Em's Awful Good Fortune

by Marcie Maxfield

  “It’s not a family vacation if it’s just the three of us,” Rio said.

  Gee didn’t come. He practically has to be forced to take time off work, especially overseas. By the time he gets sent to a job site, the clock is ticking and the project is on a deadline. But that only partly explains Gee’s workaholism. It has more to do with his father’s being an artist, creative but not particularly motivated to make money. There were a few years when Gee was growing up that his dad was out of work and the whole family had to live at the grandparents’ house. Hamburger Helper and Jell-O pudding. A rough patch like that doesn’t just stay with you; it forms you.

  Ruby sulked in Senegal too. But not because it was just the three of us. She didn’t like our hotel; she complained that it was another thatched-roof hut in the middle of nowhere. Zoey’s family always goes to Hawaii, she reminded me; they stay at a fancy hotel with a giant pool slide and room service. Why couldn’t we ever stay someplace like that, she wanted to know. “It’s like you intentionally find the crummiest place on Earth,” she whined, “and that’s where you take us.” She folded her arms across her chest in protest.

  Zoey came running into the house, shadowed by Ivy, her new mini-me—her Ruby replacement.

  “Where’s Ruby?” I asked.

  “In the pool,” Zoey said flippantly. And then, reading my expression, she added, “She didn’t want to come. True swear.”

  Zoey and Ruby had been best friends before we moved to Paris. They did everything together. Wore matching outfits, giggled in the back seat of my car, and practically lived at each other’s houses. They were like sisters. That was four years ago. This new version of Zoey was standing on the staircase in a bikini top and short shorts, on her way upstairs to her bedroom with her new best friend, who was wearing a see-through mesh top over a black bra and tight jeans. Eighth grade going on eighteen. The girls turned and ran upstairs together, legs and hair flying.

  Willy laughed, saying, “Zoey can be a mean girl.” It was half apology, half proud papa. Nadia always nurtured this side of their daughter; she thought it meant Zoey would grow up to be a strong woman. I wished they hadn’t invited Zoey’s new best friend to Ruby’s homecoming dinner. It seemed insensitive, at best.

  “Do you want me to go upstairs and talk to Zoey?” Willy offered.

  The last thing I wanted was for Zoey’s dad to force his daughter to be nice to mine. Instead, I went outside to find Ruby; she was in the pool with Rio. “What’s up, kids?” I asked. Ruby didn’t answer. She didn’t need to; I could imagine how she was feeling. Her old best friend had a new best friend. It must have hurt like a broken heart. And on top of that, she’d had to leave her new best friend in Paris. She climbed out of the pool, wearing a T-shirt over her bathing suit to cover up her changing body, fleshy and self-conscious, and stood there, sopping wet, eyes red. I wondered if she’d been crying, but it could have just been the chlorine.

  “Do you have another top?” I asked her.

  “Nah,” she said, wringing out the corner of her ISP T-shirt, International School of Paris, like it was a security blanket she didn’t ever want to take off.

  “Can we go home?” Rio wanted to know.

  Repatriation is hard. They don’t tell you that when you move overseas. The company warns you all about culture shock and provides global sensitivity training, but it leaves out the worst part: coming home and not fitting in. Here’s what happened. I’m just gonna give you the CliffsNotes on how our first year back in Los Angeles played out. Willy was right: The real estate market was sky high. We couldn’t afford a teardown in our old neighborhood, much less buy back our dream house in the hills—the one we sold because we wanted to enjoy the expat life. We were living in the now, baby! That house paid for our trips to Senegal, Italy, Morocco, and Amsterdam.

  “You’re in multiple bids,” our real estate agent told us over the phone, international long distance. We thought that was a good thing. Multiple bids! Really, it just meant we had something everyone else wanted. Something we undervalued. A real home. In a desirable community. Where we knew our neighbors and our kids went to school with the kids down the street.

  When Gee’s project ended, we moved back to LA, tails between our legs, as renters. And we leased the Barbie house. In the Valley. Not just in the Valley but in the flats, no winding canyon streets or hillside views, instead we heard cars screeching and helicopters overhead. That house had all the rooms we needed. It was real cozy, just miniature in size, like a dollhouse. In a way, it worked for us. Being an expat can bust up a marriage or make you a tight-knit family unit. We came home snug and smug, woven together.

