Go Ask Fannie, page 5
“I didn’t see her.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You don’t trust me, though.”
No, Morgan, after you fuck a Southern ditz in a fleabag hotel for two months and then tell me about it after you’ve ended it, leaving me in the cuckolded dark for sixty days and counting, no, I don’t completely trust you.
“Never mind,” said Ruth. “But I can see how you’re tired.” This was how it was with them these days: a lot of “never minds” and “it’s nothings.”
Morgan cleared his throat. “How’s the visit going?”
“Oh, Lizzie had some big fight with her boyfriend, or rather her ex-boyfriend, or rather I shouldn’t say boyfriend at all,” Ruth said, closing the door to the twin bedroom, because George had gotten back and she’d heard Lizzie’s footsteps on the stairs. “It’s complicated. Things got messy. And now Gavin’s in the hospital.”
“What’d she do, deck him?”
Through the walls, Ruth could hear George and Lizzie in the next room, laughing over something. She felt left out. She briefly sketched out the scenario for Morgan, but in doing so, the whole incident sounded silly. A cookbook was a cookbook. They sounded like the sappiest family around. Indeed, Morgan found it hard to grasp the level of outrage.
“Aren’t there other cookbooks?”
There were, actually. Lillian had liked to watch The French Chef on television, and she’d bought Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes I and II, and taken notes in the margins while watching Julia Child, and when Julia swigged wine, Lillian did as well. But Lillian’s French dinners—her pot au feu, her boeuf bourguignon—had never evolved into family favorites.
She grew defensive. “You don’t treat a borrowed book with a mother’s notes like some paperback from the used bookstore,” she said. “I’ve got to go start dinner. I’ll call you later.”
Morgan coughed delicately. “Not too late,” he said. “I’m going to bed early. I want to nip this thing in the bud.”
Morgan was frequently “nipping things in the bud,” and he took very good care of himself when doing so.
She wondered if Charlene had lost that silly Southern accent by now.
In the room next door, George and Lizzie were slouching side by side on the four-poster double bed, cracking up as they watched videos on George’s phone. When Ruth tried to join them, George closed out the app.
“Not really your kind of humor, Ruth,” he said.
That hurt.
“Come on,” said Ruth, wiggling between them. She noticed a water stain on the wallpaper. Did the house have a leak? Maybe there was black mold everywhere, not just in the bathroom. “Show me something funny.”
George reloaded the video, which was an old Saturday Night Live clip with John Belushi and Laraine Newman. Ruth laughed loudly. George and Lizzie, who’d already seen it, didn’t laugh so hard this time around.
That hurt, too.
Chalk it up to a difference of age, Ruth told herself. There were four years between her and George, and almost eleven between her and Lizzie; Daniel had bridged the upper gap, being a year and a half younger than Ruth. In many of their childhood photos, they were all lined up, oldest to youngest, pretty evenly spaced until you got to little Lizzie. Ruth sometimes wondered if Lizzie had been a surprise. She wished she could ask her mother. She wished she could ask her mother a lot of things. Did you ever go through a rough patch with Dad? What would you have done, if he’d had an affair? Was Daniel really the most difficult one? And what did you write about up there in the guest room?
There were no answers to these questions (Lillian and Daniel gone, the stories lost or thrown away), and there never would be. At times like this Ruth resented her mother for dying so early. Who’s going to tell me what to expect with menopause? she wanted to ask. Who’s going to help me deal with a sixteen-year-old boy?
And, in the end: Why couldn’t you have gone straight home that night? Why’d you have to drive up School Street hill?
