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Kissing in America Page 8
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I wanted, more than anything, for Fran to be wrong, for them not to have known the plane was going down, for my dad not to have been scared. “He didn’t know, he never knew, he didn’t feel a thing,” my mom had said. “We’re lucky it wasn’t a long, painful, drawn-out illness.” I’d asked her about that a few days later, after the words had sunk in. Lucky? She shook her head and never mentioned it again.
In my first letter to Will after he’d left, I’d told him how nervous I was about the recorders being recovered. He’d written back:
The recorders will confirm what you already know: he wasn’t scared. I’m glad you’re coming out here. It will be great to see you.
He sounded so confident, so sure, and I thought of how he walked down the halls of our school, fearless as a cowboy, as if he knew what was out there and was ready to face it. Unlike me. I was always shrinking back, peering around corners, trying not to panic. My insides felt like a mushy mess, and the part of me that loved him also wanted to soak up his strength and fearlessness and become like that, too.
The door to the waiting room opened and I looked up: Annie stood in front of me, holding a golden envelope.
Because my mother is about as likely to let us take the bus to California as she is to let us travel by donkey
Annie cradled the envelope. She didn’t seem to believe it herself.
My whole body felt warm and cold at the same time. She told me about the audition, the screen test, the interviews, the exams, the mock quiz rounds, and the endless forms to fill out. We were going to California.
I caught my breath. I couldn’t get too excited yet: I still had to figure out how to pay for the trip. And I had to convince my mother to let me go.
We walked toward the elevator. I knew that as soon as I mentioned the word bus, my mom would recite all the bus accidents that had happened in the last ten years. She didn’t even like the idea of me crossing the street, not to mention crossing the country.
I thought of my mom’s research papers and the talks she gave about women and economics. The only thing that might convince her was the hope of winning the money.
“I don’t have enough saved for the bus fare, though,” I told Annie.
“I can lend you the money. Then when we win, you can pay me back. Even more motivation for us to kick some ass.”
“I love you,” I said. “I’ll pay you back with interest. Unless my mom locks me in my room forever, which will probably happen after I tell her this whole plan.”
I spent the next twenty-four hours memorizing passages from Women and Economics, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse”), which was the subject of my mom’s PhD thesis. Annie helped me put together a spreadsheet about what the $50,000 might mean for my future wealth, success, happiness, and achievement (especially if, according to Annie’s calculations, it accrued interest at an annual 6 percent rate).
The next night, I practiced what I’d say to my mom as I cooked dinner. I chopped garlic and parsley, and stirred the tomato sauce. The kitchen was my favorite room in our house. When I cooked, I forgot about school and Will and everything for a little while.
When my dad cooked, he’d hum or whistle and enter this happy sort of trance. Sometimes, what I missed most about him was this secret well of joy he always had, how he made everything fun. Whenever I had a bad day, he’d say, “All is not lost, is it?” He’d make tea (he only liked Tetley, sent from his London friends—he said the kind sold here wasn’t the same) with sugar cubes on the saucer, and there would be Toffee Crisp bars cut into small pieces, and Jammie Dodgers and Rich Tea biscuits on a tray. On cold nights—our stingy landlord always kept the heat low—he’d fill up a hot water bottle and put it in my bed, so the sheets were warm when I got inside. Once a week, he bought my mother flowers from the bodega on our corner.
Tonight, as we ate dinner, I twirled and retwirled the spaghetti on my fork. My mom seemed distracted; she kept glancing out the window. She always seemed in her own world lately. She’d leave little Post-it notes all over the place—Tuesday: department meeting, pick up dry cleaning, pay electric bill, committee report, grades due—and forget about them. I’d find them and stick them in her bag. Or she’d forget that she’d left the iron on, and I’d have to turn it off. She had insomnia, and sometimes I’d hear her up at three thirty in the morning.
