John laughed. “I guess we have to face the music.” He looked doubtfully toward the steps.
Jessica stood at the stove, making eggs. Elizabeth had hardly seen Jessica since she had returned, and she was momentarily startled by the sight of her at the stove where she had seen her own mother cook.
“I called your mom, Elizabeth, when I saw your car out there. I said you guys must have fallen asleep watching TV.”
“Thanks,” Elizabeth said. “I was afraid she’d call the police.”
“We’d never let that happen, sweetheart. Are you guys having breakfast?” The woman seemed completely at ease.
“We’ve gotta take off, Mom,” John said, and he took Elizabeth’s hand.
To her surprise, John didn’t say good-bye in the driveway, but slipped into her passenger seat. “Where are we going?” he said.
Elizabeth started the engine. “Do you want to be seen or not seen?” Elizabeth asked.
“You know,” he said, “I feel like a little visibility.”
“No more skulking around?”
“I’m not going to let them scare me.”
“Me neither,” she said. “You mean the parents or everyone else?”
“I mean people.”
They drove past the movie theater and the boutique she’d never been in that sold dusty-looking formal wear. She glanced at John. There was that now-familiar blue of his eyes, the way his mouth tightened and turned downward in concentration. Being with him was like being in an accident in which no one was hurt. She constantly felt both fear and elation.
She pulled into the diner parking lot, which was already half full. He opened the door and ushered her through. She saw Frank McCormick with sad-eyed Lucy Something, Mrs. Deutsch, who she babysat for. She thought a hush fell on the room when they entered, a pause in the chatter. But it was okay, she thought, if people greeted them with silence. It was like the silence after she finished a piece on her cello. A complex silence, filled with vibrations both light and dark.
Mom and Ginger Pete, a Love Story
If you ask me, old people should never fall in love.
If your parents are widowed or divorced, you probably know what I mean. That is, you will if you are a halfway awake person, because, like teenagers, or really anyone with sense, they will try to hide it. But the fact is, the evidence is clear even if you try to avoid it. With my mother, it’s happened twice, with the same guy named Pete both times. The first time around, she got over it. But it turned out to be like one of those cancers that pops up again, even when the doctors think they got rid of it and everything will be fine. That was Mom with Ginger Pete.
To tell the whole story you have to go back to the shitty marriage my parents have. I say have, not had, because they have a shitty time now, even though they’re separated, whenever they talk about even dumb stuff like who has to get the car fixed, or whether Tommy, my little brother, is supposed to get picked up at five or six. Mom tries to control herself when she knows Dad is dicking her around, but she still isn’t any good at it. I don’t actually take sides, even when Dad is being a dick, because in my opinion if someone is a dick to you for twenty years, you shouldn’t be that surprised about it. But Mom is into how “unbelievable” Dad is. He is nothing of the sort. It is completely believable that he is forty-five minutes late to pick Tommy up from baseball practice, and it is completely believable that he introduced Tommy and me to Rashae the first time we slept at his new place. Rashae used to be the receptionist at Dad’s company, but now she is the hot biracial thirty-year-old chick who makes Tommy peanut butter and honey sandwiches while Dad watches baseball or takes business calls, and tells everyone on the phone to go fuck themselves eight times an hour.
But that is all fairly consistent with Dad. Mom is actually the one who is hard to believe, and that has nothing to do with fighting with Dad, dyeing her hair auburn, losing twenty pounds, or never wearing the same dress twice. All of that is stuff I might have predicted, knowing her as I have all my life. Things got weird when she met Pete.
It was about a month into the whole splitsville thing and Mom asked me would I watch Tommy while she went out with “a friend.” A suspicious thing right off since I know all her friends, and she’s the type to give details about where she’s going, not just so I can locate her if there’s a major terrorist attack, but because Mom is an over-sharer. Like if she’s going out with a friend who has tacky huge-ass fake tits, she’ll say so. Or if she has a friend who smokes weed, she’ll let on about this as well. I find it amusing, and like that she talks to me, but I actually don’t usually reciprocate myself. I think she thinks maybe if she tells me her secrets, I’ll tell her mine. It doesn’t work that way, though. Mom’s secrets have a way of eating all the oxygen, and crowding my own out.
