Falling Together Read online

  Before she got out of the car, Pen smoothed her already smooth hair and put on lip gloss, stabbing at her mouth with the sponge-tipped wand and cursing herself between clenched teeth for caring, even a little, about Patrick’s and Tanya’s opinions of her. She started to check for food in her teeth, then stopped. Enough, she thought, enough, enough, for God’s sake, and she set off briskly down the long driveway, pat pat pat, her dark red ballet flats flashing against the white. It was strange, Pen thought, how coming to this house never got any less awkward, especially strange when you considered that she hadn’t hated Tanya for a long time, not for years, and was ashamed that she ever had.

  The trouble was that Tanya still hated Pen. She hid it, most of the time, or, rather, camouflaged it as cold dislike or stony indifference or mocking disdain (the woman had Joan Crawford eyebrows and knew how to use them), but then, as sudden as a slap, it would hit Pen: a blazing, palpable, ever-fresh hatred that whipped around and raged inside Tanya’s eyes like twin electrical storms. If you ever get diagnosed with terminal cancer, if you get hit by a freight train or just drop dead for no reason at all, the look told Pen, I would rejoice in my soul.

  Certainly, this was disturbing, but Pen had to admit that she found it kind of admirable. She could imagine sustaining certain emotions at that pitch for that long—love absolutely, grief probably, guilt maybe—but hatred was exhausting and gave so little back. Once, after her father died, Pen had tried to keep hatred alive, but it kept losing its firm shape, kept smudging and blurring until it became an immense, black, impossibly heavy sadness that lived inside her body and made it hard to move, so she had given it up. Sometimes she missed it, though.

  When Tanya opened the door, the eyebrows were telegraphing a patronizing impatience, but nothing more.

  “Finally, she arrives,” said Tanya.

  Pen didn’t apologize or glance at her watch. Her habitual lateness was a fiction Tanya had maintained for years, despite the fact that Pen was chronically, even annoyingly punctual. (“It has to end,” Amelie had ranted once. “This arriving on the dot. Good Lord. It’s an affront!”) But Pen couldn’t help it. It was family law. Her parents had caught her young and brainwashed her. Even Jamie was never late.

  “We said five,” Pen reminded her. Then she made the snap decision to smile and did it, slowly, beginning with her eyes, ending with the corners of her mouth, throwing a tiny nose crinkle in for good measure. What the hell; she had a favor to ask Tanya and Patrick and could use a boost, even a cheap one. She held the smile for a few seconds, letting it ripen on her face like a peach. She waited. Whenever Pen was friendly to Tanya (and sometimes she was even friendly by accident, rather than by design), she got the same response: Tanya was thrown off her game entirely, sometimes freezing up, sometimes spluttering incoherently, sometimes stomping out of the room. Whatever her response, for a few moments anyway, Pen had the upper hand.

  Her face still beaming post-smile warmth, Pen watched Tanya take a step back and clear her throat. “We have a dinner reservation with Lou and Bev Byatt at a tapas place. We ordered the special rice dish, not risotto”—she paused, searching for the word, then shaking her head, impatiently—“in advance because it takes an extremely long time”—her voice rose as she finished—“to prepare!”

  Tanya didn’t say, “So there,” but with her raised eyebrows and fist on her hip, she might as well have. Pen had to stop herself from smiling again.

  “You mean paella?” asked Pen. “Lucky you. You’ll love it.”

  “Oh, I’ve had it,” Tanya told her. “Many, many times!” Then she twisted her neck to bellow over her shoulder, “Lila! Time for Augusta to go!” And she turned on her heel and was gone.

  Pen leaned against the foyer wall, feeling more guilty than satisfied. The truth was that Tanya was not a ridiculous person, not most of the time, anyway. She was smart, generous, and community-minded, a former ob-gyn who now worked for a women’s health advocacy group. Pen had met a few of her former patients over the years, and they all worshipped her. She was pretty, too. Five years older than Patrick, which meant that she was ten years older than Pen, but no one would ever have guessed it. She had an aquiline nose and the kind of coloring that Pen’s mother called “autumn redhead,” auburn hair, tawny skin, and eyes the color of whiskey.

