“Well, that’s true for Eliza, so I think it’s fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,” their father said. “This happened to all of us. Not the same thing-there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.”
Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible-experienced, not suffered, or even endured. Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza’s parents didn’t want to define her life for her. “You get to be the expert on yourself,” her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had the knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose. They probably did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they refused to claim this power. Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.
“I was willing to defer admission,” Vonnie reminded her father. This was accurate, as far as it went. She had offered to delay entering Northwestern, but not very wholeheartedly, and there was a risk that her parents would have to forfeit part of her tuition. Besides, now that Eliza was home, her parents were still keen on making distinctions between authentic issues, as they called them-her need to know that the house was locked at night, not so much as a window open, even on the fairest spring evenings-and rationalizations, or any attempt to use her past to unfair advantage.
Yet it was Vonnie who was inclined to leverage her sister to garner attention. Oh, she didn’t tell her new college friends too much. But she hinted at a terrible tragedy, an unthinkable occurrence, one that had made the national news. She was perhaps too broad in her allusions. Over the years, as Vonnie’s various college friends visited, they were clearly surprised to meet a normal-seeming high school girl with all her limbs and no obvious disfigurement. At least one had believed that Eliza was a young flautist, who lost her arm after being pushed in front of a subway train.
“Remember,” Eliza said to her mother now, “how Vonnie hated this house at first? Now she has a meltdown if you even suggest you might want to downsize.”
“I think we’re still a few years away, knock wood.” Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. “What do you call this?” he’d asked Eliza, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him. “No name,” she’d said. “Just tea and lemonade.” “We should make up a name for it,” he’d said, “sell it by the roadside.” Like most of Walter’s plans, this was all talk.
“Where will you go when you do sell this house?” she asked her mother now.
“ Downtown D.C., I think, what they call the Penn Quarter neighborhood now.”
“Not Baltimore?”
Inez shook her head. “We’ve been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it’s all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can’t see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood panhandlers by name. I’m Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres.”
Eliza had to laugh at this image, her bohemian, unaffected mother as Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. The children burst in, faces smeared with the residue from Rita’s, their favorite custard stand, whose neon letters promised ICE * CUSTARD * HAPPINESS. She couldn’t have felt any safer, even if the windows had been closed and locked.
The windows were open. That’s what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live that way.
ELIZA HEADED HOME ALONG the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver’s ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: “You see that Roy Rogers? That’s where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn’t play any sports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn’t kill. Why do you think that was?”
“Mommy?” Albie said from the backseat. “You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”
“No, honey, I’m-” Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.
“What was that?” Albie asked.
“A deer,” Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.
“But it was white.”
“That was the tail.”
A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn’t sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, running for her life.
6
1985
“WANNABE,” HER SISTER SAID.
“I’m not,” Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn’t know what Vonnie meant, and Vonnie pounced on that little wriggle of doubt, the way their family cat, Barnacle, impaled garden snakes.
“It’s a term for girls like you, who think they’re Madonna.”
“I don’t think I’m Madonna.”
But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vonnie a lot of leeway-no curfew, although she had to call if she was going to stay out past midnight, and they trusted her never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking. But this summer, Elizabeth had suddenly discovered that there were all sorts of things she was forbidden to do. Dye her hair, even with a nonpermanent tint. Spend her days at the mall or the Roy Rogers on Route 40. (“Watch all the television you want, take long walks, go to the community pool, but no just hanging,” her mother had clarified.) And although she wasn’t actually prohibited from wearing the fingerless lace gloves she had purchased when a friend’s mother took them to the mall, her mother sighed at the mere sight of them.
Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vonnie left for her job at a day camp for underprivileged kids, checking herself in the mirror. She had a piece of stretchy lace, filched from her mother’s sewing basket, tied in her reddish curls, and a pink T-shirt that proclaimed WILD GIRL, which even she recognized was laughably untrue. Although it was a typical August day, hot and humid, she had layered a bouffant black skirt over a pair of leggings that stopped at her knees, and she wore black ankle boots with faux zebra inserts worked into the leather. She thought she looked wonderful. Vonnie was jealous.