by Sara Polsky
I step into the kitchen, the floor creaking under my bare feet, as if I can somehow step into this, an actual conversation with my cousin. “What happens if you don’t bake for everyone?”
Leila adds sugar to the mixture in her bowl, cracks an egg rhythmically against the side.
“I have to sing in the hallway at school, between every period, for a whole day. That’s James’s rule.”
“And that’s worse?”
Leila looks at me, a look that says of course. The Leila in my head is loud, willing to be wild, up for anything. I’ve forgotten that the real Leila can be just as cautious as I am.
“James probably just wanted the free food,” I say, even though I’m not sure I know James that well anymore. “He wouldn’t have made you sing.”
“Of course not,” Leila agrees with me. “But I wanted cookies anyway. This is just an excuse. Actually, the whole singing thing reminded me of those notes your mom used to give you—you know the ones where she’d tell you to pretend to be someone else for the day? I’m surprised she never told you to be a singer.”
I nod mutely, but Leila can’t see me, because she’s busy fiddling with the measuring cups on the counter. There’s a lump in my stomach and I have no idea what to say. Leila and I don’t talk about my mother.
Leila has no idea my mother still gives me those notes.
“Here,” Leila says abruptly, pulling a mixer out of its box on the counter. “Hold this.” The real Leila has no trouble ordering me around. That’s something she shares with the Leila in my head.
I could say no, but I actually like being asked, having something to do with my hands. So I take the mixer from her and stick the beaters in, pushing until they click into their slots.
“I need to add these in while the mixer’s going,” Leila says, pointing to more measuring cups full of chocolate chips and coconut. “So whenever you’re ready…”
I plug the mixer in and stretch the cord back across the counter to the bowl. Leila reaches over with the cup of chocolate chips. I switch the mixer on and stick it in the bowl—and cookie dough flies everywhere. The counter, our clothes, the floor, our hair.
We both shriek and jump back. Leila curses, I try to hold the mixer in the bowl and find the off switch while also keeping my pajamas away from the airborne flour-sugar-egg mixture, and somewhere in there the doorbell rings. For a minute there’s a rhythm, the bell’s ding-dong, ding-dong combined with the whir of the mixer.
Then, at once, everything is quiet. Dough is crumbling off the ends of my hair and I still have my arm stretched over the bowl, holding the turned-off mixer and trying to contain the damage. A drop of dough with a chocolate chip in it falls from Leila’s sleeve onto the counter and her shoulders slump. I’ve just ruined her recipe.
I want to pick up the bowl and chuck all of the dough into the trash. How can Leila calmly and neatly bake a batch of cookies while I, even though I cook meals at home almost every day, can’t manage a simple mixer?
But Leila isn’t angry. I hear a soft sound coming from her, and when I look over, I realize she’s actually laughing. So hard her shoulders are shaking and she can barely catch her breath.
“You have to…tilt the bowl…to keep everything from flying around,” she manages to say, bossy again.
Without warning, she picks a glob of dough off her shirt and flings it at me, hard, right at my nose. I duck, but it still hits the top of my head, adding to the sticky mess in my hair.
I’m holding some dough myself, about to pelt it back at her, when Uncle John walks into the kitchen, followed by James, his hair falling over his face.
“Look who I found at the front door,” Uncle John announces. Then he sees the mess.
Behind him, James’s eyes meet mine, and then they travel over my dough-covered hair and pajamas. James grins and raises an eyebrow, and I feel myself start to turn red. I drop the handful of cookie dough I was about to toss at Leila back into the mixing bowl. James follows my arms to the bowl and his eyes light up, a mischievous look I recognize even though the face that’s making it is five years older.
Leila and I, knowing what’s coming next, reach for the bowl at the same time. She gets to it first and hugs it toward her, heedless of the flour and sugar lining its edge.
“No,” she tells James forcefully, still clutching the bowl and walking sideways with it toward the sink. He reaches over the counter for it, she holds it away, and both of them start laughing.
James catches my eyes over Leila’s head, and I smile, thinking that this feels almost the way it used to.
But then Uncle John interrupts. “We can head out whenever you’re ready, Sophie,” he says, and his words pull me away from the scene in the kitchen. They zoom me out of the room and up, up, until I’m back in the guest room by myself, no longer in on the joke.
Twelve
As we drive to his office one town over, Uncle John talks about the projects he’ll be meeting with clients about today. Every so often, he interrupts himself to point out houses his firm worked on. Some are still under construction, wooden frames up where new rooms will go. I try to pay attention, to imagine the houses those frames will become, but the car’s motion lulls me, and soon my mind starts to wander.
My mother loves to drive around and look at houses. Her favorite is one about forty-five minutes away from our town, out in a more rural part of New Jersey near farms and apple orchards. But it isn’t a farmhouse. It’s more modern than all the other homes, all glass and pale wood, towering over the nearby trees.
Sometimes she’d drive us out there in our rattling green car and park in front of the house, turning the engine off but making no move to get out.
