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  As a Driscoll wife, Diane had to go to every fund-raiser for every cause under the sun, and at those events, it was important for her to dress appropriately and make appropriate small talk with people she found supremely boring. She dreaded every event, and couldn’t wait to come home, collapse on our sofa, and give us the dirt on Claudia Von Hoeffing’s eye work and how Richard Wertlinger was getting handsy with a cocktail waitress in the coat closet. But as much as Diane hated going to galas, she loved buying dresses for them. She’d sign me out of school and we’d spend the day hopping from Neiman Marcus to little boutiques. We’d wrap up the day with massages and facials.

  We never told my mom or Janie. We never talked about not telling them, but it was understood. One of the first times we went, my mom pulled into the driveway at the same time we did. Diane told my mom I was sick and the school called her to come pick me up after they couldn’t get through at the carriage house.

  My mom smoothed my hair and looked concerned.

  Diane said, “I have some tea that will make her feel better. Van, you go get yourself in bed, missy.” She pouted at my mom like she felt bad for me. “Come on, Nat. I’ll get it for you.” As they walked away, she looked over her shoulder and winked at me.

  I ran up to the carriage house and pulled the tape out of the cassette in our answering machine so it looked like it had broken.

  But then there was the secret Diane kept from me. For almost a year she didn’t tell me. And neither did my mom. And when they finally told me, and I came home from college to be there, my mother was small and frail and bald under her red designer knit cap.

  I walked into the carriage house and they were both in my mom’s bedroom. They didn’t hear me, and I watched in horror as my mom and Diane had a serious discussion over the fabric swatches for her casket.

  “Satin is too flashy, Diane,” my mom said. “It’s not me.” She held up a rectangle of gray wool.

  Diane made a face like she’d just sucked a lemon and shook her head. She grabbed for another swatch and held it up, smiling.

  “It’s classic, Nat,” she said, “and the dark pink is just so- ” and then she saw me and stopped like she was caught in the headlights.

  They had their own language about it. They had their own routines. Diane knew all the names of all the pills in the orange bottles that lined the bathroom counter. She could identify them by color and shape and she knew the dosage by heart. And until I saw them picking out options on the casket like it was a new car, all I had heard were phrases like lump removed and routine procedure. And I’d believed my mother when she’d said, “Everything will be fine, sweetie.”

  The funeral was awful. Diane talked my mother into every lavish accommodation Driscoll money could buy. It was their pet project. They’d planned every detail from the moment they heard the word terminal. And it all upset me- from the ornate urns of yellow roses to the gray raw silk cover on the guest book at the funeral parlor (to match the casket fabric they finally agreed on) to the fact that they acted like it was normal to plan your own funeral. The details made me feel so far away- like I didn’t know either of them. And I wasn’t sure if it was the distance from my mother or the distance from Diane that bothered me more, but Diane was the only one around to take the heat for it.

  I screamed at her. I cried. I called her every version of every name for the Devil I could think of. I threw things. And then I drove back up to Rochester and stopped answering the phone.

  Janie told me that Diane went to my college graduation, and sat in the stands with a huge bouquet of flowers, looking for me in the sea of black robes. I spent that weekend in Ithaca at the Holiday Inn watching bad movies on the free cable. And after that, when Diane came to visit Janie, I was always out of town. It was easier to avoid Diane than it was to see her, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forgive her for not telling me how sick my mom really was. I would have dropped out of college. I would have taken care of my mother. I would have known which pill was for what, and I would have held her hand through chemo and brought her Popsicles and made her laugh. I could have had a few more memories of my mom, and I would have held on to every single one as tightly as I could.

  For a while, Diane kept trying. She called every Sunday. She left overly chirpy messages on my answering machine, saying things like, “I hope you had a great week,” even though it had been months since we talked. She sent me the kind of “Thinking of You” cards old ladies send each other in Hallmark commercials. She even had flowers delivered on the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I ignored all of it, and eventually, the phone messages became holiday-only events, and her voice sounded more clipped than chirpy. I got a card on my birthday, and another one at Christmas. The anniversary of my mother’s death came and went several times over without any fanfare.

  Throughout the wedding events, I kept my distance as much as I could. I had a fake smile I wore just for Diane, and until she’d invited me back to the carriage house, she’d acted cool and polite, like I was just another one of Janie’s college friends, like we had no real history.

  I slipped off my dress, dropped it in a big orange puddle on the floor, and sat on the side of the tub. I plugged the drain, turned the faucet on, and squirted a generous helping of lilac-scented bubble bath into the stream of water. I left the water to run while I peeled off my black panty hose. The mean red mark they left around my waist made it look like I’d slept with a tourniquet binding me.

  Diane knocked on the door and opened it at the same time.

  “I have to pee like a demon, Van.” She did a nervous jig into the bathroom, lifted up the toilet lid, scooched up her dress, and sat down. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said, smiling at me. “God, Van, I would kill for your boobs. I didn’t know nature made them that way.”

  I felt so self-conscious. Diane took me to buy my first push-up bra, peeking over the door while I modeled each one, but I knew her then.

