The Trouble with Lexie Read online

  “Lexie.” Amy turned Lexie’s face toward her own so they were eye to eye, both of them shiny-cheeked. “You are getting married. Remember?”

  “She spent way too much money.” Lexie could feel mascara pooling below her eyes but she didn’t care.

  “No, it’s good she spent the money.” Amy used her thumb to wipe Lexie’s face. “She had fun shopping with her sister.”

  Lexie heard her name and looked across the room at Don. “Sorry?” she said, sniffing.

  “Can you clear your calendar for the influx of students who might want to talk about the loss?” Don was abrupt. Annoyed maybe that Lexie and Amy were whispering in the back of the room.

  “Yes. Not a problem.”

  “Thank you. Now, we need to discuss housing,” Don said. “Dot resided in Rilke, as most of you probably already know, and we have a responsibility to make sure we have a faculty dorm parent there . . .”

  Lexie’s ears felt like they were filling with warm syrup. Her breathing bumped out like a rutted road. Snot and tears fell on the glass screen of her phone as she started a new game of Yahtzee.

  “That’s what you want to do at this moment in time?” Amy looked down at the game. Her skin was so thick and smooth that when she lifted her brow her forehead folded, rather than wrinkled, into layers that resembled poured cake batter.

  “I’m playing for Dot.” Lexie finger-dragged down two 5s.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I think Dot knew the marriage was wrong.” Lexie’s fingers kept working the game.

  “She bought the dress. She knew it was right.”

  “No.” Lexie stared at the phone and moved her fingers faster than ever, leaving the decisions in the game to her subconscious. “She told me that if I married him, it’d be my first of more than one marriage. If I get over three hundred points—” Lexie stopped speaking as she zoned in on the game.

  “If you get over three hundred points?” Amy asked, urgently.

  “It means I should leave Peter and stay in Dot’s apartment until I figure things out.” Lexie used her left thumb as well as her right—both sides paddling like little flippers.

  “Listen, it’s one thing to let Yahtzee decide if you’re eating carbs or not—” Lexie had made many diet decisions based on the outcome of her games, “but you can’t end an engagement on the very day that your good friend dies, because of some random rolls on your iPhone.” Amy’s voice was edging out of a whisper. She almost sounded angry.

  “Oh my god!” Lexie stopped playing and looked at Amy—she couldn’t see clearly for the flow of tears. “I think Dot knew she was going to die. We are mammals after all, don’t we all sense these things inside our bodies?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “But maybe Dot did. Maybe she knew she was going to die and she hurried it up a little so that I’d have a place to live. She created the space for me to leave Peter.” Lexie started playing again.

  “So Dot died to give you an apartment, and Dot is jumping into your phone and controlling your Yahtzee game to help you do what she thinks you should do?”

  Lexie stopped rolling once more. She had 260 points. Only a full house remained and that was worth 25 points. “I can see myself from the outside and I recognize that I am totally and completely not in my right mind. But I can also feel myself from the inside and I know that I have to play this game in order to decide what to do.”

  “Well, go ahead and roll. It’s impossible for you to get over three hundred.” Amy tapped a nail on the screen of the phone.

  “But if I roll a second Yahtzee, it’s worth a hundred points and I’ll have well over three hundred.” Goose bumps rushed up Lexie’s flesh—it felt like a sheet had been yanked off her body.

  Amy wiped her eyes. “So do it. Let’s see what Dot and Our Father who art in Yahtzee say about your future.”

  Lexie rolled. Three 3s and two 5s: a full house. She dragged the three 3s down to hold them, then rolled again to let go of the two 5s. She got another 3 and a 6. She held the 3, making it a total of four 3s, and released the 6 to roll again. The fifth 3 showed up.

  “Yahtzee.” Lexie felt a shock of relief. An incredible lightness. A life sentence pardoned at the last minute. And then what felt like an ocean wave unfurled beneath Lexie’s skin, and the empty space inside her was suddenly washed with another thrust of sadness. Lexie was audibly crying. She fully felt it all: the loss of Dot and the loss of Peter. But one was more painful than the other. She wanted Dot back.

  “Well, dang.” Amy put one arm around Lexie, and took the phone from her. She stared at the screen while Lexie cried into Amy’s shoulder.

