“My mom’s coming to pick me up. We can take you home, too.”
I was unsure whether I wanted to be so close to Mrs. Golden right now, after she had lost her mother – my ineptitude would surely rear its ugly head, and possibly I would say something insensitive or stupid – but I had no immediate alternatives and it was very, very cold. Before I could answer, Mrs. Golden was pulling up in front of us in their black SUV, and I was climbing into the back after Rudy.
“Hello, girls.” Mrs. Golden turned to smile weakly at us from the front seat. She was wearing large black sunglasses, though there was virtually no sun in the sky. She took them off as we were situating ourselves, and I could see that the skin around her eyes was puffy and red. She wasn’t wearing any eye make-up, or she had cried it all off.
At first, none of us spoke. I didn’t dare say anything. I just stared out the tinted window, out at the leafless trees and dirty sidewalks as we cruised down the street. It was odd riding in the car with Mrs. Golden. I had literally never seen her driving; I hadn’t even been positive that she had a driver’s license, though in retrospect it seemed ignorant of me to think she wouldn’t. But still, the back of her head, far below the tall headrest of the driver’s seat, her ringed fingers clutching the big, leather steering wheel seemed out of place, almost comical.
“Rudy, I packed up your bag,” Mrs. Golden said, glancing back at us over her shoulder. “Daddy’s coming home early; he should be there when we get back, and we’re going straight to the airport.”
“Are Marta and Kent going?”
At this, Mrs. Golden sniffled. “Kent left this afternoon. He should meet us when we arrive. But Marta can’t be there. You know, she just started on this project, and she’s new at the company. She wishes she could be there…” she trailed off, her voice wavering. I could see that her chin was beginning to quiver.
“It’s okay, mom.” Rudy scooted up to the edge of the seat so that she could reach over the back of the driver’s seat and hug her mom around the shoulders. Mrs. Golden put one hand over Rudy’s. “I love you.”
When Mrs. Golden pulled into my driveway, I picked up my book bag and climbed out of the car. “Mrs. Golden,” I finally spoke, just before I closed the door behind me. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
She smiled at me, tears glistening in her bare eyelashes. “Thank you, sweetheart.”
It didn’t snow in St. Louis at all over our Christmas break, though there was a chance of it in the forecast nearly every day. My family flew to Boston for a few days, to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’ house, and it felt eerie to be back in my old neighborhood, to see the Frank man’s house across the street, and to drive past my old school on our trip back from the airport. In Boston it was a snowy Christmas; big, fat, picturesque flakes tumbled down out of the clouds beginning in the morning, when we crowded around the gigantic Christmas tree, and lasting until dinnertime, when we crowded around my grandparents’ antique dining room table. We ate glazed ham (except my mother, who had currently gone vegetarian) and I gorged myself on sweet potato casserole because it was so cold outside and I felt empty and moody and wanted to be filled with something. Winter was always my least favorite season – it still is, to this day, the time when I feel the deepest sadness, almost in the marrow of my bones.
It was the first family Christmas I was allowed to sit at the adults’ table instead of at the children’s table with my younger cousins (my dad was the oldest of his siblings, and I was the oldest grandchild). Also, for some reason that Christmas my mother was absolutely insistent I spend time with her. She woke me up early to eat breakfast with her, and she invited me to go to yoga class with her at the gym down the street from my grandparents’ (I gave her a look before I flat out declined). Most important to her was that I spend one full day of my vacation shopping with her, something I hated to do because she would whine that I didn’t listen to her and I made fun of her clothing choices, which was true, for the most part, though I wouldn’t admit it to her.
“We’ll get manicures and pedicures, too,” she begged, after we had finished Christmas dinner. “Please, Jill, just this one little thing for me. It’s Christmas. I want to spend some time with you.”
Reluctantly, I had agreed and on the day after Christmas I found myself riding shotgun beside my mother as she drove wildly through busy Boston traffic on snow-slicked roads. I buckled my seatbelt and clung tightly to the armrests, my knuckles turning white, something I had never thought actually happened in real life.
“So, what do you want to do first?” She smiled cheerfully from behind the steering wheel.
“I don’t care.”
“Shopping? Or the spa? We could do facials too, if you want.”
“I really don’t care.” It was early morning and I was irritable. “Either is fine with me.”
“Honey, it’s your day. Pick whatever you want.”
“No, mom, it’s your day. You’re the one who wanted to do this.” My voice had come out with sharper edges than I had intended, and my mother pursed her lips, looking slightly injured.
“How about shopping first,” I offered after a few moments of silence, an apology for my transgression. “Then we can do the spa when we’re tired. It’ll be relaxing that way.”
“Sounds great,” she perked up again. “Good idea.”
I had hoped that because this was all her big plan, my mother would be less demanding and opinionated on our girls’ day shopping trip, but perhaps I had set my expectations far too high. It was naïve of me, knowing my mother, but even in the car on the way to the mall I had envisioned us walking among the throngs of shoppers, blissfully swinging glossy shopping bags from our arms, pointing at dresses we liked in the store windows and sharing mother-daughterly laughs. But that was Rudy’s mother I was thinking of, not my own.
