This Lullaby Read online

  “Go away,” I told him.

  He smiled again, running a hand through his hair. The Muzak was now building to a crescendo over us, the speaker popping, as if close to short-circuiting. We both glanced up, then at each other.

  “You know what?” he said, pointing up at the speaker, which popped again, louder this time, then hissed before resuming the theme song at full blast. “From now on, forever”—he pointed up again, jabbing with his finger—“this will be our song.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, and right then I was saved, hallelujah, as Don’s office door swung open and Ruth, led by her salesman, came out. She was holding a sheaf of papers and wore that stunned, recently-depleted-of-thousands look on her tired face. But she did have the complimentary fake-gold-plated key chain, all hers.

  I stood up, and the guy beside me leapt to his feet. “Wait, I only want—”

  “Don?” I called out, ignoring him.

  “Just take this,” the guy said, grabbing my hand. He turned it palm up before I could even react, and pulled a pen out of his back pocket, then proceeded—I am not joking—to write a name and phone number in the space between my thumb and forefinger.

  “You are insane,” I said, jerking my hand back, which caused the last digits to get smeared and knocked the pen out of his hand. It clattered to the floor, rolling under a nearby gumball machine.

  “Yo, Romeo!” someone yelled from the showroom, and there was a burst of laughter. “Come on man, let’s go!”

  I looked up at him, still incredulous. Talk about not respecting a person’s boundaries. I’d dumped drinks on guys for even brushing against me at a club, much less yanking my hand and actually writing on it.

  He glanced behind him, then back at me. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, and grinned at me.

  “Like hell,” I replied, but then he was already going, dodging the truck and minivan in the showroom and out the front glass door, where a beat-up white van was idling by the curb. The back door flung open and he moved to climb in, but then the van jerked forward, making him stumble, before stopping again. He sighed, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky, then grabbed the door handle again and started to pull himself up just as it moved again, this time accompanied by someone beeping the horn. This sequence repeated itself all the way across the parking lot, the salesmen in the showroom chuckling, before someone stuck a hand out the back door, offering him a hand, which he ignored. The fingers on the hand waggled, a little at first, then wildly, and finally he reached up and grabbed hold, hoisting himself in. Then the door slammed, the horn beeped again, and the van chugged out of the lot, bumping its muffler on the way out.

  I looked down at my hand, where in black ink was scrawled 933-54somethingsomething, with one word beneath it. God, his handwriting was sloppy. A big D, a smear on the last letter. And what a stupid name. Dexter.

  When I got home, the first thing I noticed was the music. Classical, soaring, filling the house with wailing oboes and flowing violins. Then, the smell of candles, vanilla, just tangy sweet enough to make you wince. And finally, the dead giveaway, a trail of crumpled papers strewn like bread crumbs from the foyer, through the kitchen, and leading to the sunporch.

  Thank God, I thought. She’s writing again.I dropped my keys on the table by the door and bent down, picking up one balled-up piece of paper by my feet, then un-crumpled it as I walked toward the kitchen. My mother was very superstitious about her work, and only wrote on the beat-up old typewriter she’d once dragged around the country when she did freelance music articles for a newspaper in San Francisco. It was loud, had a clanging bell that sounded whenever she reached the end of a line, and looked like some remnant from the days of the Pony Express. She had a brand-new top-of-the-line computer too, but she only used that to play solitaire.

  The page in my hand had a 1 in the upper right-hand corner, and started with my mother’s typical gusto.

