Real Life & Liars Read online

  Irina turns away from the pool. She didn’t even have champagne at her own wedding. She’d gone to take a sip, and Darius snatched the glass right out of her hand. “Not for my little baby,” he declared, grinning a little, but Irina knew he was serious.

  So they kissed instead, and the justice of the peace or whateverthehell took the picture himself, but Irina opened her eyes too soon, so it looks like she’s giving Darius mouth-to-mouth. Not exactly your typical soft-focus romantic wedding-day photo. Instead of a gauzy gown and veil, she wore a tacky white beaded dress from a consignment shop, which some teenager probably wore to the prom, and a fake white rose pinned in her short black hair. Darius sported a bolo tie and carnation stuck in his sport-coat lapel.

  Irina believes that she will remember what she was thinking in that photo for the rest of her life.

  What the hell did I just do?

  Darius wakes her from a doze. The sun is lower in the sky. He’s wearing his glasses with the tortoiseshell frames, a textbook in one hand. The glasses remind her of her father.

  “Hungry?” he asks her, and she’s relieved to see that he really means food this time.

  “A little,” Irina ventures weakly, laying the groundwork for her after-dinner bout of faked queasiness so she can have one night’s peaceful sleep. Darius’s romantic intentions have been undeterred by her delicate state.

  “We could order in?” he suggests. He puts down the book and folds his glasses on the nightstand.

  “No…I’d like to get up and around a bit.”

  “Sure, baby. Whatever you like.” Darius is pulling on a fresh knit shirt over his muscled chest. “So, have you called your parents yet?”

  Irina pulls the covers over her head. “I can’t tell them all this over the phone.”

  “So you’re going to spring me on them?”

  “It’s going to be ‘springing’ no matter how or when I do it. They’ve never heard of you, and suddenly you’re not only a son-in-law, but I’m having your baby? There’s no good way to do it. So I’ll do it in person.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Yes, I say so,” Irina snaps. She’s heard Katya say that to her a zillion times in their lives, and from her big sister it means, You’re an idiot, but whatever. Now she thinks, I better not have married my sister. I might have to kill myself.

  Darius says, “Are you at least going to tell them I’m black?”

  “Trust me, it will be perfectly obvious.”

  “Have you ever dated a black man before?”

  “Course I have. All kinds.”

  “OK, let me ask that another way. You ever brought a black man home before?”

  “No, but don’t worry about it. My mother is the original flower child who will probably be thrilled to death. My dad is so out of it that you’ll be lucky he even follows the conversation.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s a writer.”

  “Oh? What does he write?’

  Irina rolls out of bed, having had this conversation six hundred times before. “Nothing you’ve read, I guarantee it. I’m getting dressed.” That is, she thought, if I can find pants that fit.

  It won’t be Mom or Dad who care about Darius being black, and in fact no one in her carefully PC family would dare mention it. It will be Katya and her snooty-ass husband, she predicts, who will find subtle ways to broadcast disapproval, at least until they learn that Darius makes an excellent salary selling high-end new cars, and is taking classes at night toward an MBA. Then he’ll pass muster. Barely.

  In any case, she knows they’ll find fault with him somewhere. The very fact he married her may be enough of a flaw.

  Irina digs a loose-waisted sundress out of her suitcase. She’ll have to get Darius to take her shopping.

  CHAPTER 5

  Mira

  I PUSH MY BREASTS INTO MY WEDDING DRESS, STUBBORN THINGS seem to be bigger than they were when I got married thirty-five years ago. How is that possible?

  I squint into the oval standing mirror and realize my breasts are just as they always were, but there’s rather more flesh underneath and around them. Looking at my reflection, for a moment—quick as a flicker of déjà vu—my left breast disappears, my gown sagging in. I blink and it’s back, bulging just like the innocent right one.

  Am I still high? I don’t think so.

