“We’re eating ham sandwiches,” Allen said. “Do you want mine? It’s disgusting.”
Tina looked up at me deferentially. She did want to stay, I could tell, but not unless I wanted her to. “I should really get going,” she said.
Regret lumped in my throat, but I simply couldn’t look Tina in the eye with an open sore on my chin, with a nephew like this, who would thrill in pointing out my every flaw to her. “The least I can do is make you lunch,” I offered weakly.
“I don’t really like ham,” Tina said. The pair of us, unable to say what we really wanted, would have been comical if it weren’t so sad.
“There’s cheese,” Allen said. He grabbed her hand and tugged her inside. “The yellow and white kind.” He dragged her into the kitchen, eager to impress our beautiful visitor. When you look like Tina, children like Allen are just children. They can’t hurt you.
* * *
Allen insisted on being the one to make the cheese sandwich for Tina. I was a terrible cook, he told her, and I argued that I was actually an excellent cook, and he said no, I wasn’t, and I knew it would go on and on if I didn’t put an end to it, so I forced myself to do the adult thing. Tina laughed and said, “More women should be terrible cooks, actually.” I laughed with her, and Allen glowered, too young to understand but old enough to feel left out.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to the two of them, and then I dashed upstairs to pat the good makeup on my chin. For a moment, in the more humane lighting of my own bathroom, I wondered if those Acnotabs were actually starting to work. I didn’t look half as hideous in the mirror as I did in my mind.
When I came downstairs, Tina was standing in the wallpapered dining room before a photograph on the mahogany chest that had belonged to my grandmother.
“Allen wanted me to eat in here,” she explained without turning around. She pointed. “Is this your dad?”
The picture had been taken at my brother’s wedding eight years ago. When the photographer had said, Just the groom’s side now, my father had clapped his hand on CJ’s shoulder and stayed him in place. My sister-in-law had cast me a sympathetic look from behind her lace veil, acknowledging what had taken me years to recognize: my father was giving me an out. Quite literally an out—at the time that photograph was taken, I was living in a hospital, working through a severe emotional disturbance. Just like Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer, I would tell myself on my darker days.
CJ was married to another woman on the day that picture was taken, but no doubt my father had viewed this as a mitigating factor. CJ’s wife was a pathetic woman four years his senior. They had gotten together in high school when he was just a freshman. CJ had always looked older than he was; he was short and stocky and entered Issaquah Catholic Upper sporting a full beard, a man’s beard. The older girls went after him like it was a blood sport—students placed bets, money was won and lost.
In that photograph, CJ was still young, but his twenty-five-year-old wife was getting old. She was a heavy drinker, a nasty drunk who had to be escorted out of bars, stumbling and slurring obscenities. She had shown up to the church reeking of gin, and by the time we’d reached the reception, she had removed her shoes and lost her purse. My father had to break up an argument between her and CJ, and he was the one who called a cab for her and asked one of our cousins to escort her home. He insisted CJ stay, that he was like a member of the family and he could not miss the wedding reception of one of his oldest friends.
I knew CJ had feelings for me. Everyone in my family did. He was my protector when we were kids—he punched a neighborhood boy in the mouth after he threw a snowball that accidentally struck me and knocked me off my bike. I sensed it growing into something else, at least on his side, once I hit high school. I never thought it would amount to anything, though, not only because CJ was married by then but because he knew the reason for my hospitalization.
He shouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me, but on my brother’s wedding day, liberated from his angry, aging wife, his old longing surfaced again. I’m sure my father thought he was doing both of us a favor by moving CJ to our table, by spinning me into CJ’s arms on the dance floor when the music slowed and couples swayed. But now I think we might have been the ones performing a service for my father.
I’m seventeen years old in the picture, my skin institutionally dull but clear—the acne cropped up after I married CJ, like protective warts. I look very agreeable and lovely in my blue bridesmaid’s dress, but my shoulders are slumped, like I’d just released a heavy sigh, realizing what I’d gotten myself into.
“That’s my dad,” I told Tina.
Tina stroked her chin like some sort of British detective puzzling over a clue. Then she made a noise, the sort of hmmm! you make when someone has a good point, a point you’d never considered before.
I stepped up alongside Tina and looked again at the picture, at my father’s lips parted in a laugh while the rest of us wore our polite picture smiles. If you had never met my father, you might imagine from his expression that he produced a booming laugh from deep within his low-hanging Buddha belly. My father appeared beefier in pictures than he was—in person he was tall and pear-shaped, with a girlish giggle, an impish heeheehee that he seemed to serve on his tongue, the sort of laugh that made everyone else laugh too.
“And that’s my ex-husband,” I said, indicating CJ.
Tina seized the photo in both hands and brought it close to her face, examining every hair in CJ’s red beard. “For how long?”
CJ and I had sneaked around for years, but our marriage had lasted far less. “Not long,” I said with a short laugh.
Tina turned the picture around and showed it to me as though it were my first time seeing it. “I mean, no wonder. Look what a knockout you are.”
I blushed, wondering if I was still a knockout.
Tina set the picture back on the mahogany chest. “But your posture.” She copied me by rounding her shoulders. “I hunch like that too when I’m depressed.”
I felt like she’d dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. Immediately sobered, I saw Tina clear-eyed, the way my mother had all along. Well, therapists need clients, don’t they? That’s how they earn their living. How pitiful of me to think she had stopped by for any other reason than to fish, to try and get me to open up and realize that I needed her help.
“That picture was taken after a long day,” I said defensively. “Partly I was just tired.” Tina was reading too much into things, looking for some kind of psychological underpinning in places where, yes, it was, but only coincidentally.
Tina pursed her lips and nodded. She wouldn’t argue with me, but she didn’t believe me either. “What’s the rest?”
“Huh?”
“You said partly. What else is there?”
“I wish you’d knock it off,” I said, to my own absolute shock. I never spoke to people like that. I hated to hurt people’s feelings, to make anyone feel bad even when they deserved to feel bad. I started to apologize, but Tina shook her head vehemently. No. No. No.
“I’m the one who should be apologizing. You are so right. Frances is always warning me not to do this to people. Analyze their every breath when I don’t have all the information. Plus, who wants to feel like they’re being studied? It’s annoying. I’m annoying.” She could laugh because she knew it wasn’t true. Still, I was amazed that she’d taken my outburst in stride. It wasn’t like I had never been critical of someone, but I was used to seeing that person crumple in agony and realizing it just wasn’t worth it to be so honest. People were too easily destroyed.