  Melanie had always been the type of woman who loved a challenge. In her career, her loves, her spirit, she lived to find herself up against something that fought her back, tested her resolve, made the winning worthwhile. As she walked into the Plaza Hotel on a cold November day, she pulled the scarf from her hair and shook off the rain. Meeting Brock Dobbin hadn’t been in her plans. She hadn’t seen him since Prague, when they’d left things as bad as they’d started them. But now, a year later, with her wedding so close, he was back in the city. And she was here to meet him. This time, she would win. She was

  She was . . . what? There was only a smear of ink after the last word, trailing all the way down the page, from where it had been ripped from the machine.I continued picking up discarded papers as I walked, balling them into my hand. They didn’t vary much. In one, the setting was in L.A., not New York, and in another Brock Dobbin became Dock Brobbin, only to be switched back again. Small details, but it always took a little while for my mother to hit her stride. Once she did, though, watch out. She’d finished her last book in three and a half weeks, and it was big enough to function effectively as a doorstop.

  The music, and the clanging of the typewriter, both got louder as I walked into the kitchen, where my brother, Chris, was ironing a shirt on the kitchen table, the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder all pushed to one side.

  “Hey,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face. The iron hissed as he picked it up, then smoothed it over the edge of the collar of the shirt, pressing down hard.

  “How long’s she been at it?” I asked, pulling the trash can out from under the sink and dumping the papers into it.

  He shrugged, letting some steam hiss out and stretching his fingers. “A couple of hours now, I guess.”

  I glanced past him, through the dining room to the sunporch, where I could see my mother hunched over the typewriter, a candle beside her, pounding away. It was always weird to watch her. She really slammed the keys, throwing her whole body into it, as if she couldn’t get the words out fast enough. She’d keep it up for hours at a time, finally emerging with her fingers cramped, back aching, and a good fifty pages, which would probably be enough to keep her editor in New York satisfied for the time being.

  I sat down at the table and flipped through a stack of mail by the fruit bowl as Chris turned the shirt over, nudging the iron slowly around one cuff. He was a really slow ironer, to the point that more than once I’d just jerked it away, unable to stand how long it took him to do just the collar. The only thing I can’t stand more than seeing something done wrong is seeing it done slowly.

  “Big night tonight?” I asked him. He was leaning close to the shirt now, really focusing on the front pocket.

  “Jennifer Anne’s having a dinner party,” he said. “It’s smart casual.”

  “Smart casual?”

  “It means,” he said slowly, still concentrating, “no jeans, but not quite a sport jacket event either. Ties optional. That kind of thing.”

  I rolled my eyes. Six months ago, my brother wouldn’t have been able to define smart much less casual. Ten months earlier, on his twenty-first birthday, Chris had gotten busted at a party selling pot. It wasn’t his first brush with the law, by any means: during high school he’d racked up a few breaking and enterings (plea-bargained), one DWI (dismissed), and one possession of a controlled substance (community service and a big fine, but just by the skin of his teeth). But the party bust did him in, and he did jail time. Only three months, but it scared him enough to shape up and get a job at the local Jiffy Lube, where he’d met Jennifer Anne when she’d brought her Saturn in for a thirty-thousand-mile checkup.

  Jennifer Anne was what my mother called “a piece of work,” which meant she wasn’t scared of either of us and didn’t care if we knew it. She was a small girl with big blond hair, whip smart—though we hated to admit it—and had done more with my brother in six months than we’d ever managed in twenty-one years. She had him dressing better, working harder, and using proper grammar, including wacky new terms like “networking” and “multi
tasking” and “smart casual.” She worked as a receptionist for a conglomerate of doctors, but referred to herself as an “office specialist.” Jennifer Anne could make anything sound better than it was. I’d recently overheard her describing Chris’s job as a “multilevel automotive lubrication expert,” which made working at Jiffy Lube sound on a par with heading up NASA.

  Now Chris lifted the shirt off the table and held it up, shaking it slightly as the typewriter bell clanged again from the other room. “What do you think?”

  “Looks okay,” I said. “You missed a big crease on the right sleeve, though.”

  He glanced down at it, then sighed. “This is so freaking hard,” he said, putting it back on the table. “I don’t see why people bother.”

  “I don’t see why you bother,” I said. “Since when do you need to be wrinkle free, anyway? You used to consider wearing pants dressing up.”

