5
The dining room is so big you could fit twenty people comfortably, thirty if you wanted to push it, but tonight there are just nine of us.
Me and Oliver.
Sam Penny.
Mom.
Mom’s best friend, Debbie.
Tenny and his girlfriend, Savannah Ren.
And my sister and her husband.
We’re all bunched in at the center of the table, too much space on either end of the room for anyone to ever feel at ease, but the proximity of everyone is good for me because I can see all their faces.
I don’t like my mom. I never really have, not for a long time, and you’ll get it eventually. It sounds callous to say it now out of context, but context is everything. I love her, sure—an abstract love that stems from a place sadder and deeper and more desperate for acceptance than I care to acknowledge exists within me, but I don’t particularly like her.
All that’s to say, even without an affinity toward my mother, I have to admit the amount of despair she’s unconsciously displaying on a microlevel is like a stab in the guts.
Every smile is laced with heartache; every blink is edged with loneliness.
I don’t even know if she knows she feels like this. I don’t know if she would have let herself actually be alone since Friday to feel any hint of loss, but she’ll learn quickly that losses sneak up on you no matter how many blankets and smiles you throw over them.
My sister is anxious.
My sister is always something… Controlling, mostly, but around me, a heightened sense of anxiety tends to creep into her.
It’s because of what happened.
She’s just waiting for me to fracture her perfectly constructed world all over again.
Oliver is on edge and alert.
His defenses are high and he’s watching for criticisms and attacks. He perceives all things anyone from here says to him as underhanded, which is a mostly-safe assumption, but it’s tiring for him, and I can see it in the way his cheek muscles sag. It makes him sad to see the world how he has to when he’s with our family, but it’s the only way he’s learned to survive.
Tenny’s easy to read and it’s always disappointing.
Disappointing because he’s not an idiot, but he acts like he is.
He’s more aware of what’s going on around him than most people, but he doesn’t have the stones to do anything about it. I watch him watch Debbie make a weird comment about Oliver’s rope bracelet from Dolce she’s bouncy and cute and bright-eyed and I feel like she’s probably kind of stupid but hopefully in an endearing, na?ve way.
To her credit, she doesn’t actually ask him any of the kinds of questions I’ve come to expect from people here, which are usually so absurdly grounded in what they perceive to be as current queer culture, but are maybe like 2008 queer-adjacent at best (e.g.: “Do you love Ellen?”, “Will you audition for Queer Eye?”, etc.).
Tennyson’s girlfriend immediately compliments Oliver’s hair—touches it, even—which he loves, so starved of affection and acceptance all his life—he’s so thrilled to have a friend. I don’t think Tenny’s thrilled though, which I love, but it does add another layer of complexity to the situation because for all our lives, for as long as I can remember, Oliver has been trying to win the approval of our older brother, and buying matching Golden Goose sneakers with his girlfriend won’t get him the affirmation he so desires.
Jason Devlin sits beside my sister staring at his plate of food, and I wonder if he hates his life or whether I’m just projecting that on to him. It is a regret of mine, admittedly, with missing (read: avoiding) their wedding, that I didn’t get to see their faces leading up to and surrounding it. I’ll know by the end of the week whether she loves him and he loves her, truly, or whether they married because that’s what the trajectory of their relationship called for them to do.
He’s checked out of the dinner conversation, and fair enough, because it’s weird.
I know it’s weird because I can see it all over Sam Penny’s face.
It’s like Dad’s dead body is on the other end of the table and we’re all avoiding looking at it or talking about it. They’re all speaking about him like he’s still here.
“Daddy likes the Beach Boys.”
“Dad likes whitewashed woods.”
“Dad likes finger sandwiches.” As though as he’ll be there to eat them.
“Dad likes open collared shirts,” Tenny tells the room, and my mother points a condemning finger at him.
“Boy, I will lay a hurtin’ on you if you show up to your daddy’s funeral with your shirt buttons down.”
“Yes ma’am.” Tennyson nods, smiling tight.
“A funeral.” My mom sighs. “Good gravy, where do we start?”
“Mama, we’re going to sort it,” Maryanne tells her, holding her arm. “I don’t want you to worry about a thing.”
“Sweetheart.” Mom pets her hand tenderly. “This is a tough time for us all. I don’t want you carrying more than your share—”
Maryanne shushes her. “Don’t you lift a finger, we’ll do it all…”
Oliver and I trade looks.
I hadn’t really planned on doing anything. Like, maybe getting drunk the night of the funeral and having it out with my sister so I don’t have to see her for another six years—something like that—but that was the height of my plans.
“So.” My sister claps her hands together to get my attention. “How’s London?” Her eyebrow is curved upward. It’s more of a challenge than a question.
She’s daring for my life to be better than hers.
“It’s good—”
“Are you dating anyone?” she asks, eyebrows unmoved.
“No.”
“I thought you were dating someone,” she tells me in a weird tone. Like she’s annoyed that she doesn’t have the most up-to-date information on my life.
“We broke up.”
“When?”
I sigh, tireder than I mean to sound, and I chastise myself for doing it because she’ll take it as a tiny victory. “I don’t know—four or five months ago?”
