Family Secrets Read online

  “No.”

  “Good. No parties. But your fiancé can come and go as he likes. I’m a very modern landlady!”

  “That’s great!” Julia exclaimed. “Sam!” She flashed him a genuine smile. “Welcome to my new home!”

  She had plenty of money from her clothing allowance and summer babysitting jobs. She paid Mrs. Overtoom, feeling enormously grown-up as she took the handwritten receipt. Sam waited while she unpacked her duffel bag, then they went together up to the campus for lunch. Friends of Sam’s drifted up to talk. Sam went off to class, leaving Julia to hunt for a job. Instead, she found herself wandering around the beautiful college grounds. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t at Gressex. She searched her soul for a bit of remorse, and found none. Even if Sam didn’t marry her, even if he came to despise her, she still had no regrets. She was free.

  In the early evening she met Sam and walked back down to her room, stopping on the way at Marino’s to pick up a six-pack of Diet Cokes, some sandwiches, and a tin of Band-Aids. Back in the room, Sam helped Julia take off the brown, blood-stained pieces of paper towel. He smoothed the bandages over her cuts, which were small, but ugly and jagged, crusted red-black, as if irritated. Then Sam did his homework on the floor while Julia lay on the double bed looking at the want ads in the local newspaper.

  At ten o’clock, Sam said, “All right!” and slammed his book shut. “I’ve kept my end of the bargain, Julia. Now you keep yours. Call your parents and tell them where you are.”

  “Okay.” Julia sighed.

  Together they went out of her room, down the hall, and into the living room where Mrs. Overtoom, whom Sam had already secretly nicknamed Mrs. Overload, sat watching television.

  “Would it be all right to use your telephone?” Julia asked.

  “Local?”

  “Long distance. But I’ll make it collect.”

  “All right. It’s in the kitchen. You can use it for local calls as long as you don’t tie up the phone, but no long-distance calls charged to this number.”

  “No, of course not. I won’t be on long.”

  Together Julia and Sam went back into the kitchen. He sat on the table while she stood next to the wall phone. Her mother answered and said she’d accept the collect call. “Julia! Darling! Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mother. I’m in Middletown with Sam. I’m sorry about worrying you and Dad, but I just couldn’t stay at school any longer.”

  “But Sonja said you—” Diane’s voice broke.

  “I’m fine, Mother!” Julia was instantly impatient. “I was just— Look. I’ll explain it all to you some other time. I just wanted to let you know where I am.”

  “I’m so glad you’re all right, darling. What are your plans?”

  “Mom, I’m going to get a job. I don’t want to go to school. I want to stay here and work and see Sam.”

  “Oh, Julia—”

  “Look, Mom, I don’t want to argue. Listen. I’ll call you again in a few days. I’ll talk to you longer then.”

  She slammed the receiver back into place, cutting off their connection. “Julia,” Sam said, “that wasn’t very nice.”

  “Oh, I hate talking to her. She always expects so much of me.”

  “Like what? What did she say?”

  “Oh, she wanted to know what my plans are. She probably thinks I should have every day of my month scheduled in a Filofax the way she does. She just doesn’t understand me, Sam. Please, don’t push me. I’ve done what you asked. I told her where I am and that I’m safe and with you. Now she won’t worry. I’ll call her back in a few days.”

  “I’d better call my parents, too,” Sam said.

  Her throat constricted with fear. What if the Weyborns convinced Sam—ordered him—to take her back? She crept back down the hall to her room and collapsed on her bed. Her hands on her throat were ice cold. She held the Band-Aids on her wrists to her nose, finding comfort in the sharp antiseptic smell that they gave off. She tried to inhale it. She closed her eyes and focused only on the scent.

  “Julia? What are you doing?”

  Sam came in the room and shut the door behind him. Turning, Julia waited for him to say he was leaving her now, his parents had insisted, he had to go back to his dorm room.…

  “Julia.”

  Sam sat down on the bed next to her and pulled her to him. When her head touched his chest, her breath returned in an explosion. She gasped and shuddered. He kept his arms around her. Warmth returned.