In the first store we visited, I wanted to stop and look at the sweaters, but she dragged me to the shoe department and immediately began picking up pointed stiletto heels and handing them to me as I stood there, baffled.
“Mom,” I said. “These are way too high. I can’t walk in these.”
The pair I was currently holding, electric blue and almost five inches tall, would put me at a height taller than some of the boys at Ogden.
“Just try them on,” she pleaded. “They would be so cute on you, with your long legs!”
I sighed under my breath, and sat down to pull the boot off my right foot. My mother was still bumbling around the tables of shoes while I slipped the blue heel over my bare toes.
“Here,” I said, standing up to model for her. “See, there’s no way I could go anywhere in this. I’d fall all over myself.” I took a few exaggeratedly wobbling steps.
“Oh, they’re so adorable though.” She was not discouraged. “Here,” she picked up another shoe, this one brown leather and fringed on the sides, but just barely shorter than the one I was wearing. “Do you want to try these on? They’re cute, too.”
“Gross,” I said, changing back into the shoes I owned. “Those are ugly.”
My mother put her hands on her hips, and I could feel an argument brewing between us, but she said nothing and it seemed to pass, at least for the moment.
“Can we please go back and look at the sweaters?” I asked, a small peace offering. “I don’t really need any shoes right now. I can’t wear those to school, anyway.”
Reluctantly, she followed me back to the junior’s department and stood nearby as I thumbed through racks of colorful sweaters, all of them soft and pretty under my fingertips. She waited outside the dressing room as I modeled each shirt for her, and she nodded noncommittally and paid for three sweaters before we moved on to another store. For an hour, things went successfully, both of us polite and slightly deferential toward one another, the way you would act toward a new friend, or a crush you were trying hard to impress. She even took me to get coffee and bought herself a drink as well, a latte with real milk (though the syrup was sugar-free). But as we
were sitting at the coffee shop, sipping our drinks and resting our feet, the tenuous balance between us began to crack.
“So, where to next?” My mother asked, looking at the mall directory she held in her hands.
“I don’t know. I don’t really need anything else. We’ve already bought a lot of stuff.” I took a drink of my hot, sweet beverage. “Thanks, for all the clothes, though. And for taking me.”
“You’re very welcome,” she smiled. “Come on though, we’re not ready to go home yet! We’ve barely covered half the good stores.”
I drank some more and did not say anything.
“We should look for some other things, some ‘party clothes’.” She actually made quotations marks in the air with her fingers as she said this. “I know you and your friends go to parties and things sometimes. What do you wear then?”
I was literally shocked that my mother knew I went to parties. We always, without fail, went on nights we would be staying at the Goldens’. My parents would have enforced a curfew; they would have stayed up waiting for us to return home (my mother, so she could prod us for information about the social scene at the party, my father, if he happened to be home, to smell our clothes and our breath for signs of alcohol and to examine our eyes for pupil dilation). Sometimes, before I left the house, I would tell my mother that Rudy and I were going to hang out with friends, but I had never actually told her we were going to a party.
“They’re not exactly parties.” I mirrored her dorky air quotes. “I mean, it’s usually just some friends hanging out.” I spoke carefully, delicately, afraid I was stepping into a trap. My mother was not someone in whom I felt I could confide.
“Okay. Well, what do you wear to these hangouts? Not the same clothes you wear to school, right?”
“No,” I said. “Usually I just borrow something from Rudy.”
My mother cringed a little. “Well why don’t you let me buy you some things, so you don’t always have to borrow.”
“It’s not a big deal. I like sharing clothes with Rudy.” If I agreed to what she was offering, I knew she would expect me to divulge.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if she could borrow your things, too? If you could return the favor?” She was clicking her fingernails against the tabletop, and I couldn’t block out the annoying sound.
“No,” I said. It was only one word, but we could both hear the layers of attitude beneath it. I suspected that even someone sitting nearby, maybe the balding man two tables away reading a newspaper, could discern all of the hidden messages in my ‘no’.
Abruptly, my mother’s facial features changed. They relaxed, went smooth and flat, then tightened again into a far less friendly formation.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I guess daddy and I can’t provide you with things that are as nice as the Goldens’. I’m sorry we don’t have enough money to impress your friends, Jillian.”
This, her explicit mention of money, and most of all, her insulting Rudy’s family, made my blood boil. I narrowed my eyes at her across the table.
“That’s ridiculous. You’re being stupid.”
“I’m your mother. You shouldn’t speak to me that way.”
“Well, maybe if you acted like my mother, not my bitchy older sister, I would treat you that way.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, as it was happening even, I wished I could take them back. But it was like when you were about to vomit – you could will the contents of your stomach to settle, you could cover your mouth with your hands, but once it was projectile, nothing you did could reverse it.
She leaned back against the curved bars of her chair as though I’d slapped her across the face with the palm of my hand (I think, perhaps, it may have been easier to take if that’s what I had done).
“Well,” she said quietly, after a few seconds passed, seconds during which I became saturated with guilt. “I think that’s enough for the day.”
