Barefoot: A Novel Read online

  Josh pul ed away from Didi.

  “I’m not into this,” he said.

  At this announcement, she bit his neck and sucked. She was trying to mark him as her own. There had been so many hickeys in high school, his teachers had looked at him sideways. He pushed at her.

  “Didi, stop.”

  She persisted, in what she wanted him to believe was a playful way, her forehead boring into his jaw, her mouth like a Hoover on his neck. Josh took hold of her shoulders and pried her off. He got to his feet.

  “Stop it, I said.”

  “What?” Didi lay splayed across the disgusting sofa looking very much like a half-opened Christmas present in her red satin. Her makeup was smeared around her eyes, and one of the slinky shoulder straps had slid off her shoulders and threatened to expose her breast.

  There was a bloodcurdling shriek. Josh jumped. Lola stood, back arched, on the top of the recliner.

  “Okay, I’m out of here,” Josh said.

  “Wait!” Didi said. She gathered Lola in her arms.

  “Sorry,” Josh said. “This isn’t working out for me.”

  Didi slugged back the rest of her wine and trailed Josh to the door. Didi draped Lola over her shoulders like a fur wrap. “We’re stil friends, right?”

  Josh paused. He didn’t want to say yes, but if he said no there would be a barrage of sad-sack nonsense and he would never escape. “Sure,” he said.

  “So you’l lend me the money?” she said.

  This was another classic Didi trick: to refer to something completely out of the blue as if it were an already decided-upon fact.

  “What money?”

  “I need two hundred dol ars for my car,” she said. “Or they’re going to repossess it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a little behind on my bil s,” Didi said. “I bought some summer clothes, my rent went up, my credit cards are maxed . . .”

  “Ask your parents for the money,” Josh said.

  “I did. They said no.”

  “I don’t have two hundred dol ars,” Josh said. “Not to spare, anyway. I have to save. Col ege is ex-pen-sive.”

  “I’l pay you back at the end of the month,” Didi said. “I promise. Please? I’m in real y big trouble. Would you drop it off at the hospital tomorrow?

  I’m there eight to four.”

  “I work tomorrow.”

  “What about Tuesday, then?” Didi said. “Tuesday’s your day off, right?”

  Josh let his head fal forward on his neck. How did things like this happen? He should just say no and leave.

  “If you lend me the money, I’l leave you alone forever,” Didi said. “I swear it.”

  This was as blatant a lie as was ever spoken, but it was too tempting to ignore.

  “You’l stop cal ing?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’l pay me back? By the first of July?”

  “With interest,” Didi said. “Ten dol ars interest.”

  Josh managed to get himself on the opposite side of the door. Lola scratched at the screen.

  “Fine,” he said. He was absolutely certain he would never see the money again, but if he could get Didi out of his life once and for al , it was a smal price to pay. “I’l see you Tuesday.”

  According to Aunt Liv, there were only three kinds of women in the world: older sisters, younger sisters, and women without sisters. Aunt Liv was a younger sister like Brenda; Aunt Liv’s older sister, Joy, had been Brenda’s grandmother. Joy was prettier, Liv always thought, and luckier. They both got jobs working at a fabric store during the Second World War, but for whatever reason, Joy was paid a nickel more per day. The owner was sweet on her, Liv said, even though I was the one who made him laugh. Joy then married a boy from Narberth named Albert Lyndon, and they had four children, the oldest of whom was Brenda’s father, Buzz. Liv, meanwhile, inherited her parents’ stone house in Gladwyne, she attended Bryn Mawr Col ege, she taught literature there for years. She read, she lavished her nieces and nephews with attention and love and money, she kept meticulous documentation of the family history. Aunt Liv was the only person Brenda had ever confided in about Vicki because she was the only person Brenda knew who would understand.

  I spent my whole growing-up thinking Joy was born a princess and I was born a scullery maid, Liv said. But then I realized that was my own delusion.

  Brenda had cherished those words at the time of their delivery (Brenda was ten, Vicki eleven), but there were no delusions about what was happening in Aunt Liv’s cottage this summer. Brenda was not only serving as Vicki’s scul ery maid, but also as her nanny and her chauffeur.

