Mark your calendars, folks: our reading with Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent, will be Saturday, December 5th, at 1 p.m., at the Lily Pad in Inman Square, Cambridge. There will be a prose-focused open mic' following the reading, but we're also looking for a local writer to be Ms. Anthony's "opener." If you'd like to be a featured reader at the event, send a story that can be read aloud in fifteen minutes or less to submissions@meetinghousemag.com. Write "Lily Pad" in the subject line, and paste your story into the body of the email. Submissions are due by 5 p.m., Saturday, November 28th. We look forward to reading your stories.
This week, we have a new story by Jessica Ullian. Jessica received her MS in journalism from Columbia University and her MFA in fiction from Boston University. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Vibe, and Slate's online magazine, DoubleX.com. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she and her husband run the Bed & Bagel Inn.
Read on!
Off Road
Jeannie practiced as she drove: she would arrive politely curious, marveling at how Lily had scraped by for all these years and then come upon this success. A compliment for the book or the house would be ideal. It would be best not to call her a liar, although the story, as told by Lily—now calling herself Diane—was very nearly a lie. True, they had a father who had gone away, and a blue pickup truck (because he had taken the station wagon). Friends urged their mother to sell the truck and get something more practical, but she had grown to enjoy driving it. “I like being up high,” she explained. “I’m the king of the road.”
But the untruths outnumbered the facts: their mother was no more than a social drinker. If their father had indulged frequently, Jeannie was too young to know. Lily had gone to parties in high school, but came home in time for a full night’s sleep followed by an early rising to share coffee with their mother. On Saturdays, Jeannie would stumble from bed to find them cozy as girlfriends, clutching their warm mugs in both hands.
They had owned a home, always, even though they had moved to the condominium. They had never lived in a shelter. Certainly, no one had died. Or rather, no one had been killed in an alcohol-fueled collision with the blue pickup, with Jeannie at the wheel.
Perhaps Diane, the woman in the paper, was not Lily after all.
Perhaps Jeannie had merely imagined Lily’s face in the paper that morning. The drive to Maine could truly become a trip to the outlets in Freeport, where she would undo that morning’s fib by purchasing a tent for Kevin. She would treat herself to a two-piece bathing suit, new jeans, sensible but attractive flat shoes for work. After her first day as an office temp, as a college sophomore, Lily came home with blistered toes and swore off high heels forever; Jeannie, then in high school, hadn’t worn them since.
The exit for Freeport loomed on the right, arrived, and receded into her side-view mirror.
In Dover, an hour later, the pavement grew rough and turned to dirt, and pebbles pockmarked the undercarriage of her car. Jeannie practiced again. “I’m glad to know that you’re all right,” she said aloud. “It’s been such a long time.” When she pulled onto the grass, Lily — heavier, dressed in sloppy, unfashionable clothes — came out onto the front porch. Jeannie’s eyes filled and she ran at her sister, burrowing into her shoulder with such force that the woman had no choice but to open her arms.
“Why did you tell?” Jeannie sobbed. “You said you wouldn’t.”
***
The woman she had seen in that morning’s newspaper had long black hair twisted into a thick bun that rested on the back of her neck. She was standing on a gray beach with one braceleted arm extended to the ocean, laughing with her mouth open so that Jeannie could see the dead, crooked canine tooth on Lily’s left side.
Diane — that seemed to be Lily’s new name — lived on the coast of Maine, in a house she had bought with the advance from her recent book. The house felt unfamiliar to her, she said, because she had been itinerant and often homeless since childhood. Her father had been white and her mother Cherokee; both drank heavily, and often beat their children.
A noise escaped from Jeannie. They had been spanked once, at ages six and nine, for dressing up in their mother’s clothes and stuffing their coat pockets with lipstick stolen from the drugstore. The lipstick later melted, staining the fabric, and they’d both had their bottoms swatted with a rubber spatula. She took a sip of coffee.
Diane had been a drinker, too, the article said. She stopped when her sister, sloppily drunk, climbed behind the wheel of a friend’s pickup and plowed into a trailer, killing a teenage mother and the girl’s newborn baby.
Kevin shuffled into the kitchen in his slippers. Jeannie dropped the paper and pushed it away.
“Morning, babe,” he said. He reached into the cabinet for a mug. “Whatcha reading?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a story.”
He poured himself some coffee, and pulled a frying pan from the cabinet. “Eggs okay?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Jeannie reached for the business section and drew it over the exposed photo. “Want some help?”