  Pretty, hardworking, and good, Pen thought, and you had to push the one button that turns her into a blithering idiot.

  She hates you, Pen reminded herself in her own defense.

  Understandably, she argued back.

  Understandably, maybe, but not justifiably. Look at the facts.

  It was an old argument. In its first incarnation, Pen had been arguing with her mother instead of herself.

  “She’s a mother. And you’re threatening her family. Of course, she hates you,” her mother had said.

  “Look at the facts,” Pen had retorted. “He didn’t leave her for me. She called him a self-centered bastard and threw him out. I met him afterward, when he was living by himself because she threw him out!”

  “Even so.”

  “She changed the locks!”

  “Oh, Pen.”

  The kindness in her mother’s voice had been too much for Pen, who was alone, jobless, and, although she didn’t know it yet, pregnant. She had begun to cry, then to sob, clenched and bent over like an old woman. Her mother had pulled her into her lap and stroked her hair.

  “I wanted to keep him,” Pen sobbed. “And I gave him back. I loved teaching, and she got me fired, even though I gave him back.”

  Her back against the wall in Tanya’s cold foyer, Pen closed her eyes, remembering.

  “Hey there, uh, Pen.” It was Patrick, slipping into the foyer in his slinking, barefoot manner, saying her name the way he always did, as though he didn’t quite have the right to say it.

  “Hello.”

  Reluctantly, Pen opened her eyes, saw Patrick in the vintage Replacements T-shirt she had bought him when they’d first started dating, thought, Oh, God, and shut them again. The Replacements had been Jamie’s favorite band all through college (even though they had been broken up for years even then) and, therefore, Pen’s favorite, too, although Pen really only liked their major-label albums. She opened her eyes and took another look. Paul Westerberg, the first of her scrawny, shaggy-haired crushes, gazing moodily out at her from the chest of her last. Wonderful.

  “You want to come in? Sit down or something?” asked Patrick.

  Pen didn’t. She preferred the peripheries—the yard, the foyer, the driveway—and rarely ventured into the rest of the house (“the family quarters,” she joked to Jamie, “the inner sanctum,” “the bowels”). In the five years since Augusta was born, she had never gone upstairs once. Today, she needed to talk to Patrick, though, so she nodded and followed him into what she knew was called “the great room,” cavernous, a tsunami of sun cresting through the gigantic windows, drowning the room and everything in it. Pen recoiled like a vampire, arms in front of her face.

  “I know,” said Patrick. He made his voice flat and instructional, “Don sunglasses before entering.”

  Pen smiled. Don.

  “It’s actually a pretty room,” she said, blinking and looking around. “Sweeping. Gracious. All those words. I’ve always thought so.” She meant it. She couldn’t imagine living in such a room, but she liked the idea of wall-lessness: everything happening in one place, everyone together. And despite its vastness and stark light, Tanya’s decorating, or her decorator’s decorating, had given it warmth. Cream, sand, and sage, punctuated with garnet and Delft blue, large vases of real flowers, walls the color of coffee ice cream.

  “Nah,” said Patrick, with a sidelong grin, “I’ve seen the nest. I know your hermit thrush ways.”

  Pen stiffened.

  Suddenly, it was winter, her parents’ house, back when it was still her house, too, the first time Cat and Will came home with her for a weekend. Will and Cat seeing her old room for the first time: the bunk bed
s, the white swivel egg chair with the red cushions. Will pointed to the bunk beds and asked, “You and Jamie shared a room?”

  “God, no,” said Pen, making a face and ducking backward into the chair. She looked up at them, her legs swinging. “I just like bunk beds. Upper bunk. I used to pretend I was sleeping in one of those train compartments from a Hitchcock movie.” She thought for a second. “Actually, I still do pretend that.”

  Will eyed the bed. He rapped his knuckles lightly on the fiberglass shell of the chair and nodded.

  “You’re a nester,” he’d said. “You like to fold yourself into little spaces. Armchairs. Library carrels. I’ve noticed this.”

  “Restaurant booths!” added Cat, catching on. “I like an open table myself, but you!” She leaned over and poked Pen’s forehead with her finger. “You always want the booth! I bet you get in the bathtub and close the shower curtain.”

