Chapter 6 Wendybird #2
“Go like go? Or go like I’ll just sit here in the dark?”
“Nobody’s sitting in the dark.”
“Okay.” Jill changed into long shorts and a hoodie. She sat on the kitchen window seat and laced up her shoes, but she kept glancing at Wendy, who had settled next to her mother at the table.
“Steve and Andrea are coming tomorrow,” Helen said, totting up the cousins at dinner. “And they’re bringing Nate.”
“They’re driving all that way?” said Wendy.
“Don’t worry. They’re not driving just for us. They’re on a college tour,” Charles said.
Wendy ventured, “What about Aunt Sylvia? She lives right here.”
Silence. Shadow. Winter in the kitchen.
Uh-oh, thought Jill, with her hand on the doorknob, but the next moment, Helen spoke mildly. “Could you get me more coffee, dear?”
Wendy poured another cup and Helen said thank you.
“Go ahead,” Wendy encouraged Jill.
“I’ll be right back,” Jill promised as she headed out.
Only when she was gone did Wendy follow up, earnest and a tiny bit rebellious. “I wish Sylvia could come.”
“Don’t provoke your mother,” Charles warned, because he was a pragmatist, but Wendy was a peacemaker.
“I miss Aunt Sylvia,” she said.
Helen didn’t answer.
“It’s just so sad,” said Wendy. “She’s your only sister, and she lives thirty minutes away!”
“I had two sisters,” Helen said.
“And what if you lose Sylvia too, and you never have a chance to forgive her?”
Iron-gray, Helen answered, “I don’t tell you how to live your life.”
—
When Jill returned, she found Wendy in the bedroom, sitting atop her little white child’s desk with her feet on her little white chair. She was playing “Here Comes the Sun.”
“What happened?” Jill asked.
Wendy shook her head and bent over her guitar, because how could she explain what she felt about her mother?
And Jill stood there flushed and healthy from her run, and she saw that the longer they stayed, the smaller Wendy became. She never laughed in her parents’ house. She never felt like going anywhere. Jill said, “Let’s just leave. Seriously. Pam had the right idea to stay home.”
Wendy looked alarmed. “You don’t think she’s coming?”
“I mean, who knows?”
“I’m worried about her,” Wendy said. “I think that cat broke her heart.”
Jill swiped the stuffed rabbit from the dresser and started tossing it from hand to hand.
“You know she suffers from depression,” Wendy said.
“Uh-huh.”
“She tried to kill herself in college.”
“Really?” Jill palmed the rabbit. “How?”
“Jill!”
“Sorry!” Jill was sheepish, because okay, yes, how was maybe not the first thing you should ask.
“She swallowed a whole bottle of muscle relaxant,” Wendy said.
“Hmm.”
“They had to pump her stomach. It was bad!”
“Okay.”
Wendy shot Jill a look. “Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it was just a call for help.”
“I would never say that!”
“You would think it.”
“I think a lot of things.”
“I’m just saying, Pam is going through something.”
“Yeah, definitely—but you know what? If you’re going through something, you probably don’t go to Helen.”
—
The next morning, Helen’s guests began to gather, but Pam did not arrive. All was ready. The buffet was set, and still Pam didn’t come.
Of course, Helen did not call to find out what was going on. She did not ask questions. She endured, serving fruit salad, bagels, lox, white fish, dry mandelbrot, heavy apple cake.
There were a dozen friends to feed, along with the New Jersey cousins.
Steve and Andrea talked about their visits to BU, Tufts, Northeastern, and Brown, while their kid, Nate, said nothing.
Wendy’s cousin Dan and his wife Melanie arrived.
They held up Dan’s phone to show a video of their daughter, Phoebe, playing her violin in a subway station.
Long gold hair and blue-gray eyes. Gorgeous strands of sound, until the train came roaring like a monster.
Phoebe reminded Jill of Wendy, making music despite everything.
In the kitchen, Wendy was arranging miniature Danish on a tray. “How’s that?” she asked her mother.
Helen frowned and said, “It’s fine.”
Then Jill watched Wendy hide her disappointment, because fine meant terrible. Opening her presents, Helen examined the handknit cowl Wendy gave her, studying each row for flaws. Suck it, Jill thought. You won’t find anything.
Meanwhile, Wendy kept hoping for the best and, what do you know? Long after Helen had given up on Pam, Wendy saw her sister’s car through the kitchen window.
“She’s here!” Wendy called out, breathless.
Pam came the back way through the garden and screened porch.
Everything about her was tiny, her thin little arms, her pixie cut, and she was loaded down with bags and leash and Rosie barking everywhere.
“My backup sitter fell through,” Pam apologized, and Helen actually said it didn’t matter, and kissed her briskly on the cheek.