  “Cute,” he said, making a face at me. “You wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

  “Yeah, right. Excuse me, Eggbert, I keep forgetting you’re the smart one.”

  He straightened the shirt, not looking at me. “What I mean,” he said slowly, “is that you’d just have to know what it’s like to want to do something nice for somebody else. Out of consideration. Out of love.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  “Exactly.” He picked up the shirt again. The wrinkle was still there, not that I was going to point it out now. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Compassion. Relationships. Two things you are sadly, and sorely, lacking.”

  “I am the queen of relationships,” I said indignantly. “And hello, I just spent the entire morning planning our mother’s wedding. That is so freaking compassionate of me.”

  “You,” he said, folding the shirt neatly over one arm, waiter-style, “have yet to experience any kind of serious commitment—”

  “What?”

  “—and you have bitched and moaned so much about the wedding I’d hardly call that compassionate.”

  I just stood there, staring at him. There was no reasoning with him lately. It was like he’d been brainwashed by some religious cult. “Who are you?” I asked him.

  “All I’m saying,” he replied, quietly, “is that I’m really happy. And I wish you could be happy too. Like this.”

  “I am happy,” I snapped, and I meant it, although it sounded bitter just because I was so pissed off. “I am,” I repeated, in a more level voice.

  He reached over and patted my shoulder, as if he knew better. “I’ll see you later,” he said, turning and heading up the kitchen stairs to his room. I watched him go, carrying his still-wrinkled shirt, and realized I was clenching my teeth, something I found myself doing too often lately.

  Bing! went the typewriter bell from the other room, and my mother started another line. Melanie and Brock Dobbin were probably halfway to heartbreak already, by the sound of it. My mother’s novels were the gasping romantic type, spreading across several exotic locales and peopled with characters that had everything and yet nothing. Riches yet poverty of the heart. And so on.

  I walked over to the entrance of the sunroom, careful to be quiet, and looked in at her. When she wrote she seemed to be in another world, oblivious of us: even when we were little and screaming and squawking, she’d just lift her hand from where she was sitting, her back to us, the keys still clacking, and say, “Shhhhhhh.” As if that was enough to shut us up, making us see into whatever world she was in at that moment, at the Plaza Hotel or some beach in Capri, where an exquisitely dressed woman was pining for a man she was sure she had lost forever.

  When Chris and I were in elementary school, my mom was pretty broke. She hadn’t published anything yet except newspaper stuff, and even that had petered out once the bands she was writing about—like my dad’s, all 1970s stuff, what they call “classic rock” now—began to die out or drop off the radio. She got a job teaching writing at the local community college, which paid practically nothing, and we lived in a series of nasty apartment complexes, all with names like Ridgewood Pines and Lakeview Forest, which had no lakes or pines or forests anywhere to be seen. Back then, she wrote at the kitchen table, usually during the evenings or late at night, and some afternoons. Even then, her stories were exotic; she always picked up the free brochures from the local travel agency and fished Gourmet magazine out of the stacks at the recycling center to use as research. While my brother was named after my mother’s favorite saint, my name was inspired by an expensive brand of cognac she’d seen advertised in Harper’s Bazaar. Never mind that we were living on Kraft macaroni and cheese while her characters favored Cristal and caviar, lounging in Dior pantsuits while we shopped at the thrift store. She always loved glamour, my mother, even if she’d never seen it up close.

  Chris and I constantly interrupted her while she was working, which drove her crazy. Finally, at a flea market, she found one of those gypsy curtains, the kind that are made up of long strings of beads, and attached it above the entryway to the kitchen. It became our understood symbol: if the curtain was pulled aside, out of the way, the kitchen was fair game. But if it was hanging there, my mother was working, and we had to find our snacks and entertainment elsewhere.

  I was about six then, and I loved to stand there and brush my fingertips over the beads, watching them swish back and forth. They made the softest sound, like little bells. I could peer through them and still see my mother, but now she looked almost exotic, like a fortune-teller or a fairy, a maker of magic. Which was what she was, but I didn’t know it then.

