150 Pounds Part 18
"Oh, honey, he didn't mean it. You know how he gets." She ever so quickly glanced toward one of the cabinets, the one she'd always stored her bottles in, as if hiding them behind the spices were somehow keeping everyone from knowing she had a problem. It was the slightest of glances, just a flinch of her head, really, but Alexis caught it and sighed. Would even this moment be ruined by her drinking?
"Mom, I'm pretty sure Dad meant what he said." She took a sip of her juice and immediately regretted skipping lunch; the acidity of the fruit went right through her and she burped.
"Say excuse me," her mother said absentmindedly.
Alexis felt anger rising and tried to suppress it. "Excuse me," she said sarcastically, though Bunny didn't pick up on it.
Bunny clapped her hands together. "So, how are you, kitten? How's life in the Big Apple?"
Can she really not tell I'm pregnant? Alexis thought. Don't mothers have a sixth sense about these things?
"Well, I don't know if you got my e-mail, but I was on Oprah back in December." She stared out the window. The elementary school she and Mark had attended long ago had just let out, and a gaggle of pushing and shoving children flowed down the sidewalk like a river. One's backpack had a zebra's face on it, its mouth a zipper.
Bunny's eyes widened. "Noooooo, I didn't know. That's so wonderful, Lexa!"
Lexa was a nickname her mother had called her as a child. Alexis had been five, and declared she no longer wanted to go by Alexis. That she would only answer to the name Lexa. Bunny had been the single family member who agreed to call her by it, and hearing it now made Alexis afraid she might cry. She took a ragged breath.
"Right. Well, I left three messages with Elsa about it, with the date and times. I even called her when they showed a rerun."
"Oh, honey, she probably told me and I forgot. You know how bad I am about remembering things. And I've never watched much television."
Right, because it's every day that your only child is on Oprah.
"Where's Dad?"
"At work. He should be home soon."
"What are you guys having for dinner?" Her stomach rumbled.
Bunny peeked toward the cabinet again, the movement ever so slight. "Oh, we just grab any old thing these days." Her southern accent had sprung forth. "Thing" turned into "thang." She cupped her still-pretty face in her hands. "But I want to hear more about you, Lexa, darling. Have you got a young man?"
I did. He would have done anything for me and I asked him to leave. I had a man, and now I don't. Oh, and he's also the father of my child, but doesn't know I kept the baby.
"Sort of," Alexis said. She went to the refrigerator and found an old heel of bread, and, sitting down, began munching on it. Her parents had millions of dollars and never a sc.r.a.p of food in the fridge. How ironic.
"Tell me about sort of. Sort of doesn't earn you a wedding ring on that lonely finger, honey."
Alexis rolled her eyes. It had always been like this with Bunny. It didn't matter when she was taking college-level cla.s.ses while still in high school, or that she graduated in the top of her cla.s.s at Columbia. Her mother had shown no interest when Alexis started Skinny Chick, and it certainly seemed to bore Bunny Allbright that her daughter had been on Oprah.
Alexis had an odd moment when she almost blurted out, I'm pregnant! but she knew Bunny's glee would soon be followed by concern that she wasn't married. When her father got home the scorn and contempt would be overwhelming, and she'd be right back where she started from three years ago, kicked out of the house, penniless, and alone. An image of Billy vomiting on the bus home after a particularly brutal round of chemo last week steeled her nerves. She was here for him, after all. For once, she had to focus on someone other than herself.
But her mother was waiting, her eyes bright and gla.s.sy. She lifted a hand, which was shaking with tremors, to push back a lock of Alexis's thin blond hair that had fallen into her eyes. Alexis flinched. A look of sorrow pa.s.sed over Bunny's face, and Alexis regretted her impulse.
"I met this nice guy named Noah," she said, wanting to rectify the awkward moment. She looked around the room, her eyes fixing on a row of lamps of different colors and shades on the console.
