A Little Friendly Advice

by Siobhan Vivian

  “What costume are you wearing to Beth’s party?” Mom asks as she leans over to turn on the stove for her kettle.

  I’ve drawn a pretty awesome-looking frown on my pumpkin. It stretches all the way across the front, and it’s made up of long, skinny rectangles, like the grate of a scary basement furnace. I just need the right knife to start carving. Something small and delicate. “I found an old Girl Scout uniform at the thrift store today.”

  Mom gasps and closes her eyes for a few seconds, like she’s dreaming. “You always wanted to be a Girl Scout! Will you try it on for me?”

  “Maybe later.” I push the knife in all the way, and apply slow and steady pressure down on the handle, trying my best to slice in a straight line.

  “You were too shy, back then, for such a big group.” She takes the saltshaker and gives the seeds a good coating before popping them in the oven.

  Too shy is how my mom likes to describe what happened to me after Jim left. Which I find equal parts irritating and hilarious. I mean, I’m all about not dealing with reality, but come on. “It wasn’t that I was shy, Mom.” I raise my eyes the littlest bit from my pumpkin and watch her face for a reaction. “You know that. I went crazy.”

  She hums to herself as she draws a big smiley face, like she didn’t even hear me. “You could join the Girl Scouts now, if you wanted to.”

  “Umm. I don’t think so.” My hands are still slimy and I’m having some trouble holding on to my pumpkin, so I cradle it in between my legs, using them as a vise.

  “Oh, but you can! They have it for older girls. It’s like the Eagle Scouts. Except not that, exactly. I don’t know what they call it for the girls. Maybe the Eaglettes?”

  “Mom, I don’t want to be a teenage Girl Scout. It’s just a Halloween costume.”

  She rests her marker on the table and looks at me, like I’ve done something wrong. “You can do anything you want to do, Ruby. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  I know she means well by orchestrating this mother-daughter time, and pumpkin carving is kind of a fun thing to do after all, I guess. I don’t mean to be edgy or impatient with her. It’s just that I find her motivational speeches pretty meaningless. It’s obvious that Jim’s presence is as tangible as if he were sitting right between us, yet she tries to pretend like everything’s just peachy keen in our happy home. She thinks she’s protecting me, though the truth is Mom’s as messed up as I am — and even worse at hiding it. Before I know it, my hands are shaking and I’m afraid I’m going to screw up my pumpkin. So I drop my knife on the table and walk over to the countertop.

  I decide that two can play at this game.

  “I went to a party at Teddy Baker’s house yesterday,” I say, waving a steaming fork full of noodles around.

  “Oh, you did? How was it?”

  “His mother ran off with Teddy’s orthodonist. Did you know that?”

  “Yes,” she says, glancing at my empty chair instead of where I’m standing. “I think I heard that.”

  I make some mmMMmming sounds as I chew and swallow. And then I drop my fork into the sink, letting it clank against some dirty dishes. “Can I ask you something?”

  She presses the tip of her knife blade into the flesh of the pumpkin and holds it steady. “Fine.”

  That isn’t the most inviting way to change a conversational topic, but I’ll take what I can get. “Do you think you’ll ever date someone again?”

  The skin on her forehead gets all wrinkly. “I hope you don’t think for a second that I would ever date Mr. Baker.”

  “Eww! No.” I return to my seat and take up the knife and the pumpkin again. “I’m just saying that you’re divorced. So you can do whatever you want to do too. You know, like you said before. To me.” The moment the last word drips off my lips, I tense up. I wish I could reach out and take it all back. But I can’t. I’ve said it, for better or worse.

  She takes a deep breath and slides her knife into the pumpkin. “Ruby — I’m your mother, not your girlfriend. My personal life is none of your business, and I’d appreciate it if you’d respect my privacy.”

  “Why are you getting all defensive?” I don’t want to hurt her. I want to help her.

  “Why are you purposefully trying to upset me?” she says, like I’m a traitor, the worst daughter in history.

