The Fifth Wife

Since 9/11, my dad refused to get on a plane; so he, my sister Vanessa, and I were forced to endure the twenty-hour marathon train ride from New York to Orlando to bury our grandmother.  According to our mother who he had divorced three step-mothers ago, back when we were toddlers, Dad had announced the end to his flying in an uncharacteristically decisive manner. After the second tower collapsed and took with it three of his boyhood friends–men who just moments before sat at seemingly safe desks with views overlooking the glorious city, Dad had said: “I’m done.”  And that was it. No drama, no discussion, no white knuckling it with a glass of wine and a Xanax like every other fearful flyer after the attacks.  From now on, he would drive or in extreme circumstances, take the train.

That said, my dad hated the train. So he lubricated the experience with a seemingly endless succession of gin and tonics and constant chit-chat with strangers, specifically, with strange women. And on this particular trip to Florida, Dad was in-between wives, so my sister Vanessa and I were on high alert. We had settled for the night in the dining car. None of us could sleep on public transportation so we made the best of it: eating pre-packaged stale brownies, drinking cold drinks in plastic cups, and playing Spades while the train sped through the sleeping cities of the South. Vanessa dealt the cards, and I watched with concern as my dad clocked a new arrival to the dining car, his eyes moving so subtly you could almost think you imagined it.  

A tall red-haired woman in leopard leggings and dangly silver statement earrings approached, swaying gracefully to keep balance as the train moved.  It was nearly one a.m. and she smiled apologetically at the bartender who was half-asleep on his stool and ordered a gin and tonic. “Good choice,” Dad called out a touch too loudly, holding up his clear plastic cup to toast to her from across the car. Though my dad had graduated from Exeter two decades earlier, he still dressed like a dissipated teenager on fall break from boarding school: faded, patched Nantucket Reds topped by an antique speckled navy and white LL Bean wool sweater, scuffed penny loafers with actual copper coins in them, socks with tiny embroidered golden retrievers romping across them.

The woman turned slowly to look over her shoulder, her tight half-smile relaxing when she saw the voice belonged to a handsome if rumpled man with two teenage daughters. And my dad was good-looking. He always politely disagreed when people remarked upon how much he looked like a younger Harrison Ford, but he actually loved it. Dad looked like a guy who would know how to repair an engine, tie a slip knot, caulk a tub.  A lethal combination of accessible ruggedness and an open boyishness which, unfortunately, read as honesty.  

The woman awkwardly raised her cup to him and chose a booth one away from ours, sitting facing him. My sister Vanessa shifted her position, placing her Doc Martens up on the bench, and sliding her body over so she blocked Dad’s line-of-sight to the woman. Dad countered by moving in closer to me so he could make eye contact with the woman.

“Long trip,” he said, raising his cup again. Three drinks into the journey, he had found his sweet spot of charming and garrulous, a few hours away from sloppy and maudlin.    

“Endless,” the redhead said, smiling at us. With some relief, I noticed she wasn’t really his type. Her hair was a garish shade of box-dye burgundy, and although her body was lush and curvy, her tight black V-neck top revealed enough cleavage to verge on vulgar. 

My dad liked, for lack of a better word, classy women. He wasn’t one to run off with an actress or a stripper. Our stepmothers were never educationally or socially inappropriate, with the possible exception of wife number three, Rachel Gersten who was, unfortunately for everyone involved, a close friend of our mother’s. Our mother was Lynn Stein, wife number one. Vanessa and I referred to my father’s wives by their full maiden names. It helped avoid confusion because there were two Lynns, a Rachel, and, most recently, a Hillary.

Dad’s type fell into two categories: one composed of women like our mother and her (former) friend:, beautiful, highly educated Jews from New York City who he married, quite possibly, to shock and piss off Dad’s WASP-y Boston Social Register family. Group two was made up of blandly blond former field hockey players, country club Junior Leaguers who had attended prep schools like Madeira or Miss Porter’s, women who probably felt as familiar and comfy as his old LL Bean sweater. The woman on the train was neither. That still did not mean we were safe. 