  I smile at myself in the mirror, and why not? To even be able to slip into—all right, squish into—my bridal gown after all those years and three babies is a rare feat indeed.

  It helps that empire-waisted gowns were in fashion, which are forgiving in having the narrow part up underneath the boobs. This might have caused a whisper in the church that I was pregnant, and that’s why I needed a loose waist. After all, I had already been brazenly living with Max, with a child already, dear little Katya.

  Not that my university colleagues or Max’s writer friends gave a good goddamn, being leftist children of the late sixties and seventies. To them, the scandal was that we bothered getting married after all those years. We had a real minister, even, as a grudging concession to Max’s parents.

  It was our parents’ generation that sat with gargoyle faces locked in grimace, or so I had imagined, while we faced the benevolent minister, who wore a beard and a small gold hoop earring along with his frock and rainbow stole.

  Max’s wild curly hair would not be tamed, even for our wedding day, and his ears stuck out like dessert plates on his head. He’d forgotten to take off his glasses, and they were perched on top of his head throughout the entire, blessedly brief, fifteen-minute ceremony.

  And the door behind me opens, and poof! there appears Max now, hair still curly, though it’s retreating up his scalp. He’s still not dressed for the day. He’s got manuscript pages clutched in his fist.

  “Oh!” he gasps. “Oh, you look lovely. Just like the day we married.”

  I do look nice enough in this, though not at all like the day we married. Instead of brown hair like espresso, it’s gone bright silver, and I have pronounced laugh lines, and smile lines, and yes, worry lines, too. Three children will produce plenty of those, to be sure.

  The sight of me in wedding garb seems to have arrested Max from whatever he was going to say. He simply stares.

  Finally, I ask him, “What did you need?”

  He gulps hard and asks me, quavering, “When are we going to tell them? The kids?”

  I reach back and undo the zipper, which slides gratefully down, released from its duty. I step out of the dress, which I may wear tomorrow night instead of the suitable matronly frock that Katya picked out. I shake out my silk slip, feeling the air on my skin.

  “Tomorrow, after the party, I think. Or maybe Sunday morning, before they all leave.”

  “Are you going to tell them…all of it?”

  Max means, am I going to tell them that I won’t go back there, to that doctor with her scalpel and her anesthesia, and her chemicals and radiation.

  “I think I’d better, don’t you?”

  “They won’t like it.” He grips the pages tighter. I expect he’s right about the kids. But it’s not their choice to make. Nor is it his, no matter what he seems to think. Max continues, “You shouldn’t tell them that part. You might change your mind. Why upset them?”

  “I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “Mira, it’s only been a few days, give yourself time…”

  “Leave me alone, I’m trying to get dressed.”

  Max shrinks out of the room, and I feel a sinking in my chest. Because I have a finite number of words left—who can say how many?—and each one that’s less than loving is a squandered opportunity.

  The burden of this impending end makes me gasp for air for just a moment, then I shake it off by closing my eyes and brushing my hand across the mess and the dirt and the pain, wiping it all away.

  CHAPTER 6

  Katya

  KATYA CLUCKS HER TONGUE AT THE SIGHT OF HER MOTHER’S YARD, as
it comes into view of her Escalade’s front windshield. Viny, creeping weeds smother the grass, and chunks of tall fescue stab up through the mess to announce, Look! No one has mowed here for a week!

  She feels reassured in her argument against having the anniversary party under a tent in the yard. It’s a double lot, it would have been big enough—the carriage house was long ago torn down by some previous owner, so the Victorian home stands alone, with plenty of lawn—but really, for such a lovely event to be held over the top of all those weeds seemed so wrong. Like a Tiffany diamond wrapped in cellophane.

  Katya frowns at the clouds on the horizon. They look benign enough so far, puffy and light. But the weather forecasts have been showing ominously increasing chances for rain tomorrow.

  “Charles, you missed the house.”

  “Mmm? Oh. I’ll go around the block.”

