Chapter I #3
“Nobody is doubting you,” Evelyn said gently, even though we were literally all doubting her. “It just seems so … I mean … Well, Bernie, you don’t even play volleyball.”
“That’s probably why I took a volleyball to the face,” Bernadette said brightly, and we all had to admit she had a point.
She was wearing a vintage leather jacket with shiny silver buckles, and she’d smudged black eyeliner over the eye that wasn’t currently half-closed with swelling.
Clara, to my left, wore a pale blue dress with a Peter Pan collar.
She’d had Evelyn do her hair in two braids.
She was fourteen and still looked a bit like a baby.
On my diagonal, Evelyn spread a very even, neat layer of marmalade on a piece of wheat toast. She wore her favorite evergreen-hued turtleneck, and when she saw me looking at her, she smiled warmly.
“Are you going back to school?” Clara asked, even though Bernadette had sworn up and down all night that she would not be stepping foot back on that campus. But we all knew the morning light often changed people’s minds.
Not Bernadette’s, apparently.
She rolled her one good eye and said, “Can you all stop fucking asking me that?”
“But you love that school,” Evelyn said gently. Evelyn said everything gently.
We’d gone over all of this last night. Bernadette looked at me, for help, but I stuffed my mouth with toast and gave her a weak smile. She rolled her eye again.
“I have changed my goddamn opinion of school, Evelyn,” she said.
Todd’s packed tables in like sardines, and a gray-haired lady next to us sighed loudly at that, and said to Bernadette, “Can you please mind your language?”
“I don’t mind my language at all,” Bernie replied, and she flashed a smile so big and catching that the woman actually laughed.
“So you’re just going to live with us again?” Clara asked.
“Do you not want me to, Cece?” Only Bernadette ever called Clara Cece.
“Of course I want you to,” Clara said, her cheeks reddening with delight. I thought she was probably the one who missed Bernadette the most, because despite initially claiming she would never change a diaper, Bernadette had ended up being very fond of her third younger sister, and vice versa.
“Are you going to get a job?” I asked.
Bernadette raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been home for twelve hours and you want me to get a job? What are you, Dad?”
“She’s just asking,” Evelyn said. The peacemaker. But Bernadette wasn’t really annoyed; I could tell because she was still eating, and she never ate when she was annoyed, she always rested her fork down on the side of her plate and just waited.
“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Clara said.
“I’m glad you’re back, too,” I said.
“Of course I’m glad you’re back,” Evelyn said.
“I’m glad I’m back, too. When are Mom and Dad getting home?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. They were in the Berkshires, a place they went often because they had friends with a house there and didn’t have to pay for a hotel.
Our family wasn’t particularly wealthy, more luck-touched.
Our brownstone had been in the family for generations (and was, of course, paid off), and we all went to private schools on funds set aside by our father’s parents (except for Clara, who hadn’t wanted to).
Everything else was aggressively budgeted by our parents, and some months I caught them giving some very skeptical looks to a stack of pale red bills.
(“Persephone didn’t have to pay bills,” my mother would sometimes mumble, petulant and snooty, and my father would nod his head in a mollifying way and say, “Yes, darling, it’s so hard to be cast off Mount Olympus, isn’t it?
” in a tone that implied that perhaps he didn’t believe that particular old Farthing yarn.)
“I miss the Berkshires,” Clara said. “So green. There isn’t any green in the city.”
“We live two blocks from Central Park,” Bernie pointed out. “How much green do you want?”
“It’s not the same,” Clara said. “You know it’s not the same. There isn’t anywhere in Central Park you can go where you don’t hear cars.”
Clara was the only one of us who hadn’t gone to a private all-girls school on the other side of the park.
She was oddly practical, for a fourteen-year-old, and she’d negotiated a deal with our parents—she took the money they would have spent on private school and had them put it in a trust fund she could access when she was twenty-five.
I had a feeling, in about ten years, we’d all be pissed with ourselves for not going to her for financial advice.
Evelyn and I left the house every morning at seven and walked across the park together to get to our school on the Upper East Side. Evelyn was a senior now. She’d been offered a spot at a prestigious music conservatory next year. She hadn’t given them an answer yet.