“Mom,” I’d say, sometimes lowering my voice to a whisper, as if the people in the house could hear us through the car windows and across the lawn. “What are you doing? I bet they’re wondering who we are, sitting out here. We’re probably making them nervous. What if they come out and ask us what we want?”
The sunlight reflecting off the glass panes on the front of the house made it hard to look inside. But sometimes, if I squinted, I could see people moving around. Their furniture looked like the frame of the house, stark and plain and uncomfortable. Out back was another structure that looked like a mini house on stilts, with a window that stretched all the way across one wall.
“Come on, Sophie,” my mother would say, in that tone that meant do you really have to be so uptight all the time?
Why don’t you bring Leila, then, if you want someone who will be more fun? I would always argue back in my head. But I never said it.
“It’s just for a few minutes,” my mother would say, cajoling me. “I’m sure they don’t mind at all. They can’t have a house like this, out here with all this farmland, and not expect people to stop and look at it. We always see other people stopping to take pictures.”
Then she would turn slightly, to face the house and me. “Now, tell me,” she would say. She’d pat the corner of her seat as if inviting me to come closer and share a secret, and I always wanted to lean over and give her a hug at that moment. “When we live in this house, which room do you want to have?” She would nod toward the second floor, where I could look through the windows into a few of the rooms. I could see a pillow against a wall, the corner of a dresser, the knob on an open closet door.
While I wondered who lived in each room, my mother would open her arms and laugh.
“Sophie, you know what? When we live here, you can have as many rooms as you want! One to sleep in, one to brush your hair in, one to keep shoes in, one to sketch in. Anything!”
Then she would point toward the structure behind the house, another thing she always did. “Except for that,” she would say, nodding decisively. “That’s going to be my studio. Much better light than the basement. I bet whoever built that is an artist.”
That
’s when I would stop her. “Mom, why are we even talking about this? We’re never going to live in this house.”
It seemed so unlikely I didn’t want to imagine it. I made myself think of our tiny, shabby apartment instead, of counting out the money for groceries and my mother’s medication every Friday afternoon after school. Of how, whenever my mother sold a painting for more than she expected, she used the money up almost as soon as she got it. Sometimes she couldn’t even remember the next day what she’d spent it on. An evening gown she wouldn’t wear, a piece of jewelry for me that was far too fancy for school, an expensive rug that might have paint on it within a few days. How could we possibly afford to have this house? We never could, unless we won the lottery. My mother bought lottery tickets all the time, fanning them out across the kitchen table and comparing each winning number to the list in the newspaper. But I knew how small the odds of winning were.
My mother would put the car back in drive then and pull away from the curb. I would glance quickly over my shoulder for traffic, because my mother always forgot to check her mirrors. I never saw anything, but sometimes a horn blared from behind us and another car would speed by. The road was always wide and empty, so it was easy for the person honking to swerve around our car. But I wondered what the other driver was thinking, whether he muttered crazy lady as he passed my mother, who drove without looking while talking about life in a house that wasn’t hers.
“You never know, Sophie,” my mother would say as we drove away. She sounded disappointed at my lack of imagination, and I told myself that next time I would talk about the house with her the way she wanted me to. I would pick a bedroom and everything. “Things could change.”
—
“Well, here we are,” Uncle John says, shutting the car off. I unbuckle my seat belt and open my door, shaking off the memory.
I already have such a clear picture of Uncle John’s office in my mind—a small house with bright yellow siding and a narrow strip of parking lot off to one side; a room full of wide wooden desks that Leila and I hid under with drawing paper one year on Take Your Child to Work Day—that I have to blink a few times to convince myself that’s not actually where we are.
We’re parked in a field, not a lot. There are no desks here, no rugs across wooden floors, no framed photos from design magazines hanging on the walls with captions trumpeting comfort and relaxation. There’s tall grass around us, four other cars, a few people in work boots carrying notepads and folders and pencils.
When I follow Uncle John out of the car, I see why. The field isn’t just a field. At the other end is a house, small and slanting. We’re looking at it from the side, and one of the windows, partially punched out, stares back at us, gaping. The front porch looks intact, but the wood of the back porch tilts downward toward the ground.
Uncle John leads me to a tall table in front of the house.
“Claire,” Uncle John calls, and a woman steps away from the table. “This is my niece, Sophie. Sophie, this is Claire Greenberg, our newest project manager.”
“Nice to meet you,” Claire says, sticking out a hand for me to shake. She’s polite, but she seems frazzled, still half-turned toward the table. “Natalie’s around the back taking photos,” she tells Uncle John.
We start walking again, following a path of trampled grass around the side of the house. It feels like the windows are peering down at us, curious and wary.
“The people who own this land”—Uncle John waves his arm toward the house and its overgrown yard—“just hired us to build something here. They think they want to keep at least part of the existing structure, so we could use some sketches of it.”
“Okay,” I say, pulling my sketchbook and a pencil from my bag as we go. I’m not sure why the photos won’t be enough, but I agreed to come here, so I’ll do whatever Uncle John asks me to.