  “Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “Sam.”

  They fell down together on the bed and held each other. Sam pulled a blanket up over them. Exhausted, they fell asleep.

  In the morning Julia and Sam awakened very early. They made quick, silent love in the bumpy double bed before he pulled on his clothes and hurried up the hill. Julia dug around in the plastic bags she’d brought in, found a Diet Coke, and crawled back into bed to drink it as she contemplated the day ahead. She leaned back against the wall—the bed had no headboard—reliving the moments she’d spent that morning with Sam, hearing again the words of love he’d spoken, and then, with a spurt of energy, she jumped from the bed to begin her day.

  First she had to wash some clothes, mostly underwear and socks. She’d been away from Gressex only two days, but she hadn’t brought many clothes with her, and she’d always been fastidious about what touched her skin. Although she bought her clothes at thrift shops, she washed them constantly. In the large bathroom down the hall she’d found a plastic container of Ivory Liquid and set about soaking and scrubbing her clothes by hand in the small sink. White cotton socks, expensive, lacy underwear, white cotton shirts. She wore kind of a uniform of white cotton turtlenecks and white cotton oversized men’s shirts that went over blue jeans.

  It was the most wonderful experience, hanging her sweet-smelling clothes on the clothesline with knobbed wooden pins exactly like the ones her grandmother used. It was a cold day, but sunny, and Julia felt cheerful. She would not have taken a spoonful of sugar for her coffee without first asking the landlady, but as she slipped into her bedroom and pulled the door shut behind her, she held a wooden clothespin tightly in her hand. She intended to go out searching for a job, but the rumpled bed beckoned to her. She kicked off her loafers, crawled back into bed fully dressed, and lay looking at the clothespin as if it could stake down one more clear thing in the whirlwind of her life.

  Julia didn’t quite sleep, but she felt herself entering that relaxed state where the mind drifts free. The wooden clothespin in her hand blurred until she was in her grandmother’s backyard in McLean, and it was this past July, when she had gone down with her mother to help her grandmother move out of the wonderful house.

  Aunt Susan had come for the funeral, then flown home to organize her family, and was due back in two days to stay for a while to help. It was morning, and Julia was walking through the house munching Cheerios dry from the box as she stood studying each wall and corner of the rooms, trying to memorize every inch of this house she was losing forever. She’d wandered out onto the screened-in porch, which was lushly covered with climbing roses, ivy, and morning glories, and purely by accident she’d overheard her grandmother and her mother arguing.

  Diane was talking in a brittle, cheerful manner. “You know, Mother, in your condo you won’t be able to hang your laundry out on a line.”

  Julia was shocked by the gloating, even vicious, pleasure in her mother’s voice. She sank down onto a flower-cushioned wicker chair to eavesdrop.

  “I know,” Jean said, wistfully. “I’ve thought of that. It’s always been one of my greatest pleasures in life, hanging out the wash.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Mother. You talk like some dotty old peasant caught in a time warp. Everyone’s been using dryers for years and years.”

  “Well, I’m not ‘everyone.’ The smell of the sun and wind on my sheets at night is one of the things I’ve always treasured. Your father liked it, too.”

  “I�
��m sure he did. And I’m sure he liked knowing that you were using up hours of your days lugging this heavy basket outside, bending and stooping like a washerwoman, when other women were free to use dryers, and could save time and do something with their lives!”

  Julia’s stomach clenched at the bitterness in Diane’s tone and was surprised at the mildness of her grandmother’s reply.

  “Darling, I did do something with my life. You and I have always had our disagreements about that. It makes me so sad when you continually blame your father. I had a dryer. And I had help with the housework. It was my choice to hang out the laundry. I’ve always considered it a sort of ritual, Diane. You can laugh at me. But I always felt, each time I pinned clothes on the line, that I was invoking a kind of blessing, as if benevolent spirits were being blown into the fabrics that touched my family.”

  “Oh, God, Mother, sometimes you sound as superstitious as a pagan. Benevolent spirits! The stuff from the dryer was always soft, and whatever I took down from the clothesline was always scratchy and stiff!”

