Chapter 13 Victoria #2
“You guessed it. My parents were furious. They acted like I did it intentionally, as if I drove up there not to celebrate him, but to sabotage my brother. And I haven’t been back since then, so this should be fun.
Buckle your seat belt,” Victoria said with a half smile.
She pulled onto the freeway, which was mercifully flowing this morning rather than clogged with thick ropes of traffic.
Victoria realized that despite the reason precipitating it, she was already enjoying this road trip.
It was the first she had ever taken with a friend.
The absurdity of that—and of the idea of two pregnant women belting out classic tunes like “Free Fallin’ ” on their way to the armpit of the great state of California for such a solemn occasion—suddenly struck Victoria as hysterical.
She cracked up, and Liz looked over with alarm.
“What’s happening?”
“It’s funny,” Victoria said, hiccupping with laughter. “And ridiculous. It really is.” Victoria’s hysteria slowly abated. “Sorry.” She signaled and switched into the HOV lane.
“Don’t be,” Liz said. “I think any reaction after a parent dies is completely normal.”
Victoria smiled at her. “I’m glad you’re here with me.”
“Me too. Thank you for inviting me.”
“Fresno? For a funeral? What could be better than that?”
“My boss’s face when he got my email calling him a rapey hack?”
Victoria cracked up all over again.
As they discussed everything from politics to Victoria’s baby shower to the sublime, almost indescribable experience of feeling their babies move inside them, the extended metropolis of Los Angeles gave way to suburban strip malls, and then stretched into flat, endless plains as they made their way farther in-state.
They stopped at several rest stations for bathroom breaks and sustenance, Liz leading the charge to select the requisite road trip items—warm, doughy pretzels dusted with salt crystals, oversized Big Gulp slushies the shade of stoplights, french fries sweating oil from the fryer they had emerged from, and a handful of Snak Club bags filled with sour watermelons, gummy bears, toffee peanuts, and chocolate trail mix.
Victoria picked out two trucker hats, T-shirts bearing the rest stop’s name, and furry novelty sunglasses made in China.
When Ace called to check on Victoria with one hour to go to Fresno, she answered over the car’s Bluetooth and told him she was having a great time.
Ace sounded slightly baffled by her jubilant tone, but relieved, and thanked Liz for being such a good friend to his wife.
Then a Miley Cyrus song came on the radio, and while Liz sang along and bopped her head to the beat, Victoria shimmied her shoulders since she didn’t know the words.
Their faces shone with the pleasure of camaraderie as they crossed into Fresno, the “best little city in the U.S.A.” according to the sign on the side of the road.
When Victoria arrived at the home she had grown up in, her mother instantly appeared at the threshold, clad in all black with the countenance of the grim reaper himself, perhaps to spectate at Victoria’s arrival like she might accidentally drive over the gravel front path or trample her prized begonias.
Jimmy emerged in the doorway behind the bereaved widow and inspected Victoria’s car like he had never seen a Range Rover in person before.
“I better go face the execution squad,” Victoria said, already weary from the effort.
They got out of the car and Victoria’s mother and brother both did a double take, their eyes sliding over her body to determine whether Victoria had shape-shifted or if she was pregnant.
From their expressions, both were equally possible.
Their gazes bounced to Liz next; Victoria’s mother stared at the two women with an uneasiness that suggested she was confronting evidence of a contagion infiltrating her home.
“Hi,” Victoria said. “This is my friend Liz.”
“Nice to meet you both,” Liz said politely.
Neither her mother nor brother returned the favor. They stood there, as welcoming and impassive as the security detail outside the White House. “As you can see, I’m expecting,” Victoria said. “Liz too. We’re due at the same time.” The silence that ensued could also be described as pregnant.
“I thought you married a guy,” Jimmy said finally.
This was going to be ten times more insufferable than the awards-day TED Talk debacle. Victoria cleared her throat. “Ace—my husband—is in London and couldn’t make it back in time. Liz was kind enough to come with me.”
“Oh,” Jimmy said, literally scratching his head.
“I guess you’ll be wanting to come inside,” Victoria’s mother said.
Not particularly, Victoria thought. But she offered a polite smile of assent and her mother sidestepped to allow for entry.
Victoria and Liz trundled inside the modest house and Victoria was struck by the sense of inertia it exuded.
