Lovey

Little Lies

It was a woman’s responsibility to replace herself and her husband times two, according to my momma. And that was even more important for me, since momma only had Lib and me to carry on the family. I listened, but there were an awful lot of times when my five girls were growing up that I thought I must have been insane. Who, I would ask myself, would sign up for all of this time after time after time? But now that the tantrums are over, the fights about late nights out and car dating and boys and outfits and shoes, and Dan walking through the house counting how many lights had been left on, I’m so happy that I have my five girls—and that they have each other.

That afternoon, sitting at my squeaky-clean new assisted living apartment, there they all were, crowded around their daddy, doing their best tricks to get his attention even though he didn’t know if he was in North Carolina or Timbuktu.

“I think he knows what’s going on and just can’t express himself,” Sally said.

The thought made me shiver. I hated when she said it. I couldn’t think of much worse than being trapped inside your body like that, aware of what was going on but unable to interact, thoughts cruising through your mind like always but unable to get off at the port of your mouth.

“Sally,” Lauren, who was my feistiest child, scolded, “Momma hates when you say that.”

Louise shrugged her shoulders, a perfect fourth child. She waved her hand. “He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. And he’s just perfectly content to sit in that chair and watch his black and whites.”

I nodded, not sure if I agreed. But I had to convince myself that was true to chase away the nightmares of being trapped inside myself, screaming and screaming with no one able to hear me or help. “He’s such a good patient,” I said. “And that’s something to be thankful for.”

“Yeah.” Jean laughed. “Because I think we all know it could easily have gone the other way.”

She grabbed a handful of Hershey’s Kisses and placed them in front of her feet, where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Then she handed the bowl to Martha, who was sitting beside her in the semicircle, flanking the chairs where Dan and I were sitting.

“Hey, Daddy,” Martha said, like he was going to answer. “Do you remember that time that Bobby Franco came to pick me up in his T-Bird convertible and didn’t get out of the car to open my door?’

“Oh, yeah,” Lauren said. “He beeped the horn, didn’t he?”

Martha nodded. “And Daddy flew out of that house and told him he better get the hell out of his driveway and never come around his daughters again until he had learned some damn manners.”

We all laughed, and I felt that familiar mix of pride and sorrow that so often filled me these days. We had had so much life together. It burned like turpentine for it to be gone, but I was so grateful it had happened. My Dan had been a lot of things in his life, but, without fail, the constant was that he was a complete gentleman. From our first date to the last time I saw him on his feet, he opened my door, pulled out my chair, stood when I left the table and always treated me with respect. Well, almost always.

“Could we please stay on task, girls?”

Jean exhaled sharply. “Momma, none of us cares what we get. Just pick who you want to give everything to.”

“I call the ring!” Sally and Louise shouted at the same time.

Then Sally added, “For sentimental reasons, of course.”

Dan had bought me a five-carat diamond after Jean was born, one carat for each daughter. It was a mea culpa for putting me through so much.

And I well, well deserved it.

I wouldn’t say to them that day—or any day—that Jean was getting that ring. It symbolized so much more than she would ever realize, and, as much as it had been a carat for each girl, that ring was really about Jean. And I wanted her to have it.

Jean shook her head. “I’m not talking about this anymore, so let’s talk about something else or let me get back to writing campaign contribution thank-you notes.”

I smiled at her, internally musing at the irony that she was by far the most attached to me, the most horrified by the thoughts of my being gone.

Trying to change the subject, never wanting these family moments to be too fleeting, Louise said, “Can you imagine if you had married Ernest Wake, Momma? None of this would be happening right now.”

Lauren looked up at Dan, who had been fiddling for ten minutes with an old letter we had handed him. I had no idea what he was doing, but I would have bet the cases of gold coins he kept in the credenza beside him that it wasn’t reading.

“Daddy, you made short work of that old Ernest, didn’t you?”

To my surprise, he looked at her, smiled and said, “Yeah.”

I put my head in my hands. “Oh, girls, if you could have been on a dinner date with him.” I rolled my eyes. “The way he sent his food back, and talked down to the waiters. I was beyond mortified. It was so dreadful.”

“So why didn’t you just refuse to go?” Lauren asked.

