It sounds horrible, but with Becka off in Paris with Libby (LUCKY HER!) I was a lot happier than I had been for a while. It was the same feeling of when you’re sick but not enough to stay in bed, but when you finally feel better it’s like the whole world feels brighter? That’s how I felt. Even when, at work, some customer or another got cranky (which happened all the time) or Daphne got in a snit over something, I just sailed through it.
Then Becka came back from Paris.
It was Christmas Eve, my last day of work.
She called me in the morning, just as I was pulling on that divine soft pink dress. In it, I felt so professional and grown-up, like there wasn’t much that could come at me that I wouldn’t be able to handle. The first thing she said was: “I’m going to slit my wrists!”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“I’m not joking!” she cried. “I have to see you. Now! I mean it, Robin. I’m like — oh, I can’t even tell you!”
“I have to go to work.”
“Cancel it.”
“I can’t. It’s a real job. At Daphne’s Designer. I’m supposed to be there in about ten minutes.”
“When do you get off?”
“Not until nine. It’s the last-minute rush.”
“Come over then. Please. Meryl’s driving me crazy and . . .” Her words got gobbled up in her sobs.
“Fine,” I finally said. “I’ll come after work. Just don’t call me there, okay? I’m not allowed to get phone calls. I’m not allowed to so much as glance at my cell phone to see if there’s a message. My boss is a slave driver.”
Work was even crazier than usual that day. “Santa Claus panic,” Daphne explained with a shrug. It was nonstop until around eight, when I finally had a moment to myself. Except a second later, an older woman came in saying that she needed something extra special because she’d just found out that her favorite grandchild was bringing his fiancée over to meet her on Christmas day, and I must have hauled out two dozen different outfits before she found one she liked. In the middle of all that, Daphne came storming across the store and said: “Your mother’s on the phone, Robin. She said it’s an emergency.”
An emergency? All I could think of was that Dad had gotten into a car accident. Or fallen down the front steps. Anything could have happened. My heart raced.
“Oh my God,” I said into the phone. “What’s wrong?”
But it wasn’t Mom on the phone. It was Becka. “I have to talk to you!”
From the corner of her eye, Daphne was observing me. “I’ll see you later, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m coming straight home after work. I’m glad everything’s okay. You scared me!” Then I hung up.
“Robin?” Daphne said as I returned to my spot on the floor. “What was that all about?”
“Just that she wanted to tell me where she’s going to hide the house key for me,” I fibbed. “We just got our locks changed. And Mom and Dad are going out tonight.”
“Is that so?” Daphne said, looking at me with her face in a clench like someone just gave her a wedgie. “You know,” she said as I reddened, “I really like you, Robin. You’re a good worker, and you have what it takes. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I think I do,” I said. That’s when I realized how much I liked her, too.
“What on earth are you wearing?” was the first thing Becka said to me when I arrived at her house, letting myself in the back door because, just like at my house, the back door was always left unlocked. She’d propped herself up on the eight million pillows on her double bed, a copy of French Vogue on her knees, and a glass of cherry soda on her bedside table, like when she was little. It was this dumb thing she did with her mother — the cherry soda, I mean. Downstairs, Lucy was howling at an imaginary squirrel.
“A dress?” I said.
“A dress for a grandma?”
“Are you kidding me? I love this dress. It’s Chanel. And you called me at work, Becka! You said you were my mother and begged me to come over and now I’m here and you’re insulting me?” I was angry now, my voice rising as I felt my empty stomach gurgling for attention. Scowling, she raised her eyes heavenward, as if I were so utterly and abjectly immature that she wanted nothing to do with me. As usual, she was dressed perfectly — in black velvet leggings, with an oversized black sweater on top. Lying on the floor were her beautiful, perfect black boots — the exact kind that I wanted — and thrown over her chair were more new clothes, including some Libby Fine originals. Reaching over languidly, she took a sip of soda.
“You’re right,” she said, putting her glass back down with a dramatic thud. “I should never have called you in the first place. You’ve started hanging out with the biggest weirdos in school. How could a girl who spends all her time babysitting and going to high school sports events — rah, rah, team — possibly understand? Not with your experience — or perhaps I should say your lack of experience. I’d just be wasting my breath, trying to tell you.”
I was so stupefied that I just stood there, gaping.
“And you’re right about the Chanel dress, too,” she said. “I mean, you might look like a grandmother in it, but at least you don’t look like you’re dressed for a sleepover party.”
That’s when I lost it.
“You don’t need to tell me anything. Because I already know! You had me over here so you can tell me all about your fabulous French boyfriend, and how great it was going all the way with him. Of course, that makes you a grown woman now, which means that you just can’t bear being around boring unsophisticated people like me anymore! You’re going to tell me that I just don’t measure up, and how boring it is here in the suburbs, and how you hate everyone, and can’t wait to go to NYU, and how much smarter and more sophisticated you are, even though you’ve been acting so horrible that no one likes you anymore and —”
“And?” she said.
“And your own mother has asked me to spy on you!” It felt good to let go like that — to really let her have it.
“What? Meryl did what?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I never told her a thing. Not about your boyfriend. Not about how you planned to go see him and Paris and . . .”