“Where are y’all headed,” the woman asked, pointedly addressing me, avoiding eye contact with my Dad.

“Orlando,” I said just politely enough to answer while simultaneously discouraging further conversation and looked back down at my cards. 

“Getting some family time in the sun,” my dad added, smiling his trademark smile, reaching over to tousle my hair and give my shoulder a performative little squeeze, as if I was five years old. This was bad.  My dad, like many other good WASPs, did not innately understand or practice physical affection. My earliest memories of his hugs are of insubstantial lightning-fast embraces ending with a formal, fraternal pat on the shoulder, his delicious smell of Polo cologne, cigarettes, and alcohol wafting away as quickly as it appeared. Vanessa rolled her eyes at me and kicked me under the booth with one of her hard black boots. 

“That’s so nice,” the redhead said leaning in. Her breasts were so large they were practically resting on the Formica table. The plastic straw from the drink dangled from her cupid’s bow lips. She had to be in her mid-thirties, but her face had a plump, youthful earnestness that fought against the sexiness of the rest of her.  Even though she was not his usual type, we had good reason to be nervous about any new woman that piqued his interest.  In a recent fight with our dad over the fact that he had neglected to pay his small portion of my senior year NYU tuition bill and Vanessa’s sophomore year bill at Brown because he was “a little behind” in his four alimony payments, I suggested he just date and not get married so goddamn much. He had said: “Phoebe, I love being married. I have been married for twenty-two years. Just not to the same woman.” 

Vanessa, who studied critical theory at Brown and had an amazing resting bitch face, wasn’t having it.  Gripping the back of the booth with fingernails painted the dark iridescent green of venomous snake, Vanessa twisted her whole body to face the woman. “We are actually going to our grandmother’s funeral,” she said, over-emphasizing each word. It was the verbal equivalent of trying to throw a pot of cold water on a rutting dog.   

My dad ignored Vanessa and leaned even closer to me so he could see the woman. “We are, yes,” he said apologetically. Dad found the discussion of death socially awkward, therefore we were still in the dark on the details of the funeral, who was attending, and most of all, how he felt. “We are getting off in Orlando to pick up a family member and driving to Palm Beach, where the event will take place,” my dad explained, smiling sadly.  “Or rather “I will drive because neither of these two do.”  

Our lack of driving frustrated and puzzled my Dad who had shared all his fond adolescent memories of joyously tooling his way through the changing New England leaves in his ancient Peugeot convertible with, according to him, a different girlfriend at his side every season. We did not drive because we were city kids. Since our parents got divorced when Vanessa and I were one and three years old, respectively, my sister and I had been raised by our mother in New York City, while our Dad, most recently, had lived with his recently departed (divorced, not dead) wife Hillary Dean, in what was possibly the preppiest town on the planet: Darien, Connecticut.  Dad and Hillary Dean had also belonged to a nearby beach club, a place where my sister and I were ninety-nine percent sure they did not allow Jews – a fact that sent our mom into rages and prompted Vanessa to start wearing a vulgar and enormous gold chai necklace with a conversely tiny black bikini whenever we visited them.  Hillary Dean had cringed like a vampire confronted with a cross at the sight of that necklace. We would not miss Hillary Dean. 

***

“I’m so, so sorry for your loss,” the red headed woman said. “Are you okay?” She looked genuinely sad, like she cared.  Maybe she was one of those genuine empaths: people whose eyes get watery at other people’s misfortunes. That didn’t run in our DNA, but I believed it existed. 

“He is good, we are so, so good,” said Vanessa, telegraphing keep away as she had towards every new woman in Dad’s life since we were toddlers.  We had always had different approaches: Vanessa played it jealous, possessive, petulant, while I always got overly attached, tried to bond, yearned to find something to like in each stepmother.  

