Unspeakable Things(2)

Mom lifted her drink and emptied it before offering it to Dad. “Thanks, love.”

He strode over to her side of the table, leaning in for a deep kiss before taking her glass. Now I was rolling my eyes right along with Sephie. Mom and Dad, mostly Dad, regularly tried to convince us that we were lucky they were still so in love, but gross.

Dad pulled away from kissing Mom and caught our expressions. He laughed his air-only heh heh laugh, setting down both glasses so he was free to massage Mom’s shoulders. They were an attractive couple, people said it all the time. Mom had been beautiful, every cloudy picture taken of her proved that, and she still had the glossy brown hair and wide eyes, though incubating Sephie and me had padded her hips and belly. Dad was handsome, too, with a Charles Bronson thing going on. You could see how they’d ended up together, especially after Mom downed a glass of wine, and she’d let spill how she’d always been drawn to the bad boys, even back in high school.

My immediate family was small: just Mom and Aunt Jin; my big sister, Persephone (my parents had a thing for Greek names); and Dad. I didn’t know my dad’s side of the family. They wouldn’t be worth sweeping into a dustpan, at least that’s what my grandpa on Mom’s side swore to my grandma the winter he died of a massive heart attack. My grandma hadn’t argued. She’d been a docile lady who always smelled of fresh-baked bread no matter the season. A few weeks after Grandpa passed, she died of a stroke, which sounds like a swim move but is not.

They’d lost a son, my mom’s parents, when I was three years old. He’d been a wild one, I guess. Died playing chicken in a ’79 Camaro, probably drinking, people said. I could only remember one thing about Uncle Richard. It was at his funeral. Jin was crying, but Mom was crying louder, and she went up to Grandpa for a hug. He turned away from her, and she stood there, looking sadder than a lost baby.

I asked her about it once, about why Grandpa wouldn’t hug her. She said I was too young to remember anything from Rich’s funeral, and besides, the past should stay in the past.

“I think your mother is the most beautiful woman in the world,” Dad said in the here and now, rubbing Mom’s shoulders while she closed her eyes and made a dreamy face.

“Fine by me,” I said. “Just get a room.”

Dad swept his arm in a wide arc, his smile tipped sideways. “I have a whole house. Maybe you should learn to relax. I’ll rub your shoulders next.”

My eyes cut to Sephie. She was flicking a bent corner of a playing card.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Sephie? Your neck tense?”

She shrugged.

“That’s my girl!” He moved to her, laying his hands on her bony shoulders. She was two years older than me but skinny no matter what she ate, all buckeroo teeth and dimples, a dead ringer for Kristy McNichol, though I’d eat my own hair before I’d tell her.

Dad started in on Sephie. “It’s good to feel good,” he murmured to her.

That made me itch inside. “Can we play another game of cribbage?”

“Soon,” Dad said. “First, I want to hear everyone’s summer dreams.”

I groaned. Dad was big on dreams. He believed you could be whatever you wanted, but you had to “see it” first. Hippie-dippie, but I suppose a person got used to it. Both Sephie and I swapped a look. We knew without saying it that Dad would not approve of our plan to transform ourselves into blondes. Girls should not try to be anything for anyone, he’d tell us. We needed to command our own minds and bodies.

Again, gross.

“I want to visit Aunt Jin,” I offered.

Mom had been going half-lidded, but her eyes popped open at the mention of her sister. “That’s a great plan! We can drive to Canada for a week.”

“Excellent,” Dad agreed.

My heart soared. We hardly ever traveled farther than up the highway to St. Cloud for co-op groceries, but now that Mom had her full-time teaching job, there’d been talk of road-tripping this summer. Still, I’d been afraid to suggest we visit Aunt Jin. If Mom and Dad were in the wrong mood, they’d kill that idea for eternity, and I really needed some Aunt Jin time. I loved her to death.

She was the only one who didn’t pretend I was normal.

She was there when I was born, stayed on for a few weeks after that to help out Mom, but my first actual memory of her was from right after Uncle Richard’s funeral. Aunt Jin was a decade younger than Mom, which put her at no more than seventeen at the time. I’d caught her staring at my throat, something a lot of people do.

Rather than look away, she’d smiled and said, “If you’d been born two hundred years ago, they’d have drowned you.”

She was referring to the red, ropy scar that circled where my neck met my shoulders, thick as one of Mr. T’s gold chains. Apparently, I’d shot out of Mom with the umbilical cord coiled around my throat, my body blue as a Berry Punch Fla-Vor-Ice, eyes wide even though I wasn’t breathing. I exited so fast that the doctor dropped me.

Or at least that’s the story I was told.

There I hung, a human dingleberry, until one of the nurses swooped in and unwound the cord, uncovering an amniotic band strangling me beneath that. The quick-thinking nurse cut it, then slapped me till I wailed. She’d saved my life, but the band had branded me. Mom said my lesion looked like an angry scarlet snake at first. That seemed dramatic. In any case, I suspect the nurse was a little shaky when she finally handed me over. The whole fiasco wasn’t exactly a job well done. Plus, Rosemary’s Baby had hit theaters a couple years before, and everyone in that room must have been wondering what had propelled me out of the womb with such force.