  “I’m not! I just want to talk about the way things really are.” I don’t get why everyone’s trying so hard to shield me from living my own life. I’m about to throw down my knife and storm out of the room when I feel a pop. A pinch on the tip of my finger. Then something warm and wet. A trickle of blood rolls down the side of my pumpkin.

  “Ruby!” My mom jumps up and wraps her hand tight around my finger. She hoists my hand over my head like I’m a wounded Statue of Liberty and tugs me over to the sink. “Look at what you’ve done.” She’s fumbling to open the first-aid kit with her one free hand and cursing under her breath. She says, “I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you,” as she swabs at the cut with a moist cotton ball.

  It doesn’t sting, but I can feel tears welling up in my eyes anyway. “Then stop expecting me to fill up your pathetic Saturday nights, because I have a life.”

  That finally does it. Mom drops the first-aid kit on the floor and takes off for her bedroom, leaving me to bandage up my finger myself.

  I wasn’t much help.

  She was a packing machine, boxing stuff up, swirling room to room. My sadness was always in her way. I wanted to linger over the things she was wrapping up in newspaper, as if it were the last time I’d ever see them again. In a way, it was. I knew the new house would never feel like home.

  To get me out of her hair, she told me to pack up the old toys in the basement for Goodwill. I doubt she would have sent me there if she’d remembered. I found it hidden at the bottom of a musty duffel bag of faded jeans and tops with big, chunky shoulder pads. An unassuming spiral notebook from the drugstore, with a red cover.

  Mom only wrote in black ink and had extremely neat penmanship. It was beautiful, like calligraphy. I pressed my thumb down on the edge and watched the days of her life flicker by.

  The exposed beams creaked above me. Mom walked from kitchen to bathroom to front porch. I stuffed the journal into my waistband and took off immediately for Beth’s house.

  At first, Beth didn’t want us to read it, because she thought it might make things worse for me. Then she flipped through to the end and read the last entry, which was written before I was born, and decided it was okay.

  Beth read me the journal from cover to cover during a sleepover that night. Together we analyzed facts and tidbits and potentially useful trivia. The kinds of personal things Mom would never tell me in a million years. Especially after he’d left.

  She was a student at University of Akron, taking a chemistry class for nursing school. He approached her in the hallway with a cocky swagger and asked her the time. She politely pointed to the silver wristwatch he was wearing. He suggested she cut whatever class was next and go for a beer. Against her better judgment, she accepted his invitation. She was secretly thankful that her birthday was the week before, and she was now twenty-one.

  That was their first date.

  Mom didn’t have much prior experience with guys — one boyfriend during high school, and a one-night stand where she lost her virginity to a friend’s older brother a few months before she met Dad. I guess that’s part of why she fell for him so fast, in just a handful of pages.

  He did do some cute romantic things. Like the time he waited for her at the bus stop after her first day working at the hospital. He wore his only suit and had one of her dresses slung over his shoulder. He took her out to a fancy dinner at the big steak house up on the hill. Even Beth said that was a classy move, and I felt momentarily proud.

  He proposed without a ring, in front of her two roommates, seven months later. They bought the house when Mom got pregnant.

  Initially, Dad was dead set against working for Goodyear.
He got by for a while, taking carpenter work, plumber emergencies, and odd jobs from the neighbors. But as Mom’s belly swelled up with me, he finally relented for the sake of stability.

  After his first day as a machinist on the operations floor, she had his new suit, the one he married her in, pressed. She cooked a feast modeled after his dead mother’s Thanksgiving. His already-callused hands were rawer than she had ever seen, and she did him the favor of feeding him with her fork that night.

  I was so confused. It seemed like they had a lot of good memories. But Beth said that journals are sometimes like photo albums. People don’t put in the ugly pictures. They just keep the ones where they look pretty and happy.

  I took the journal home the next morning, put it back in the duffel bag, and waited for Mom to find it. She did, later that afternoon. And while I wrapped up her collection of teakettles in newspaper, I watched out of the corner of my eye as she flipped briefly through the pages. I thought she’d get really sentimental and sad over it. I hoped she wouldn’t cry. But all she did was let out a long deep sigh before stuffing it deep into a bag of trash.