  Because Vicki had cancer! If Brenda wanted to throw a pity party for herself, she would be the only one attending. More than once already, Brenda had sat on her bed in the old nursery, hoping to absorb some of Aunt Liv’s strength, patience, and kindness.

  On Tuesday, Brenda drove Vicki to chemotherapy in the neighbors’ ancient Peugeot with the kids strapped into the backseat. Taking the kids had not been in the original plan; however, over the weekend, one thing had become clear: If the children were left in Melanie’s care, they would die in a kitchen fire or drown drinking from the garden hose. Melanie was going to stay home and “rest,” she said—and if she attempted another escape and was successful, so much the better in Brenda’s opinion.

  Brenda tried not to appear martyrish in her role as servant, because she knew this was exactly what Vicki expected. They had argued about Melanie on Sunday afternoon. Brenda expressed her discontent while Vicki made what Brenda could only think of as the “she’s becoming our mother” face. Brenda couldn’t stand that facial expression, and yet she sensed she would see a lot of it this summer. In the end, however, Vicki had

  —surprise!—agreed with Brenda, and apologized. Melanie probably shouldn’t have come. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but maybe we were hasty. I’m sorry. Yes, we’ll look for a babysitter, and no, you won’t get much of your screenplay written until we do. Brenda had been impressed by Vicki’s admission of her own poor judgment. It was, in thirty years of sisterhood, unprecedented. Vicki was always right; this was a fact of her birth. She had been born right—as wel as pretty, talented, intel igent, and athletic; she was a model daughter, a natural-born leader, the gold-medal/blue-ribbon winner in whatever she did, a magnet for girlfriends and boyfriends alike. She was the sister people preferred. Again and again and again while growing up, Brenda had screamed at her parents: How could you do this to me? They had never once asked her to define the “this”; it was understood. How could you make me follow Vicki? Only sixteen months apart, they were constantly compared, and Brenda constantly found herself coming up short.

  People are different. El en Lyndon had been tel ing Brenda this for thirty years. Even sisters were different. But, as Aunt Liv was quick to point out, El en Lyndon was a woman without sisters. El en Lyndon had grown up with three older brothers, and the fact that she had given birth to sisters in rather rapid succession left her perplexed, as though she had brought home not children, but rather a rare breed of chinchil a. Brenda thought her mother the loveliest of women. She was stylish, cultivated, and impeccably mannered. She was educated about art, poetry, and classical music. On the one hand, it seemed El en had been born into the world to be the mother of girls: to orchestrate the tea parties, buckle up the patent leather shoes, read A Little Princess aloud, and procure tickets to the Nutcracker. But on the other hand—and here was the one thing Brenda and Vicki had always agreed upon—she had no idea what it was like to have a sister. El en understood nothing of hand-me-downs; she didn’t know what it felt like to walk into a classroom and watch the expression of delight on a new teacher’s face when she learned that she was blessed with another Lyndon girl this year! El en, Brenda was sure, knew nothing of insidious jealousy. She would be appal ed to learn that the deepest and darkest secrets in Brenda’s life al somehow related to her envy of Vicki.

  Vicki teased Brenda
al the time about her devotion to The Innocent Impostor, but that book, discovered at the tender age of fourteen when Brenda was in danger of being crushed under the toe of Vicki’s Tretorn sneaker, had served as Brenda’s life raft. It gave her a focus, an identity.

  Because of that book, Brenda became a reader, a critical thinker, a writer, an American literature major in col ege, a graduate student, a doctoral candidate, a doctor, a professor, possibly the foremost authority on Fleming Trainor in the world. And now that Brenda would never be able to teach the book again, and would never be able to write about it with any hope of being published someplace even remotely legitimate and scholarly, she was forced to commit a transgression (seen by some academics as even more egregious than the ones she’d already committed) and commercialize the novel. Take it public, as it were. She would write a screenplay for The Innocent Impostor. Brenda vacil ated between thinking this was a bril iant idea and thinking it was completely inane. She wondered: Do al bril iant ideas seem bril iant from the very beginning, or do they seem far-fetched until they come into clearer focus? Brenda had first considered writing the screenplay for the novel (or “treating it,” as they say) back in grad school, when she was dirt poor, subsisting on green tea, saltines, and ramen noodles, but she had dismissed the idea as crass and ridiculous. She was, like every other academic worth her salt, a purist.