“And?”
“And everything else!” I said.
Which is when she began to sob. And when I say “sob,” I mean sob. The tears gushed out of her eyes, her face turned pink, and she rocked back and forth, clutching her pillow, as if she were one of those autistic kids who are so locked into their own bodies that the only thing that makes them feel okay is rocking. She sobbed so hard that I thought she was going to choke.
“He barely had time for me at all!” she sobbed. “I spent every penny I had at a hair salon so I’d look good and then he met me with all of his friends around — and they laughed at me! And then — the scarf he gave me? It was his old girlfriend’s. Then I threw up! I’ll be stuck here forever, in high school. I’ll never get out of West Falls, New Jersey!”
I didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, all I wanted to do was go home, put on some flannel pajamas and a pair of slippers, and eat a bowl of cereal. Tomorrow was Christmas and I hadn’t even had time to help decorate the tree. Plus, why should I stay when everything that came out of her mouth was snide? Then I remembered how the two of us would spread out on her bed, surround ourselves with pillows, and tell each other stories, and later, as we got older, how we’d look at Seventeen magazine together, and tell each other our deepest secrets. How we’d drink so much cherry soda that we had to take turns making pee. She was the only person who could ever make me laugh about Ben, the only friend who knew how stupid I felt compared to him, the girl who understood what it was like to love clothes as much as I did. In second grade, she’d beaten up a kid named Kevin who’d been trying to pull down my underwear during recess, and in eighth grade she’d told the boy who invited her to the Valentine’s Day Dance that she wouldn’t go with him unless he made his best friend ask me, too. She’d alw
ays been the strong one, the brave one, the leader. And now she was rocking back and forth on her bed, sobbing so hard that she was gulping for breath.
I sat down next to her and hugged her as hard as I could. She clutched me, bawling, her howls of misery rising higher and higher, until suddenly, there was a whooshing sound as her door slammed open and Lucy jumped up onto the bed in an agony of doggie love. Licking Becka’s face and neck, her tail thumping wildly, Lucy danced around on the bed. It was only after Becka’s sobs had crazily turned into uncontrollable laughter that I realized my entire back was wet, and turned to see that Lucy had spilled cherry soda all over everything — me, the bed, the floor, the pillows.
Only it smelled too strong to be cherry soda. And that’s because it wasn’t. It was red wine: I knew that smell as well as I knew anything, and it had left a stain the shape of New Jersey on Daphne’s pale-pink dress.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Look what you did.”
“Now you’re going to tell Meryl about the wine, too, aren’t you?”
I just looked at her — drunk, sobbing, hysterical.
“I’ll lose my job!”
“It’s just a job,” she said. “You’ll get another.”
“But I like it there.”
“Working as a salesgirl?”
“Can you at least pay to get it dry-cleaned?”
“I don’t have any money, Robin. Didn’t you hear me! I spent every penny in Paris! On my stupid hair!”
At home, Dad was passed out on the sofa, and all the lights were out.
Oh, joy. Christmas. As if our Dadless Thanksgiving hadn’t been bad enough, with just me and Mom trying to look happy for each other while we gnawed on the smallest turkey Mom could find, a few days later my father announced that he had another business trip coming up — a long one. Even so, he said he was going to be home by Christmas Eve. He stood there in the living room, grinning, as if he expected applause. “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful news!” my mother said, bouncing up to give him a quick kiss.
“I thought I might spend some time with my two favorite gals,” he said.
My mood could not have been any worse. I hadn’t told anyone about the “darling sweetest” email from Dad — not even Dad. In fact, I’d deleted the email permanently, first clicking “delete,” and then “delete forever,” to make sure it was gone. The last time I’d had the pleasure of running into Becka, she’d looked at me like I was something nasty stuck on the bottom of her shoe, made a face, and hissed: “Yeah, right.” And even though it wasn’t a big deal, that “Yeah, right” was stuck on automatic replay in my mind. Meantime, Mom went around the house humming some ancient hippie folk song from when she was in high school, and talking about making this Christmas the best Christmas ever. “A new Christmas in a brand-new place,” she said as she bustled about, making angel-shaped cookies and spray-painting pinecones gold to hang on the tree. Outside, it was snowing like crazy, with big white fluffy drifts covering the curbs and the gardens, making everything fresh and dazzling and magical. I hadn’t lived in a place that had snow since when we’d been in Germany, and didn’t have anything to keep me warm but an old, lumpy, stained white ski parka that had been Mom’s in college, which I’d last worn at Eliza’s thirteenth-birthday ice-skating party in San Francisco. And one day, while I was standing at my locker pulling it on, Becka had walked by and said: “Love the marshmallow look, Umster.” The next day, she’d actually barked at me. As in: Woof woof. As in: I’m a dog. She looked her usual better-than-everyone-else-on-the-planet, with her swishing thick long black hair cascading down her cashmere-encrusted back toward her designer-jean-covered backside. “Or maybe,” she said, “that thing you’re wearing is more like mashed potatoes.” Then Ann started bugging me about helping her with her blog.
“Can Santa bring me a new coat this year?” I asked Mom one day after having been on the receiving end of yet another of Becka’s witticisms, this one comparing my hideous parka to “a walking mattress.”