  “Don.” Lexie pulled away from Amy, pulled herself together and spoke as loudly as she could. She waved her hand to get his attention. “I’m sorry, I’ve lost track of the discussion. Did someone volunteer to be the dorm parent in Rilke yet?”

  Before Don could answer, Janet clucked out a response like a hen pecking corn: “Jim is staying there tonight and Artie is staying the next night. Beyond that we have no idea.”

  “I can stay there tonight, and I can stay for at least a few weeks.”

  “Great. I’m sure the kids will appreciate having you downstairs.” Don nodded at Lexie. She had redeemed herself for whispering with Amy.

  “Hold on,” Janet said. “Hang fire. We can’t have a female dorm parent in a boys’ residence.”

  “Dot—” Lexie choked out. “Dot was a woman, Janet.” Lexie heard snickering from the front of the room.

  “Dot and Beau lived there together. The only reason Dot was there alone was because Beau had passed and Dot had been there so many years by then.”

  “Surely the boys are used to having a woman downstairs. They’ll be fine.” Don turned his face toward Janet and stared at her in a way that froze her out and shut her down. He was one of the most boring men Lexie had ever met, but he exerted an authority that was impossible to dismiss.

  “Well, let’s make sure they all have Jim or Artie’s number so they have access to a male faculty member for emergencies.” Janet pulled herself up straight—as if her head had been attached to a string hanging from the ceiling.

  Don looked away from Janet and straight toward Lexie. “We’ll talk after the meeting.” He immediately switched the discussion to the memorial service.

  Lexie sniffed hard. She took her phone from Amy and then tapped out a text to Daniel while Amy looked onto her lap, reading the words as they appeared. Meet you at Inn on the Lake this afternoon. Can’t talk until then. Someone I love died.

  Your fiancé?! Daniel texted.

  No. I’ll tell you when I see you.

  Be strong. You can cry in my arms @3.

  Lexie looked over at Amy. “I’m meeting him at three and the Yahtzee was with threes. You don’t think that means something?”

  “Oh honey, everything means something if you decide it does.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.” Amy leaned in and hugged Lexie. “Peter’s going to be heartbroken and there’s gonna be a shitstorm of anger coming your way. But no matter how crazy you act, I’m on your side.”

  DON MCCLEAR WAS CALM AND DISPASSIONATE AS LEXIE TOLD HIM she was breaking off the engagement and leaving Peter. He didn’t ask why. Lexie figured if she were having the discussion with a woman, she would have asked why. But like many men she knew, Don didn’t dig further than what was laid out before him. It was an admirable quality, Lexie thought. She herself had a ravenous curiosity about most people and sometimes hated her need to keep scratching at the information people were willing to give until she’d dug herself into a tomb-sized crater before their feet.

  “We’ll need you to move in tonight, if you can,” Don said. “I hope that doesn’t feel too soon, too—”

  “That’s fine.” Lexie couldn’t focus on what Don was saying. Dot was gone and she was leaving Peter: Those two ideas were all her brain could hold.

  “And I’m sure you already kno
w this, but I have to say it anyway: It is required that you sleep there every night school is in session. Although you could have another faculty member cover for you if you need to be away a night or two. And overnight guests are forbidden.” Don looked down at his desk, he seemed embarrassed to be discussing this.

  “I understand. I remember the story about the woman who worked here who had the boyfriend in town—”

  “Melanie Birkin. She was too young for . . . well, for everything that came to her while she was here. You’re much more together.” Don looked at Lexie quickly and then shuffled some papers.

  “Thanks.” Hopefully Don would never discover that Lexie’s decision had been made by the outcome of a Yahtzee game. That alone would likely make her the loser in the Melanie Birkin/Lexie James shit together race.

  “Oh, Janet sent me an email to remind me that the buffet belongs to the school. I think she wants it in her apartment. But you get first choice since the buffet’s already in Dot’s place.”

  “I’ve never had a buffet. I’m not even sure what a buffet is.”

  “Neither am I. But keep it if you want it.”

  “If Janet wants it, I probably wouldn’t like it.” Lexie blushed. She had never been so bold as to discuss her dislike of Janet with Don.

  “I’ll shoot her an email and tell her it’s hers.” Don winked at Lexie in a way that made her actually smile. “I know you had a special relationship with Dot. I’m sure this is terribly hard on you.”

