Through the Heart Read online

  “None,” Tammy agreed. “It’s a useless emotion, along with guilt and regret.”

  “Hey, you’re knocking my staple diet there. Guilt, regret, and grilled cheese.” I peeled slices of cheese out of the package. “How many slices of cheese. One or two?”

  “Three,” Tammy replied.

  “Did you tell him how old you are?” I asked

  “Yes,” Tammy said. “I told him I was twenty-four.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  I was the same age as Tammy: we were thirty-three.

  “Well, it’s how old I feel,” Tammy replied.

  “It’s certainly how old you act.”

  “And how I look,” she shot back.

  That was true. But a big part of it was that Tammy hadn’t changed her look since high school. She had long blonde hair, which she wore most of the time in a ponytail. And she wore the same makeup, the most important item of which was pink lip gloss. But it was mostly her height. Tammy was tiny. She was barely over five feet, tiny all over except one place—her chest. It was comical to watch men when they met her. They’d try to look at her face, but their eyes would be drawn like a magnet down to her chest.

  “You’re just jealous I’m gettin’ some,” Tammy said.

  “You’re absolutely right.” I slapped the sandwiches in the pan with the heat turned high.

  “How long has it been?” Tammy asked.

  “You know exactly how long it’s been. Don’t make me say it aloud.” I pressed the spatula on top of each sandwich.

  “What about the guy in Chicago last spring?”

  “No.”

  “I thought . . .”

  “No,” I said again. “How is it you can find so many men in a town the size of a pea, and I get nothing?”

  Our town was actually not so small by midwestern standards, since something like 90 percent of the towns in the Midwest have fewer than three thousand people. Apparently, everyone was leaving the small towns—they called it the rural exodus. I fervently wished I could be a part of it.

  “You get nothing because you’re not approachable,” Tammy said. Then she added, more kindly, “And I’m obviously not picky. You actually want to like the guy. I just want to be entertained.”

  “What do you mean, I’m not approachable?”

  “You’re not. You’re actually a bit intimidating.”

  “Me?” I said. “Give me a break.”

  “You’ve been stuck in this town too long. You don’t even know what damage you could do somewhere else. You’re not bad-looking, you know,” Tammy said.

  “Gee, thanks.” I flipped each sandwich. The undersides had turned a perfect golden brown.

  “Okay, you’re beautiful. You happy?”

  “I know, my hair . . .”

  My mother always said my hair was my beauty. It was a color you don’t usually see: dark red, straight and thick. I never felt like I was beautiful, just my hair.

  “No, I’m not talking about your hair,” Tammy said.

  “You’re full of it,” I said. “I’m not ugly, but I’m not beautiful.”

  “You didn’t use to be,” Tammy agreed. “You were cute. But you’ve changed.”

  “That’s true. I’ve become miserable. I guess it must be the drawn, lo ng-suffering look.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Tammy said. “Speaking of suffering, how’s it going with,” and she rolled her eyes up to the ceiling.

  “Not so good.” I checked the other side of the sandwiches, but they weren’t done yet.

  “Worse than usual?” Tammy asked.

  I shrugged.

  Tammy knew me too well. She didn’t buy the understated reaction. “Oh no. What happened?”

  “I asked her again if I could come into the hospital with her.”

  “Oh, the horror,” Tammy drawled, pressing a hand dramatically to her chest. “Wanting to go into the hospital with your sick mother instead of waiting in the car—how could you?”

  I checked the undersides of the sandwiches again. They were done. I forked them onto the waiting plates and brought them over to the table and sat down. The chair creaked in protest. Nothing in this house was stable.

  “Well, that’s pretty much what she said,” I admitted. “But you know she doesn’t mean it.”

  Tammy couldn’t answer right away because she’d taken a huge bite of her sandwich while it was too hot and now had her mouth open, fanning the air ineffectually with her hand. But she looked like she was about to choke, she wanted to talk so badly.

  “Of course I know that,” Tammy said. “But do you? She’s playing you, honey.”

  “What would you do? Seriously . . .” I paused, as if Tammy could be serious. I decided to rephrase it. “I mean, if she were your mother.”

  “If she were my mother, she wouldn’t have gotten cancer, because I’d have killed her long before this.”

  Some people might have found Tammy’s reactions to be a bit, well, unsympathetic. But I loved them. Tammy said all the things you weren’t supposed to say. I remembered when I first told Tammy that my mother had leukemia, and Tammy said, “It figures your mother would get a kid’s disease. It’s perfect, because she acts like she’s five.”

  I said, “She’s not that bad.”

  Tammy gave me a look.

  “Don’t give me the pity look,” I said.

  “Hey, if the pity fits,” Tammy said, taking another bite. Somehow she’d managed to eat almost all her sandwich in three bites. I hadn’t even started mine. I picked it up, sighed, and put it down again.

  “Okay, fine. It fits,” I said.

  “Face it, Nora, your life sucks.”

  “I’ve been facing it. If you could tell me how I could run away from it, that would be great. Now, that’s some advice I could use.”

  “Leave,” Tammy said bluntly—and not for the first time.

  “But how would you get by without me?”

  “Please. Abandon me here. I’d love to see you do it.”

