Chapter Twenty-Two
twenty-two
Lanie
“Next time I’m in town I have to visit my sister Siggy down in Philadelphia,” Ridley explained. “I’ve been promising to visit. And I think she’s starting to take it personally that I’ve been on the East Coast four times in the past three months and haven’t stopped by yet.”
Lanie lay on her bed talking with Ridley. She didn’t know when their text messages had graduated to transatlantic phone calls but now they were talking two or three times a week in addition to the texting. She had learned so much about him in that time. He was an Aries; he’d lived in the UK for thirteen years; he was originally from Worcester, Massachusetts; he was one of four kids; he’d gone to Williams College on an athletic scholarship for his undergraduate studies and then on to Harvard for medical school. And now, because she’d explained how small and tight her family was, he’d decided to tell her a little more about his own.
“You’re such a bad brother,” Lanie teased.
“I know, I know. I’m just dreading the drive but Sig’s convinced herself that I think I’m too ‘fancy’ now to condescend to spend time with her. Which I find ridiculous, in no small part because she’s a tenured professor at Temple. So I wonder, who’s afraid to associate with whom in this scenario?” He laughed. “My sister is very class-conscious.”
“My dad’s the same. He barely talks to his siblings down South, only my aunt Claudia. None of the others have ever even been invited to visit him, that I know of. He lives in Darien, Connecticut, in a six-bedroom house, with his white wife and two point three children.”
“‘Point three’? Isn’t it ‘point five’?”
“They have an old Persian named Truffle. And I deducted points because Truffle’s a little asshole.”
Ridley snorted. But Lanie winced remembering that one of the things he’d told her was that Thyra was biracial.
Why did I mention that Dad’s wife was white? Ryan and her resentments were in Lanie’s head even when Ryan wasn’t physically there.
“My teenage parents could barely handle the four kids they had,” Ridley admitted.
“I think I was a handful for my mom too. She ended up needing my grandma to come help her.” It was a gross oversimplification but made Lanie feel like she was sharing as much as he was.
“I wish my grandparents had chosen to stay more involved. Maybe then my parents wouldn’t have moved around so much or named all us kids after their favorite horror movies.”
“Really?” Lanie perked up, lifting her legs and crossing them at the ankle like she was a teenager talking to her crush. “Is that why you’re Ridley?”
He paused, then sighed before speaking. “Yep, my mom loved the Alien franchise and my dad’s favorites were the Halloween movies. So, ‘Sig’ is short for ‘Sigourney,’ then there’s Jamie Lee, Carpenter...and me, Ridley.”
Lanie’s barking laugh burst forth as she tried to stifle it. “No, no, I’m so sorry. I’m not laughing at you.”
“Seems like you are. But I get it. We used to get it all the time, particularly me and Sig. But even Jamie Lee legally changed her name to James in her twenties—”
“Lanie, you okay?” her mother called out. “I’m in the kitchen. Can I make you some lemon ginger tea for that cough?”
“Hold on a sec,” Lanie said quickly then punched the mute button and held the phone to her chest.
A minute later, her door opened a crack and Ryan’s face peeked in.
Lanie shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m just laughing.”
Ryan smiled. “Tell Gem Auntie says hi, and to give you a little break. She’s a grown woman, she can make at least some of those wedding decisions on her own.”
Lanie coughed out her residual chuckle. “Thank you for lookin’ out, Mommy. But it’s not Gem, she’s been scarily radio silent all weekend.”
“Probably saving it all up for when you see her next,” her mom said presciently.
“Probably.” Lanie looked down at the phone in her hand. “Well, I got to get back to him.”
“Him?”
Damn. She knew her mom was curious but after what she’d already said Lanie was reticent to divulge any details. “Yup, him.” She nodded, owning it. “Anyway, it’s my fault. I told Gem to tell me what she needed.” Lanie sighed, and that was biting her in the butt currently. “I am her maid of honor after all.”
Ryan shook her head. “There’s such a thing as overdoing it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Lanie, throwing yourself into helping them won’t do as much as you think it will to prove you’re not hurt.”