  The loss of Dot was something Lexie could feel from her feet up. She wanted to plant Dot beneath herself; Lexie’s roots would grow into her, connecting them in the way of families and bloodlines. A daisy chain that would never end.

  11

  IN SEPTEMBER, LEXIE HAD PRACTICALLY PASSED OUT FROM ANXIETY after flirting with Daniel Waite. And now it was October: Dot was dead, Daniel was waiting for her at the Inn on the Lake, Lexie was hours away from breaking Peter’s heart, and she was still standing (or sitting, just then). Handling it all. Answering emails. Filling out paperwork. Amy, with whom she had been on and off the phone all day, said she thought maybe Lexie was in a state of shock. Was this the gentle, quiet building up of something that would soon explode? Was she experiencing a bodily version of earthquake weather? (Mitzy loved to point out earthquake weather. Earthquakes came, she claimed, on glaring sunny days when it was too bright to read a magazine outdoors. The birds would quiet and nothing moved. Not even the air. Once, after a rare shopping trip to Ralph’s, Lexie and Mitzy were walking through the parking lot, each holding a bag of groceries in their arms, when Mitzy pointed out the earthquake weather. Seconds later, like magic, the blacktop beneath them shifted back and forth as if it were a giant skateboard on which they both were standing. A booming echoed from the sky and Lexie dropped her bag; a jar of Ragu smashed on the ground. The spaghetti sauce quivered and ran like thick blood toward her feet. Lexie stepped away from it and looked toward her mother. Mitzy was beaming, so proud of herself for having predicted the quake, that she wasn’t even mad about the lost sauce.)

  Lexie put down her pen, pushed the papers away and shut her eyes. Dot was projecting on the screen in her head. Immediately, her brain slapped on the dress Dot had bought for Lexie’s wedding. The image was so incongruent, so off-kilter that Lexie laughed. Lexie decided that Dot would not have looked like an overly decorated Christmas tree in the dress, as she’d originally thought. She’d have resembled a goat in an evening gown.

  The more Lexie laughed, the more she felt Dot’s presence. Dot would have loved the simile. She would have come up with something equally absurd. Look at me! I’m a piece of broken crockery glued together and held in place with a fucking wad of satin!

  Was the dress satin? Or was it silk? Lexie would see when she got into the apartment. And it was then, when she thought of Dot in her apartment, the dress laid out on the bed, that the crying started up again. She didn’t worry about the noise—the only person who showed up at Lexie’s office without an appointment was Dot.

  Lexie straightened her desk while she cried. It was a strange impulse, but it felt right at the time. She chugged and slobbered and made odd donkey noises as she sorted papers quickly into the trash, or into To Do Later and To Do Soon files. Once her desk was clean, while the crying continued to chug out of her like a freight train with endless cars, Lexie went to her office closet and pulled out her small vacuum. She plugged in the appliance; it wailed the way most cheap machines do. Lexie cried louder and harder while the vacuum swept over the old Persian rug, the wood floors, and even the couch. Afterward, Lexie (still crying) dusted with Pledge and a netted dust cloth she’d ordered over the Internet. When even the baseboards had been wiped clean, the crying let up. Lexie stood in the middle of her office and inhaled deeply. The room smelled like chemically created lemons. A line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem came to her, but she wasn’t sure exactly how it went. It was a poem about a dying old woman and there was something in there about perfume, refueling, pulling up the droop. Of all the people Lexie knew, Dot was the only one who would have known the Brooks poem offhand. She probably would have recited it in her scratchy, metallic voice. Lexie cried a little more at the thought.

  NOT ONE RUXTON STUDENT CAME TO TALK ABOUT DOT. LEXIE KNEW it was unlikely. Once you hit sixty, teenagers thought you were old enough to die. And eighty? Yeah, they were sad. But it was okay to them. Dot had had a long life.

  At ten of three, Lexie put a note on her door: Gone to a meeting off campus. If this is an emergency, call my cell phone. Every student she had treated had her phone number. And tonight when she moved into Rilke, every student resident of that dorm would have her number, too.

