The Three Weissmanns of Westport

14

Beneath a garish blue sky, Annie made her way quickly across the synthetic golf-course terrain. It was unimaginable, this story of Amber's. She, at least, had never imagined it. In what world could Frederick, her Frederick, even Felicity's Frederick, be the father of Amber's child?

In this world, this very one, the one with clean-shaven lawns and exaggerated sunlight. It was unimaginable, and yet it was true. Like so many stories, the stories she never read, the stories Miranda liked so much. Palm trees spread out before her, their tall, curved trunks and symmetrical spray of fronds, such platitudes, like cartoons, like doodles, like a neon sign.

Frederick was going to marry Amber.

Annie had been so careful these last months to view her relationship with Frederick in the clearest light of the clearest day: he was drawn to her, he liked her; he was a man who had lived alone for a long time and seemed to like it that way; his children wanted him unencumbered by a wife, by a rival for their affections, their control, their inheritance; his wide-eyed sister had torn apart her mother's life. Annie had shone the light of reality on what she knew was an unlikely match, Annie Weissmann and Frederick Barrow. She had talked to herself and explained the situation in all its unpromising detail. She had also, she now knew, fallen in love.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be more accurate to say that love had fallen, fallen like a log in her path. And she had tripped over it. Still, she'd landed on her feet, hadn't she? In an attempt to illustrate how much better suited for sorrow her sister was than she, Miranda sometimes dismissively declared that Annie always landed on her feet, like a cat. Annie sighed and thought of a cat's pretty little feet, so dainty and treacherous. She did not feel like a cat. Her feet did not feel like a cat's paws. They felt flat and enormous and abused, the dead feet of an old and weary waitress.

The tears came. They evaporated in the heat. They reappeared. They disappeared again. Everything dies, Annie thought. Even tears.

Pregnant. She repeated the word to herself several times, but she could not connect it to Amber and Frederick. Funny, she thought, since it was a word that embodied, literally, the connection between them. Among them, she corrected herself. Among the three of them: Amber, Frederick, and the proto-baby. But try as she would, all she could really imagine and understand, each time she silently uttered the word "pregnant," was the memory, the reality, of her own pregnancies: the humid, overheated, swollen fleshy physicality of it; the weight of her belly pulling down and straining, simultaneously, horizontally, in its taut width; the vast dense fatigue; the fear, the pride, the terror, the joy, the extravagant joy. She had stretched herself out on the couch and read War and Peace both times, a different translation with each pregnancy. Yet she had never read Anna Karenina. Odd. But was it so odd? She had started Anna Karenina numerous times, and with each attempt had been flooded with a startled anxious concern for Anna and her comfort that made her close the book in panic. She didn't want to know what she already knew.

She suddenly missed her children. She missed them as the young men they were and as the babies they had been. The soft wavy hair that had become coarser with age, the little dirty hands that had grown big and clean, the eyes that looked out from their manly faces, eyes that were the same eyes she had looked into when each one was first placed, blue and scrawny, on her exhausted belly.

For the first time that she could remember, Annie felt alone, truly and desperately alone. Even when her husband had disappeared and she had been left to fend for herself with two little boys, there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.

She imagined Frederick coming home to his house, a house he loved and longed for. Perhaps it was that very night he left her at the library and his children urged him to stay in the city with them. He had driven and driven in the highway's nighttime of passing headlights and blank horizons. He had stopped for coffee, certainly. Maybe a doughnut, too. Then back in the car, his knees a little stiff, squinting at the windshield. When he finally pulled into his driveway, with what joy and relief he saw his little house, or his big rambling house, or whatever size house he had, with what joy and relief — a surge of emotion. I'm home, he thought. At last, I'm home. And then there, in her tiny jersey shorts and camisole, getting herself a late-night snack or pouring yet another glass of wine, there was Amber, a beautiful young woman in his kitchen smelling of the bath she had just taken, her skin glowing with youth and health. And she would have greeted him with so much warmth. And poured a glass of wine for him. And then they would have gone out onto the porch and listened to the sea as it swished up onto the sand. The stars would have stared down at them, or they would have watched the clouds rush across the face of the moon. He would throw out some lines of Shakespeare, she would be thrilled. He was so happy to be home. And part of that home was the pretty home sitter, someone so comfortable, so natural, in his kitchen, on the arm of his Adirondack chair on his porch, the arm of his Adirondack chair in which he was sitting while she kneaded his shoulders with her strong, young healer hands. And then, on the arm of his Adirondack chair, his own arm would notice her bare thigh against it, and the thought of comfort would fly from his mind, swept out by another thought, a new thought, an unexpected thought, but one he could not now unthink. And his hand would move to the suggestive curve of her leg, and he would take the suggestion and move his hand higher. And, with a little moan, the home sitter would slip into his lap, at home...