  Most of the remnants of our apartment years had been long lost or given away, but the beaded curtain had made the trip to the Big New House, as we’d called it when we moved in. It was one of the first things my mother hung up, before even our school pictures or her favorite Picasso print in the living room. There was a nail so it could be pulled back out of sight, but now it was down, a little worse for wear, but still doing the job. I leaned closer, peering in at my mother. She was still hard at work, fingers flying, and I closed my eyes and listened. It was like music I’d heard all my life, even more than “This Lullaby.” All those keystrokes, all those letters, so many words. I brushed my fingers over the beads and watched as her image rippled, like it was on water, breaking apart gently and shimmering before becoming whole again.

  Chapter Two

  It was time to dump Jonathan.

  “Tell me again why you’re doing this?” Lissa asked me. She was sitting on my bed, flipping through my CDs and smoking a cigarette, which was fast stinking up my room even though she’d sworn it wouldn’t, since she had it halfway out the window. Even before I quit I’d hated the stink of smoking, but with Lissa I always let things slide more than I should have. I think everyone has at least one friend like that. “I mean, I like Jonathan.”“You like everybody,” I told her, leaning closer to the mirror and examining my lip liner.

  “That’s not true,” she said, picking up a CD and turning it over to examine the back. “I never liked Mr. Mitchell. He always looked at my boobs when I went up to do theorems on the board. He looked at everybody’s boobs.”

  “Lissa,” I said, “high school is over. And besides, teachers don’t count.”

  “I’m just saying,” she said.

  “The thing is,” I went on as I lined my lips, turning the pencil slowly, “that it’s summer now, and I’m leaving for school in September. And Jonathan . . . I don’t know. He’s just not a keeper. He’s not worth working my schedule around if we’re only going to break up in a few weeks anyway.”

  “But you might not break up.”

  I leaned back, admiring my handiwork, and smudged a bit along my top lip, evening it out. “We’ll break up,” I said. “I’m not going to Stanford with any other entanglements than absolutely necessary.”

  She bit her lip, then tucked a springy curl behind one ear, ducking her head with the hurt expression she always got lately when we talked about the end of the summer. Lissa’s safe zone
was the eight weeks left before we all split for different directions, and she hated to think past that. “Well, of course not,” she said quietly. “I mean, why would you?”

  “Lissa,” I said, sighing. “I didn’t mean you. You know that. I just mean”—I gestured to the bedroom door, slightly ajar, beyond which we could hear my mother’s typewriter still clacking, with violins drifting in the background—“you know.”

  She nodded. But in truth I knew she didn’t understand. Lissa was the only one of us who was even slightly sentimental about high school being over. She’d actually cried at graduation, great heaving sobs, ensuring that in every picture and video she’d be red-eyed and blotchy, giving her something to complain about for the next twenty years. Meanwhile, me, Jess, and Chloe couldn’t wait to get across that stage and grab our diploma, to be free at last, free at last. But Lissa had always felt things too deeply. That was what made us all so protective of her, and why I worried most about leaving her behind. She’d gotten accepted into the local university with a full scholarship, a deal too good to pass up. It helped that her boyfriend, Adam, was going there too. Lissa had it all planned out, how they’d go to freshman orientation together, live in dorms that were in close proximity, share a couple of classes. Just like high school, but bigger.

  The very thought of it made me itch. But then, I wasn’t Lissa. I’d powered through the last two years with my eyes on one thing, which was getting out. Getting gone. Making the grades I needed to finally live a life that was all my own. No wedding planning. No messy romantic entanglements. No revolving door of stepfathers. Just me and the future, finally together. Now there was a happy ending I could believe in.

  Lissa reached over and turned up the radio, filling the room with some boppy song with a la-la-la chorus. I walked over to my closet, pulling open the door to examine my options.