  “Well, Diane, you now have your own home and your own dryer. I’ve never tried to convince you to hang your clothes on the line. Have I? Have I? So won’t you please let me do my clothes my way. I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up about it.”

  “Oh, you’re just determined to be old-fashioned, aren’t you?” Diane concluded.

  The distress in her mother’s voice made Julia rise from the wicker chair and peer out through the thick lacing of vines. Diane was striding toward the house, swiping angrily at tears that were flowing down her face. Jean continued to hang up her wash, carefully shaking out a blouse, pinning it by its tail, uncoiling a sleeve so that it hung free.

  It was getting hot. The air was heavy, and now so quiet that Julia could hear the hum of bees on the other side of the screen. She lay back in the wicker chair and closed her eyes. Her mother was such a nag. She was always trying to get people to do things her way. Julia had been puzzled all her life by the way her mother kept trying to change her father, when it was obvious he was always going to stay the same.

  Julia lay in the mussed and bumpy bed in the rented room in Middletown, Connecticut. It was October but she was suspended between sleeping and waking, staring at the wooden clothespin that had brought back a day from summer.

  Now it brought back more.

  Julia’s memory had switched channels and she was no longer at her grandmother’s but in her own home, a little girl mystified by her parents’ endless, teeth-clenchingly civilized battles.

  Every night their mother gave them a bath, looked over their homework, and read them a bedtime story before tucking them in and kissing them good night. The nights she was out of town on business always held a tang of loneliness for Julia. Worse than that were the nights their mother tried to persuade their father to join in their routine. Often Julia and Chase would crouch at the top of the stairs holding their breath, listening to their parents’ whispered arguments.

  “Jim, it’s almost nine. You promised me you’d put the kids to bed tonight.”

  “I can’t, Diane. I’m busy. I need to finish reading this article. Can’t you take care of it?”

  “Of course I can. But I was hoping—”

  “Look, I’m involved in something important here! I wish you wouldn’t keep interrupting me!”

  Other disagreements arose with an almost ritualistic frequency over everyday breakfast madness.

  “Oh, no!” Julia would cry. “Mommy, I spilled my Cheerios!”

  “That’s okay, sweetie. Ask Daddy to sweep it up.”

  “Daddy—”

  “Better ask your mother to do it, sport. I don’t know where she keeps the broom.”

  “Mommy—” Anxiously Julia would look from one parent to the other.

  Her mother would speak over her shoulder as she hurriedly spread peanut butter and jelly on bread. “Jim, the broom’s in the broom closet. Over by the basement door. Or I’ll sweep it up and you finish making their lunches.”

  “I don’t know how to make their lunches. Anyway, I’ve got to go—”

  “Jim, I can’t do everything by myself.”

  “Diane, would you stop nagging me!”

  The door would slam as their father left for work.

  Another time:

  Chase’s seven-year-old voice, plaintive: “Mommy, there’s sticky stuff on my shoe.”

  “Ask your daddy to clean it off, darling. Daddy forgot to clean the kitchen floor after dinner last night; that’s why there’s sticky stuff on the floor and on your shoe.”

  “Okay, sport, I’ll clean off your shoe. Let me see it. Yuck. Diane, how can I get this off? I don’t think it’ll come off with just soap and a paper towel.” Her father sounded genuinely baffled.

  “I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” her mother answered, speaking in the no-nonsense, sensible voice that always warned Julia not to mess around.

  But her father didn’t seem to hear the warning. “Yeah, but I don’t know what this stuff on the shoe is. Hmm. Do we have any cleanser?”

  “Probably.”

  “Where is it?”

  Her mother’s voice was becoming tight with irritation, and a corresponding tightness clutched Julia’s chest. “I assume it’s under the sink.”

  “Or do you think cleanser would just stick to this stuff? It’s so gluey.”

  Diane turned to Julia and said, sweetly, “Honey, you’re not eating your carrots. Here. Let Mommy cut them for you.”

