back of Beverly’s BMW station wagon?), and it made her queasy.
The house was hot and stuffy and silent, with the doors closed to the afternoon breeze. “Mom?” she called out, but there was no response: Janice was out. She slid across the parquet of the entry hall, her flip-flops squeaking on the wax, and thunked up the stairs. The house was designed in L-shaped wings that met in the center at a sweeping mahogany staircase that unrolled like the tongue of a panting dog. Downstairs, the musty living room and terrifying dining room—done all in white, an invitation for Lizzie’s inevitable cranberry spills and scuff marks—dominated the east wing. She usually gravitated instead toward the west, where the vast kitchen stretched across the length of the house (offering views in both directions as well as access to the Sub-Zero), next to the family room, with its 422 channels of nonstop entertainment. Upstairs, the girls’ bedrooms were to the left, from the top of the staircase; master and guest bedrooms to the right. It was entirely possible to stand at the end of the girls’ wing and shout as loud as you could and never be heard at the other end—mostly because the upholstery was so lush that it seemed to suck all the sound from the rooms. The drapes were thick brocade; the cream carpet piled an inch thick; the furniture heaped with down-filled cushions in velvets and tweeds. Sometimes, as Lizzie walked down the hall, she would whack the walls with the side of her hand until it throbbed, just to remind the house that she was, in fact, alive.
Shaken by Susan’s news, that day, she found herself inexplicably drawn toward the master bedroom, the main locus of mystery in the house. What did she expect to find there—answers? hidden love letters? her father, doing it with Beverly Weatherlove? Certainly, she didn’t expect to find her mother, lying down in the middle of the day.
When she pushed open the door, she saw that the blinds were drawn, with only a little daylight leaking from behind the swagged curtains to illuminate the silhouette of an unmade bed. Lizzie hit the light switch with the edge of her palm and then froze in alarm: Her mother was lying on the bed, fully dressed in a cerulean velour tracksuit with a gel mask over her eyes. A bottle of Côtes du Rhône sat on the nightstand, leaving a cherry ring on the wood. A half-empty tumbler held loosely in her right hand listed dangerously. One of Lizzie’s father’s suits, covered with dust, lay on the bed beside her.
At the sound of the door, her mother twitched, letting a little wine splash onto the linen. “Paul?” she called out, struggling to heave herself to her elbows. She pushed the gel pack to the top of her head—it caught back her fine blond hair like a headband—and blinked twice at Lizzie with enlarged pupils. “Oh. Sorry, honey. How was swim camp?” Janice put the glass back down on the side table and dabbed at the spilled wine with the edge of her palm.
Lizzie took a step forward. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Janice sat up against the pillows, fanning her flaming cheeks with her left hand. The gel mask had left deep creases in the thin skin surrounding her eyes, giving her the appearance of a stunned owl. “Just a little under the weather,” Janice said, but her voice was as parched and thin as dust. “I think it might be allergies. All the pollen in the air this time of year.”
“Oh,” Lizzie said, not quite sure how to address this obvious untruth. Her mother smelled faintly tangy, like stale alcohol. Was she
drunk
? Lizzie stared at her mother with alarm: Her mother
never
got drunk. “Um, are you sure?”
Janice nodded, her head wobbling and bumping the headboard with each jerk.
Lizzie swallowed hard. She’d spent the last few days waiting for her mother’s collapse—waiting for some clue that might reveal exactly how Lizzie was supposed to react to her father’s departure—but her mother hadn’t shed a single tear that Lizzie had witnessed. Instead, she had behaved as if nothing had changed. She sat at dinner—ignoring the empty place setting, where her father had not come to the table—and quizzed Lizzie about her day at swim camp. She put together shopping lists and continued to thumb through
Gourmet,
compiling the menu for an upcoming cocktail party. She drove to her Wednesday morning Pilates class and got her nails wrapped by Ellie. But the pitch of her chatter had ascended several octaves, until it had taken on a shrill quality. Lizzie felt as if she were watching a delicate crystal vase teeter on the edge of a tall shelf, aware that it could come crashing to the ground at any minute but too far away to stop it.
That Thursday, Lizzie was relieved that something had finally changed, although this particular collapse wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind. She’d expected something a bit more basic: tears, for example. This felt more like a black hole that had sucked all the emotion from the room. The emptiness was frightening. She took a tentative step forward. “Mom? Are you sad about Dad?”
Janice stiffened. “We’re not going to talk about your father right now, okay?”
Lizzie tried to hold her tongue, pressing it to the roof of her mouth as hard as she could, but the question slipped out anyway. She couldn’t help it. “Mom, I heard something today about Beverly Weatherlove?” she asked, then instinctively winced in anticipation of her mother’s response.
But nothing happened at all. Janice just pressed her fingers to her temple. “Could you bring me a few aspirin? I have a headache.”
Lizzie sighed and sidled into the bathroom to paw through the cabinets, sending a pair of tweezers and an empty bottle of Vicodin onto the tile in the process. Returning to the bedroom, Lizzie plopped two Tylenol into her mother’s outstretched hand. Janice clenched her fingers around them. “Do you want water?” Lizzie asked, but Janice was already washing the pills down with the wine.
“You’re my angel,” Janice said, and reached out to pat Lizzie on the wrist. “I just need to sleep this off. But I’ll make you dinner later.”