  Now, however, Brenda tried to convince herself that the novel was perfect for Hol ywood. Set in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, the book told the story of a man named Calvin Dare, whose horse kil s another man, Thomas Beech, by accident. (The horse kicks Beech in the head while the two men are tying up in front of a tavern during a lightning storm.) Calvin Dare, through a series of careful y disguised coincidences, proceeds to become the deceased Beech. He applies for and is given Beech’s old job; he fal s in love with Beech’s bereaved fiancée, Emily. He becomes a Quaker and joins Beech’s meetinghouse. The book was unsatisfying to some critics because of its blissful ending: Dare marries Emily, produces healthy and loving children, and is happy in his work. Dare suffers no qualms about how he moved into Beech’s life as though it were an abandoned house, fixed it up, and made it his own. Brenda had spent the greater part of six years parsing the book’s definition of identity and holding the implied messages of the book up against colonial, and modern, morality. If you didn’t like your life, was it okay to become someone else? What if that person was dead? Brenda had often felt like a lone traveler on the icy plateau of this topic. There was nobody else who cared. But that might change if The Innocent Impostor were produced. She, Dr. Brenda Lyndon, formerly Professor Brenda Lyndon, would be acknowledged for unearthing a lost classic; and more important, she would be forgiven.

  And yet, even with redemption almost within her grasp, doubt plagued her. Why waste her time on an idiotic project that was destined to lead nowhere? The answer was, she had no other options. She wished again and again that her academic career had not been so gruesomely derailed.

  Even with mil ions of potential dol ars in her future, Brenda dwel ed on the “if onlys.” If only she hadn’t answered her cel phone the night John Walsh first cal ed, if only she’d warned Walsh not to show his midterm paper to anyone, if only she hadn’t lost her temper with Mrs. Pencaldron and thrown a book at the painting, if only she’d exercised a modicum of common sense . . . she would stil be a professor. Professor Brenda Lyndon. Herself.

  Her first semester at Champion had gone beautiful y. Brenda was awarded the highest teaching rating of any professor in her department, and these ratings were published in the campus newspaper for al to see. Some said it was because Brenda was new blood, a professor half the age of anyone else in the department, and with such unusual subject matter (Champion was the only university in the country teaching Fleming Trainor).

  Brenda was attractive to boot—slender, with long hair, blue eyes, Prada loafers. Some said the English Department offered no competition. The rest of the faculty were dinosaurs, wax dummies. Whatever the reason, Brenda blew away the other professors in her department, not only in the numerical ratings, but with the anecdotals. Engaging, absorbing . . . we hung on every word . . . we carried the discussion into the quad . . . we were still talking about the reading at dinner. Dr. Lyndon is available and fair. . . . She is everything a Champion professor should be. The Pen & Feather ran a front-page feature on Brenda the fol owing week. She was a celebrity. She was part Britney Spears, part Condoleezza Rice. Each of Brenda’s much-older col eagues—including the department chair, Dr. Suzanne Atela—cal ed to congratulate her. They were envious, though not surprised. That’s why we hired you, Dr. Atela said. You’re young. You have a passion for your subject matter that we outgrew long ago.

  Congratulations, Dr. Lyndon.

  Brenda had bragged to her family at Christmastime; she had bought a bottle of expensive champagne to celebrate, drank most of it herself, and then blew her own horn. My students like me, she said as they al sat around the harvest table in Vicki and Ted’s dining room eating the impeccable meal that Vicki had prepared entirely from scratch. They love me.

  These words took on a mortifying nuance second semester, when Brenda’s class consisted of eleven females and one male, a fox in the henhouse, a thirty-one-year-old sophomore from Fremantle, Australia, named John Walsh.

  I love you, Walsh said. Brindah, I love you.