  “All right. Maybe I will.”

  Tammy rolled her eyes at me. “That wasn’t exactly convincing.”

  “I could surprise you,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. Okay. Let’s settle this once and for all.”

  Tammy wiped her fingers on her napkin and held out her hand, waiting for me to put my hand in hers. We had been doing this since middle school. It started when Tammy read a novel in which a psychic was able to tell a person’s future by taking their hand and asking a question.

  Tammy decided that she was a psychic, and she wanted to try it with me as her guinea pig. We tested it by asking when I was going to get my period (Tammy had already gotten hers. It seemed she always managed to hit the important life milestones before I did). Tammy had taken my hand and asked the question, and then, she told me, it was as if a date appeared in her head, like it was written on a piece of paper. The date was February 2, five months distant, which when you’re in seventh grade feels like forever. So I proceeded to completely forget about it—until February 2 came around, and I got my period that morning in the middle of social studies class. I missed all of the Boer War in the bathroom. I still don’t know what it was about.

  Tammy had been predicting for me ever since. She predicted my first kiss and my first boyfriend. She told me where I was going to go to college, where I was going to grad school, that I wouldn’t finish grad school, and that I would move home. (I remember how much I laughed at that one when she predicted it.)

  It didn’t work every time. There were days when she didn’t get anything; she said it was just like a blank. That’s what happened the few times she tried to predict for a couple of other friends. She said it was just a blank. But for some reason it usually worked with me, and when she made a prediction, it was never wrong. Not once.

  This should have scared me. I don’t know why it didn’t. Maybe it just seemed like part of my friendship with Tammy. Her mother was always a little different, what people called “crunchy
,” with long skirts and always talking about horoscopes and Mercury in retrograde.

  But I think it didn’t scare me because, deep down, I didn’t really believe in it. In some ways, I can’t really blame myself for it. Who would believe it—even with all the evidence Tammy had provided over the years? Believing it would mean that nothing is really what we think it is. So instead, in the face of the evidence, I chose to believe that the world is solid and ordinary and familiar. Like everyone does.

  As I put my hand in Tammy’s, I said, “We’ve tried it before. It doesn’t work for this question.” We had already attempted to find out when I might be leaving; Tammy always came up with a blank.

  “It hasn’t worked yet,” Tammy corrected me as she took my hand. Her palms were dry and warm.

  We both closed our eyes, and the heat seemed to intensify like an oven as Tammy pressed my hand between hers.

  I felt it—or I thought I did—the little spark of electricity going from me to her. It was as if I had all the information about my own life, and I was just passing it along for her to decode.

  I opened my eyes. She opened hers at the exact same time.

  And she said, “Don’t go.”

  “Don’t go? What do you mean, don’t go? Don’t go where?”

  “Don’t leave. Stay here with your mother.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You spend the last three years telling me to go, and now you’re telling me not to? Are you saying I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life trapped here?”

  I was half joking, but Tammy didn’t even crack a smile. Her eyes looked far away, as if she was still looking at my future.

  “No, that’s the problem—I see you leaving.”

  “On a long journey, right?” I joked.

  That’s when Tammy said the words I never thought she’d say: “It’s not funny. It will look like you’re getting everything you thought you wanted. But it’s not safe. Listen to me, okay? It’s not safe.”

  “Aw, you care,” I said, teasing her.

  Tammy scowled at me.

  “Come on, you are not the kind of girl who worries,” I reminded her.

  Finally, at that comment, her eyes refocused on me, and she snorted—and the Tammy I knew was back.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I forgot for a second—I’m the kind of girl who doesn’t give a shit. Thank God. It must be this house. The atmosphere of caring and obligation is suffocating. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  She stood up, brushing the crumbs off her shirt—and onto the floor.

  “Wait a second. You mean you’re not going to tell me any more than that?”

  “Not today,” she said. “Let’s see what happens. Maybe I’m wrong, and you will be stuck here forever. In that case, it won’t matter.”

  “You’re such a comfort to me.”

  “Call me tomorrow, and let me know if anything happens,” she said.

  “I call you almost every day anyway. But nothing ever happens, so I seriously doubt anything interesting is going to happen by tomorrow.”

  But I was wrong about that.

  Timothy

  The Family Dinner

  My mother had no soul. That’s what I thought when I looked up from the dinner table at her.

  I thought that every week when we gathered for the family dinner, or, rather, what counted as family according to my mother.

  Andrew, the next oldest after me, always greeted my mother with a peck on the cheek, saying, “Nancy and the kids send their love.” Nancy was his wife, but I very much doubted that Nancy and the kids really did send their love—because they were not invited to the family dinner. Ever.

  My sister, Emily, had once tried simply showing up with husband number two, but my mother dealt with that situation by refusing to let anyone bring a chair for him. After standing around awkwardly for a few minutes, he left. Emily never even tried with husband number three.

  I had never had a wife to be excluded and neither had my younger brother, Edward. In some ways Edward and I were alike, but he was a more extreme version—if you think I’m an asshole, you should see Edward.