  “When you go to get yours replaced, I’ll give you a picture,” I said, and then felt awful immediately. We used to have the sarcastic banter thing down. We said things like that to each other all the time and it was funny, but now, it just came out mean. I didn’t want it to be, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Maybe Diane felt the same way. I wondered if there was some way to suck the venom out. I ran my hand under the faucet to make sure the water was okay.

  Diane flushed, but didn’t leave. She closed the toilet lid and sat back down. I turned away from her and slipped my underwear off quickly.

  “Nice underwear, Vannie. Were you thinking someone might see them?” Her voice was supersmooth.

  “Aw, Diane, thanks for noticing,” I said, trying to make my voice equally smooth. I stepped into the tub and pulled the shower curtain closed.

  The backside of the shower curtain, blurred by the clear plastic liner, was familiar and safe. My mom and I bought it at a closeout sale. It was hideous and comforting at the same time. Fat purple fish blowing orange bubbles swam along in a green sea. The fish had eyelashes and bright pink lips like they were wearing lipstick.

  I sat down and pushed my feet up against the end of the tub so I wouldn’t slip down too far.

  “Good,” Diane said. “Now we can talk.”

  “Crap, Diane. I don’t want to talk. I’ve got to take a bath and get my ass in the car. I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Well then, you clean, I’ll talk.” Her voice was suddenly stern. She peeked her head around the side of the shower curtain. “Multitasking, Savannah.”

  I snapped the curtain closed, scooped up a handful of bubbles, and clapped my hands together. A clump of foam landed on my nose. It was hard to focus on and harder to look past.

  “You’ve lived in Rochester for a long time now, huh?” Diane tapped the tips of her fake fingernails against the marble.

  I strained my eyes to watch the tiny bubbles popping on my nose.

  “So?” I wiped the rest of the foam away.

  “I just never saw
you as an upstate person. I thought you’d be somewhere more exciting-living in London or Paris. At least getting a loft in SoHo. Not Rochester.”

  “Diane- ”

  “What are you staying for, anyway? I mean, you don’t have to stay. It’s not like you have family up there. Peter and Janie-they have Peter’s family. Peter has his dad’s firm. They have a reason to be up there. You don’t.”

  “I have my job, and it’s not like I have family here either.”

  “It’s not like you have a real job,” Diane snapped. She didn’t understand what I did at all. Working from home and wearing sweats instead of suits took all the legitimacy out of it for her. When Janie told her I started freelancing as a grant writer, Diane left me a twenty- minute message about the merits of getting a good, solid office job with good, solid benefits. Hysterical, really, since she’d never done it. She met Charles when she waited tables at the Larchmont Yacht Club, the summer between her sophomore and junior years at Manhattanville. She got pregnant with Janie halfway through her junior year and quit school. They got married, despite the protests from Charles’s parents, and Diane never worked another day.

  “I do too have a real job,” I said, feeling like a child, tempted to add you big meanie.

  “You don’t have an office.”

  “I have clients. I have connections in Rochester, Diane. I’m established.”

  Diane’s nails stopped clicking. “But you’ve got to be lonely.” She lingered on the word lonely, drawing it out like a song lyric. “I mean, you don’t really know anyone up there anymore, do you? Everyone from school must have left by now.” The clicking started again. “Janie and Pete will be busy with the house and all. Babies. Married people don’t keep single friends around, Van. You just won’t have anything in common, and I know you don’t want to be a third wheel.”

  I flipped the bird in her direction, shielded by the shower curtain. I pedaled my feet, making small waves that hit the walls of the tub.

  “What are you doing in there?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. She didn’t say anything either. It was quiet except for the sound of my waves. I broke before she did.

  “I’m trying to take a bath, so I don’t get stuck in the car for eight hours smelling like a booze hound.” I coughed lightly. “No offense.” It was one of those things we would have laughed at together before, but now Diane stayed silent. “So, what do you want from me?” I said, quickly.

  “I just don’t want to see you get left behind, Van. Maybe it’s time you did something new, took a chance at something. Or someone. Start over somewhere else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We haven’t really talked since the funeral,” she said.

  “Well, I’ve been busy,” I said, praying she’d pick a different subject. I couldn’t get into it with her. I just couldn’t.

  “Your mother left you some money, you know.”

  “My mother didn’t have any money.” The water in the tub was starting to get cold, but I didn’t want to get out and lose the protection of the shower curtain.

  “She had fifteen thousand in savings. And then there was the life insurance. That was in your name.”

  “What life insurance? She didn’t have life insurance.”

  “How would you know? You don’t know these things, Van,” she said, like I was still some silly kid.

  “What are you pulling?” I asked. The bubbles in the tub were mostly popped now, but the bubble bath had left the water an awful green-gray color. My legs looked swollen and too white. “Am I supposed to be grateful?” I hugged my knees up to my chest so I wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.

  “You don’t have to be grateful, Savannah. It was one of your mother’s employee benefits.” There was the slightest hesitation in her voice-this extra breath before she said employee benefits.

  “So why haven’t I heard about this before?”

  “You refuse to take my calls. You won’t meet me for lunch when I come to see Jane.”

