“Look, even if you don’t want cake, won’t you please come back to the party? I know you don’t want to be here, with my friends, but I’m so happy you came.”
“You are?”
“I am. I don’t have any real cousins. You and Linda and Rachel are the closest thing I have. And my brothers are such assholes.”
“Sydney!” Michelle didn’t disagree. She was just shocked that Sydney was so candid.
“Everyone knows. Except Mom, which I guess is how it’s supposed to be. Look, I don’t mind that I was adopted, I really don’t, and that my brothers were born eighteen months later and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what happens when people adopt, they relax and have their own children.’ My parents have never made me feel second-rate. We’re all three spoiled, but the twins are extra spoiled. Did you notice they’re not here today? They’re out with Uncle Tubby playing miniature golf because I knew they would ruin everything. I asked Dad to get rid of them. They’re psychopaths.”
“Do you ever think about your natural parents?”
“Mom and Dad are my natural parents,” Sydney said. Then, after a pause: “I do wonder about my biological parents, though. I mean, I’m curious. How could I not be? And my folks won’t tell me much about my adoption. They say it was done through the Associated.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yes, but there should be a story, right? And the only thing I know is that it happened really fast, that they got a call and they picked me up and they didn’t have anything ready. Twenty-four hours after I was born. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
Michelle thought it made as much sense as anything did. She also realized she better start thinking about birth control. Eventually. The women in her family were fertile. Linda had four kids and was talking about getting her tubes tied. Michelle had been not quite an accident, a by-product of too much revelry, her father trying one more time for a boy, although her mother insisted he had preferred being the only man in a household of women. “He liked women,” she said, oh so dryly.
“Anyway,” Sydney said, “I want cake. And it’s my birthday. For one day I get to call the shots around here. Then it will be Heckle and Jeckle’s world all over again. Sometimes, I feel like Ferris Bueller’s sister. You know, there’s probably a reason she was such a freaking bitch.”
“Well, if you’re Jennifer Grey, you get to end up dancing with Patrick Swayze, so it’s not all bad.”
Sydney’s face was a study. “Yeah, no one puts Baby in the corner, right? Only I spend a lot of time in corners. Well, maybe not so many corners, but watching stupid TV, like Blossom. Everyone else in this family is so jocky. Even Mom plays golf.” She shuddered.
“So why did you want a pool party for your Sweet Sixteen?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t even want a party. I wanted to go to a nice restaurant, just Mom and Dad and me. They didn’t think that was special enough.”
“I’m sorry,” Michelle said. She wasn’t. It angered her that Sydney had parents who worried about what was special enough for her. Her family was always trying to knock down Michelle’s ideas about what she deserved, said she was grandiose.
“That’s okay. In two years, I’ll go away to college. My mom thinks I should go to one of the Seven Sisters, but I want to live in New York. Columbia, Barnard, NYU-whatever it takes, I’ll get into at least one of them, I think.”
“I wish I were going away to school. I’m just going to College Park.”
“College Park is away.”
“Not really.”
“Well, then kick ass your freshman year and transfer somewhere you’d rather be.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Not easy,” said Sydney. “But possible. You’re smart, Michelle. You’re just lazy.”
The words were specific-thrillingly, awfully specific. Michelle knew they had been snatched from some adult conversation. Lorraine and Bert, most likely, but maybe her own mother. “Smart”-a flicker of warmth because no one ever said Michelle was smart. But “lazy” and this brought a more familiar slap of shame because she knew she was exactly that. Michelle, who didn’t panic when she awoke in a strange bed as a man tried to undress her, felt nervous and ashamed that Sydney should have heard grown-ups say these things about her.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”
“No one,” Sydney said, “knows what it’s like to be anyone. Let’s go have cake. Happy birthday to me.”
Michelle followed her, wondering how this plump sixteen-year-old had gotten so wise. No one knows what it’s like to be anyone. Oh, she wasn’t so smart. She had probably overheard that, too. A line from a movie or a sitcom, maybe even Blossom.
March 16, 2012
If Sandy had been pressed to put a description to the Gelmans’ house in Garrison Forest, he might have said “fancy” or “interesting.” He readied those precise words because the lady of the house, who was leading him to the living room, struck him as someone who might solicit compliments, even from a stranger. The house wasn’t really to his taste, but he thought it was probably in good taste, although maybe not. Mainly, it had a decorated quality to it, a ruthless perfection that felt cold and off-putting. Even the one overtly personal touch, an enormous oil painting of a family that hung over the fireplace, seemed a little generic to him.
“Nice portrait,” he guessed.
“Thank you,” Lorraine Gelman said. “It makes me smile, every day. A lovely time in our lives. The boys were turning thirteen, Sydney was fifteen. I hate to say it because it sounds so proud-motherish, but I don’t think my sons ever had an awkward age.”
Awkward age. Sandy noticed that Lorraine did not say the same of her daughter, who was plump and not quite pretty, even as rendered by brush-for-hire.
“How long ago was that?” Making conversation, trying to put her at ease. And maybe himself. Although Lorraine had agreed to talk to him alone, he was unclear if she had asked her husband’s advice about this meeting. And she kept stressing that she had never met Julie Saxony. Not even one time, she said, and she said it more than once, often the sign of a big whopping lie.
“Almost twenty-five years ago. My daughter is a lawyer in New York now, and the boys are in Chicago. All settled with children-well, Sydney has a partner, but we adore her. Adriana is the best daughter-in-law in the bunch.”
Sandy couldn’t help thinking, as he often did, about the things this woman took for granted-her home, her healthy children, now grandchildren. If Bobby had been normal, could Sandy have accepted a partner with this woman’s easy grace? He yearned to think so.
“Well,” he said, taking out his pad, signaling the beginning of the interview. “Julie Saxony.”
“As I told you, I never met her.”
“No, but you knew Felix.”
“Of course. He was my husband’s closest friend; I am Bambi’s best friend to this day. We were sort of forced on each other, through our husbands, but we’ve ended up being as close as the men, maybe closer. You know how that goes.”
Sandy didn’t, but he nodded. He and Mary hadn’t done that couple-dating-couple thing. They had socialized with people from his work and hers, but they hadn’t created that dynamic where the men talk about sports and the women talk about kids. That was Mary’s decision as much as his, another legacy from Bobby. Mary could deal with a lot, but she learned quickly that people didn’t want her to contribute to their happy chatter about their sons and daughters. When she talked about Bobby, it was almost as if she was one of those people who offered pet stories as a counterpoint to kid stories. Other people thought Bobby was a tragedy, that it was in bad taste to mention him in a discussion about normal kids. Mary, so naturally sociable, had pulled away from the world when she realized no one wanted her to talk about Bobby. Not even Sandy.