“It’s under control.” Kevin cracked the eggshells against the lip of the pan. “Read me the front page?”
Over breakfast, Kevin carefully revealed that he wouldn’t mind going to his old roommate’s to watch baseball. They had been living together for three months and were still unsure about how many hours were allotted for togetherness, how many for life as usual. Jeannie glanced at the paper.
“I don’t mind if you go,” she said.
He hesitated. “What are you going to do?”
“I might do some shopping. Or stay home and read.”
“Bookworm.” He bent to kiss her, then stood to get dressed. “Go to the park if you’re going to read. It’s a beautiful day.”
When she heard the lock turn she took up the article. But she read unevenly, eyes darting across the details of Diane’s homelessness, the predictable kindly pastor who had discovered her journal and encouraged her to write. She searched for mention of the sister again, who had inspired Diane’s flight from home. She was not present; instead, the interviewer focused on Diane’s house, with hand-crafted dreamcatchers in each window and brambled raspberry bushes lining the path. Jeannie tossed the paper aside and looked at the clock.
She avoided the small bookshop in their neighborhood, where she was known, and arrived at the nearest Barnes & Noble within half an hour, jogging up the escalator as the employees were still turning on their registers. She smuggled her purchase to the counter with the cover pressed against her sweater. On a park bench outside the local elementary school, she began to read. By the time she called Kevin an hour later to say she was going shopping with a friend from work, she was already in the car.
***
“You look good,” Lily said, patting Jeannie’s back. “Something’s different.”
Jeannie pulled back from her sister and stared. Her weeping had subsided.
“Of course something’s different,” she said. “I’m eight years older.”
Lily shook her head. “It’s not that.” Her eyes roamed Jeannie’s face and body, then she leaned in and inhaled deeply.
“That’s it,” she said. “You quit smoking.”
“Five years ago.”
Lily raised her eyebrows. “And?”
“And nothing.” Jeannie crossed her arms and shivered; it was sunny in Dover, but a strong breeze from the ocean pimpled her skin with goosebumps.
Inside, at the scarred kitchen table, Jeannie stared at the woman drinking tea across from her. The weight was surprising. Lily had long prided herself on her slimness, making time for her daily run even in the last weeks of their mother’s life, when they had rarely left the hospital, and Jeannie could hardly trudge to the cafeteria for some Jell-O or a soda. Now she had meaty thighs, and substantial breasts that were not a family trait pushing against her baggy sweater.
“So you said you had some questions,” Lily said.
Jeannie laughed sharply. “Yeah, I have a few.”
“Shoot.”
“Where have you been?”
“Traveling around the country, mostly. Although the first few years I was still in New York, working.”
“You stayed?”
She had always assumed that Lily had run away, as she had threatened. Three days after their mother’s funeral, they were cleaning out her closet when Lily said that she was going somewhere new, to make a new life alone. Jeannie, a college junior, had just asked to keep their mother’s silk bathrobe, and her first impulse was to hold out the slippery material and offer it up.
“I was only in the apartment for a little longer anyway. But I kept working until I’d saved enough to wander around. I went to San Francisco, first, and worked my way back. I waited tables a lot, and stayed in hostels. It was a lot of fun.”
Lily kept talking, describing the communal rooms she had lived in, the pubs where she had waitressed. Jeannie bathed in the sound of her sister’s voice, once more relating a tale of life that Jeannie had not yet experienced. She sniffled, a remnant of her earlier tears, and reached into her purse for a tissue. Her fingers knocked against the shiny hardcover. Lily stopped talking as she pulled the book out.
“Did you read it?” she asked.
“Some of it.” Jeannie placed it on the table between them.
“It’s stories I picked up from people. I met a lot of Indians when I was in Oklahoma.”
“Do they know you’re claiming to be Cherokee?”
Lily shrugged. “It’s not so hard to convince people that you’re Indian. I don’t think anyone who’s legitimate would care, unless I tried to get land rights.”
“Still, it was risky to let a reporter come and write about you.”
“It was one story. Nobody will remember it tomorrow. And maybe I’ll sell a few more books.”
“Won’t someone from your old job recognize you?”
“Even if they think they do, they won’t be sure enough to come after me.” She leaned closer. “Besides, people love this story. If anyone figures out it’s me, they’ll probably think I was using a fake name then, not now!” She chuckled, then began to cough in a deep, rich heave — a smoker’s cough.
“What about me? Didn’t you think I’d find you?”
Lily drummed her fingers on the tabletop. Her nails were cut so short that half-moons of tender pink skin rose above the ends.