Annie, to her horror, could, and did, envision every movement of this New England soft-core courtship.

Turn the page, she told herself. Better yet, close the book.

Miranda had waited until her sister, that hovering, omnipresent figure of concern, had finally gone off for a walk. Then she sat up in bed. She opened her computer.

There he was.

He had stopped wearing pants with whales on them. He wore jeans in the picture, like everyone else, and a designer army jacket, like everyone else. He even had on the obligatory Hollywood hat, a small brimmed straw hipster hat with a ribbon band. And the red string. She hadn't noticed that last night. The red fucking Kabbalah string. Beside him was the actress, Ingrid Chopin, a slight, dark woman with a voluptuous chest and a dazzling smile. Her long hair tumbled like wild vines onto her shoulders. She was irresistible, Miranda could see. She was at least forty, though she passed for thirty-five. A less-older woman, but another older woman nevertheless.

What does she have that I don't have? Miranda asked herself. Let me count the ways.

She pushed the laptop away. She returned to the position Annie had left her in, a tight fetal loop of enraged humiliation. Her arms, extraneous things, coiled around her. Her thoughts raged. You moron, you cretin, you thick-headed, gullible old bag. You thought you would have a little family with a little white picket fence, you and your handsome hero and your innocent little child friend. But you have nothing. Your life is a mess. A folly. A blank. You will not be spending your waning years with your attentive husband and adoring little boy. You will be alone, ranting, in a cardboard box in Riverside Park. White picket fence? Your home will be spattered by the white excrement of pigeons. Your life is empty. A shoe box. A few dead bees.

"It's just a nobby," she growled into the pillow. "It's just a fucking nobby."

Annie slunk from the blazing outdoors into the bedroom, hoping somehow to be alone, but there was her sister, knotted up on her bed, embalmed in air-conditioning. For just a moment, Annie thought of confiding in her. She would sit on the side of the bed and tell Miranda how profoundly let down she was, how fatigued and defeated, how beleaguered, how disappointed. She would sink back into the bed in her misery and stare at the ceiling, and Miranda would lie beside her, and they would talk and talk and talk until Frederick and Amber were dismantled, torn into smaller and smaller pieces, bits so small and tattered and insignificant they just floated away.

Miranda opened her eyes, said, "Jesus, Annie. Go away," and closed them again.

Rebuffed, rejected before she had said a word. Annie felt the heat she had just left and the chill of the room coursing through her. It was all too much. It was all too little.

"Why are you just lying there?" she said.

She poked Miranda's shoulder.

She was suddenly, finally, thoroughly angry, so angry the blood came rushing to her head. Poor little Miranda, poor ever-suffering Miranda. "It's pathetic! Get up!"

Miranda sat up, her hair stuck to one side of her face. "What is your problem?"

"What's my problem?" Annie was almost dizzy now, a blind ferocious nausea of fury and disillusionment. "That's a first."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're a diva," Annie said. "It means you're a self-important diva. Do you even notice that other people have problems?"

Miranda looked stunned, then the color began to creep up her neck. "Since you bring it up, at least I don't try to control everyone else's life like you." Her voice darkened with strangled tears. "Why don't you get a fucking life of your own?"

Now they began to fight the way they had as girls — nasty, vicious, both of them crying. It went on like this, ugly and loud.

"I'm tired, okay?" Annie sobbed. She wiped away tears with her hand. "Stupid," she said. "Damn." She drew her arm across her eyes. "Tired. Tired of figuring out the money while you buy boats and Mom buys Chanel suits. Tired of being the grown-up..."

"Whoa! And you call me self-important?"

"Miranda is upset, Annie, so we can't possibly take you to ballet class... You and your theatrical breakdowns devoured my childhood..."

"Ballet class? You mean where you stomped around wearing an undershirt under your tutu? With sleeves..."

"I was shy. I was cold."

"You stole my troll."

"You stole it from Debby Dickstein. I gave it back. I was just trying to help." Annie's voice veered into the hated high register of female weeping. "That's all I ever do. I try and I try..."

"Yeah? Well, instead of being such a martyr, why can't you just leave me alone to mind my own business?"