I took a breath and finally told her, “I’ve been reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She’s amazing. The best part is when she says—”
My mom wasn’t listening. She stared into space and tucked a gray strand of hair behind her ear. She’d stopped dyeing it in the last year. She touched the edges of the faded, worn Pucci scarf around her neck. She used to love to hunt through thrift shops in the bowels of Queens and Brooklyn and unearth vintage Lanvin skirts and Yves Saint Laurent shoes for dirt cheap. When I was little, I’d hide in the middle of the clothing racks and squeal when she found me, and she’d always let me pick out a little treasure—a glass heart-shaped box or a wind-up toy.
We never went shopping together anymore, and she hardly went out for fun at all now, except for her weekly dinner with Larry at Meredith’s restaurant in Bayside (if you could call that fun).
Now, my mom took a deep breath, looked up from her plate, and met my gaze. “Larry and I’ve decided to get married,” she said.
“What?” I almost spat out my iced tea.
“We started thinking about it when he got laid off. He needs insurance . . . and it seems like the right time for me to consider marriage.” She said the word marriage the way one might say back surgery.
“I don’t want to worry you, though,” she added. “Larry and I will keep our separate apartments and assets. Our lives won’t change much.”
“You’re freaking kidding me.” I put down my fork. It clanged on the table. Annie and I still called Larry the Benign Fungus, or sometimes the Sad Fungus, because he was a disaster magnet. He kept losing things: wallet, keys, library books, his job—recently, the accounting firm where he worked laid off Larry’s entire department. If someone threw a soda can out a window, it would hit him on the head. Birds aimed at his bald spot. Ceiling leaks dripped only onto him. He’d met my mom when he accidentally dumped an entire glass of kosher wine on her thrifted vintage shoes. He tracked down a replacement pair on eBay and hand-delivered them to her office, along with a first edition of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, her favorite book.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. It wasn’t that I hated Larry—it was that I knew she’d decided to marry him because it would be the final, most permanent way to forget my dad.
“Do you even love him?”
“He’s a good person. I like him very much.”
“You hardly know him.” I should’ve seen this coming, that they were getting serious. A month ago, Larry’s mother, Irma, had flown from Texas to New York to meet us. Irma’s hair was whipped into a frothy golden swirl; her teeth looked as white and thick as bathroom tiles. She’d taken us to dinner at a barbecue place in midtown where you could drop your peanut shells on the floor, and kept smiling at me somewhat creepily and saying, “Isn’t she cute?” as if I wasn’t actually there.
“We know each other well. Really well,” my mom said.
“You said like. You didn’t say love.”
“Not every relationship involves sunsets and pirate ships.”
We left most of our dinner on our plates.
In my parents’ wedding pictures, my mom literally had stars in her eyes, bright glints in the photos. They’d gotten married at City Hall and then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain. In the pictures (taken by Lulu) my mom wore a vintage white short dress and carried a white umbrella; my parents’ faces glowed beneath it, beaming.
When my mom looked at Larry, her eyes said, Please don’t spill that on me.
Now my mom washed the dishes while I hid in my room. Sunsets and pirate ships. She was always saying t
hings that squashed little bits of my soul. She’d see me wearing one of Annie’s sister’s old miniskirts and say, “Where’d you get that?” Or she’d look at my romance covers, or walk in while Annie and I were watching a Lifetime movie, and make scoffing noises. Annie and I even had a hand motion for it: we’d mash an invisible flea with our thumbs. It had become a joke, but it was telling the truth, too: every time she said these things, she crushed tiny little bits of me.
I decided to call Lulu and ask for advice. She told me, “This trip to LA is perfect timing for both of you. You each need some space right now. You can give her some time alone with Larry, so she can be sure she’s making the right decision. And maybe time away will help you wrap your head around it, too. Remind her of that and she’ll let you go.”
I hoped she was right. My mom had to agree that it was a good idea for me to go away right now. And I was sure the uninterrupted time with Larry would make her come to her senses and call it off.
