The Sun in Your Eyes Read online

  “Your mother was cleaning out the cedar closet. I can’t believe it still fits! Though I’m feeling a little, uh, sheepish about wearing it.”

  “You look like Stellan Skarsgard in Breaking the Waves,” said Lee. She was our Sacagawea, the interpreter who spoke everyone’s language and knew the terrain or could fake it.

  “Is that good?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s good. That rugged Danish oil rigger look.”

  “I’ll take it. Rugged Danish. Been feeling more like cheese Danish lately. I’m astounded I can still button this thing.”

  I didn’t mention that Skarsgard’s character was maybe Norwegian, I just thanked God for the cheese Danish joke, which made my dad recognizable to me again. On the car ride he referred to us as “you girls”—Did you girls have a good trip? How is New York treating you girls? That helped, too.

  Lee asked him how “the skin trade” was going.

  “It’s not what it used to be. Which is both a blessing and a curse.” My father took the tone of a disappointed rabbi. Noninvasive techniques and advances in lasers had revolutionized his field, creating a demand for often unnecessary yet lucrative cosmetic procedures. To a man of integrity, which he hoped himself to be, it posed an ethical question. He hadn’t gone into medicine to administer glycolic peels and pump cow collagen into the lips of pampered patients. And yet, and yet. Those peels and injections, those beams of pulsed light, had paid for my college education.

  He drove us in his Toyota down the leafy suburban streets of my childhood. I envied myself having grown up here, and I envied my parents and their life here. Maybe I had finally broken with this place—it was no longer home—and so I could see it as an outsider. The oak trees shading the yard, the slate path leading to the front door of a white colonial with black trim. Lamplight already glowing through the windows on a darkening afternoon.

  “Hello, hello!” My mother called from the kitchen, where she was in the process of baking a pumpkin pie. My mother had generally practiced homemaking in moderation. She regarded cooking, cleaning, and decorating as necessary and sometimes satisfying but didn’t consider them exalted art forms. Except, I had noticed, in the presence of Lee. When Lee was around, my mother became a purveyor of domestic enchantments: a dinner of simple, delicious roast chicken or an aromatic tajine, dense chocolate cakes served with individual pots of freshly whipped cream; clean, loftily folded linens; a gleaming bathroom. Hospitality mingled with pity and pride in these efforts: Welcome, Lee! Make yourself at home in a real home such as you never had growing up, you poor thing. As though Lee had been raised by wolves. Which I suppose is how my mother thought of Linda West. A woman led by her appetites, threatening to those who kept their desires in check, and those even more innocent lambs who didn’t even know what real desire was.

  The year before, Lee had given my mother a silk scarf from the Linda West Collection (the pricier, upmarket line) and even as my mother exclaimed how gorgeous it was, she seemed wary that something had to be sacrificed in order to produce such a pretty thing. “Your mother has exquisite taste,” she said to Lee. “And such drive to get her vision out into the world. I’m not quite sure how she does it.” A Faustian bargain must have been struck somewhere along the way, perhaps involving sweatshop labor or the sort of sexual favors euphemistically referred to as liaisons? There had to be a downside to this scarf, because if there wasn’t, what did that say about the sacrifices my mother had made? That they had been in vain? My parents had been invited to a party later that holiday weekend, and I happened to spy my mother getting ready. She tied the scarf around her neck and put on lipstick. Then she frowned into the mirror, took a tissue to wipe the color off her mouth, and untied the scarf and put it away in a drawer.

  I never got the sense that my mother’s pity and pride made Lee squirm. She seemed to appreciate being taken care of in that maternal way. If anyone was put out, it was me, seized by a jealous urge to expose the pumpkin pie act as a total sham.

  “It smells so good in here!” said Lee.

  “The aroma of a store-bought and reheated pie,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” said my mother. “I made this from scratch.”

  I felt like an asshole, though not an unjustified asshole.

  My father hung his magical shearling coat in the hall and then came up behind my mother and massaged her shoulders.

  “I am glad you’re here,” my mother said, primarily to Lee but also to me. “We’ve got a full house this year. Wait until you meet Genevieve.” My brother had brought his new girlfriend home from college. They’d gone off for the afternoon but would be back soon. We should know, my mother explained, that Genevieve would be staying in Aaron’s room, with Aaron, this being a condition that Genevieve had insisted upon before agreeing to spend Thanksgiving with Aaron. “You should have heard him on the phone—Mom, Genevieve believes that sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of and that we need to own ourselves as sexual beings. He could barely get the words out. I think he was reading off a piece of paper she’d handed him. But just so you know, girls, sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Viv is blushing,” said Lee.

  “It’s just warm in here.”

  “If you can’t stand the heat,” said my father. I got out of the kitchen. I thought Lee would follow me but from the stairs I heard the three of them talking about Genevieve. My parents treated Lee like an expert. They asked her for assurance that Genevieve was a phase my brother was going through. Having been a phase herself, more than once, Lee could say yes, it was. Easy laughter, things were positively merry, but if Lee hadn’t been there, acting as a counterweight to Genevieve, I wondered if my parents would have been so comfortable with the sleeping arrangements.