  Repatriation gave us a bunker mentality. Sure, we couldn’t touch our old neighborhood, but we didn’t want to live there anyway. We may have become renters, but we were also Euro snobs: fresh produce, good wine, quality over quantity. Paris had ruined us for LA. The food, the fashion, the architecture, the art. The metro system, for God’s sake! Even the weather—wrapping up in coats and boots and hats and drinking hot cocoa at Angelina’s, where the chocolate is so thick you can stand a spoon in it. It was hard to move back to the States after living in France. We knew Target wasn’t French even if you pronounced it Tarjay, like Nadia did. And we had no appetite for cruff, a word Rio made up that refers to the crappy stuff Americans buy to fill up their lives. We said “Americans” as if they were not us and we were not them; we no longer belonged. Anywhere. Our cachet was crashing; we didn’t have that hipster pad in the hills, no longer could anyone introduce us as “our friends who live in Paris.”

  I won’t even go into detail about every uncomfortable phone call with so-called friends who were too cool to visit us in the Valley. The excuses so lame, you wouldn’t believe: “It’s so far”; “It’s too hot”; “The traffic”; “I grew up in the Valley!” Meaning, I couldn’t wait to get out. Or how Ruby’s old friends disappeared into thin air and how Rio’s school had me on speed dial because he was having “adjustment issues.” Everybody expected us to come home from Paris the same as we were before we moved. To pick up where we’d left off, unchanged. Or, worse, changed in some fabulous way. “Ruby must be soooooo sophisticated now,” Nadia exclaimed on the telephone when she invited us for that welcome-home fiasco. She meant transformed, like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, into a gamine, pixie dream girl. That kind of sophisticated. As if somehow living in France meant girls could skip over the awkward middle-school phase. Ruby was sophisticated, in ways that weren’t so easy to see. She was worldly, well traveled; she spoke French with an almost flawless accent. She didn’t look like a Cali girl anymore. She seemed younger, more innocent; she dressed more modestly than her American friends. That’s because she’d been living in an international environment where young girls were not influenced by Hollywood culture. She went to Paris an LA girl, and she came back a TCK (third-culture kid)—not French, not American, totally comfortable in a room full of global nomads. The kind of life experience her girlfriends in Los Angeles didn’t understand or value.

  “You need to make new friends,” Dr. B. Queensly suggested.

  “Add that to the list,” I laughed. “I’ve got to get my kids situated in new schools, update my résumé, reboot my professional network, and somehow get a job. And you want me to make new friends?”

  “What I mean is, you need to make an effort to reestablish community here in Los Angeles,” she advised. “Expand your social circle. Reach out to people with whom you’ve lost touch. Four years is a long time, and you’ve fallen off their radar. Maybe join a book club. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like a lot of work.”

  It would have been easier if I had actually been from Los Angeles. My roots there would have been stronger. I’d have family. All I had was Gee. And he wasn’t much help. He didn’t have the same issues when we repatriated. Sure, he had the superficial “Lost in the Supermarket” stuff, but—let’s get real—he came home from an overseas post, took a week or two off work to get resituat
ed, and then Monday morning, bright and early, he was back at the office. With the same boss, the same team. It was the kids and I who floundered. And on top of the whole real estate debacle, there was the financial reality that without Gee’s expat package, we needed a second income. So I had to get my life together—fast.

  My life. Two one-syllable words. Huge concept. I needed a job.

  “Come work with me,” Andra offered over coffee served in paper cups. With plastic lids. Even though we were not taking it to go. We were sitting two feet from the counter where we’d ordered our drinks. Andra was working at a media rep firm that handled a hot new architecture-and-design publication. The kind of magazine that featured beautiful people running around gorgeous modern homes barefoot, in linen. “Design is the new rock ’n’ roll,” she joked. “All you have to do is run the office, answer phones, and maybe help with pitches and proposals—the sort of thing you can do in your sleep, Em. It’s just part-time. It would be a huge help to me, and we’d get to work together again!”