"He owns a restaurant. It's a microbrewery as well. It's actually gotten pretty popular," she said with a note of pride in her voice. "I helped him find the s.p.a.ce and fix up the inside. He's got these huge photographs on the walls..." She held her arms out to show how wide the pictures were and felt another nudge in her lower belly, as though the baby were reminding her it was here. "He went around the neighborhood and took pictures of some of the people that eat in the restaurant, and then had them blown up poster-sized and glossy. The s.p.a.ce is gorgeous." She smiled for the first time since entering her house. "Naomi Watts had a beer in there the other day, with her family."
"Are you two pretty serious?" Bunny examined her already-perfect manicure.
"We were. We kind of had a falling-out."
Alexis's mother patted her arm. Again, the slight tremble. Bunny was holding out on pouring herself a drink in front of her daughter, and Alexis was strangely touched by this.
"Y'all will be making up in no time. Beautiful young girl like you? How could he stay angry for long?"
She wanted to say that she was the one who had been angry. That she'd ignored his calls, e-mails, love letters, and cards. Thrown away the most special thing that had ever happened to her because of her own stubbornness, which surely came from her father's gene pool. That she'd called him and left a message, but he hadn't returned it and probably never would. She wanted to tell her mother everything, and be held like she had been as a child, but Bunny was already getting up, gathering her robe around her large, still-pert b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
Suddenly it was as if she'd seen her daughter for the first time.
"You've put on some weight, darling." She said it as a fact, not an insult, but still the words burned through Alexis. She'd done a lot of thinking since Billy got sick, and there was Noah's encouragement that she put on weight and relax about religiously weighing herself and working out in such a harsh, exhausting way. Standing in her mother's kitchen and ruminating about food, Alexis suddenly realized how odd it was that Bunny had always eaten like a bird, and had such an aversion and outright hostility toward food.
Alexis couldn't have felt more different now.
Noah's cooking brought her house together; his spicy chili, oddly enough, was the only thing Billy felt like eating when his nausea was overwhelming. Noah coaxed Vanya out of the dark depths of her black room, he fed the homeless man who squatted in front of his restaurant, who in turn washed Noah's windows each morning. His arrival made a tornado of change in her rigidly structured life. Alexis grew up thinking food was the enemy, but something in the past few months had shifted. She had to eat to nourish the baby growing within her. That was a fact. She'd tried her old eating habits but Billy had called her OB/GYN and tattled on her, and Alexis was given a very strict and scary lecture for half an hour by her doctor. Besides, when she tried skipping meals or eating just half of what was on her plate, which was her tried and trusty rule for staying slim, she'd been hit with overwhelming sickness, almost as if the baby Noah had made inside her was echoing its father's thoughts that Alexis should eat more. So ... she ate. And it surprised her how happy that act made her.
She blinked. Her mother was still looking at her. "Yeah-yes. I've put on some weight." She smiled thinly. "But the boy I was telling you about? He likes the extra curves."
"Oh," Bunny said, looking confused. Curves were not something valued around Greenwich, where all the wives had personal trainers, and skinny was always "in."
"Well, sugar, I'm going to run out and pick up something for dinner, since I a.s.sume you're staying and not running off on me again?"
"Sure. I'll stay and see Dad. Besides, I have to talk to him." Alexis walked over to the dishwasher and opened it, setting down her gla.s.s on one of the plastic rungs.
"That's settled, then." Bunny pushed her tall, thin frame away from the counter and stood. Her robe fell slightly open and Alexis could see her ribs, their ridges showing through her skin. She's like a dying swan, Alexis thought.
Suddenly her mother's arms were around her. Bunny hugged her daughter. "I'm so d.a.m.n glad you're here. I get lonely, you know."
Alexis hugged her awkwardly, feeling the soft silk of the robe beneath her palm. "It's nice to see you, too, Mom." There was so much left unsaid, and the words hung in the air so heavily for Alexis that she could almost see them, typewritten letters in a dark font.
While Bunny showered upstairs, and, Alexis suspected, took a few nips of booze, Alexis walked around the entryway and first floor, remembering.
