I'll Be You(59)

But now I regretted putting the idea out there like this: as a backhanded insult, not a real offer at all.

“No, you shouldn’t.” Her words were flat and dark. It felt like I’d accidentally broken something between us, the fragile connection we’d been rebuilding for the last few weeks.

“Have I done something to offend you? Seriously, what’s with the attitude?”

She reached down and picked up the potato masher from the floor and walked it stiffly over to the sink. She wouldn’t even look at me now. “I’ve spent the last decade of my life picking up the messes you’ve made,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the drain. “You had everything you wanted and you screwed it all up like it meant nothing to you. And now here I am and the only thing I really want, you somehow have and you just…throw it away.”

I didn’t know how to respond to this. She wasn’t wrong about the first part, but how was the second my fault? There were plenty of things to pin on me, I wasn’t going to deny that, but her infertility seemed particularly unfair. “Gosh. It must be hard being so perfect, living in your safe little world. It must be awfully hard to see from the height of the pedestal you’ve put yourself on.”

She turned around and glared at me. I saw my anger mirrored in hers, the way her eyes went pinched and tight, the hot red spots on her cheeks, the tight line of her lips. I knew my own face must look exactly the same. “God, it’s always about you, isn’t it? There’s never any room for me to struggle because you suck all the air out of the room. You always have. Even when we were kids.” I tried to interject but she held up a hand, silencing me. “So you know what? If the life I’ve chosen for myself is so galling to you, why don’t you just leave? You don’t need to stay here anymore. Go back to L.A. I’m done helping you.” With that she swept up her wineglass and marched from the room.

It’s so easy for good intentions to get undone by unspoken resentments; a history of small bumps piling up until you have an insurmountable mountain of issues. I wanted to rewind the conversation back to the moment when I’d hugged her; if only I hadn’t said anything about my own fertility. I never planned to have kids anyway; I could have let her believe we were still identical in this one critical way. It wouldn’t have hurt me. Instead, I’d managed to send myself back into exile.

Go back to L.A. I’m done helping you. I couldn’t catch my breath, as if her words had lodged in my solar plexus.

I heard Chuck clattering around at the patio door, heading back to the kitchen with a platter full of oozing meat. I didn’t want to look at him. Instead, I grabbed the half-empty bottle of wine and walked straight out the front door.



* * *



—

Of course, I got drunk.

I finished the bottle of wine in a beach parking lot, watching the sun drown itself in the ocean as the last stragglers made their way, sandy and sunburned, back to their cars. And maybe at that point everything would still have been OK if I’d just sucked it up and gone back to my sister’s house, only slightly tipsy; but I just couldn’t imagine facing her and her judgment—you suck all the air out of the room…you screwed it all up—so instead I made my way to a beachfront bar where they sold buckets of Coronas and fish tacos to partying UCSB students.

For the first few margaritas, I let myself be furious that my sister had expelled me from her nest for a transgression I couldn’t even control. A few drinks after that, I got into a morose phase, in which I felt sorry for myself, feeling helplessly trapped in the flywheel trajectory of my life. The usual solipsistic alcoholic pity party. But by drink seven, around the time the walls of the bar began to feel like they were closing in and I stumbled out onto the sand with a double-pour of tequila in a plastic cup, I’d realized that I was a terrible sister, that Elli was a saint, and that she was just sad. So sad! Poor Elli was sad. I had to do something about that.

It’s hard to explain the logic of intoxication. When your brain is blurred like that, caught in the dimming spiral of your drunkenness, any sudden moment of clarity feels like brilliance. Even if it would be patently ridiculous in the cold, sober light of day. You reach for and grasp anything that feels like it might be something solid: I need a pizza and a bag of Doritos. Skinny-dipping in this public fountain is a good idea. I should have sex with this guy I just met. I should call my mom and tell her I love her even though it’s two a.m.

Or, in this particular case, My sister wants a baby and I should make one for her to show her how much I love her and appreciate everything she’s done for me.

The sentiment was fine—noble, even. My solution to the dilemma was…not.



* * *



—

It was nearly one by the time I found myself back at Elli’s house, not quite clear on how I’d managed to navigate my way home. The house was dark, shuttered tight, the HVAC compressor humming quietly. I let myself in and stumbled around the downstairs, looking for my sister’s liquor cabinet. There was a wet bar in the living room, which my sister had thoughtfully cleaned out before my arrival, but surely she had to have stashed the bottles in a cabinet somewhere.

I almost tripped over Chuck, asleep on the couch in the den. I stood weaving over him, trying to bring him into focus in the gloom. The gold hair against the dark blue pillow, the rise and fall of his breath under the thread-worn gray tee he wore to bed: He was handsome as a Greek statue chipped from smooth marble. No wonder he wanted his DNA and my sister’s DNA mixed together in a child, I thought. Any child of theirs would be extraordinarily beautiful.