The Middle of Somewhere(28)

In junior high, the simple understanding of people and relationships she had assembled crumbled under the burden of puberty (hers and everyone else’s). Claire moved them from Seattle to Santa Fe in the middle of seventh grade. “For my art,” she explained, and Liz could not voice her anxiety over losing her tiny social toehold. As a newcomer to the school and her own body, she turned to sitcoms for information about families. Her favorite was Home Improvement, because she also learned about carpentry and power tools. She survived high school and braced herself for college.

She needn’t have worried. Even before she began dating Gabriel, she had Valerie’s friendship and enviable accommodations in her aunt’s house in Beverly Hills, a half mile from campus. Claire’s sister, Georgette, was a professional socialite whose ridiculously large mansion was filled regularly with celebrities, politicians and the merely rich. The glitterati didn’t attract Liz (she failed to recognize the names of most of the people her aunt went on about), but she did appreciate her lodgings. Her aunt installed her in the au pair suite, for which Georgette had no use, as she had no children and, during Liz’s tenure, no husband. The suite was as large as her Santa Fe home but, more important, completely private, with a view of the lush gardens. She’d seen the dorms. The cramped quarters she could live with. All those noisy, sloppy kids she could not.

Georgette was indifferent to Liz’s activities and made few social demands on her, asking her only from time to time “to say hello to some people.” For these occasions, she’d provide Liz with an expensive outfit and trot her out for show. “This is my niece, Elizabeth. She studies medical engineering next door. Isn’t she lovely?” Liz wasn’t thrilled with being treated as an accessory, but it seemed a small price to pay for what she received in return.

Gabriel listened to Liz’s story as he would a documentary about an aboriginal people in a remote and hostile country. His history couldn’t have been more at odds with hers, balanced and normal in every way. Liz had long known his father was a Presbyterian minister who, together with his tall, handsome wife, had raised five children, none of whom, she suspected, had ever been left alone with a screwdriver and a toaster. The Pembertons were well respected. It was what gave Gabriel, the middle child, his easy confidence.

From their courtship conversations, Liz pieced together a more complete tableau of the family. The youngest son, Daniel, had Down’s syndrome, but even this seemed more of a blessing than an affliction; God had given them Daniel because they were that good. The Pembertons perpetrated all manner of charity among areas of Santa Fe Liz had no contact with: Rotary Club, Meals on Wheels, Boys and Girls Clubs, soup kitchens, hospice groups and Native American reservations. The most her mother had ever done was donate art supplies to the schools when she ran out of space at home.

Gabriel could readily have become a sanctimonious bore, but didn’t. He was serious about his goals (he wanted to be a computer jock), but was typically lighthearted (although never goofy). Liz warmed to the idea that there was something to all this God talk—the Pembertons’ version of it anyway—and sensed she’d missed an important part of her development. She had gills while other people were breathing with lungs. There was, however, no point in dwelling on it, as it was too late to grow up differently.

She waited for Gabriel to voice a complaint about having wanted to play video games instead of working at a food bank, or having to suffer personalized sermons from Pastor Pemberton, but he never did. This made her worry he was too good for her by far, and she might represent a spiritual and emotional charity case to him. When they’d been dating three months, she got up the nerve to ask him what he saw in her.

“What do you mean? You’re amazing.”

“I am? I thought I was cynical, aloof and unusually twitchy.”

He laughed. “You are. Twitchy, I mean. And, yeah, you can be pretty cynical, but who could blame you, the way your parents were. Are. I don’t think you mean it.”

“I don’t?”

“No. I think you want what everyone wants.”

“And what’s that, pray tell?”

“A normal life.”

So she shouldn’t have been surprised when, the day after they returned to Santa Fe at the end of the semester, Gabriel invited her to meet his family. Liz had been concerned Pastor Thomas Pemberton and his wife, Eleanor, would be less than thrilled about their son’s choice of a Godless geek for a girlfriend, but if it was true, they hid it well. She was asked to join them for dinners, walks, charity events and, of course, at church. The pastor’s sermons weren’t as sermony as Liz expected. Some were posed as friendly suggestions, which an individual could take or leave. Others were parables, delivered in a way to make the ending seem more of a question than an answer. She asked Gabriel’s father how much time he spent creating a sermon.