In five years, so much had changed in her life, and yet it was as if here, in her childhood home, time had stood still.
The same scent had always clung to these walls—musty floral potpourri.
The faded wallpaper, the yellow curtains hanging like overgrown bangs on the kitchen window over the sink, the linoleum flooring, the telephone extant in its wall mount, the round wooden table wedged into a corner so it had only ever really fit three chairs comfortably, not four—nothing had changed.
“Everyone’s out back,” Jimmy said. Victoria and Liz followed him wordlessly; her mother stayed behind, busying herself with some unnamed, important task.
They entered the screened-in porch where mourners were gathered alongside a folding table of refreshments—two-liter bottles of every variety of soda imaginable, clear plastic boxes of cookies cracked open like clamshells to display their contents, and a large plate of crackers next to a can of Cheez Whiz.
The small room couldn’t contain all the guests, so they spilled out into the backyard, where tufts of dirt still outnumbered patches of grass and a storage shed battled with the elements to prove its fortitude.
When Victoria and Liz entered, the pockets of conversation abruptly ceased.
Victoria put up a hand in greeting to the general vicinity.
“Victoria’s here,” Jimmy announced needlessly. “And she’s pregnant. And she brought a pregnant friend. But they’re not lesbians.”
“Thank you, Jimmy,” Victoria hissed under her breath.
He turned to her. “What?”
“Never mind.” Victoria shot Liz a plaintive look. “Do you want a drink? Or an Uber to the hotel?”
“I’m totally fine,” Liz assured her.
“That makes one of us. I have never not wanted to be sober any less than this exact moment.”
Liz sympathetically rubbed her shoulder. Victoria saw her cousin Kristine approaching and mentally rectified her previous statement: Make that this moment.
“No way!” Kristine said. “This is nuts! Congrats, Cuz.” Victoria saw that middle age had not tempered Kristine’s fondness for a full face of makeup. Her eyebrows looked like they had been drawn on and her hair was striped with highlights. Kristine cracked her gum and looked at Liz. “You too.”
“Thank you,” Victoria and Liz murmured at the same time.
“Let me tell you, it’s murder on the body.
I still piss a little when I laugh—or cough—or sneeze, but I love my little fuckers,” Kristine said, gesturing behind her to two gangly teenage boys who were calmly beating the shit out of each other in the driveway.
“My Benny’s got a mean right hook,” Kristine bragged.
“How—nice,” Liz said.
“Does he box? Or wrestle?” Victoria asked, trying to seem interested and avoid looking at a small child who appeared to be licking rocks and eating dirt nearby.
Kristine furrowed her brow and frosty-blue eye shadow caked in the corners of her eyes.
“In one of those tight-ass spandex onesies? Over my dead body!” she said.
Then Kristine seemed to realize the impropriety of this statement given the context and crossed herself.
“Sorry, Father.” She looked at Victoria. “And sorry about yours.”
The afternoon passed in a similar way. Victoria accepted condolences, braved her mother’s contemptuous silence, and withstood the shock of a whole town that never thought Victoria would find someone who wanted to love her or procreate with her.
When guests eventually filtered out, Victoria and Liz escaped to Jimmy’s former room, which her mother had turned into a sewing room.
Victoria’s childhood bedroom had been claimed by Jimmy the second she left for college, all chess-team trophies and SAT study guides swept away to erase any evidence of her presence.
“I don’t know why I came here,” Victoria said, her face drawn and her mood dismal.
“Because he was your father?” Liz suggested delicately.
Victoria’s phone chimed and she checked a text from Jen, who said she couldn’t get away from the kids’ soccer practice, but she’d see her at the funeral in the morning. “My friend Jen,” Victoria explained to Liz, gesturing to the phone. “I owe her an apology.”
“Why?”
“I looked down on her,” Victoria said. “I did to her exactly what everyone here did to me my entire life: I judged her for her choices. She was the closest thing to a kindred spirit I had, so when she dropped out of college to get married and told me that all she wanted in life was to be a stay-at-home mom, I was horrified. I could have been disappointed for her, but I shouldn’t have told her I was disappointed in her. ”
“You could still tell her that.”
“You’re right,” Victoria said. “Jen will probably think it’s because I’m pregnant now so I see the value in her choices, but that’s not it. If she’s happy managing her kids’ schedules and volunteering for school plays, who am I to say she should be more than a stay-at-home mom?”
