The Guest Room(20)

She noticed that a strip of the wallpaper was starting to peel where it met the ceiling a couple of feet from the window. There was an ancient water stain—mildew-brown—a few inches above the top of the bedroom’s other window. The room, when you gazed at it from the bed, looked a little tired. This weary ceiling was so different from the one in her bedroom at home.

Once more she stretched, elongating her arms and legs—her fingers and toes. (There was some kid song about fingers and toes that they all used to sing in preschool. Perhaps even in kindergarten. She wished she could retrieve it right now, but it was floating somewhere just beyond her mind’s reach.) She guessed she should join her mother and grandmother and have some breakfast. Learn what she could. She might even hover for a minute or two just outside the kitchen, in the entryway to the apartment, and eavesdrop.

As she was on her way there, however—as she was walking silently past the apartment’s front door—she heard the bing of the elevator on the other side of the door, and then her father’s keys. A second later, there he was, opening the door. For a long moment they just stared at each other, neither saying a word. She saw that he had Cassandra with him in the animal’s cat carrier. Then he knelt, put the cat carrier on the floor, and wrapped his arms around her. She detected a trace of an unfamiliar perfume—definitely not her mother’s. She didn’t think he had ever looked worse.

…

Kristin asked her mother to make Melissa breakfast and then led her husband back to the guest bedroom, where only a few minutes earlier their daughter had been fast asleep. The only chair in the room was a violin-shaped monster that must have been designed by Torquemada—usually it just held clothes when they were visiting, and sometimes Melissa’s backpack—but this morning Richard sank into it, as if he were shrinking with shame into the seat. But perhaps, Kristin thought as she watched him, she was reading too much into his body language and projecting onto him what she thought he should feel. Maybe he was just hung over. Maybe he was just tired. She noticed that the stubble on his chin was flecked with white. He had bags under his eyes, and her heart opened a little to him. God. What he had seen. There was no eyewash in the world that could make that go away…

“Have you slept?” he asked her, his voice weary.

“Not since you called. I presume you haven’t either.”

He shook his head. “I almost fell asleep on the train. But not really.”

“So, tell me everything,” she said. “I don’t want to know, but I don’t think I have a choice. And maybe it will help you to talk about it.”

“Why don’t you sit down? You look like…”

“I look like what?”

“You look like you’re about to interrogate me.”

His tone surprised her. He probably hadn’t meant to sound hostile, but he had. “Well, you would know what it’s like to be interrogated, wouldn’t you?” she countered.

“Kris, please.”

She sat down on the bed. She rested her hands in her lap, a conscious attempt not to appear adversarial.

“You know how sorry I am,” he said. “I know what a disaster this is. All I thought…all I thought was that I was giving my idiot younger brother a bachelor party. I’m the best man. It’s what you do, right?”

“I know. And he is an idiot.”

“And I thought it would be more…wholesome…having it at home. Our home. I mean, I could have had it at someplace sleazy. But I didn’t.”

“No,” she agreed, “you didn’t”—though inside she was wishing now that he had.

“You know? Home delivery wings? A vat of guac? Beer? It just all went crazy. And it went crazy so weirdly fast.”

“Of course, that is your brother’s modus operandi. If you have a choice between partying like a grown-up and partying like a frat boy on spring break, he will always pick the latter.”

“It’s so true…”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

“The beginning of the party? Or when the strippers arrived?”

“Please: stop calling them strippers. They weren’t strippers.”

“Okay.”

She glanced down at her pantyhose and her skirt. It seemed hours ago that she had gotten dressed. In the half darkness, she had put on the skirt and the blouse that she had planned to wear that Saturday anyway. It was a matinee sort of skirt. Broadway pantyhose. Black with little pin dots. She liked it when she spent a day or a night (or a weekend) in Manhattan; she could dress in ways that she never could when she was teaching American history at a suburban high school. Half the time when she went to work, she was dressed as casually as the kids in her class.

No, that wasn’t quite right. The girls dressed considerably more provocatively. She recalled one of her first days at the school, another teacher—a history teacher named Amy Doud—had asked Kristin to accompany her on crack patrol. Initially, Kristin had been horrified, presuming this was some sort of drug interdiction. She found the very idea that there might be kids doing crack in a suburb this tony a little chilling. But it wasn’t about drugs at all. It was about enforcing the dress code. Kristin had watched as Amy walked softly up behind a pretty, coquettish young thing at her locker, the girl’s navy thong riding an inch or two up on her hips and above the top of her immaculate white jeans. There was the upside-down triangle of fabric at the very small of her back, the girl’s flesh around it shaped into a pair of perfectly formed meringues below the elastic band and a belt-wide strip of skin above it. Amy had deftly—and with preternatural speed—given the girl a wedgie so sudden and so pronounced that the student had been lifted up onto her toes in her flip-flops and squealed. “Dress code,” Amy reminded the girl. “Pull that shirt down and those pants up.” Then she had turned to Kristin and shrugged. “The glamorous life of a schoolteacher on crack patrol,” she said, smirking ever so slightly. “In truth, I do get a little pleasure from this. I really do. Once upon a time, I guess, I was kind of a mean girl.”