When my dad married number three, Rachel Gersten, Vanessa was twelve and I was fourteen, and I thought Rachel Gersten would be different. She was familiar, obviously, having been friends with our Mom. And the whole endeavor was so high stakes; it was incredibly risky for both of them to choose each other. Their mutual friends sided with my mom, and my Dad’s family was already lukewarm on New York Jews, so I felt sure in my teenage bones that this had to be it, true love. Rachel Gersten was fun and kind;: like a crazy big sister she took us shopping at Bergdorf’s, splurging on glittery three-hundred-dollar sneakers (shoes that my father definitely could not afford on his part-time lawyer salary, supplemented by his ever-dwindling trust fund), snuck us white wine spritzers at holiday parties, and, since she was an editor at Vanity Fair, she was a huge help editing my angst-ridden teenage attempts at fiction.  “How about the main character does the opposite of what you expect or what you want?” She would often say kindly. 

One night a year into the marriage, thirteen-year-old Vanessa saw Rachel and I sitting in front of the computer, heads together, working on a story, giggling. When we were finished, Vanessa came into the room and gently brushed my bangs away. “Don’t get too attached,” Vanessa said sadly, “He won’t let you keep her,” as if Rachel was a puppy or a kitten destined to be exiled to a farm.  Of course, Vanessa was right, and by the time we had our learner’s permits, Dad had done the opposite of what I wanted, but what I deep down had expected: strayed again and moved on. 

“I’m Khaki, and this is Phoebe and Vanessa,” my dad said, reaching over the booth past a cringing Vanessa, deploying his studied good manners to firmly shake the red head’s hand.  Dad still did self-consciously chivalrous things like that: standing when a woman came to the table and pulling out her chair; walking on the street side of the sidewalk to shield a woman from car spray; sprinting to open doors for ladies laden with packages.  I never understood how charming it was until I turned eighteen, and he started doing it for me.  

“Khaki?  The woman said, “That’s an interesting name.”  I noticed she had straightened up and was twisting her long red hair around her index finger. 

“It’s a nickname,” said Vanessa, purposely keeping her back to the woman. “Obviously.” 

My Dad’s real name was Kent Thomas Carswell but at some point, one of his four towheaded younger siblings for some reason started calling him “Khaki” and it stuck.  It became permanent in the manner of many ostentatiously ridiculous traditions in my father’s family that ranged from the mildly eccentric – the tradition of naming the family dog Moses and the cat Catserole, no matter their gender; to the serious – all the siblings clinging to ownership of a gray-shingled family compound on Cape Cod, a crumbling monstrosity with severe foundation issues, mildew, and upkeep costs so high that all the siblings seem to view ongoing ownership of the house to be  a moral duty, similar to a tithe.

“My younger siblings couldn’t say Kent,” Dad said apologetically. 

“I’m Lisa,” the red-haired woman said.  Lisa then explained she was meeting friends for a “girls’ trip” to Orlando, specifically to Disney.  

Can you think of anything worse? texted Vanessa, typing furiously under the table. 

Do you think they will post pictures with the characters? I texted back 

Maybe it’s a specific sexual fetish? Vanessa answered. 

But Dad was clearly charmed. He put down his cards and leaned forward deploying the laser focused interest that indicates he is intrigued by a new woman. “Disney, do you have children then?” Dad asked casually.  I knew he preferred that she did not. 

“My friend just recovered from breast cancer and she loves Disney,” Lisa explained, shrugging apologetically. I liked the way she said cancer, flatly, with no drama.  Our mother always called it “the big C” in a dramatic stage whisper, as if saying it could infect you. 

“That’s sweet,” Vanessa said, rolling her eyes at me. 

“Chips?” Lisa offered holding an open family– sized bag of potato chips over the back of the seat. 

“No,” said Vanessa recoiling against her seat as if Lisa had just held a cocked pistol against her forehead. 

“She’s allergic to garlic; she has to be really careful,” I explained. Vanessa was anaphylactic shock allergic to garlic: an insidious and dangerous allergy and because garlic is in virtually everything, Vanessa lived with a level of food paranoia which had slowly evolved into a full-blown eating disorder.   