She trailed her hand on the cool wall her mother painted a dark, muted silver, the color of a thunderstorm rolling over the ocean. Nearly all the walls were painted in this color, which gave a visitor the feeling of weightlessness.
Photographs of her and Mark were diagonally hung on the winding staircase off the entrance leading to the second floor. She walked up three steps and leaned her spine against the base of the banister, where it curved into a snail's sh.e.l.l. Mark never went through that traditional teenage ugly stage; he'd had twenty-twenty vision and the most metal he'd had to put in his mouth was a small retainer he'd worn at night for a year. There were many shots of him coming off the football field, his helmet (number 23) thrown up in the air triumphantly, his sandy blond hair sweaty and pushed off his forehead, his smile huge and infectious, his muscular body throbbing with life.
Alexis's pictures told a different story of adolescence. She'd been a gangly, slightly chubby, awkward teenager, not getting her period or (small!) b.r.e.a.s.t.s until three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. She knew this was often the story of famous supermodels and celebrities, that the very sleekness they were now famous for had once been unattractive to others. Tyra Banks often commented on how skinny and ugly people had thought she was.
She peered closer at a picture of herself in an unflattering J.Crew striped sweater that made her long neck look like a bird reaching for a worm from its mother. Her smile looked strained. The look in her eyes was, Please like me! She scoffed now, but stopped when she saw that all the pictures of Mark were shiny. She could see her own reflection, as if she were the ghost standing beside him instead of the other way around. When she straightened and surveyed the rest of her pictures-ten years old with buck teeth and pink c.o.ke-bottle gla.s.ses, thirteen with a full set of braces (but at least wearing contact lenses now), midstride on the lawn at Columbia accepting her college diploma, sitting at a desk and looking serious at her law firm summer internship-the frames with pictures of her were dusty. The old familiar sick feeling rushed over her, and she had to literally put her hand on her lower stomach to catch her breath. It wasn't that her parents didn't love her; it was that they loved Mark more, always had, even with him dead.
He'd been the golden boy. It had been that way when they were kids; Mark the easygoing charmer who was always throwing a football in the backyard with their father, or willing to go to the mall and shop for a dress with Bunny. Alexis was the brooder, her bedroom door closed, her nose stuck in a book night and day.
He'd had dyslexia, which had forged the bond between him and Bunny, who had spent countless hours side-by-side with him playing books on tape, helping him write his papers all the way through middle school and even high school. If Alexis had one image from her childhood burned into her retinas it was Mark and her mother's b.u.t.terscotch heads bent as Bunny helped him with homework, the warm golden glow of his desk lamp casting shadows over their bodies, the sounds of easy laughter as they worked through Hamlet, or the scratching sounds of pencil on paper while figuring out algebra.
She'd excelled on her own, earning straight A's without a lick of help, though both her parents had offered. She was in all honors cla.s.ses, she was the head of the cheerleading squad, and she got into Columbia with a small scholarship. She'd done very well at the law firm internship, earning high praise, which, if it made its way up to her father, he'd never acknowledged.
Looking at another picture of Mark in uniform, taken when he'd completed boot camp, Alexis remembered before he'd died they'd spoken of taking a road trip together. He had been to Iraq earlier that year, and this second tour was going to be his last. She'd sat on his bed cross-legged, tired from studying for finals, and asked him what he planned on doing after he came back home. "Meet some nice woman and make her my wife," he'd said, grinning. What a a wicked smile he had! It could calm any tense situation. "I was actually thinking it might be nice to drive across the country, see the South, and the West Coast, then start cla.s.ses, cause the Marines will pay tuition. Would you want to come with?"
She'd thought about it, playing with a twenty-five-pound weight he had resting on his dresser. They'd been eating bowls of chicken soup, slurping and talking. She could still remember the rich smell of the broth. "You know Dad would never let me," she'd said. "I'm supposed to be studying for the LSATs and then starting law school."
