Rachel sat back with her arms at the sides of the patio chair. “In the grocery store, in the line for coffee . . . ‘Mommy, a penis is private.’ ‘Mommy, you can’t play tag with a penis.’ ‘Mommy, I have a penis and our dog has a penis and you lost yours so you need to be more careful.’”
“Oh God,” Tamra said. “Why is he being all Freud on you?”
“Okay, so these guys already know my embarrassing moment,” Jodi said, turning to Alix. “But Prudence went to a church camp with her cousins last summer and one of her counselors called me in because Prudence had carefully explained that her mommy took little boys and girls into a room and put them in front of a video camera.”
“Oh no.” Alix laughed.
“And the children that cried?” Jodi leaned forward. One of her green eyes went wide and the other closed. “Those were the bad ones, and they don’t get to come back again.”
Tamra chuckled through her nose. “I remember this.”
Rachel shook her head. “I fucking love that kid.”
“And”—Jodi held up a finger—“only the good boys and girls got to come back, and Mommy puts them on camera more, and when you’re on camera you have to do exactly what Mommy says, even if you cry.”
Alix said, “I’m guessing she wasn’t invited back to camp.”
“I had to go in and everything.” Jodi pulled a chunk of crust off her pizza and took a bite. “I was pulling out my business card, I pulled up my website. I became this crazy person sitting in a kid’s chair way too small for my ass, telling them that I’m not a pedophile and that I cast children in feature films.”
Tamra looked to Alix. “What does Briar think you do for a living?”
Alix picked up her wine and said, “Briar is fairly certain that I work at the post office,” to which Tamra replied, “Okay, that’s not so off.”
“Hudson thinks I buy books for a living, which is sometimes pretty accurate,” Rachel said. “Jo, what does Pru think you do now?”
“I think I just covered this. Mommy is a pervert.”
The women laughed into their wine and mozzarella.
Alix looked to Tamra. “And what do Imani and Cleo think you do?”
Tamra put down her glass. “Oh, they know I’m a principal.”
“Ohhhh, how odd.” Rachel sighed. “Tamra’s perfect children are perfectly aware of their mother’s perfect job.” As she said this, Rachel clasped her hands together at the side of her head as if she were an animated princess. Alix realized that Rachel was quite tipsy, and she felt an affinity for her, this group, this moment. She loved hearing their voices and seeing them take large bites of their pizza, and how the sun took so long to go down in the summer.
Tamra smiled beneath the cluster of dark freckles that gathered underneath her eyes. When she shook her head, her long, neat dreadlocks shimmied behind her elbows. She was the only one eating her pizza with a fork and knife. “Imani would disagree with you on the perfect-job part,” she said. “But my most embarrassing moment was in college for sure. I started my period in a lecture hall on my second day at Brown. And I was wearing white shorts.” Tamra said this slowly, hitting the t’s hard with a tight bottom lip. “A very nice girl gave me her jacket to tie around my waist, but this was after a bunch of people had seen. I didn’t drop the class,” Tamra congratulated herself, “but I sat in the back row all semester, and asked other students to go up and turn my tests in for me.”
“Good for you,” Jodi said. “I would have deferred.”
“Alix’s turn,” Rachel said. “You have to say yours, and it’s gotta be better than periods, penises, and pedophiles.”
Alix had a tomato slice in her mouth. She spread her fingers and waved them in front of her chest. “Uh-uh.” She swallowed. “Mine is . . . not fun.”
“Okay, is no one hearing me?” Jodi raised her right hand. “Ped-o-phile.”
“She has a point,” Rachel said.
“Okay, okay,” Alix said. “Mine was in high school.”
In the summer before her junior year, Alex Murphy’s grandparents died, two days apart. They were written about in the local newspaper, and their joint funeral, held in a tiny chapel on a Thursday afternoon, was standing room only. In public, Alex’s father properly mourned the loss of his parents, but in private, Alex’s parents rejoiced over a surprise inheritance of what came close to nine hundred thousand dollars. Grandma and Grandpa Murphy had plots picked out in a cemetery, side by side, and not far from Grandma Murphy’s parents, but before the burial, the funeral home made a massive mistake. Grandma and Grandpa Murphy were accidentally cremated. Alex and her family went through with the funeral and pretended there were bodies in the closed caskets in front of them.
Rachel gasped and Tamra said, “Oh God.”
“Yeah, it was a huge deal,” Alix said. “So my parents used their inheritance to get this big-time lawyer, they sued for a shit ton of money . . . they won. And then immediately went insane.”
Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, who looked shockingly alike with light hair, skinny legs, and round, paunchy bellies, moved Alex and her little sister, Betheny, from Philadelphia to Allentown. They wanted land. “Like, land land,” Alix explained, and they purchased a seven-bedroom house on a rolling green hill; what Alix now recognized as a textbook McMansion. There were four digits to punch to open the front gate and enter the long stretch of driveway. There was a balcony off the master bedroom where you could spot the flagpole of Alex and Betheny’s new high school. And there was a double staircase framing a fireplace where Alex and her sister would never end up taking pictures before they left for prom or graduation. “From day to night, my whole life changed,” Alix said. “My mom got her eyeliner tattooed. We had a movie theater in our house. I’d never been on a plane before, and suddenly we were flying first class to Fort Lauderdale.”
The Murphys also purchased the services of Mrs. Claudette Laurens. Claudette was a light-skinned black woman with curly gray hair who kept the home clean, cooked weekly dinners, and watched game shows with the Murphy girls when they were home sick. It was Claudette who taught Alex how to make a cobbler, how to sew a button, and how to drive a stick shift. Claudette was the only person in the world to whom Alix still signed her letters as Alex, but instead of going into her deep affection for Claudette, Alix told her girlfriends about the pointless purchases her parents had no business buying (self-portraits done by real artists, loafers with real gold coins on the tops, guitars and pianos once owned by rock stars).
“Alix, I feel like I’m learning so much about you,” Rachel said. “So much of this makes sense.”