Chapter 4 #2
Clemence listens from the back seat where she’s wedged in between the twins who are strapped into their giant car seats, because apparently children require car seats until they’re old enough to vote now.
The car seats seem more suited to space travel than a trip up the highway, aerodynamic, except for all the plastic and metal edges that are stabbing Clemence on both sides, which would be uncomfortable enough, but also Juniper has already vomited twice.
Nobody else is fazed by the puking, especially Juniper herself, who appears, out of thin air, to produce a yellow beach pail in which to spew.
The first time it happens, they are still in the city, and Grace pulls over so Allison can empty the pail’s contents by the side of the road.
But now that they’re on the highway, there’s no stopping, and Clemence has the bucket on her lap, trying not to breathe through her nose, her arms extended as long as possible, but there is so little room, and she’s terrified that if Grace comes to a sudden stop, the bucket’s contents could spill all over her.
Upon arrival, Grace helps yank Clemence from her confines, once the twins are sprung, and Allison accepts the puke pail with a nod of thanks, but she doesn’t have to carry it for long, because Bonnie arrives to greet them, taking the bucket without a word—apparently the puking is routine—and managing to hold it steady while her grandchildren climb her like a tree. Balance has always been Bonnie’s forte.
It feels good to be home, Clemence thinks, never more so than now that she doesn’t have to stay here, which means she can take in the pleasures of the food, and the comfort, and even her parents’ attention without it all becoming too much.
“Grace said your place is pretty terrific,” Roger tells her when she goes out to meet him grilling burgers in the backyard.
She kisses him on the cheek and asks how he knows that, since Grace is still out front unloading the car.
“She texted your mother,” says Roger. When Allison was emptying the plastic pail? When had she found the chance?
Clemence reminds her father, “I already told you the place was all right.”
“It’s nice to have it verified.”
“My word isn’t enough?”
Her dad turns back to the burgers. “We worry about you.” And they do, because she’s giving them reason to lately.
Her parents are having trouble taking her seriously, the way they do with her sisters, and she can’t blame them entirely, because she’s the one who has messed up and had to come home to them.
Clemence tells her father, “I’m doing okay.”
“Any news on the job front?” Of course.
So she needs to assure him. “I’m still making plans. Strategizing.”
Roger puts down the flipper and closes the barbecue lid. Enveloping her in his arms in a way that had been unchanging for as long as he could remember, he tells her, “It’s really good to have you back, kid.”
Clemence’s elder sister Prudence is married to Sandro, who is the same age as Roger and on his second family but this one (fortunately) seems to be sticking.
Prudence and Sandro have four children, whose ages fall somewhere between five and twelve—Alessia, Lila, Roberto, and Enzo—and Clemence has never managed to remember any of their birthdays, which she knows is much discussed behind her back.
She is a very bad aunt, and this one time she held the vomit pail, she knows, will do nothing to change that perception.
But she has also been so far away for so long that her sister’s children are more an abstract idea than actual people, which honestly seems preferable to Clemence since abstract children don’t puke, or yell, or grab their sibling’s bums to make them scream even louder.
There are so many of them, too, nieces and nephews rushing around the house and across the backyard like a blur, so fast that it seems as though every child is actually three children.
In theory, Clemence would like to know these kids, to grow to love each one of them as individuals even, but how do you get to know a hurricane?
Perhaps with a drink. Prudence presses one into her sister’s hand and sits down beside her at the patio table. “Be careful of Sandro. He thinks you want to sleep with him.”
“With him?” Clemence has always been surprised that there are two women who married Sandro at all, but perhaps it’s made him big-headed enough to suppose that anything is possible.
“Don’t say anything to make him uncomfortable, I mean.” Prudence sips her drink.
“I haven’t even seen him,” Clemence says. Not since last summer when she was back for the anniversary, and it was true that it had been the beginning of a peculiar moment in her life, but an attraction to Sandro didn’t factor into it. He had ear hair. “Where did he get that idea?”
“Well, he knows,” says Prudence. “I told him what happened, with your neighbours.” She saw her sister’s look. “I told you I wouldn’t tell anybody, but Sandro doesn’t count. I tell Sandro everything. And he’s nervous now.”