I smiled and shrugged, thinking of my parents, of how hard they worked for everything they had, of the way they scrimped and saved and sacrificed to make sure that my sister and I had as many advantages as we could. I would wrap myself in my bedclothes during the most frigid winter nights, huddling by the roaring fire in my room, the heat rising rapidly through the tall ceilings that were our only reprieve from the scalding summer heat. “It made my momma and daddy so proud that I was dating Ernest Wake. Plus,” I added, looking over in Dan’s direction, “Dan had been called back to the service, and it wasn’t like we had e-mail and cell phones. I didn’t have any good way of knowing where he was going or when or if he was coming back.” I swallowed hard, realizing that it wasn’t all that different now. “At my age, I didn’t have too many good prospects, and I knew that Ernest and I would have a nice life together if, God forbid, Dan didn’t come back.”

“God, that’s depressing,” Louise said. “Hence the reason I’m not married.”

“Well, it was a different time, Louise,” I said. “You know that. An unmarried woman didn’t have a lot of good options. Sometimes marrying for love wasn’t in the cards.”

“So you may as well marry for money,” Martha said, laughing.

I made all my girls smile with one of my trademark phrases: “It’s as easy to love a rich man as it is a poor one.”

“Speaking of,” Lauren said, “I’ve been meaning to tell y’all about the new man that I’m dating.”

“Oh my goodness, who?” Sally asked.

Lauren smiled, and I could sense just a hint of that maliciousness in her getting ready to escape. My stomach gripped like I’d had too much Metamucil just about the time she said, “Kyle Jenkins.”

All eyes turned instantly to Sally, as Kyle Jenkins had been the man we thought she would marry. She had dated him for five years and then, one night, after he had asked Dan’s permission to marry her, he dumped her with no explanation whatsoever. He tried to get her back, but she had already met Doug. Sally had decided that, while brilliant, good-looking and destined for the kind of fortune that girls dream of, all she really wanted in a partner was someone who would be kind, steady and would never hurt her like that again.

I braced myself for the reaction of my other girls, and it didn’t surprise me one bit when Louise said, “Don’t you sort of feel like he’s using you? Like you’re the Sally replacement?”

Sally shook her head and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I think it’s great.”

But you didn’t have to be trained in reading body language to realize she didn’t think it was so great.

“He is so wonderful,” Lauren said, as though none of her sisters had even spoken. “He’s smart and charming and so, so funny.”

“He’s a great dancer too,” Sally added.

“Lauren, that’s so weird,” Jean chimed in. “He’s never even gotten married. You have to know that he’s been in love with Sally his entire life.”

She waved her hand. “I think that’s absurd. When we saw each other at the club over the summer, we really hit it off.” She smiled. “It’s so difficult to find a man who can really take care of you these days.”

It was the tiniest jab at her sister, a reminder that Sally’s stay-at-home husband had rarely held down a job for more than a few months over the course of their marriage. But, as a stay-at-home wife, I thought they diminished Doug’s role in the family way too easily. He was a good man, and they were happy. Who could ask for more than that?

I always defended Lauren when the other girls ganged up against her, but, this time, there was little to defend. She had made her choice, they had formed their opinion, and that was all there was to it. It had to have bothered Sally that her sister was dating the man I always suspected was the love of her life. But she was as cool and calm as I’d ever seen her, and, if it bothered her, she didn’t let on.

“Okay, then,” Lauren said, glancing at the diamond Tiffany watch she had inherited when her former mother-in-law died. “Kyle and I are meeting for dinner in Chapel Hill tonight, so I better go home and get beautiful.”

Jean rolled her eyes at Martha, Lauren kissed her daddy and me, and, just like that, she was out the door and on the elevator. It was as if she wanted to make sure we were talking about her when she was gone.

“She is such a bitch!” Jean said, as soon as Lauren had closed the door.

“Jean,” I scolded, trying not to smile. “Don’t say that word and especially not about your own sister.”

Louise nodded her head, taking a sip of the kombucha mess that she was rarely without. She was always trying to get Dan and me to drink it to improve our immunity and gut flora. But I liked my gut flora the way it was, thank you very much. “Momma, I don’t know how you can defend her all the time. She is such a hideous person. How did you raise her and all of us in the same family?”

“Now, girls . . .”

I looked over at Sally. She hadn’t said a word, but she was whiter than Ernest used to be in his swim trunks on the first day of summer. For someone who had held it together so beautifully while Lauren was in the room, her countenance immediately shifted when her sister walked away. “I can’t believe that he would actually do this to me,” Sally whispered.

“He?” Martha asked. “What about your wicked witch of a sister?”

And I didn’t need to hear any more to know that, sometimes, no matter how good a girl seems, all of us, from top to bottom, need to use our little lies every now and then.