  “Tea parties under the table,” said her mother’s voice from behind them. Pen couldn’t see her, but could hear her mother smile, and swiveled around to look.

  “I think they’re on to me,” said Pen to her mother.

  Her mother pointed to the wardrobe against the far wall of the room. “That’s got a deep, low shelf, for shoes, maybe, or blankets. But when Pen was little, she used to climb out of her bed and sleep on it. The first time it happened, Ben and I were scared to death, looked for her everywhere.”

  “Like I said,” said Will, “a nester. A hermit thrush.”

  After graduation, a week after the three of them had moved to Philadelphia together, Pen had come home to the apartment she shared with Cat to find that they had made her a nest. A window seat rigged with a wooden curtain rod, a green curtain, and a matching cushion, so that she could curl up inside, draw the curtain shut, and look out at her little piece of city. Pen had still lived in the apartment when she’d met Patrick, even though, by then, Cat was long gone.

  So unfair, Patrick’s fingerprints on her funny stories, her pet phrases, on people he never knew.

  This is what you get, she berated herself, for handing everything over.

  She had felt the same way when Cat and Will left. “I gave you two my life,” she had raged at Will the last time she saw him. “My childhood, my parents, the things that scare me, the books I love, the sentences I love from the books I love. You went on bike rides with my dad. And you’re leaving? Are you kidding me?”

  Keep the T-shirt, she wanted to tell Patrick, but everything else, everything pre-you, forget it; erase it from your clucking hard drive.

  “Have a seat,” Patrick offered.

  Pen looked at the sofas, the deep armchairs, and the love seats and could not imagine doing that kind of sinking down and leaning back in Tanya and Patrick’s house.

  “How about over here?” She was already walking toward the kitchen, which lay at the distant end of the great room, rising up out of the earth tones like a city, all steel, edges, and glass, its appliances mammoth, its countertops shining like lakes. She sat on one of the high stools that flanked one of the counters, feeling out of place and rigid, her back straight, her hands in her lap, becoming prim the way she often did when she felt out of place. She shook her head when Patrick offered her something to drink.

  “So,” she began, but Patrick grabbed her “so” and ran with it, in the last direction Pen wanted to go.

  “So, yeah,” he said, widening his blue eyes, “tell me about the weekend at your mom’s. The bike ride and all. It go okay?”

  Just like that: Tell me about. Pen stared at him. Tell you? Tell you? He cares, she tried to remind herself. He has no tact and is presumptuous, but he does care. And he had taken Augusta for an unscheduled weekend so that Pen and Jamie could go alone to the anniversary ride. You’re about to ask him for another unscheduled weekend, Pen thought. Suck it up.

  “I guess it went okay,” she said. “It was crazy-sad, but we got through it. And it felt like the right thing to do.”

  “Was it different from last year?”

  It had been. Jamie had been too loyal to tell Patrick about Pen’s little breakdown last year, and Pen had been too ashamed, but Patrick had picked up on the fact that it had been an ordeal for everyone. This year had been different, maybe not easier, but hard in a different way. Last year, Pen hadn’t been able to finish the ride; this year, she hadn’t wanted it to end. With the road unspooling under her bike wheels and the trees leaning in on either side, Pen remembered doing the same ride with her father, a memory of such detail and vividness that, for several sweet miles, she almost believed he was there with her, riding just outside of her peripheral vision, his voice tugged out of earshot by the wind. But when the ride ended, he was as gone as ever, and Pen was left raw, windburned by loss.

  Then, afterward, eating catered food in her parents’ house with their friends, Pen kept expecting her mother to appear, to come down the stairs in a linen dress and lipstick. Pen had known she wouldn’t be there (she had called the night before from Greece), but Pen kept watching for her anyway. “It’s awful,” she’d told Jamie. “Like phantom limb syndrome.”

  But to Patrick, who had lost his right to know about such things, she said simply, “Yes.”

  Patrick nodded his trademark nod, a movement not just of his head, but of his shoulders and chest as well. Full-upper-body empathy. Please know that I, and my entire torso, are right there with you.