"You'll have the rest of your life to study for the LSATs," Mark had said. He chucked her on her chin. "I'll talk to Dad. Promise me when I get back you'll come cross-country with me. We'll rent some s.h.i.tty motor home and eat beans for all three meals and just drive and fart all day, it will be awesome."
Alexis had laughed. Oh, the pleasure of Mark wanting to spend time with her! He always had been that way, even when they were teenagers. Never acting too cool to be with her, driving her to school each day, bringing her to parties his friends were throwing. He was proud of her.
"I promise," she'd said, eyes glittering with the promise of the trip, how much fun it would be to really have her brother back for good. When he came home from the first Iraq tour his light shone a little less brightly, he laughed just a tiny bit less easily. He had sand in his backpack and boots. She'd find it in the shower; it was as though Iraq had followed him home at the end of each tour. He'd been twenty-five when he died.
The last picture on the wall was one of his casket draped with an American flag. "So morbid, Mom," she imagined Mark would say, teasing Bunny. Alexis was the first to hear the news that he'd died. It had been the weekend, so when the doorbell rang Alexis was the only one home; Bunny was at a tennis lesson, and her father worked most Sat.u.r.day mornings. She was supposed to be studying but she'd been hungry, and wandered downstairs to dig up a snack: celery and peanut b.u.t.ter. She was filling the celery stalks like small green canoes when the chimes of the doorbell rang. Elsa will answer it, she thought. It rang again. She suddenly remembered Elsa was away in El Salvador visiting her mother. s.h.i.t. She padded over to the door.
She was wearing Mark's blue striped pajama bottoms and a white tank top. The top was thin, but when the doorbell rang a third time she realized she didn't have time to grab a coat from the closet so she swung open the door.
There were three officers standing on the porch, their hats in their hands. Mark can't be dead because in the movies it's always two guys, Alexis thought, feeling a temporary relief at this inner proclamation.
"h.e.l.lo," she said.
"Are you Bunny Allbright?" one asked. He couldn't be older than twenty and was short and muscular. He must have been a wrestler. She felt sorry for him immediately, to be her own age and be given this job. She wondered why he was in the States and not fighting overseas. He had red hair and freckles, and she wondered if he'd been teased about them in high school.
"That's my mom," she said.
The three men looked at one another. The oldest one, in his forties, seemed to be in charge. "May we come in and wait for her?" he asked respectfully.
She didn't say anything, but stepped aside and held the door. She gripped it so hard she later found a splinter shaped like a comma dug in her palm. The third serviceman was tall and well built, with chiseled features, messy brown hair, and full lips. Alexis felt him scan her body as he pa.s.sed. It was lightning-quick, but she felt it nonetheless, as he kept his eyes averted from her the rest of the time he was in her house.
The three men sat on the white leather couch across from Alexis, their legs crossed, hats beside them. They didn't looked hurried or uncomfortable. They were trained for this. Their shoes shone, and their fingernails were clean. For some reason, focusing on their clean-cut appearances was the only thing that kept Alexis from screaming.
"Look. Just tell me," Alexis said. "Tell me what happened." Her voice wavered on "happened," and she squared her shoulders to fight it. She dug her fingers into the leather of the chair she was sitting on.
It was the older one who spoke. She appreciated this later, that he didn't treat her as a child, or tell her he had to wait until her parents got home, those were his orders. He looked Alexis right in the eye, and she thought what an unusual color they were, nearly purple, but they were kind.
Each word he spoke was like a tiny injury to her body: roadside IED, six others killed, three lives saved by Mark throwing himself on top of them, Mark a national hero to receive the Medal of Honor for gallantry at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States ...
They stayed three hours. Alexis fixed them a plate of cheese and crackers, even though they said they were just fine, thank you. She also brought out three bottles of VitaminWater, which she placed on the table and then nearly collapsed, remembering Mark teasing her about purchasing it just a few months ago: "You know they don't really put all the vitamins in there that you need in a day," he'd said.
"They do, too! It says it right there on the label."