Mom came out of her room dressed in a classic little black dress, so I figured right off she was going uptown. She looked good. Auburn hair, down to her shoulders. Eyeliner not all fucked up and crooked for once. Retro red lips. “You guys can order whatever,” she said. “Just keep it under a hundred dollars.” That was a crack on me for my sushi addiction. I felt kind of small looking at her in her movie star dress. It was a Thursday night and I had a history paper due, and still had to get through physics. It didn’t seem fair, when looked at objectively, that since our parents split they got to go out and party whenever they wanted, and I still had to do all the same shit I’d been doing all along, without any kind of break. Dad and Rashae had Dad’s place to themselves most of the time, and now Mom was joining the circuit, and stepping out on Tommy and me too.
I remember she got home that night around ten thirty. I had just put Tommy to bed, even though he was supposed to be in bed an hour before since he’s only in the sixth grade and is the slowest, crankiest, smelliest little kid in the morning.
I was on the couch eating ice cream out of the container, which bugs Mom, though she’s stopped trying to get me to stop. I had my physics textbook open but I was actually watching this stupid piece of crap TV show I’m addicted to about a couple that’s trapped on an island, who are actually being hunted by this madman who spies on them with high-powered, night-vision binoculars, though they don’t even know it yet after five episodes. Mom looked windblown when she came in, though it was a warm, still night. “Have fun?” I asked, like she was the teenager and I was the middle-aged woman with nothing in her life.
“I did,” she said. She looked around the apartment, like she suddenly noticed how quiet it was without Dad around, as if she hadn’t realized the last three months had even happened. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “We ended up getting hungry, and went for dinner.” She said this as if dinner were an aberration, like hunger was not a completely predictable condition.
It was only a few days later that the name “Pete” began to crop up in conversation, as in, “My friend Pete recommended this Thai restaurant in Chelsea.” Or, “Pete is actually from Wisconsin,” when something came up in the news about a school shooting there, as if this were even remotely relevant information.
A few weeks later, Tommy and I were treated to our first Pete and Mom outing.
They tried to make it into a casual thing. Pete was living on the Upper West Side, and Tommy had this science fair exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, and we were all schlepping up there to see Tommy present his project. Even I agreed to go because Tommy was so jazzed about his little experiment. It had something to do with rot or mildew, and he and another smelly little kid worked on their cardboard triptych display for like forty geeky hours straight. It was a breezy day, and the triptych thing kept bouncing around in the wind in the short walk to the museum door, banging every so often into my shins. Mom kept craning her neck and looking around distractedly, but not really saying who she was looking for. Then there was Pete, with his own smelly little daughter.
Pete is a ginger. His hair is thin on top and reaches down to his shirt collar. The kid is also a ginger, the kind with no freckles at all, jus
t creamy skin, and big brown eyes—a gorgeous little girl named Shana, Tommy’s own age. It kills me when people give beautiful little kids romance novel names like Shana, like they knew in utero the kid would be a babe.
Mom was casual about the encounter, as though it were all by chance. Pete introduced himself to Tommy and me as “a friend of your mom’s,” then we all went our separate ways and dealt with the science fair chaos. But then afterward, sure enough, Pete and Shana were exiting the museum at the same time we were, and we all “decided” it might be nice to grab some lunch.
We took the subway down to a ramen place Pete was all excited about over on Fiftieth. Right off, I could feel the guy trying to impress us, and Mom being pretty obviously pleased with the fact, smiling a twitchy, private-moment smile. It was one of those cramped little places with mostly Asian customers. Pete looked particularly out of place, with his long legs and red hair. Shana, at least, wasn’t shy and she and Tommy bonded over geeky science shit and eating weird pickled eggs.
