Family Pictures Page 8

  Eve groans, then pulls out a chair and sits down, her long hair flowing over a shoulder, knees pulled up, toes curling over the edge of the chair, resting against the table as she pulls a magazine toward her and starts idly flicking through.

  Sylvie cracks two eggs into a bowl, adds a splash of water, then the heavy seasoning she learned from her mother.

  A large knob of butter in the pan, Sylvie waits until the butter is sizzling hot, almost brown, before quickly whisking the eggs in the pan, swirling the eggs with the back of her fork and bringing them together off the heat until a minute later she slides a perfectly folded omelette onto a plate, putting it in front of Eve.

  Eve hesitates. Sylvie watches carefully, expecting Eve to say she isn’t hungry, but Eve picks up the fork and takes a bite, groaning with pleasure, and Sylvie is finally able to relax, unable to take her eyes off this almost-woman, so recently a little girl.

  Look at her legs, long and lithe. Those feet with long, skinny toes, one calf now resting on the other knee, ankle moving in a lazy circle as she continues to eat, turning the pages.

  “I know you’re staring,” Eve sighs eventually. “And yes, I know. You grew me. In your stomach. No, I can’t believe it either,” and this time she looks over her shoulder, catches her mother’s eye, and they both smile, for it is indeed what Sylvie was thinking, always thinks, when she is overcome with a wave of love for her daughter.

  Sylvie marvels at her all the time. How did she, who never knew what it was to be comfortable in her skin, produce this beautiful, confident, wise child. Where did she come from? How could they possibly share the same genes? Even though Eve is going through a phase now where she isn’t as confident, isn’t as sunny, Sylvie recognizes this is not her true nature; since the day she emerged, Eve has always been filled with joy.

  Closing the magazine, Eve stands and stretches, ready to get dressed for school, before glancing over at her mother. “Uh-oh.” Eve backs away slowly, shaking her head, hands stretched in front of her as if to stop an advancing invasion. “It’s coming, isn’t it. You’re in the middle. It’s a big one, right. Do I need to get out of—?”

  “Yes!” Sylvie exclaims, darting forward to grab Eve, squeezing her tight, covering her head and cheeks with kisses as Eve squirms, giggling. “It’s the Wave of Love! I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I just love you sooooooooo much.” Eve pretends to try to push her mother away, but both of them know she loves this.

  Mark started doing this to Eve when she was little, Eve always collapsing in giggles as he scooped her up and covered her in kisses, Eve basking in being truly loved by the only father she would ever know.

  When Sylvie finally lets her daughter go, Eve steps back with a frown.

  “Mom? What is it? Why are you crying?”

  “It’s not crying.” Sylvie wiped the tears away, still smiling. “I was just thinking how much like your father you are. You’re such a good person. I’m happy, I just wish he could see you. I wish he could have known you.”

  “He knows me,” Eve said matter-of-factly. “I talk to him all the time.”

  “You do? Still?”

  “Of course!” Eve shrugged as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Especially at night. We have long conversations.”

  Sylvie just looks at her until Eve starts to laugh. “Before you ask, no, he doesn’t talk back. I’m not certifiable, Mom. He’s dead.”

  Sylvie attempts a smile.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I was trying to be funny. Do you … still think about him?”

  Sylvie takes a deep breath. “I do, but it’s not painful in the way it was. I think about him a lot, and now it feels good. I feel so incredibly lucky to have had him in my life for the short time I did, and of course, he gave me you.”

  “Were you more in love with him than with Papa?” Eve is looking at her with curiosity as Sylvie blinks. She isn’t ready for these questions that Eve has started lobbing at her, hasn’t prepared the answers, doesn’t know the right way to respond.

  “Don’t say it was different,” Eve warns. “Because that’s not an answer.”

  “It was different,” Sylvie insists. “We were so young, so in love. There is something magical about young love, when you still think the world is your oyster, you have your whole life ahead of you.”

  “So did you love him more?”

  “More than what?”

  “More than Dad?”