  I wake up obnoxiously early on Sunday morning to find a collection of hazy blue spots dotting my white ceiling. They’re the kinds that appear when you look away from a bright light, even though, at seven minutes to five, my room is totally dark and so is the sky outside my window. I rub my eyes and they slowly disappear, but the memory of where I’ve seen them before does not.

  I shuffle toward my desk in my oversized sweatpants. My desk light illuminates Friday’s English exam on top of a stack of textbooks. The entire left margin is hued by blue smudges, as my palm smeared its way across the most b.s. essay ever composed on Manifestations of Guilt in Macbeth. This kind of inky mess incriminates any left-handed person, and my smudges are almost exact duplicates of the ones that lined the margin of Jim’s letter. His sentences are blurry and broken in my memory, but I see the smudges, delicately webbed by palm prints, in sharp detail.

  I head downstairs to fix myself some cereal. Mom’s bedroom door is cracked open — her body is covered in a puffy white comforter and all her decorative pillows are pilled high on her dressing chair. She sleeps so close to the edge of her big mattress, not even rumpling the sheets on the other side. I close her door.

  Mom must have gotten up in the middle of the night to clean up any trace of our pumpkin-carving debacle, because I walk into a spotless kitchen — knives washed and filling the silverware cup in our dish rack, trash can under our sink with a new empty bag that smells like lemon, and a Tupperware container full of seeds anchoring the center of our immaculate kitchen table. I could have cleaned up before I went to bed, but I decided against it. After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong, and it had been her stupid idea anyway.

  I open the front door and take a step outside. Even though the sun is rising, it’s still too early to be anything but gray. The air is thick and wet, and the blacktop glistens from a night of quiet, steady rain that has stripped most of the dying leaves from their branches. Two finished jack-o’-lanterns flank me on opposite sides of the top stair. Mom carved hers and mine, following the tracings we’d made with the precision of a nurse who often wields sharp objects. Inside each, a tea light candle has burned out, leaving behind an empty aluminum shell and a charred wick.

  I peel away my Band-Aid and rub my thumb gently over the long, skinny, dark scab. Her gesture could be an apology or a guilt trip. It’s a toss-up either way.

  A breeze kicks up in the trees, and it takes a few seconds before the chill blows against me. I pull my bare feet inside the baggy legs of my sweats, transforming them into impromptu footie pajamas. They conceal the WELCOME on our doormat, where Jim’s unwelcome letter was probably left for me yesterday morning.

  Right now, at the Holiday Inn, he might be sitting down to a free continental breakfast of stale pastries, bitter coffee, and watered-down orange juice, opting for a seat with a view of the lobby. Maybe he’s taking a hot shower with the phone pulled close to the bathroom door, so he can hear if it rings. Or he’s just lying on the bed, watching the green light on a fire alarm blink, memorizing the quiet of the empty room and wondering if it had been a mistake to look for me after all this time. These images flash in my mind in washed-out, overexposed colors, like a boring old slide presentation.

  The reality is that while Jim’s here now, he’ll be gone again soon. He said so in his letter — he’s being transferred. I can’t allow some lame last-minute olive branch mess up everything else in my life. But I also know I can’t obsess about it anymore. It’s not good for me. I’m going to have to figure out a way to let it all go, to take control of the situation. At least until Beth finally tells me about the letter on her own accord.

  And then, I get an idea.

  The ride doesn’t take long. There’s hardly any traffic on the road this early. I fly down main streets, my bike tires purling through puddles. The wind whips against me, and I thread my thumbs through my scarf tails to protect my knuckles from the breeze.

  The entrance to the Holiday Inn parking lot is a wide driveway that drops through two green grassy hills. Traffic whizzing by becomes white noise as I ride past an LED sign welcoming guests to a RUBBER TRADE SHOW WELCOME BRUNCH in the conference room. A smattering of cars fill the spots nearest to the entrance. Toward the back, near a drooping willow tree whose branches tickle puddles on the pavement, is his blue truck.