“Why?” She blinks, and everything about the conversation has a passive-aggressive undertone, and I don’t fully understand why Oliver isn’t saying something to save me until I clock him and see he’s texting someone.
“He…” I trail because I don’t want to tell her anything. Maryanne doesn’t know about my life for a reason. Also, I don’t want to keep talking about my ex-boyfriend in front of Sam Penny because—no reason. I just don’t want to.
“Was he an asshole?” Maryanne cringes sympathetically, but it’s fake, because she quite likes the idea of someone being an asshole to me.
“No,” I say sincerely, because I can’t say anything bad about Anatole Storm, and I hope my face doesn’t look pained the way I think it might because I don’t want Sam to think I’m still in love with him or unavailable or whatever. I’m not; it was just sad what happened, that’s all.
He is watching me closely, by the way. Sam Penny’s watching me very closely. His eyebrows are furrowed. He’s quite stoic.
“Are you still living with that”—my mother drops her voice so as not to summon more of them—“lesbian?”
Debbie and Mom trade ominous looks.
I try not to smirk at their despair. “Yes.”
My mother rolls her eyes a little and sighs.
“You live with a lesbian?” Savannah asks pleasantly. Kind of the same way someone might say, “Oh, you live with a doctor?”—pure interest.
I tilt my head to clarify. “Well, she’s bisexual.”
“Are you a bisexual?” she asks brightly.
Oliver chokes on his sparkling water and my mother drops her fork, as though the mere thought of having two children on the LGBTQ+ spectrum might kill her dead on the spot.
“Um.” I give her a big smile. “No—I wish—”
“You wish?” Debbie blinks. “What in tarnation are you talking about?”
“Well, it’s just that when you’re bi, the world is your sexual oyster, plus my housemate is super hot, and—” My joke does not go down well with my mother, so I purse my lips and change tactics. “I was joking. I’m happy with my sexual ori—”
“So, London,” Sam Penny butts in from across the table from me, catching my eyes. “You’ve been there a while?”
I flash him a quick, grateful smile. “About ten years.”
He nods, and his eyes flick right and upward as he tries to do the math of it all, which I imagine is rather difficult because he doesn’t know how old I am.
“So when did you move away?”
Maryanne and I catch eyes.
“When we made her.” My mom laughs airily, as though it was nothing more than moving the little silver dog from Park Lane to Mayfair.
“Made her?” Sam blinks, glancing at me, confused.
Oliver cracks his back and stares at his plate, having just tuned back in.
My mother squares her shoulders and, using both hands, pushes her hair behind her ears, which is a form of upregulating. She’s asserting dominance; she feels threatened by the question—why would a mother make her own child move to another country? What does that say about her? What does that say about her child? All questions I’ve asked myself a hundred billion times, but I dare say my mother’s probably managed to sidestep.
“There was an…incident,” my mother says delicately.
“She was sleeping with Maryanne’s boyfriend,” Tennyson announces unceremoniously.
“Tennyson!” My mother overenunciates his name with a growl, but not because she’s defensive of me, but because she’s ashamed of me. She doesn’t want people to know her daughter’s a whore, but everyone here already does. Except for Sam. Until now.
I can feel his eyes on me, and I hate it. Staring at me like I’m the kind of girl who sleeps with her sister’s boyfriend.
The kind of girl I’m not.
“Bygones.” Maryanne flaps her hand.
“Very gracious of you, Maryanne.” Debbie nods at her from across the table before throwing daggers at me with her eyes.
My mother pats my sister’s hand. “Such a good heart, my Maryanne.” She looks at her proudly and then over at Sam. “It was a mistake,” my mother tells Sam, then eyes me down. “Wasn’t it, darling?”
I press my lips together. It’s a self-hushing technique, but no one here knows it, thank God.
“It happened one time, and it was a mistake.” Maryanne gives me a tight smile across the table. “They both said sorry.” Her smile grows as she shrugs. “Like I said, bygones.”
I drop my eyes to my plate. A pile of food I’ve barely eaten, just shoveled around with the good forks, reserved strictly for the best company, the queen, and dinner parties for when Dad’s died, apparently.
And do you know what, my eyes are glued to the table, my breath is tucked in under my chest, and I’m still as a stone, because it’s not true.
My mom’s telling the only story she knows.
Maryanne’s telling a lie.
“Excuse me.” I push back from the table. “I’m going to start cleaning the dishes.”
“Oh—” My mom swats her hand. “We have Rita for that.”
“I’m going to help her,” I say, already walking away.
“So sensitive,” I hear my mother say under her breath, but loud enough for us all to hear.
“Yeah, well, some people don’t like their past dug up at dinner, Mom,” Oli tells her.
“Oh, Oliver, she’s hardly the victim here—” And I can just imagine it, my mother leaning over, squeezing my sister’s arm. “Maryanne thought she was going to marry that boy—and we’re so glad she didn’t!” she declares loudly for Jason’s sake. “Because then we wou—”
And then I’m too far away to hear any more.
I don’t need to hear any more, I’ve heard it all before. And part of me is dying that Sam Penny’s hearing it right now: Maryanne, good. Georgia, bad.