“Fitting In” by Tom Roth

The day Dominic finally introduced Ava to the family, my old self started up again. Someone I knew, someone I once was, someone I learned to silence, had found the key to my mind and let herself back in, and her first words were a song I used to play to myself: You are more than that, Claire. You are more than the flat screen television. You are more than the valet service and the cleaning woman. More than the boutique mannequins. More than the new minivan. More than that.

Everyone in the backyard circled around Ava. She arrived like a white-spotted fawn. They came to her with a manner of respect and joy, a right-away love I was never given, received only in false form. And the moment I made my way to her, the circle broke apart as if a sickly, wild thing had entered its core, but Ava remained there and took my hand without alarm or façade.

            “You know, Ava,” my husband Michael said, “we thought you weren’t real. Didn’t we, Claire?”

            “Stop it,” I replied. “Dominic has told us so much about you.”

I wondered where she was from, if her home was still simple and true, not tainted like Glenwood, and then I stopped myself because Dominic was eyeing me. He had already pulled her away before I could offer her a drink.

            “Pretty cute,” Michael said, turning burgers and sausages on the grill.

            “Yes, she is.” Ava had long brunette hair. She seemed present and aware, taking things in with a bright alacrity, unafraid to be herself. She had just taken a bocce ball from my other son Vinny and rolled it near the white pellino. “You think it’s a bit much to bring her around everyone for the first time?”

            “She seems okay. Already doing celeb-shots.”

            Our Fourth of July party happened in the backyard every year. We had a lot of space with a brick patio, a deck, and a pool where the all kids swam. Everyone else drank and ate at the long tables. It was mostly the Campanos, Michael’s side. The year was 2005. Dominic and Ava were sophomores at Ohio State. They had been dating for almost a year now, but this was the first time we ever met Ava.

            “It’s a lot for the first time,” I said. “We hardly said anything to her.” I became aware of all the groups—the bocce game, the kids in the water, the older folks on the patio. Everyone was talking about me, I just knew it. “You think he brought her to this just so he could keep her away?”

            “Away from what?” Michael asked. “Claire, don’t do this now. Not with everyone here. Look at what we got.”

            “I know,” I said.

            “No.”

Michael put the tongs down and wrapped me from behind. We stood on the deck above everyone else. The heat had thickened that afternoon like any other Ohio summer day, the sun and the air and the white clouds weighing down on us. Trees shaded one side of our yard. Tonight the fireworks would bang and burst like magic. Hot air balloons would float in the sky the next morning. All the other tall houses seemed empty, ours the one with the party, and everything in Glenwood now was so beautiful and new, so different it all felt unreal, like I could press my hand on the hot grill and feel no burn, nothing, and I’d wake up soon. Michael spoke in my ear, his chin on my shoulder.

“Look,” he said.  

*                    *                    *

That voice kept up me the whole night. More than the fireworks. More than the leftovers. More than the clean sink and the steaming dishwasher. I replayed Ava’s arrival that afternoon, how the family came to her, and I even paused at our guest room, almost opened the door to see her asleep in the bed.

            By dawn, I had made coffee and waited for the others to wake. It wasn’t that I heard voices, or that I was going crazy, becoming two people at once. It was a kind of feeling in me that made sound. Like music without words, but I understood the notes meant something more to me. More? More what? It was a rhythm, and I wrote lyrics to the notes in my head.

Then Ava came down to the kitchen.

“You sleep okay?” I asked her after our good mornings.

She said yes, then asked me the same, and I told her I slept.

We drank coffee on the deck and waited for the balloons. I learned Ava was from Lewiston, Pennsylvania, just west of Pittsburgh. She came from a place with more backroads than lined streets. A town no bigger than a few old businesses along a main road. The tallest things there were church steeples, water towers, and wooded hills.

“Sounds like what this place used to be,” I replied.

When I was growing up, downtown Glenwood was only a short drag of brick storefronts and awnings. Past the edge of town-center once lay the flatlands and farms and trees that separated the narrow frame houses. On bus rides to school, I’d find wild turkeys roaming the frosted earth in the fall. At night in the summer fireflies lit up the green lush fields, glowing by the thousands, three times the meager amount my own sons would find in our backyard.

“At least there’s a lot to do,” Ava said.

“Sure is,” I said.

The top of a red balloon had just lifted over all the houses.

“You make it sound like a bad thing,” Ava said.