What Ruth remembered most about Daniel was that he was the family comedian. At the dinner table, in the car, or over dessert, Daniel told jokes and did imitations—of teachers, the mailman, the family physician. Ruth, as his older sister, always felt like he stole her spotlight, but she loved his antics, the way he could simply stand up and make them all laugh. One Thanksgiving, just as they were about to all sing the Doxology for grace (per Grammy Holmes’s pious insistence), Daniel tapped his spoon against his water glass. “Ahem,” he said. He had his own grace to sing, he said. Warily Lillian cocked her head. Daniel stood up. Holding an imaginary mike to his mouth, he began to croon: “Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen,” on key and resonant, with enough syrupy inflection to make Ruth suspect, three years later while watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, that Matthew Broderick had somehow been listening in that day and taking his cue from Daniel.
“Go Dutch treat, you were sweet—”
“All right,” said Grammy Holmes. “That’s enough.”
Lillian ostensibly agreed with her mother, and tried to look stern, but everyone could see the stars in her eyes.
“You heard Grammy,” she said, giving Daniel a hug.
Daniel was even able to find humor in Murray’s campaign. This was notable, since after a long day in the Blaire-Mobile it was easy for them to all find themselves in a piqued state. Murray dragged them to a lot of church suppers that fall, which the children hated (baked beans and coleslaw again?), but it was Daniel who invoked images of reverent, bosomy old ladies slumbering in happy flatulence later that night.
“Stop that,” Lillian scolded them, but she, too, would laugh, stubbing out her cigarette in the little ashtray as they pulled into the church parking lot in the Blaire-Mobile.
“Behave yourselves,” said Murray. He’d be neatly dressed for the evening in a pressed pair of khakis and a light blue button-down shirt. “You’re potentially members of a congressman’s family.”
“Afterward can we go to McDonald’s?” asked George, twelve at the time.
“No,” said Lillian, always cost-conscious. “You eat those beans and hot dogs.”
Murray cut the engine, which ticked and wheezed before falling silent.
“Look, Channel Nine is here,” Daniel said.
“Will we be on TV tonight?” asked Ruth anxiously. She’d just turned seventeen, and her face was all broken out.
Lillian took a moment to brush dandruff from Murray’s lapels. “I will remind everyone to use their napkins. You don’t want food on your face if you’re going to be on TV.”
“Beans, beans, the energy fruit,” Daniel began.
“No bean jokes in the church, please,” said Murray. “Okay, men, let’s get this show on the road. What do we want?”
“Equal rights!” the children groaned. “Health care!”
“And when do we want it?”
“Now!”
Afterward they would stop at McDonald’s, Murray’s pumped-up optimism trumping Lillian’s budgetary protests, and they would divvy up the fries and burgers, no longer concerned about napkins, arriving back at the big house in Concord with greasy fingers and ketchup in the corners of their mouths.
Ruth didn’t mind these campaign events. She was certain her father was going to win, and she liked to picture herself living in Washington, DC, visiting the White House, the Capitol, the stone memorials dedicated to men she’d read about in history books. She liked imagining a school filled with the children of other congressmen (and they were, at the time, mostly men), girls in plaid skirts and boys in preppy blue blazers who would all take an active interest in civic engagement. She pictured herself visiting the White House and asking questions that might catch the attention of someone important, who would then take her back into the Oval Office to meet the president himself—Ronald Reagan or Walter Mondale, depending on how the election turned out.
So she was crestfallen when, one night, her father made an offhand reference to the studio apartment he would rent if elected.
“Studio?” Ruth said blankly.
“Or a one-bedroom.”
“We’re not going?”
Murray, who was leaning over the dining room table with a mess of newspapers spread out before him, looked up with surprise. “You weren’t expecting me to uproot the family, were you? Pull you kids out of school halfway through the year? No, you’ll stay here in the house with your mother. I’ll come home on the weekends. It’s better that way. You can keep your friends, keep your after-school activities.”
Ruth didn’t want to keep her friends. She was already at that point where she wanted nothing but to get the hell out of Concord, New Hampshire, where half the kids didn’t even know that each state had two senators and an apportioned number of representatives. She wanted to live in Washington, DC, where people would talk about something besides hockey or baseball.
