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“Well, that’s true for Eliza, so I think it’s fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,” their father said. “This happened to all of us. Not the same thing-there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.”
Ma
“I was willing to defer admission,” Vo
Yet it was Vo
“Remember,” Eliza said to her mother now, “how Vo
“I think we’re still a few years away, knock wood.” Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. “What do you call this?” he’d asked Eliza, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him. “No name,” she’d said. “Just tea and lemonade.” “We should make up a name for it,” he’d said, “sell it by the roadside.” Like most of Walter’s plans, this was all talk.
“Where will you go when you do sell this house?” she asked her mother now.
“ Downtown D.C., I think, what they call the Pe
“Not Baltimore?”
Inez shook her head. “We’ve been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it’s all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can’t see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood panhandlers by name. I’m Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres.”
Eliza had to laugh at this image, her bohemian, unaffected mother as Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. The children burst in, faces smeared with the residue from Rita’s, their favorite custard stand, whose neon letters promised ICE * CUSTARD * HAPPINESS. She couldn’t have felt any safer, even if the windows had been closed and locked.
The windows were open. That’s what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live that way.
ELIZA HEADED HOME ALONG the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver’s ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: “You see that Roy Rogers? That’s where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn’t play any sports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn’t kill. Why do you think that was?”
“Mommy?” Albie said from the backseat. “You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”
“No, honey, I’m-” Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.
“What was that?” Albie asked.
“A deer,” Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.
“But it was white.”
“That was the tail.”
A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn’t sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, ru
6
1985
“WANNABE,” HER SISTER SAID.
“I’m not,” Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn’t know what Vo
“It’s a term for girls like you, who think they’re Mado
“I don’t think I’m Mado
But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vo
Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vo