  “Why not have Janie tell me?”

  Diane took an audible breath and forced the air out through her nose. “You know how she is. This isn’t between you and her. This is between you and me.”

  “I just-” I stood up. The water dripped off me and sounded like a rainstorm. “Isn’t some man in a bad suit supposed to come and tell me this?”

  “You watch too many movies.”

  “Call it what it is, Diane.” I pulled the shower curtain open, and stepped out onto the bath mat.

  Diane was leaning her butt against the counter, with both hands stretched behind her. Her right hand curled into the sink, still tapping. Her legs were crossed, and she was resting on the balls of her feet. Diane’s feet were like Barbie’s. She’d worn heels for so long that she couldn’t stand flat-footed. I scanned her face for hints of unease, but she was hiding behind her surly smile.

  “Call it what it is? Insurance money. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  I got up close to her; close enough to drip water on her dark red satin dress, leaving black splotches across her chest. I reached around her to grab a towel.

  We locked eyes while I wrapped the towel around me. I was hoping for some speck of light, but her eyes were set and dark.

  I walked away, my wet feet slapping loudly against the floor.

  “I know a payoff from you when I see one, Diane,” I said.

  “You might want to get your eyes checked, missy,” Diane said. “You don’t know-”

  I shut the door behind me, leaving her in the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to hear the rest of her excuses. I shut myself in my old bedroom, and opened drawers to scavenge for left-behind clothes so I wouldn’t have to wear my orange gown again.

  I opened and closed the top drawer of my dresser three times, like maybe if I looked one more time it wouldn’t be empty. My hands were shaking. This was not the first time I’d seen Diane throw money at a problem to make it go away. It was just the first time I’d ever been the problem.

  Janie had a crush on the pool boy the summer she turned seventeen. Every time he showed up to clean the filters, Janie made it her business to be outside at the pool sunning herself in her classy black one-piece and movie star sunglasses. When the pool boy started flirting back, Diane was furious. “I don’t pay that boy to make attempts at impregnating my teenage daughter,” she’d whispered sharply to my mother when she thought I was out of earshot. Even though the poor boy had done nothing more than smile and make small talk with Janie, Diane decided he had to go. On his next visit, Diane sent me down to the pool with an envelope for him, while Janie was in the bathroom applying sunscreen. I peeked in the envelope before I delivered it. There was a bank check for two hundred dollars, and a note written in Diane’s curvy script telling him that his services were no longer needed and any attempt to contact Jane would not be met kindly. We never heard from him again.

  And, when my mother graduated from college with a degree in art education after years of night school, Diane gave her a congratulations card and a check that turned all the studying and homework she’d done into an exercise in futility. The bonus and the raise Diane gave her paid much more than teaching ever would.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom,” I told her. “Teachers make good money, right? We’ll be fine. We don’t need a big apartment.”

  My mom looked broken. She sat there, tracing the letters as they went from blue to purple to red, spelling out Natalie Mavis Leone.

  “You can’t buy her, Diane!” I’d yelled, thinking about all the times I’d watched my mother run out the door frantically, to try to make it to class on time after a full day of work, textbooks in one hand and the peanut butter sandwich she’d call dinner in the other. She’d been working to be an art teacher so hard for so long, and I hated that Diane was taking it away from her. “You can’t buy us.”

  Diane was sitting at her makeup table, taking a drag of her cigarette. She talked without air. “Oh, I know, I’m such a horrib
le person, giving my head housekeeper a bonus and a raise like that.” She blew the smoke out after her words, and waved it away like I was just being silly.

  “You can’t buy us,” I said again, since I couldn’t find a better argument.

  “You don’t come cheap, Vannie,” Diane said, laughing. “No kid does.” She used the mirror to make eye contact with me while she pinned her hair up in a French twist. “You need food and clothes. Eventually, you’ll need to go out in the world and get a good job, and you can’t do that without going to college. Your mother can’t do all of that herself on an assistant art teacher’s salary.” She tucked a stray hair up and pinned it. “This is a good thing,” she said, smiling, like it was absurd for me to think otherwise. “This is a nice thing I’m doing.”

  So my mother turned down her dream job at Rye Country Day School, and I went to the University of Rochester on a partial scholarship and a grant from the Driscoll Housekeeping Society.

  I rounded up some grandma-cut cotton undies with yellowed elastic, a tattered gray sports bra, and a pair of brown- and-beige-striped socks with matching holes at the big toes. The closet was pretty much empty, with the exception of a pair of black stirrup pants hanging up, and a pair of jeans folded on the top shelf. I grabbed the jeans. They were from my short-lived, but memorable, badass phase in high school. They had a hole below the knee and another one under the butt that was loosely stitched with a black shoelace. I pulled them on. They were cold, and the seams creaked. They still fit, but they were much tighter across the hips than they used to be.

  I left my bedroom out of necessity. I couldn’t find a shirt. The bathroom door was open. “Diane?”

  No answer. Her coat wasn’t draped over the back of the couch anymore.

  I went over to the kitchen window and saw Diane walking briskly toward the main house. Her camel-hair coat was open and billowing out behind her.