“Hurt?” Lanie understood after a moment her mother was talking about her and Jonah. Funnily, she hadn’t thought of him. Not in any real way. Not in weeks. Huh . The realization was bracing. “I’m not. Just being a good cousin.”
“Okay, ‘good cousin.’” Ryan closed the door on her way out. “’Night.”
Lanie rushed back to her phone. “I’m back. Is that another reason why you’re Ridley?” Lanie said, resuming their discussion as if it hadn’t paused. “Makes you sound like a white guy?”
“I wish it was that calculated since it would mean my parents had been thinking about it. It would have made a lot of the shit I got for being a Black kid named Ridley worth it.” There was a long pause. “But as I said, my parents are...free spirits.” He sounded like he was being facetious.
“I think ‘James’ is pretty cool for a woman,” Lanie offered.
“I do too. She’s a systems engineer for Raytheon down in Florida and said it makes things much easier because people always mistake her for a white man before they meet her.”
“Oh, but that’s not...” Lanie deflated. “She shouldn’t need a masculine name.”
“Agreed.”
There was a pause. “Though I do understand the impulse. I think if I’d applied to grad school as ‘Mel Turner’ I might have done better.”
“Bad grad school experience? I get that,” Ridley answered, clearing his throat. “Thyra had a lot of difficulties too. Back then, I had thought it was difficult for me, being a Black man in medicine, but seeing how doubly hard it was for her studying emergency surgery was humbling.”
Jesus, Thyra was a freakin’ surgeon? Lanie thought, hating the twinge of barely logical insecurity the knowledge unearthed, even as she saw the similarities between them both.
“Yeah, I bet,” Lanie answered quickly, sweeping a stack of readmission papers from her old grad school off her bed, suddenly angered. Dr. Markham’s application from Berkeley was among them.
“She had to work daily, hourly, to show her colleagues she deserved to be there. Again and again. At the top of her game constantly.”
Lanie could hear the second-hand frustration in his voice and she recognized it, having experienced it herself.
“We’ve tried to teach Bea that she deserves to be in any room she enters, but you know how it is. And I know it’ll always be an extra struggle for her. Even more difficult for her because she has dyscalculia.”
“Dyscalculia?”
“A learning disorder similar to dyslexia but far less well-known. Bea struggles with understanding or remembering mathematical concepts. We had to take her out of school for a little while when we first discovered it. It took years and a formal diagnosis before any of her teachers took us seriously.”
Lanie opened her laptop and typed “dyscalculia” into a Google search. As she read, the urge to share her experience with her anxiety grew, but it felt insensitive to shift the attention away from Bea.
“There were a million tests and assessments and parent-teacher conferences before we could get her help. We had to pay for a lot of it ourselves when going through the council stalled repeatedly.”
There was another extended silence. Lanie waited to see what else he would say, not wanting to overstep. “Yeah, that sounds like my cousin, Gem,” Lanie shared. “But for her it was dyslexia. Diagnosis took some time too and she ended up dropping out of school eventually. She’s a gifted hairstylist though.”
Lanie found she couldn’t talk about how, when faced with the adversities of grad school and the entitled boys’ club it was, she’d chosen to give up because of her crippling anxiety. She couldn’t admit that she’d allowed all the doubters and detractors who’d wondered what she was doing in their labs, who wouldn’t study with her, and professors who’d refused to mentor her and questioned her aptitude, to get into her head. Especially since admitting that to someone like Ridley, who had married someone like Thyra—both of whom had toughed it out and persevered—would only make her seem weak, cowardly or worse yet, like the doubters had been right.
“So, is Bea okay now?” she deflected.
“Sure, she’ll always have her challenges. She’s not neurotypical but she has strategies now, or as she calls them, ‘hacks’— thank you, YouTube —to deal with them.”
Lanie’s stomach rolled. She questioned, for a moment longer, whether or not to share her truth...the fact that the anxiety attack he’d witnessed wasn’t a one-off. That her struggle was ongoing. But she decided against it.
As close as they’d become in a few short weeks, they weren’t there yet.