Mom was standing in the corner of the living room, boxes of tinsel and decorations spread out around her on the floor. “Perfect timing,” Mom said. “Get yourself a snack and then help me trim the tree!” I didn’t know which annoyed me more — finding out that my father had a girlfriend, dealing with Becka, or having to pretend that I thought Mom was actually cheerful, when anyone with half a brain cell could tell she wasn’t.
“The coat, Mom?”
“We’ll see,” she said, whistling.
Yeah, right.
What bugged me the most, though? It was that, once upon a time, before I’d been born, Mom had had an entirely different life, as a dancer, and had just given it up, like that, like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. I’d seen the pictures. In her black leotards, her straight, dark-brown hair pulled into a braid or a bun, she looked like some kind of forest creature. There are pictures of her in college with heavy black eyeliner on, leaping across a stage, and other pictures of her in various impossible dancer poses: balancing on one leg while she leans impossibly sideways; arching back to catch her toes in her hands while balancing on the remaining five. She used to tell me stories, too — about staying up all night rehearsing, or how she danced under the moonlight one summer in Michigan — and now and again, she’d get so carried away on the tide of her memories that she’d get up and start dancing around the room. She hadn’t done anything like that, though, for years.
I went into the kitchen and made myself a snack.
“So I was thinking,” she said when I returned to the living room to help her with the tree. “With Dad gone for a whole week, you and I should have a girls’ day out. Let’s go to the city, do some shopping, maybe see a matinee? What do you say?”
Already, West Falls had the same emptied-out feeling that it had had over the summer when we’d moved. The bitch across the street was in Paris, thank the Lord. Ann was about to go to Florida, and even Weird John had left town to spend the holiday with his grandparents in Baltimore. Of course, that didn’t mean he didn’t find a way to annoy me long-distance, sending me various obnoxious emails and text messages, including one that said: “I want you to be the mother of my children.”
“Meryl’s worried about Becka,” Mom went on in her oblivious way. “She’s in Paris, you know. She’s too grown-up for her own good. Meryl says she’s utterly miserable and that her daddy spoils her silly. Poor thing.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Poor Becka. She has to go to Paris over vacation. She has a daddy who buys her everything she wants.”
“Just because we can’t go to Paris doesn’t mean that we can’t have a good time right here, though,” Mom continued. “So what do you say to my proposal that we go shopping one day in New York?” She was wearing a white sweater with black-and-red smiling reindeer on it, and holding a couple of gold-painted pinecones, which she’d just finished stringing to hang on the tree. She looked ridiculous, like a giant elf from Santa’s workshop. “Honey?”
But for some reason, instead of answering her, I came on out with it: “Why did you stop dancing?”
“What a question! And anyway, I’ve told you.”
“All you ever said was that it had gotten too competitive and it wasn’t fun anymore. But that doesn’t explain anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I said, suddenly feeling my voice rise in my throat and the flush that I get when I’m angry. “That it’s like when you and Dad got married, you just stopped doing — well, everything.”
“I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a dancer.”
“But, Mom!” I could feel the tears — of frustration, mainly — backing up behind the bridge of my nose, but squeezed my eyes hard before they could get any farther. “You don’t do anything at all! Even if you didn’t want to be a dancer anymore, you could have taught dancing, or been a dance coach, like in high school, or worked with kids on plays. You could have done something.” My mother’s life as a dancer was shrouded in deep
shadows and blurs, as if it had happened a hundred years ago, instead of just before I was born.
“I consider being your mother something,” she said. “Especially with your dad working so hard all the time. And don’t forget that we’ve moved around a lot. It’s hard to launch a career when you move every three or four years.”
“Well, that never stopped Dad —”
“That’s true.”
But I wasn’t finished. “— from totally focusing on his career.”
She sighed heavily. “I didn’t really ever want to tell you this, Justine, but I think you’re old enough now. The fact of the matter is that I wanted to have a big family — four kids, maybe even five. So when I stopped dancing, it was because, when I got pregnant with you, I naturally thought that you were just the beginning of my being a mother.”
“And you could only have me?”
“Yes and no,” she said.
“Fine. I’m too stupid to understand.”
She wrung her hands, suddenly slumping and pale, as if she’d never heard of spray-painted pinecones and homemade Christmas cookies and chestnut-stuffed baked ham with a honey-orange glaze. (She’d been talking about it for days.) Suddenly she looked so serious — her big grin and animated eyebrows disappearing to reveal a face so blank and exhausted that it was as if she hadn’t slept in weeks — that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. She told me anyway.
“It was hard for your father, having a baby at home. Hard because I was so tired all the time, taking care of you — you had colic and cried a lot — and, of course, he was trying to launch his career. He had such big dreams, honey. He still has such big dreams. Just a few more years, he’d tell me. Just a few more years, and then we’d settle down for good, in a big house somewhere, with a big backyard so I could have a flower garden, and there’d be plenty of room for a swing set or a sandbox, anything I wanted. But for now, he said, while we were still moving around so much, he didn’t think it was fair to have more children.”
Tales From My Closet Page 15