  At the sound of Diane’s normal tone, Jim seemed to relax. “Look, son,” he said, “let’s deal with your shoe after dinner. My food’s getting cold.”

  Diane’s voice suddenly became shrill. “Jim. Chase will finish eating before you do. He always does. If he runs through the house with that on his shoe—”

  “Okay. Chase. Tell you what. Take off your shoe. I’ll clean it up after dinner.”

  “Jim. You told me you’re going back to the lab after dinner.”

  “So?”

  “So please clean his shoe off now. He’ll need it for school tomorrow. If you don’t do it now, you’ll forget about it.”

  “Then I’ll clean it off when I come home tonight.”

  “No, you won’t! Jesus Christ, Jim, why do you make me go through this every time? You never do anything when you come home from the lab—”

  “Mommy, I’ll clean my shoe off! Look. I’m getting it off.”

  “Oh, Chase … here.” Their mother’s voice seemed to collapse. Quietly she said, “Let Mommy have it. It’s okay, honey. You sit with Daddy and eat your dinner.”

  Julia sat at the table, staring at her plate, while their mother stood at the sink, scrubbing Chase’s shoe.

  Another time. The worst time. The time that stuck her raw, wounded stomach with savage stabbing pins:

  “Julia? Julia, sweetie? Listen, it’s Daddy. Baby, we’re going to go to the hospital now so they can make you feel better. Remember what Dr. Walker said? That you might need to go? Well, he just called, and we’re going.”

  “I want Mommy.”

  “I know you do, sweetheart, and we’re trying to reach her. We’re calling her on the telephone, and she’ll come home as soon as she can. Here, honey, let Daddy put this blanket around you. I’m going to carry you down to the car. Mr. Donalin’s driving us. Won’t that be nice, in his big red car?”

  “I’m eight years old. I don’t want you to carry me. I’m a big girl.”

  “Oh, come on and be my baby just one more time. Let Daddy carry you. We’ll get Teddy and you can hold him.”

  “I don’t want the blanket, it’s too hot! It’s too hot when you hold me, Daddy. Your skin is too hot. It’s hurting me! I want Mommy!”

  The blur of white rooms, people dressed in what looked like white sheets, hands in rubber gloves, whispers everywhere, light that was so bright it burned her eyes. The voices.

  “We’re testing for spinal meningitis.”

  Her father�
�s face flinching, his eyes so full of pain Julia cried to see them. Julia didn’t understand the words, but she could clearly sense his terror. Who could take care of her? Who could fend off this white room, this heat, these strangers?

  “I want Mommy!”

  “Mommy will come. Mommy will come.”

  But Mommy did not come.

  In her bed in her rented room, Julia crammed her face into her pillow and sobbed. The wooden clothespin, forgotten, rolled off the bed and fell with a barely audible click onto the floor.

  When Sam woke Julia, it was early afternoon.

  “Lazybones,” he said. “There I was, slaving away over a hot calculus book and you were sleeping.”

  Julia had trouble opening her eyes. She felt warm and drowsy. Through her eyelashes she saw Sam, beautiful Sam, and smelled his apple-cider smell, cold now, fresh, from the outside air. She reached her arms up and pulled him down against her.

  “Mmmmm,” She breathed, hugging him tightly.

  But underneath, she felt his tenseness, resisting her.

  “Let’s run away, Sam,” she said urgently. Sitting up, she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Let’s run away and get married! Today!”

  Sam pulled back. “Julia. It’s right in the middle of the semester. I can’t run away. My parents have paid a year’s tuition.”

  “Oh, they have all the money in the world. Why worry about that? You can go to college anywhere! We just need a little time, another place, far away—”

  “Julia, stop it. I’ve brought you here. Let’s just take it easy.”

  “Your parents don’t want you to be with me.”

  “That’s not true, Julia. They’re concerned about you. Don’t be so paranoid.”

  “What did they say last night?”

  “They asked me to bring you home this weekend. Just so we can all talk. Julia, they want to help you. We all just want to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  Julia searched Sam’s face. This was not how she’d imagined it would ever be.