“That’s super challenging,” Lisa said  

“It was tricky when she was little,” Dad said. “But she’s got it down to a science now.”  This was not strictly true. Our dad had no idea how much Vanessa’s life was dictated by the allergy, how she had been to the hospital twice since she started Brown, both accidental exposures.  How each time it happened, the doctors had said her sensitivity potentially increased and exposure became more dangerous.  I thought about it all the time: the garlic lurking in everything from chips to four-star restaurants, a waiting stalker with invisible hands that could close her throat and steal my sister’s last breath. I knew it had gotten to the point that Vanessa, who was by nature a dance-on-the table-in-her-bra kind of girl, had stopped drinking at parties because one of her trips to the ER was caused by a drunken hookup with a guy who had recently eaten a double-stuffed garlic pizza.   

“Let’s go get my food,” said Vanessa abruptly as she grabbed my hand to pull me from the booth. I followed behind as she stomped noisily through the dimly lit train. 

When we got to our seats, Vanessa rummaged through her backpack to retrieve the insulated lunch bag containing her usual: a prepared tuna sandwich bought from her favorite deli, a place where they all knew her and greeted her by name.  

“Do you think they will bang in the bathroom?” she asked. 

“Bang? Who says bang?” I said. “He is just being him.” 

“He is pathetic. His fucking mother just died,” Vanessa said.   

To be fair, Dad was semi-estranged from our grandmother.  The last straw was the Christmas I was eleven when my grandmother, who was both emotionally remote and aristocratically alcoholic, called a neighbor on her Palm Beach cul-de-sac a dirty Jew after four dry martinis, in the course of casual conversation.

“Mom! What the hell?”  my father had exclaimed leaping from his chair to shield us with his body like a medieval knight. 

“Oh, please,” my grandmother countered. “They know I don’t mean them,” my grandmother said, gesturing at Vanessa and me with her drink, the charm bracelets on her wrist jingling like bells. 

Vanessa says that in the fantasy version of that visit, Dad and Lynn Hamilton (wife number two, WASP number one) packed us up and left my grandmother’s house in righteous outrage. In reality, we stayed and dined on baked stuffed lobsters and creamed chipped beef while my semi-sober uncles showed home movies of idyllic-looking weekends from their childhood at the Cape house unsullied by dark-haired Semitic relatives. 

But I also know after that weekend, Dad pulled away from his mother.  Since Dad didn’t do confrontation (to the point that he told Hillary Dean he was leaving her by text), he just gradually stopped seeing Nana; we spent the Christmas breaks of our teens trying out the different Club Meds of the Caribbean, which was great the years he was married, less good when he was on the prowl. 

***

When we got back to the dining car, we saw Dad had switched seats and was now sitting across from Lisa.  Lisa looked up and smiled at us, perhaps embarrassed, and slid over on the plastic bench to make room for us. 

“Lisa here is a nurse,” Dad said. Vanessa smiled and started typing, holding her phone only partially under the table. Of course she is, Vanessa texted me. 

“Not only that, Lisa works in the pediatric ICU,” Dad added proudly, as if he was somehow responsible. 

Better and better, Vanessa texted again.  

“That must be hard,” I said 

But it’s rewarding, Vanessa texted. 

“It’s damn hard,” Lisa said in a way that suggested she somehow knew Vanessa was making fun of her.  

“Phoebe is a poet and Vanessa,” My dad paused, “What is it you are studying again?” 

“Critical theory,” Vanessa said. 

“Sounds hard,” said Lisa in her sweet southern drawl.  It was impossible to detect if she was being sarcastic.  

***

I couldn’t tell if Lisa was fully buying my Dad’s charm offensive.  At forty-six, he seemed a little old for her.  Not that age was an issue for him. The previous year, shortly after Dad Irish-exited from his marriage with Hillary Dean, he came to my poetry reading at a coffee house in Spanish Harlem in a converted garage.  It was so far outside his comfort zone he might as well have been on Mars. He showed up absurdly and wrongly overdressed in a Brooks Brothers gold button blazer, wide leg tan khakis and a plaid purple button down, his yellow silk pocket scarf adorned with tiny whales. Clean-shaven and fresh–faced in a sea of ironic facial hair and neck tattoos, he looked somehow simultaneously older and younger than all my friends.  