“No,” Lily said. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d still be alive.”
A tickle caught in the back of Jeannie’s throat, as if she had inhaled one of the tiny down feathers that pushed their way out of Kevin’s pillow and floated among the bedsheets. At times, she had fallen down in bars and in people’s homes, and thrown up in the middle of the street. But she had injured no one; even Lily had escaped unhurt the night Jeannie tried to drive the truck home.
Her sister, nineteen and back from college for the summer, had been at a party and called for a ride. Their mother was reading in bed, Jeannie watching television on the living room couch, a can of Sprite that was three-quarters vodka clamped between her knees. When the phone rang their mother groaned.
“Jeannie, I’m tired,” she called. “Will you go pick up your sister? The address is on the counter.”
Jeannie lurched off the sofa, struggled into her shoes, and made it to her destination driving at a creeping pace. When she honked, Lily bounded out the front door and into the truck. Her eyes narrowed.
“You’re drunk! I can smell you.”
“Shut up. I am not.”
“You’d better give me those keys.”
Jeannie had pulled away from the curb so quickly that her sister was tossed against the door. Lily began to scream.
They had almost made it home; at the bottom of their hill, an oncoming car startled her into making a hard right. The truck skidded across the road. A telephone pole tore through the front, shearing the bumper and headlights cleanly off, and they came to rest in front of a two-story house. The windows lit up with a yellow glow. Jeannie vomited into her own lap. Lily pulled her across the seat onto the passenger side, then climbed over her to sit behind the wheel.
Jeannie rolled down her window and spat sour fluid. A man with a flashlight approached the ruined vehicle, while a woman and a teenaged girl stood in the doorway of the house.
“Don’t tell on me,” she said. “Please.”
Lily said, “I won’t.”
The policeman insisted on driving them up the street to their apartment complex. When he left Lily began to speak, but their mother put a hand up and turned her head away.
“In a minute,” she said. “Let’s get your sister cleaned up.”
Jeannie sat on the edge of the tub as Lily turned on the shower and her mother stripped off her shirt and jeans. Then it was time to sit at the kitchen table, a glass of milk before Jeannie and steaming mugs of tea in front of the others. The ruby-colored gloss she had worn to the party was a raw sore against Lily’s face.
“They said you were driving,” their mother said to Lily. “He said you swerved because you saw an animal in the road, and you lost control of the truck.”
Lily nodded.
“What kind of animal was it?”
“I don’t know. It was so quick I couldn’t really tell.”
“You couldn’t tell?” She pushed her chair back and began circling them, her bare feet slapping against the linoleum floor. “Because they’re going to be back and they’ll ask you again. And God only knows how many questions the neighbors are going to have. You are going to have to tell them what happened, over and over, and what do you think they’ll do if the first day you say it’s a dog, and the second a cat?”
Lily’s eyes were squeezed shut. She shook her head. Their mother dropped to her knees beside her chair.
“They’ll say she needs help, that we can’t control her,” she whispered. “They’ll send her to him and that woman.”
She reached for the girls’ hands at the same time, forming a triptych around the round table with its wood-print laminate top.
“It was a dog,” Lily said. “I’m sure.”
Jeannie’s hand was released as their mother wrapped her arms around Lily and kissed the crown of her head.
“That’s right,” she murmured. “That’s exactly right.”
***
The afternoon light formed a grid on the floor through the window frame. Voices sounded outside, and Lily went to look; a group of teenagers were headed down to the shore, she announced, and wouldn’t bother them.
Jeannie’s mobile phone began buzzing in her purse; Kevin was calling. Her hand moved toward the sound, but she met Lily’s gaze and brought it back to rest on her lap.
“Where will you say you’ve been?” Lily asked.
“I don’t know. Shopping, I guess. To look for camping gear.”
“You, camping?” Lily’s face creased with amusement. “Good God. Maybe people do change. Did he tell you it’s outdoors?”
She was teasing now, the flinty edge in her voice gone, the words swinging from cold to warm like a boom on a sailboat. Jeannie was suddenly exhausted. She could wrest the conversation back, but the effort would leave her spent and tense, anticipating the next time that her sister would step in with authoritative calm and steer them to whatever outcome pleased her. There was nothing left to ask. She began to fidget with her purse. Lily brought their mugs to the sink, wet a sponge, and began wiping the insides out.
“I should get back. Thank you for letting me come.”
“Anytime you like.” Lily turned off the water and set the cups in the drainer.
“You don’t mean that.”