But the most she could hope for, she realized that evening, was that her father would get a one-bedroom with a pullout sofa, maybe, so that she could visit him over school breaks. Quickly she amended her fantasy. She would take the train down; she would spend her Christmas money on a soft-sided suitcase instead of the clunky gray Samsonites her parents kept in the attic. She would buy a leather purse that slung over her shoulder, and a nice trench coat for spring that would coordinate with a new pair of shoes. And she would stop in New York and buy some good makeup, to cover the pimples.
She was all set to tell her father that if he won, she would be more than happy to go apartment hunting with him, when Daniel came in.
“Looking kind of glum, Ruth,” he said.
“Don’t you have homework?”
“Don’t you?”
“Kids,” said Murray, folding up the paper.
Daniel was eating peanuts. “So knock-knock.”
“Who’s there?” said Murray.
“Impatient cow.”
Ruth rolled her eyes, but Murray grinned. “Im—”
“MOOOOO!” yelled Daniel, right in Ruth’s ear, which made her jump. She pursed her lips, partly out of irritation but partly to keep herself from laughing.
“You are, like, in first grade,” she told Daniel.
“Yeah, but people love me,” he replied, tossing a peanut in the air to catch in his mouth.
The next day Ruth tried to retell the joke to her own friends. She waited too long for the punch line, though, and then yelled too loud, and the joke fell flat.
* * *
• • •
THE LAST CAMPAIGN EVENT they all attended that fall occurred in early November, a Saturday rally in front of the State House. Although most of the leaves had fallen, the weather started out warm, the sun strong enough that Ruth knew she would be squinting in all the pictures. First she gave her own well-prepared speech, her voice trembling ever so slightly but then evening out, allowing her to use the inflection techniques she’d learned in English class. Then her father took the podium. He spoke of health care, of course, along with government aid for pregnant women and children, more preschool education, tax increases on the rich—lofty ideas that floated in Ruth’s mind like dreams of Christmas morning. Clouds began to gather, but Ruth nevertheless took off her sweater and draped it neatly over her shoulders, trying to casually tie the sleeves together like she’d seen in the Georgetown catalog. Her father kept speaking. The sun vanished. The crowd cheered.
Nobody knew that temperatures were about to plummet into the thirties, icing the roads and sending shivers down the trunks of fruit trees; the next spring there would be no apple blossoms as a result. Not even the weatherman had predicted it—though later George would claim that he sensed the imminent cold snap from the lack of birds in the sky.
“I knew something bad was coming,” he said.
* * *
• • •
HAVING BEEN ABANDONED by Lizzie and George after the YouTube videos, Ruth sprawled on one of the twin beds and killed time on Facebook. Ruth had ninety-seven friends, a relatively paltry number that included a lot of those high school classmates she’d disparaged in her teens, but who now curiously seemed to have grown into decent people, which made her ashamed of her previous snobbery.
Unbeknownst to Morgan, Ruth was in touch with several old boyfriends on Facebook. The friend requests had come from them, not her, and she’d felt it would have been rude not to accept them. She learned that one of them had had cancer. Another was a right-wing Republican. Yet another had continued the personal Messenger thing a little too long, and she stopped responding.
Today there was a recent post from Abe, the one with cancer. He still lived in the Concord area, and Ruth had actually run into him a few years ago in Target. He’d looked as healthy as a pumpkin back then and she was glad for him. She’d tried to remember why they’d broken up. Some of it had to do with his lack of direction, which stood in such sharp contrast to her type-A drive as she started law school. But was that all?
Oh. Right. Morgan.
She read Abe’s post, which accompanied a photo of the mountains. “Spectacular early-morning ride through Franconia Notch,” he wrote. “Moose, eagle, apple orchards laden with fruit. I love the Granite State!”
On a whim, Ruth fired off a message. “Am home for the weekend. Any time to connect?” What the heck. It wasn’t like she was interested in starting something up with him again. She’d just like to catch up.
Okay, and so maybe she was a little irked at Morgan.