“Is he going to get mugged on the way out?” my friend Isiah had fretted, shaking his blond dreadlocked head with worry. 

But Dad, as usual, was unphased, chatting and charming his way through the crowd of twenty-something writers, artists, playwrights, flitting around like a parrot trapped in a cluster of crows. 

“Your dad is a total DILF,” Isiah said as he watched my dad work the crowd. “Man has moves.” 

“I just threw up in my mouth, “I said. 

That night I was so nervous, I was not sure if he paid attention to my reading.  I saw him standing next to a girl I knew casually, but who I respected. Lara, a grad student in the MFA program, was alluring in an understated geeky way that drew admirers of both sexes, including me. 

After I read, sweaty from leftover nerves and shaking with adrenaline high, I wove my way through the crowd to find Dad.  I noticed Lara was standing close to him. A novice in the study of my father wouldn’t have caught it, but I saw her lean towards him, their shoulders slightly touching as if she could not resist the slight subtle pull into his orbit. 

You were excellent Phebs,” he said, clapping me heartily on the shoulder. I knew it was a big deal for him to come and was grateful, because his typical literary consumption was a yearly John Grisham novel. 

“Drink!” Screamed Isiah and I was swallowed by the crowd, losing sight of my Dad and Lara.  Half an hour later, I looked over and my heart squeezed with the painful promise of a future poem as I watched Dad slip out the door with Lara, his square capable hands sitting just a little too low on Lara’s lower back as he slid into a cab next to her. 

***

While Vanessa ate her sandwich and I dug into Lisa’s chips, we learned why Lisa was on the train instead of taking the short flight from Richmond to Orlando.  She explained she had been called into the ER the night a small commuter jet went down.  The pilot had nearly landed the plane. “He did a good job as these things go. There were actually survivors. But their injuries.” She paused, uncomfortable. “It’s not logical, but I don’t fly anymore.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” my Dad said, raising his plastic cup and clinking it to Lisa’s.  

I noticed Vanessa had gone strangely still and quiet. “I feel weird.” she said suddenly, her elegant angular face white and drawn. “Allergy-weird, maybe,” she said.  Her hand slowly slid up her chest towards her throat as she began rubbing the area right over her sharp collarbones. 

“How?” Dad asked, his tone hovering between fear and anger. 

Lisa ignored him. “Do you have an EpiPen?” she asked Vanessa in a calm professional tone. 

Vanessa was wheezing a little. “In my bag,” Vanessa whispered. 

My fear tasted metallic like ozone, gasoline, iron. I hadn’t actually seen my sister have an episode since we were in middle school. She collapsed on the floor of our summer camp cafeteria clutching her throat while her face turned red and her lips turned white. That time, a quick-witted seventeen-year-old waterskiing counselor jabbed an EpiPen into Vanessa’s thigh and stopped the reaction cold.  It was over so fast I could almost pretend it hadn’t happened. 

“Go get the pen,” Lisa said to me. “Run.”  

I propelled myself through the sliding door, banging my hip bones on the side of seats as I ricocheted through the listing car. I grabbed Vanessa’s backpack and ran back to the dining car where my sister was lying on the gray molded bench, her legs dangling limply on the floor, her head cradled in Dad’s lap.  He stroked her hair, murmuring nonsense. Vanessa’s breaths trickled out like slow, scrabbling, insufficient things. 

Lisa grabbed the EpiPen and without hesitation, pulled down Vanessa’s joggers and jammed it into her thigh in a fluid, practiced arc. 

I heard myself start screaming – my panicked heart insisting the EpiPen would not be enough; this poison was in her and it could cause another reaction as she digested it, the garlic a fragrant bloom, sending out noxious toxic tendrils through Vanessa’s bloodstream. 