The dog would sleep in her crate on the porch—that went without saying—but catastrophe had been averted.
Helen would not disown her. No, on the contrary, joy suffused Helen’s face, softening her disapproving lines.
Amazing, thought Jill. Even with the late arrival, even with her hyper and unwelcome dog, Pam remained the favorite.
Wendy took Pam’s coat. She cut her a slice of cake, but Pam turned to everybody else—Cousin Steve and Andrea and even Nate, who favored her with his deep, rumbling, almost inaudible replies. Good. I don’t know. I’m not sure.
Whenever Wendy tried to talk to her sister, Pam looked away, distracted. She had to eat. She had to speak to someone else. In the real world, Wendy was next-level. Renaissance! She could rewire a lamp, explain Judaism, bake a three-tier wedding cake. Here in her mom’s house, she was extraneous.
Jill stalked out to the porch where Rosie paced, worrying a tennis ball. Instantly, Rosie was up in her face.
“Down. Down! Wow, you are so lonely.” Jill tried to pry the ball from Rosie’s mouth. “I can’t throw the ball if you don’t let go.” She opened the porch door. “Okay, girl. Get it!”
Rosie sprinted through Helen’s muddy flower beds. Every time, she brought the ball back, slobbering, and every time, Jill had to talk her into giving the thing up. Sweet dog, but not super bright.
They stayed in the backyard until people began leaving, some waving to Jill through Helen’s kitchen windows. “Take care,” Jill called back, waving. “Talk soon!”
She entertained the dog until the cold pinched her toes, and her nose started running, and the last guests were gone. Then she called Rosie and tossed the ball into the crate.
A flash of pink.
“Whoa.” Jill reached in. “What do you have here?” An old blanket, some rubber toy, and in the back, the shredded remnants of a pink yarn hat.
“Where did you get this?” Jill asked Rosie.
Then she said, “Don’t answer that.” The hat was all clawed up and ruined, as if Rosie had been teething on it. “Pam gave this to you!”
Rosie was jumpy, eager to run out again. She had more energy than one little screened-in porch or yard could hold. She kept nudging, pleading, but Jill ignored her. She balled up the rat’s nest that had been Wendy’s gift and hid it in her sweatshirt pocket.
In the living room, Charles was stacking wood in his deliberate way, tending the fireplace. Helen sat on the couch with Pam on one side and Wendy on the other. There was room for Jill, but she said, “That’s okay.”
“Thanks for playing with Rosie,” Pam told Jill. “She was cooped up in the car so long.”
Jill said, “Sure.” You’re welcome, bitch, she added silently.
Maybe Rosie had snatched the hat and slobbered on it and Pam just gave it to her.
Maybe Rosie had chewed the padded envelope itself.
She’d got into the mail and destroyed it.
The dog was so bored. She needed to be out hunting, not cooped up in Pam’s car or townhouse.
Probably the mailman was the only living soul she saw all day.
Pam didn’t deserve a dog. Or a sister. When Jill went upstairs to change, she shoved her sweatshirt with the ruined hat into her open duffle bag.
—
At dinner Pam talked about her work, and Charles mentioned installing a new fence. Wendy ventured something about the kids she taught at After School, and how some of them were discovering they could sing. She believed, in her pure way, that anyone could learn.
Her mother countered, “I’m not so sure.”
“With the right teacher, they can,” Jill interjected, startling everyone. She spent the rest of the dinner mulling the things nobody mentioned—starting with Pam’s cat.
After dinner, she and Wendy retreated upstairs.
Wendy brushed her teeth and put on her nightgown and dove into bed, while Jill rummaged through the white bookcase full of children’s books.
What the Moon Brought. All-of-a-Kind Family.
All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown. Hurry Henrietta: A Biography of Henrietta Szold.
“Who was…?” Jill said and broke off when she saw that Wendy was asleep.
Poor thing. She was tired out. Jill, on the other hand, was full of energy.
She skimmed The Man Who Loved Laughter, a biography of Sholom Aleichem.
Kneeling, she started reading The Adventures of K’tonton: A Little Jewish Tom Thumb.
The kid was just a few inches tall, but nobody ignored him.
Footsteps. Someone on the stairs. Jill stole out to the landing, listened for a second, and then ducked back into Wendy’s room to grab her sweatshirt.
The house was dark, but she heard a prowler in the kitchen. No, the den. Softly, trained in surveillance, Jill glided down the stairs and found Pam in front of Charles’s liquor cabinet.
Jill came up right behind her. “Boo.”
“Oh God,” Pam gasped. “You scared me.”
“Too bad,” said Jill.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pam asked shakily.
“Let me,” Jill said more kindly, as she poured two shots of Scotch. “Sit.”
Pam sank into her dad’s big leather chair, and Jill handed her a drink.