  In the passenger seat, Vicki coughed. Brenda peeked at her. She was pale, her hands were like restless birds in her lap. I am driving my sister to chemotherapy, Brenda thought. Vicki has cancer and might die from it.

  Today, Vicki was having a port instal ed in her chest that would al ow the oncology nurses to thread a tube into her vein and administer the poison. Instal ing the port was outpatient surgery, though the hospital told her to expect a three-hour visit. Brenda was supposed to take the kids to the playground, buy them an ice cream at Congdon’s Pharmacy on Main Street for lunch, and be back at the hospital in time to pick up Vicki and get Porter home for his afternoon nap. Vicki had made it sound al nice and neat, the perfect plan, but Brenda could tel that Vicki was nervous.

  When other people got nervous, they tightened up, they became high-pitched and strained. Vicki was like this normal y. When she got addled, she became floppy and indecisive. She was al over the place.

  Brenda pul ed into the hospital parking lot. As soon as she shut off the engine, Porter started to cry. Blaine said, “Actual y, I want to go home.”

  “We’re dropping Mom off, then we’re going to the playground,” Brenda said. She got out of the car and unbuckled Porter, but he screamed and thrust himself at Vicki.

  “Give him his pacifier,” Vicki said flatly. She was eyeing the gray-shingled hospital.

  “Where is it?” Brenda said.

  Vicki rummaged through her bag. “I can’t find it right this second, but I know it’s here,” she said. “I remember packing it. But . . . maybe we should run home and get another one.”

  “Run home?” Brenda said. “Here, I’l just take him.” But Porter kicked and screamed some more. He nearly wriggled out of her arms. “Whoa!”

  “Give him to me,” Vicki said. “I may be able to nurse him one last time before I go in.”

  “But you did bring a bottle?” Brenda said.

  “I did,” Vicki said. “This is going to be known as extreme weaning.”

  Brenda moved to the other side of the car and set Blaine free from his five-point harness. A person had to have an advanced degree just to operate the car seats. “Come on, Champ.”

  “Actual y, I want to go home. To my house. In Connecticut.”

  “Actual y, you have no choice in the matter,” Vicki said in a stern voice. “Mommy has an appointment. Now hop out.”

  “Here,” Brenda said. “I’l carry you.”

  “He can walk,” Vicki said.

  “No,” Blaine said, and he kicked the seat in front of him. “I’m not getting out.”

  “After we drop Mom off, we’re going to the
playground at Children’s Beach,” Brenda said.

  “I don’t want to go to the beach! I want to go to my house in Connecticut. Where my dad lives.”

  “We should have left him at the cottage,” Vicki said. “But I couldn’t do that to Melanie.”

  Brenda kept quiet. She was not going to be predictable.

  “I’m taking you to get ice cream for lunch,” Brenda told Blaine. “At the pharmacy.” This was the ace up her sleeve, and she was dismayed to have to throw it so early, but . . .

  “I don’t want ice cream for lunch,” Blaine said. He started to cry. “I want to stay with Mommy.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Vicki said. “Can we just get inside, please? Blaine? Wil you help Mommy out here and come with me inside?”

  Blaine shook his head. Strains of “Für Elise” floated up from Brenda’s purse. Her cel phone.

  “That’s probably Ted,” Vicki said.

  Brenda checked the display, thinking, Yes, it’s probably Ted, but hoping it was Walsh. The display said, Delaney, Brian. Brenda groaned. “Shit,”

  she said. “My lawyer.” She shoved the phone back into her purse and, fueled by her anger at the cal , barked at Blaine, “Let’s go. Right now.”

  Reluctantly, Blaine climbed into Brenda’s arms. She gasped; he weighed a ton.

  “I want to stay with Mommy,” he said.

  If only the university officials could see me now, Brenda thought as they walked through the sliding doors into the bright chil of the hospital. They would have mercy on me. Anyone would.

  They slogged toward the admitting desk, where a busty young woman waited for them. She had blond hair held in a very sloppy bun with what looked like crazy straws, streaky blusher on her cheekbones, and breasts that were shoved up and out so far it looked like she was offering them up on a platter. Didi, her name tag said.