  It was perhaps the least professional job I had been offered since I’d graduated from college, barely a smidge above being a secretary. But I grabbed it. We needed the money. And I wanted the flexibility—the kids still had to be dropped off and picked up. Anyway, I was pretty sure they were sending Gee back to Japan in a year. It wasn’t even worth it to put my résumé together and look for something more substantial. That could take months. By the time I found a professional position with flexible hours, I’d just have to quit. And, to be honest, I couldn’t wait to get out of LA.

  GOMEN NASAI — SORRY, NOT SORRY

  “I’m not moving to Tokyo!” Ruby screamed, flying down the hall and slamming her bedroom door, before blasting Linkin Park on her boom box.

  Rio headed to the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

  It was like the kids had switched bodies. Rio was my constant concern when we lived in Paris, but now he was all chill about Tokyo and Ruby was the one having a full-on meltdown.

  “You know how she gets,” Rio said, his face in the fridge. “She’s just being a drama queen; she’ll get over it. Want some?” he asked, pulling out a box of leftover pizza.

  I shook my head no.

  “Don’t do it!” he yelled at the back of my head as I followed Ruby down the hall into her room.

  Rio was right; I shouldn’t have barged into Ruby’s room. I should have given her space, should have let her cry it out, should have respected her emotional process. You know what else I should have done? I should have let her live with Celia. Let her stay in Los Angeles and move in with her best friend’s family. I didn’t even consider that as an option, even though she begged me—they both did, Ruby and Celia, two against one, promising to focus on school and get good grades—but no, I had to keep the family together. What was I thinking? I was thinking, Ruby’s sixteen, and before you know it, she’ll be off to college and it will never be the four of us again. I wanted the family to be together, even if it meant moving to Japan, and I needed Ruby to get with the program, so I barged into her bedroom.

  Her room looked like a tornado had blown through: moldy dishes in her underwear drawer, half-empty cans of soda littered on the desk, cookies and magazines scattered, her entire wardrobe balled up and dropped carelessly. It’s embarrassing to admit how many times I have screamed, “Clean up your room” at that girl, mostly because I know for sure that somewhere there is a picture of me at about the same age, holding a teacup pup in my lap, making that silly excuse for a dog wave at the camera like my very own fur baby. In that photo, I’m wearing a peasant blouse, rocking an Acapulco tan, and smiling the most blissfully blind teenage smile you can imagine, while less than two feet away from me, on the floor, is a dirty little rock-hard dog turd. Ruby and me, we’re like the apple and the tree.

  When Ruby was a little girl, we were almost preternaturally connected. She used to climb into my bed in the stillness of morning and snuggle up close. One morning when she was about five years old, we were lying there and I was stroking her hair, thinking, She is the same age I was when I broke my leg. That morning, with Ruby curled up at my side, was the first time in my life that I ever considered the accident from my mother’s perspective: how frightened she must have been to find her baby on the front lawn, broken; the sheer panic that caused her to throw me into the back seat of the car, not realizing an ambulance to the hospital might make more sense. Maybe she couldn’t bear to stand by, waiting helplessly. She must have been in shock, out of her mind, unable to think anything other than Please, God, let this not be a big deal, let this be something the pediatrician down the street can fix. Or maybe she was tipsy. That’s a possibility too. I was at home with the housekeeper and the handyman while Mom was out playing mah-jongg with the girls when it happened. Not that I judge her.

  Okay, what a crock of shit—we all judge our moms, our girlfriends, our daughters. And ourselves. Judge and compare. But, that morning, for the first time, my heart felt the depth of my mother’s fear. I don’t know where she found the strength. I’m not sure I could handle a Ruby crisis. Andra says you get the shit you can take, like it’s custom-made, which is just a hokey way of saying, “You rise to the occasion or the adversity.” My full-body cast catapulted my mother into supermom mode. That’s what I was thinking about when Ruby interrupted my thoughts to say, “That must have hurt, Mommy.”

  “What, honey?” I asked. We hadn’t even been speaking.

  “When you broke your leg.”

  Being a mother is mysterious. The connection between Ruby and me was beyond sight and sound. It was subterranean. It lived at a cellular level. I telepathed and she received. That’s how close we were. When she was six. Ruby at sixteen was a whole other kind of relationship.

  “Why can’t Dad go to Tokyo and we stay here?”

