“The ironic thing,” Lexie said one afternoon, “is that in ten years we’re going to see Izzy on Springer.”
“Seven,” Trip said. “Eight at most. ‘Jerry, Get Me Out of Jail!’”
“Or ‘My Family Wants to Commit Me,’” Lexie agreed.
Moody shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Lexie and Trip treated Izzy as if she were a dog that might go rabid at any minute, but the two of them had always gotten along. “She’s just a little impulsive, that’s all,” he said to Pearl.
“A little impulsive?” Lexie laughed. “You don’t really know her yet, Pearl. You’ll see.” And the stories began to pour out, Jerry Springer temporarily forgotten.
Izzy, at ten, had been apprehended sneaking into the Humane Society in an attempt to free all the stray cats. “They’re like prisoners on death row,” she’d said. At eleven, her mother—convinced that Izzy was overly clumsy—had enrolled her in dance classes to improve her coordination. Her father insisted she try it for one term before she could quit. Every class, Izzy sat down on the floor and refused to move. For the recital—with the aid of a mirror and a Sharpie—Izzy had written NOT YOUR PUPPET across her forehead and cheeks just before taking the stage, where she stood stock-still while the others, disconcerted, danced around her.
“I thought Mom was going to die of embarrassment,” Lexie said. “And then last year? Mom thought she wore too much black and bought her all these cute dresses. And Izzy just rolled them up in a grocery bag and took the bus downtown and gave them to some person on the street. Mom grounded her for a month.”
“She’s not crazy,” Moody protested. “She just doesn’t think.”
Lexie snorted, and Trip hit unmute on the remote, and Jerry Springer roared to life again.
The sectional seated eight, but even with only three Richardson children, there was always a fair amount of jockeying to get the spots with the best view. Now, with the addition of Pearl, there were even more complicated maneuverings. Whenever she could manage it, Pearl would drop—unobtrusively, nonchalantly, she hoped—into the seat next to Trip. All her life, her crushes had been from afar; she’d never had the courage to speak to any of the boys who caught her fancy. But now that they’d settled in Shaker Heights for good, now that Trip was here, in this house, sitting on the very same couch—well, it was perfectly natural, she told herself, that she might sit next to him now and then; no one could read into that, surely, least of all Trip. Moody, meanwhile, felt he deserved the seat beside Pearl: he was the one who had introduced her to the fold, and of all the Richardsons he felt his claim—as the one who’d known her longest—was paramount. The end result was that Pearl would settle beside Trip, Moody would plop down beside her, sandwiching her between them, Lexie would stretch out on the corner, smirking at the three of them, and turn on the television, and all four of them turned their attention to the screen while remaining keenly aware of everything happening in the room.
The Richardson children, Pearl soon learned, had their most heated discussions about Jerry Springer. “Thank god we live in Shaker,” Lexie said one day during a provocative episode entitled “Stop Bringing White Girls Home to Dinner!” “I mean, we’re lucky. No one sees race here.”
“Everyone sees race, Lex,” said Moody. “The only difference is who pretends not to.”
“Look at me and Brian,” said Lexie. “We’ve been together since junior year and no one gives a crap that I’m white and he’s black.”
“You don’t think his parents would rather he was dating somebody black?” said Moody.
“I honestly don’t think they care.” Lexie popped the tab on another Diet Coke. “Skin color doesn’t say anything about who you are.”
“Shhh,” said Trip. “It’s back.”
It was during one of those afternoons—during “I’m Having Your Husband’s Baby!”—that Lexie suddenly turned to Pearl and asked, “Do you ever think about trying to find your father?” Pearl gave her a calculated blank stare, but Lexie continued anyway. “I mean, like where he is. Don’t you ever want to meet him?”
Pearl turned her eyes to the TV screen, where burly security guards were wrestling an orange-haired woman built like a BarcaLounger back into her seat. “I’d have to start by finding out who he is,” she said. “And, I mean, look at how well this is going. Why wouldn’t I want to?” Sarcasm didn’t come naturally to her, and even to herself she sounded more plaintive than ironic.
“He could be anybody,” Lexie mused. “An old boyfriend. Maybe he split when your mom got pregnant. Or maybe he got killed in an accident before you were born.” She tapped one finger on her lip, brainstorming possibilities. “He could have left her for another woman. Or—” She sat up, titillated. “Maybe he raped her. And she got pregnant and kept the baby.”
“Lexie,” Trip said suddenly. He slid across the sofa and slung an arm over Pearl’s shoulders. “Shut the fuck up.” For Trip to pay attention to a conversation that wasn’t about sports, let alone tune in on someone else’s feelings, was nothing short of unusual, and they all knew it.
Lexie rolled her eyes. “I was just kidding,” she said. “Pearl knows that. Don’t you, Pearl?”
“Sure,” Pearl said. She forced herself to smile. “Duh.” She felt a sudden rush of dampness beneath her arms, her heart pounding, and she wasn’t sure if it was Trip’s arm around her shoulders, or Lexie’s comments, or both. Above them, somewhere overhead, Izzy practiced Lalo on her violin. On the screen, the two women leapt from their seats again and began to claw at each other’s hair.
But Lexie’s comment rankled. It was nothing Pearl hadn’t thought about herself over the years, but hearing it spoken aloud, from someone else’s mouth, made it feel more urgent. She had wondered these things, now and again, but when she’d asked as a child, her mother had given her flippant answers. “Oh, I found you in the bargain bin at the Goodwill,” Mia had said once. Another time: “I picked you from a cabbage patch. Didn’t you know?” As a teen, she’d finally stopped asking. This afternoon, the question still churning in her mind, she got home and found her mother in the living room, applying paint to a photograph of a stripped-down bicycle.
“Mom,” she began, then found she could not repeat Lexie’s blunt words. Instead she asked the question that ran below all the other questions like a deep underground river. “Was I wanted?”
“Wanted where?” With one careful lick of the brush Mia supplied a Prussian-blue tire in the empty fork of the bike.