But I was distracted from my noodles by the Mom and Pete thing. I couldn’t tell if it was some new makeup Mom was wearing or some internal change in her—she looked far prettier than usual but in no particular way I could identify. Pete didn’t say much, but he had a weird old-guy smile that showed too many teeth. Pete was a doctor, it turned out, who worked in Chinatown, which amused me since this was more of the same super-tall ginger guy surrounded by Asian people.
When the waiter brought our check, Pete took it right away and waved my mom off when she began digging in her purse. That made sense, since he was a doctor and Mom was just a divorced woman who, in her words, had “spent far too much time out of the workforce.” This was a giant issue with Mom, and even Dad felt bad about it and tried to give her some moral support about all the “untapped talents and abilities” she had. So far, Mom had settled on doing some tutoring, since in her past life she had been a high school English teacher, though only for a year or two in her early thirties.
At that first lunch I felt a little happy for Mom and also a little sad. She had laughed at every semi-funny thing Pete said, like a girl at school who should have played things cooler. Even the choice of restaurants was a kind of compromise for Mom since the whole menu was ramen and Mom didn’t even eat noodles.
It was about two weeks later, after a weekend with Dad, that I sensed something amiss—Tommy and I got back to the apartment and Mom was in her yoga pants, though it didn’t seem like she’d been to a class. There were piles of dishes in the sink, which wasn’t like her either, and some wilted-looking lilies, which I knew she hadn’t bought, since they make her sneeze. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Not much. Just sorting through the bills Dad didn’t pay again.” Mom had her glasses perched at the end of her nose, and her new prettiness had more or less vanished. I could see tiny hairs at the edge of her mouth, and thought maybe it was all about visits to the salon, attention to detail, and nothing more mysterious.
“What’d you do all weekend?” I asked, eyeing the flowers, the newspaper spread across the coffee table, the evidence of habits not her own. She sighed.
“Saw a movie. Had dinner with friends. Missed you kids.” She rumpled my hair, and I let her kiss me on the cheek.
When Dad first left us I didn’t cry. I wasn’t even pissed about Rashae, though it annoyed me that I was expected to like her. I was glad that for once, Mom and Dad were being honest about us as a family, and the fact that things sucked at least three-quarters of the time. Dad was annoying to live with, pissed when the coffee tasted burnt or I left my shoes in the living room, but Mom had basically lost it at the end. It was her anger, not his, that made Tommy and me hole up in my room, me resorting to playing inane video games with the little dude, just to keep away from Mom’s eye-popping fury. One day, she’d even thrown a coffee mug at Dad’s head. Missed by a foot, so you knew she wasn’t trying, but what was left in the mug sprayed everywhere, and there are still coffee spots on the wall to the left of the television. That was over some small shit too, like Dad not calling to say he’d be home late the night before. Maybe there was some bigger shit underneath all that, some Rashae-sized shit, but still. I thought it meant something that no one tried very hard to clean up those coffee splatters.
Mom put away her piles of bills, threw away her lilies, and made Tommy and me spaghetti with meatballs that she didn’t even pretend to eat. She jumped whenever her cell phone went off, even at dinner, something she’d be on my case for, and she seemed disappointed when, each time, it was another tutoring job, a thing she’d normally get excited about. I had to figure something had gone down with Pete, that there were some weekend goings-on that didn’t go the way she’d planned, and now she was all down about it. It was hard to watch, especially since she wouldn’t admit anything was wrong.
I could recognize the symptoms readily, symptoms of having a really bad crush, and something terrible, truly earth-shattering occurs, like the dude likes someone else better than you, or another bitch got there first, and guess what, you aren’t the only hottie under the sun. The fact is any guy you’d like, anyone at all who’d get you hot and bothered, has got at least one other girl good and bothered too. I wanted to tell Mom that I felt her pain, that she should remember what she told me herself when Gordon Kaplan only wanted to be friends after we’d hooked up at Kaitlynn Appel’s party. Mom had told me then that though love was real, it didn’t happen every day, that it took more waiting than you could imagine, and that first and foremost you had to love yourself.