  “Because, Ruby, I want the family to be together.”

  “I hate this family,” she screeched. “Why do we always have to move? This is not normal—you know that, don’t you? This is not a normal life.”

  Then she burst into tears, like it was the end of the world. She was wearing her deep blue and silver one-piece competition jumpsuit.

  “I’m gonna lose my spot on dance guard,” she cried. “It’s all your fault.”

  “That’s not fair,” I told her. “It’s your dad’s fault; it’s his job that’s dragging us to Tokyo, not mine.”

  “You always do that—” she said, “blame Dad. I get that it’s his job and he has to move; I’m not stupid. What I don’t get is why you have to go too.”

  “I’m just trying to be a good wife,” I said.

  “Why don’t you try being a good mother?”

  “I’m trying to do both, Ruby, but it’s not easy.”

  “What about your job? You’re just going to quit, aren’t you? What is wrong with you, anyway? It is all your fault, because you’re going to follow Daddy and that’s the only reason Rio and I have to go too. I don’t understand why Daddy can’t move to Japan without us.”

  “Well, there’s a lot you don’t understand,” I said.

  I wasn’t going to tell her the reality, scare her off marriage and destroy the Disney princess fantasy she swirled in, layers of tulle with powder blue butterflies. “That’s the dress I want to wear to my wedding,” she said at ten years old. We were window-shopping in Paris, and no doubt she could describe that dress in perfect detail today, that dress she has committed to memory. Unlike French. I bellied up to her pity party, saying I knew just how she felt, that I didn’t want to go to Tokyo either. Tried to make it sound like we were in the same boat, girlfriends waiting for the phone to ring—laying it on thick, cajoling, commiserating—but in the end I reality-checked my daughter.

  “We’re moving to Tokyo, Ruby. As a family. You’re coming, and you don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “I thought life was all about choices,” she snapped back. “Every time I leave the house, it’s ‘Make good decisions, Ruby.’ Not ‘I lov
e you’ or ‘Goodbye, Ruby; have a great day, Ruby’—it’s always ‘Make good decisions.’ Why don’t you practice what you preach, for once? Celia’s mom says I can live with them. Just because you don’t have friends or a job you love doesn’t mean I don’t have friends and a school I love. You’re ruining my life.”

  And that’s when I said, “Ruby, honey, c’mon; it’ll be an adventure. Tokyo!” And when that didn’t work, I went with increments of time. “It’s only a year,” I said, sounding just like Gee, like I had Stockholm syndrome, channeling Patty Hearst, Tanya in combat fatigues with a machine gun, sleeping with her captor.

  “It’ll be fun,” I said.

  “For you, maybe.”

  “For us. We’re a family.”

  “I’m not going,” she whined. “You can’t make me.” She curled up in a fetal position and began to twist her hair around her index finger for comfort, signaling that she was done with the conversation. As I was leaving her room, she slipped in one last dig. “Oh, and Mom,” she said, not even looking at me, “those pants …” meaning my new skinny jeans, camo-style, with zippers at the ankles.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re too old for them.”

  Someday Ruby will pull these international experiences out of her back pocket at a cocktail party and she’ll thank me. That’s what Andra always says. It’s like money in the conversation bank. Andra is my biggest supporter, and she loves Ruby, but what she knows about parenting can fit in a bottle cap. She shows up for the fun stuff, birthdays and BBQs, and the kids love her. But she was wrong about this. Japan was life-defining for Ruby, and not in a good way. She dug her heels in, cut-off-your-nose-in-spite angry. When she wasn’t eating or moping about the house, she was barhopping in Roppongi—karaoke and smoking shisha with the expat kids. She had a boyfriend in the navy. I know this only because I snooped and found pictures of her with a sailor in her desk drawer (one of those black-and-white strips that spit out of a photo booth). She didn’t actually use that desk, just the drawers. She failed almost all of her classes that year. Even French. Four years in Paris, and Ruby flunked French at the American School in Japan. Failing was her way of saying “fuck you” to Gee and me. Only it was eleventh grade, so she was really saying “fuck you” to college. Someday, she’ll cut me some slack and stop blaming me for the year she got dragged to Japan, like I stopped blaming my mom for the accident, but I will always feel responsible for the fallout.