“I will try to resist him,” Clemence solemnly vows.
There was a time when Prudence had been the person Clemence most revered in all the universe, the lodestar she would have followed anywhere.
Dear Prudence was going to be secretary-general of the United Nations, but then she’d fallen in love with Sandro, her Italian professor, in her second year of university, dropping out of school altogether when she became pregnant with Alessia, and since then she has devoted her life to serving her children and moderating various online communities of home-schooling parents, which means (and Clemence is not being flippant) that Prudence’s diplomatic skills are being utilized—but to what end?
Prudence says, “Just don’t be weird.”
Grace and Allison appear, with one of the twins. “She’s being weird again?” asks Grace.
Prudence says, “She’s being warned not to be.”
Grace says, “You’re wasting your breath.
” Grace, the afterthought, who’d always been a little bit abstract herself when they were growing up, because it was Clemence and Prudence who’d been the pair, Grace so little and foolish, just barely formed, and now that she was grown, Clemence wasn’t altogether sure she liked her younger sister, the familiarity with which she delivered barbs like that.
She was trying to impress Allison, was Clemence’s theory, and Prudence didn’t disagree with it.
Allison was a badass, in a family of virtuous daughters, with her tattooed arms and battered leather jacket.
Allison smoked. And if Allison were a man, it might have been different, because she wouldn’t have been here at the table, she would have been off somewhere, with Sandro and Toad.
But of course, that wasn’t fair. It was Clemence, after all, who’d disturbed the family symmetry, because Toad wasn’t here, and Allison was lovely.
They all said that—“Allison is lovely”—to compensate for all the ways in which she wasn’t.
Bonnie kept ashtrays for her, bringing one outside now, vessels that had decorated all the end tables and coffee tables in their home decades ago, but these days were more like museum pieces.
Bonnie sits down in the one remaining space at the table, a table that seats five, as though the Lathburys were who they’d always been in their tidy backyard.
When everybody sits down to eat, the children and superfluous adults will pile all over the lawn.
And there will not be enough food, either, because Bonnie still cooks for five.
It’s all she knows how to do, and Clemence’s sisters know this, too, which is why they’ve both brought bread rolls and salads and trays of cheese and vegetables.
No one has asked Clemence to contribute a single thing.
“We had it covered,” says Prudence.
“And you don’t have a kitchen,” Grace reminds her—but now Bonnie looks aghast.
“I have a kitchen,” Clemence says. It’s a small kitchen, but it’s her kitchen.
Grace says, “She’s essentially cooking on a camp stove.”
Bonnie’s going to lose it. “You can’t do that indoors.”
“It’s not a camp stove,” says Clemence.
“Because of carbon monoxide, I mean. Roger, did you hear this? Clemence cooking on a camp stove?”
Roger wanders over from the barbecue. “That’s not a good idea, honey,” he tells her.
And Prudence says, “Seriously. You could poison yourself.”
“Like Sylvia Plath,” says Allison helpfully.
“Didn’t you and Toad have an electric oven? And induction stove?” Bonnie asks. “I kind of wish you’d stuck with that.”
“Bonnie,” says Roger, evidently reminding her of a line they’ve drawn.
“Well, not with Toad, obviously,” says Bonnie. “By the way, don’t forget to pick up the letter. But I mean, with the electric. You both had such a nice kitchen. It’s too bad you couldn’t have kept it, but it would have been awkward, I mean. Once you start getting involved with all the neighbours …”
“It wasn’t all the neighbours,” says Clemence. “And how do you even know about that?” Prudence raised her hand while staring at her lap. Allison has got her hands clamped over the twin’s ears. Clemence says, “This is appalling.”
Bonnie shrugs and smiles. “We don’t judge.”
“Except for the camp stove,” says Roger.
“It’s a fucking hot plate,” says Clemence. “Hot. Plate.”
“Well, hello to you, too, Clemence,” says Sandro, coming out of the kitchen. “Welcome back to the fold. A hot plate, indeed,” and then he kisses her on the lips, in front of everybody, and she can’t tell if he’s being inappropriate or just European.