I never understood the part about loving yourself until I saw Mom looking so pale and sad-eyed after her alone-with-Pete weekend. Love yourself, Mom, I wanted to say. But I still didn’t know exactly what this meant, other than it’s the thing we say to people we want to be happy—love yourself, love anything but love. Really, it’s a way of saying give it up already, move on.
A few months after my mother got her heart broken by Ginger Pete, she got a job with a nonprofit working with poor kids in Chinatown helping them prepare for the statewide English tests. It was nice to all get up and leave the house at more or less the same time every morning, Mom with her Banana Republic work pants and low-heeled pumps, and Tommy and me dressing more alike than I’d like to admit, given our gender difference, and the fact that I am a junior in high school attempting hotness while dressing like a twelve-year-old boy.
Mom was still thin, but had started eating actual food again. She also stopped with the wine after dinner. There’d been one night deep in Pete heartbreak land when she fell asleep in the living room, wineglass in hand. I almost forwarded her the downtown Manhattan evening AA schedule, but then she got the job and snapped out of it.
After about a month or so of her working every day, I even stopped worrying about her, maybe for the first time since the split, or since the coffee mug moment. Then she started getting flowers again.
First there was a delivery of white roses. Then, after a Dad weekend, these were replaced with irises. Then, a mixed bouquet. Some nights, Mom would text and ask me to take Tommy out or order in pizza. There was the mysterious prettiness again, the unusually smooth-looking skin, some brightness that seemed internal. Then, one night at dinner, she asked Tommy and me if we remembered “her friend Pete, and his daughter, Shana?” It was Tommy who annoyed her by asking “You mean the ginger?”
Mom frowned. “Pete has red hair, yes,” she said. “He works in Chinatown. Actually, he was the one who helped me get this job. It’s through a nonprofit his organization partners with.”
“I didn’t know you’d kept up with him,” I said. There was no way I had read her signs wrong months back when she’d padded around the house barefoot, jumping at the phone, tired morning, noon, and night. No way the guy wasn’t dicking her around.
“Intermittently,” she said. Then she passed me the broccoli. But I couldn’t let it go.
“What does that mean, like on and off, seeing other people, testing the waters, what?�
� She rolled her eyes, kid-like.
“Things are complicated when you’re an adult, and are getting to know someone new.”
“As opposed,” I said, “to when you are young and you don’t know if someone is a total douche or not?”
“Sweetheart,” Mom said, protesting, I believed, only on the language front. She held up a prettily manicured hand. It annoyed me that she couldn’t admit that this wasn’t only an age issue, wasn’t specific to her, but the sort of thing felt by thousands of New York City girls after every Saturday night. I thought she should admit Ginger Pete might have douche bag tendencies, that maybe she had to throw her hat in the ring like every other bitch, that now that she had broken up with Dad, she wasn’t special anymore, wasn’t anyone’s wife.
I wanted to tell my mom that she was just like me now, only old, and that I understood her.
After that night at dinner, Ginger Pete, Shana, Tommy, Mom, and I all met for lunch one Saturday in Chinatown. Shana and Tommy got bubble teas, while Mom and Pete walked around holding hands and I went to check out some bonsai plants. I had my eye on this one little tree, in a jade green ceramic pot. There was a tacky little frog next to the miniature tree, and its eyes were somehow merry-looking, I think because they were just painted-on slits. The guy at the store spoke very little English and mimed for me how to spray the leaves, how to be sure to get every single one. He kept saying the same thing “be sure repeat, be sure repeat.” I think what he meant was that I needed to water the thing every day. “Without repeat, no, no.” He shook his head sadly to indicate that the tiny bonsai would die. It felt like a lot of responsibility to take home the little tree and the happy porcelain frog. But I had already come this far, had gotten the guy all excited about my bonsai caregiving. Somehow, I couldn’t see myself leaving the place empty-handed, and figured it was better to take the chance, and pay for the special spray bottle.
Nothing Real Volume 2 Page 5