We round the back corner of the house and there’s a girl my age in front of us, pointing a camera toward the back porch. I recognize her by the blue streak in her hair, Natalie from my art class. She stands squarely on the grass in her laced-up boots and dress, the kind of outfit I don’t remember seeing her wear before this year. Something about her posture says she doesn’t want to be here either.
“Natalie is Claire’s daughter,” Uncle John explains, which I should have realized when Claire said her last name. “Claire recently got divorced, so on weekends when Natalie’s younger sister is with their dad, Natalie usually helps us out around the office or on projects.”
So all the relatives no one knows what to do with get stuck here.
Uncle John and I walk toward Natalie, who’s staring at the back of her camera and hasn’t seen us yet. She shifts her weight and holds the camera to her eye, fiddling with a setting.
“Natalie!” Uncle John shouts, and she looks up. I can tell she recognizes me, even though there’s nothing memorable about me, no boots or dyed hair.
“Hey,” she says, cordial but not exactly warm.
I nod back. I can do cordial.
I settle into the grass as Uncle John leaves, opening my sketchbook onto my lap. I work quickly, getting the slanted porch, the paint-flecked door, the all-seeing windows onto the page. I hear an occasional click as Natalie moves around me, shooting the house from all angles.
I’m halfway through my sketch by the time she kneels down next to me.
“So you’re the other pity intern,” she says.
I nod again. That’s it exactly.
“Welcome to the club.”
It’s still not quite friendly, but Natalie doesn’t walk away again. Instead she sits fully on the grass. She angles the camera, and her index finger, with its dark nail polish chipping off the nail, clicks the button rapidly, once, twice, three times. I can’t see the photo on the back of the camera, only the light that flickers from the images as she quickly reviews each one.
“I think my mom is convinced that if she doesn’t bring me here, I’ll mope in my room all weekend. Or run away to the city or something,” she says, still looking intently at the back of her camera.
“Would you?” I ask.
I try to remember what I’ve thought of her before, whether she seems like the kind of person who would run away, but I have no idea. In my memory there are only a few images of her, walking through the halls, sitting in art class looking through one of Ms. Triste’s books.
Natalie shrugs.
“I don’t know. My boyfriend is there. And my dad, now.”
She sounds uncertain, defeated, somehow, by the fact that she has to be here and not there. I try to imagine what Natalie’s boyfriend might be like. I picture someone with giant headphones on, listening to indie music, wearing a T-shirt no one else understands.
I see her peering at my sketchbook, and I turn it slightly toward her, so she can watch me shade in the next section of my drawing.
“That’s really good,” she says. “No wonder you can skip art.”
I look over at her. I’m not sure how to begin to explain that I wasn’t just cutting class or why I stayed in the hall to talk to James or the fact that I walked right out of school and to the hospital to see my mother.
“My turn,” I say instead, reaching out a hand for her camera. “Let me see.”
Natalie presses a button for me and I see her first picture. I’m not a photographer, but I know these can’t be the kinds of photos Claire and Uncle John were looking for. Wherever Natalie was standing, the sun was at exactly the right angle to whiten the shot. In another photo, I see the edge of a finger poking into the photo’s frame.
But I keep clicking through, and as I do, the photos start to get good, as if Natalie couldn’t quite keep herself from caring or from using everything she knew about how to compose an image. There’s one I stop on. Natalie must have taken it from a distance, at least as far back as where Uncle John parked the car, and maybe from up on a hill. T
he building looks so small, almost lost in its own overgrown lawn. It could be an illustration for a picture book. “What will happen to me?” asks the empty house.
“This one’s incredible,” I tell Natalie, turning the camera so she can see which one I mean. She’s flopped backward onto the lawn, and I lie down too, letting the grass tickle all the parts of me it can reach.
I hold the camera screen above both of us, and Natalie explains how she composed a few of the photos as I click through them. Like her photos, better with each shot, her voice gets more animated as we talk, until she’s moving her arms and everything. She almost whacks my face with one enthusiastic gesture.
“Sorry,” she says, and we get quiet again. I’ve made it through all of her photos and am back at those first few, the intentionally bad ones.
“So why is your dad dragging you here?” Natalie asks after a few minutes.
I’m confused. My dad? Then I realize who she’s talking about.
“Oh, John’s my uncle,” I say. “Not my dad. I’m staying with them right now—my uncle and his family.” That doesn’t sound quite right. “My aunt and her family, actually.” I correct myself again. “My family.”
“Sounds complicated,” Natalie says.
I laugh a little.
“Yeah,” I say. Natalie doesn’t pry.
We lie there on the lawn quietly, almost covered by grass and weeds. I pass the camera back to Natalie, pull up a few weeds, and braid them together. This silence doesn’t feel full of all the things we’re not saying, the way sitting in the car with Leila does. With Leila or James, with Aunt Cynthia or Uncle John, I never explain myself either, but this is the first time I feel like I don’t have to.
Next to me, Natalie points her camera randomly and clicks, trying to take interesting shots by accident. By the time Uncle John comes looking for me, I’ve woven a whole grassy crown, and I set it down by Natalie’s head. She turns her camera toward it.
“See you Monday,” she says.