Lily shrugged. “It’s okay, now. I have my life, and you have yours. So it’s all the same to me. You can come up now and then, or we can go back to how it’s been. Next time, let me know and I’ll make you lunch.”
She had no fear of Jeannie, it seemed, which made Jeannie afraid of her. Taking the book from her bag and brandishing it, she asked, “Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell?”
“Of course not,” Lily said. “I never told on you.”
***
Kevin was surprised that she hadn’t purchased anything, but she lied smoothly, saying there had been so many people at the store that the shelves were picked clean. He was boyishly cheerful and accepting, having enjoyed the game and a late-afternoon run along the river in her absence. The bridge of his nose was red with sun, and his skin radiated the heat of the day in a feverish aura.
“It was a great game,” he said at dinner, and went on to describe the diving catch in the eighth inning that had prompted him and the old roommate to leap off the couch in an ecstatic burst. She listened, admiring Kevin’s enthusiasm for the events of an ordinary weekend day, only slightly jealous of the unselfconscious ease that had first drawn her to him, and that she hoped was quietly attaching itself to her as they progressed each day. At the beginning she had said, deliberately offhand, that she had “gotten over” drinking during college, that now it made her feel ill. He had never suspected that the world around her had grown so still in the next moment she could hear the bubbles of her seltzer slipping down her throat, nor that the sounds had come rushing back when he smiled and asked where she’d gone to school.
They were dining late, and the Mexican restaurant they liked best was already crowded with Saturday drinkers. Young women, celebrating the May weather in backless shirts and open-toed shoes, downed tequila shots at the bar. Kevin and Jeannie held hands across the table as they waited for their food.
“I can’t believe you went all the way to Freeport and back, and you didn’t even get a pair of socks.”
“I got a late start, and then it was so crowded it didn’t seem worth it.”
“What’d you do all morning?”
She prepared to lie, then reconsidered; Lily, as Diane, posed no danger. “I bought a new book, and read in the park for a while.”
“Must have been a good book. You’re sunburned.”
“It was really interesting.” Their food arrived, and they settled into eating. “This woman, the author, grew up on an Indian reservation, and ran away because her family were alcoholics. She reinvented a whole new life.”
Kevin wiped a string of cheese from his lips. “I never understood why people feel the need to break away from their old life. In college, I knew this guy who showed up the first day and told everyone to start calling him Chuck, when his name was really Dave. How bad could it have been to be Dave?”
“But people change, and grow up,” Jeannie said. She tried to summon Lily’s gestures and tone — that sense of certainty that bordered on boredom. “Haven’t you ever done anything you’d rather forget?”
“Sure, but haven’t we all?”
Her hands were beginning to tremble. Jeannie steadied her breaths. “I definitely have. I did some really stupid things, when I was younger.”
“Sounds like you’ve got some good stories to tell.” He yawned. “You want dessert?”
It was over so quickly: she had offered a hint at her old self without catastrophe. She had stayed calm and steadfast like her sister, and her own life had not cracked open either. She wanted sprinkles, a candle to blow out, a celebration of the moment. “Yes,” she said happily. “Let me just use the ladies’.”
She stepped out of the booth and collided with one of the girls at the bar, who lost her footing and landed on the floor with her knees splayed. The girl bobbled her head like a puppy shaking off water.
“I’m sorry,” Jeannie said, abashed. “Let me help you up.”
“Bitch,” the girl slurred. “Watch yourself!”
Jeannie sat back down and turned to Kevin with a giggle rising in her throat. He was watching the girl with narrowed eyes as her friends helped her up and brought her outside; his sigh was heavy with disgust. She swallowed her laughter.
The waitress brought the menus. Kevin ordered over Jeannie’s protestations that she wasn’t hungry, and told the waitress to bring two spoons. Then he leaned back in his chair and cocked his head at her. “So let’s hear about your bad-girl past,” he said, smiling. “You get tipsy on a glass of champagne one time?”
The door opened as another couple left, letting in the scraping sound of retching outside. Jeannie closed her senses against the dank, familiar smell, and groped for a safe truth. “When I was six, I stole five lipsticks from Woolworth’s.”
As they ate their tres leches cake, the dining tables emptied and the bar grew crowded. The spot where the girl had fallen remained bare, as if protected by a collective desire to forget. But Jeannie knew most of them had already forgotten—Kevin had, and for the girl only a vague embarrassment would remain, intangible and growing hazy each day. Jeannie alone would remember for days, if not weeks, and recall it each time they returned here, even though the event had not been tragic, and there was nothing to forgive.