  “I loved him differently,” Sylvie says. “There isn’t another way to explain it.” She looks at her watch and squeals. “Eve! You have to get dressed! Oh, and tomorrow, you’re going to see Grand-mère, like it or not.”

  “No,” Eve groans as Sylvie frog-marches her out of the kitchen. “Please. Anything but that.”

  “You never know, you might get lucky. She may have another vintage Chanel jacket lying around for you.” Sylvie shakes her head with a smile as Eve happily says she’ll go.

  13

  Eve

  Eve waits in line at the checkout, unable to meet anyone’s eye, filled with shame at what she is buying, convinced everyone knows what she is planning to do.

  She has tried so hard to resist. Has done three days of lemon water, but all she has thought about is food, sugary, crunchy, sweet food, and today, when she was leaving school, she knew she couldn’t hold out any longer.

  She was supposed to be hanging out with Claudia and a bunch of kids, but she said she had to go see her grandmother. Instead she went to the 7-Eleven, the place she was least likely to run into anyone she knew, and mindlessly filled her basket with junk food, doughnuts, salivating at the thought, barely able to wait to tear off the wrappers, not thinking about anything other than getting the food into her stomach as fast as possible.

  It is like this all the time now. She is either fasting, or bingeing before making herself throw up. All she thinks about, all the time, is food. What she has eaten, what she hasn’t eaten, what she is going to eat; whether she has been good or bad; whether this makes her a good person or a bad one.

  She has no time to be happy, to feel included, to feel truly alive. What once was a drive for success, to get the best grades, to do better at school, has become a drive to lose the most weight, to be as thin as she can be.

  She sets herself goals in her head, knowing that the goal will never be quite enough. Each goal she has reached hasn’t felt right.

  Eve can’t eat in public. She drives out to Marian Bear Park, finds a quiet spot in the corner of the parking lot where no one can see her, slinks down in her seat, and grabs the first of the grocery bags, pulling out a packet of doughnuts, stuffing them in her mouth.

  Something inside her calms down. Even as her outside movements are frantic, tearing at the wrappers, grabbing the food, swallowing without tasting, inside a peace descends as she eats. For those moments she is eating, she feels nothing. Stuffing the food brings her a particular kind of numbness that she has mistakenly likened to peace.

  Fast, fast, slower, slow, grinding to a halt as the nausea builds. She sits back, disgusted, ashamed, methodically gathering the empty wrappers, tying them in the plastic bag, climbing out of the car, and dropping the bag in a trash can on the way to the public bathroom, where all evidence of the last half hour will be entirely purged.

  She doesn’t get straight back in the car today. She sets off down one of the dusty trails, climbing up a small grassy hill, settling down at the top, her arms around her knees.

  “Hey, Dad,” she whispers, looking up at the sky, the pale puffs of clouds moving across. “I think I’m in pretty bad shape. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here, but I can’t stop and I can’t talk to anyone about it. I keep thinking that at some point, it’s going to be okay, at some point I’ll have to reach a point where I’ll be happy, because what’s the alternative?” Tears run down her cheeks as she whispers.

  “I can’t talk to anyone about it,” she says. “Only you. But I need you to look after me, okay? I need you to show me what to do
.” Eve watches the clouds for a few seconds, then raises her head, looking around, waiting to see if something would happen, a branch would fall, some kind of sign that her father had heard, but, as always, nothing.

  Which didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. Sighing, she slowly eased herself up with a groan—even sitting on the ground hurts these days, with nothing to protect her joints—and headed back to the safety of chewing gum and the car.

  14

  Sylvie

  The foyer—with its swirly patterned carpets whose ugliness is outweighed by their practicality, huge plastic ficus trees in ceramic pots, and pastel watercolors of beach scenes to inject some sunshine—is nothing if not depressing.

  Each time Sylvie walks through, she feels a cloud of depression descend, lifting only when she enters the atrium, the one room in the home that is covered in glass, filled with sunlight: a room that is truly lovely.

