The Better Liar(29)

“No,” she said, coming to a stop so slowly that the car behind her honked. She was not a frequent driver. I don’t even remember if she had her license. She looked over at me, blinking her lengthened eyelashes. “Don’t tell him, okay? This is just for you and me.”

I was a practiced sidekick; I gave her a wink. She laughed.

We drove for what seemed like a long time. I expected that we were going to a ballroom, or maybe somebody’s enormous house, so I was surprised when she pulled into the Monroe’s parking lot near Arroyo del Oso and began touching her hair in the rearview mirror, as if she were about to get out of the car. “Are we here?” I asked.

    She glanced at me. “Yeah, of course. Here, fix your skirt.” She pulled on the belt loops of my denim skirt until the side seams were again at my sides.

Inside the restaurant, she took my hand and guided me to a corner, where several tables had been pushed together to accommodate a lot of people I had never seen before. “Chrissy!” a gray-haired woman called out. “Over here!”

I glanced up at my mother, who was wearing an open, cheerful expression that was almost as jarring as the clothes. “Hi, hi, hello,” she said, kissing the woman on the cheek, embracing other strangers as if she’d known them for years. “Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas!” the table chorused.

“And who are you?” the gray-haired woman asked me.

“My name is Robin Voigt,” I said, offering her a hand.

Instead of taking it, she turned to my mother and said, “She’s so cute! Did you teach her to do that?”

My mother glanced at me, slightly puzzled, and said, “No, but I love it!”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “You can call me Miss Susan. I used to work with your mother at Macy’s—how long has it been now, Chrissy?”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” my mother said. “Too long!” They laughed together, and I stared between them, amazed.

“You work at Macy’s?” I said.

“I used to,” my mother said, barely looking at me. “I worked there for years before I got married. You know that.”

I hadn’t known it at all. For the next forty-five minutes, I watched my mother drink two glasses of wine and eat from a community basket of chips and salsa and say things that sounded like lines from a TV show, like “Tell me everything, don’t leave out a detail!” and “How did I guess…” and “Well, she’s a handful!” She knew my grades in school and had a picture of Leslie in her wallet—I’d never seen her carry a wallet before, only her old pink purse. She talked about Daddy’s job and our trip to the Grand Canyon, and threw back her head and laughed until she choked when Miss Susan brought up a story about her hiding from a customer for three hours in the employee bathrooms.

    On our way home, we stopped and bought KFC chicken, which she paid for with money from the wallet I’d never seen. “Do you always go to the Christmas party when you go away?” I asked.

“I go every year,” my mother said absently, sorting her change by size in her palm.

I selected a penny from her hand and put it in my shoe, startling her. “Leslie always lets me have a penny,” I explained.

“I see,” she said.

“How come you’re so dressed up?” I asked, hoping to press my advantage before her Christmas-party chattiness died away.

She glanced down at herself. “I used to dress like this every day,” she told me. “You had to wear hose or they wouldn’t let you work.”

Leslie was watching TV in the living room; she jumped up as soon as we came in the front door and watched with her mouth hanging open as my mother put the chicken on the table and arranged napkins on everyone’s placemat. I strutted in behind her, being sure to make eye contact with Leslie: Yes, that’s right, she chose me to go with her on her secret excursion. As we sat down to eat, my mother went to bed. She stayed in her bedroom for the next two days, and when she came out again she was back to herself, soft clothing, soft voice, that shuttered expression that meant we weren’t to upset her by asking too many questions. Leslie was too proud to bug me for details, and I was too busy trying to understand it myself: whether once a year our mother became a stranger, or whether she was a stranger for the rest of the year and only once a year became herself.





21


    Mary


I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. Cramped and dark, a little hump of clay in the middle of the desert. Like some kind of burrow. The old man hadn’t read his own books or listened to his own music or opened the blinds in his study. He’d just stayed in, dying, as if it were an activity. That kind of sadness leaves something behind. It was all over the house, a blue film, spots on your vision that stuck around.

I’d tried to cheer us up with the record, but the feeling only lasted for the length of the song. Then the dimness set back in, infecting us both. I had this horrible idea that anybody who stayed in that house too long would turn ghost.

In a way I already was one. I was walking around a dead girl’s house, wearing her face. Sometimes I could see it in Leslie’s expression when she looked at me. For that moment I wasn’t Mary to her—I was Robin.