"Oh, Alexis, you are so gullible," and he'd put her in a headlock, mussing up her hair, and she'd punched him in the gut, which was like hitting a brick wall.
The red-haired one caught her, gently helping her sit back down. She'd finally put on Wheel of Fortune and the four of them watched it in silence, the men never trying to get comfortable, sitting rigidly and straight-backed. She felt like pulling out her hair the entire time, the feeling was so intense she finally sat on her hands.
When her father returned, it was Alexis who told him, an unintended affliction, which she would forever after regret. It was as if by this simple act she'd somehow made Mark's death her fault in John Allbright's eyes. She'd been the first person to deal the blow that would change everything. After she spoke to her father quietly she walked with him to the living room, where the three men had stood, saluting him. They spoke to him as they had to Alexis, matter-of-fact and quick. There was no beating around the bush. Her father nodded, thanked them for coming. "I will inform my wife, gentlemen," he said, as they turned and walked briskly out the door.
Her mother had needed to be sedated. Alexis sat on the stairs like she had as a child and listened to her being informed. Bunny screamed just once, "No!" and fainted. Their family doctor came to the house, administering the first dosage of sleeping medication she was still hooked on three years later. Alexis hadn't thought doctors still made house calls; it felt archaic and absurd. That it was her family that needed such an extravagance, or called for such an unwanted luxury.
Her father flew alone to Boston to collect Mark's body. The Marines held a ceremony at the airport. Alexis saw a photograph of it in the newspaper. There was an image of her father, standing stone-faced and grim among the fluttering flags on cars, the small white airplane landing behind him blurry. Alexis carefully cut the picture out and folded it inside one of her books.
Her father only cried at night. The sound was ragged, like a scuba diver coming up for air after a plunge into the ocean. Wet and ugly. It was more obscene to her than anything. Her father crying was such a strange phenomenon, a private and intimate sound. More intimate than s.e.x. Her parents slept in separate bedrooms and his was directly above Alexis's, the sound filtering in through an air-conditioning vent in the wall. Alexis sat next to it and tried to read at night sometimes, her hand on the vent, an attempt to soothe.
Mark was buried during a snowstorm. The older, silver-haired officer and the short wrestler-type were there, holding the American flag that would be presented to Bunny. The governor of Connecticut attended, along with his pretty wife, who sobbed softly into her handkerchief the entire time, the sound like a baby bird chirping. How odd, Alexis thought at the time. Here is this woman who never met Mark, and she is crying. And I cannot. When the rifles went off in unison her mother pinched her arm.
The coldness had seeped into Alexis's bones, and the snow continued to fall. It was beautiful. Like confetti twinkling down on an empty stage. She'd thought of Mark teaching her how to s...o...b..ard on a trip to New Hampshire when she was nine, how he'd skied down the bunny slope with her again and again until she mastered it, their faces red and chapped.
Now she turned the door handle to his room. Bunny had turned it into a shrine. There were photographs of Mark in and out of uniform, condolence letters from former President George W. Bush, him and Alexis as kids, eating an ice-cream cone, a big splotch of green mint on his white Hanes T-shirt. He was missing a front tooth, his arm slung around Alexis. Her eyes welled up looking at it. He'd been so easy, even as a kid. In many ways Alexis was more like her dad than he was, so stiff, her emotions kept bottled inside. Mark was the opposite, like the sun had fallen in love with him and followed him wherever he went.
Alexis touched the gunmetal-gray weight that still resided on top of his dresser, the same weight she'd been playing with the day she'd promised him the cross-country trip. His deodorant had fallen off his nightstand and still lay on the floor, like a giant red bug. Football trophies spread across his dresser. Everything in here was silent and gleaming, as though someone (probably Elsa) dusted daily.
Alexis lay down on top of his red and blue plaid comforter, and stared at the ceiling. The bed felt soft beneath her. On the wall was his surfboard, long and off-white and sleek. Once after surfing in Rhode Island with friends, he'd come to dinner with seaweed in his hair and it had made her father laugh, changing the whole shape of his face.