On the walk back to the car my shopping bags hung like anchors from my arms, weighing me down. I wanted to return it all, the gifts my mother had bought me before I said rude and irrevocable things to her. I was sorry, truly sorry, but even during the twenty-minute car ride back to my grandparents’ house, I couldn’t make my mouth form the words to make an apology. I’m not sure I could have said anything in that moment, in the aftermath of calling my mother a bitch, that would have been sufficient. By the end of my Christmas vacation, the freshness of the incident had worn off (as far as I know, she never said anything to my father about what had happened), but, as atonement for my mistake, I was more patient and kind with my mother for the remaining years I lived under her roof. She was not a bad mother – she made mistakes, lots of mistakes, and she often approached situations from a direction that did not appeal to me, but she loved me and I denied her the credit she deserved. But this was my small penance: often in the years that followed, I got irritated or frustrated with her, but never again did I lose my temper so badly. Never again was I so cruel.
On our first snow day of the year Rudy called to wake me up at 6:30 in the morning, a full half hour before my alarm was set to wake me for school.
“Wake up,” she called cheerily from out of the speaker. “It’s a snow day! School’s cancelled.”
“It’s six-thirty,” I said groggily. My mind was still half asleep. Possibly three-quarters.
“Come over. And bring your snow stuff.”
She hung up the phone before I could answer, and I lay underneath my warm covers, still clutching the phone in my outstretched hand. After fifteen minutes, I crawled out of bed and pulled back the curtains from my window. Outside our yard was blanketed in white, and tiny flakes were still pouring down from the sky, obscuring the houses across the street.
When I walked downstairs my father was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking from a steaming mug of coffee and casting angry glares at the screen of his laptop.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked, reaching for a banana from the fruit basket on the table.
“My flight was cancelled.” He didn’t look up from the computer.
“Sorry,” I said, peeling back the banana’s yellow skin.
He glanced up at me. “So, I guess school got cancelled too, huh?”
I nodded.
“And you’re going over to the neighbors’, I presume?”
I nodded again. My father and I were not particularly close either, but we did not mince words as I did with my mother.
“Well, be careful. And don’t ride anywhere with anyone, especially not anyone your own age.”
“Okay,” I said.
After I had dressed, bundled up in so many layers I could barely move, I trudged out the front door and through the snow to Rudy’s house. The snow on the ground was a foot deep, slushy and thick as my boots pushed down into it.
Mrs. Golden opened the front door after a single chime of the doorbell, and she ushered me inside, where I stripped off my top layer of clothing.
“You must be freezing,” she exclaimed. “But it looks beautiful outside, all covered in white, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely.” I nodded my agreement.
Upstairs on the second floor, Rudy was in her bedroom, yanking clothes out of her closet.
“What’s up?” I said, throwing myself onto her unmade bed.
“Hey.” She turned around, an enormous pair of sweatpants in her hands, and began to pull them on over the pair she was already wearing. “Your first proper St. Louis snow day. Are you excited?”
Rudy clearly was. Her eyes were bright and she was smiling from ear to ear.
There had been a few snow days the year before, the first winter I was there, but I did not correct her. “Sure, I guess. What exactly does that entail?”
“Sledding.” Rudy stuck her hands through the arms of a sweatshirt and pulled it over her head. “And a snowball fight in Forest Park.”
“With who?” Inside the Goldens’ well-heated house I was beginning to sweat underneath my bulky clothes.
I harbored extreme doubts about Houston’s ability to drive in inclement weather, and my father’s warning was still fresh in the back of my mind, but an hour and a half later (teenage boys, it seemed to me, were incapable of showing up for anything on time) I followed Rudy into the backseat, where we squished up against another guy already seated behind Houston.
“Did you bring your hot chocolate?” Houston said from the front seat, over the thump of music rattling the car.
Rudy and I brandished our thermoses. “We came prepared,” she said.
“Yeah, so did we,” the guy in the back with us – Patrick – said, and Jack, the guy in the passenger’s seat, laughed.
Patrick pulled out a bottle of Bailey’s and, in the backseat of the moving car, poured a generous amount into each of our thermoses, spilling on my arms and on the floor of the car in the process. The drive was slow and Houston drove with more caution than I had expected. I thought maybe I had underestimated his skills. Then, as we pulled into the parking lot at the park, he threw the emergency brake and the back end of the car slid around and I was tossed into Rudy’s shoulder as the car spun in a circle. My hot chocolate sloshed into Rudy’s lap.
“Do it again,” Jack cried when we slid to a stop, all of the boys laughing and grinning, and Houston hit the gas pedal again, then repeated the process and we went sliding across the icy pavement a second time. This time I squealed with glee as well, my heart pounding in my chest. When we got out of the car I saw four other vehicles parked in one corner of the lot. I recognized two of them as belonging to kids from school, but there was no one inside the cars and we didn’t see them nearby either.
“Watch out,” Houston said as we walked out of the parking lot and into the park. “They’re probably hiding somewhere waiting for us.”
The second the words were out of his mouth I heard something zipping through the air and before I could move a snowball slammed into the side of my face.
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