  Wherever Clothilde is to be found, Sylvie tries to entice her to the atrium for tea, never knowing what mood Clothilde will be in, whether she will want to gather friends around as she charms and disarms, or sit scowling in a dark corner of a depressing lounge, making loud, rude comments about everyone who passes.

  Always self-absorbed, before the accident, Clothilde was so busy, so social, she was able to reserve her harshest behavior for her family.

  No one is safe from it now. Her friends dropped away, paying only the occasional guilt visit—giving Clothilde the opportunity to throw thinly disguised barbs about how she has been abandoned, how appalling it is that her so-called friends are so self-absorbed, they cannot even come to see her once a week.

  As her bitterness has grown, the only person she has to take it out on, other than the nurses, is Sylvie.

  * * *

  As Sylvie turns toward the elevators, she stops. In the corner, their backs toward Sylvie, are two people. A man with thin wisps of white hair, his cane resting against the table, and next to him, entertaining him with her stories as he looks on rapt, Clothilde.

  “Mom?” Sylvie bends down and kisses her mother on both cheeks as her mother stares up at her, almost dazed. “You look beautiful. I’m so happy to find you downstairs.”

  “I do get out of bed from time to time,” Clothilde says. “I have friends to see and things to do. I’m not quite the cabbage you think I am.” She rolls her eyes at her friend with a laugh.

  “I don’t, Mom. I’m glad.”

  The man stands up awkwardly, wobbling slightly as he reaches his feet. “I’ll let you ladies spend some time together,” he says as Sylvie instinctively puts a hand out to help steady him, her mother snorting derisively.

  “He’s fine, Sylvie. Don’t patronize him by trying to help.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “She wasn’t,” the man reassures Clothilde, who just sucks her teeth and looks away. “Shall we have tea together today?”

  Clothilde then smiles in her most seductive manner. “That would be lovely,” she murmurs.

  “Charles Fielding.” The man extends a hand to Sylvie. “A pleasure to meet you. Your mother has told me wonderful things about you.”

  Sylvie knows this is unlikely, but she merely nods as he leaves them to be alone.

  “You have an admirer!” she teases lightly, sitting in the seat Charles Fielding has just vacated, as her mother scowls.

  “Yes. And he’s very nice, so don’t you start getting any ideas. I saw the way you smiled at him.” From anyone else, Sylvie would know they are joking, but not her mother.

  “Mom! He’s old enough to be my grandfather. Not to mention the fact that I’m happily married.”

  “Still. Being happily married never stopped anyone before.” She narrows her eyes at Sylvie. “You stay away from Charles.”

  Sylvie sighs. “Sure, Mom. He’s all yours. Oh! I brought something for you.” Sylvie digs into the bag and brings out the candle, now wrapped in brown paper and cellophane, tied with a raffia bow. She hands it proudly to Clothilde, who frowns as she turns it over in her hands.

  “What is it? La confiture? Jam?”

  “No. It’s a candle. I thought you might like to try something other than the Diptyque.”

  Sylvie watches her mother attempt to unwrap the raffia. Any offers of help will be silenced, even though she is struggling; eventually she lifts the candle up and bites through the cellophane, tearing it off with her teeth; then, with the large wad of cellophane still in her teeth, she catches Sylvie’s eye, and curling her good hand like a claw, she growls unexpectedly, like a tiger, before letting the cellophane fall from her mouth with a laugh as she sees Sylvie’s shocked expression.

  “Let the crazy old lady have a little fun.” Clothilde winks before bringing the candle up to her nose, closing her eyes to inhale deeply before letting out a small murmur of pleasure. “La figue.” She nods approvingly. “Et tubéreuse. And amber! This is nice. I like this.”

  A warm glow of pleasure floods Sylvie. Even after all these years, all the therapy that helps her think she has detached from her mother, this joy at having done something right, having done something to please her mother, takes her straight back to childhood. This cord will never be cut.

  Her mother is now reading the label as Sylvie sits motionless, itching to tell her mother but wanting her mother to figure it out, waiting to see her mother’s delight when she realizes.

