Where You End

by Anna Pellicioli

  I follow Adam up into the bus and slip through a few whispers, but most of the class is already lost in a sea of music, their headphones like garlands across their heavy heads. Elliot and Maggie have settled in the back, his scarf around her neck, her hair on his shoulder. They are not talking. They could be on a riverboat in Paris, on a jeep in the Serengeti.

  Wherever they are, they’re together, looking out. I twist my hair into a loose bun. It’s always been tangled enough to stay tied. I see the phone number on my arm again, but instead of hiding it under the sweater, I let my arm drop to my side. Let them see it. I stare at Elliot and Maggie. I’m not scared. My secret soothes me. Maggie is distracted, but I catch Elliot’s eyes. He closes them to shut me out. Adam tugs at my sweater.

  “Meem, sit down.”

  Someone saw what I did, but they haven’t told on me yet. Someone saw what I did, but they want to talk to me first. Someone saw what I did and they think it means something. We can help each other, the girl said. She’ll know what she wants.

  “Hey Adam,” I say, “what do you know about Picasso?”

  “He’s dead. Will you sit?

  I sit and smile.

  First, there was dark matter. The beginning was pitch black.

  three

  In our kitchen, my mother looks up deviled eggs in The Art of Simple Food.

  “Stuffed eggs,” she says with her finger on the recipe index. “Stuffed eggs.”

  She rubs the grease off the side of her nose, a sign of worry.

  I know them well, the signs. Driving with both hands on the wheel, buying a new plant at the nursery, eating chips out of a pretty ceramic bowl, loading the dishwasher before we’ve finished dessert, dog-earing furniture catalogues, looking up a recipe she’s made a hundred times. My mother is a coping machine. And despite her efforts to keep it together, my job is to try and pull her apart like a pack of frozen chicken breasts. I used to justify it as a way of reminding my mother she was human, but now it feels like I’m pounding her just because I can.

  “Miriam. Come here.”

  She turns the faucet on with her wrists, to wash off any raw egg, and instructs me to sit down on one of the mismatched chairs around our kitchen table. I choose the yellow one with the teetering leg.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “So?”

  “So.”

  “What happened?” she says.

  The controlled tone would be scary if I didn’t know this technique. It feels familiar and safe. I sink back to my role in our game.

  “I was late.”

  She’s using a needle to poke one hole on the bottom of each eggshell. She waits until she’s finished to look up. Good. She’s going to play.

  “Why were you late?” she says.

  “I kind of got lost.”

  “On the Mall?”

  “Yes.”

  A variety of herbs are laid out on a clear cutting board: basil, parsley, chives. They come from little pots on the kitchen windowsill. It’s usually my job to pick them. When I was a kid, if I gave her the wrong one, Mom would put it in my pocket so I could smell it all day until I knew the difference between cilantro and parsley, lavender and rosemary. I was also a sort of prodigy in the produce section. More than once, I remember sticking my face in a green plastic bag and, with great confidence, declaring the name of an obscure vegetable.

  “Adam said you were sick,” she says.

  She rolls the basil up into little green cigarettes, preparing to slice them and let the magic out of the leaves. Once I got old enough to use a knife, that was my favorite part. I teeter back and forth on the yellow chair’s lame leg. Adam must’ve called her after the bus.

  “Adam doesn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t know what?”

  “Doesn’t know anything.”

  “Doesn’t know anything?”

  “Doesn’t know why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why I was late.”

  “You said you got lost.”

  “Yes.”

  The timer rings eight minutes, and she dips a slotted spoon in the pot, fishes out an egg, and drops it carefully in a bowl of cold water. Six times.

  “He was worried,” she says.

  “I know. He worries.”

  “So, were you sick or were you lost?”

  Normally, before Elliot, this is when I would give up and remember my mother’s heart is painfully accurate, most of the time. And I would join her at the sink, help peel the eggs and drop my guns. I would tell her what happened, how I’m feeling, who said what at school and why they shouldn’t have, and how we read this great story and someone made a stupid comment, and I can’t wait to get out of high school etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And she would nod and laugh her deep strong laugh and remind me that everyone is different, Miriam, but we all deserve the same respect. But I would know, instinctively, what that actually means: that she thinks I’m smarter than everyone else, and so I should oblige.

  Before Elliot, this is when I would spill.

  Today I can’t. Today I keep quiet about the carousel and Picasso and Paloma, because this feels like my problem, like it’s more than what she could possibly understand. Something separates her life from mine. Maybe this is what happens after you fall in love.

  When you start out, if you’re lucky, your parents are the closest thing you have to yourself. They’re your safe spot, your personal believers. Then, if you’re lucky again, you meet a guy who makes you feel like you might be different than what you imagined, more … like everything in your body has a purpose and that purpose comes to life when he’s around. Only when he’s around.

  All of a sudden, he’s the only one in the entire world who knows you, so nothing is ever the same. You come home, and your parents kiss you in that spot on your head where they’ve always kissed you, but they don’t know. They sit at the same table and make the same jokes, but they don’t know what’s in your head. They don’t know your laugh and who it’s for. Not anymore. It’s not your hands they’re holding, your face they’re kissing, your voice they’re listening to. They are loving a memory.