  “Dad! I’ve gotta pee!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Taylor, you can hold it two more minutes. I’ve had enough out of you.”

  Katya winces at his tone with their younger son. Charles remains eternally disappointed that neither of his sons seems appropriate as heir apparent to Peterson Enterprises. Hope is not lost for Kit, but Katya has to allow that she doesn’t seem a likely prospect, given her current trajectory on the apprentice-bimbo track.

  Anyway, Katya thinks bitterly as the SUV pulls into the long drive up to the house, their daughter could be the next Madeleine Albright and it would never cross Charles’s mind to appoint a woman as his successor.

  Mira appears on the screened-in back porch. Through the haze of the screen she looks exactly like her youthful self, with the same Rapunzel waves of hair. She never did cut her hair short and resort to a curly perm like her contemporaries. Mira opens the door and the effect is gone like the wink of a firefly. Now she is just her postmenopausal self, wrinkles and silver hair intact. Bangles rattle on her wrist as she glides down the stairs to greet the family.

  “Oh, I’ve missed you,” she whispers into Katya’s hair as she squishes her into a hug.

  Katya steps back. “Mom, you should wear shoes out here; you’ll cut yourself on these rocks.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, I’m barefoot so often my feet are tough as any old sandals.” To demonstrate, she picks up a foot and shows Katya the sole: darkened by dirt and worn as the cover of an old book.

  “Maybe tomorrow we should get you a pedicure,” Katya muses, half to herself, as she grabs some bags of kid-friendly food out of the car. Chip and Tay each give a barely audible “hi” to their grandmother as they stomp through the porch, heading for the kitchen. No doubt they will be disappointed to see Mira’s usual assortment of transfat-free brown-flour sugarless fare. Kit hops out, those damn white iPod cords trailing from her ears. She pops an air-kiss in Mira’s direction and bops off to find a comfy chair for her texting. Katya had only asked her to take out the earbuds, just long enough to say hello. Such a simple request.

  “A pedicure? Those boys should have carried those bags for you.”

  “I can handle the bags. I mean tomorrow morning, when we get your hair done. You remember, I mentioned it yesterday?”

  Mira chews on her lip and looks Katya in the eye. “No, can’t say that I do. Well, a hairdo is fine, then. No sense bothering with the feet, though, those shoes you picked out will cover up my nasty old paws anyhow.”

  Katya slams the Escalade door with her hip as Charles comes around and takes the bags from her hands, a mere nod in Mira’s direction.

  “He’s tired,” she says to her mother. She takes Mira’s elbow, and they go up the stairs together, through the back porch, and into the kitchen. Charles is already on his cell phone, and the boys have turned on the television upstairs in the guest room; Katya can hear an abrasive commercial through the floorboards. Mira never watches television herself; the small one in the guest room is a concession for her grandchildren, but even that doesn’t have cable. She can see Kit’s feet over the arm of an overstuffed violet-leather chair in the front room, tapping to some beat throbbing into her ears.

  The kids consider it near purgatory to visit their grandmother these days.

  “Your siblings should be here shortly,” announces Mira, walking to a cutting board with vegetables and a big knife. She starts going at a piece of celery. “Dad will be down when he finishes his paragraph.”

  “Or his chapter, or his whole damn book,” Katya says with a sigh. She catches Charles’s eye and sends him a glance, which after fifteen years of marriage he should very well know means Get off the damn phone and be sociable.

  He pretends not to see her, though his eyes are trained squarely on her forehead. Katya might as well be a fax machine for all the emotion in his gaze.

  Katya glances at her watch. Nearly 5 P.M., almost her self-permitted wine time.

  “Did you hear that Van isn’t bringing a date after all?” Katya gets up to go rummaging for a Diet Coke. Mira usually has lemonade and mineral water, but to humor guests she keeps some soda around.

  “No, he didn’t say that. That’s too bad.”

  “Not exactly surprising, though is it? I have yet to see him bring a girl to any family function.”

