“How’s your lesbian lover?” Bea would ask Melody, referring to Leah. “You guys going steady yet?”
“Shut up,” Melody would say. She didn’t even know at first what lesbian meant. She sneaked into Leonard’s study one day to look it up in the dictionary and then had to look up homosexual and although she knew right away that the word didn’t describe her, she knew who it did describe: Jack. She pictured Jack and his friends sitting in the summer sun, lounging by the pool at the club, rubbing baby oil on each other’s shoulders. Homosexuals, she thought, slamming the book closed.
Melody had led everyone to the kitchen at the back of the first floor. There were no streamers, no balloons, no festive paper plates and matching cups or shiny cardboard letters spelling out Happy Birthday strung above the breakfast nook, but there was a cake box. Melody was hugely relieved to see that there would, at the very least, be cake.
“Where’s the party?” Kate said, staring at the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes and the table scattered with catalogs and empty grocery bags.
“The party is wherever you make it, ladies.” Francie had followed the girls to the kitchen to refill her glass, the martini shaker glistening on the butter-and-crumb-streaked counter. “Party is an attitude, not a destination.”
The girls looked at her, confused. Even though it was February, Francie marched the girls outside to the lawn beyond the patio, which was devoid of snow but still frozen and bare, and led an anemic game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. “For God’s sake,” Francie yelled, standing on the patio in a fur coat, smoking, as the girls walked gingerly forward, mittened hands stretched out in front of them, “how hard can it be to locate an enormous tree trunk?”
The Pin the Tail game was old, had been sitting in the storage area under the stairs for years. Melody frantically tried to remember what else was housed in that space overloaded with broken toys and old board games. How could she fake a party for two whole hours?
“I think you girls have the hang of it,” Francie said after bringing them back inside and handing Leah a key chain with a tiny dangling Rubik’s cube from the junk drawer as a prize for pinning her tail closest to the donkey’s ass. “I’ll check back with you in a little bit.”
Melody started sifting through the boxes under the stairs, wondering if she could salvage enough Monopoly money to keep a game going. “I have Twister,” she said to her friends. “The spinner is broken, but we can close our eyes and point to a color and play that way. It works just as well.”
“Maybe I should just call my mom,” Beth said. All the girls were still wearing their coats.
“I’m thirsty,” said Leah.
“We could have cake?” Kate suggested. The other two girls nodded eagerly.
Melody knew that cake was the last thing to happen at a birthday party. After all the games and snacks, the birthday cake was cut and everyone grabbed their gift bag and went home. Melody did not want to cut the cake. As she stood there with the broken Twister spinner in her hand, trying not to surrender to the tears that had been threatening to spill forth with humiliating force since her mother had greeted them, the front door opened. Leo.
Leo had taken pity on Melody that day. He made huge bowls of buttered popcorn for the girls. He went up to his room and brought back a deck of cards and taught them how to play blackjack with pennies; he played the dealer. He brought down the vinyl records he kept under lock and key in his room and let them dance and lip-synch behind his air guitar version of “Start Me Up.” Just when things were looking up, Francie reappeared, ushering the girls—sweaty and breathless and all a little in love with Leo—into the living room for cake, a cake she’d clearly forgotten to order in advance. “Congratulations, Betty!” the cake said, with a little frosting stork underneath, carrying a folded diaper in its beak.
“Who’s Betty?” Beth asked.
“That’s another family joke,” Melody said, enjoying the versatility of this new excuse, tucking it away for future use. The cake tasted delicious, though, and the girls all took huge pieces and moved to the sofa, where Francie made them sit and listen to her play Harold Arlen songs on the piano. At first it was fun and watching her mother’s fingers almost dance above the keyboard, Melody thought that if the party ended right then, right after the rousing version of “If I Only Had a Brain,” everything would be fine. The party would be dubbed a success the next day at school. Her reputation saved.