  “Cathartic, right?” he prompted. “Healing? I bet you have that wrung-out but good-wrung-out feeling, right?”

  Pen stared at him. He had not always been like this; she swore he hadn’t. Back when they were together, he’d had a far more distracted approach to conversation, losing track of threads, doodling while they talked, playing his own knee like a techno-pop keyboardist. Back then, he had a trick of nodding with apparent interest even as he zoned out, then zoned back in, saying, maddeningly, “So, yeah. Wow. Anyway.”

  Somehow, since their final split two years ago, he had become a talk-show host, a conversational lobster eater, cracking open shells, twisting off legs, trying to get at every soft and hidden thing. His bright blue eyes were lit with over-interest, and Pen had to stop looking at them, focusing instead on the pepper grinder in front of her. It was a foot and a half high and appeared heavy as lead.

  “Man felled by pepper grinder in own kitchen,” she said.

  “What?” Patrick’s full-body nod stopped midbend, and his neck turned scarlet. “Oh, okay. Boundaries, right?” They’d had boundaries conversations before.

  “Right.”

  “Sorry.” He gave a little laugh, but his face shifted into the kind of puzzled hurt that you usually only see on the faces of small children. Once Pen had crumbled before that expression. Even now, her first impulse was to take back what she’d said, but she resisted. Instead, she smiled a lopsided smile at him, and said, “Man apologizes in nick of time.”

  Then, sailing toward her from across the room: “Mama!”

  High-pitched, even squeaky, it was the most soul-catching sound Pen knew. She was turning in its direction before she had even slid off the stool, and, when she saw the girl bounding rabbit-fashion through the great room, she felt what she always felt, her body opening toward her daughter in a great whoosh of breathless blooming.

  “Sweetpea,” she whispered, smiling, and then Augusta flew against her with a whack, and Pen knelt down to gather all of the child into her, pressing her cheek into the cloud of dark hair, her palms against the narrow back. At five, Augusta was already losing her baby softness, was becoming pared down, almost sinewy, her back a delicate landscape of spine and shoulder blades that Pen could feel through her shirt.

  “I am so happy to see you,” said Pen.

  “My heart leaps up, Mama.” It was what they always said.

  “My heart leaps up, too.”

  She drew back and looked at Augusta’s face, which was smeared with colors, brilliant, glittery, and iridescent as a hummingbird’s neck. For the first time, Pen noticed
the child’s outfit: black go-go boots so big they were merely drifting around her calves, a scratchy pink tutu, a silvery tank top slipping off one scrawny shoulder.

  “Hey there, Pop Star.”

  Augusta shimmied her shoulders and sang a few lines from a song about going out with her girlfriends and leaving the boys behind.

  “Sounds good to me,” said Patrick.

  Pen could imagine her before-kids self being utterly disapproving of this, the little girl in makeup and grown-up clothes thing, the pre-pre-pre-tween fascination with fabulousness. But seeing it in action, she found it didn’t bother her. Little girls were magpies and butterflies, gaga for everything shiny, in sheer, giggly, joyful love with transformation. Pen looked at Augusta, so at home in her body, so convinced of her own gorgeousness. Keep it up, honey, she thought. Hang on to it with both hands.

  “Hi, Pen.” Lila stood behind Augusta, smiling and tugging at her T-shirt in a way that made Pen’s heart ache. At nine, Lila barely qualified as chubby, but, despite her parents’ efforts to celebrate her good points, which were many (smarts, big blue eyes, and an uncommon sweetness), self-consciousness was setting in.

  “Hey, lovely,” said Pen, standing. Lila’s eyes widened with happiness. Pen did not spend enough time with Lila for the two of them to really be close, but Pen knew Lila regarded her with the kind of shy, eager interest that verged on adulation. She remembered feeling that way herself, about her fifth-grade teacher, her friend Sydney’s teenaged sister who began loading her neck with rosaries (to her family’s deep and everlasting horror) and her arms with rubber bracelets before most people in Wilmington even knew who Madonna was. Pen could not imagine Tanya’s enjoying Lila’s crush on Pen, but to her credit, she had never tried to squelch it.

  “You guys have fun this weekend?” Pen asked.