I was sixteen and thought I would go to college for something unexpected and strange—like a classics course at a small liberal arts school in Vermont (I’d read The Secret History recently and won’t admit just how much it had altered my brain chemistry).
The art Clara made was dark and violent and strange.
Disembodied heads and fifty shades of black piled meticulously on top of each other and open, bleeding wounds leaking from the canvas like someone had cut it open from the outside.
It wasn’t anything like what you thought she would make, if you heard she was an artist. Our parents had hung an enormous piece over the fireplace on the ground floor.
It kind of creeped us all out to look at it, but also, we loved her, and it was beautiful, if you didn’t have a weak stomach.
Bernadette had gone to school for an undecided major.
We all knew she’d have to declare soon, and we were wondering if that was why she was here now, and it was what we were all thinking about as we ate our breakfast and realized, with a start, that she was suddenly sobbing.
Deep heaving sobs that wracked her shoulders and made the woman next to her, the one who’d scolded her about her language, jump with fright.
Evelyn didn’t say anything. She wrapped her arms around Bernadette and Bernadette turned her body and melted into Evie’s side.
Clara and I looked at each other. Neither of us were good at nurturing; open displays of emotion made the insides of my wrists itch.
I could feel the other diners looking at us, some of them neighborhood people, faces I had seen all my life but couldn’t put names to, and some of them strangers, visiting the American Museum of Natural History, tourists who’d taken the subway up from Union Square and stumbled into the first place they saw that said brEAKFAST in the window.
Clara took my hand, and I knew when I looked at her that she’d done something she shouldn’t have; her eyes had gotten very wide and she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking past me, and when I turned around my breath caught in my throat, because there were Mom and Dad, looking frazzled and car rumpled.
For a moment they didn’t see us, and then their eyes landed on me, and Mom practically launched herself across the room, pushing Bernadette’s butt over in her seat as she sat next to her and hugged her.
“I called Mom and Dad,” Clara whispered into my ear, as our father hung back awkwardly, even now, after all these years of practice, never quite knowing what to do with a table full of women.
“No shit,” I replied.
“She has a black eye,” Clara said.
“No shit.”
“What was I supposed to do!” Her voice was getting high-pitched, like it did when she was worried she’d done something wrong, so I gave a half-hearted wave to Dad and turned around to face her.
“It’s fine, Clara,” I said. “They’re here. It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.”
“Traitor,” Bernadette mumbled from underneath Mom’s left arm, but we could tell from the sound of her voice that she was mostly joking, and Clara relaxed a little and stabbed at her egg scramble, because she never left a meal unfinished, as a rule.
Dad was still sort of hanging out around the entrance, but Todd spotted him and brought a chair over next to me, apologizing to the woman who’d admonished us for our language but who was now looking quite thrilled at the soap opera of our family.
Dad came and sat down next to me. I’d always been closest with him, just by a little, and he put his hand on my knee and squeezed, relieved to finally be sitting.
“Hi, kiddo,” he said.
“Hi, Dad.”
He was facing me but his eyes were trained on Bernadette and Mom, who were still hugging. But at least it seemed like Bernie had stopped crying by then.
I slid my plate toward Dad, suddenly not very hungry, and he started eating without a moment’s hesitation, I think happy for the distraction.
Across the table, Evelyn met my eyes and she looked a little sad and far away.
With Evelyn, though, it was hard to tell what that meant.
Was she actually sad and faraway or was she composing a sonata in her mind?
I smiled at her and she smiled back and I noticed that her smile didn’t touch her eyes. She started eating again. Mom and Bernadette were still hugging. Everybody was either eating or hugging, except me and the woman next to us, who was eagerly awaiting the next move in our little family drama.
“Luckily there was no traffic,” Dad said, apropos of absolutely nothing. “Made it in about two and a half hours, if you can believe it.”
That meant Clara had been up at least three hours before anyone else, calling them from another floor, speaking in hushed tones so we wouldn’t overhear.
Clara didn’t seem to need as much sleep as the average person.
She was always the last to close her eyes and the first to open them.
She must have seen Bernadette’s black eye and sneaked downstairs to call our parents.