“Mom…” Lizzie began.
Her mother closed her eyes. “Don’t,” she said, strangling the end of the word. The room fell silent again. Lizzie could hear the faint whine of the neighbors’ dog, barking in the distance. The air tasted hot. She waited by the bed for a minute, but Janice didn’t open her eyes. Instead, she pulled the gel mask down again and slid down the pillows until she was lying flat, her hair fanning out behind her on the sheets.
Lizzie slipped out the door. Downstairs, she picked up the phone and dialed her sister in Los Angeles. This was too much to deal with alone, she decided. Margaret would know what to do. She always knew everything. She would come home and make everything okay again.
Except that Margaret is here now, and her presence isn’t nearly as reassuring as Lizzie had thought it would be. Something about her sister’s appearance makes her nervous, although she can’t quite pin down why. She has always been jealous of her sister’s skinny-girl metabolism: Margaret has a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward food, whereas Lizzie is an unfortunate lifelong member of the clean-plate club. (If Lizzie forces herself to eat a salad for dinner, she’ll dream that night of Twinkies and fried chicken, tuna sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise, and chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven.) But now Margaret is a total
twig:
When she went in for a hug on the driveway, Lizzie could feel the angles of Margaret’s collarbones, the gaping of the terry-cloth sundress around her chest. Maybe it’s just because Lizzie, in her four-inch platform sandals, is taller than her, but the weird truth is that Margaret seems
diminished.
They walk up the driveway and toward the house, Lizzie carrying Margaret’s laptop case, Margaret heaving the duffel over a fragile-looking shoulder. “So,” Lizzie says, eager to get started with the fun gossip. “How’s Bart?”
“He’s fine,” says Margaret, quickly. Lizzie waits for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t. Lizzie bites her tongue. Maybe in Los Angeles it’s not considered cool to talk about your famous boyfriend. Maybe it’s about acting like that kind of thing is just totally normal. Still, she is dying to know everything about the Hollywood life she reads about in the tabloids, and Margaret is always so
stingy
with those kinds of details.
She changes tactics. “Have you been to any Hollywood parties lately?” she asks. “What celebrities have you seen?”
“Lizzie, celebrities aren’t really as interesting as you think they are,” says Margaret, giving her a sidelong look. “You really should stop buying those trashy magazines. They’re just going to make you feel insecure. Don’t you read the magazines I send you? I had a big editorial in the February issue about that.”
“Of course,” says Lizzie, although the truth is that she finds
Snatch
boring and difficult to read. Too many ten-dollar vocabulary words, not enough celebrity gossip: It makes Lizzie’s brain hurt to try to follow along, although she found the vibrator pictures in the last issue very educational. Still, she smiles gamely at her sister. “Did you bring the new issue for me?”
But Margaret doesn’t answer. Instead, she stops at the door to the house, with its formidable brass knocker, and looks Lizzie up and down. “You’ve lost more weight, haven’t you?” she says, changing the subject.
Lizzie feels herself beaming. She had wondered when Margaret would notice. “Thirty-seven pounds now. You can tell?”
“Of course. You look terrific. Not, of course, that you looked bad before, mind you. Marilyn Monroe was a size fourteen, did you know that? The cult of thin is just a recent development in human evolution. But, anyway, you look great. Really great. You should be proud of yourself.”
Lizzie smiles and shrugs, hoping to look casually indifferent. “It’s the swimming.”
“I figured it wasn’t the elocution lessons,” Margaret says and smiles as they walk into the house and head up the stairs in search of their mother.
in the beginning of eighth grade, a year and a half earlier, Lizzie’s mother signed her up for classes in etiquette, ballet, and elocution. “For grace, poise, and eloquence,” Janice explained to Lizzie. Lizzie hated them all. She was terrible at ballet. Her pliés were mushy, her pirouettes wobbly, and the way the elastic on the leotard squished the fat on her thighs depressed her. Etiquette was the most useless thing she’d ever learned: Snails were disgusting, she’d never in a million years eat one, so why did she need to learn the proper fork for escargot? And elocution was even worse. Mrs. Grimley would make her trill her
r
’s over and over and over again until she thought she would hyperventilate.
The classes were filled with gawky, awkward girls, girls with surgical-looking headgear, or with erupting acne, or crippling shyness, or who were overweight and lumpen like herself. The lot of them spent their weekly internment miserably chewing on their hair and trying to shrink as far into the corners as possible, lest the teacher call on them. Lizzie felt like she’d been banished to the island of misfit toys.
“Light and feminine! Like a robin on a branch! Rrrrrrobin!” Grimley would command, as she cruised up and down the line of cowering teenagers. She would, without fail, pick out poor Rebekah Steinberg—six feet tall, with a deadly lisp and so self-conscious she would blush if you even looked at her—and force her to repeat phrases like “Why yes, sir, I’d be delighted for this dance,” except that in Rebekah’s mouth it came out like a bowl of oatmeal mush and you knew that no boy was ever going to give her the opportunity to botch that sentence. And Lizzie, while pitying Rebekah, would inch that much farther away, aware that befriending other social pariahs might diminish her status even more. She was cooler than this class, she knew; sure, she was a little chunky, but her personality wasn’t crippled, like many of these other girls’. Maybe she wasn’t at the top of the social spectrum, but she hadn’t yet hit the bottom either.