  Our weekly family dinner wasn’t just any dinner. To see it, you’d think we were celebrating some huge milestone like a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary or a fiftieth birthday party, but that was just the way my mother did things—perfectly. The table was set with silver and crystal and china and flowers and silver tureens. The food was prepared by a different chef every week, even though no one ever seemed to eat much.

  “Tell me again, Timothy, where is the portfolio now?” my mother asked me, while carving a tiny piece of the chicken. She cut her food into pieces so small I didn’t know how she managed to chew them.

  Before I could answer my mother’s question, Emily jumped in.

  “Can’t we wait until after dinner to talk about this?” she whined. “Listening to Timothy talk about money makes me lose my appetite.”

  “Give me a break,” I said to Emily. “Don’t bring me into it. You haven’t eaten since 1986.” That was the first time she went into the hospital for anorexia. She was twelve at the time.

  “Timothy, don’t be cruel,” my mother said, but I swear she was smiling. Then she turned to Emily to explain. “Darling, we have to talk about finances. Don’t you know what’s going on in the market?” she said gently—as if my sister wouldn’t know about the financial crisis that was the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  Emily was in reality probably smarter than all the rest of us combined, but my mother treated her like an idiot. And unfortunately, most of the time my sister insisted on living up to her expectations. She never had a job, and she had been married three times, once for only three hours. You are probably getting the picture: my sister was not the most stable person.

  “I just don’t see why we have to talk about it while we’re eating,” Emily said.

  “I promise I won’t talk if I actually see you eating,” I told her.

  “Mind your own goddamned business,” she said.

  “Anyway, Timothy, you were saying?” my mother tuned back to me.

  I managed the family’s money, and normally it was a drudgery to report back to my mother, but I had been looking forward to this moment all week.

  “We lost fifteen percent of the portfolio’s value,” I told her.

  My mother practically choked on her tiny piece of chicken. It was priceless. Really. An undignified, uncontrolled reaction from my mother; it would have been worth double what we lost just to see it.

  She recovered quickly, pressing her napkin to her mouth. Then she said, “Please tell me you’re joking, Timothy.”

  “I wouldn’t joke about that,” I said truthfully.

  I took my job seriously. I enjoyed it, and I did it well. But I knew that to be good at making money you had to be good at losing it. It was something my mother didn’t understand.

  “This is not acceptable. This is not how I expect you to take care of your family. Do you want to land us in the poorhouse?”

  That was one of her favorite lines: “Do you want to land us in the poorhouse?” But she was the one who was working on that destination. I knew because, managing the family money, I had a window into how much everyone spent. And my mother was frightening in her ability to spend money; that is, if anything could frighten me. If she couldn’t do it, then nothing would—that’s what I thought anyway.

  I cut off a piece of the chicken on my plate and took a cautious bite. It tasted like chicken dessert. Had the chef used cinnamon? It was probably the latest food trend. Whatever it was, it was disgusting. But it had served as the delaying tactic I wanted—making my mother wait for my answer.

  “We’ve lost less than last year’s profits,” I told her.

  But my mother didn’t want to hear that the situation wasn’t as dire as she was making it out to be.

  “I don’t want to hear excuses. I want you to get that money back. In the meantime, the rest of you need to limit
your spending. Now that we don’t have the same resources, we need to think about conserving.”

  “We could cut back a lot just by scaling back the family dinners,” I suggested.

  “Family time is not where you cut back,” my mother snapped.

  She glared at me, but I didn’t back down. I just stared back. It was like looking straight into the Gorgon’s eyes—just in case you wonder why I’m stone.

  When she turned away from me, it was clear I was done.

  On weeks when the report for the portfolio was good, I had to go into the details of all the trades. Sometimes it lasted the whole dinner, talking about the money we’d made. With the bad news, she never wanted to hear the details. But even when her questions about the portfolio lasted most of dinner, I considered myself lucky. My weekly examination was only about money. The rest of the family had to endure her poking around in their private lives.

  Today, after she was done with me, she raked Andrew over the coals about his boys and whether they’d gotten into what she considered the “right” private school. And in her estimation, only one was the “right” one. This was of paramount importance, even though his older boy was just going into kindergarten, and the other was barely pre-K.

  After Andrew, Edward got nailed on whether he had finished the draft of his book yet. He wanted to be the next Hemingway. He had the lifestyle and the women part down, but the writing part didn’t seem to be going as well. He’d been working on the great American novel for the last twelve years.

  Emily got interrogated about how much she weighed. Today she claimed to have gained three pounds. My mother didn’t believe her. She sent Mary, the housekeeper, to get the scale from the bathroom and bring it to the dining room. Then my mother made my sister get on it. That’s when I knew my mother must really be in a bad mood. She hadn’t done that for a while.

  My father was the only one who escaped questioning, but he lived with her. Who knew what happened when she got him alone? And I think there was the sense that he let her have full rein as long as she respected his boundaries. Those boundaries did not include any protection for us, his children. They never had.

  As all this was going on, I tried the other things on my plate. There was some dark red whipped thing. I think it was made of beets, but I can’t be sure. The chicken was out. The only things safe to eat were three tiny fingerling potatoes and seven string beans. The way she fed us, I don’t know how my mother expected Emily to weigh anything.