  What surprised me about Genevieve when she and Aaron returned was her appearance. Cute. Petite, with good posture. Nice enough but not very warm. She probably had excellent time-management skills. Above all, she wasn’t impressed with Lee, who I had begun to think of as my family’s secret weapon. But Genevieve was impervious to her.

  That night, I sat in the den watching Charlie Rose with Genevieve and Aaron when it occurred to me that Lee wasn’t there with us.

  “Where did you get off to?” I asked when she came in.

  “I wanted to ask your dad about this weird area on my back.”

  She pulled at the neckline of her shirt to reveal an irritated patch of skin just above her shoulder blade.

  “Okay.” I tried to match her neutral tone. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing to worry about. He prescribed a cream.”

  I tried not to think too hard about it. I worked a crossword puzzle while Lee pulled a recent copy of our college alumni magazine from a pile on an end table and began to leaf through it. My parents kept issues around out of the same sentimental pride with which they’d affixed school stickers to the back windshield of their car. I’d never given the alumni association my own address. If you don’t want to know how you measure up, it’s best not to keep a yardstick in the house. But Lee seemed interested in the anthropological curiosity of it. She flipped directly to the class notes.

  “It’s like everyone has invented a new irrigation system in a developing country or written and directed a movie about twenty-somethings.”

  “Or both.”

  “Wait, this one is from Chipmunk. Remember Chipmunk?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s a lawyer now, living in San Francisco with her husband, and she’s pregnant with her first child. Jesus. I wonder what Moose is doing?”

  “Moose is in med school, planning to be a psychiatrist. I read that last time I was here.”

  “A psychiatrist? How?”

  “Do you mind?” my brother asked. “We’re trying to watch this.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?” he said.

  “It’s just squawky people who like to hear themselves talk,” I said.

  “Ironic,” said Aaron. Genevieve looked sm
ug.

  “Maybe we misjudged Chipmunk and Moose,” I said. “They’re quite accomplished.”

  “Well, so are you,” said Lee.

  “Hardly.”

  “Things are happening for you. You should have written in here about your story.”

  “You should have written in.”

  “About being a face? About wearing clothes and getting my picture taken?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Next time somebody asks me what I fucking do, I’m just going to say ‘I’m a doctor.’”

  It was the first time I’d heard her express dissatisfaction or discomfort with the direction her life had taken. But then, I hadn’t been around to listen much lately.

  “What kind of doctor?”

  “A radiologist. At Mount Sinai.”

  “But what if you meet a radiologist who works at Mount Sinai?”

  “That would be kind of perfect in a universe-folding-in-on-itself way.”

  I offered up a sad laugh. I believed she didn’t have to do anything in order to be someone. “You’re Lee Parrish,” I wanted to say. But being Lee Parrish was part of the problem. She would always be Jesse and Linda’s daughter, and people would always take an interest in her because of that. She never had to earn it.

  “Why don’t you become a doctor?” Genevieve turned to Lee. “If you really want to, what’s keeping you?”

  “My defeatist attitude,” said Lee. “And blood. I’m not good with blood.”

  “But you could be a radiologist,” said Aaron. “They don’t really deal with blood.” He spoke, not to second Genevieve’s annoyance, but as though he had discovered the loophole that would allow Lee to follow her dreams.

  My brother had had a thing for Lee since he was fifteen. He’d tried to impress her with bits from various standup comedy routines. The next year, he’d grown sullen and brooding and didn’t say much of anything. I would catch him looking at her in the way I wished a boy would have looked at me when I was sixteen. He worshiped her, and Lee played it to the hilt. She even kissed his forehead once and told him he was going to be a “real heartbreaker in a year or two.” Aaron must have resented her on some level, found the whole situation humiliating, and now he had Genevieve to throw in her face. The appeal of a girl like Genevieve, as I understood it, was that she did all the work and Aaron just had to show up and be told what books to read, what rallies to attend, and how exactly she could be brought to orgasm.

  “Thanks, Aaron,” said Lee.

  “No problem. But you’re not going to be a radiologist.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No,” he said. “You’re Lee fucking Parrish.”

  They smiled at each other. Charlie Rose was wrapping things up with a journalist from the Washington Post. Carol Channing was the next guest.

  “It’s about time,” I said. Genevieve glared at the screen.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I slipped out of bed and headed for the living room, stopping on the stairs when I heard voices.

  “Look at your sister and her friend,” Genevieve was saying. “Some people are just more directed than others.”

  “More directed?”

  “People who have beliefs. Who know what they want out of life and go after it. People who care about the state of the world! I’m sorry, but they don’t seem that passionate about anything.”

  I wanted to interject: “It’s a holiday. Do we have to be passionate on a holiday?” And why wasn’t my brother defending us?

  “You’re brave,” he told her. “It’s hot.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  They began to honor their sexuality and I crept back to my room.

  THANKSGIVING MORNING SHOWED an autumnal gray sky through cold windowpanes. Weather for blankets and lit fireplaces, green grass fading in the yard below, and a quiet street beyond. Someone was already up brewing coffee.