“Oh no, not at all,” I said. “It’s just—”

I was about to tell her this place wasn’t as great as it appeared to be. By the time our boys finished high school in the 2000s, all kinds of plazas and strip malls had replaced the long stretches of farms and fields. It all arrived as a dream at first—sudden, without prelude—and its sequence only blossomed to the point of becoming almost impossible: hotels, traffic, country clubs, chain restaurants, lemonade stands and garage sales and the song of the ice cream man down the street.

“Just what?” Ava asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I took a sip of coffee. “And your folks are in Lewiston?”

Ava then told me her mother died of breast cancer when she was in high school. Her father had passed away (aneurysm) just before she met Dominic at Ohio State her freshman semester. Her aunt, one of the few relatives she had left Lewiston, helped out with the house. They planned on selling it soon. 

“I don’t really go home anymore,” she concluded. “There’s not much there.”  She looked at the first balloon rising in full sight. “I’m really glad I met Dominic. He’s been someone I can count on.”

I didn’t what else to say but sorry or thank you, so I just reached out and patted her wrist. I was proud of Dominic, proud of myself for once, and I wanted to be there for her, too. It felt like we were sisters, like we had known each other our whole lives, and she could understand me, could see me, could remember this place as it once was. Another balloon came in sight. I almost cried right there in front of her.

After that, Ava and I shared a bond as she made more visits over the next few years. Our conversations seemed separate from the regular humdrum during holiday parties and birthdays. Ava would bring up a roommate’s trouble with a boyfriend or show me funny pictures of Dominic passed out. I looked forward to seeing her. It helped, too. I kept my old self under control again until Dominic said I should give her some space.

            “Space,” I had repeated to Michael. We sat by the pool, sunbathing, and we expected Ava to come in later that afternoon. She was staying with us over Father’s Day weekend that June of 2010. Dominic and Ava were out of college, working, living together in an apartment nearby.

            “I think what he’s saying,” Michael replied, “is that you try too hard. That’s all it is.” He gave the sky a curious glance. “You know, sometimes, you get…”

            “I what?”

            “I don’t know,” he paused, smiling at me. “You get so wrapped up in your head that it’s like you got on the wrong glasses, or everything’s under a magnifying glass, you know what I mean?”

Michael had that smile of his, courteous and calm, a look that says everything’s all right. He was sixty, ten years older than me. We met at the softball fields in 1978. Back then in the summers, the guys played in leagues and the girls chatted on the bleachers and everyone drank beer. I liked Michael because he was older, more mature, and he wasn’t on the field but walking around, supervising like some chaperone. The younger guys even respected him, likened him to a big brother, and I felt I could grow with him.

His family, though, had an intricate system of in and out, and I always found myself on the peripheral. They came from an old Italian neighborhood in the downtown Glenwood, what would be named a “Little Italy” once everything here was suburbanized, and they didn’t like that I grew up in the fields, by farmlands, near trailers.  They said “out there” with the same poison, the same spite as “white trash,” and they didn’t like that I wasn’t Italian. They owned a construction company that Michael would take over one day, and I used to tease him that it was a front for the Mafia.

A couple of years after those softball games, we got married and bought a house in a new neighborhood. Michael proposed just before I finished college. It was the first time people started to say suburbs in Glenwood. A hotel had been built because the small airport near Akron was getting more travelers. We lived at the center of so much growth and possibility, and I was still so young then that I could only want more of it.

Aside from all the get-togethers, his family didn’t matter to the one we were starting. I could tell how much our boys loved driving out to my parents’ place in the farms and pastures, Dominic especially. His eyes lit up whenever my dad took him for rides in the truck or on the tractor. He liked the little chores he did for them: gathering sticks in the backyard for a bonfire, feeding the dogs, shoveling snow.

My father was a farmhand, my mother a waitress. They’d spend their free time in simple ways: coffee on the porch, fishing trips on Lake Mohawk, steak-nights with childhood friends who taught their kids how to drive a tractor, bait a hook, and shuck corn. They moved when the farm was sold, the land paved over for another neighborhood. More and more people like them had been replaced by younger couples bringing in bigger homes and sprinkler systems.

When my parents left for West Virginia (where my father was born), I soon realized how life in Glenwood would never be the same again. Wide, obtrusive billboards appeared out of the fields, advertising apartments, businesses, and housing developments. It had occurred to me then that my children would have an upbringing different from my own, that the way of living I once knew was fading from this place, that Michael’s family would be the one with a lasting impact on them, no matter the few road-trips to West Virginia we’d try over the years, and I feared they’d learn the same views of the Campanos and soon see me as something else, some other form on the outside of a window, her hands always on glass, never skin.