“I think she’ll appreciate that,” Liz said. “But don’t go getting soft on me. I need someone to boss me around and tell me what to do with my life now.”
Jimmy walked into the room at that moment, interrupting Victoria and Liz laughing together in the corner. He raised an eyebrow, as if he had confirmed his belief that things were more than platonic. “Ma and I were gonna go through some of Dad’s stuff.”
“So soon?” Victoria didn’t understand what the rush was, but Jimmy shrugged. She turned to Liz. “It’s been a long day. Why don’t you take the car and check into the hotel? I’ll catch a ride and be over in a bit.”
“Are you sure?”
Victoria gave Liz the reservation number and her car key, promising she wouldn’t be too long—and instructing Liz to send a SWAT team if she was.
Then she joined her mother and brother in her parents’ bedroom.
Victoria felt uneasy in these quarters, as if she were a child walking in on something illicit.
Jimmy didn’t exhibit any such discomfort in invading their parents’ domain; he plopped on the bed and watched their mother carry over an armful of their dead father’s clothing from the closet.
“We didn’t have a will,” their mother announced. “Your father always said, ‘What’s the point in paying a lawyer when I can write it down myself?’ ”
“He wrote down his wishes?” Victoria asked.
“He didn’t have time, Victoria. He died before he had the chance!”
Victoria pressed her lips together. Her brother flashed her an annoyed look: Why do you have to upset her like that?
“Sorry,” Victoria said. “And to be clear, I don’t want anything. I’m only here…” She paused. Why was she there? “To pay my respects.”
Her mother scoffed. After a full day testing her self-control, Victoria was running on empty. “Is that funny?” she asked her mother.
“It is, considering you’ll show up for a funeral but didn’t want us at your wedding.”
“Some of the neighbors saw the announcement in The New York Times,” Jimmy explained.
Victoria’s mother turned to Jimmy as if the topic weren’t worth further discussion. “Take whatever you want of his clothes. Anything else we’ll give to the church donation bin. I’m going to keep his wedding ring, and I thought you should hang on to his watch.”
“Thanks, Ma.”
“He loved that watch.”
Victoria felt as unwanted as a hemorrhoid and as out of place as a financial analyst at a rave.
She tried to determine a non-obstreperous way she could remove herself from the situation.
But when Victoria shifted on her feet, her ankles suddenly feeling as heavy as the emotional pall cast over the room, they both looked over at her.
“Are you going somewhere?” her mother asked.
“No.”
Her mother then opened the bottom drawer of her father’s nightstand and, from underneath a pile of old remotes, chargers to nonfunctioning phones, and other assorted junk, pulled out a manila folder.
She glanced at it with confusion, flipped through briefly, then handed it to Victoria without pageantry.
Victoria took the innocuous-looking folder, wondering if this was the moment she had hungered for in her youth, when she would finally learn that she had been adopted and all the photos of her pregnant mother had been Photoshopped.
But the contents of the folder caught her by even more surprise.
Inside, Victoria found every newspaper article she had either written or been featured in, old term papers, report cards smattered with straight A’s, written commendations from her teachers, a National Merit Scholarship award, and copies of every single college acceptance letter.
It was a comprehensive capsule of the achievements Victoria never thought her father had noticed.
Tears sprang to her eyes and Victoria choked them back, her throat suddenly raw with the effort.
“I need to stretch my legs,” she croaked, then fled the room before her mother or brother could say anything.
Victoria traversed the hallway and living room of the house in six strides, then flung upon the front door and took a large gulp of air, reeling.
When Victoria looked up, she saw that Liz was sitting in the Range Rover, waiting for her.
Her friend hadn’t gone ahead to the hotel without her.
And then the tears came. Liz wordlessly got out of the car and held Victoria in her arms.
“It’s okay,” she soothed, offering up the instinctive incantation of a mother comforting a child after they had fallen and skinned a knee. “It’s going to be okay.”
Victoria and Liz stood there, two expectant mothers who had never been properly mothered, who had not been shielded from the disappointments and injustices of life but still could find themselves surprised by its largess and, more to the point, loved.
Victoria let the tears cascade down her face, weeping for all that could have been and all that still could be, for the exquisite agony and joy of being human.