  I found my father leaning against the countertop contemplating a mug with the logo of an old pharmaceutical company on it, as though it would offer up answers if he looked at it deeply enough. The jocular Nordic oil rigger of the day before had disappeared. There was no mantle for him to take up at that moment. He asked me how I’d slept as an opening for him to tell me about his night of tossing and turning. Aside from the usual anxieties that keep a man of his age awake, something was weighing on him. I had always thought of my father as straightforward, but I realized he’d never delivered bad news to me before.

  “Do you know what I thought about this morning that I hadn’t thought of in years?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Taking you to the Army Navy surplus store in Kenmore Square. Remember that? You were maybe fifteen. You wanted those fatigue pants.”

  “I was fourteen. I loved those pants.”

  “I remember thinking, if that’s what you want to wear, that’s what you want to wear. Fine by me. Because I knew that was probably going to be the last time you would ever ask me to do anything like that.”

  “They were German. From the West German army, I think. I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you wouldn’t let me get them.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The Holocaust?”

  “Well.”

  “I can’t believe I asked you to take me shopping for those.”

  “I remember that store smelled like camphor and rubber. The music they played was interesting. Some kind of reggae. I was completely wrapped up in watching you. You were nervous, a little timid, not sure you should be there, but still confident, and you found what you wanted without asking for any help. And as I was watching you do this, I had no idea who you were, but I felt incredibly proud.”

  I had no idea who you were, I thought.

  “It was the Slits,” I said.

  “The what?”

  “The music in the store.” I remembered everything about that trip, but I hadn’t thought my dad did, too. “What made you think of that?”

  He looked, again, to his coffee cup, his hands.

  “Something happened with Lee. Last night. She came by my study and asked if I would take a look at an inflamed spot on her back. It seemed pretty harmless. I’m a doctor. There is an irritation there, nothing serious, a topical corticosteroid would take care of it, but she—”

  “What? Did she throw herself at you?”

  “I wouldn’t say throw, but, yes.”

  What I already knew but didn’t want to believe.

  Nothing he said would have made that better, so I decided to make it worse.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Dad. You could’ve been anyone, I’m sure. You just happened to be the nearest man with a pulse.”

  “Maybe that’s true. But I’m not just anyone. I don’t think Lee is in a very good place. It seems to me like a fairly obvious cry for help. Which is why I’m telling you this.”

  “So that I can help her stop hitting on other people’s fathers?”

  “Vivian.”

  As much as I tried, I couldn’t make my father the object of my anger.

  “What am I supposed to do with this? Did you tell Mom?”

  “I did. We agreed I should tell you. We all care about Lee. But obviously, you’re her friend. We want to leave it up to you to handle however you think best.”

  I had no idea what was best.

  He walked toward the tiered metal basket of onions that had been hanging from the ceiling for as long as I could remember. I thought he might try to illustrate something with one of them, an object lesson in how many layers there are to a person. But he just reached in. “I told your mother I would get started early on the stuffing.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. I suppose we have an exceedingly awkward dinner to look forward to.”

  My father’s gift for understatement may have been matched only by his good manners. He wasn’t Midwestern, though people often assumed he was. He started on the stuffing while I stood there, mostly stunned by the fact that I wasn
’t all that stunned.

  Before I had much time to figure out where to go or what to do next, I met my brother coming down the stairs, looking disheveled and relaxed, and decided to ruin his day. He asked me if I was okay and I did that thing of not answering, of making it seem like something was so wrong I had lost the power of speech. Aaron wasn’t a nervous person, he didn’t see trouble everywhere, but when he did see it, it concerned him. He had been a cuddly boy, and though he tried to toughen up (headphones, a hooded sweatshirt, a stony, unmoved look on his face), he hadn’t lost his need to comfort and be comforted. I took him out to the front porch, and he folded his bare arms against the cold and stood over me a little. When had he grown so tall?

  I played the reluctant confessor. But I hadn’t expected my brother to be so calm.

  “Why are you bringing me into this?” he asked.

  “I’m not bringing you in. You’re already in it.”

  “No. I’m not. This is part of some fucked-up thing between you and Lee. And I didn’t need to know.”

  “You really don’t care?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know, something honest? Because what I don’t understand is why she went for Dad when she could have easily had you.”

  “Fuck you, Viv.”

  He brushed past me and went inside.

  Our lawn, its flagstone path, its low row of shrubbery by the empty sidewalk, had a hard quality to it this time of year. This suburb was an old one, old trees, old houses, streets named for old Protestant families. I had read enough to know what happened in places like this, and I wanted to be sophisticated and accepting of the messiness of life. I wanted to be unassuming but I assumed, I assumed. Had Lee planned it? Had she worn a pretty bra? Had my father, the rugged oil rigger, for an instant, enjoyed it? What had it been? A kiss? Had his hand touched her shoulder, slid to the small of her back? Why had he seen it so necessary to tell me? Why not let it rest as one of the moments that shape one’s secret life? Lee needs help, I get it, but wasn’t there also some pride on his part, that he could still attract that kind of attention and that he was principled enough to turn it down? Maybe he saw it as his fatherly duty to let me know. Did Lee, familiar with my father’s honorable code of behavior, initiate this whole thing precisely because she knew that he would tell me?