  Only you know the present tense, the stuff that makes your blood move and your lungs work. All of that belongs to the person you just said goodbye to, the guy who you can still smell on your shirt. And you don’t recover from that. Even after the guy drops you. They still can’t know you anymore.

  Mom peels off the shells and dumps them into the disposal on her own, and I get chills from the sound of them crick-cracking into egg dust.

  “I heard there’s a Winogrand exhibit at the Gallery,” she says, before I can make my escape.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Is that where you were, Miriam?”

  “Yes,” I say, grateful for an honorable way out. Of course that’s where I was.

  “You lost track of time at the Gallery?”

  “Yes,” I say, pretending to give in, sort of soft and dejected, the best kind of fake.

  You got me, Mom. I was actually looking at photographs, just like you would’ve been, just like you do every day. I was studying the masters. I got lost in the art. It was that good.

  “It was the 1964 photos, right?” she asks as she scoops out the yolks and leaves twelve little rowboats wiggling on the board.

  I can tell she’s struggling to rein in her excitement. Only a genius skips the field trip to gaze at modern art. And everybody wants a genius, no matter how deviant.

  “Yes. It was amazing. They had all the best pictures, the white sands picnic and everything.”

  “No?”

  “Yes,” I sputter like a faucet that’s been turned off for too long, my lies the brown muck. “The Daley Plaza, the lady with the pink headband … ”

  “The woman in the garage.”

 
“Exactly. The woman in the garage, with the baby. That one is gorgeous.”

  There’s a word you don’t hear every day at the Feldmans’. Certainly never to describe a photograph. Mom should smell this one, but she stays quiet.

  “Where’s the mayo?” I ask, all puffed up from my perfect fib.

  “I’m doing olive oil tonight,” she says. “I’m glad you liked it so much—the exhibit. You should’ve told me the truth though, Miriam … ”

  I nearly choke on my own spit.

  “It’s important,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with going to see art, but you should’ve been on time, and you should’ve told me the truth.”

  I breathe out.

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry. He’s my favorite, you know. I got caught up.”

  “Lange is your favorite,” she says.

  Then she flips her palm, drops all the green bits into the yolks and starts stirring, never lifting her head from the bowl, waiting for me to rescue myself. My silence always wins, though, because she’s the mother, and I’m her baby, and she’s the one who’s left with the worry. All my mother can do is rip a page out of her cookbook and shove it under the wooden leg of my chair.

  “There,” she says.

  And, for a minute, I feel sad the chair is the only thing we can get straight in this house. Sad for my mother, not for me.

  four

  Across the street, our neighbor walks past a couple of plastic tombstones, high-fives Frankenstein, and reaches up the tree to turn on his polyester ghost. Mr. Wallace stands under the white sheet for a minute or so, to make sure it’s howling properly. I move closer to the window and figure about half the leaves are off our gingko. Last time I really looked at the tree, it was full of fruits that smell like sewage. Now they are thousands of miniature yellow fans covering our front yard. Oooooohhhhhhhhh. OOOOOhhhhhhhhhh, the ghost cries. My elbow is on the windowsill, and I’m watching it turn green, blue, and then white once more. The dishes rattle in the sink downstairs. The sun is setting. This is the view from my window. This is what I know.

  My first real photo teacher always told us to take pictures of what we know. Stay close to home, he said, where it hurts to look. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but now I’m getting closer to understanding. I watch Mr. Wallace walk back through the fake cobwebs toward his house.

  I’m so tired I can barely hear the kitchen clatter downstairs, but when I lie down to sleep, everything suddenly conspires to keep me awake. I can’t tune out the second hand tick-tocking on my watch. I take the watch off, and my ears start ringing a mean ring, like the batteries in my head have gone out. A dog barks. The computer hums. It doesn’t matter that I took everything off my walls the minute I got home from Elliot’s beach house—the photographs, the F-stop cheat sheet, the books off the shelves and the shelves off the wall. This empty room still haunts me.

  I went to Ace Hardware by myself. I brought home painter’s tape, a brush, and many quarts of dirty green paint. I did the whole room in one morning, while my parents were at the farmer’s market buying heirloom tomatoes the size of your face. When they came back and saw the walls, my mom’s eyes started twitching and my father dropped the rhubarb.

  “It’s the Atlantic Ocean,” I told them.

  Someone knocks to interrupt my memory. I shut my eyes, breathing deep to feign sleep. The door squeaks open and Dad whispers my name. I picture my lids smooth and angelic. I float my tongue in my mouth to fake peace. He tiptoes out and I listen for his feet down the stairs, toward the dining room.

  I run to the bathroom and roll up my sleeve to erase Paloma’s writing, but when I reach for the soap I can’t bring myself to do it. It happened. She wasn’t a ghost. I turn off the water and get my phone to dial the number. It goes straight to voicemail. Instead of Paloma’s voice, a little boy comes on. He tells me I’ve reached the number on my arm and tells me to leave a message. A girl laughs in the background.