My mom knocked on the door. I was still talking to Lulu on the phone, so I said good-bye and passed the phone to her, and they talked for a few minutes.
“What were you and Lulu talking about?” she asked me after they hung up.
“Nothing,” I said. “School stuff.”
I knew Lulu wouldn’t tell my mom what we spoke about. They had sort of an agreement—my mom liked that I had “another female role model” to confide stuff in, and so she let us talk without making Lulu share it with her. It was good that Lulu lived in Arizona, since otherwise my mom might make her crack under pressure.
I decided to tell my mom about the trip the next night. After our shift at the laundromat, Annie helped me put together an entire file folder of stuff about the show, and when my mom walked in the door at six o’clock—Larry followed behind her—Annie and I stood up. I handed the file to her, and I told her about the $200,000 scholarship for Annie and the $50,000 bonus for me.
“I need to make a brave choice and take this economic risk. This opportunity could change the course of my future. And you and Larry need time alone right now. So Annie and I are going to leave threeweeksfromThursdayonabus.” I said the last phrase really fast, hoping she wouldn’t notice the last word.
“On a what?” she asked.
“On a very, very safe”—I said it quietly—“bus.”
She glanced at the pages we’d printed out. “On a bus. And where is this bus going—where’s this show taking place?”
“Los Angeles,” Annie said.
“Two sixteen-year-old girls alone on a bus? Cross-country?” My mother laughed. She looked stunned that I’d even asked to go, as if I’d just asked if I could perform brain surgery on her with my fork.
“My daughter, my only child, is not taking a bus trip across the entire country with no adult supervision,” she said. “The bus is for society’s underbelly. For sex criminals and moral degenerates and psychotic rapist-murderers.”
I shook my head. “This is all Aunt Janet’s fault. She’s poisoned your mind.” When my aunt Janet lived in Syracuse, she’d take the bus to see us once a month and always arrived with stories of the crazies on board. One time she sat next to a recently paroled man from Auburn. The man wore an eye patch and proceeded to slowly eat his hair; he’d pick out a few strands and then munch the hairs in his gnarled paws like a squirrel. His patchy head resembled a checkerboard. Then he asked Janet on a date. Tonight’s yer lucky night. I’m gonna take ya out and buy ya an ice cream. She’d told him: No thank you. I’d thought it was a funny story. My mom and Janet hadn’t laughed.
Now my mom shook her head. “It’s not just Aunt Janet. You remember that beheading in Canada.” Years ago, a crazy person had stabbed and decapitated a young guy on a Greyhound. I knew my mom would file that story away and use it against me someday.
“We could take the train instead,” Annie suggested. “Though it’s more expensive.”
My mom shook her head. “It’s no safer.”
“They could just fly,” Larry said brightly. “It’s an easy hop to LA—I did it lots of times for my old job. Unaccompanied minors get special treatment.” He had a large yellow stain on his button-down shirt; it was a rare day when he appeared stain-free.
He glanced at my mom and me and suddenly remembered why we didn’t fly. He picked up the newspaper and hid behind it, as he always did whenever anything remotely relating to my father came up. My mom’s face hardened and she looked away.
She asked, “Annie, is there someone else you can take with you? Your mom, or another friend?”
Annie shook her head. “My mom can’t take off work. Eva has to come. She knows the most about my weakest subjects, like literature and women’s history. I can’t do it without her.”
My mom seemed unconvinced. She glanced at the file we’d given her. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. I’m sorry.” She handed the folder back to me, then turned and went into her bedroom.
“You have to let me go,” I called after her. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman says all troubles are traceable to the heart or the purse, so this could save me from a lifetime of trouble—”
My mom’s door closed with a thud. I heard perfume bottles clinking. Whenever my mom had a bad day, she’d stand beside her dresser, remove the little crystal stoppers of Coco and Opium, and inhale. She guarded them Gollum-like and forbade me to try them on, since she didn’t want me wasting or breaking them.