  I kickstand my bike alongside it, making the truck a barrier between me and the hotel. Crouching down, I peer over the truck bed and scan the hotel windows. Most of the beige curtains are either closed for privacy or pulled wide open, vacancy style. A few are half spread, but I don’t see any faces looking out. Four men in business suits loiter near the entrance, smoking cigarettes and comparing colorful ties. Leather briefcases lie next to their leather shoes. They don’t notice me.

  I keep low and shuffle around to the truck’s front bumper and have a look at the Oregon license plate. It’s actually pretty cool-looking. A huge green tree grows in the middle of six digits, and two purple mountains rise up in the distance. It’s way more majestic than the red, white, and blue Ohio plate, though majestic is probably too strong a word for a license place. I let my fingers rub over the raised metal numerals and letters, leaving five winding tracks through the grime. Then I think better of it and wipe my prints away with the end of my scarf.

  The front hood of the truck is dented and pinpricked with rust. The windshield is blurred by a lacquer of squashed insects from the long trip across the country. Some of the dead bugs still have a set of wings intact, but their bodies are gelatinous blobs, stuck to the glass like ooze.

  I don’t know why, but I pull out my Polaroid camera from my book bag and take a picture.

  Then I stalk around to the passenger window and peer inside the truck. Just one look and I am flooded with memories: riding shotgun with Jim to school, or to the Giant Eagle. I was so small then, I used to press my sneakers up against the glove compartment to keep myself from sliding down the slippery gray pleather of the seats. On the seat is a blue Bic pen, dimpled by bite marks along the white plastic shaft. It’s probably the one he used to write my letter. I squint at the glove compartment, trying to make out if my footprints might still be visible, but of course they’re not. The bed of his truck is filled with boxes and bags full of everything that makes up his life.

  I shoot a few more Polaroids, flapping each foggy white square in the brisk air until it fully develops, then sliding it carefully into the front pocket of my book bag. In one shot of his silver hubcap, you can see a funhouse reflection of me and my camera, which actually looks kind of cool. Suddenly I’m not worried about getting caught. I feel kind of brave and powerful.

  Two sets of clicking high heels grow louder behind me. I look over my shoulder at a pair of businesswomen spackled in pancake makeup, watching me with suspicious, heavily mascaraed eyes. I guess I deserve it, stalking around and snapping pictures of unoccupied veh
icles. After they pass me, each one turns back around to give me a last warning look.

  Whatever. I should get out of here anyway.

  So I climb back on my bike and picture myself saying a final good-bye to Jim as I pedal out of the parking lot. I tell him it’s his fault that things are this way. I’m not yelling like I did on my birthday. Instead I’m calm and collected, which actually makes me smile with pride. Jim opens his mouth to defend himself. His lips are moving — pursed, then flat, then open in rapid succession. But no sound comes out. It’s like watching a television on mute.

  He doesn’t have a voice because I can’t remember what it sounds like.

  I skid out the realization with my bike tires, and they slide against the wet pavement, nearly knocking me to the ground. He said my name that night. He did. But I can’t remember the sound. I’ve already forgotten it.

  But instead of celebrating that things might finally be going back to normal inside my head, I drop my bike and walk purposefully into the lobby, even though every one of my muscles is tightening up and telling me this is a bad idea. A man smiles at me from behind the front desk. He’s helping those two women from the parking lot and I don’t want to call any more attention to myself than I already have. So I pivot away from them and head toward a brass counter where three white hotel phones sit in a row. There are a lot of business types milling around with laminated name tags, and the lobby music seems like the volume is cranked up extra high to compensate. Cool sweat runs like a river down my spine as I lift the receiver. I gnaw on my hurt finger, chewing down any fingernail that might have grown overnight. Then I use it to press the barely visible numbers still scrawled in my wrist. Each one stings through the delicate scab. 4. 3. 5.

  It only rings once.

  “Hello?” A voice greets me. It’s gravelly, probably from the smoking. Tired. Like he’s slept, but not all that much. The television is on in the background. Maybe he hasn’t slept at all.