Annie shot her sister a venomous look. She said, "Business? That's a good one."

Miranda was suddenly still. There was no sound but the hum of the air conditioner. She said softly, "Fuck you, Annie. Fuck you and your worries and your budgets and your cramped little life. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you."

Annie, watching herself in disbelief, threw a lamp at her sister, a white lamp shaped like a giraffe, the giraffe's head popping up over the white shade. The giraffe bounced on the bed, lay there peering sideways.

"Amber is pregnant," she said. "Frederick is the father."

Watching Miranda's eyes widen, Annie thought, So there.

"Oh, Annie..."

"So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." And Annie left the room, slamming the large shivering glass door behind her.

The next day was Christmas. Miranda had tried to speak to Annie, to tell her that yes, Annie was right, Miranda was a melodramatic monster who appropriated every emotion she could get her hands on, that she was selfish, that Annie was selfless and good and suffered in silence and could she ever forgive her? But Annie refused to listen.

They both did their best to conceal the estrangement from their mother. Betty, thankfully, seemed more dislocated than usual and noticed nothing. She waited for Roberts with the rest of them in the living room. He was going to take them all, including Amber and Crystal, to a secret place he knew, a cave in a canyon, shady and cool, looking out on cactus and brush, an easy walk from the road. There would be a picnic with cherry pie and apple pie and pumpkin pie. And there would be a turkey and a goose. It was Christmas, after all.

"And every good Jew knows what is required," Rosalyn said.

Annie, ashamed of her outburst the day before and so even angrier at Miranda, thought back to their childhood Christmas trees. There were little wooden Santas on skis, glass balls whirling with color, reindeer, teddy bears in red stocking caps. "Now remember, girls," Josie would say as they danced around the tree, hanging the ornaments from its fragrant branches. The Nutcracker Suite played on the stereo. "Remember. This holiday celebrates the birth of a man in whose name an entire religion has persecuted and murdered our people for thousands of years." He would look at them sternly. "You understand that, don't you?"

"Yes, Josie."

"Good! And knowing that, why should we let them have all the fun, right?" And he would break out into an enormous grin, and the sisters would dance like ballerinas, their arms stretched above them, spinning and spinning until they fell, dizzy and exhilarated, onto the floor.

"Where is Roberts?" Betty asked now. "I feel just like a kid. I want to get on the road!" In fact, she wanted to get on a plane and go home. The memories of so many happy Christmas mornings were unbearable in this strange, empty place with its sunshine and rocks. But she could not spoil Christmas for her daughters. She clapped her hands and smiled at them, remembering the children they had been and would always be to her.

Annie forced herself to smile back at her mother. Betty was still wearing black, today a black sweater with a lavender gray scarf, but lavender was a color the Victorians used for light mourning, right before they reverted back to their normal clothes. Could this be a sign? Was Betty coming out of her distracted depression? Perhaps this trip had at least been good for someone.

Annie sat down on the corner of the couch, brooding. She assiduously avoided eye contact with Miranda. She hated the bright sun, unsparing and ugly. She hated the mountains. Cousin Lou offered her a mimosa. She shook her head. She closed her eyes. She was waiting for Amber to arrive as if anticipating a blow.

Then, a rustling, a shift in the couch cushion. She sensed someone next to her, someone leaning against her, someone so familiar she might just as well have been a part of Annie.

"I miss Josie," Miranda said, her head now heavy on Annie's shoulder.

"'Why should they have all the fun,'" Annie said softly.

The heavy head nodded. The fight had come to an end.

Roberts never did appear. He called on his way to the airport. He had sudden, urgent business in Connecticut. He was sorry. The Christmas outing had to be canceled.

In the general commotion following this announcement, Mr. Shpuntov spilled a glass of water, pointed a crooked finger at Rosalyn, and said, "So, Mr. Plumber! You took your time getting here." He turned his finger to the wet carpet. "Leaky roof, torrential rains. What next?"

"We'll miss our Family Jewish Christmas picnic?" Cousin Lou was saying, dismayed.

"A plumber on Christmas?" Rosalyn said to her father. "Now, that would be a miracle!"

"Come on, mister," he replied brusquely, "get to work, get to work now."

"Oh, what's the big deal?" Miranda said. "It's only a picnic."

"Life is not a picnic." Betty spoke in a dull singsong, as if she were reciting the multiplication table. "Once again."

They spread the picnic food out on the dining room table, then assembled in the living room with their paper plates on their knees. Annie sat on an isolated chair to protect herself from any further intimacies with Amber, but Amber simply sat on the floor at her feet.