  Chop, chop, chop, goes Mira’s blade, now on a red pepper. “Not everyone meets the man of their dreams at college freshman orientation.” She shoots Katya a look through a lock of silvery hair that’s fallen over the side of her face.

  “I didn’t start dating him right away. I had my share of duds, believe me.” Kat jumps up from the table and takes the knife from her mother. “Here, let me do the salad.”

  Katya doesn’t have to ask what’s for dinner. Spaghetti, as always when they come to visit. The only Mirabelle meal the kids will tolerate. Mira says, “Did he call you? Did he say what happened?”

  “No. But it’ll be yet another instance of picking a girl completely wrong for him, same as the last dozen.”

  “Katya.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. But look at the girls he tries to date. They’re too old, or too young, or dating three other guys at once, or they can barely spell. He’s so…” Katya waves the knife in the air, searching for the word. “Self-sabotaging.”

  Mira leans against the kitchen counter, having put the water on to boil. She absentmindedly braids a strand of her hair. “He’s not the most savvy of men, that’s for sure.”

  Katya snorts. “Oh, and if he does happen to find a nice girl, he comes on so strong she makes a break for the exit. Remember the time he invited a girl he barely knew to a wedding, then bought her a necklace? She spooked like a show horse.”

  “As I said”—Mira continues to twine and untwine that strand of hair—“we don’t all have your luck, dear.”

  Footsteps on the stairs interrupt them, just as Katya finishes with the vegetables. She turns to see her father, in brown-corduroy pants and a god-awful salmon pink polo shirt, hair like he lost a fight with a live wire. “Katya!” he cries theatrically, and runs down the rest of the stairs. He reaches the kitchen and sweeps her into a hug, barely giving her time to put down the knife to avoid impaling him.

  Katya tries to pull back no less than three times before her dad releases her, and even then he looks into her eyes with a penetrating gaze. He looks up at Mira, still holding one of Katya’s hands, and the two of them trade a look that makes Katya shiver, despite the heat from the stove.

  Charles walks back in, clicking shut his cell phone. “Damn work, I might have to go back into the office tomorrow.”

  Lucky me, thinks Katya, as she turns from her father and sweeps the vegetables into the bowl with the side of the knife. Lucky, lucky me.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ivan

  IVAN SITS IN HIS VW, LISTENING TO THE ENGINE TICK AND HISS, two blocks from his parents’ home, where his older sister has no doubt already arrived and taken over everything. Ivan turns his cell phone over in his hand. His gaze rests on a group of children playing jump rope in a yard. But he’s thinking about Barbara.

  He
could call her. Maybe she’s had a change of heart.

  And what to tell the family? It was ill-advised, but he’d bragged ahead of time about her beauty. He shouldn’t say anything at all, let them think what they will. But what to say when they asked about his life?

  The job? He’ll say, “Great, terrific.” One of his students obviously forged his parents’ signature on his practice record sheet, and Ivan graded him a “zero” for that week, thereafter getting called on the carpet because his parents swore up and down that they’d signed it, and Jason had indeed practiced his sax the required thirty minutes a day. Sure, and his father just happens to have identical handwriting, right down to the flattened top of the cursive “J” with which Jason signs his own name. And with all this alleged practice, how is it possible not to show even one speck of improvement? If anything, he’s gotten worse as one of the busty flute girls has been flirting with him during her sixteen-measure rest, squelching what little musicality he ever had.

  Ivan smelled defeat on the wind and gave in.

  The songwriting? He could talk about the close personal relationship he has with several rock acts in town, if by “close” he means “running from me like a crazed stalker with a machete” and “personal” means “using my demos as coasters for their drinks.”

  He notices that the children have stopped jumping rope and are staring at him like rabbits before bolting into the underbrush. He starts the car, leaving the cell phone in the cup holder.

  Van knows he can’t dodge the Barbara question. Someone will mention it. Someone always does.