Outside the window the wind picked up, and she noticed some of the leaves had orange tips. The seasons were shifting again, but Mark wouldn't be here to see it. The three years that had pa.s.sed felt like three seconds. She felt a weight on her chest that made breathing unbearable. Just then she felt another nudge from within.
A tear streamed down Alexis's cheek. She wiped off the wetness, surprised still at the deep well of her emotions lately. It was as if she'd been saving up all her tears in a jar for quite some time, and it was now tipping over and pouring out.
"I feel you, baby," she whispered aloud in the empty room. The droning sound of a lawnmower started up outside. "I can feel you." She suddenly wished for a boy, and thought how much Mark would have loved him, carrying him around under his arm like a football. She would find out the gender in a week.
She heard the front door open and close, the sounds of heavy leather loafers treading across the marble floor in the front hall. She leaped off Mark's bed and smoothed down the blankets so there were no ripples. She'd slipped her boots off and quickly bent down to put them back on, zipping up the sides.
She leaned over the banister and called into the front hallway. "Dad?"
A few seconds of silence. Then he walked slowly out of his office, set down his briefcase, and stared up at Alexis. His hair had gone completely white since the last time she'd seen him. A former polo player and Marine, he was still thick in the chest and had strong forearms, one with an anchor tattoo that he kept covered with high-thread-count b.u.t.ton-downs. Bunny picked out suits for him, and they were always excellently tailored. He was a handsome man, with a strong jaw like Mark's and the same Roman nose, but he had none of Mark's warmth or charm in his face.
"I thought we agreed you were going to not come back here," John Allbright said.
"Nice to see you, too, Dad."
She walked down the stairs, refusing to show how afraid she was. Her footsteps gave off an unpleasant clicking sound as she descended.
"Well?" he asked. The gold in his Marines ring glinted under the light.
"There's something I wanted to talk to you about."
He raised an eyebrow.
"It's about money," she said, reaching the bottom step and staying on it so that she would be at the same height as him, not giving him the upper hand.
He smirked. "Knew you'd run out of it eventually. It was inevitable. 'Send the girl a check,' your mother kept saying. As if you'd learn anything that way."
She burned with humiliation. Billy, she thought. I'm doing this for Billy. "Er, yes. You're right, Dad. I certainly have had some difficult times over the last few years, going at it on my own. But Skinny Chick is actually doing really well, I have three million subscribers and I was recently on Oprah-"
She stood up straighter. Squared her shoulders.
He held up a hand as though she were a small bug to swat away. "Enough. Get to the point. How much?"
Her mother came in the front door just then, a mix of Chanel No. 5 and vodka trailing behind her. She took off a long white camel-hair coat and flung it onto a chair dramatically as she strode to the kitchen. Alexis realized she must have had a car service take her grocery shopping, as a tall, thin man wearing a dark blue cap and a nervous expression followed her, carrying brown paper bags. She'd been so lost in thought in Mark's old room she hadn't heard the front door close.
"You two can talk business after dinner," Bunny trilled, her southern accent deeper when she was drunk. "We're having penne a la vodka with chicken!" She was wearing a deep orange silk dress, her long hair curled and pinned in a ballerina bun on the top of her head. She is still so beautiful, Alexis thought. As usual, she was overdressed.
Her father glanced at his Rolex. "How much time do I have, Bun? There are some papers I wanted to go through."
She made a tsk sound. "No time at all. The food's already been prepared. I just have to pop it onto plates! Isn't that wonderful?"
Alexis covered her smile with her hand. Her mother was famous for going to various restaurants in town and having them cook dinner, which she would then bring home and nonchalantly serve up as though every housewife did this. Her dad seemed to be trying not to smile as well, there was just a brief flicker of amus.e.m.e.nt on his stone face, and Alexis shared a moment with him in which she thought things might just be fine after all. Their eyes locked and a mutual frustration yet deep love for Bunny crossed between them. It was over before Alexis could be sure it had happened. John Allbright turned and strode into the kitchen.