Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Your mother was cleaning out the cedar closet. I can’t believe it still fits! Though I’m feeling a little, uh, sheepish about wearing it.”

“You look like Stellan Skarsgard in Breaking the Waves, ” said Lee. She was our Sacagawea, the interpreter who spoke everyone’s language and knew the terrain or could fake it.

“Is that good?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s good. That rugged Danish oil rigger look.”

“I’ll take it. Rugged Danish. Been feeling more like cheese Danish lately. I’m astounded I can still button this thing.”

I didn’t mention that Skarsgard’s character was maybe Norwegian, I just thanked God for the cheese Danish joke, which made my dad recognizable to me again. On the car ride he referred to us as “you girls”— Did you girls have a good trip? How is New York treating you girls? That helped, too.

Lee asked him how “the skin trade” was going.

“It’s not what it used to be. Which is both a blessing and a curse.” My father took the tone of a disappointed rabbi. Noninvasive techniques and advances in lasers had revolutionized his field, creating a demand for often unnecessary yet lucrative cosmetic procedures. To a man of integrity, which he hoped himself to be, it posed an ethical question. He hadn’t gone into medicine to administer glycolic peels and pump cow collagen into the lips of pampered patients. And yet, and yet. Those peels and injections, those beams of pulsed light, had paid for my college education.

He drove us in his Toyota down the leafy suburban streets of my childhood. I envied myself having grown up here, and I envied my parents and their life here. Maybe I had finally broken with this place — it was no longer home — and so I could see it as an outsider. The oak trees shading the yard, the slate path leading to the front door of a white colonial with black trim. Lamplight already glowing through the windows on a darkening afternoon.

“Hello, hello!” My mother called from the kitchen, where she was in the process of baking a pumpkin pie. My mother had generally practiced homemaking in moderation. She regarded cooking, cleaning, and decorating as necessary and sometimes satisfying but didn’t consider them exalted art forms. Except, I had noticed, in the presence of Lee. When Lee was around, my mother became a purveyor of domestic enchantments: a dinner of simple, delicious roast chicken or an aromatic tajine, dense chocolate cakes served with individual pots of freshly whipped cream; clean, loftily folded linens; a gleaming bathroom. Hospitality mingled with pity and pride in these efforts: Welcome, Lee! Make yourself at home in a real home such as you never had growing up, you poor thing. As though Lee had been raised by wolves. Which I suppose is how my mother thought of Linda West. A woman led by her appetites, threatening to those who kept their desires in check, and those even more innocent lambs who didn’t even know what real desire was.

The year before, Lee had given my mother a silk scarf from the Linda West Collection (the pricier, upmarket line) and even as my mother exclaimed how gorgeous it was, she seemed wary that something had to be sacrificed in order to produce such a pretty thing. “Your mother has exquisite taste,” she said to Lee. “And such drive to get her vision out into the world. I’m not quite sure how she does it.” A Faustian bargain must have been struck somewhere along the way, perhaps involving sweatshop labor or the sort of sexual favors euphemistically referred to as liaisons? There had to be a downside to this scarf, because if there wasn’t, what did that say about the sacrifices my mother had made? That they had been in vain? My parents had been invited to a party later that holiday weekend, and I happened to spy my mother getting ready. She tied the scarf around her neck and put on lipstick. Then she frowned into the mirror, took a tissue to wipe the color off her mouth, and untied the scarf and put it away in a drawer.

I never got the sense that my mother’s pity and pride made Lee squirm. She seemed to appreciate being taken care of in that maternal way. If anyone was put out, it was me, seized by a jealous urge to expose the pumpkin pie act as a total sham.

“It smells so good in here!” said Lee.

“The aroma of a store-bought and reheated pie,” I said.

“Excuse me?” said my mother. “I made this from scratch.”

I felt like an asshole, though not an unjustified asshole.

My father hung his magical shearling coat in the hall and then came up behind my mother and massaged her shoulders.

“I am glad you’re here,” my mother said, primarily to Lee but also to me. “We’ve got a full house this year. Wait until you meet Genevieve.” My brother had brought his new girlfriend home from college. They’d gone off for the afternoon but would be back soon. We should know, my mother explained, that Genevieve would be staying in Aaron’s room, with Aaron, this being a condition that Genevieve had insisted upon before agreeing to spend Thanksgiving with Aaron. “You should have heard him on the phone— Mom, Genevieve believes that sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of and that we need to own ourselves as sexual beings. He could barely get the words out. I think he was reading off a piece of paper she’d handed him. But just so you know, girls, sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Viv is blushing,” said Lee.

“It’s just warm in here.”

“If you can’t stand the heat,” said my father. I got out of the kitchen. I thought Lee would follow me but from the stairs I heard the three of them talking about Genevieve. My parents treated Lee like an expert. They asked her for assurance that Genevieve was a phase my brother was going through. Having been a phase herself, more than once, Lee could say yes, it was. Easy laughter, things were positively merry, but if Lee hadn’t been there, acting as a counterweight to Genevieve, I wondered if my parents would have been so comfortable with the sleeping arrangements.

What surprised me about Genevieve when she and Aaron returned was her appearance. Cute. Petite, with good posture. Nice enough but not very warm. She probably had excellent time-management skills. Above all, she wasn’t impressed with Lee, who I had begun to think of as my family’s secret weapon. But Genevieve was impervious to her.

That night, I sat in the den watching Charlie Rose with Genevieve and Aaron when it occurred to me that Lee wasn’t there with us.

“Where did you get off to?” I asked when she came in.

“I wanted to ask your dad about this weird area on my back.”

She pulled at the neckline of her shirt to reveal an irritated patch of skin just above her shoulder blade.

“Okay.” I tried to match her neutral tone. “What did he say?”

“Nothing to worry about. He prescribed a cream.”

I tried not to think too hard about it. I worked a crossword puzzle while Lee pulled a recent copy of our college alumni magazine from a pile on an end table and began to leaf through it. My parents kept issues around out of the same sentimental pride with which they’d affixed school stickers to the back windshield of their car. I’d never given the alumni association my own address. If you don’t want to know how you measure up, it’s best not to keep a yardstick in the house. But Lee seemed interested in the anthropological curiosity of it. She flipped directly to the class notes.

“It’s like everyone has invented a new irrigation system in a developing country or written and directed a movie about twenty-somethings.”

“Or both.”

“Wait, this one is from Chipmunk. Remember Chipmunk?”

“Of course.”

“She’s a lawyer now, living in San Francisco with her husband, and she’s pregnant with her first child. Jesus. I wonder what Moose is doing?”