  “Miriaaaaaam. Dinner.”

  Mom’s call makes it past the floorboards, through the carpet, under my door. I hang up the phone right after the beep. It’s Friday—the linen tablecloth, the heavy silverware, the challah, and the wine. We don’t go to temple, but my parents take the weekly dinner pretty seriously. I get it. Rituals matter. They keep us together, and, when everything is changing, we know at least Friday is coming and we’ll eat the same thing, at the same table, with the same people. Some things never change, and thank God for that. Elliot is holding hands with Maggie, but it’s Friday. I pushed a Picasso, but it’s Friday. I just hung up on the person who can turn me in, but it’s Friday. It’s Friday, and my period is exactly two weeks late.

  “Miiiriaaaam. It’s getting cold.”

  I rub the ink off with the soap until it burns. The water feels good.

  “Miriam, the sun!”

  I check outside. I can still see some light through the trees.

  “Miriam.” Mom’s voice is closer, outside the bathroom door. “We’re waiting for you. What are you doing?”

  When I open the door, with my hair all messed up and my eyes narrow and straight, Mom shoves a pack of matches in my palm.

  “You do the blessing tonight,” she says, in a manner so clear and strong it immediately makes me think of bronze.

  Following her down the steps, I notice her ass is sort of getting flatter. I imagine yanking her belt loops the way a toddler might, to make her mad, to pull her close. But she turns around and offers her eyes, round and deep, and says:

  “I haven’t told your father yet.”

  Which part? Her voice suggests I did something worse today than make the bus wait. For a second I think maybe she knows, but that’s impossible. Mom was working at her gallery. If she knew, she would’ve already forced me to go back and apologize, or called a friend to make me intern at the museum. I would have to read Picasso’s biography. It would already be on my desk.

  No. My mother thinks I escaped the tedium of a high school field trip to examine the work of a creative master, one of her masters. She has no idea what happened. She just wanted me to be on time, and she wants to light the candles before the sun sets.

  Dad is standing behind his chair at the dinner table, his hands wrapped around the back, poised and eager to sit as soon as I say the blessing. The food is waiting on a tray shaped like a big olive leaf, a wedding present that comes out on Friday evening. I’ve been through the ritual countless times. Dad ruffles my hair and smiles. I close my eyes and picture the bread, the cup, the candle. Even Adam could do this by now, and his dad is a Quaker who believes Jerusalem should be shared.

  Mom plants her eyes on my forehead and purses her lips in expectation. She’s made all our favorite dishes. My body wants to sleep. I just want to sleep. She runs the gold charm back and forth on the thin chain around her neck—my initials and my date of birth. I think of Paloma’s gold fish necklace. This whole thing feels like a test. Even Dad suspects it.

  Mom pushes the candle across the table and brings her hands toward her eyes to prompt me. Barukh atah Adonai. I remember the words like a summer hit on the radio, and before reciting the blessing, I notice Mom peeking through her fingers, a kid cheating at hide-and-go-seek, to check on me. Like I said, a test.

  I light the match and then blow it out before it can reach my fingertip.

  “Light it again,” she says, her hands still in mid-air, mid-prayer.

  “You do it, Mom. I don’t remember how.”

  “Light it again, Miriam.”

  I put the matches down and look for Dad, whose eyebrows squint to read what’s behind the tension. He lets me drown.

  “I don’t feel good, Mom.”

  She drops her hands. God can wait until I get a grip.

  “I thought you felt fine.”

  “Yeah, I did … I do. I just don’t want to do this right now. I just want to sit down and eat. I’m
really tired. Can you do this, please?”

  “That sounds reasonable.” Dad jumps in like a tiger through a hoop of fire.

  Mom’s shoulders assume position. This is familiar.

  You may have your ice cream when you’ve finished your peas. You may watch TV when you’ve cleaned up your toys. You may go to Adam’s when you’ve done the dishes. You may walk home alone when you know how to punch. You may use my Leica camera when you graduate from college. You may sleep with someone when you are ready to be with them. And always use protection.

  Protection from what?

  Dad lets out a weak sigh.

  “I will say the blessing when you’ve lit the candle,” she says.

  I roll my eyes.

  “Sarah … ” Dad says, his eyes begging.

  “Seth?” she says.

  “Maybe we can try again next Friday,” he tries.

  “It’s not that hard, Seth. I’ve cooked an entire meal. She can light a candle.”

  “I know, Sarah, it’s great. Everything looks great. Let’s just say the blessing and enjoy it. I’ll say it.”

  “You can’t say it, remember? Only the women, it’s tradition. Right, Mom?”

  My voice comes out whinier than I intended, a kind of silly, entitled whine.

  “Light it, Miriam.” Her final words.

  I strike a match against the box, wait a few seconds until the flame is getting close, then drop it in my plate. Mom actually gasps. Before the flame can turn blue, I cover my eyes and say the blessing, for the bread, for the cup, for the Jews. Then I push my chair in and walk upstairs to my room, unable to shake the rage that has swallowed my head since Elliot told me he just didn’t know.