  “By Sylvie?” her mother asks. “How funny. What a coincidence. Where did you find it?”

  “I didn’t,” bursts out Sylvie. “I made it.”

  “Made it? What do you mean?”

  “I made the candle. As in, I melted the wax, mixed the fragrance, poured it. Remember the candle-wrapping class we did here? I was quizzing the instructor about how to do it. I wanted to make you a scented candle that you would really love. I know you love fig, and that perfume you love is tuberose, so I came up with this myself.” She forces herself to stop, sit back, for her voice is bubbling with excitement as she waits for her mother’s delight.

  Clothilde stares at Sylvie, her initial confusion having given way to blankness. She dips her eyes back down to the candle. Saying nothing.

  The smile slides off Sylvie’s face as she turns her head slightly to stare deliberately out the window, silently berating herself for trying to do something nice, for being so naive as to think she could do something to make her mother happy.

  Picking the candle up, Clothilde smells it again. “It’s really very nice,” she murmurs. “It smells good and it’s pretty. Well done.”

  Sylvie just stares. Is she hearing what she thinks she’s hearing?

  “Dreadful name, though.” Clothilde stares at the label. “You can do much better. I was always very creative. I’m sure I can come up with something clever. You remember that advertising campaign for the soap? You know that was all me? We were at a dinner for the CEO of…”

  As she talks, Sylvie drifts off, her mother’s compliments reverberating in her head, mixed in with the voice of Sally Field: She likes it. She really, really likes it.

  She is brought back to earth with a bump.

  “So where is that husband of yours?” Clothilde asks. “He hasn’t been to see me for far too long. I’m going to phone him and demand he come to see me.”

  Sylvie, relieved Clothilde will deal with it directly, says nothing.

  “Is he traveling again?”

  “Yes. You know how it is. Always on the road.”

  “Oh yes, I know how it is. A different town, no wife, no children, he’s out there having fun. You need to seduce him back home.”

  Sylvie snorts. “Mom! Are you implying Mark’s out partying? With other women? Because that’s just ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous? For a handsome, young, virile man like Mark? Men can’t survive without sex, and if he’s not getting it from you, he’s getting it from someone else.”

  “We have a perfectly wonderful sex life, thank you.” Sylvie tries to laugh.

  “I’m sure you do. But he’s not g
etting it from you enough, because he’s never with you. How much do you see him? A week a month? Don’t be stupid, Sylvie. You need to start making him want to be home.”

  “It’s not a week a month,” Sylvie says furiously, mentally working it out in her head. Surely it’s not a week a month. It’s always roughly been two weeks a month, half here, half in the California office or on the road. But apart from his surprise visit this past weekend, he has been here less of late.

  The palpitations start again. Could her mother be right?

  Could her mother be right?

  15

  Sylvie

  It has never occurred to Sylvie to check Mark’s e-mail. She is not, or has not been, insecure enough to feel she has to delve into her husband’s life. There have, of course, been occasions where she has called him, has heard a woman’s voice in the background, but as she well knows, half his colleagues are women. Part of his company’s policy is engendering a close team by constant, fun, extracurricular activies.

  Has she, as her mother seems to think, been naive? Should she do the unthinkable and snoop? Terrifying, yet she is increasingly compelled to do so?

  Her brain is firing. First with fear of the possibility being true, then a calmer voice talking her down, telling her how unlikely it is. This is Mark. This isn’t Bill. This isn’t a man who is flirtatious, a little too tactile with the women in the neighborhood, a touch too familiar when they’ve had a glass too many at a party.

  Not Mark. Even when so-called friends attempt to flirt with him, shoot him seductive glances, lean in a little too close at a wine-tasting soiree, Sylvie sees him smile, then excuse himself, eyes frantically searching over the heads for his wife to come rescue him.

  They always laugh about it later, Mark unaware that anyone was flirting, insisting women were just being friendly, Sylvie teasing him about his new “girlfriend,” able to tease because Mark isn’t like that, has never given her any indication he is interested in anyone but her.