“Just stop trying so hard,” Michael was saying. “Let her fit in with everyone else, too.”

Fitting in, I thought. By the time we moved into our second house, I had silenced the side of me that echoed through my head like music. You are more than the paved sidewalks and the corrals of shopping carts. More than the acres of outlet stores and car dealerships. All of it went mute. And I learned it wasn’t so hard to fit in so long as you kept your closest thoughts to yourself. It was here I became someone else, someone quiet and polite, hardly there, almost nameless, someone without history, without much thought.

Until Ava. Throughout the years, she visited our home so often I sometimes wondered if it was because of me, because she saw through the others, because we were from the same kind of place. She once told me when in the fifth grade her parents used to take her to a town fair in the summer, and if they won a stuffed animal at a carnival game, they’d find someone, usually a younger child, and give it to them before they’d share a funnel cake.

“Okay?” Michael said now.

I said okay, and he kissed my cheek before he walked up to the house.

The summer heat, layered and leaden, made me sweat just sitting there. I slipped in the water, swimming beneath its cool bright roof as I reached for the wall at the other end. My shadow crawled on the bottom, the black figure cutting across the glows from above. I stopped in the deep and spread out my arms and crossed my legs. My dark form looked crucified and limp. I let myself sink, and I heard Ava. Claire, Claire. She was speaking through the water. We are the backroads and the fields. We are the fishing lines, the cornhusks. The screen doors and the porches. The gravel and grit. Then she was screaming, and I tried to stay but I had to go up.

Later on, after the cheeseburgers and pulled pork and baked beans, the Campano women seized my kitchen and assigned me to the sink. Together, their menace was a low growl, the sound a mean dog might make if you look at it the wrong way, and apart, each had their own subtly of exclusion, an expression of false gratitude (“Oh, Claire, you didn’t have to do that.”) or a cheery demand to get out of the way (“Why don’t you sit down? You’ve done enough!”). They were the kind of girls who wove webs, who laid eggs in bite wounds, who devoured their mates, and I was their no-good Cinderella, and Ava their delicious prey.

            Isabella, Michael’s little sister, asked for Ava. Izzy often feigned forgetfulness for the sake of small talk or excuses for showing up late, and her behavior toward me was a cruel kindness, an indifferent curiosity. She handed Ava a knife. “Will you cut up all the desserts?”

            The girls had just arranged the pies and brownies on the island. Ava cut, someone else scooped out slices onto paper plates. Dominic stood next to a cherry pie at the end of the desserts. The elderly and children were always first line. I plunged my hands through warm, soapy water and pulled out a glass pan of cheesy potatoes, and I could only wait and wait, scrubbing away, because I had no part in what was coming.

            “There’s something in here,” Ava said as she finished cutting the cherry pie.

            “What is that?” Dominic said, his smile like Michael’s.

            “Oh my God,” Ava said.

            In one hand, she held a ring with a tiny blossom of a diamond, a family heirloom of the Campano side. The ring was smothered in cherry filling. It seemed from a severed finger, all bloody and bright. Dominic took her hands and fell on one knee. Ava began to cry as all of us encircled her in the kitchen.

            “Will you marry me?” Dominic said.

Everyone in the circle gasped, cupped their mouths, teared up like a cheap rom-com scene. And I did too, but not because my son was getting married. I felt the length of my life lift me like the takeoff of a plane, and everything was shrinking the higher I climbed—everywhere I had been and every year I had lived turned to a faraway puzzle—and I couldn’t name a place of my own, I couldn’t say there, and I didn’t know what place I would land in after this.

“Yes,” Ava cried, and Dominic slipped on the ring, fingers smeared red. 

“We thought we’d keep it simple,” Ava said.

            A year later, the summer of 2011, Dominic and Ava began planning for a wedding next July. The four us sat by the pool and drank in the summer sun. Michael had popped a bottle of champagne.

            “Yes,” I replied, “simple but sufficient, too.”

            “Listen to her,” Michael laughed.

            “I just don’t want anything that’s too much,” Ava said.

            “Whatever you need,” I said. “However we can help.”

            “Thank you, Claire,” Ava said.