I returned to the kitchen and stared at Annie. “What now?”
She shrugged. We sat down at the table. Larry busied himself in the kitchen. He took a package of pistachios out of the cupboard and cracked one nut with his molars.
“I was in the Academic Bowl in junior high, but we only won gift certificates to McDonald’s,” he said between chews. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and scratched his elbow; a bandage covered his fleshy arm.
“What happened to your arm?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “I was turning the corner on 42nd Street and a hot dog cart ran right into me. Gouged a hole here. Scratch on my leg too.”
“Larry,” Annie said with a sigh. Everyone always said Larry with a sigh.
He picked at his bandage. “Maybe I can help,” he said. “I can talk to your mom for you. The chance for that kind of money doesn’t land in your lap every day.”
I doubted that it would help—it might even make things worse, knowing Larry. “I don’t know,” I said.
Annie was more optimistic. “It’s worth a try.”
I touched the dented edge of our kitchen table and looked at him. “Just please don’t make her more angry. Don’t make her ground me for the rest of the month.”
“I won’t. I promise. Here goes.” He tossed his red pistachio shells in the trash and wiped his hands on his shirt, leaving pink streaks. “Wish me luck.” He disappeared into the bedroom.
“I think she’ll come around. She has to,” Annie said.
I wasn’t so sure.
Our bathroom shared a wall with my mom’s bedroom; Annie and I perched on the edge of the tub, listening to my mom’s raised voice.
“I’m not going to let them travel alone, with no adults to watch over them on the way,” she said.
“Maybe you can take some time off work to go with them,” Larry told her.
Oh god. There was no way I’d get to see Will if my mom was with me.
“You know I can’t afford to do that. I’m teaching all summer,” she said.
They were quiet for a few minutes. “What if she’s not alone on the way?” Larry asked. “They can stay with family. There’s your sister in Cleveland, and my mother in Texas, and Lulu in Arizona . . . they’d watch out for the girls. And she can keep in touch by cell phone and email. We’d know where she is at all times.”
“It’s not safe for her. She’s never traveled. She’s never been anywhere,” my mom said.
“She’s a good kid. Got a good head on her shoulders. In two years she’ll be in college. This is exactly what she needs, to try
out being on her own. And think about us. The wedding. This will give us time to take care of everything.”
They whispered something I couldn’t hear, and they were quiet again.
Kissing noises. Ugh. I frowned and moved away from the wall. We went back to the kitchen.
Annie checked her watch; it was time for her to go home and study. Her parents worked until nine o’clock, and her sisters were out with their latest boyfriends—she loved the few, rare hours when she had her apartment to herself to read and be alone.
“I bet your mom will change her mind,” she said.
I shrugged. “I hope.”
We said good-bye; two hours later my mom came into my room. She’d been sitting on the fire escape talking to Aunt Janet and Lulu on the phone—our fire escape was like a little deck, with a chair and a spider plant; it was the only place in our apartment where you could actually have a completely private conversation. Larry had gone back to his place.
She stood in my doorway. I’d been reading Torrid Tomorrow (book 6: Torrid Tears) but had shoved it under my pillow when she knocked on the door.
She perched on the edge of my bed and stared at the collection of historical teddy bears sitting on my bookshelves. She’d bought one for me every year until I turned twelve: Amelia Bearhart, Florence Nightingbear, Ida Bear Wells, Elizabear Cady Stanton. She loved those bears. Sometimes I think she liked the bears better than me. The bears achieved great things in the world, and they were perfectly dressed, always smiling, never wallowing, never emotional, never wearing too-short skirts or disappointing and bewildering her by joining the Romance of the Month Club, or turning on Pride and Prejudice just to watch the kissing part.
I kept thinking: Please let me go.
She picked at an unraveling corner of my quilt. “Aunt Janet and Lulu really want to see you. Larry talked to his mother, and she said they’d be thrilled to have you stay with them.” She used her high-pitched voice, her conflicted tone.