"I hope I didn't, you know, upset you," Amber said quietly. "You know, about my secret."

"Upset me?" Annie listened to her voice, relieved that it was level and neutral. "Why would you think that? After all, I'm not your mother. Or Frederick's mother, for that matter." She affected an astonished laugh, but when Amber did not confirm the absurdity of either of those scenarios, she sobered immediately.

"Still," Amber said, "I don't know. You seemed kind of pissed. No, not pissed. But like critical? Or cold? That was the vibe I got, Annie, to be honest. I mean, maybe you guys had a flirtationship or something. Of course, I know there was nothing really going on. But I just wanted to clear the air. Because I felt badly. Like, had I been too personal or whatever."

"You have no reason to worry, Amber."

Did Amber get the point? Oh yes, Annie thought she did. Just as Annie had gotten the point: whatever might have happened between you, which of course could not be much, because here I am carrying his baby, as they say on the soaps, whatever happened, it didn't really happen at all.

"God! Total relief!"

"It must be pretty tough, walking around with that kind of secret."

Amber gave a little laugh of agreement.

"Especially since it can't really stay a secret," Annie added, enjoying the touch of cruelty in the remark. "I'm sorry the family part is so awful," she said, to compensate. "His kids are pretty proprietary. But, you know, Amber, even if they weren't, it's always hard — a new member of an established family." Not to mention two new members, she thought. Poor Amber. Fireworks ahead. "Oh well, I guess you won't be the first stepmother in the world."

"Stepmother?" Amber looked confused. "Oh, them." A bitter laugh. "Right. He's so devoted to them."

She said the word "devoted" as if it were a disease Frederick had caught from his children.

"I mean, he's always having to go into New York to see them, to stay with them. God, he can't be away from them for more than a few days. I sure as hell don't spend that much time with my father. And I wouldn't want to, either. Couldn't pay me to. We fight like cats and dogs, me and him. Wait till he hears about this. That should be fun on a bun. But what the fuck."

"What the fuck," Annie repeated.

"Freddie is so scared Gwen will hijack his grandchildren once he tells her. Like he'll have time for grandchildren, with his own baby? I don't think so. But tell him that. Well, he'll just have to get used to the situation, I can understand that. God bless. He hasn't been in this position in a long time, right? That's what my trainer says."

"You told your trainer?"

"Well, not in so many words, but they feel things, they can just tell. And I had to let her know I was pregnant." She lowered her voice when she said "pregnant," the way people sometimes do when they say "gay" or "black" or "cancer."

"So I know it will take a while, and if I didn't know how he really felt, I guess I would be really insecure and defensive. But since I'm so sure, I can totally wait." She paused: assessing, Annie thought. Then, seemingly satisfied with Annie's studied neutrality, she continued: "And if I really thought he wanted me to, I would get an abortion, you know." She straightened her spine and let her chin jut out prettily. "I would do anything to make him happy."

"But he didn't want you to?"

"Oh my God, no. He asked what I wanted, isn't that so totally Mr. Frederick Barrow? And did I want him to get in touch with a doctor he knew, and of course he would pay and everything, but when I said that he had no obligation at all to even recognize his own child as his own, because after all we're all children of the planet in a way, you understand what I mean, I know you do, well, he wouldn't hear of that. He's an honorable human being. And of course, he was just looking out for me, because I'm so young and everything."

Poor Frederick had gotten himself caught in a web spun of his own thread, part manly sexual adventure, part manly honor. Annie could see that there was no way out. She tried to conjure up the anger of the day before. He was old enough to know better, he was irresponsible, there was a completely innocent life at stake, hadn't he thought about that, hadn't he ever heard of contraceptives, was he so out of control? But really all she could feel now was pity. He had made a mistake and he would pay for it for the rest of his life.

"There you are!" Mr. Shpuntov yelled out, spotting Rosalyn. "Highway robbery. I should have been a plumber, I tell you."

"You were a plumber," Rosalyn said drily. "For fifty years."

Miranda watched Cousin Lou lead Mr. Shpuntov into the dining room. She sat as far from everyone as she could. She ate her goose and her duck and her apple pie. She drank eggnog. She offered Annie the occasional sheepish smile, which Annie returned in kind. She participated in the lighting of the Hanukkah candles. Poor Hanukkah, she thought as she did every year, as if it were a bird with a bent wing she'd found on the sidewalk. It was the third night of the holiday. They had completely forgotten the first two.