“I need you to calm down,” Lisa said, allowing no room to disobey her. “You are not helping your sister.” Lisa turned from me to the bartender, who had roused himself from dozing and was looking on with concern, “Call the conductor” she said. “Tell him we need to stop as soon as possible. We need an ambulance.”    

Even in the moment, I could see how Lisa must be good at her job, how she was someone strong enough to hold the hands of dying children, to watch them take their last labored breaths. Leaning in close, Lisa watched Vanessa’s face intently while simultaneously grabbing her wrist to check her pulse. Vanessa’s closed eyes fluttered, but I could not hear her breathing at all. 

“She is always so careful,” Dad murmured.  “How could this happen?” he asked Lisa, blinking like a dazed little boy, “How?” 

“It can happen,” Lisa said. “Cross contamination, maybe a new allergy.” Lisa put her ear over Vanessa’s pale lips, listening. “Get her on the floor,” she commanded.  She and my father slid Vanessa to the floor and Lisa knelt at her side, tilted her chin up, and leaned in bringing her plump lips to meet Vanessa’s like a kiss, blowing oxygen into my sister’s shuttered lungs. 

After a minute, Lisa stopped. “I think she’s moving air, but I don’t like how she’s looking,” Lisa said, not moving her gaze from Vanessa. My Dad stood over them, and I hated him in that moment for being so helpless, for not ever being able to fix anything that mattered. 

“When is this goddamn train going to stop?” Lisa pointed at the bartender.  “Go find out what’s going on.” 

But that moment, as if in answer to Lisa, the train slowed, and the conductor came on and announced the train was making an unscheduled stop for an emergency.  He apologized for the inconvenience. “Good. Thank God,” Lisa said mostly to herself. I could see Vanessa taking quick shallow breaths on her own. 

“Is she ok, will she be ok?” My Dad asked Lisa.    

“They’ll keep her on meds at the hospital and observe her to make sure she’s stable, that she doesn’t get worse.” Lisa said. I saw my dad had shockingly started silently crying, large rogue tears dripped down his cheeks without authorization. “Hey,” she said gently, placing her hand on his forearm like a caress, or maybe a rebuke. “Pull it together.” 

When the train stopped at a small station an hour outside of Charleston, Lisa insisted on getting off with us to make sure Vanessa got safely into the ambulance. “I’ll get the next train,” she said, although I suspected it would end up being a huge inconvenience for her and she would definitely be late meeting her friends at Disney. 

When the ambulance pulled up with lights flashing, almost immediately, the EMT’s realized Lisa was in charge of the situation. They ignored my father and me, and addressed their questions to Lisa who, in turn, efficiently listed an alphabet’s-worth of coded medical acronyms, SOB, AAS, low BP. All of it basically said my sister was still in very bad shape.  As the EMTs loaded my sister in on a stretcher, Lisa said to Dad and me, “I’d like to know how she’s doing, please let me know.”  

“Of course, of course,” My dad said remembering his beautiful manners.  He stepped forward as if to embrace her but at the last minute gripped her hand instead, pumping it up and down over and over, “Thanks, just thank you so much” he sniffed, his voice cracking. He climbed in next to Vanessa for the ride to the hospital, and when he looked out at us from the back of the ambulance his gaze was rheumy and wet, his blue eyes faded like an old man’s.  

Lisa stayed with me while I ordered a cab to the hospital and I called my mom. As we waited on the chilly empty platform, our breath crystalized into smoky clouds. The sun broke over the horizon, glowing a cheerful bright orange oblivious to my terror, to my gratitude. 

When my cab finally arrived, I tried to reach out to shake Lisa’s hand and instead, she reached out with her strong arms to gather me in close. It was a real embrace, her warm breasts pressed against me as I collapsed into her; she smelled like roses, sweat, and safety. 

I forced myself to pull away. “Let me get your number so we can update you on how she’s doing. What’s your last name?” I asked as I typed in her information into my contacts. 

“Barnet,” she said. 

“Lisa Barnet,” I repeated.