“I’m not going to sit around and let him talk about her that way.”
“Please, Chip. Let him…” Her voice trailed away.
I waited. He glared at me for a moment, then slammed his chair in against the table. “Fuck you,” he said to me and turned and left.
Meredith and I were quiet. She made an embarrassed laugh, though there was nothing funny.
“Chippy’s so bogus, sometimes,” she said.
I waited. She laughed again, an extraneous laugh, something to punctuate the silence.
“You know about your mother?” I said.
“Dr. Faye says we all do and won’t admit it. Not about her being somebody else, but the other…”
I nodded.
“Daddy would be up in his room with the TV on,” Meredith said in her small flat voice. “Chip was at college. And she would come home; I could tell she’d been drinking. Her lipstick would be a little bit smeared, maybe, and her mouth would have that sort of red chapped look around it, the way it gets after people have been kissing. And I would say, `You’re having an affair.”‘
“And?”
“And she would say, `Don’t ask me that.‘ ”And I would say, `Don’t lie to me.“’
I leaned forward a little trying to hear her. She had her hands folded tightly in front of her on the tabletop and her eyes were fastened on them.
“And her eyes would get teary and she would shake her head. And she’d say, `Oh, Mere, you’re so young.‘ And she would shake her head and cry without, you know, boo-hooing, just talking with the tears running down her face, and she’d say something about `life is probably a lie,’ and then she’d put her arms around me and hug me and pat my hair and cry some more.”
“Hard on you.”
“When I came to school,” she said, “I was having trouble, you know, adjusting. And I talked with Jane Burgess, my advisor, and she got me an appointment with Dr. Faye.”
“He’s a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.” The word was almost nonexistent, squeezed out in the smallest of voices. Her Barbie doll face, devoid of character lines, showed no sign of the adult struggle she was waging. It remained placid, hidden behind the affectless makeup.
“Know anything about money?” I said.
“Sometimes they’d fight. She said if he couldn’t get money, she would. She knew where to get some.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He’d just go upstairs and turn on the television.”
“What would she say?”
“She’d go out.”
“You don’t know what her plan was? For money?”
“She always just said she knew where to get it.”
“How long did you live like this?”
“I don’t know. All the time, I guess. Dr. Faye says I didn’t buy the family myth.”
I put a hand out and patted her folded fists. She got very rigid when I did that, but she didn’t pull away.
“Stick with Dr. Faye,” I said. “I’ll work on the other stuff.”
Susan and I were in the dining room at The Orchards, Susan wearing tight black pants and a plaid jacket, her eyes clear, her makeup perfect.
“There’s a beard burn on your chin,” I said.
“Perhaps if you were to shave more carefully,” Susan said.
“You didn’t give me time,” I said. “Besides, there are many people who would consider it a badge of honor.”
“Name two,” Susan said.
“Don’t be so literal,” I said.
There were fresh rolls in the bread basket, and the waitress had promised to find me a piece of pie for breakfast. We were at a window by the terrace and the sun washed in across our linen tablecloth. I drank some coffee.
“It is a lot better,” I said, “to be you and me than to be most people.”
Susan smiled.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Especially better than being one of the Tripps.”
“What I don’t get is the girl, Meredith. How did she escape it? She’s very odd. She’s obviously in trouble. Most of the time she’s barely there at all. But she’s the one that will look at it, that doesn’t buy the family myth.”
“There’s too much you don’t know,” Susan said.