Three hovering dots, and a quick reply. “Camping at Lafayette,” he wrote. “Coffee tomorrow? The Grind?”
She didn’t know the place, but she’d find out. “10?”
“”
Of course, instantly she regretted making the date. Her words were too eager, she thought. She came off as sneaky. She should cancel.
Then she saw that it would look even worse to cancel. Oh, just see him, she told herself; it’s nothing but a get-together with an old friend.
“Ruth!” George called from downstairs.
She went to the top of the stairs.
“Can you iron paper?” he asked.
“How am I supposed to know?!”
“We’re thinking of ironing the pages in the cookbook,” George said. “We thought you’d know if it was a good idea or not.”
“I’m not Martha Stewart,” said Ruth. This happened to her at home a lot. People thought she was a walking encyclopedia of homemaking tricks. “Where’s Dad?”
“Still sleeping,” said George.
Ruth glanced in the hall mirror. Straightened up. Fluffed her hair out. Grinned to see if her teeth looked yellow.
Downstairs she found George and Lizzie with the cookbook open on the kitchen table, the iron plugged in.
“I don’t think it’s normal, for someone Dad’s age to sleep so much,” she said.
“You really are a worrywart,” said George.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “And don’t burn those pages.”
4.
An Ideal Marriage
George had, in fact, always been somewhat of a worrywart himself—but mainly when it came to his little sister, Lizzie, whom he thought of as in need of protection: from monsters and bogeymen, from boys in general, from his roommates in college who arrived uninvited over holiday breaks. Lizzie had been born four weeks early, weighing in at just over five pounds, and she was slow enough in growing that the pediatrician advised Lillian to stop nursing and switch to formula, something Lillian—breastfeeding before it became so popular—did with great reluctance. George remembered bottle-feeding Lizzie and learning to burp her as well. He took this job very seriously, holding his bobble-headed sister over his shoulder and patting her to get the air up.
Lizzie began to grow a little faster, but she was never what their mother called a sturdy child—“sturdy” used more often to describe George, who according to the notes in his baby book weighed a hefty nine pounds and three ounces at birth and remained in the 98th percentile throughout childhood. Which made sense, for George loved to eat. He loved buttered noodles and cinnamon toast, bloody roast beef, any raw vegetable his mother cut up. He loved milk. He loved pie. Lillian said he was going to eat them out of house and home.
“You’re going to eat us out of house and home,” she scolded, wrapping him in her arms.
But his little sister: she was petite, and since George was just that much older (by six years) and that much bigger (by sixty pounds, when Lizzie was born), he felt the need to take care of her. Daniel, three years older than George, was off with his own friends and didn’t want George tagging along, and Ruth had piano lessons and dance, and when she wasn’t pursuing the arts, she had her nose in a book.
And so George, taking Lizzie under his wing, taught her how to tie her shoes. How to whistle. How to turn a somersault, ride a bike, jump on a pogo stick, dive—every step of the way making sure there were no rocks in her path, no spiders in her bed, no throat-swelling peanuts in her Cracker Jack.
In the schoolyard, there were some boys in his sixth-grade class who, during recess, liked to kick the ball straight at the younger girls. Lizzie didn’t really need protecting, even as a kindergartner—she kicked it right back, and nearly as hard—but George met up with those boys after school and threatened to beat them up if they ever took aim at his sister again. In high school, with Daniel gone, George grew even more intensely protective, and anatomically specific as well: when one of his classmates referred to the girls in junior high as a ripe crop of cherries just waiting to be popped, George shoved the boy up against a row of lockers and told him that if he looked at his sister in that way, George would cut his dick off.
Which is what Daniel would have said, he told himself.
The older she got, the less Lizzie appreciated George’s protective bent. She just wished he would let things take their course. If boys were talking about popping her cherry, let them talk all they wanted; she was the one who would decide when and where her cherry would be popped. At one point she told George to stop messing with her life.