  LEXIE SAT IN THE JETTA AND STARED AT THE DOOR TO THE CAFÉ OF the Inn on the Lake. She knew it was selfish and unreasonable to see Daniel and break up with Peter on the very day that Dot died. But she felt she could no more stop herself from these two abhorrent acts than she could have stopped Dot from dying. Maybe she’d inherited a genetic inability to properly respond to tragedy and that was why she was sitting in a car, parked at the inn.

  Lexie thought of Derek Clifford the newscaster who was on the local news from the time Lexie could talk until the summer after seventh grade. When Derek sat in Mitzy’s station at Heidi Pies, Mitzy would later report to Lexie everything he’d said, what he’d been wearing, how much tip he’d left, and how his brown-sugar-colored hair looked that day. It seemed a relationship so intimate that Lexie, at age eight, often bragged at school that her mother was best friends with Derek Clifford. She didn’t think it an exaggeration when she told Tammy Lunden, who was brand new to the school, that she called him Uncle Derek.

  Then, when she was thirteen, Lexie and Mitzy went into a gas station mini-mart to splurge on Dr Pepper and pink Sno Balls, a combo Mitzy swore gave you enough energy that it was the only meal you’d need all day (and would, therefore, be the only meal Mitzy would provide that day). Derek Clifford came in, picked up a bottle of water, and stood behind them in line. Water was a luxury Lexie wasn’t allowed to buy. (Why pay money for something that comes free from the tap?)

  Lexie had smiled up at Derek. Uncle Derek. She waited for Mitzy to say something, to hug and kiss him hello, to at the very least mention the last meal he’d had at Heidi Pies. But not a sound issued from Mitzy’s mouth. Lexie wasn’t even sure her mother was breathing; she stood so rigid, so flush-faced, that Derek was the first one to speak. “You’re up,” he said, and he flipped down his sunglasses from where they’d sat on top of his head and then pointed toward the cashier. In the car, as they drove away, Mitzy happily reexamined the encounter. “He said, ‘Your turn, Mitzy,’ didn’t he?” she said. “He knows my name!” As young as she was, Lexie knew better than to disagree.

  A few months later, when Derek Clifford’s taxi-yellow convertible was hit by a truck, Derek suffered brain damage that wiped him as clean as a wrung-out sponge. He had to learn life all over again. This time, however, he was missing the personality-mold
ing experiences of dodge ball games, first love, underage drinking, and heartbreak. According to Mitzy, his new personality was identical to that of his caretaker: a woman the shape of a soft ice cream swirl who held each of Derek’s hands in hers as they dropped their head in prayer before each meal at Heidi Pies. It’s a damn shame, Mitzy would say. A tragedy. And then she’d light a cigarette, smile real big, and say, “Remember, before he lost his marbles, he knew my name!”

  Mitzy’s blitheness sat in Lexie’s mind like a snapshot carried in a wallet. It was filed beside another thought snapshot: her father’s behavior following the death of his parents. That had always seemed to be about the importance of a bag of Bugles chips on a road trip to Omaha.

  “At least I’ve been crying,” Lexie said aloud. But wait. Did the sobbing in her office count, since she had simultaneously vacuumed and dusted like it was a game-show competition? Lexie needed to escape her own mind. “Onward,” she said, and she reached into her purse, pulled out her phone (holding it high to avoid neck wrinkles), and quickly worked her thumbs for a text to Peter.

  Dinner duty tonight. Dot passed away at her sister’s house last night. I’ll be staying in her apt. for a bit. It’s so sad. Let’s talk when I’m home packing my bag.

  She knew it was wrong to tell Peter about Dot’s death in a text. But she also knew she couldn’t speak to him until she told him she was breaking up. It was too cruel to have any other conversation in light of what was next to come.

  A text buzzed in from Peter: Shocked. Talk when you get home. Yours, like the sun. Lately Peter had been signing off his emails and texts with a poorly bastardized line from an old Jefferson Starship song he had been teaching Lexie on the guitar. The only kind of music Peter listened to other than classical and jazz was ’70s rock. It was the stuff her mother used to sing around the house or in the car, belting it out in a way that made Lexie suspect she was imagining herself on stage in a sold-out arena.

  Lexie turned off the phone, dropped it in her purse, and got out of the car. She pushed both her palms into her cheeks to stop herself from smiling. She couldn’t help it. The anticipation of seeing Daniel erased all decorum.