            Dominic dragged Ava into the pool. The two of them splashed and floated together in the water, their wet bodies shining, still so young, twenty-five, just kids. My fingers curled around the thin moist glass of champagne. Ava pulled away from Dominic and floated on her back and smiled with her closed eyes to the sun. She once handed me a picture of her parents and of her as baby. It was a few nights after Christmas one year, and we were the only ones still up, watching a snowstorm. In the picture, they held Ava on a bridge. There was snow on the hills and trees, and the river below was black. Her first hike, she told me, and then she said she wished I had the chance to meet one of them. She gave it to me, and I kept it in an envelope in my nightstand.

I considered myself a mother to Ava. My sons always did what I said and spoke to me, but I felt closer to Ava. We are the trails through the trees and the bed of stones in the creeks. We are the watermills and the covered bridges and the silos. We are the skipped stones and kicked cans and captured flags.

Ava pulled herself out of the water now and walked onto the diving board. She jumped, her arms over her head, and crashed into the deep end. Thank you, Claire. She deserved a good wedding, and, as a mother, I’d be the one to give it to her.

Their wedding reception was at the Glenwood Country Club in the summer of 2012. The outdoor ballroom had a balcony that overlooked the lake and woods around the golf course. Our side of family and friends greatly outnumbered Ava’s. The big crowd split off into groups on the dance floor, at the balcony, in the Tiffany chairs at the tables, and everyone I had talked to, even Michael’s sisters, said how beautiful the night turned out.

Without me, the wedding would’ve never been such a spectacle. I ordered centerpieces of white peonies and floral installation for the ceilings. I helped Ava pick out the taper candles and mauve silk runners to match the bridesmaid dresses. The string quartet played classic hits during cocktails and dinner. We ate with gold silverware.

All night I expected a moment with her—she’d throw her arms around me, crying on my shoulder, saying thank you over and over. Of course it was very hard to speak with her, all the running around she had to do, but I wondered if maybe she was doing some of it on purpose. I’d try pulling her from a group or sidling up to her on the dance floor, and she’d hurry away, preoccupied. It got to the point that I had watched her for most of the night.

Finally, near the end of the reception, I caught her alone in the bathroom and waited for her to meet me at the sinks. A wicker basket by the soap was full of hairbrushes, bobby pins, and lotions. As I touched up my blonde hair, I saw how shut and severe my mouth looked. It was an effort to smile when Ava came out.

“That’s the last time I go to the bathroom with this thing on,” Ava said.

“Here,” I said, bending down to smooth out her long dress. “I told them ten times to unlock the rest of the club so you could use the other bathrooms. You shouldn’t have to come in here with everyone else.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s your day.” It came out clumsy, cheap. “Your big day.” I had lost count of my drinks by dinnertime. “Turned out to be pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Ava said.

I was still fiddling with her dress—a trumpet with an expansive, glittering gown. I had been the first to see her in it the day we went shopping. The party sounded distant and muffled, the music and noises from the dance floor barely audible.

“There,” I said.

When I stood up, I stared at her in the mirror, still behind her, and she looked back.

“What?” Ava said. Her voice had an edge to it. “What is it, Claire?”

“What do you mean what is it?”

She looked ugly with her nose wrinkled up, her brow creased.  

“You don’t have the slightest idea, do you?” Ava said. “I like you, Claire, I really do, but sometimes you’re too much. Like all of this.” She rattled the basket. A few bobby pins and a hairbrush fell out.  I looked in the mirror, and I noticed my hands had piled on my stomach as if I had just been stabbed. I couldn’t move. “You’re always going on how Glenwood used to be so simple, that you and me are so different from everyone else. But do you realize it’s all just your own projection? It’s not like I feel the same all the time, Claire.” She paused. “And I’m not your fucking daughter.” She was about to speak again, but held back tears, her finger pressing her temple. “Shit,” she said, and walked out, bundling up her dress as she opened the door.

I tidied up the basket and listened to the garbled sounds from the ballroom. I felt very alone, hearing the laughs and voices and music outside. It all felt impossible again—the people, the night—and all I had wanted was to be a part of something real, the way Glenwood used to be, but somebody always said I was in the wrong, I was out instead of in, and why did it feel like they were all lying to me?

A drunk woman came in, a friend of ours. She saw me in the mirror.

“Claire, Claire,” she said, shaking her head, “would you stop fussing around and just enjoy the night? Everything’s perfect.” She entered a stall and let out a sigh. I heard her pissing. “Just perfect,” she said.

END

---